The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

She laughed. “That’s what I was talking about. Use that in your speeches.”

  “My dick?”

  “Metaphorically, yes.”

  By the time they arrived at Borough High Street, Lawrence’s confidence in the triumph of his lecture had been restored. Yet if self-satisfaction was his natural state, humility underpinned it. His expectations of himself were reasonable in scale. He had not stumbled in his delivery. His ideas were sound. The attendance had been reputable. That was sufficient. He was not going to rail at the heavens if he hadn’t, just today, changed the course of history, drawn prime ministers and presidents, and brought down the house with a standing ovation. Surely a key to contentment, he appreciated modest success.

  Walking up to the flat, Irina was about to ask, “What’s this about your going to Russia?” and, on impulse, didn’t. As a matter of discipline, Irina didn’t raise the subject for the rest of the evening, just to see if he’d bring it up himself. The funds had been approved back in the summer? And when was this trip to be? Would he ask if she’d like to go? Even if she’d never been there, Russia was a country about which she naturally felt proprietary.

  As the night concluded, then the week, then the whole of November, all without a peep from Lawrence about a prospective visit to her motherland, discipline gave way to scientific experiment. At Christmas, when for once they begged off visiting Brighton Beach, Irina’s original proposal that they honeymoon in Thailand got downgraded to a getaway in Cornwall. True, their ancient rental car dropped a hose-clip, and put Lawrence out of sorts; yet nothing about a little automotive breakdown prevented his using one of their long, coastal walks to broach the subject of an impending research trip. It was one thing to be independent, but independence could slyly morph to exclusion, and Irina felt shut out. Through the following months, his omission grew tumorous, and she would brush up against it like a lump on her breast in the shower. As many a woman has done to her peril, she told herself it was nothing, in preference to bravely palpating its dimensions, testing for a texture that might indicate a discrete, cystlike aberration, or a growth more invasively malign.

  12

  THE BRITISH OPEN WAS played in Plymouth across the Easter holidays. Increasingly prone to hiding out in their hotel room, Irina often watched the news. Though she’d been unable to raise even an “Oi, that’s a fair turn, innit?” from the snooker players down in the bar, every channel was chockablock with an occasion of “historic” magnitude: late into the night of Good Friday, politicians in Belfast had arrived at an agreement that would officially bring an end to the Northern Irish troubles, which had been festering for thirty years.

  The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was not a salutary event in Irina’s life. Yet it was certainly salutary for Lawrence Trainer, which the media moguls of the BBC and CNN were not about to let her forget. As a recognized expert at ready hand to London TV stations, Lawrence was everywhere. For days she couldn’t switch on the set without confronting her ex, who pierced her with an expression that she interpreted as chiding. Lawrence was ambitious. Lawrence was well regarded. Lawrence was doing his job. Lawrence didn’t drink too much and Lawrence didn’t smoke too much—at all—and Lawrence didn’t trot along in accordance with someone else’s schedule and thereby demote himself from player to fan.

  He looked handsome, the brown suit he wore in interviews bringing out the warmth of his umber eyes. His delivery was so self-assured that she had to wonder if he was doing better without her than she’d have expected—which was good, of course, very, very good, so why did his fine form make her feel forlorn? Quoting verbatim, he seemed to have memorized the entire document, and was ready with an opinion on its every aspect. That old dinner-table scorn emerged whenever the interviewer raised the issue of the agreement’s wholesale release of paramilitary prisoners, a “get-out-of-jail-free card” with which Lawrence was utterly disgusted. “This means a raft of convicted killers,” he told Jeremy Paxman on BBC2, “will end up serving a shorter sentence than they would for an outstanding parking ticket. But anything for peace, right? Justice is expendable.”

  Lawrence was popular with the media as the sole Cassandra in a chorus of Pollyannas. In their eagerness to see the back of all that mayhem, most commentators showered the agreement with flowers, and didn’t examine the fine print. Only Lawrence noted that the supermajority required for passage of politically significant legislation in the assembly was a formula for deadlock, and that the biggest sticking-points in negotiations—revamping of the police force and paramilitary disarmament—hadn’t been resolved but put off for a very rainy day indeed. His lone voice of forewarning was drowned by drunken high spirits from every other corner, but seemed only the braver for flying in the face of prevailing winds. Whether or not he was right, she was proud of him.

  Yet Irina had a sixth sense that it would really be better, wouldn’t it—anything for peace, right?—if Ramsey were to miss altogether these appearances of his predecessor. Such premonitions descended often these days, leading her to elude any line of conversation in which Lawrence’s name might possibly crop up. But since she thought about Lawrence often—how could she not?—and most of her stories from the last decade involved him in some way, that meant eradicating from her discourse many of the very confidences that drew her close to her husband. Perhaps too much caution was dangerous.

  Since Ramsey was no more interested in the Good Friday Agreement than in the migration patterns of caribou, it had been fairly easy to deprive him of these newscasts, although on a couple of evenings she barely got the set off as he was inserting his pass key. One night when he was safely at the practice table, with Lawrence once more holding forth on ITV, she was overcome with such a melting tenderness that, though she knew it was silly, and self-dramatizing like her mother, she rested her cheek against the screen.

  Her timing was poor. The remote was back on the bed when Ramsey walked in the door. Irina sprang from the tube, searched in vain for the power button that she’d never used, and grabbed a sock. “The screen was dusty,” she said, hastily wiping it down. She got her hands on the remote, but too late.

  “That’s Anorak Man.”

  “You know, you’re right!” she said brightly.

  “You ain’t telling me you hear the voice of the bloke what you used to live with, and see his face big as life on the telly, and you don’t recognize the git.”

  “Well, of course, now that I’m paying attention, I recognize him…”

  “You knew he’d be on the telly, didn’t you. That’s why you pushed me to go and practice. It’s called appointment TV.”

  “But Ramsey—Lawrence has been on every channel for a week!”

  Error.

  “That so. And you been a faithful viewer. Funny you ain’t mentioned you seen him and that. Not once.”

  “Why would I? He’s talking about the Good Friday Agreement, which puts you to sleep.”

  “’Cause I ain’t intellectual. I don’t care about world affairs. All I care about is snooker.”

  That’s right would not exhibit the height of diplomacy. “You can’t begrudge him a few days in the sun. Experts on Northern Ireland don’t get many. And think about it—he must have to see your face pop up on television all the time.”

  “He don’t have to watch you watching me on the telly, does he now?”

  “No,” she said. “He has to watch, in his imagination anyway, me fucking you blind every night instead. Who’s got the better deal?”

  Of course, that was only the beginning, and, like so many knock-down-drag-outs before it, this one carried on into the wee-smalls. But this time what stayed with her afterwards wasn’t another self-admonition to conduct her life with Ramsey as if Lawrence Trainer had never been born, but the haunting image of those deep-set brown eyes, harrowing from the screen with reproach. What was she doing in Plymouth? Since when was her solution to too much time on her hands to jack up her consumption of cigarettes? For that matter, since when did she have time on her ha
nds? Didn’t she once have a horror of being idle? Puffin had been decent enough about giving her an extra six months to deliver The Miss Ability Act for “personal reasons,” but shouldn’t she save begging such indulgence for illness or emergency? Had she lined up her next job yet? Didn’t she used to make sure there was always another project in the pipeline? And didn’t she miss those feverish afternoons, when she was so consumed by an illustration that she forgot to eat? Nothing wrong with having a good time on occasion, but wasn’t such absorption once, more than drinking and fucking and bantering about next to nothing with snooker players, her very definition of a good time? Somehow Lawrence had morphed from ex to alter ego, her good angel, the voice of her straight-A self.

  His transformation was not altogether in her head. Maybe taking advantage of her carte-blanche access to Ramsey’s laptop (which he mostly used for responding to fan mail on his own Web site) for this purpose was scurrilous, but Irina had established tentative e-mail contact with her former partner. She was careful to pursue the correspondence only when Ramsey was certain not to walk in; superstitiously, she changed the password on her Yahoo! account every week. Her notes were discreet, allusions to frequent “differences of opinion” arising in her new life left opaque. She kept from Lawrence just how debauched her average evening had grown, and to how many tournaments—like, all of them—she had accompanied Ramsey this season.

  Of course, to regale Lawrence with the high times would have been cruel—the raucous songfests in bars, the amniotic oblivion of waking in Ramsey’s arms. But what she most protected him from would have been far more hurtful. In defiance of Lawrence’s bleak forecast that a life with Ramsey promised only dreary reruns of the same old snooker stories, what reliably kept the pair up until four in the morning was less often sex than talk. Ramsey listened; Lawrence had waited for her to finish. So driven was Ramsey to dissect the main thing that he might have learned the occasional value of the unsaid.

  By contrast, discussions with Lawrence had always a strange tendency to truncate. When appraising an acquaintance, he would slap a hasty label on the subject of their speculation—“He’s a fool”—like pasting an address on a parcel at the post office. Whoosh, it was down the chute; there was nothing more to say. With Ramsey, conversation only took off—and could wend on wing for hours—at the very point at which, with Lawrence, their earthbound craft had sputtered to a halt. Regarding other people, Ramsey was as fascinated by the fine points as Lawrence was by the minutiae of the Good Friday Agreement. So long as she steered her husband gently away from snooker, like guiding him around an open manhole, he displayed remarkably keen instincts about, say, her father, who, he noted, clearly hid behind foreign accents because he had lost touch with the sound of his own voice. Or Irina would remember how, when she was twelve, her mother had kneeled solicitously at the dentist’s, murmuring tenderly that she’d never have conceded to these bothersome braces for cosmetic reasons, but only because Irina’s dentist claimed that they were a “medical necessity.” Ramsey exclaimed, “What a cow! Your mum would keep you from getting your teeth fixed if it was only so you’d be pretty?” Funny, Irina had never considered that snippet appalling before.

  And while it was true that Northern Ireland plunged Ramsey into a coma, in relation to many other issues of the day he could profitably apply the same natural intuition about what made people tick, even if he had trouble keeping the facts straight. Lawrence had kept nothing but facts straight. Lawrence focused on the what, Ramsey on the who. For Ramsey, politics was about particular, barmy people getting up to no good. He said Milosevic had a face “like a baby what’s just soiled his nappies—and is right pleased you’ve to clean up the mess.” When two boys murdered several fellow students with their grandfather’s shotguns in Arkansas, Irina was mystified; Ramsey said, “Well, in your country, they ain’t going to impress their girlfriends by getting high marks in English, are they?” Clinton’s apology for slavery on a trip to Africa elicited a snort. “What’s the use in apologizing for something you didn’t do? Sanctimonious git—he’s busting with pride! When you’re really sorry, you’re ashamed of yourself.” And a casual stroll by the television news could occasion comments surprising astute. “Sounds like Marvel Comics, don’t it? Can you believe your president and the PM both say ‘weapons of mass destruction’ with a straight face?”

  But then, the very, very last thing she would ever tell Lawrence was that even discussions of current events with Ramsey were funnier and more reflective than Lawrence’s terse lectures while washing dishes, so her e-mails tended to be short. Lawrence’s e-mails were even shorter. He did sometimes indulge in a savage diatribe on the subject of Ramsey. (Although out of spousal loyalty she probably should have told him to keep his disagreeable thoughts on her husband to himself, somehow she could never quite bring herself to disclose to Lawrence that she and Ramsey had married.) Yet his dominant running theme was that at all costs she must return to her work. He was right. Lawrence knew her so well. Like prodding her with clues to a word on the tip of her tongue—It begins with I—Lawrence could remind her who she was.

  JUST AS IRINA WAS working up to a firm resolve to rededicate herself to her own occupation, the next tournament on the calendar would have to be the World Championship—the one tournament that Ramsey might most reasonably expect her to attend. Hence Irina acceded, but for the first time begrudged the gesture as a bridge too far.

  In such hushed tones did players and commentators alike speak of “the Crucible” in Sheffield that she had pictured the venue for the championship as old and gilded, garlanded on its grand façade with stone-carved olive branches and cornered with gargoyles, its theater ornate with velvet-lined boxes and glittering chandeliers. What a disappointment! The real thing was a hulking concrete affair harkening back no further than the architecturally inaugust 1960s. Its lino was gritty, its carpeting thin, the interior’s overall atmosphere that of a failing public high school. So even the building put Irina in a foul mood.

  Now, by this time Irina had seen an awful lot of snooker. She had learned most of the fiddly rules, how a perfectly tied score was resolved by a “respotted black.” Furthermore, when watching Ramsey himself Irina was implicitly invested in the results. Victory or defeat would determine whether later that night Ramsey would carouse in manic elation, throwing her in the air and jigging around their suite to Charlie Parker, or would brood through a room-service dinner and pick a quarrel. Nonetheless, a whole back-to-back snooker season involved thousands of frames. As fully as Irina might now appreciate the fact that no frame is ever perfectly repeated, after seven months of snooker OD they had started to look mighty goddamned similar to her. Slumping through the first few rounds of the World, she had to admit that she was bored. Not just a little bored, either. Unrelentingly bored, jump-out-of-her-skin bored, so bored that she wanted to kill.

  Ramsey made it all the way to the final again this year, to Irina’s exasperation, for in the privacy of her head she was now unapologetically chafing for him to drop out early so that they could please, finally go home. Be that as it may, when at the end of the match Ramsey extended his hand in congratulations to John Higgins and then accepted the seventh runner-up trophy of his career—not an elegant silver urn, but yet another clunky glass plate—no amount of grace could disguise a devastation that any decent wife would find anguishing in her own husband’s face.

  Here she was married to a man with a singular talent, the stuff of fanzine profiles and interviews on the BBC; strangers badgered him on the street. The whole world was entranced with Ramsey Acton’s snooker game, with the notable exception of his wife. These days, rather than be captivated by his uncanny long pots, ingenious doubles, and dazzling plants, she reliably watched Ramsey’s matches with eyes at half-mast. What most distinguished the man to others had become the very excellence that she not only took for granted, but could no longer see. As she threaded guiltily from the guests-and-family section to console him, a line from that seminal bir
thday dinner returned: It’s queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them. He was right. For now, she was merely bored with snooker. After another whole season of tagging along, she would come to hate it.

  AS THEIR LIMO AT last headed back to Victoria Park Road in early May, Ramsey brooded. He was always touchy about coming in second, which fortified the popular myth that he didn’t quite believe in himself, that whenever he was really up against it he was driven to lose. All he would say aloud regarded some vague intestinal complaint, though he was too shy to explain whether he was shitting too much or too little. Irina was beginning to find his bafflingly complicated relationship to his guts a little trying, and such bashfulness about the biological basics between spouses was ridiculous.

  Much as she had pined for months to go “home,” as she walked into Ramsey’s gaunt three-story house, Irina’s heart sank.

  Apparently the home for which she’d really been pining was the flat in Borough. She missed her mismatched Victorian crockery, her multiple rows of spice jars, her 1940s mixer lovingly retouched with green and manila enamel. Having forsaken her motley possessions made her feel like a wanton woman who’d walked out on a homely brood. Yet in mourning the familiar objects of her abandoned household—the stacks of great white pasta bowls, the Delft sugar bowl and matching creamer—she may have used them as mediums for a grief she could not yet afford to face in its animate form. For as she manifested her old flat in her mind’s eye, it rang with the ritual rattle of keys in the lock; “Irina Galina!” echoed down the hall.

  It was a brisk spring afternoon. When Irina suggested a walk in Victoria Park, she hoped it wasn’t too obvious that, after carrying on so about longing to come back here, she was immediately desperate to get out. The ducks on the pond had bits of sticks and peanut shells stuck to their feet. After months of too much champagne and hour upon hour of dark, airless snooker matches Irina was exhausted and could think of little to talk about, other than the one subject that she should keep to herself. Ramsey was her husband. It wouldn’t be considerate—or wise—to confide on the very day he swept her over his transom that she was dolorous over another man.