The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “Oh, great.”

  “Of course, we could always go to Las Vegas instead…” Irina threatened.

  “Anything but Vegas. I guess Brighton Beach gets us out of that.”

  “My mother likes you.”

  “I could be anybody so long as I tell her she’s wearing a nice dress.”

  Irina felt a building desperation to provide him something positive to have come home to. So far he’d returned to a woman who was bitter about having been left behind, whose work was dull, and whose family was burdensome. But she could only lay her hands on the very sort of lame compliment that Lawrence had just pilloried: “Speaking of which, I like your new shirt.”

  The fact that he’d arrived wearing clothing that she didn’t recognize had heightened his unfamiliarity when he walked in. The black crewneck with a slashing diagonal red line and punctuating white dot suggestive of Russian constructivism was more daring, and frankly more stylish, than Lawrence was wont to don.

  “Oh, yeah. Got it in Moscow, at GUM.”

  “You went shopping? Without a gun to your head?”

  “I don’t see what’s so suspect about that. I’ve bought things in my life.”

  “I didn’t say it was ‘suspect.’ Just out of character.”

  “Well, I was ah, I was looking for something for you. In fact…” He got up to rustle around in his luggage, and came up with a plastic bag. He thrust it into her hands. There was no card. The present wasn’t wrapped.

  Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are. Accordingly, showing up at the door with a package could be more hazardous than arriving empty-handed. Tendering nothing risks only seeming thoughtless or cheap. Barring the generic gratuity like a nice bottle of booze—and the neutral offering has its own pitfalls of seeming too impersonal or cautious—any present risks exposing the donor for a fool, and the relationship as a travesty.

  But the choker she pulled from the bag was quite pretty—a band of black velvet with a delicate floral enamelwork in the center. Its finely painted bouquet against a cream background was characteristic of a Rostov finift. So what was it about the gift that didn’t quite work? The word? Given the prickly tenor of his homecoming, did “choke-her” sound upsetting? That was absurd. No, it was just this funny feeling that it could have been anything. See, Lawrence hadn’t seemed impatient to give her the bag as soon as he walked in, nor had he made anxious inquiries about whether she liked it when she first pulled the choker from its tissue paper, and now he wasn’t fussing over it to show her how to work the clasp. So she had a hunch that, perhaps bought in haste on the last day in order to give her “something,” the present didn’t mean much to Lawrence, in which case it couldn’t possibly mean much to her. Even if the choker were expensive, Irina might have been more touched had he rocked up instead with a little package of Russian seasoning for their popcorn.

  Oh, she was being unreasonable! Lawrence had been run ragged, and for him to have darted out for any token at all was sweet. She thanked him profusely, and put it on.

  Irina followed him into the bedroom, where he took his bags to unpack, frustrated that it was only four-thirty p.m., which precluded a reunion activity like a drink or dinner any time soon. Nevertheless, she was taken aback when Lawrence announced that he had a box of documents from the trip to haul to Blue Sky, and he was leaving for the office.

  “Can’t you do that tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got e-mail to catch up on. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

  The box was heavy, and he decided to ring a minicab. Irina walked down with him to await its arrival at the curb. She knew he was busy, and behind at the office. Still, there was something very, very wrong about his having been gone for a whole month only to flee after a single cup of coffee that he didn’t drink. It was so wrong, so disturbing on a ground-shifting, tectonic level, that as soon as she started to think about it her mind shimmied over to whether to dress the salmon tonight with a vanilla sauce or sesame seeds and soy.

  When the taxi pulled up, they faced each other on the sidewalk.

  Displaying the sleeve-tugging insecurity that Lawrence couldn’t abide, she asked, “You are glad to see me, aren’t you?”

  Yet rather than act annoyed, Lawrence looked into her face long and soberly, and for the first time since his arrival met her eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her hard against his chest. “Of course I am,” he said. “Very glad.”

  She was so grateful for the moment of warmth that it seemed to wipe out all his previous combativeness in a stroke, and she touched the choker at her throat with a resolve not to find it meaningless but to treasure it always, because it was beautiful and because anything from Lawrence necessarily meant the world. Yet as he scooted into the cab and waved, assuring her that he’d be back by nine at the latest, she had the eerie impression of saying good-bye to him in a more profound sense than the one in which one commonly bids farewell to a man who will return a mere four hours hence for dinner.

  14

  FOR RAMSEY, PLAYING was work. Summers, he worked at playing. To celebrate his forty-eighth birthday that July, he took Irina on a trip to India to visit the Ooty Club, where he gave a dazzling exhibition of trick shots on the world’s first snooker table. On their return, there was always something that beat laboring over a drawing in her stuffy garret—wine-soaked lunches, afternoon cinema, a spontaneous excursion to Dover. By the time the snooker season resumed in October, Irina had made pitiful progress on The Miss Ability Act.

  Mindful of her springtime vow to knuckle down, she gave Bournemouth a miss, albeit with regret; if the Ooty Club was “the cradle of the game,” Bournemouth was the cradle of their marriage. Yet the dislocated sensation that afflicted her on the road grew only more manifest in their large, empty home. She would pare her nails, sharpen pencils, fix tea. It’s not so simple a matter for an artist—however she avoided the word—to “knuckle down.” She’d make a mark on the paper and it was wrong and the paper was spoiled and she would have to start again. Grown accustomed to companionship morning to night, Irina had lost the knack of solitude.

  If only for distraction from the harrying task of tracking down her peripatetic talent, which seemed to have wandered off like a naughty child, Irina filled the gaps in the furnishings left by Jude’s plunder. Habitually, Irina headed down to the Oxfam shop in Streatham. Although while Ramsey was in Bournemouth she found several lovely pieces for a song, his Platinum MasterCard in her wallet undermined her satisfaction. Indeed, Irina wasn’t cut out for wealth, and with money infinitely on offer found the world curiously cheapened. Negotiating an expensive city on a budget took ingenuity and cunning. Times past, snagging yellow-tagged supermarket snow peas in excellent condition for half-price had made her feel victorious. Now that their average weekly restaurant bill that summer must have been £1,000, how could she feel clever for saving 60p?

  Ramsey rang every evening on his mobile from the Royal Bath bar, and she could hear the carousing in the background, the crooning and ballyhoo and clinking of glassware. When she’d been along for the ride, the swanning from hotel to hotel had seemed tiring and depersonalized; from a distance the tour inevitably appeared glamorous again. In the vacuum of the stay-at-home wife, she grew paranoid. Snooker players were dogged by packs of adoring fans, not all of whom were boys.

  Ramsey’s take on the Monica Lewinsky scandal across the pond was at least reassuring; the hoo-ha was rapidly advancing toward the impeachment of President Clinton. Unlike most Europeans, Ramsey didn’t deride the American public for being unsophisticated about the perks of power. Nor did Ramsey trot out the hackneyed assertion of the day that must have disquieted American women coast-to-coast: All men lie about sex, right? Rather, Ramsey said that if you’ll lie about sex, then you’ll lie about anything, because if a man will lie to his wife, he’ll lie to anybody. T
oo, Ramsey said that a man who would put such an august career on the line for the sake of a little “messing about” with a groupie was a gobshite.

  Still, after hours of aimless snacking, fags lit and extinguished and lit again five minutes later, and dull, uncomprehending confrontation with blank sheets of paper, who could blame her for fleeing such a dismal life for the adoring companionship of a lovely man at the UK Championship in Preston in November?

  Right before Christmas, she pulled three all-nighters straight to meet her extended deadline for The Miss Ability Act, more than once breaking down in tears. Irina conceded to herself on the way to deliver the portfolio to Puffin that perhaps the last ones were a little “hasty,” but at least she got them in on time. Nevertheless, fatigue, insecurity, and a soiling sensation of having done a slapdash job on her homework was not the best preparation for Christmas in Brighton Beach, and for finally introducing her mother to not only Ramsey Acton himself, but to the fact of the man’s existence.

  AFTER LAWRENCE’S CHIDING, IRINA had headed off her mother’s calls to Borough by ringing Brighton Beach frequently herself. She did hint that she had a “surprise” when announcing that “we are coming for Christmas,” but demurred from identifying the constituents of the pronoun. Since there was no telling how her melodramatic mother would react to her having left dependable Lawrence Trainer for an impetuous snooker player, Irina decided to simply show up with Ramsey Acton at the door. It was a plan indicative either of a newly matured boldness, or of a regressively childish desperation to put off the unpleasant for as long as humanly possible.

  En route to Heathrow in the Jaguar on December 23, Ramsey nipped and surged in and out of traffic with the usual nervy precision, and being whizzed about zip-zip-zip was thrilling. Yet by Hammersmith, she laid an apprehensive hand on his arm. “Now, you know that my mother is difficult,” she said.

  “You made that more than clear.”

  “And you know it isn’t easy for me to visit her, at the best of times. And this isn’t the best of times. That is, she won’t be expecting you. She’s obsessed with order, and people like that don’t like being snuck up on. They like to know what’s coming.”

  “So why didn’t you tell her on the blower?”

  “As I told you, there’s a raw power in a person standing physically in front of you that brooks no argument—and that may shut her up. But I want you to make me a promise.”

  “Shoot,” said Ramsey.

  “Promise me that under no circumstances will you pick a fight. You can berate me up one side and down the other when we come back. But even if I get drunk and dance naked on a table, you will not, will not take it up with me in Brighton Beach.”

  “Why do you assume we’ll have a row?” he asked, sounding wounded.

  Their every set-to had lodged indelibly in the part of Irina’s brain that stored other major traumas, like car accidents and the deaths of close friends. Ramsey never seemed to recall having spoken a single harsh word.

  “I’m not assuming anything,” she said. “I’m asking you for a promise. Ironclad, pinky-swear. You haven’t made it yet.”

  “Fair enough.” He shrugged. “No rows. I promise.”

  Irina squeezed his arm and thanked him, but his assent had sounded ominously offhand. Like the inexpensive toys she used to get for Christmas from distant relatives, a promise cheaply given was prone to break the first time you played with it.

  AT DUTY-FREE, IRINA COULD no more stop Ramsey from springing for a bottle of Hennessy XO than she’d been able to discourage his purchase of first-class tickets. Indeed, turning a blind eye to the buckets of money that Ramsey threw at any problem or pleasure was becoming the norm. At first Irina had grabbed the odd lunch bill; lately she hadn’t bothered. She didn’t harbor any presumptuous notions about his funds being hers as well now that they were married. Still, Ramsey was rich, he enjoyed spending money on her, and it was amazing how readily a woman who once spooned out the Cajun seasoning at the bottom of the popcorn bowl to use again could adapt to plane tickets that cost—well, she’d rather not even think about it. And merely because those complimentary toiletry kits were, according to Ramsey, “the business.” Never mind that for the price of a miniature spritzer of noisome cologne, foam earplugs, and two tablespoons of mouthwash you could probably put a down-payment on a small house.

  On the plane, the service was solicitous, and they did get rather tipsy. Between queries about how he’d fared in the UK Championship, the flight attendant was forever asking if Ramsey wanted another box of chocolates or an extra blanket.

  Extra blankets came in useful. Irina had always spurned that “mile-high club” nonsense, for she couldn’t see the appeal of sexual intercourse atop the plastic toilet of a cramped airline loo that’s wah-ing from a circulation fan and reeking of nauseous disinfectant. Yet somewhere over Iceland as they reclined under a mound of tartan synthetic it did seem wasteful to ignore the fact that Ramsey had a hard-on that could have doubled as a police baton for bashing anti-globalist protesters over the head. Once Ramsey loosened his belt, in their dark tent her hand traced the outlines of the most beautiful dick she had ever encountered. It was impossible to say why. Irina may never have been one of those women who find male genitals a little repulsive, but she had never, either, made great aesthetic distinctions between them. But this particular dick was unspeakably exquisite—smooth, simple, and straight, with testicles that snugged close to his groin with skin that was taut and talcum-dry. When Ramsey forced himself to the practice table in Preston last month, she had only to conjure the image of his erection that morning to emit a groan of such helplessness and urgency that the waitress in the hotel café asked if there was something wrong with the coffee. Frankly, she’d become a slave to that dick, and it sometimes alarmed her what extravagant sacrifices she might make or humiliations she might endure just to be allowed to touch it one more time.

  They got Ramsey’s shirt wet. Once he slipped under her skirt to return the favor, he chuckled in her ear, “Oi, I could wash my hands down there!” When he reached her cervix she managed to keep from crying out, but her eyes bulged and the rasp of her inhalation was probably audible. None of their little activities seemed to take very long and they were careful to keep covered, but chances were that the flight attendants knew exactly what was going on. Old Irina would have been mortified. Old Irina had never had a very good time on airplanes, either.

  AS THE FRONT DOOR opened, Raisa’s outfit obligingly announced the fact that her personality as well was contrived and over-deliberate: a flaming red blouse over a snug black skirt, with a scarf, belt, and heels color-coordinated in the same precise shade of blinding sun-yellow. It was flashy, it was Sunday-magazine-supplement sharp, and it was too much.

  Ordinarily Raisa imbued her every sentence with an artificial enthusiasm, like a mortician pumping embalming fluid into a corpse. Yet she was so nonplussed to find a tall, narrow stranger beside her daughter that she failed to marshal her hallmark theatricality. She kissed her daughter with perfunctory distraction, then asked flatly in a normal-person tone of voice that Irina almost never heard, “Eto kto takoi?”

  “Mama, I’d like you to meet my husband, Ramsey Acton.”

  “Tvoi muzh? Bozhe moi, Irina, ty vyskochila zamuzh!” She shot a skeptical glance at Ramsey’s hose-clip, which he’d forbidden Irina to replace.

  “You heard me.”

  “Tak!” Raisa exclaimed. “Eto tvoi suprees!”

  “Ramsey, this is my mother, Raisa McGovern.” Obscurely, Raisa had refused to relinquish her ex-husband’s surname, to keep him and to get back at him at the same time.

  “Pleasure,” said Ramsey, kissing his mother-in-law with Continental elegance on both cheeks. He was just the kind of man Raisa would admire—graceful, kitted out in soft dark fabrics with expensive tailoring, albeit with that little dash of dangerousness in the leather jacket. Yet her clumsy, wallflower elder daughter had no business marrying such a striking older man. Raisa w
ould be far more comfortable with a son-in-law in slovenly plaid flannel, whose comeliness was at best an acquired taste, preferably two inches shorter than Raisa’s own stately height of five-ten, and with chronically poor posture. In sum, Raisa was far more comfortable with Lawrence.

  “Akh, izveneete!” Having recovered a measure of her excruciating vivacity, Raisa ushered the two inside. “Kak grubo s moei storony! Pozhaluysta, prokhodite, prokhodite! Dobro pozhalovat!”

  “Mama, Ramsey would feel a great deal more welcome if you’d speak po-angliyski. You’d never know it, my dear, but my mother has lived in this country for over forty years, and does speak English of a kind.”

  “Rumsee? Rumsee Achtun, da?” It was all an act, including that Slavically trilled R on Ramsey’s first name. When she deigned to switch to scrupulously crummy English, that was an act, too. “I no can get over it! When you two marry? Ee gdye Lawrence, Irina? Shto sloochilos s Lawrensom?” As if Ramsey couldn’t translate the word Lawrence.

  “Lawrence and I have amicably parted ways. And please don’t take exception to not being invited to the wedding. No one was. It was a registry-office job, just the two of us.”

  “This very sudden, da?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Irina lied; their first anniversary was last week. “Very sudden.”

  Raisa led Ramsey upstairs to deposit their luggage in Irina’s old room, then gave him a tour of the house, which she’d bought for a pittance with the spartan proceeds of her divorce when her marriage finally went up in flames during Irina’s senior year of high school. (The dowdy hovel’s now being worth a small fortune was a fact about which Raisa was both smug and secretive.) She’d made a beeline for the increasingly Russian enclave, where she could live among her people and feel superior to the Jews at the same time. Presently, she’d be wanting to show off her studio to Ramsey, in order to impress upon her guest that she was not just anybody but an accomplished ballerina and famously strict dance instructor (Raisa boasted that her students were afraid of her) who still worked out at the bar indefatigably every day. Raisa was not going gentle into that good night, and Irina supposed, despite herself, that her mother’s ferocity at sixty-four was impressive.