A Better Man by Leah McLaren Read Free Book Online Page B

particularly remember buying, and relieves Velma, who has an appointment to get her eyebrows threaded. The afternoon and evening slide by like all the rest, a montage of sippy cups, talking toys, educational books (
L is for llamas, who eat up all the leaves!
),make-believe play and board games (Maya instituted a strict screen ban after reading a study that linked the brain’s absorption of LED light to shrinking attention spans), followed by a dinner of spelt-battered chicken fingers and untouched (but dutifully procured) blanched kale. Then it’s bath, shea-butter body rub, story, comfort feed and family bed.
    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a week out of date, but she likes to work her way through in order.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 cookinggrown-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 flipsaround 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.