The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “How could I think what she said was ‘spot on’ and still keep working at all?”

  “She did think your composition was brilliant, and that your craftsmanship was class. But there were something, in them first few books, a wildness—it’s gone missing.”

  “Well, you don’t just go put ‘wildness’ back. ‘Oh, I’ll add a little wildness!’”

  He smiled, painfully. “Don’t get your nose in a sling. I were only trying to help. Making a hash of it as well. I don’t know your business. But I did think you was right talented.”

  “Past tense?”

  “What Jude was on about—it’s hard to put into words, like.”

  “Jude didn’t have a hard time putting it into words,” Irina countered bitterly. “Adjectives like flat and lifeless are very evocative. She put her sniffy disapproval into action, too, and commissioned another illustrator for her preachy story line. I had to toss a year’s worth of work.”

  “Sorry, love. And you was bang on—what we was talking about, it ain’t something you can add like a pinch of salt. It ain’t out there, it runs through you. Same as in snooker.”

  “Well, I guess illustration isn’t as fun for me as it used to be. But what is?”

  Her degenerative expectations seemed to sadden him. “You’re too young to talk like that.”

  “I’m over forty, and can talk however I please.”

  “Fair enough—you’re too beautiful to talk like that, then.”

  Lawrence was wont to describe her as cute, and though Ramsey was a bit out of order the more serious adjective was refreshing. Self-conscious, Irina struggled with the oily strips of eel. “If I am, I didn’t used to be. I was a scrawny kid. Knobby, all knees.”

  “What a load of waffle. Never met a bird what wasn’t proud of being skinny.”

  “But I was also a klutz. Gawky, ungraceful. Do you think that’s boasting, too?”

  “It’s hard to credit. Weren’t your mum a ballerina?”

  Irina was always amazed when anyone remembered biographical details mentioned years ago. “Well, not a performing one, after she had me. Which she never let me forget. Anyway, I disgusted her. I wasn’t limber. I couldn’t do splits or tuck my heels behind my head. I could barely touch my toes. I was constantly knocking things over.” Irina talked with her hands; with a smile, Ramsey moved her green tea out of reach.

  “Oh, it was worse than that,” she went on. “I guess plenty of kids aren’t Anna Pavlova. But I had buck teeth.”

  Ramsey angled his head. “Looks like a fine set of chops to me.”

  “I don’t think my mother would have sprung for them, but luckily my father paid for braces. Really, my front teeth weren’t just a little crooked. They hung out of my mouth and rested on my lower lip.” Irina demonstrated, and Ramsey laughed.

  “Well, you helped explain something,” he said. “You ain’t—aware of yourself. You are beautiful, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so. But you don’t know it.”

  Abashed, Irina reached for her sake cup only to discover that it was empty; she pretended to take a slug. “My mother’s much more beautiful than I am.”

  “Even allowing that were ever true,” he said, signaling for another round of sake flagons, “you must mean she was.”

  “No, is. At sixty-three. In comparison to my mother, I’m a schlub. She still works out on a bar, for hours. All on three sticks of celery and a leaf of lettuce. Sorry—half a leaf.”

  “She sounds a right pain in the arse.”

  “She is—a right pain in the arse.”

  Their sashimi platters arrived, and the chef was such an artist—the spicy tuna was bound with edible gold leaf—that eating his creation seemed like vandalism.

  “Me,” said Ramsey, surveying his platter with the same respectful look-don’t-touch expression with which he’d met Irina by his car, “I watch buff birds strut the pavement, first thing goes through my head ain’t, ‘Blimey, love a bit o’ that, ’ey!’ but, ‘Bloody hell, she must spend all day in the gym.’ I don’t see no beauty; all I see is vanity.”

  “Great excuse for skipping sit-ups: oh, I wouldn’t want to look ‘vain.’”

  “No chance of that, pet.”

  Irina frowned. “You know, something changed when that tin came off my teeth. Too much changed. It was sort of horrifying.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Everyone treated me like a completely different person. Not just boys, but girls. You’ve probably been good-looking all your life, so you have no idea.”

  “Am I?”

  “Don’t be coy. It’s like me pretending to be ashamed of having been skinny.” Worried that she was encouraging something that she shouldn’t, she added, “I only mean, you have regular features.”

  “Grand,” he said dryly. “I’m overcome.”

  “I’m convinced that decent-looking people—”

  “I fancy good-looking better.”

  “—All right, then, good-looking people. They haven’t a clue that how they’re treated—how much it has to do with their appearance. I even bet that attractive people have a higher opinion of humanity. Since everybody’s always nice to them, they think everybody’s nice. But everybody’s not nice. And they’re superficial beyond belief. It’s depressing, when you’ve been on the other side. You get treated like gum on somebody’s shoe, or worse, like nothing. As if you’re not just unsightly, you’re unseeable. Ugly people, fat people, even people who just aren’t anything special? They have to work harder to please. They have to do something to prove out, whereas when you’re pretty to look at you don’t have to do anything but sit there and everybody is plumb delighted.”

  Irina wasn’t accustomed to talking so much. Early in that speech Lawrence would have interrupted that she had made her point, so enough already. When Ramsey said nothing to shut her up, he induced the little falling sensation of anticipating resistance and meeting none, like unexpectedly stepping off a curb.

  “Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.”

  “Rubbish. You’ll still be ravishing at seventy-five.”

  “Dream on, buddy,” she said with a smile. “But you—you have that telltale face of a boy all the girls were a-swoon over in high school. Grammar school,” she corrected.

  “Hate to disappoint you, sunshine, but I didn’t go to no grammar school. Secondary modern. I failed the eleven-plus. I don’t think you lot have it, it’s—”

  “I know.” The British had since converted to the “comprehensive” system in most of the UK, but in Ramsey’s day tremulous eleven-year-olds were put through a grueling separation of wheat from chaff, whose results determined whether they went to the grammar schools of the university-bound, or the lowly secondary schools intended to encourage entry into the trades. “That must have been painful.”

  “I weren’t fussed, were I? I aimed to be a snooker player. Jesus God, I bunked off school more than I went.”

  “Still, I can see it. You were the kind of kid that the eyesores like me would all have hopeless crushes on from the back row, while you went out with the only girl in class who’d had breasts since she was ten.” The image came readily. Maybe it was the Peter Pan effect of playing games all day, but Ramsey still looked adolescent. Even his hair, turning less gray than white, gilded in candlelight to surfer-blond.

  “I may have had my options,” he conceded. “But only in hindsight. In them days, girls scared my bollocks off. I’m thirteen, right? A bird named Estelle, what’s a year or two older, takes me to her room and pulls her shirt off. I stare at her Beatles posters—anywhere but at her chest, like—mumble something about snooker practice, and scarper to the push-bike. I hadn’t a monkeys’ what I were meant to do.”

  “You left her there, st
anding in her room, with her shirt off? I bet she loved that.”

  “Seem to recollect she never spoke to me again.”

  “But you figured it out eventually. What to do.”

  “Matter of fact, I ain’t sure I have done.”

  “I could steer you toward a few birds-and-bees how-tos, but I should warn you they’re mostly targeted at ages five to eight.”

  “To be honest, the most erotic memories of my life ain’t of shagging at all,” he reflected. “I did have a girlfriend in senior school, you was right about that. And she did have breasts, but they was small. Small and perfect. We was inseparable, and I wager the rest of the school assumed we was bonking our brains out. We wasn’t. Denise was tiny, and dark-haired, like you. Quiet. She spent every night she could get away at Rackers, the local snooker club in Clapham, watching me cane fellas twice my age for a fiver a frame. I’d give her the dosh to hold, and my coat, and she knew the signal for ‘the competition’s getting bolshie, so do a runner sharpish.’ She liked to chalk my cue.”

  “Sounds metaphorical.”

  “Well, there’s something to be said for getting your cue chalked, full stop, and not in any filthy sense. When I cleared up my last frame, I’d walk her home. She’d carry my case. I’d hold her hand. We always walked through Clapham Common and stopped midway at the same bench. We snogged there, for hours. It sounds innocent; I reckon it was. Them kisses, they was so endless, and each one so different… I weren’t really busting to do anything else. I didn’t feel cheated. Though best nobody warned me that at sixteen I were experiencing the highlight of my erotic life. I still have dreams about Denise, and that bench on the Common.”

  Irina felt the squirm of an emotion that she was reluctant to name. In the early days with Lawrence, they, too, had whiled away hours on the battered brown couch in her apartment on West 104th Street, giving each other mouth-to-mouth. But those memories had grown too precious. At some indeterminate point in perhaps the second year they lived together she noticed that they no longer kissed—really kiss-kissed, the way Ramsey meant, even if they still pecked good-bye. It probably wasn’t fair to blame it all on Lawrence, but Irina couldn’t resist the impression that he had stopped kissing her. They had a robust sex life, and it seemed insensible to focus on the deficits of sensory window-dressing. Yet lately when she watched actors smooching in movies, Irina felt a confusing admixture of alienation—what obscure anthropological custom is this, the pressing of lips?—and jealousy.

  “Kissing,” she ventured wistfully. “It’s more emotional than sex, isn’t it? Especially these days, maybe it means more.”

  “I’d not want to do down shagging, but snogging might be more fun.”

  In the subsequent conversational lull, Irina bore down on her sashimi platter, now pleasantly vandalized. The creamy slabs of fish lolled indolently from her chopsticks, their fleshy texture indefinably obscene. The taste was clear and unmuddied, a relief after nine days of chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose clinging coffee icing left a residual sludge.

  “So how long you been married?” asked Ramsey formally.

  “Well, technically,” she admitted, nibbling a giant clam, “we’re not.”

  Ramsey clapped his chopsticks to his platter. “But the bloke calls you his wife!”

  “I know. He says he’s forty-three, and too old to have a ‘girlfriend.’”

  “So he marries you, don’t he? Seems sloppy.”

  “Lawrence hates pomp. Anyway, these days your only real security is good intentions. You can’t get married in the same way you used to, not since the advent of ready divorce. So it doesn’t matter. I know how he feels.”

  “Oi, he adores you,” said Ramsey. “It’s one of the things I like about visiting you two. You and Lawrence, you’re like—Gibraltar.”

  “What about you? Going to try again?”

  “Figure I about packed it in.”

  “Everyone says that after a divorce, and it’s always nonsense.”

  “Fair enough. But it’s crap of you to try and rob me of such a comforting fancy.”

  Her loyalty to Lawrence firmly reestablished, Irina could afford to be nosy. “May I take that to mean that you aren’t seeing anyone?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  There was no reason to be pleased. “But aren’t snooker players constantly hit on by groupies? Like Estelle, who drag you to their rooms and tear off their shirts?”

  “It ain’t as bad as football; snooker is massively a blokes’ sport. But it ain’t so different from school. I got”—he paused decorously—“options.”

  “Did Jude leave you feeling burnt?”

  “Jude left me knackered. Nil were never enough. We buy a house in Spain; it should have been in Tuscany. I mean, good on her, she’s a bird what has high expectations of life, and that’s brilliant. Honest to fuck, it’s bloody brilliant. Still, when you’re bollixing them expectations—when all you got to do is walk into a room to make your wife want to top herself from disappointment—well, it wears you out, like. Can’t say as I’ve totally recovered.

  “Jude got ideas of things,” he speculated. “When real life didn’t come across she kept trying to yank reality round to the idea ’stead of the other way round. Know what I’m saying? Snooker trains you out of that. After every shot, it’s a whole new frame. You live with the balls the way they lay, and not the way they was a minute ago when you had the whole break planned out. She’d an idea of what it would be like to write children’s books, which didn’t include rejections or crap sales or having to compromise with illustrators like you. You know, she pictured touring libraries and reading aloud to gobsmacked six-year-olds, all big-eyed with chins in their hands. Fucking hell, she should have played snooker, if that’s the sort of crowd she wanted. For that matter, I’m afraid she started out with a right unrealistic picture of living with a snooker player. The lonely humdrum of me being on the tour most of the year was a shock. So she rides me to come back to London between tournaments, meantime having worked up this notion of me, this airbrushed photo like, and then when I do what she asks and Actual Ramsey rocks up, she just acts ticked off.

  “I reckon the short of it is,” he said, ordering a fourth round of sake, “it’s got to be perfect, or I ain’t interested. Like you and Lawrence.”

  FOR YEARS IRINA HAD imagined that only the presence of Jude and Lawrence had made it possible for her to while away so much as ten minutes at table with Ramsey Acton. Yet apparently since 1992 those two hadn’t been facilitating Irina’s tentative relationship to Ramsey. They’d been getting in the way.

  Thus by their shared dish of green-tea ice cream, the occasion had taken on the quality of a school holiday. Lawrence would be appalled. If Lawrence were here, he’d have been nursing his single Kirin beer through his chicken teriyaki (he hated raw fish), frowning at Irina’s second sake, and by her third publicly abjuring that she had had enough; a fourth he’d not merely have discouraged but would have vetoed outright. He’d have been disgusted that she accepted an unfiltered Gauloise at the end of the meal, waving the smoke from his face and later recoiling from her breath in their minicab home—“You smell like an ash can!”—as if, had she forgone the fag, he would ever think to kiss her in the back of a taxi. It was nearly one a.m., and he’d long before have pulled back his chair and stretched with theatrical exhaustion because it was time to leave. He wasn’t obsessed with germs, but she had a funny feeling he wouldn’t have liked the fact that she and Ramsey were sharing the same bowl of ice cream. Of this much she was certain: were Ramsey to propose to them both, as he did to Irina while she regretfully stubbed out her Gauloise, that they head back to his house on Victoria Park Road to get stoned, Lawrence would have dismissed the notion as preposterous. He might have smoked a bit back in the day, but Lawrence was a grown-up now, Lawrence didn’t do drugs of any description any longer, and that meant, ipso facto, that Irina didn’t do drugs, either.

  Then again, Lawrence wasn’t here, was he? Th
at was the holiday.

  So what if she said yes, and then confessed to Lawrence on his return from Sarajevo that she had stumbled off to Ramsey’s to get stoned? He’d rebuke her for acting “juvenile.” He’d remind her that she always clammed up when she got high—recalling the last time they’d tried marijuana back in ’89 on 104th Street, when she’d gawked silently at the paisley wallpaper for three hours. Curiously, the one thing Lawrence would fail to observe would be that she was (or so it was said) a handsome woman; that while Irina was married in all but law, Ramsey had been divorced for eighteen months and had made a point of the fact that he was available; that going back to his house at this hour, to smoke dope no less, could therefore be dangerously misconstrued. Why was that the one thing that Lawrence would never say? Because it was the main thing. And Lawrence was afraid of the main thing. He had a tendency to talk feverishly all around the main thing, as if bundling it with twine. Presumably if he talked in circles around the main thing for long enough it would lie there, vanquished, panting on its side, like a roped steer.

  Nonetheless, an acceptance of Ramsey’s outré invitation would emphatically entail keeping the end of their evening a secret from Lawrence. Though Irina had always considered secrets between partners perfect poison, she nursed a competing theory about small secrets. She may have sneaked a cigarette or two not so much because she enjoyed the nicotine rush itself, but because she enjoyed the secret. She wondered if you didn’t need to keep a few bits and pieces to yourself even in the closest of relationships—especially in the closest, which otherwise threatened to subsume you into a conjoined twin (who did not take drugs) that defied surgical separation. The odd fag in his absence confirmed for her that when Lawrence walked out the door she did not simply vanish, and preserved within her a covert capacity for badness that she had treasured in herself since adolescence, when she’d occasionally flouted her straight-A persona by cutting school with the most unsavory elements that she could find.

  “Sure, why not?”