A Better Man (6 page)

It’s ten after eight when Maya finally pours herself the first merciful glass of Barolo. The wine untangles the knot in her brain, and for a few minutes she finds she is able to devote herself to the act of reading—something she used to do far more of when she had less time. Tonight it’s just an old copy of the
Economist,
a week out of date, but she likes to work her way through in order. She’s never been the sort of person who could skim through books, skipping the boring parts and rushing ahead to the relevant bits. Instead, in reading as in life, her talent is diligence and what her mother the architecture professor used to call stick-to-it-iveness. Once set on a course, she will not deviate, pushing through to the bitter end, whatever the cost.

She pours herself a generous second glass and tries to find a comfortable spot on the unforgiving L-shaped sectional she recently had shipped over from Denmark at idiotic expense. (It looked so comfortable online, who knew it would feel like lounging on a church pew?) After half an hour or so, the alcohol that has, until now, focused her thoughts begins to make her brain murky and restless. A vague sensation of melancholy sets in. She tries to shake it off by fixing herself a dinner of cottage cheese and seaweed crackers and (what the heck?) another glass of wine, making sure to leave a respectable amount in the bottle. She’ll use that for cooking, if she ever gets around to cooking
grown-up food again—another thing she did more of when she spent less time at home. And when she had a husband who came home before 10:00 p.m.

Nibbling her bachelorette’s supper, she wonders what life would have been like if she had ended up just that: a bachelorette. She thinks of her girlfriend Diana from law school, of her immaculate condominium and endless weekend dating dramas. Trawling the Internet for a husband. How depressing to be going through that at this age, when the thought of getting naked in front her own husband—let alone a complete stranger—fills her with a dull, throbbing horror.

It’s amazing to her that the sex could have stopped when it was once the thing that bound them. A common language and a shared world. In university she and Nick spent what seemed like (and probably amounted to) hundreds of hours in bed, exploring each other, experimenting in physical pleasure, and being swept up in waves of laughter and almost unbearable intensity. The door of her bedroom in the rundown Victorian house she shared with two other roommates (both vegan medievalists) came to seem like a portal to a parallel universe—one that belonged exclusively to her and Nick.

And years later, even after the excitement of marriage and the caffeine-fuelled blur of law school had passed (they’d married in the summer between her third and fourth years, just after Nick set up his company), the physical connection remained. It never took much for them to persuade each other in that direction.

The night is cold and inky, and it feels much later than it is, so Maya wraps herself in a blanket and settles in, abandoning a vague plan to reorganize the mudroom. She turns on the TV and flips
around until she settles on a rerun of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
An indeterminate amount of time later (could be minutes, could be hours), she’s awoken by the bleep of the front-door motion sensor. She struggles to compose herself as Nick’s footsteps approach, but the wine has made her bleary, uncoordinated, a person out of focus. He enters the family room, and for a strange, fleeting moment, he looks startled to see her. It is as if he has forgotten who she is, or even that he’s married. Then his face recomposes itself into the smooth, familiar mask. His eyes shift to the nearly empty wine bottle on the coffee table, then back to her.

“Need any help getting up to bed?” He hangs his overcoat on a hook, then washes his hands in the kitchen sink before applying lemon-scented lotion.

“I’m fine, thanks.” Maya’s sitting up now, blinking and smoothing her hair into place. She stands and smacks her thighs to alert her body to the fact that it’s time to climb the stairs. “How was your day?”

“Oh, you know, just the usual office shenanigans. How was the, uh, thingy?”

“What
thingy
?”

Nick looks exhausted and on the spot. “I mean whatever it is that you …” He searches, then finds what he’s looking for. “I was going to say the gym. How was the gym?”

She looks at him and waits for the sting to subside. But the wine, which usually acts as an emotional force field, has somehow lost its buffering power while she slept. A coppery taste fills her mouth and her eyes begin to sting. It feels like an allergic reaction, but then she realizes that for the first time since the birth of the twins, she might actually cry in his presence.

“You should be nicer” is all she can think to say, her voice smudged with alcohol and emotion. Nick takes this in, rubs his eyes and starts to say something back but decides against it. The set of his shoulders clearly says,
What’s the point?
They stand in silence for a minute, until he finally gives a dry little laugh and walks out of the room without bothering to look at her again.

Nick is relieved to see that Shelley’s breasts are every bit as remarkable as he remembered. Small and thrillingly high, they remind him of china teacups or those French ballerinas from the old Impressionist paintings.

He doesn’t look at them, of course, but instead shifts his gaze from her eyes—all squinty with laughter at his not-so-great jokes—to the restaurant’s front door, just over her left shoulder. He’d suggested the bistro around the corner from the SoupCan offices out of habit and laziness, and is now keenly aware of how this (perfectly innocent!) lunch might look should one of his colleagues happen upon it. Still, he is here and determined to enjoy it.

Shelley is telling him all about her food blog, and how she takes photos of everything she eats and immediately uploads them to her “platforms” so her followers can track her minute-to-minute consumption habits. “It’s like an open-kitchen diary philosophy,” she is saying, eyes glittering beneath her auburn fringe, “so people can taste what I’m tasting, almost in real time.” She is developing
an app with a friend to “digitally replicate the experience of smell, texture and taste,” which she hopes will “give the experience an added sensory dimension.” At present she has over seven thousand followers. Nick pretends to perk up at this, though for all he knows they could be following her just to see her breasts. He certainly would. In fact, he makes a mental note to do so. She keeps talking and talking, and he finds he doesn’t mind, since it leaves him free to daydream about exactly how she would look, sitting here in this restaurant, eating bread and butter and drinking a glass of daytime Rioja with her clothes off.

She tells him a long and animated story of how, three winters in a row, she has volunteered as the cook on the canteen bus for a charity bicycle race across Africa. Local villages in impoverished regions across the continent, she explains, send their best cyclists to compete alongside North American riders and raise funds for local schools and hospitals. The trip lasts four months, stretches from Cairo to Cape Town, is “incredibly inspiring” and has “changed her life.”

Nick lets his eye slide down her throat like a finger as she talks. Shelley is sweeter and more earnest than he’d remembered, though not quite as pretty. She wanted to meet him, she says, because she has always dreamt of becoming a TV food stylist “for a day job.” Presumably she thinks Nick will help her out in this regard. He pushes this from his mind as they continue to talk because he dislikes it when people want something from him.

She is small without qualifying as short—maybe five foot five—and has an overexcited energy that causes her to flutter her hands and open her eyes very wide when trying to make
a point, which is most of the time. She wears a pair of smooth black jeans and a tank top that’s so worn Nick can sense that if he were to look closely, he’d be rewarded with a glimpse of pale areolae through the nubby cotton ridges (she doesn’t seem to be wearing a bra). Her severe red bob is a shade brassier than he remembers, and it reminds him of a Christmas decoration. Not the tasteful, hand-crafted ones Maya buys but the tacky kind he grew up with in the suburbs. Also, she wears glasses—thick, black 1950s science-nerd specs that look like they might actually cause her head to buckle on her slender neck. He realizes that something about her style is meant to eschew sexuality, to throw up a roadblock to potential suitors or at least send out a signal that this girl means business. Nick isn’t bothered by this. A part of him instinctively rises to the challenge.

Shelley holds up her phone and snaps a photo of herself, tongue out, eyes closed, slurping an oyster from its shell. Then she snaps one of Nick.

“What’s the problem?” she asks when he shrinks away. Her tone immediately makes him feel ten years older than he is.

He shrugs. “I like to keep my digital footprint to a minimum, that’s all.”

“Footprint?” Shelley is scrolling through images on her phone now. “Isn’t that an environmental thing?”

“I’m not a fan of clutter—physical, virtual or emotional.”

Nick takes another look at Shelley, this one openly appraising. He makes a viewfinder with his fingers, Hollywood director–style, and watches with pleasure as her posture corrects.

“You know what?” he tells her. “I think you ought to be one of those people who cook on TV.”

Shelley presses her lips together and rolls her eyes, but he can see she’s delighted. She takes a long sip of wine. “You mean like on
MasterChef
?”

“No, no. I mean like one of those shows hosted by women who just kind of float around a kitchen sticking their fingers in everything and licking them.”

Shelley laughs, head back, giving him a clear view of the muscles contracting in her milky white throat. “But those women can’t cook—not really. And I want to be a
real
chef, not some culinary spokesmodel.”

Nick leans back. “Maybe so, but you make people hungry. You should capitalize on that somehow.”

Shelley smacks his knee, mock offended.

“Ha! That’s almost disgusting!”

Nick’s raises his hands like he’s been busted by the police and has nothing to hide. “How so? I just have a healthy appetite, that’s all.”

This is about as dirty as it gets—for now. Less than an hour later, Nick’s back at the office sitting in a production meeting to discuss possible locations for his latest spot: a three-part narrative smartphone ad about a hot young couple flirting, fighting and making up—all by phone, text, email and instant messages. He’s particularly proud of the log line:
CurvePhones—so you’ll never feel alone again.
It’s a lie, of course, but a beautiful one. All the best slogans are.

There are five of them around the boardroom table—Nick, Ben, the production manager, the location scout and Larry, who is flipping through a book of location photos while chewing noisily on a peanut protein bar.

“Didn’t you see anything more, I dunno,
swank
?” Larry asks the scout, crumbs speckling his chin. Larry has an endearing habit of demanding that everything be classier in the most vulgar possible way. “The actors are kids—but they’re rich kids. Don’t forget this is a
high-end
smartphone. We can afford to go aspirational on the shag pad here. In fact, I think it’s pretty much imperative.” He glances at Nick, who gives an almost imperceptible dip of his jaw. It is his habit not to talk in the first half of any meeting, even—indeed especially—if he’s in charge of it. That way when he does open his mouth, people actually seem to care.

Larry, meanwhile, continues yakking on in his usual fashion, pushing papers around the table, gesticulating like an angry silverback. On Nick’s left, Ben is taking notes, which he will later type up and email to everyone at the table. Nick is comforted by this, because it means he doesn’t actually need to listen.

He sifts through the images of antiseptic condo kitchens, fluffy bedroom suites and light-flooded lounging rooms. An industrial loft is perfect except for its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (too intellectually intimidating for the client); an Edwardian brick house is dismissed as “too grown-up” and a gleaming ultra-modern condo “too clinical.”

Just as Nick is beginning to feel almost as agitated as Larry is acting (why can’t these people ever find anything new and fresh?), he comes across a printout of an airy, light-drenched space with white walls, an eclectic mix of mid-century furniture and ragtag antiques, a baby grand piano and a distant view of the water. In the corner is a jumble of musical instruments for children, the wooden, painted kind that Nick remembers playing with thirty years earlier—tambourine, xylophone and drum
set creep into the frame. Art books are piled on the floor. Worn oriental carpets on barnboards. Oil paintings lean against the wall. Everything about the space suggests a kind of sophisticated domestic peace to Nick. He taps the corner of the photo on the table. “What about this one?”

The production designer—a slim, soft-spoken man with a head of trimmed, prematurely white hair—reaches over, pinches the photo between his fingers and gently, but not without some effort, tugs it out of Nick’s hand. “Sorry, Nick. Not sure how that even slipped in there,” he says, shoving the photo in the outside breast pocket of his slim black blazer. “It’s a place I’m using for another job, starting next week. A family show.”

“Give it here,” Larry says, plucking the photo from the designer’s pocket. “Oooh, I like it. Just the sort of slice of heaven we need. What’s the other job? Tell me their budget. I’m sure we can trump them. Have the owners signed anything?”

The designer frowns, his loyalties clearly torn. “I’m afraid it’s fully booked. It took us ages to find it. I really can’t—”

Larry leans forward, rubbing his hands together and staring straight into the production designer’s face. He actually licks his lips. “Our director prefers that location,” he says, tapping a thick buffed fingernail on the image. “The question now isn’t
if
but
how
you are going to get it for him.”