The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “I guess you really missed me,” he said, giving her a final squeeze.

  “Mmm,” she said.

  Sleep remained at bay, even as Lawrence began lightly to snore. Irina was disconsolate. Lawrence didn’t know, and he never had to know. Not about last night, and not about tonight, either. But she still held herself accountable, and not only for her perfidy on Victoria Park Road, but for the more considerable infidelity a few minutes ago in her head. That was the whole theory behind mental kindness, wasn’t it? That on any Judgment Day worth its salt, you wouldn’t merely be confronted with whom you insulted or what you stole, but with the whole unspooled videotape of your tawdry little mind from birth to lights-out. Before tonight, Irina had never pictured fucking another man—not a real man, a man they knew. Now not only had she kissed another man while her partner was trustingly out of town, but tonight she fucked him. Forget clinging to cheap literalism. She had cuckolded Lawrence in his own bed.

  Nothing could ever be the same again. How pathetic, that at Omen she had worried about “vandalizing” a deluxe sashimi platter with extra yellowtail, while remaining coolly oblivious to smashing up nine years’ worth of mutual devotion in a single reckless night. With one kiss, she had sent the greatest achievement of her life crashing to the floor in a million pieces, like the countless vases and crystal pitchers that she had clumsily upset as a girl. At forty-two, she was still clumsy, but worse, brutally so, purposely so. Yet maybe there was justice after all. As Lawrence slumbered faithfully beside her, she looked at the soft shadow of his face on the pillow, and felt stone-cold. While bull-in-a-china-shopping through this weekend, she had broken not only their covenant, but her own heart.

  A grown woman should be able to stop herself. Adulthood was about thinking things through. Now she hadn’t looked before she leapt, and everything was ruined. She had kissed her life good-bye. Even as she whipped herself for being an awful, empty, selfish shrew undeserving of the abiding love of an intelligent, loyal man like Lawrence, she was afflicted again by visions, of the black belt, the silk jacket.

  For forty-two years, Irina had lived with the consequences of everything she had ever done. She’d taken her punishment for spitefully hiding her sister’s ballet slippers the night before a recital. When Columbia had accidentally added an extra zero to her check for tutoring undergraduates and she spent the money, she’d paid back every dime when they caught the error, taking out a loan on her credit card at 20 percent. She had faced down the disagreeable results of every confidence betrayed, every hurtful remark blurted, every poorly drafted illustration irrevocably published for the world to see. Surely it was asking little enough, this once, to turn back the clock—not years or anything, nor months nor even weeks, but barely a day. Once again they would lean in tandem over the snooker table, inches apart, as Ramsey demonstrated how to brace the cue. Drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina looked temptation square in the face, smiled bravely, and withdrew.

  3

  TO IRINA’S MIND, IT was the most underrated of symphonies: the jingle of the ring, the hard rasp, the clop of the bolt withdrawing, open-Sesame. The soft brush of wood against carpet. Engrossed in her reading, she had turned down Shawn Colvin, the better to keep her ear cocked. Curled impatiently in her armchair, she had more than once brightened in a false start as neighbors tromped past the flat and on upstairs. At last there was no mistaking the bold assertion of dominion, of access, of belonging, into their escutcheon. These were the unsung peak moments of domestic life: those Pavlovian leaps of the heart on an ordinary night when your beloved walks in the door.

  “Irina Galina!”

  Still in the hallway, he missed the flush of her smile, though there would be others. Only Lawrence would be able to redeem a middle name otherwise a mocking misnomer. Galina Ulanova was the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina in the 1940s, and Irina’s squat pliés (before her mother gave up on her altogether) had conspicuously failed to live up to her namesake. She’d always hated that name, until Lawrence converted it first to joke, and then, if only because she now associated it with his voice, to joy.

  “Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she cried, completing a responsive ritual that never grew tired. As for the sardonic patronymic, his father’s name was Lawrence also.

  “Hey!” He kissed her lightly, and nodded at the stereo. “The usual tear-jerking soundtrack.”

  “That’s right. I do nothing while you’re gone but sob.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Memoirs of a Geisha.” She teased, “You’d hate it.”

  “Oh, probably,” he said airily, returning to the hall. “What don’t I hate?”

  “Come back here!”

  “I was just going to unpack.”

  “Sod unpacking!” While Lawrence maintained a militantly American vocabulary as a point of pride, Irina appropriated British lingo whimsically, and even, after seven years here, as a matter of right. “You’ve been gone for ten days. Come back and kiss me properly!”

  Though Lawrence duly dropped his bags again and U-turned to the living room, his expression as she looped her wrists about his neck was perplexed. He tried for a closed-mouth kiss, but Irina was having none of that, and parted his lips with her tongue. So rarely had they locked mouths in these latter years that their tongues kept smashing into each other, as at ten she would bumble into partners during a pas de deux. Unpracticed, he pulled back prematurely, stringing spittle between their lips—not cinematic romance. Lawrence glanced at her askance. “What’s got into you?”

  She would rather not say. She was not planning to say, and didn’t. “You call me your ‘wife.’ Well, that’s what husbands do, when they come home. They kiss their wives. Sometimes they even enjoy it.”

  “It’s coming up on eleven,” he said, launching back down the hall with his bags. “Thought you might want to watch Late Review!”

  He was a hard case.

  When Lawrence sprawled on the couch after unpacking, she took a moment to study his face. The feeling it induced was gratitude, if only for her own restraint. Last night had been close, as close a call as ever she had encountered, and a fleeting shadow crossed her mind, of that other life in which she could only look at Lawrence in guilt and shame and frantic desperation to cover her tracks. The contrasting cleanliness would have been even more refreshing had she intended to tell him everything, but she and Lawrence had been leaving something out—it was hard to identify what—for long enough that to gush that she had nearly kissed Ramsey Acton last night and then thought better of it would have been dangerous, however wryly she recounted the moment. To recount it wryly would entail a gross distortion anyway, and unless she related the crisis as the Gethsemane it had been there’d be no point. Fully truthful, she’d make him anxious, and create a wariness of Ramsey forever after. It was Lawrence’s friendship with Ramsey as well as her own with Lawrence of which she had been mindful when she’d wished the snooker player happy birthday and then excused herself hastily, in a panic, to the loo.

  Curiously, contemplating Lawrence she felt less the recognition of when they met than the mystery of his eternal unfamiliarity. There was a discomfort in Lawrence that his bluster would disguise, and in truth she was never quite sure what really went on in his head. As striking as the planes in that drastic face, they were like theater flats that shut you from the pulleys behind the scenes. She even thought tentatively, He looks a trace melancholy.

  There was no doubting that Lawrence’s was a beautiful face, or better than beautiful; fascinating. The kind you could dive into like dark water and get lost. She felt privileged to be allowed to study it, and to follow the unexplained clouds as they crossed his countenance and then dispersed with the changeability of island weather. It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known—as if progressive intimacy didn’t involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant. To whatever degree she had been assemblin
g a vivid portrait of Lawrence Trainer’s nature, its refinement was all about deconstruction. She would no sooner limn this or that quality than rub it out for being wildly inaccurate or cartoonlike in its simplicity or exaggeration. He was kind; no, sorry, he was savage. He was selflessly devoted to her; to the contrary, he held something back in a way that was decidedly selfish. He was sure of himself; uh-uh, how could she buy into that superficial confidence when it was obvious that he was achingly insecure? At once, Lawrence was kind, he was devoted, and some portion of that assurance drove to his core. Were her mental picture of Lawrence an illustration on her drawing table, it would after over nine years appear a messy smudge of erasures. Maybe by the time she was eighty-five she would approach the limit of having absolutely no idea who Lawrence was, when before she might have listed out “character traits” as if together they amounted to a man. Maybe arriving at this state of being stymied was an achievement. Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you—and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “You.”

  “Seen me before.”

  “Sometimes I forget what you look like.”

  “Been gone ten days, not ten years.” Lawrence glanced at his watch. It wasn’t eleven.

  “You haven’t asked me how it went last night, with Ramsey.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot.” She sensed Lawrence had not forgotten.

  “We had a much nicer time than I expected.”

  “Talk about snooker? At least I’ve primed you enough that you should have been able to keep your head above water.”

  “No, we hardly talked about snooker at all.”

  “What a waste! Who else do you know who’s a professional snooker player? You could have at least gotten the dope—the literal dope—on Ronnie O’Sullivan.”

  “Ramsey’s not only a snooker player. He’s a person.” Deftly, she chose person over man. “He seems more at ease one-on-one.”

  Lawrence shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

  “Lots of people.” She could see that Lawrence was jealous. But she wanted to laugh. Lawrence was jealous over Ramsey. Lawrence had title to Ramsey, and her evening with his snooker buddy was meant to have been awkward. Irina had been sent on a mission to maintain Lawrence’s own friendship with Ramsey by proxy, but was supposed to learn her lesson along the way: that she and Ramsey were chalk and cheese, and that she was incapable of engaging in the jubilant snooker banter that only Anorak Man could furnish. Ramsey was meant to have learned his lesson as well: that while Irina might be nice to look at, shapely legs know nothing of Stephen Hendry’s renown for mastery of side pockets, and at the end of the day her partner was much more fun. Alas, these lessons had not proceeded as their architect had planned.

  Of course, the evening had been plenty awkward, leaving her unnerved, even shaken, but also intrigued. What was that, what had happened? Whence this improvident urge to fasten her mouth on the wrong man? After Ramsey had given her a lift home—the ride having proceeded in petrified silence—she’d battened herself into the flat, flipping the top bolt, drawing the chain, and leaning with her back against the door, palms pressed flat, as if something were trying to get in. Breathing a bit too heavily still, she had assured herself that the high voltage in that basement snooker hall must already be dissipating to static electricity. Brushing her teeth before bed, she’d envisaged the relief of waking prudently by herself in her as-good-as-marital bed this morning—having done nothing disreputable, nothing that she had to hide from Lawrence or might be tempted to divulge in a confessional rush, after which he would never quite trust her again. Surely once she was straight, sobered up, and well rested, her scandalous impulse while leaning over that fancy match-grade snooker table would shrink to drunken, stoned idiocy, to mere naughtiness, to a delusional infatuation that—there is a God—she’d had the eleventh-hour sense to squelch. In the plain light of day, she would take the strange evening under advisement, as testimony that she should stay away from drugs, that she should drink moderately, that she missed Lawrence and needed to get laid. Over coffee, she had told herself, rinsing her mouth, you’ll shake your head in dry amusement and go ha-ha-ha.

  Yet sipping her cappuccino this morning, she’d regarded her near miss with awe and respect. It hadn’t shrunk. To the contrary, what had appeared beforehand as a merely diverting flirtation on Ramsey’s part, one that could prove embarrassing or inconvenient for Irina, had only grown larger as she approached it. Last night had been like groping about in a fog and expecting to bump into a low stone wall, and instead banging her nose smack against an Egyptian pyramid. Whatever she had run up against on Victoria Park Road, by accident, in innocence, and however wisely she had about-faced and soldiered in blind lockstep in the opposite direction, it was big. Briefly, a whole other life had opened up before her, and the fact that she declined to avail herself of it could not eradicate the image.

  One other memory had haunted her all day. At the end of that lift home, Ramsey had drawn into the lay-by in front of this building. He should have kept the motor running, to indicate that at three a.m. he had no expectation of being asked up “for coffee” (a perilous nighttime invitation for any woman in Britain, since to issue this codified UK wink-wink you’d no need for cream and sugar). Instead he switched off the engine, and sat for what seemed a terribly long time—though it wasn’t—hands at rest in his lap with a dead quality. They were exquisite hands, with long, sinuous fingers and slender metacarpi, more those of a musician than a sportsman. Yet they lay on his thighs with corpselike inertness, the delicate dusting of blue cue chalk creased in his cuticles, lending them a ghoulish hue. He stared straight through the windshield, his face, too, at rest, almost empty; he might have been contemplating a list of groceries to pick up on the way home at a twenty-four-hour Tesco. Irina as well made no move to get out of the car.

  But that wasn’t the memory that lingered so. After a beat, they had both resumed animation, and Ramsey got out. Irina remained seated, because she could tell he preferred to come round. He was a gentleman. He opened her door with the gravity of a chauffeur ushering the bereaved from a hearse. As ever, that hand hovered at the small of her back as she walked half a pace ahead. Yet as she rooted for her keys and proceeded to the door, she turned to find him still standing in the street—as if to take the next step onto the curb was to cross a line in the sand. Since he remained ten feet away and gave no indication of coming closer, that took care of any discomfiting question of a farewell peck on the cheek.

  The two matching Georgian squares on which Lawrence and Irina lived were registered buildings, and in order to so much as change the outside color of the window frames from black to white their management company had to ask permission from the National Trust. (They said no.) So pristinely preserved was this estate that production companies like Merchant-Ivory often used it as a backdrop for historical films. Thus while standard aluminum London street lamps glared a rude orange, the lantern to Ramsey’s left was an iron reproduction gaslight from the nineteenth century. The bulb was flame-shaped, its glow antique. Cast in this theatrical light, golden on one side with his other half in shadow, Ramsey himself could have been acting in a period drama; his uncompromising verticality seemed a posture from an earlier age. Tall, gaunt, and darkly clad, his figure evinced a brooding solemnity she associated not with Snooker Scene but Thomas Hardy.

  “Good night,” she said. “Thank you for dinner. I had a lovely time.”

  “Yes,” he said. From lack of use and too many cigarettes, his voice was dry. “I did as well. Thank you for joining me. Good-night.” He stood there. “I’d say, ‘Safe home,’ but it looks like you’re going to make it.” A flickered smile.

  She should have shot him a returning smile, and let herself inside. She didn’t. She looked at him. Stock-still before
the curb, Ramsey looked back. Unlike the pause in the car, really only a moment, this suspension was a solid fifteen seconds—which once you have already exchanged “good-nights” has the touch and feel of about a year and a half. Something unsaid passed between them, and if Irina had her way it would stay unsaid, too. Forever. She turned to the door with the resolve of capping a jar of something tasty that is not very good for you, like lemon curd, after having sampled a tantalizing half-spoonful—turning the lid tight, slipping the jar onto a high shelf, and closing the cupboard.

  Irina blurted unthinkingly to Lawrence, “I have a confession.”

  The look of instant wariness on his face announced that Lawrence liked everything to be fine, thank you very much, that Lawrence didn’t care for “confessions,” and that Lawrence might even have wanted, if necessary, to be lied to. He could seem so industrious, but in some respects he was a lazy man.

  “When we finished dinner—” she continued in the absence of any encouragement. “Oh, and you’d have hated it—”

  “Do we have anything in common?”

  She laughed. “I like Memoirs of a Geisha and sushi. You don’t. Anyway, it was still early when the check arrived—” It hadn’t been remotely early. Irina was damned if she understood this compulsion to revise the irrelevant side details that didn’t even matter whenever you were tinkering with the main thing. “So Ramsey asked if I wanted to go get stoned, and, I don’t know. I said sure.”

  “You hate getting stoned!”

  “I clammed up, as usual. I wouldn’t do it often. I don’t mind it once in a while.”

  “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where did you get stoned?”

  “Well, not out on the street in Soho. Obviously, we went back to Victoria Park Road. I’ve been there often enough, with Jude.”

  “They’re divorced.”