A Better Man (30 page)

“Officially?” Maya is confused. “You know you can’t act for me, Adam. That would be a conflict—”

He shakes his head vigorously. “No, no, no. I mean officially in a personal capacity. Look.” He opens his briefcase again and pulls out another folder, which he hands directly to her. Inside is a glossy real estate brochure featuring pictures of a large yellow-brick house on an uptown street not far from where she used to live with Nick. There are photos of a sunny kitchen trimmed with marble and butcher’s block, and a large garden filled with flowers and trees and an old-fashioned swing set.

“I don’t understand,” says Maya. “You’re looking at a house?”

Gray takes the brochure from her and gazes at it, clearly entranced. “I bought a house,” he says. “I made the offer today. They accepted. The loft is going on the market tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s great,” she says. “I’m happy for you. It’s a beautiful house.”

Gray takes her hand and unfolds it in her lap, then he presses the brochure into it, as though it’s a talisman. Maya can feel the glossy paper stick to the dampness of her palm.

“I’m not quite sure you’re feeling me here, Maya. I bought the house for you. For
us.
For the twins. Now that the divorce is coming through, I want us to live there together. As a family.”

She feels the back of her neck start to prickle, and instantly black bars emerge at the edges of her vision. She breathes in through her mouth and out through her nose, the way Bradley taught her to do.

“What’s happening?” asks Gray. “Are you okay?”

She nods and speaks through the fleshy Darth Vader mask of her fingers. “Mmm, fine. Just getting some, uh, carbon monoxide to the brain. Or is it carbon dioxide? Whichever doesn’t make you pass out. I can never remember.”

When the black bars recede, she takes another sip of beer and looks at the brochure on her lap. The house blinks back at her. Bright white-shuttered eyes. A happy, perfect place for happy, perfect people. She feels like throwing up.

“This is lovely,” she says, the words coming slowly from her brain to her lips, as if through a broken transmitter. “Maybe the loveliest thing anyone’s ever done for me without asking. But you know I can’t possibly do this.”

“Do what?” Gray does not look altogether alarmed. It’s clear he was expecting a bit of resistance. He might be impulsive, but he’s no idiot.

“Be ‘a family.’ With you. In this house.”

“But why not? Isn’t that sort of what we’re already doing?”

Maya shakes her head. “No, it’s not. I’m an old friend you’ve
kindly taken in while I sort my life out. And we’ve slept together a few times, which was maybe a mistake or maybe not. I’m still not sure—”

“Eleven times, exactly—not that I’m counting. But I don’t think you can call eleven times a mistake.”

“Eleven times we had sex, or eleven times I slept with you in your bed?”

Gray looks caught out. “Okay, eleven times slept and eight times sex. You are a stickler for the truth, aren’t you?”

Maya laughs, then fights the urge to touch his face. She doesn’t want to be patronizing. “Adam, I can’t tell you how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for me and the twins. But you can’t just ambush me like this. I’m tired of being ambushed. I want to be the one who decides my life, don’t you see?”

Gray is silent. He licks his fingers and rubs his eyelids. When he opens his eyes they are red and weary. “I wish I didn’t see,” he says, “but I do.”

Slowly, slowly, Nick pedals up the mountain. The earth is red, cracked and burnt clay, the terrain is rough, more of a gesture toward a road more than an actual thoroughfare. The bike is moving so gradually it would almost make more sense to get off and walk. But not quite. (Nick has a speedometer and has done the math.) He works the dented, dirt-caked mountain bike over small boulders and in and out of ruts, its fat tires gripping the path then spinning out as the hill gets steeper. It is noon. High noon. A cowboy time of day. The Tanzanian sun blazes down on his back, soaking his jersey with sweat and dust as if he’s been dipped in hot, gritty tea.

He hears the bus before he sees it. A braying diesel acceleration as the driver rips through gears to get up to speed. He swerves to the side fast and presses himself and the bike up against the rock face, as he’s learned to do to avoid being flicked off the road like a bug. The bus doesn’t slow—they never do—but rattles past at high speed, spewing dust and fumes, an audible trail of Bob Marley blaring from the loudspeaker over the
windshield. Like all local buses, it’s crammed to bursting with families, children, baskets of food and caged chickens, steamer trunks strapped precariously to the roof—a careening miracle on mud-crusted tires.

“
Mzungu
!
Mzungu
!” the children holler out the window—the Swahili word for “white man.” Nick waves back with a big stupid grin, and the children scream in crazed delight. On the back of the bus is a hand-painted sign for Manchester City Football Club. Nick continues waving until the children’s shrieking faces have flown around the mountain and out of sight. He gets back on the bike.

After six weeks on the road, he is tired. More tired than he’s ever been. And yet there is elation in his exhaustion. He understands why those Buddhist monks walk for days, exhausting themselves in epic pilgrimages to sacred places. He never understood it before, but now he does. His hands are callused from gripping the handlebars. There is numbness in his wrists—nerve damage from white-knuckling it over bumpy roads. His body bears the marks of his journey. He is toasted dark on his neck, arms and calves, and paper white from collar to knees. A farmer’s tan. His whole body hurts in a way that pleases him.

He rides alone all day, and when he reaches camp, he immediately pitches his tent alongside the other riders. He is friendly with a few but as a rule doesn’t talk much. Keeps his story to himself. A big dinner from the canteen truck follows—huge, gluppy pots of pasta or stew sloshed into mess kits, perfect for riders burning hundreds of thousands of calories between them—usually complemented by a warm beer purchased from an enterprising local village kid, then to bed. Nick is sleeping
well for the first time in months. Flat-out death sleep, nothing between him and the dirt but a thin, synthetic layer. It is so hot at night he sleeps naked on top of his sleeping bag, sweat vaporizing into the flimsy tent walls. He drinks gallons of water a day. Floods. Sucking up whole freshwater lakes. He dreams of home as he does this. Of the twins and their swimming lessons at the cottage. His mind, for the most part, is clear.

Up the mountain, then down again. He lets the momentum take him, standing high on his pedals to save his ass (also numb) from the impact of the road, breaking only for boulders or ruts in the path. This is Tanzania, a mountainous country of lush green forest, searing hot sun and raggedy kids running barefoot to school, their books strapped together with leather belts like in the olden days. Looking at these grinning children, he thinks of the things he will do with the twins: camping, picking blueberries, teaching them to drive, one at a time.

He hopes they will understand one day why he needed to take these weeks away—why the distance and the selfishness of it is actually his only hope to come back to them in one piece. He sees now, finally, what the problem was: fear. When the twins were born, he glimpsed something that terrified him. A love—there was no better word for it—that made him more vulnerable than he could bear. Maya poured her whole self into this love until she was consumed by it, the waters closing over her head. Nick resisted it until he was exhausted from the effort of refusing to surrender. Her smothering constancy became the counterbalance to his corrosive absence. The more she gave away, the more he withheld, until somehow they were both left with nothing. And everything. And now here he is. Not fixed, he now realizes,
but finally coming to understand a fraction of himself. Not the old self or the new self—neither the mask nor the face—but the sliver-thin gap in between. This is the place where Nick has ended up.

At the bottom of the hill the terrain flattens out—a miles-long open stretch with no other riders in sight. He enjoys the flat ride, gearing down and spinning out his legs, letting the wind dry the sweat on his back and push him from behind. He practises going as fast as he can with minimal exertion, in an effort to cool himself down. It almost works. He drinks more water as he rides and, feeling that camp is near, squirts the last of it on his face to rinse away the dust. When he opens his eyes he sees the figure about one hundred feet in front of him. A Maasai warrior in the traditional red cloth robe, stacks of beaded necklaces and bracelets, and a great ivory nose ring, raising his spear by the side of the road. Nick is surprised. Not to see the Maasai—they are common in this part of the country, usually tending their goats—but to be summoned. The Maasai, particularly in rural areas, tend to be proud, composed and not particularly sociable with foreigners. But not this guy.

“
Mzungu
! Hel—lo!” he shouts at Nick as he pulls up on his bike. The man is dark-skinned with close-cropped hair, shaved almost to the skull. His face is friendly, though he wears no hint of a smile. When Nick dismounts, a staccato stream of English words fall from the man’s lips. “Hello. Celine Dion. Barack Obama. Man City. Coca-Cola!” he says. If he means it as a joke it works. Nick laughs and the Maasai chuckles unsmilingly in shared recognition. It is as if the man has said, “You see? We are living in the same world.” Nick thinks this might be all he wanted
to say, but then the Maasai raises his long, elegant arm and holds out an object. It’s a cellphone, a very old Nokia, battered and scratched, about the size of a jumbo Mars bar. Nick can see from the face that it’s getting a signal, which is more than he can say for his state-of-the-art 5G model.

“Very nice,” says Nick. He pulls out his own phone to show the Maasai.

The man nods, unimpressed. There is something else on his mind. He gestures with his head and points his spear into the long grass by the side of the road. Makes the universal sign for “Look over here. I have something to show you.”

Nick looks around. Even though the road is long and flat and open, he doesn’t see another rider on either quavering horizon. The Maasai is already striding barefoot into underbrush and motioning for him to follow. With a sigh, Nick sees he must go. It’s not curiosity that propels him but a sense of fate. He drops his bike by the road and trails the Maasai down a path that looks animal-made. There are no huts or signs of human agriculture or civilization anywhere, and Nick has the strange feeling of being sucked back several millennia in time. He is considering turning back when the Maasai stops. He turns to Nick to make sure he has his full attention, then points with his spear.

Beneath a bush, there is a tail. Then a paw and a haunch. Nick squints, then staggers back in unmistakable recognition: a large male lion, having his mid-afternoon nap.

He scrambles back into the grass, stomach leaping up into his throat, choking him mid-jump. A powerful jolt of pure animal adrenaline shoots through his body like a lightning bolt. He’s about to run when he notices the Maasai shaking his head,
a would-you-look-at-the-crazy-foreigner expression on his face. Nick pauses and watches in receding horror as the Maasai pokes the big cat’s ass with his spear. But the lion is still. Dead still. So dead still he is actually dead. Using his hands, the Maasai reaches down and heaves the lion over so Nick can see the football-sized hole in the beast’s side. Maggots swirl over crusted blood. There is the hot, acrid stink of death. It’s then that Nick notices the turkey vultures circling languorously overhead. Why hadn’t he seen them earlier?

The Maasai flips the lion right side up again, and then turns to Nick and makes the motion of shooting a rifle at the beast. A poacher, Nick understands. He must have outrun his assassin and come here to die.

But why has the Maasai led him here to see this poor dead creature? Does he want to sell him his carcass as a trophy? Does he need help carrying the beast back to his village for food? Nick is confused, but this is clarified by what the Maasai does next: he takes his battered old cellphone, presses a few buttons and then hands it to Nick with an expectant look. He waves Nick back a few steps, then crouches down beside the dead cat and places his head on top of its mane. For a moment Nick wonders if he’s performing some sort of tribal death ritual. A traditional animal funeral rite. But the warrior gestures toward the phone in Nick’s hands, and it finally dawns on him that the man wants his picture taken. Nick sees it’s been all set up—all he has to do is press the button, and so he does, three or four times, from a couple of different angles, until the Maasai seems happy. Safely snapped, the man stands up, takes back his phone and inspects the images, nodding to himself. Then he ducks his head in a gesture of thanks. And without a goodbye,
the tribesman ambles off through the grass, leaving Nick alone with the lion.

He stares at the beast, breathing in the sweet, terrible smell of him. It’s really not so bad, considering the oven-like heat; the rot must not yet have begun in earnest. Nick stares at the arch of his rib cage, his powerful haunches, and his heavy padded paws, each one the circumference of a baby’s head, soft black pads like leather cushions. He has an urge to stroke the lion’s nose, which is dry and grey and cracked like a drought-stricken mud plain. His lip is curled up at the side, revealing a long yellow fang, pointed and chipped at the end. Looking at the tooth, Nick decides that the lion was at the end of his prime, that he must have had a large pride and a distinguished life. It must have pained him yet also seemed somehow inevitable—his time had come. And instead of giving himself over to the poacher, he used his last dregs of energy to come here. To die a peaceful old man’s death under a bush.

Nick crouches down and puts a hand on the lion’s velvet flank. It’s hot from the sun, but it’s not a warmth that could be confused with mammalian blood rhythm. Instead of this, he feels the stillness. The absence of life. He crouches like that until his legs cramp. Then he gets back on his bike and carries on down the road.