Read A Better Man for Free Online Page B

the only ones to care about their appearance?). Back then, Nick seemed a bit weak to her, a bit too self-consciously fastidious ever to be one of the real men on campus. And yet there was something compelling about him. A sensitivity and patience, awillingness to listen to her yammering about Spinoza as if what she said were a revelation rather than an undergraduate regurgitation. It was a skill the other frat brothers and private school boys, with their fixation on sports and keg party logistics, didn’t even pretend to possess.
    He reeled her in by listening. Listening to her excitement about some confessional poet or other on the freezing walk from the arts building to her shared student digs. Listening to her story of an argument with her mother as she filled her jumbo Ikea cart with not-yet-assembled bookshelves and plastic kitchen implements. Listening to her pre-exam anxieties as they blew on steaming hot chocolates in the dingy cafeteria under the campus library. And finally, after a drunken night in a smoky fondue joint on the French side of town, listening to her surprise at having ended up sweaty and entwined on a futon on the floor of her bedroom. And that, as they say, was that. Sex bonded them instantly as companions, and from then on it was the Nick and Maya Show, a sold-out run with Sunday matinee in perpetuity. Or so she’d assumed.
    It was difficult to put her finger on precisely when the balance shifted. When Nick the slavishly devoted boyfriend and uxorious husband became Nick the eerily remote apparition of his former self. The twins’ arrival and Maya’s decision to quit the law in the hope of effecting “life balance” seemed to have had something to do with it. In a period of just a few months, Maya had undergone the most dramatic change of her adult life. One day she was a focused, eagle-eyed attorney in a silk suit tackling the business of divorce, and the next she was a harried housewife and budding exercise addict whose biggestdaily challenge was determining how to work her private hot yoga session around the twins’ nap schedule. It was amazing, she quickly learned, what minutiae could fill your day and—in the absence of court dates, filing deadlines and responsibilities handed down from the fast-retreating World of Work—begin to take on monumentally troubling proportions. Take email, for instance. Where she had once spent the better part of her days and nights connected, practically via implant, to the endless, absorbing cacophony of her smartphone, today she found it a trial to return more than one or two messages in a day. And why should she, when there was never anything interesting enough to demand her full attention? A play-date invitation here, a preschool newsletter there. A “Hello dear, how are the children?” email from her mother from whatever silent meditation retreat she was on. Reminders and updates from the twins’ endless edutainment schedule of intuitive movement, baby yoga, Junior Picasso classes and Suzuki violin. Her inbox—once a place of intrigue, urgency and melodrama—had become a utilitarian emotional dead zone. Apart from the twins, no one
needed
her attention anymore. Not even Nick.
    In her first two years of career withdrawal, Maya had made a couple of attempts at “mommy track” sidelines: the hemp-diaper import business that crashed and burned, then a humiliating stint as a self-styled “design concierge” (who knew the rich actually preferred their own dubious taste to other people’s?). But after three years of treading water, Maya has come to the conclusion that it is more dignified simply not to work than to pretend to do so. Nick had supported, even encouraged, her decision to quit the firm (that was around thetime SoupCan got the Duracell account, which tipped the balance in favour of his earning power anyway). She could tell that a part of him (probably not the best part) was secretly pleased with the idea of being the sole breadwinner.