The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Still, it could have been a small decision. Drunken, addled revelers often do things late at night for which they apologize in the morning with a reductive titter. But the minimizing of such moments was a matter for other people. For Irina knew with perfect certainty that she now stood at the most consequential crossroads of her life.

  “I almost forgot,” she said with a shaky smile. “Happy birthday.”

  2

  AT THE RATTLE OF the key in the lock, Irina felt her pulse in her teeth.

  “Irina Galina!” It wasn’t precisely a sobriquet. In a nod to the rhymey assonance of the Russian language, Irina’s mother had chosen Galina for her middle name, and Lawrence loved the boisterous, comical cadence of the double-barrel. Yet tonight his pet handle rang from the hallway with a grating singsong, as if she were an adorable Muppet on Sesame Street and not a grown woman.

  Dropping his luggage, Lawrence poked his head into the living room. In a stroke, her heart fell. She thought, I have never before looked into that face and felt absolutely nothing.

  The first time Irina ever laid eyes on Lawrence—having found her posting for Russian tutoring on a Columbia message board, he’d made an appointment for his first lesson—she opened the door of her West 104th Street apartment with an imperceptible double-take. She wouldn’t pretend to love at first sight, but she did register a familiarity, as if they had met before. Though his trim physique was buried in flannel and drooping denim, the face was arresting: sharply cut, cheeks hollowed from overwork, forehead curdled, deep-set eyes as big, brown, and imploring as a bloodhound’s.

  Even then, Lawrence liked to think of himself as a self-sustaining unit, like a geodesic dome whose moisture infinitely recirculates and waters its own crops. Irina did soon grow to appreciate that Lawrence was an enterprising young man who had bootstrapped himself from the moneyed equivalent of trailer-park trash to the Ivy League. But what tore at her sympathy that first afternoon was the immediate apprehension that he was starved—that emotionally he was like one of those wild boys raised by chimps, who’d been subsisting in the forest on roots and berries. That first impression had never left her, of pleading and raw need, of an undercurrent of desperation of which Lawrence himself was unaware. Even the cockiness with which he had leaned, smirking, against the door frame had proven simply heartbreaking in the end, since his improbable incompetence at Russian justified no swagger. Over the proceeding years her sympathy had only deepened.

  Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence’s face was familiar, it was killingly so—as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She’d been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises—or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence’s face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead. Strong, unapologetic nose: nothing. Boyishly tousled hair: nothing. Pleading brown eyes—

  She couldn’t look in his eyes.

  “Hey, what’s up?” said Lawrence, kissing her perfunctorily with dry lips. “Don’t tell me you’re just sitting here, not even reading.”

  Just sitting here was exactly what she’d been doing. Her own mind having converted overnight into a home entertainment center, she’d felt no need to reach for a book. In fact, the prospect of reading anything as demanding as a cereal box was risible.

  “Just thinking,” she said weakly. “And waiting for you to come home.”

  “Well, it’s coming up on eleven, right?” he said, returning to the hall to cart his bags to the bedroom. “Almost time for Late Review!”

  Lawrence’s voice died quickly and left dead air, as if the very acoustics of their home had gone flat. Irina struggled to right her posture, but kept sagging into the cushions of her chair. She heard bustling from the bedroom. Naturally the instant he arrived he had to unpack. Always this tyrannical obsession with order.

  When he shambled back to the living room, Irina couldn’t think of anything to say, and she wasn’t accustomed to having to “think of” something to say to Lawrence.

  “Okay,” she croaked. As if contaminated by Ramsey’s syncopated syntax, Irina’s timing was off, and her response to Lawrence’s proposal was minutes late.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, let’s watch Late Review.”

  There was too much space around their words. Irina visualized this ragged discourse as a mismatch of type-sizes and prints, like a kidnapper’s ransom note snipped jaggedly from different headlines. That she and Lawrence had ever carried a competent conversation now seemed incredible. She wondered what they used to talk about.

  “We’ve got another twenty minutes,” he said, splaying on the couch opposite. “So how’s tricks? Anything new?”

  “Oh,” she said, “nothing much since we last spoke.” Behold, her first lie. Irina had a queasy feeling that it wouldn’t be her last.

  “Didn’t you have dinner with Ramsey? Don’t tell me you chickened out.”

  “Oh, right,” she said thickly. She was no good at this. She was already botching it. Of course she’d have to give an accounting of last night. But the mere sounding of Ramsey’s name gave her palpitations. “Yes, we did that.”

  “So how was it? You were worried that you’d have nothing to say to each other.”

  “We managed,” she said. “I guess.”

  Lawrence was beginning to look irked. “Well, what did you talk about?”

  “Oh, you know—Jude. Snooker.”

  “Is he entering the Grand Prix this year? Because I thought I might go.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I wondered if his ranking’s slipped enough to have to play the qualifiers.”

  “Beats me.”

  “Well, you can’t have talked that much about snooker.”

  “No,” she said. “Not so much.” It was as if she had to hoist every word from her mouth with a forklift.

  “Did you at least get any good gossip?”

  Irina tilted her head. “Since when did you care about ‘gossip’? That is, about what’s going on in someone’s heart, and not in their head?”

  “I meant like, is it true that Ronnie O’Sullivan has checked himself into rehab. What’s your problem?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. She had not, overnight, turned into an ogre, and she gazed at her partner mournfully. It was obscene, though, that he couldn’t tell the difference the moment he walked in the door, if a flicker of nervousness ran through her that maybe he had. Since Lawrence avoided the main thing like the plague, the fact that he hadn’t remarked on her lackluster response to his homecoming was if anything a red flag. It was hardly subtle: so far this conversation was reminiscent of a prison visit. They seemed separated by a thick pane of glass, and spoke haltingly as if through receivers. After all, Irina had broken a law of a kind, and had just begun her first day of what could prove a very long sentence. She added pitifully, “I made you a pie.”

  “I had a snack on the plane… Sure, why not. A small piece.”

  “Would you like a beer with that?”

  “I’ve already had a Heineken… What the hell, let’s celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “The fact that I’m back.” He looked wounded. “Or didn’t you notice?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Yes, of course. That’s what the pie is for. To welcome you home.”

  In the kitchen, she leaned her palms against the counter, dropped her head, and breathed. It was a relief to escape Lawrence’s company, however briefly; yet from the fact of the relief itself there was no escape, and it cored her.

  Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. We
ll, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon…) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.

  She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stolichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”

  Lawrence was too polite to object that she’d served him a slice much bigger than he’d asked for, and exclaimed, “Krasny!”

  “That’s ‘red,’ you doorak,” she said, in the best imitation of affectionate teasing she could muster. “‘Beautiful’ is krasivy. Red Square, krasnaya ploshchad, da?”

  Ordinarily Lawrence’s tin ear for Russian made her laugh, but there was an edge on her voice that made Lawrence look over.

  “Izvini, pozhaluysta,” he apologized correctly. “Konyeshno, krasivy. As in, krasivy pirog”—she was amazed that he knew the word for “pie”—“or, moya krasivaya zhena.”

  For pity’s sake. Even in Russian, he called her his “wife.” The term had never before struck her as cheeky, but it did now.

  And it was typical, wasn’t it, that he could only call her beautiful in Russian. In English, she was cute, a safe, minimizing adjective that could as easily apply to a hamster as to a “wife.” It wasn’t fair to be irritated by a perfectly lovely compliment, but the resort to speaking in tongues when coming anywhere near emotional subject matter was painfully reminiscent of her father. A dialogue coach for mostly B-movies, her father was a master of accents; his work ran along the lines of coaching the man who did the voice of Boris Badenov in Bullwinkle on how to thicken his consonants with Soviet wickedness. He could switch readily from Chinese “flied lice” to Irish brogue, and she supposed it was all very amusing. Except that he had never told her he loved her, or was proud of something she’d accomplished, unless rolling his Rs like Sean Connery or lapsing into a Swedish lilt—I lahf me leetle dahter, jaaaaaa! She’d adored all the voices he’d employed reading her stories when she was little, but as she grew older the charm wore off. Why, he was born in Ohio, but even his Midwestern delivery sounded like one more accent.

  Besides, Lawrence may have used Russian as a device to arms-length sentiments that might sound embarrassing in English, but it was also their private argot, and right now it was too much. It was too intimate. It hurt. “Thank you,” she said firmly in English, and brought the Russki speak to a close.

  Lawrence tried, with one more line, to keep it going. “Tih u-sta-la?” His minor-key delivery was wrenchingly tender, and Irina bowed her head. She hadn’t touched her pie.

  “Yes, I’m a little tired. I didn’t sleep well.” She hoped this didn’t count as her second lie. Arguably “not sleeping at all” fell under the subhead of “not sleeping well.”

  “Something on your mind?” He had noticed. He was fishing.

  “Oh, maybe it was the sushi. Only takes one piece of dicey tuna. My appetite’s off. I’m not sure I can eat this.”

  “You do look pale.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I feel pale.” Not wanting to appear too conscious of the time, Irina surreptitiously glanced at the watch on Lawrence’s wrist. Damn. Still five more minutes before Late Review.

  “So, how was the conference?” It was disgraceful, how little she cared.

  He shrugged. “A junket, basically. Except for the fact that I got to see Sarajevo, a total waste of time. Too many UN wonks, and NGO losers. You know, you need a police force. Well, duh. At least my budget didn’t have to cover it.”

  “God forbid you should come back having learned something you didn’t know already, or having met someone you actually liked.” The sentence escaped her mouth before she could stop it. She tried to gentle the barb with a smile, but from the expression on Lawrence’s face she might have slapped it. “Milyi!” she scrambled; “dear” sounded warmer in Russian. “I’m just razzing you. Don’t look so serious.”

  She had to stop this, the compulsive criticism. What ever happened to mental kindness? For that matter, what ever happened to plain kindness? Lawrence had been out of town for ten days, and everything she’d said since his arrival had been either flat-out mean or insultingly fatigued. Another man—whoever that might be—would have taken issue with the dig. But Lawrence didn’t like trouble, and reached for the remote.

  Irina considered the word. The fact that Lawrence so frequently reached for the remote seemed apt.

  More criticism.

  When BBC2 came on, Irina was so grateful for the distraction that she could have kissed the tube. Ordinarily, in front of the TV Irina sewed on buttons, snapped beans, but now she focused on the screen with what she hoped was a look of rapt fascination.

  She was rapt, and she was fascinated all right, but not by Late Review. Because Irina was seeing things. Really, it was like being possessed, or schizophrenic. Figures grappled in the shadows. Behind the TV, a man and woman grasped each other so tightly that it was impossible to tell which arms and legs were whose. Their mouths were open and fastened. When she glanced to the left, the same man flattened his lover against the wall, raising the woman’s arms overhead and pinioning her wrists to the plaster as he buried his face in her neck. If Irina cut her eyes a few degrees to the right, there they were again, disrupting the drapes, as the taller figure pressed the woman so fiercely against the window frame with his pelvis that her tailbone must have hurt. (It still hurt, but only a little. The soreness on Irina’s tailbone was from the side of the snooker table. The abrasion might have been worse had they not sunk in tandem to the floor.)

  These figures that had invaded her living room, Irina hadn’t invited them, nor bid them to make such exhibitions of themselves against her walls. (And on her carpet. She glanced down, and there was the same immoderate couple. He was on top. Slight enough that the woman could still breathe, the man was still heavy enough to pin her. She couldn’t get away if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.) In their defense, the visitors were only kissing, but if a qualifier like only applied to kissing like that, one might as well say that Jeffrey Dahmer had only murdered and cannibalized people or that Hitler had only tried to rule the world.

  The hallucinations were an affliction. She was trying to watch television with her partner, to have a convivial slice of pie and a quiet nightcap—though Irina’s vodka seemed to have evaporated, and she couldn’t remember drinking it—and here were these people in her home who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, and who induced her to keep squeezing and kneading against one another the muscles of her inner thighs.

  “You might not be keen on the subject matter,” said Lawrence. “But that still looks worth seeing.”

  Irina tore her eyes from her shameless guests. “What’s worth seeing?”

  “Boogie Nights!”

  Gamely, she ventured, “Well, I wasn’t big on Flashdance, but I didn’t mind Saturday Night Fever.”

  Lawrence looked incredulous. “How could you have listened to a fifteen-minute discussion of that movie and still think it bears any relation to Saturday Night Fever?”

  Irina cringed. “Oh. What’s it about, then.”

  “The porn industry!”

  “I was a little distracted.”

  “A little?”

  “I told you I was tired.”<
br />
  “Being short of sleep might take the edge off, but it doesn’t send most people’s IQ plummeting to below fifty.”

  “Just because my mind wandered doesn’t make me an idiot. I don’t like it when you do that. You do it all the time, too. You’re always telling me I’m stupid.”

  “On the contrary. I’m constantly trying to get you to have faith in your own opinions and to be more forceful about them in public. I’m constantly telling you that you are smart, and very perceptive about the world, even if you don’t have a PhD in international relations. Sound familiar?”

  Irina hung her head. It did sound familiar. Lawrence could be tempted to use the M-word on Irina, but he used it indiscriminately on everyone sooner or later, so there was no purpose to taking it personally. And he had, he was right, many times urged her to be more outspoken about her views around his colleagues’ dinner tables.

  “Yes, you’re usually very supportive,” she conceded.

  “Why do you keep trying to pick a fight?” From Lawrence, this was brave.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and with genuine puzzlement. She truly did not understand why, when she had such a powerful motivation not to rock the boat, she would keep being so provocative, or, on an evening when she was desperate not to attract close examination, she would behave in an erratic, irritable fashion sure to bring maximum scrutiny to bear. Did she want him to know? Maybe she was forcing him to play a parlor game, like Botticelli: I’m a famous person, and my name begins with big scarlet A.

  Are you dead?

  (As of tonight? To my marrow.)

  Are you female?

  (All too female, it turns out.)

  Where were you last night, at five in the fucking morning?

  (Only yes-or-nos. That question is cheating.)

  You’re one to talk about cheating!

  Or maybe Lawrence was supposed to play hangman on the back of his conference program, and, since he would never in a million years guess that she’d have chosen F-A-I-T-H-L-E-S-S H-U-S-S-Y, proceed to noose himself, letter by letter?