Better Than This (2 page)

I wished suddenly that I had left when I had the chance, that I hadn’t gotten into this, but I was committed now. “I think you’re afraid the bank will pull the plug on us this morning. And then we’ll have to wait a while longer before we can think about starting a family.”

She uttered a short humourless laugh. “Well, I should be used to that shouldn’t I?”

Beneath her anger was a blunt edged blade of truth. “It’ll work out, Sally, I promise,” I said. Her shoulders sagged slightly in weary resignation.

“You know, I don’t know if I care.”

I was a little shocked and I couldn’t believe she meant it. “How can you not care about our future?”

“Our future? I don’t know what that is any more.”

This kind of talk bothered me deeply. The one thing I’d always held onto was my dream, my idea of what our lives would one day be like. But dreams need people to believe in them otherwise the colour begins to bleed out of them like an old painting and they begin to seem less real, taking on the mantle of wistful imaginings instead of something actually possible. I was suddenly aware of something I’d known for some time. Sally didn’t believe any more. I tried to rally her.

“Our future is what it has always been. This house, a family. Isn’t that what you want?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want though does it, Nick. It’s about what you want.”

“What I want is for you to be happy. For both of us to be happy together.”

She gave a little shake of her head. “If that’s true why have you never wanted me to get pregnant?”

“Come on. We’ve been all over this. I want kids as much as you do. I only ever wanted us to be ready. I want us to have all the things a child needs. For you to be able to stay home and not have to go to work. I just think it ought to be the right time, that’s all.”

“The right time?” She gave me a cynical smile, “Right. And when is that going to be?” She started ticking off the fingers of one hand. “Let’s see, first you wanted to wait until the agency was on its feet. Then we had to have the right kind of house, which you made damn sure it took for ever to find because there was always something not quite right. Wrong neighbourhood. Too far from the city. Too close to the city. Garden too big, garden too small

“This isn’t fair,” I cut in.

“No! No it isn’t fair, you’re right. Because I’ve always gone along with you before. I went along with you when we finally found this house and you said we should wait awhile because we’d borrowed more than we could afford. So I waited. And then when the agency was doing okay, when everything was going along just fine, what happens then?”

I knew what was coming. A little over a year ago we had taken on a new client, a start-up dot. com company. They folded owing us a lot of money. Office Line was a calculated risk. Nobody could have predicted they wouldn’t make it.”

“Marcus was always against it,” Sally countered.

“If it was left to Marcus we would never take any risks. You can’t run a business that way.”

“Marcus wanted you to slow down. Take it a step at a time. But you wouldn’t listen. You never listen to anyone.”

It’s easy to argue your case in retrospect if your position was ultimately proven right, and in this case I didn’t have a leg to stand on. It didn’t matter that Office Line might have easily been a huge success, and made us all rich. It could have happened. It just didn’t. I couldn’t win this one so I gave in.

“I admit it didn’t work out that time. I made some mistakes. But I was doing what I thought was best. For us.”

“For us, Nick? Really, it was for us?”

“Of course.”

“You almost ruined us. We nearly lost the house, we nearly lost everything.”

“But we didn’t,” I pointed out. “We’re still here.”

Today we are, but what about tomorrow? I waited, Nick. I waited again while we worked another year to pay off the debts.”

Her voice cracked and I thought she was going to cry. I could see the anguish in her expression and it pierced me to my core. I wanted to hold her, reassure her and I started a movement that would have encircled her in my arms and held her against me while she sobbed against my chest, but she flinched as if she’d been struck and anger flashed in her eyes.

“And now, dammit, when finally, finally I thought everything was supposed to be coming right, I find out the bank are threatening to close you down again.” She shook her head in disbelief. “How could you do it, Nick? How could you take such a risk again? And without telling anybody. Not even Marcus, let alone me? How could you have done that?”

“Look, I know how you feel,” I said, avoiding the difficult part of her question and concentrating on justifying what I did rather than the way I did it. “But Spectrum isn’t Office Line It’s a different situation. Once the bank understand that if we get this account it’ll put the agency in a whole different league they’ll back off. A couple more months and this will all be behind us. You’ll be able to quit work. A year from now we’ll be parents. I swear to you. This time it’s going to happen.”

For a moment we stared at each other. My expression appealing, Sally looking as if I’d uttered something completely incomprehensible to her. Once again I made a move towards her but she spun sideways to evade me.

“No!” She held up her hand. “I’ve heard it all before, Nick. And you don’t know how I feel. You don’t! If you did, if you cared about me, about what I want we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

She peered at me intently, as if trying to see me through a thick fog. The anger seemed to drain out of her and her shoulders slumped a little, but I didn’t like what replaced it in her eyes. When she spoke again her voice was heavy with resignation and weariness. “I used to think I knew you.”

“What do you mean? Of course you know me.”

“Do I? Sometimes I don’t recognize you. You don’t listen to anyone any more. You’re so obsessed with making the agency into a huge success, it seems as if you’d do anything to get what you want.”

“I work hard, and I know what I want, is that so bad?”

“It is when you start lying. When you keep things from me.”

“I didn’t tell you about the bank because I didn’t want to worry you.”

“I’m your wife, Nick. You’ve known for months that you were in trouble and you didn’t say anything. You went on pretending nothing was happening. This is my life too. And what about Marcus? For God’s sake he’s supposed to be your friend, not just your partner! This could ruin him too. Don’t you think he had a right to know?”

“It isn’t as simple as that, Sally, you know that. Marcus is a terrifically talented guy. Creatively he’s the best, I’ve always said that. But even he’d admit that if it wasn’t for me Carpe Diem would never get any bigger. We’d stay the way we are for ever.”

“So that makes it okay to go behind his back? Ignore everything he says?”

“It isn’t like that.”

“It is, Nick. It’s exactly like that, and you’re the only one who can’t see it.” She shook her head, still peering at me. “You’ve changed.”

I didn’t like the way she sounded, the way she was looking at me. I could see how things must look to her, but she was wrong about me. All I wanted was for us to be happy. “Sally…” I said, making a final appeal.

“Don’t,” she said, placing a hand against my chest. Then again quietly. “Don’t.”

The house we lived in was a three bedroom, two bath clapboard with a two car garage in the wooded hills of Hillsborough. All of the houses on our street were set back from the road behind neat front lawns and shady trees. It was a pleasant neighbourhood where the lot sizes ran to a third of an acre and on a good day the 280 freeway allowed me to be in downtown San Francisco in less than half an hour. We bought the house four years ago when already real estate in the Bay Area was shooting towards the stratosphere fuelled by Silicon Valley. It cost seven forty-five then, but now was worth somewhere around a million. From the end of the street I could look across the valley and see houses less than half a mile away nestled snugly among the trees worth eight, nine, ten million. Crazy.

Back when we found the house I’d balked at the price, but looking for a family home had been my idea in the first place and I’d stretched out the search for six months before we found this one. At the time we were renting an apartment in South Beach. Sally had been becoming impatient, and so we’d put in an offer, even though it meant stretching our borrowing to the limit and ensured that Sally couldn’t contemplate quitting work for a while until I was making enough money to meet the mortgage payments. She had argued we could buy something cheaper, but in the end I had got my way. There was no denying that I’d seen buying the house partly as a means of delaying starting a family.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sally to have the baby she craved.

We’d always talked about having a family and I knew the day we were married how important it was to her. The only discord between us was about when we should start. When we were younger we were happy to nominate some vague future time when we were ‘settled’. It was only when Sally hit her mid-twenties and she saw friends and people at work start to have babies that we began debating in earnest what being settled really meant. That was when the cracks appeared. To Sally it meant having a decent place to live in and earning enough to maintain a pleasant lifestyle. To me it meant something else. It meant having security.

When I left the house that morning I put down the top of my Saab convertible which was on a two-year lease to the company. It was the kind of morning that we don’t take for granted during May in the Bay Area. The sky was robin’s egg blue promising a fine day. As I turned onto the freeway to join the San Francisco bound traffic I wondered how much longer we would be living in Hillsborough. The 280 runs along a high ridge on the peninsula bounded by hills and woods on the Pacific Ocean side and the expensive communities built on the wooded slopes on the Bay side. It feels like a thousand miles from anywhere, and is a warm and sheltered environment protected from the cool air and fog that haunts San Francisco and the coastal towns of Half Moon Bay and Pacifica. As the crow flows it’s no more than a couple of miles to the Bayshore freeway that runs parallel and carries traffic from the south and the east across the San Mateo Bridge on towards the airport and San Francisco, but the contrast couldn’t be more different. Down there the view is of endless ugly housing and commercial development that appears devoid of trees, a land packed beneath a for ever boiling sky of grey cloud. Up here there is the sun and the woods and hills and peace. A nice way to begin the day, and a nice place to come home to at the end of it.

As I drove I wondered how long it would last. The bank was threatening to shut us down. That would mean selling the house and losing everything. For once I didn’t notice the view. My stomach churned and every now and then I broke out in a cold

sweat of fear. By the end of the day Carpe Diem could be history.

It was Marcus who had come up with the name when we decided to start our own advertising agency. He had to explain to me what it meant.

“It’s Latin,” he said. “It means Seize The Day.”

I liked it. Advertising agencies typically have names that are derived directly from the partners, as in the Saatchi brothers, or else they’re either corporate bland, such as KCM, one of the biggies in the Bay Area and one I’d once worked for, or they choose something obscure and cutting edge. Going the latter route made us sound up market and trendy, not a bad thing in the advertising business, and the name we chose reflected a basic truth about Marcus and I. The arty feel was Marcus in a nutshell, he was the creative genius whereas the go-getting sentiment applied more to me. I’ve always been the talker, the deal maker, the one who handled the clients. Together we made a pretty good team.

We met at college and became friends when Marcus was majoring in art and graphic design and I was doing a business degree and neither of us had any idea what we wanted to do with our lives. I moved into a room in the house where Marcus lived and from the beginning we got on well, even though in many ways we weren’t alike. I was in the swim team and I ran the fifteen hundred, so a lot of the people I knew were from athletic circles, but Marcus wasn’t much interested in competitive sport. His interests revolved more around political issues and he was often involved in petitions and protest marches about things like the destruction of the environment or the exploitation of the third world. The first time I saw him he was wearing faded jeans and a “I-shirt with a marijuana leaf printed on the front. He had dark brown hair which he wore longish so that it constantly fell over his glasses and he had a short beard.

“Glad to meet you,” he said and shook my hand. He was a head shorter than me and my instant impression was that he was the intelligent, serious type. I pigeonholed him as one of the kind who ran the student bodies and the radio station, who always made me feel slightly uncomfortable with their knowledge of what was going on in the world and their belief that they should and could contribute to change. He was with a Eurasian girl who had the most stunning eyes and skin. I saw him with a lot of girls after that, always young, always beautiful and intelligent. I would run into them coming from his room on the way to the bathroom wrapped in a towel, and sometimes we’d exchange a few words. I was used to hanging out with the girls who buzzed around the jocks. A lot of them were fun loving cheerleader types, and mostly gorgeous. I’d always assumed guys like Marcus had to make do with what was left over, but of course I was wrong about that and Marcus opened my eyes to that truth.

Our friendship grew slowly. I liked being with Marcus because we talked about all kind of things I never could discuss with my other friends. Around him I didn’t feel as if I always had to be presenting some macho front, but I could be who I was. I realized eventually that was why girls liked him too. Maybe he wasn’t classically good looking or particularly athletic, attributes often admired on university campuses, but he was a good listener, and he didn’t judge people arbitrarily. I don’t know what he saw in me, but somehow we ended up firm friends.