The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “It’s easier for me to give you—a little help—from, you know, behind.”

  “True. Oh, let’s just—it’s fine. Let’s just—the way we’ve been doing it is fine.”

  “But is there something bothering you? About the way we do it?”

  Obviously there was something bothering her, like the fact that she had not seen his face while they made love for at least eight years, but she couldn’t bring herself to say so aloud. She could see that she was upsetting him, the last thing she’d intended. She wanted to make him feel welcome and warm and loved, and not suddenly anxious that all this time she’d been dissatisfied with their sex life but had been keeping her mouth shut. This was all wrong-headed and backfiring like crazy.

  “Not a thing,” she said softly, kissing his forehead and turning on her right side to snuggle her back against his chest. “I’ve missed you, and you feel wonderful.”

  “… Is it all right if I turn out the light?”

  A slight collapsing sensation, in her chest. “Sure. That’s fine. Turn out the light.”

  In the soundest of relationships, it is not always possible to organize epiphanies in concert. Lawrence could hardly be blamed if he failed to experience a burning desire to assault Bethany Anders the exact same evening on which Irina had fixated on Ramsey Acton’s finely articulated mouth, that they might both turn tail in simultaneous panic and rush headlong into each other’s arms. This was probably not the best of nights to upset the sexual apple-cart, and any fine-tuning of their proven method could wait for another time. Besides, this felt good. It did. Looking at the wall. In the dark.

  One thing The Usual had to recommend it was that, with her face unobserved, her mind could more readily roam its most disgraceful corridors. She was not opposed, in the privacy of her head, to smut. Yet when Lawrence reached around to graze his fingers lightly between her legs, her mind remained static, and refused to generate any nasty little pictures. She couldn’t get anywhere. Indeed, she visualized herself in a small, enclosed room, standing still. There was a door. There was a door that she could open if she were willing to. But it was not a good idea. Proceeding through this one doorway was forbidden. Slammed in her own face, the door recalled the expression gaining such favor in the States that it was becoming a pestilence: Don’t go there. As time went on and Irina stood helplessly in the same desolate place—it was all dull clinical white, the walls, the linoleum, like some austere coital waiting room where no receptionist ever called her name—she began to realize that only by passing through that forbidden portal would she be able to come.

  Lawrence’s dedicated ministrations had grown so protracted that Irina was abashed. She felt fairly sure that he didn’t mind giving her a helping hand, but it was taking too long, and she hated the idea of the procedure becoming tedious, in which case he might even lose his erection. Irina’s fretting that her excitement was becoming a chore for him didn’t heighten it any. This wasn’t working. It was so weird. She’d never had any real trouble with Lawrence, but then she had never told herself, either, that she couldn’t think about something she wanted to think about. The problem was that door, that closed door, and since she refused to defy her own prohibition and push through it, Irina could contrive no means of bringing this dutiful stimulation to a graceful conclusion besides fakery.

  She didn’t overdo it. She didn’t light into a reprise of the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally. In fact, with a soft, shuddering groan, she tried to imply that this was one of the quieter ones—and wasn’t it. She worried that she had underplayed the performance to such a degree that it had gone right past him, until Lawrence moved a few times and pulsed; he must have been taken in, because he always waited.

  To have gotten away with the sham was discouraging. After all these years he should know the difference. Now sexual fraud joined the list of other little white lies, like claiming to have forgotten about Ramsey’s birthday, or pretending that it had been early in the evening when the bill arrived at Omen. And she had ruined a perfect record. Never again could she say to herself that she had come when having sex with Lawrence every single time. Now she knew how a pinball player felt on an unprecedented winning streak, when abruptly the ball drops, clunk, into the machine.

  The deception was minor. If she had effectively passed a counterfeit bill in bed, the denomination was low—at most, a fiver. Doubtless some women faked climaxes for years with their partners; one bogus orgasm over nine years of the real thing could hardly matter. So why did she feel so sorrowful? She should be jubilant. Lawrence was home. Moreover, she had been tested last night, and her fidelity had not proved wanting. But drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina couldn’t be entirely sure if she had passed the test, or failed it.

  4

  SPURNING HER FEW MINUTES’ lie-in, Irina was first out of bed the next morning. The rev and horn blare of bumper-to-bumper traffic on Trinity Street had been driving her insane. The relief of being on her own while buying a Daily Telegraph up the street was all too brief. As she ground beans and waited for the milk steamer to spit, the monotony of their morning routine grated. For a moment it had been touch-and-go as to whether she would top up the steamer with bottled water one more time, or shoot herself. At least while she ran through these paces it was unnecessary to look at Lawrence, or talk to Lawrence. Over the Telegraph at the dining table, her eyes glazed once more; sexual intoxication had turned her into an overnight illiterate. An illiterate who never ate and couldn’t work and slept little, so what did you do when you were smitten? You fucked. And that was the one thing she could not do, would not do. Even for a changeling, there were limits.

  Lawrence the up-and-at-’em was dawdling. That toast was taking him forever. His coffee was getting cold. For pity’s sake, if he wanted to read The End of Welfare he would concentrate better in his office. It was nearly nine o’clock! As she turned the pages of the paper, it was hard not to slam them. When the minute hand on her watch passed twelve, her chest burst with ludicrous, hurtful, and patently unjustifiable fury. It was Lawrence’s right, was it not, to linger with his “wife” a few minutes before soldiering to an office where he labored long hours? Had Lawrence ever sat at table enraged by her mere presence, crazed with a desperation to get her out of her own flat, she would die. She would just die.

  Still, she couldn’t contain herself. “After having been gone for ten days, I guess you have a lot of work piled up at Blue Sky.” The sentiment might have come off as seminormal, save for the angry quaver in her voice.

  “Some,” he allowed. Since rising, she had been convincing herself that Lawrence didn’t know her at all. A sudden vigilance suggested otherwise.

  “I wonder if I feel like having another piece of toast,” he supposed.

  “Well, do or don’t!” she exploded. “Have a piece, or don’t have one, but don’t faff about deciding! It’s only toast, for God’s sake!”

  Numbly, he collected the dishes. “I guess I won’t, then.”

  She winced at his sense of injury as if ducking an incoming boomerang. Apparently cruelty hurtled at someone you love—whom you used to love until two days ago, or who at any rate didn’t deserve it—has a tendency to whip back round and thump you on the head.

  Finally Lawrence gathered his briefcase. Once he stood on the threshold, Irina flooded with remorse. Now that he really was leaving, she kept him at the door with manufactured small-talk, trying to be warm, to do a creditable impression of a helpmate who will be left alone the whole day through and is reluctant to say good-bye.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “I’m getting behind on the illustrations for Seeing Red, and I’m anxious to get to work.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  “No, of course not. I don’t know, maybe I’m premenstrual.”

  “No, you’re not.” Lawrence kept track.

  “Peri-menopausal, then. Anyway, I’m sorry. That was totally uncalled for.”

  “Yes it was.”

  “Ple
ase don’t hang on to it!” She squeezed his arm. “I’m very, very sorry.”

  His stricken mask broke into a smile. He kissed her forehead, and said he might ring later. All was forgiven. Patching over her outburst had been too easy. She couldn’t tell if Lawrence accepted her apology because he trusted her, or feared her.

  SHE STEERED CLEAR OF the telephone at first, relishing the opportunity to think straight, or if not straight at least alone. Besides, Lawrence could always come back, having forgotten something, and she wouldn’t want to have to explain to whom she was speaking. By nine-thirty, her timing was poor, but Irina couldn’t be bothered with the niceties of Ramsey’s night-owl hours when her whole life was falling apart and that was his fault.

  “Hallo?”

  Irina deplored callers who failed to identify themselves. “Hi,” she said shyly.

  The silence on the other end seemed interminable. Oh, God, maybe what was for her an exotic journey on a magic carpet was for Ramsey a casual grapple on the rug. Maybe he really was the ladies’ man the magazines made him out to be, and she should hang up before she made a bigger fool of herself than she already had.

  A sigh broke, its rush oceanic. “I’m so relieved to hear your voice.”

  “I was worried I’d wake you.”

  “That would involve my ever having got to sleep.”

  “But you didn’t get a wink the night before! You must be hallucinating.”

  “Since I let you go—yeah. I been worried I am.”

  “I started to worry that—that for you, it didn’t mean anything.”

  “It means something,” he said heavily. “Something shite.”

  “… It doesn’t feel shite.”

  “It’s wrong.” What he must have intended as emphatic came out as helpless.

  “Strange,” she said. “Not long ago, I’d have been able to conjure your face pretty easily. Now I can’t remember what you look like.”

  “I can remember your face. But there’s two of them. A Before and After. In the After, you look like a different person. More beautiful. More 3D. More complicated.”

  “I’ve been feeling that way,” she said. “Unrecognizable, to myself. It’s not all to the good. I liked looking in the mirror and having some idea who was staring back.”

  Despite a nominal sexual rectitude, they had already developed the long, thick silences of lovers—those characteristic pauses whose laden dead air has to carry everything that has nothing to do with words. Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “I promised you that I wouldn’t.”

  “I know, but did you tell him anyway?”

  “I keep my word.” With every second of this phone call, she was breaking her word. How confounding, that her hasty promise to Ramsey already weighed more than a decade’s worth of implicit vows to Lawrence.

  “I cannot—” He stopped, as if consulting a crib sheet. “Because of the snooker and that, you may’ve got the wrong end of the stick. But I don’t fancy anything tatty. With me, it’s all or nothing.”

  “What if it were all, then?”

  “You got Lawrence.” His voice was stone. “You’re happy. You got a life.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “You got to stop. You didn’t know what you was doing. You got too much to lose.” The lines were dull and empty.

  “I can’t stop,” she said. “Something has taken hold of me. Did you ever see Dangerous Liaisons? John Malkovich keeps repeating to Glenn Close, ‘It’s beyond my control.’ He’s almost sleepwalking into a catastrophic relationship with Michelle Pfeiffer, like a zombie or a drug addict. It’s beyond my control. It’s not supposed to be an excuse. Just the truth. I feel possessed. I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve always been a practical person, but I’m having visions. I wish I were exaggerating, or being melodramatic, but I’m not.”

  “The film, I ain’t seen it,” he said. “Does it end well?”

  “No.”

  “Sure there’s a reason the film came to mind, like. What happens to the bird?”

  “Dies,” Irina admitted.

  “And her bloke?”

  “Dies,” Irina admitted.

  “Tidy. In real life, love, it’s messier than that, innit? I think it’s worse.”

  “There is, in the movie,” she said, struggling, “a certain—lethal redemption.”

  “Outside the cinema, you can forget your violins. It’ll kill you all right, but you’ll still be left standing. Trouble off-screen ain’t that you can’t survive, but that you do. Everybody survives. That’s what makes it so fucking awful.”

  Ramsey had a philosophical streak.

  Irina had an obstinate one. “It’s beyond my control.”

  “It’s up to me, then.” The gentleness was forbidding. “I got to stop it for you.”

  Irina was glad she’d skipped breakfast, because she suddenly felt sick. “I don’t need anyone looking out for my interests. Lawrence has been doing that for years, and now look. I don’t need taking care of.”

  “Oh, yes you do,” he whispered. “Everyone does.”

  “You can’t make me stop. It’s not even your right.”

  “It is my responsibility,” he said, capturing Malkovich’s robotic tone in the movie he’d not seen. “I can see that now. I’m the only one can stop it.”

  Her tears were mean and hot. This was robbery. What she had discovered in that basement snooker parlor belonged to her.

  “You said—yesterday.” His temporal reference jarred. Their parting seemed months ago. “I woke something up in you. Maybe you could take what you found with me, and bring it to Lawrence. Like a present.”

  “What I found with you,” she said, “was you. You are the present. In every sense. My ‘waking up’ with all three of us in bed together might feel crowded.”

  “Nobody said anything about bed.”

  “No one had to.”

  “We ain’t doing that.”

  “No,” she agreed. “For the moment at least, we won’t.”

  “I won’t be your bit on the side.”

  “I don’t want to have an affair either.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  At that instant, Irina might have been spirited blindfolded in a car, then released to a neighborhood of London that she didn’t recognize. How did she find her way home? It was an interesting area from the looks of it, so did she want to go home? She’d been kidnapped. Now Stockholm syndrome had set in, and she was fond of her captor.

  “I want to see you as soon as possible.”

  Another roaring sigh. “Is that smart?”

  “It has nothing to do with intelligence.”

  He groaned, “I’m dying to see you as well.”

  “I could take the tube up. Mile End, right?”

  “A lady like you got no business on the tube. I’ll call by.”

  “You can’t come here. Yesterday. You shouldn’t have come here, either. You’re too recognizable from television.”

  “See what this is like? It’s a horror show! Like an affair already, without the good bit.”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “You know the alternative.”

  “That is not an option. I have to see you.” A whole new side of herself, this willfulness. It was heady.

  “It’s a long walk from the tube.”

  “I’m a sturdy creature.”

  “You are a rare and delicate flower to be kept from the crass, covetous eyes of East End low-life.” He was only half-joking. “What about Lawrence?”

  “He’s at work. He rings here during the day, but I could say I went shopping.”

  “You’ll have nil to show for it.”

  “A walk, a fruitless trip to the library? I could get my messages remotely from your house, and ring him back.”

  “You ain’t very good at this.”

  “I
take that as a compliment.”

  “Most of them office phone systems give a read-out of the number what’s rung up. Your—” He was clearly about to say husband. “—Anorak Man got a memory for figures. Like my own phone number. I should get you a mobile.”

  “That’s a nice offer, but Lawrence and I have already decided that they’re too expensive. He might find it. I’d have a terrible time explaining why I had one. My, there are a thousand ways to be found out, aren’t there?”

  “Yeah. Even when there ain’t nothing to find.”

  “Your birthday? You would call that nothing? If I were yours?”

  “You are mine,” he said softly. “Last night. You slept with him, didn’t you.”

  “Obviously I slept with him. We share the same bed.”

  “That ain’t what I mean and you know it. He’s been out of town. A bloke’s been out of town and he comes home, he shags his wife.” He went ahead and used the word.

  “All right, then. Yes. If I didn’t want to, he’d know something was up.”

  “I don’t like it. I ain’t got no right to say that, but I don’t like it.”

  “I didn’t, either,” she admitted. “I only—got anywhere by thinking about you. But it was foul, imagining another man.”

  “Best you’re in his arms thinking about me than the other way round, I reckon.”

  “Being in your arms and thinking about you appeals to me more.”

  “So when can you get your luscious bum to Mile End?”

  The pattern was probably typical: you spent the abundance of the call talking about how you shouldn’t be doing this, and its tail-end discussing the particulars of how you would. It would’ve been nice to feel special.

  ON THE TUBE, PEOPLE stared. Both men and women. It wasn’t her short denim skirt and skimpy yellow tee that were turning heads. She had a look. Her fellow passengers mightn’t have identified the look per se, but they recognized it all the same. People had babies all the time, coupled all the time, yet the look must have been rare. Sex was rare. You’d never know it, from the hoardings overhead in this carriage—the bared busts promoting island holidays, the come-on toothpaste smiles. But the adverts were meant to torment commuters with what they were missing.