The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  No such luck. Lawrence returned from the phone to announce that Ramsey had leapt at the opportunity to come to dinner, adding, “He sounds lonely.”

  “He doesn’t expect another sushi spread, does he?” asked Irina with misgiving. “I hate to seem ungenerous when he’s picked up so many checks. And last year was fun. But it was a lot of work, and I hate to repeat myself.” Irina was a proud and passionate cook, and never bought plastic bags of prewashed baby lettuces.

  “No, he begged that you not go to so much trouble. And think of me,” said Lawrence, who did the dishes. “Last year, the kitchen looked like Hiroshima.”

  Hence the fare had been, to Irina’s mind, rather ordinary: an indifferent cut of venison cubed in red-wine sauce with shiitake mushrooms and juniper berries, which constituted an old standby. Yet Ramsey was as effusive as before. This time, however, Irina wondered whether it was really the menu that captivated their guest. Perhaps in order to add one note of novelty to a meal she’d prepared several times, before he arrived she had dragged out a sleeveless dress that she hadn’t worn in years. The garment had almost certainly slipped to the back of the wardrobe because—as she discovered once more—the straps were a tad long, and kept dropping off her shoulders. The soft, pale blue cotton sized with latex stretched smoothly across her hips; the hemline was high enough that she had to yank it down her thighs every time she sat down. She’d no idea what had gotten into her, swanning around in such provocative gear before a man fresh from divorce. At any rate, it wasn’t the venison that Ramsey kept staring at all night, that was for sure.

  Mercifully, Lawrence hadn’t seemed to notice. What he did notice was that Ramsey wouldn’t leave. Even with snooker icons Lawrence’s social appetite was finite, and by two a.m. Ramsey had exceeded it by a good measure. Lawrence vigorously cleared the plates, and washed them loudly down the hall. As the censorious clank of pots carried from the kitchen, Irina was stranded with Ramsey, and panicked for lack of subject matter. Granted that Ramsey was overstaying his welcome, but she wished Lawrence wouldn’t do that with the dishes! Whenever they did get the ball rolling in the living room, Lawrence would interrupt the flow by brisking in to wipe the table, or to prize off melted candle wax, never meeting Ramsey’s eyes. Oblivious to his host’s rudeness, Ramsey refilled their wine glasses. He didn’t collect his cue case, and then with obvious reluctance, until after three.

  Thus the whole last year the trio hadn’t reconvened, as if Irina and Lawrence needed that long to recover. But Lawrence didn’t hold a grudge, agreeing with Irina that sometimes Ramsey’s social skills were as inept as his snooker game was elegant. Besides, Lawrence was well compensated for his lost sleep with free tournament tickets throughout the following season.

  IT WAS JULY AGAIN. But this year was different.

  A few days ago Lawrence had rung from Sarajevo to remind her that Ramsey’s birthday was coming up. “Oh,” she’d said. “That’s right. I’d forgotten.”

  Irina chided herself. She had not forgotten, and it was foolish to pretend that she had. The slightest abridgments of the truth with Lawrence made her feel isolated and mournful, far away and even afraid. She would rather be caught out lying than get away with it, and thus live with the horror that it was possible.

  “Going to get in touch with him?” he asked.

  Irina had been chewing on this matter ever since she learned that Lawrence would be at a conference on “nation building” in Bosnia and wouldn’t return until the night of July 7. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the one who’s big buddies with Ramsey.”

  “Oh, I think he likes you.” But Lawrence’s tone imparted moderation, or even reservation, as in “I think he likes you well enough.”

  “But he’s so odd. I have no idea what we’d talk about.”

  “The fact that they’re thinking about dropping the bow-tie rule? Really, Irina, you should call, if only to make an excuse. How many years have we—”

  “Five,” she said morosely. She’d counted.

  “If you let it go, he’ll be hurt. Before I left, I did leave a brief message on his cell-phone voice mail to apologize that I’d be in Sarajevo this year. But I let it slip that you were staying behind in London. If you want that badly to get out of it, I could always call him from here, and say that you changed your mind at the last minute and came with. You know, happy returns, but what a drag, we’re both out of town.”

  “No, don’t. I hate lying for petty reasons.” Irina was uneasy with the implication that she didn’t have a problem with lying for substantial reasons, but further qualification seemed tortuous. “I’ll ring him.”

  She didn’t. What she did do was ring up Betsy Philpot, who had edited Jude’s and Irina’s collaborations at Random House, and so knew Ramsey somewhat. Not having worked together for a couple of years, Betsy and Irina had morphed from colleagues to confidantes. “Tell me that you and Leo are free on the sixth.”

  “We’re not free on the sixth,” said Betsy, whose conversation never ran to frills.

  “Damn.”

  “This matters why?”

  “Oh, it’s Ramsey’s birthday, when we’ve had this custom of getting together. Except now Jude’s history, and Lawrence is in Sarajevo. That leaves me.”

  “So?”

  “I know this sounds vain, and it could be all in my head. But I’ve wondered if Ramsey doesn’t—if he isn’t a little sweet on me.” She’d never said so aloud.

  “He doesn’t strike me as a wolf. I’d think he’s nothing you can’t handle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

  For Betsy, another American, everything was always simple. In fact, her cool, compass-and-ruler approach to circles that others found difficult to square had a curious brutality. When Jude and Irina had fallen out, she’d advised with a savage little shrug, “As far as I could tell, you’ve never liked her much anyway. Write it off.”

  Irina wasn’t proud of the way she “dealt” with this quandary, meaning that she didn’t deal with it at all. Every day in the countdown to July 6, she promised herself in the morning to ring Ramsey in the afternoon, and in the afternoon to ring him in the evening. Yet propriety pertained even to night owls, and once it passed eleven p.m., she’d check her watch with a shake of the head and resolve to ring first thing the next day. But he probably slept late, she’d consider on rising, and the cycle would begin again. The sixth was a Saturday, and the Friday before she faced the fact that a single day’s notice so obviously risked his being busy that to ring at the last minute might seem ruder than forgetting the occasion altogether. Well, now she wouldn’t have to face down Ramsey Acton all by herself. A flood of relief was followed by a trickle of sorrow.

  The phone rang Friday at nearly midnight. At this hour, she was so sure that it was Lawrence that she answered, “Zdravstvuy, milyi!”

  Silence. No returning, “Zdravstvuy, lyubov moya!” It wasn’t Lawrence.

  “… Sorry,” said an airy, indistinct British accent after that embarrassed beat. “I were trying to reach Irina McGovern.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is Irina. It’s just, I thought it was Lawrence.”

  “… You lot rabbit in—were that Russian?”

  “Well, Lawrence’s Russian is atrocious, but he knows just enough—he’d never manage in Moscow, but we use it at home, you know, as our private language…. Endearments,” she continued into the void. “Or little jokes.”

  “… That’s dead sweet.” He had still not identified himself. It was now too awkward to ask who this was.

  “Of course, Lawrence and I met because I was his Russian tutor in New York,” Irina winged it, stalling. “He was doing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia on nonproliferation. In those days, that meant you needed to have some Russian under your belt. These days, it’s more like Korean…. But Lawrence has no gift for languages whatsoever. He was the worst student I ever had.” Blah-blah-blah. Who was this? Though she had a theory.

  A soft chuckle. �
��That’s dead sweet as well…. I dunno why.”

  “So,” Irina charged on, determined to identify the caller. “How are you?”

  “… That’d depend, wouldn’t it? On whether you was free tomorrow night.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be free?” she hazarded. “It’s your birthday.”

  Another chuckle. “You wasn’t sure it were me, was you? ’Til just then.”

  “Well, why should I be? I don’t think—this is strange—but I don’t think, after all these years, that I’ve ever spoken to you on the phone.”

  “… No,” he said with wonderment. “I reckon that’s so.”

  “I always made our social arrangements through Jude, didn’t I? Or after you two split, through Lawrence.”

  Nothing. The rhythm to Ramsey’s phone speech was syncopated, so that when Irina began to soldier on, they were both talking at once. They both stopped. Then she said, “What did you say?” at the same time he said, “Sorry?” Honestly, if a mere phone call was this excruciating, how would they ever manage dinner?

  “I’m not used to your voice on the phone,” she said. “It sounds as if you’re ringing from the North Pole. And using one of those kiddy contraptions, made of Dixie cups and kite string. You’re sometimes awfully quiet.”

  “… Your voice is wonderful,” he said. “So low. Especially when you talk Russian. Why don’t you say something.” Summat. “In Russian. Whatever you fancy. It don’t matter what it means.”

  Obviously she could rattle off any old sentence; she’d grown up bilingual. But the quality of the request unnerved her, recalling those porn lines that charged a pound per minute—what Lawrence called wank-phone.

  “Kogda mi vami razgovarivayem, mne kazhetsya shto ya golaya,” she said, binding her breasts with her free arm. Fortunately, nobody learned Russian anymore.

  “What’d that mean?”

  “You said it didn’t matter.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I asked you what you had in mind for tomorrow night.”

  “Mm. I sense you’re having a laugh.”

  But what about tomorrow night? Should she invite him over, since he liked her cooking? The prospect of being in the flat alone with Ramsey Acton made her hysterical.

  “Would you like it,” she proposed miserably, “if I made you dinner?”

  He said, “That’s bleeding decent of you, pet.” The curious little endearment, which she’d only encountered once before when collaborating with an author from way up in Newcastle, was somehow warmer for being odd. “But I fancy taking you out.”

  Irina was so relieved that she flopped into her armchair. In doing so, she pulled the cord, and the phone clattered to the floor.

  “What’s that racket?”

  “I dropped the phone.”

  He laughed, more fully this time, round, and the sound, for the first time in this halting call, relaxed her. “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “It means I’m clumsy.”

  “I never seen you clumsy.”

  “Then you’ve never seen me much.”

  “I never seen you enough.”

  This time the silence was Irina’s.

  “Been a whole year,” he continued.

  “I’m afraid Lawrence wouldn’t be able to join us.” Ramsey knew that, but she’d felt the need to insist Lawrence’s name into the conversation.

  “Rather put it off, so Lawrence could come as well?”

  He’d given her an out; she should jump at it. “That doesn’t seem very ceremonial.”

  “I were hoping you might see it that way. I’ll call by at eight.”

  FOR THE MOST PART, other people took couples as they found them: you were, or, at a certain point, you weren’t. At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker’s tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly in love, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. Of course, people did have opinions, about whether you were suited, or probably fought; almost always your friends—that is, friends of the couple—liked one of you more. But these opinions were cheap. They cost nothing to hold, and nothing to change.

  Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden. Irina had a few companions who’d little time for Lawrence, and found him paternalistic or gruff; they regarded Lawrence as a friendship tax, the cost of doing business. But one way or the other, she didn’t care.

  Love having come to her neither easily nor early, Irina accepted the fact that any minor contribution she might make to human affairs would have nothing to do with unprecedented achievement in courtship. No one would ever recount the peaceable, convivial union of a children’s book illustrator and a think-tank research fellow as one that launched ships or divided nations. No modern-day Shakespeare would squander his eloquence on the ordinary happiness—if there is such a thing—that percolated within a modest flat in Borough through the 1990s.

  Nevertheless, Irina regarded her relationship with Lawrence as a miracle. He was a devoted, funny, and intelligent man, and he loved her. She didn’t care if feminists would have maintained that she didn’t need a man; she did need a man, more than anything on earth. When Lawrence was out of town, the flat seemed to generate an echo. She would not, any longer, understand why she was here, in both the general sense of alive, and the specific sense of on a Georgian square just south of London Bridge. Many were the solitary evenings that she might have worked late in her studio, but the opportunity would be wasted. She would walk from room to room. Pour a glass of wine and leave it standing. Drizzle the stainless-steel drain board with corrosive to remove the lime scale. (So mineral was London’s tap water—reputed to have cycled through more human bodies than any liquid on the planet, and leaving a white, crusty ghost behind every evaporated drop—that it might have stood sheerly upright on the counter like the Cliffs of Dover without a glass.) But suddenly the energy required to wipe the glop away would elude her. She would go to bed, and wake to a reek in the kitchen from the chemicals left to seethe.

  Shameful or not, having a man who loved her and whom she loved in return was the most important thing in Irina’s life. It wasn’t that she didn’t have strong and abiding subordinate affections, for Irina was far more sociable than Lawrence, and had put much effort into building a whole new set of comrades when they moved to London in 1990. Yet there were hungers that friends could never satisfy, and when you made the slightest bid to get them to feed this particular appetite they ran a mile. Moreover, it wasn’t that she cared nothing for her “art,” even if two histrionically self-involved parents in film and dance impelled her to couch the word in sour quotation marks. The illustrations, when they were working, were a joy. But the joy was greater when Lawrence eased up behind her while she was drawing, and purled peevishly in her ear that it would be nice to eat.

  Monogamy had been effortless. Over nine years, Irina had been attracted to one of Lawrence’s colleagues from the Blue Sky Institute for exactly half an hour—at the end of which the man rose for another round of drinks, and she noticed that his backside was pear-shaped. That was that, like a scratchiness in your throat when you don’t end up coming down with a cold.

  The period of solitary confinement while Lawrence was in Sarajevo had passed less painfully than most, but it is in the nature of the absence of pain that one fails to take note of it. Though she commonly prepared time-consuming meals for Lawrence without complaint, it was still festive to get out of fixing complete dinners with vegetables and grains. Alone, Irina had taken to skipping the whole nonsense altogether and working through the dinner hour. At around ten p.m., famished and pleasantly tired, she’d been downing a large, g
ooey slice of Tesco chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose very purchase was out of character; now on the eighth day of Lawrence’s Bosnian departure, she was on her third box. Later she played the sappy music that Lawrence detested—Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, all those girl singers recently in vogue who deployed excessive vibrato in the exaltation of gloom, or to declare brassily that they had no need for men and you knew they were lying. Unsmitten by Lawrence’s disapproving glare—his mother was an alcoholic—she’d been pouring herself a tiny nightcap before bed. Lawrence would never have countenanced cognac more than once a month. But he might have appreciated that the fumes of brandy swirled into heady reflections on how lucky she was to have found him, how eagerly she looked forward to his coming home.

  In all, then, the week had been self-possessed. She’d allowed herself the little indulgences of the unwatched, including the gradual, contemplative incineration of a secret packet of cigarettes. But she’d made headway on her drawings, and a woman of Irina’s slight dimensions could afford a little cake. In two days, it was back to trout and broccoli, and she’d be sure to air the living room of its incriminating nicotine taint.

  Thus when Irina woke that Saturday she was startled to discover that her smug self-possession had cracked like an egg. It was ridiculously late, after eleven, and she would normally arise by eight. Groggily she reconstructed that after that disquieting phone call with Ramsey, she had not, as she ought to have, cradled the receiver and flossed. There was, she recalled, a second brandy. In the kitchen, the chocolate-cappuccino cake was decimated. That’s right, she’d stood fretfully at the counter, slicing smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left. And oh dear, she had cranked up the volume of Little Earthquakes so high that a downstairs neighbor had arrived at the door in a bathrobe to complain. There would be hell to pay if Lawrence got wind of that, since he had only last month banged on the door below to get them to “put a lid on the salsa,” and he “didn’t mean the kind you dump on tacos, either.”