The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “But how this come about?” Raisa pried. “You have dinner, two couples, and then, just like that, you marry man across table?”

  “Mama, look. One night Lawrence was out of town, and Ramsey was divorced. We got together as friends, and it was perfectly innocent. Except that we fell in love. I wasn’t looking for it, and neither was he. Falling in love isn’t something that you decide to do, any more than you decide on the weather. It descends on you, like a hurricane.”

  Alas, Irina’s set piece was tainted with a hint of talking herself into something. The question of whether you were responsible for your own feelings—whether emotions were bombardments to which you were helplessly subjected or contrivances with which you were actively complicit—tortured her on a daily basis. Are they something you suffer, or something you make? You can control what you do, but can you control what you feel? Did she choose to fall in love with Ramsey Acton? And should desire have indeed thundered from the heavens like a “hurricane,” given that the subsequent downpour had rained upon Lawrence a grievous injustice, in that theoretical universe whereby she could choose, would she have opted to forgo it?

  “Ten years ago,” said Raisa, “you say you fall in love with Lawrence. What happen?”

  “I don’t know what happened.” Even with Ramsey beside her, Irina sagged. “And I do still love Lawrence—in a way…”

  “So, when this new love fall from sky. You walk out, next day? Go marry Rumsee?”

  “No, Mama, I am an adult, and we obviously had to think about it.”

  “How long you do this—thinking?” A reflexive generational disapproval may have battled appreciative amazement that her plain, under-confident daughter had mustered the pluck and sex appeal for adultery.

  “Not that long.” Irina folded her arms. “Mama, I know I said I was in love with Lawrence, and I was. I still think he’s a wonderful man, and I won’t hear a word against him. Still, what’s between me and Ramsey is different.”

  “How different?”

  “We’re closer.”

  “Da, ya vidyela,” Raisa said dryly. Yes, so I’ve seen.

  “Obviously, Mama—” With a hand gesture of exasperation, Irina knocked over her wine glass. Ramsey’s signature Chateau Neuf du Pape Rorschached over the white tablecloth. Her cheeks burned to match the stain. “Oh—nothing’s changed, I’m still a klutz!”

  “You ain’t no such thing, pet!” Ramsey patted and covered the spill with his napkin without seeming to make a fuss, then refilled her wine glass to the brim. Finding no one with whom to share it, Raisa’s pitying smirk floated in space.

  “As I was saying, Mama,” Irina recovered, darting a grateful glance at her husband, “obviously falling in love with Ramsey was the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. But I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea. Leaving Lawrence was incredibly painful, not only for him but for me. This isn’t some flighty little whim of mine.”

  Irina should not have had to say any of that, and as soon as it was out of her mouth she felt humiliated. Somehow whenever you’re obliged to swear that a romance isn’t “a flighty little whim,” a flighty little whim is exactly what it appears.

  “Yes,” said Raisa, putting down her fork summarily; she saved grammatical English for special occasions: “I’m sure it was very unpleasant.”

  Maybe the problem was exclusive to her mother, but Irina suspected not. That is, maybe for any parent the hardest prerogative to grant grown children isn’t the right to be treated like real professionals, with their own homes and the respect of important people, but the right to annex adult feelings. You’d have grown too habituated to consoling weepy moppets who are “in love” with the boy in the front row, while certain in the knowledge that next week they would be equally smitten by the boy in back. Raisa still spoke of her marriage to Irina’s father as a tragedy of Tolstoyan proportions, while the droll story of their meeting—broke, Raisa was playing a bit part in a B-movie called Tiny Dancer, in which Charles was supposed to coach her on her Russian accent—was straight out of Chekhov. But it wouldn’t come naturally to accord a little girl with buck teeth, inordinately attached to the worn-down stumps of her Crayola-64, the capacity for heartache on the same epic scale. So there was likely no rendition of the Ramsey-Lawrence triangle that wouldn’t, to Raisa, sound tinny, trite, and dubious. When Irina put forward that leaving Lawrence had been “painful,” Raisa could only hear “It was sort of awkward and Lawrence said mean things to me.” When Irina said that falling head over heels for Ramsey was “the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her,” Raisa could only hear “He takes me out to dinner, and he has a pretty face.” And now that Irina had asserted in womanhood that she’d “fallen in love” with more than one man, her mother would revoke her provisional license, itself only granted begrudgingly after years of her loyalty to Lawrence, to have ever properly “loved,” the way real grown-ups love, anyone in her life.

  After paying the hefty bill, Ramsey was fuming, whispering in Irina’s ear on the way out of the restaurant, “Your mum is rude.” He clarified later that he was referring to her having ordered such an array of delicacies only to have the better part of every course swept away. While he didn’t care about the money, somewhere in the affected finickiness lurked ingratitude: “Like chucking it back in my face!” But Irina thought at the time that he was referring instead to her mother’s having put them both on the spot like that, trying to uncloak a sleazy, duplicitous affair as the provenance of all this happiness.

  Yet there was just enough truth in that charge to make Irina pensive on the walk home. Back in 1988, once Lawrence had moved into West 104th Street, Irina had visited her mother in Brighton Beach to break the news that she had finally met “the love of her life.” She remembered employing the shopworn phrase without self-consciousness, and meaning it with all her heart. The scene had engendered a rare sweetness between mother and daughter, even if it did take years for Raisa to credit the extravagant claim, and to achieve a reluctant (if now unfortunately tenacious) fondness for Lawrence herself. But that is not an announcement you can make twice. As splendid a man as Irina believed fiercely she’d shown up with the night before, a shabbiness, a sheepishness, had contaminated the introduction, and retroactively sullied as well that erstwhile precious memory from 1988. Irina told herself that these days people married two or three times as a matter of course, and to have a second great love was hardly incredible. But she was, at core, a romantic of an archaic cast. While she loved Ramsey, she did not, quite, love their story.

  THAT NIGHT RAMSEY AND Irina cozied in her old bedroom with the Hennessy XO, trying to keep their voices low. “Well, it seems safe to say,” Irina observed resignedly, “that you two aren’t getting on like a house afire.”

  “I don’t give a monkey’s how she treats me—”

  “Nonsense,” said Irina. “Of course you do.”

  “Good on you, I reckon I do. I never been treated like more of a waster in my life. If that bird says snookers one more time I’ve half a mind to sock her in the gob.”

  “Well, Ramsey, most Americans—never mind Russians—know next to nothing about snooker, and have no idea the kind of status you enjoy in the UK. My mother is full of pretensions and in a lot of ways she’s a total fraud, but I’m pretty sure she’s not faking on this point: She’d never heard of snooker.”

  “She’s still never heard of snooker.”

  “That may be. But no matter how much you regale people with ‘In this other country, people who do this for a living are cultural icons,’ none of that sinks in when it doesn’t connect with their own experience. I could tell you about how handsome and revered John F. Kennedy was, but if you’d flat-out never heard of him, you couldn’t possibly grasp what it meant when he was assassinated, not one bit.”

  “Who’s John F. Kennedy?” His deadpan lately was flawless.

  She biffed him. “Stop it.”

  “But never mind me. I cannot stick watching you scurr
y round the house, rushing to put the furniture legs in them special dents in the carpet, snatching up my water glass before I’m even finished and washing and drying and putting it back in its special place in the cupboard. I hook my jacket on a chair downstairs, and ten seconds later I look round and it’s disappeared. It’d be bad enough if it was her, but it was you! Why humor the bird? You play up to these daft bints and you just make them worse! If it was my own mum, I’d be flinging my suitcase full of gear all round the sitting room and filthifying as many dishes as possible, just so’s I can leave them crusty on the counter. And mind, pet, before I’m through here I’ll not only be grottying up the crockery, but chucking it!”

  “I thought you were a snookers player, and now you want to play bowls.”

  By turns wry, then confiding, their quiet debrief was so amicable that Irina let her guard down. Just about the time she was inclined to introduce her old bedroom to the depravity of adulthood, Ramsey raised, casually—just what did she mean tonight that she “still loved” Lawrence Trainer, “in a way”?

  “In a way,” said Irina warily, knowing better than to add any new words because, no matter what they were, they would inevitably dig her deeper. “What I said.”

  “I marry you,” he said, and Irina’s heart fell to the very floor, for she knew that voice, and he may have sounded moderate and reasonable and just, well, interested in a little clarification, but it was telltale, like the sound of an engine turning over once and dying and then once again and dying, but there was petrol in that tank and he was just getting started. “We’re out with your mum. Who I just met the day before. And you natter on to her. In front of your husband. About how you love another bloke?”

  “In a way, I said. I was very clear, not in the way I love you. I was obviously talking about a feeling that I’m not ashamed of and that doesn’t threaten you in the slightest. Otherwise, why would I talk about it when you’re sitting right there?”

  If the astute, objective side of Irina were hovering over the room watching this unfold, that good angel would have shouted, “SHUT UP!” For the worst thing she could do when these ructions got under way was to explain herself. To feed the flames. To add more words. But Irina was among other things polite. They were having a conversation, which seemed to oblige her to say things in return, even as she knew that every time she opened her mouth she breathed accelerant, and she’d be better off sealing it with duct tape.

  Ramsey was already gearing up. “Whyn’t you stop and think how humiliating that is to your husband? In front of your mum! Who I’m meeting for the first bleeding time!”

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with my saying that, when the feeling I’m talking about is round and warm and safe. I lived with Lawrence for almost ten years. You wouldn’t expect me to feel nothing for him, would you? I mean, God forbid that you and I should ever split up, but in the terrible event that we did, would you want me to come out the other side and feel nothing for you? Absolutely nothing?”

  “There now, you see? Five minutes into this carry-on, and you’re leaving me!”

  “I didn’t say anything about leaving you, it was just theoretical—”

  “And not only do I have to sit there listening to my own wife coo about how she loves this other bloke, but I’m to take another bite of kabob while she swoons—again, I might add—how he’s ‘a wonderful man’ who she ‘won’t hear a word against’?”

  It went on for hours. While Irina tried to keep her own voice to a hoarse whisper, Ramsey’s sotto voce hadn’t lasted two sentences, and in no time he was giving Raisa—whose bedroom was across the hall—a performance whose building bombast a ballerina with a soft spot for Tchaikovsky would have to admire. Whether she would continue to admire it at two, three, and four in the morning was another matter. “Would you please keep your voice down!” Irina would plead, her throat raw from screaming in a whisper. “She can hear every word you’re saying! How do you think this makes me look? Makes us look?” But Irina’s imprecations only inflamed him, so that back comes, full-voice, “What do I care what that dried-up bird thinks? Why do you? Is that all you can think about, keeping up appearances? When I put my heart on the line with you? Stuff what your mum thinks, I’m talking about what’s, to me anyway, a matter of life and death!”

  The light behind the curtains was beginning to gray—and the bottle of Hennessy XO beginning to wane—by the time Irina collapsed on the bed and turned her back. The sun might be rising, but her head had gone black, and she no longer cared if her mother could hear her sobbing from across the hall. “You promised me,” she said, before sinking to a bleak sleep. “You promised me.”

  WHEN IRINA DRAGGED HERSELF downstairs after two hours’ sleep she found her mother whisking a sponge around counters that were already clean, in a spirit of exceptional smugness. “Dobroye utro, milaya!” she cried gaily. “S rozhdyestrom tebya!”

  “Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too,” said Irina heavily. God, cheerfulness could be a form of assault.

  “Sleep well?” The English was pointed.

  Peering through the slits of her swollen eyelids, Irina briefly met her mother’s eyes. “Not especially.”

  That was as close as they came to mention of the discordant palaver that must have kept Raisa from sleeping at all; she’d already worked out at the bar, and the royal-blue carpet in the front room showed the slashes of fresh, feverish hoovering, perhaps to remove Ramsey’s offending indentations. Nevertheless, last night’s quarrel was written all over Irina’s face, which was puffy and bleached. Her eyes were still red, and as she drooped over her coffee to let the steam condense on her face, her forehead clenched in a dull throb. She had a hangover, but of a particular kind. Ramsey had drunk almost all of the cognac, but Irina had had lavish opportunity in the last year to establish that, between crying and drinking, anguish was the far more ravaging the next morning. Her eyes were burning, her muscles stiff; her skin was tight, her saliva thick.

  Yet Ramsey trotted down looking perfectly chipper. She’d no idea how he could kill half a bottle of cognac and not appear the worse for wear. Maybe a knack for metabolizing eighty-proof was one of the many talents that suited him to snooker.

  Sometime during that two hours of sleep, he must have nudged the bedding out from under her and worked off her clothes, for she’d woken this morning naked, covered, and embraced head to toe by a warm, beautiful, affectionate man whose touch revealed that if they’d simply done this last night, touched instead of talked, they might have skipped that whole folderol and arisen well rested for Christmas to boot. When now he knelt beside her chair to fix her with those soft gray-blue eyes and kiss her lingeringly on the mouth, she was infused with a gush of gratitude, made no less powerful for her recognition that it was perverse. Being thankful to a man who’d made her cry because he was no longer making her cry duplicated the syndrome that Lawrence deplored in relation to IRA godfather Gerry Adams—lauded by his own prime minister and promoted as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize because he was no longer blowing the British Isles to kingdom come. Though Ramsey would never hit her, Irina worried that this was exactly what kept battered wives coming back for more: an addictive gratefulness that it’s over, a tenderness made precious for the very fact of having been so long withheld, and by the by, what public-service adverts for help-lines on TV never care to mention, the sex. This morning’s had been top-drawer.

  Accordingly, when Ramsey stood she held on to his hand, using it to pull herself up. Raisa could disapprove of groping all she liked, but Irina stood in her husband’s arms and pressed her cheek to his chest not only because she needed the contact like a drug, but also to establish, firmly, that whatever her mother may have overheard, they had made up. Unfortunately, Raisa would have seen a thing or two over sixty-four years, including, in this neighborhood, more than one battered wife. When she looked over at the two wrapped in a clutch, her expression only ratcheted up another notch of knowing smugness, as if all this turnabout lovey-dovey mer
ely confirmed the same devastating verdict she had reached conclusively at two a.m.

  Irina faced the rest of the day with dread. Post-apocalypse on Victoria Park Road, she and Ramsey would have required nothing more of each other than unremitting physical contact, keeping a leg in a lap or a hand on a knee as they sipped rejuvenating coffee, intertwining fingers as they ventured for a quiet, shaky amble through the park, kept short as one would curtail the walks of cripples or convalescents. They would tender tiny favors or presents, Ramsey slipping off to return with an untried brand of hot sauce, while Irina matted the poster from the China Open to hang with the others downstairs. But today no delicate, mutually considerate ritual for the restoration of normal affections would present itself. It had to be fucking Christmas. Any time now, Tatyana and family would burst in with the fixings for a huge dinner at whose prospect Irina’s stomach lurched in revulsion. She wasn’t up to this. She wasn’t up to this at all.

  AS IRINA HAD EXPLAINED to Ramsey on the plane, until Tatyana was about twenty, she’d striven to become the reincarnation of their mother. Six years younger and not, like a certain someone, conceived in resentment, she seemed to have inherited all the fluidity and flexibility of which Irina had been cheated, and made a model ballet student. With rounder cheeks, more symmetrical features, and straight, even front teeth, of the two girls Tatyana was the more conventionally pretty. Though she wasn’t as tall as Raisa and had come by a more substantial bone structure from their father, she fought biology with some success by consuming so little that in comparison even Raisa seemed a healthy eater. The regime grew only more punishing after she began to grow breasts—protuberances, in ballet terms, against the law. She was admitted to a prestigious dance school in Manhattan, and Irina supposed that, if she were to let go of a competition over long ago, the story was sad. Tatyana had worked fantastically hard. And she did get impressively far, including a recital at Lincoln Center. But she was a little too short, and never able to starve off those hated mammaries to the satisfaction of the countless companies that never called her back after auditions. Tatyana’s crushing disappointment alerted Irina to the secondary tier of gifted also-rans that lined most of the arts with grief. Especially rarefied fields with few slots at the top fostered a whole cohort of talented people who worked very, very hard and who were very, very good, who deserved to be rewarded for their astonishing effort and achievement, and wouldn’t be.