The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  She tidied up and took the chicken out to thaw, fighting a customary desolation. Even Lawrence’s standard weekday abandonment fostered a little grief.

  Once settled in her studio, she had trouble focusing on the next illustration of Seeing Red. The impulse to make a phone call was insistent. Merely a courtesy call, of course. It was plain good form, was it not, when someone has treated you to a sumptuous spread, to thank him for his generosity? She could make it short.

  The number in her address book was still under Jude’s name. Her hand rested on the receiver for several seconds, her heart pounding. A courtesy call. She picked up the phone. She put it back in its cradle. She picked it up again.

  “Hallo?”

  She put the receiver right back down. He’d sounded sleepy. It was too early. And she’d thanked him already, Saturday night, at the door. How silly, to have roused him for nothing. How much sillier, that she was shaking. At least he’d have no way of knowing who rang, only to rudely hang up. He’d assume it was one of those computer-generated phone solicitations, or a wrong number.

  Yet as Irina returned to her drawing table, it came to her with a nauseous lurch that he would know. He would know with absolute certainty who had rung, heard his voice, been stricken by an opaque terror, and thrown the receiver to its cradle as if it might bite. In many respects they were near strangers, so it was disconcerting to realize that he knew her that well.

  The illustration went no better than before. Whatever had lit her up while she was sketching the arrival of the Crimson Traveler was withdrawing from reach. Yesterday’s inspired effort was the best of the set so far. But no matter how many times she tried, she was unable to recapture the style that Lawrence had described as unusually “bonkers.” If she couldn’t get the same frantic, energized quality into the companion illustrations, she would have to throw the “bonkers” one away. It didn’t match. It stood out. The first introduction of the color red had seemed alarming, outrageous, electrifying. In each of today’s abortive efforts, red seemed ordinary. Blending side by side with the blues, it made purple all right, but purple seemed ordinary, too. Though now expanded by a factor of two, the palette still felt cramped, and she pined for a Yellow Traveler to release her into the spectrum. She made a note of the idea for the author, that for children to come to a fuller understanding of the nature of color, a Yellow Traveler toward the end would make sense. Maybe she could imply slyly that the addition would be popular with the Chinese.

  Lawrence rang early afternoon. He often called for no reason, and the more spurious his excuse, the more she was charmed. “Hey, I tried you around ten, and it was busy. Talk to anyone interesting?”

  “Oh, you must have tried me at perfectly the wrong point. I picked up the phone to ring Betsy, and then thought better of distracting myself, and put it back.”

  What a strange little fib. She might easily have been honest: she’d rung Ramsey to thank him for dinner, had obviously woken him, and, abashed, had simply hung up with what Lawrence would regard as her usual social maladroitness. Yet just now she resisted raising the topic of Ramsey in conversation. Ramsey had become—private. Whatever had passed between them on his birthday belonged to her, and she cherished owning something of which Lawrence was not a part.

  “So how’s it going?”

  “Lousy. I keep tearing everything up.”

  “Give yourself a break! The one you did yesterday was tremendous. Maybe you should take the afternoon off for once. Go for a walk, go to the library. Head up to that place on Roman Road where you found all those cheap Indian spices. While you’re at it, you could go smoke dope with Ramsey and giggle over his video of the Steve Davis–Dennis Taylor match of 1985.”

  She should have kept her mouth shut about that joint. “Very funny.”

  “Well, I’m not kidding about the match. You should watch a replay someday. It’s the most famous in snooker. Did I ever tell you that story?”

  Oh, probably, but if so, Irina hadn’t been listening. How did so many couples grow deaf to each other? Since he would clearly enjoy recounting the famous showdown—again—she encouraged him.

  “It was the World Championship at the Crucible. Dennis Taylor—this geeky-looking guy from Northern Ireland, with big dopey-looking horn-rims, right? Well, he’d been on the circuit for thirteen years before he won a single tournament. So Taylor was considered a laughable long-shot against Steve Davis. Who was, you know, God’s gift to snooker by ’85. Reigning champion, and regarded as unbeatable. The final was bound to be a whitewash.

  “That’s the way it started, too: Taylor went down eight-zip in the first session. But he rallied in the second, almost evening the score at nine-seven, and in the third session he also finished just two frames down, at thirteen-eleven. Still, all the commentators are saying, isn’t it great that the poor schmuck won’t go down without a fight. Like it’s cute or something.

  “But in the final session, Taylor pulls even, at seventeen apiece. First to eighteen, right? So eventually the championship goes down not only to the last frame, but to the last ball. The black, of course. There’s this unbelievable sequence where Taylor misses a double, then Davis fucks up, too, then Taylor takes on a long pot and barely misses, thinks all’s lost and mopes back to his chair as if his pet just died. But it’s a thin cut, and Davis botches his opportunity, too, leaving a pretty easy black. When Taylor potted it for the title, the Crucible went bananas.”

  “So it’s a David and Goliath story. Little engine that could.”

  “Yeah. And the broadcast of that last session set BBC records. Watched by eighteen million people. Biggest audience any British sportscast had ever garnered. Ramsey says those were the days. Snooker players were like rock stars in the 80s. They lived the life of Riley, and got away with murder, too. Lotta bad boys. Ramsey says the new crop of players is too boring, and that’s why the audience has shrunk.”

  Ramsey says. Though he had generously lent the man out for one evening, Lawrence wanted Ramsey back. Like Dennis Taylor, she was disinclined to relinquish a valuable trophy without a fight. “On the contrary. Ramsey says that the new crop of players has gotten too good, and that’s why the audience has shrunk.”

  “Same idea,” said Lawrence. “Ramsey says that too good is too boring.”

  They both understood they meant good at snooker rather than good as in virtuous. Still, once they finished the call, the line stayed with her.

  THE CONCEPT BEHIND THE holiday of Thanksgiving in the States is all very laudable. Nevertheless, it doesn’t work. It is nigh impossible to sincerely count your blessings on the last Thursday of November because you’re supposed to. The occasion is reliably squandered on fretting that the turkey breast is drying out while those last morsels on the inner thighs are still running red.

  Yet thankfulness can descend unscheduled. When Lawrence cried “Irina Galina!” at the door that evening, and Irina rejoined from her studio, “Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she was grateful. When he told her about his day over peanut-butter crackers—his contacts had passed on a rumor that the IRA ceasefire would soon be reinstated—she may never have quite understood the fracas in Ulster, nor have kept up with whether its paramilitaries were or were not bombing the bejesus out of Britain these days, nor have comprehended why they would do such a thing in the first place, but still she was grateful—that Lawrence had work that fascinated him, whether or not it fascinated her. That he cared enough to fill her in about what he did during the day and respected her opinion. That were she to ask him, he would patiently explain the ins and outs of Northern Ireland in whatever detail she wished. That he would not take offense if just tonight she gave the exegesis a miss. When they settled in front of the Channel 4 news, she was grateful that she wasn’t a dairy farmer, watching his herd go up in smoke. While she was confessedly growing fatigued with the mad-cow-disease story, by and large British newscasts were superior to their American counterparts—more serious, more in-depth—and she was grateful for that, too.


  Preparing their traditional predinner popcorn, Irina was thankful for another routine of perfectly balanced variation within sameness. She had worked out the exact oil-to-kernel ratio that would maximize loft and minimize grease; after experimentation across a range of popcorn brands, she always bought Dunn’s River, the least likely to prove dried out. One shelf of her spice rack was devoted to so many ethnic toppings—Cajun, Creole, Fajita mix—that she could serve a differently seasoned bowlful every day of the month. Tonight she chose black pepper, parmesan, and garlic powder, a favorite combination, and as they decimated the batch she was glad of a snack that you could gorge on that would not fill you up.

  Picking up the remnants of cheese at the bottom of the bowl with a moistened forefinger, Irina considered that they were both in perfect health, and sometimes physical well-being could convert from the blank space between ailments to witting pleasure. Entering middle age, they remained a handsome couple; she’d survived a rash bout of chocolate-cappuccino cake, and she still wasn’t fat. No one close to her had recently died. Lawrence, grumbling over when this protracted segment on BSE would ever be over, was conspicuously alive. Dinner—the chicken had been marinating in a deadly Indonesian jerk sauce all afternoon—would be smashing.

  Nothing was wrong. Most of all, the air between them was clear. She may have kept quiet about a couple of purely interior moments with Ramsey Acton over the weekend, but she had granted herself permission this afternoon to hold those slight cards close to her chest. If Saturday night’s disquieting temptation had sent a tremor through this flat, the earth had stilled again. It was surely not naïve to believe that neither she nor Lawrence was hiding any great secret from the other. Lawrence was not covertly gambling away their savings at OTB—if he said he went to the gym on his lunch hour, to the gym he went—nor was he going through the motions of heading to the office every day when in truth he’d been sacked months ago. Maybe she did sneak an occasional cigarette, but Irina was not popping amphetamines while Lawrence was at Blue Sky. She hadn’t developed a furtive morning sherry habit, or a stealthy dependence on Valium. Lawrence did not harbor a whole other family in Rome, whom he visited while pretending to attend a conference in Sarajevo. So while it was possible that a pizza delivery boy would press the wrong buzzer, there was no chance that their doorbell would be rung tonight by a sullen teenager whom Lawrence hadn’t admitted to siring years ago, who now wanted money. Irina wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Lawrence that her self-absorbed mother could no longer afford the upkeep of her house in Brighton Beach and would be moving into their spare bedroom next week. Lawrence wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Irina that after all these years he had come to the realization that he was gay. And on Saturday night, Irina hadn’t kissed another man while Lawrence was away.

  Some years thanksgiving arrives in the lowercase, in July.

  6

  ON ONE MORE EXASPERATING afternoon in August, Irina thumbed through the illustrations for Seeing Red up until the blazing arrival of the Crimson Traveler, gripped the pages by the corners, and ripped them from her drawing pad. Not allowing herself to reconsider, she immediately tore them in half, and crumpled the uninspired blue pictures into the bin. Only the new ones had life. Only the new illustrations were tolerable to her: those visited by a tall, terrifying figure from another world, whose rash, outlandish hues would blow the mind of any stunted visual pauper raised in the cramped, confining spectrum of midnight to cerulean. How had she ever borne drafting those first nine workaday pictures without red? Nevertheless, she would craft the blue ones again. The redrawn blues would pulse with need, with longing and deprivation, with all of the dolor and ache that gave “the blues” its emotional and musical connotations.

  Though she told herself that she was simply being professional, the impatient disposal was still unnerving. What else formerly of such value, on which she had lavished painstaking care, might she suddenly tear asunder and cart to the trash because it was “workaday” and “uninspired”?

  Meanwhile, just as Irina grew more expert at designing excuses for why she was out when Lawrence rang, Lawrence ceased to solicit them. By the end of the month, when once again she barely beat him back to the flat, no “Please hang up and try agains” would await her on the answering machine. If she wasn’t there, he didn’t want to know, so perhaps he didn’t want to know why, either.

  She found his company unendurable.

  Always a bit excessive, their dependence on television grew extravagant. Night after night they propped stuporously in their appointed seats, both glad of such a miraculous object—one that facilitated spending hours at a go in the same room without speaking, and at once cast this catatonic antisocial behavior as perfectly normal. Nervous of coming upon such a black hole in the schedule that they might be forced to turn off the set—say, a deadly confluence of World’s Wildest Police Videos, Gardener’s World, and House Doctor—Lawrence took to returning daily from work with a video.

  Irina failed to follow the most primitive plot twists in the movies he rented. The visions that had begun that first phantasmagoric Sunday evening had only multiplied, furnishing far more transfixing drama than anything Lawrence dug up at Blockbuster. And visions they decisively were, as opposed to fantasies. She didn’t seem to concoct them like a fabulist, but to be subjected to them like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, arms bound, eyelids propped. She doubted she could stop them if she tried. But then—she didn’t try.

  There is a knock on the door. It is late at night. They have not been expecting a guest. Irina sags. She is heavy with foreknowledge of who has come calling, and of what the visitor will require of her. Limp in her armchair, she is slow to rise. She follows Lawrence to the hall. On the landing stands Ramsey Acton, ramrod-straight and stock-still. He would never have traveled with his most treasured possession outside its case in real life. But in this solemn passion play, he is gripping his cue, planting the butt on the lino like a staff. Clad in black, he looks Old Testament, like one of the prophets. His blue-gray eyes are harrowing. They do not light on Lawrence, but stare directly over his shoulder to Irina. Ramsey’s refusal to acknowledge her partner’s presence does not seem rude. By implication—whatever the reason for Ramsey’s strange appearance at their door in a city where people do not customarily drop in on one another unannounced, much less at such an hour—it has nothing to do with Lawrence. Irina meets Ramsey’s eyes. They are uncompromising. No one says a word. Ramsey doesn’t need to. This is a summons. Should she fail to heed it, he will not be back.

  London’s night air is cooling at the close of summer. Irina takes her coat from the rack in the hall. Following Ramsey’s gaze, Lawrence turns to Irina as she draws on her wrap.

  He looks mystified. He has not seen Ramsey Acton for over a year. He has no understanding of why the man would show up like this with no warning. Yet it is too late for explanations. She is sorry. In the oddest way, for Irina this has nothing to do with Lawrence, either. She picks up her bag from its hook. That is all she takes. It is all she will ever take. There is every likelihood that she will never return to this lovely flat again. Brushing silently past Lawrence, she slips to Ramsey’s side. His cool, dry hand slides around her waist. Finally Ramsey looks Lawrence in the eye. The one look transmits everything. All these weeks she has been petrified by the prospect of sitting Lawrence down one arbitrary evening and blurting what he most fears to hear. The hackneyed scene will no longer be required. Lawrence knows. He is reeling from learning too much too fast. His dizziness can’t be helped. He will have all the time in the world to regain his bearings—to piece together painfully why she must have snapped at him over so minor a matter as toast.

  Ramsey tosses his cue lightly into the air and catches it at a midpoint, where it balances. The cue has transformed from Biblical staff to an implement more playful, like the cane in a tap dance by Fred Astaire. Gracefully, Ramsey turns her from the door. They walk down the stairs.

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nbsp; The other recurrent vision was odder, because it never went anywhere. It just sat.

  Ramsey and Lawrence are seated at the dining table in Borough. This is the same table at which they had consolidated the couple’s resolution last year—Lawrence’s resolution, really—that though their established foursome with Jude and her husband was no more, Ramsey would not be jettisoned from their friendship. How poignant: it is only thanks to Lawrence’s insistence that Ramsey has been rescued from social oblivion. Irina would have let the man slip from their acquaintance altogether. As if she knew, and had been leading herself not into temptation by sternly lashing the object of her unconscious desire to a little raft and letting it drift down-stream. As if Lawrence had known also, and had run off to scoop Ramsey’s raft from receding waters as a gift for Irina—as if Lawrence were pimping for his own ersatz wife.

  Wife. The word forms the centerpiece of the mirage, like a bouquet on the table. Lawrence and Ramsey are sitting opposite, squared off. In the knock-on-the-door fancy, Lawrence seems irrelevant. In this one, it is Irina who doesn’t pertain. She is standing, exiled to the hallway. This is solely a matter between two men. Though the scene’s trappings are civilized—the dining table is a Victorian antique, the hand-sewn drapes are drawn and discreet—the feeling is Wild West, OK Corral. There could as well be a gauntlet on the table, and a pair of pistols.

  Lawrence’s expression is tolerant. Whatever this is about, he will hear Ramsey out. Ramsey’s expression is simple, open.

  Ramsey says to Lawrence, “I’m in love with your wife.”

  This one line, that is the vision. It poses neither question nor solution. It merely frames a predicament. The scene stops there, for there is nowhere for it to go. Were the confrontation to carry on—Lawrence might say gruffly, “Well, that’s tough luck,” and Ramsey might return quietly, “Whose tough luck?”—the perfect impasse would remain. However little Irina herself “pertains,” Irina and only Irina has the power to move this encounter beyond face-off, to advance the plot.