The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “Okay, one small house,” Lawrence conceded. “It makes more sense to conserve body heat with a sweater than to warm your entire environment.”

  “Nip in air keep you awake, make you keep moving!” As if to demonstrate, Raisa was rushing about the kitchen, creating a remarkable to and fro with the storage of a single clean spoon.

  “Damn right,” he agreed ferociously. “Overheated houses put me to sleep.”

  AS THEY STROLLED THE Avenue under the el after coffee, Lawrence gave her a cajoling shake of the shoulder. “Hey! Why are you so grumpy?”

  “You never take my side. I always feel ganged up on, and it’s my mother.”

  “I’m just trying to keep the peace.”

  “What’s so great about peace?”

  “Actually, that question sometimes comes up in conflict studies. Peace is a little dull. It always presses the existential question of, you know, what’s the point, what are you trying to achieve, not only as an individual, but as a country.”

  “So how do people in conflict studies resolve this peace-sucks problem?”

  “Same way as any sane man visiting his mother-in-law: It beats the alternative.”

  Lawrence loved Brighton Beach, for he was naturally stimulated by externals—not a bad thing, really, for inward spelunking into family dynamics was claustrophobic, whereas the outside world that lay before them was as vast as their appetite for it. After all, her own work entailed meticulously deconstructing the lush fluctuation of color in a single leaf, or discerning the complexity of its lines as seen lolling backwards from a side view. There was simply so much to look at in the most commonplace vista that to spend any time at all dithering over thermostats or napkins seemed a waste. She had always valued the way Lawrence helped to pull her into the very world that she would feign to draw.

  So Irina shed her sulk, and poked with him into shops, pleased that the visit to Moscow had made him braver about chatting up clerks in Russian. They considered getting some caviar for a Christmas treat, but it was exorbitant. So they partook of the pleasures on offer that were free, the spectacle of ex-Soviets on the boardwalk. Burly men in their seventies bared sagging chests to an overcast December sky and strode stoically into the icy shallows. Teenage girls paraded fluffy white fur coats that looked to have been made from poodles. A disheveled character rummaged bins for bottles, which he would upend to drain their last drizzles of beer, vodka, or wine down his gullet.

  When they met Raisa at Café Volna, Lawrence greeted her with the usual, “That dress is killing!” He would only order a salad, despite Irina’s derision that he “ate lunch like a girl.” Goaded by her mother’s remark that she was looking “healthy,” Irina defiantly ordered pickled herring, lamb-and-rice soup, chicken Kiev, and a beer.

  When Raisa asked dutifully after her daughter’s illustrations, Irina admitted that she was feeling uninspired. Needing to “knock herself for six,” she might take Lawrence’s advice and investigate computer graphics. But the quality of her mother’s attention was merely patient.

  “Skazhitye, Lawrence. You think you stay in London much longer?”

  “Blue Sky is a good place for me right now. I could see putting in several more years.”

  “Since when?” said Irina. “I thought you were keen to get a post with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.”

  “I’ve had a change of heart. In London, I can take advantage of the special relationship.”

  “What special relationship? With whom?”

  “Between Britain and the US, you moron. It’s a standard expression.”

  “Don’t call me a moron.”

  “Irina, I call everyone a moron.”

  “Except me. Not ever.”

  “All right! I’m sorry! Jesus Christ. I just mean, if I stay in Britain I’m ideally situated to keep a policy hand in both the States and Europe.”

  “Bloody hell, when were you going to tell me?”

  “I just told you.”

  Watching the show, Raisa submitted to Lawrence from the sidelines, “You know, longer she stay in UK, Irina change how she talk, da? She use expressions I no hear in New York. And even way she say words. Every year, more differences.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Lawrence groaned. “On the plane, she ordered a tomahto juice.”

  Since she’d ordered the tomahto juice to pander to his paranoia about his mother who didn’t even really have a drinking problem, it was rich to get stick for it. “When you grow up bilingual,” said Irina, “language seems less fixed. Besides, I think British lingo is a bit of all right.” She managed to deliver the expression with almost no consonants.

  Lawrence folded his arms. “To the contrary, growing up as a second-generation Russian-American gave you an identity problem. Making matters worse, you were a social reject as a kid because of your buck teeth, so as an adult you bend over backwards to fit in.”

  Irina’s cheeks burnt. “How long have you thought that?”

  “Approximately forever. But this faux Brit-speak is wrong-headed. You’re trying to please, and it backfires. You invite contempt. Brits want you to talk like an American, because that’s what you are. When you ask for tomahto juice, you come across like a suck-up who has no self-respect. I wish you’d get that through your head, because other Americans think that tomahto shit is pretentious. You sound like a pompous ass.”

  “Excuse me,” said Irina. “You, of all people, are taking me to task for ‘trying to please’? After you’ve just told my mother that you like her dress three times?”

  His expression blackened. “I do like your mother’s dress, and I don’t see anything wrong with saying so.” He looked at his watch, and left a twenty on the table. “I’ve got some errands to run in the city. I’ll see you guys for dinner.” Like that, he was gone.

  “Lawrence is under a lot of pressure at work,” Irina apologized; for months, the hackneyed explanation had circled in her head like a fly .

  Raisa switched to Russian. “Lawrence is a good man. He is thrifty, and considerate. He makes a regular wage. He works hard. He is disciplined about alcohol. He is not like the men around here, all lazy drunks who can’t keep a penny in their pockets. I never see him raise a hand to you. Maybe you should be careful.”

  “I should be careful? He berated me!”

  “Sometimes a woman must look the other way. Not take issue with every little thing. And he’s a man. He has his pride. What you said, about his complimenting my dress. You embarrassed him.”

  “But he embarrassed me! That crack about my teeth—”

  “This is what I mean.” Raisa squeezed her daughter’s arm. “You look the other way. You rise above. It isn’t weak. It’s grown-up. All men are little children. So the woman cannot afford to be a little child, too, or your home turns into a kindergarten.”

  “Lawrence hasn’t been himself lately. When he went to Russia, I was jealous. I wanted to go too. I wasn’t very nice about it. He may still be angry at me over that.”

  “I am sure you are right. That will pass. Just take my advice, for once? You look the other way, you rise above, about the small things. And then if something ever comes along that is big, you know how, and are already in the habit.”

  LAWRENCE RETURNED LATE AFTERNOON, mumbling something about Christmas shopping, though he wasn’t carrying any packages. He offered to take everyone out to dinner at the usual garish Russian restaurant on the Avenue. When they went upstairs to get ready, Irina stopped him in the hallway.

  “I’m sorry about what I said at Café Volna. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot about being obsequious with my mother. Or I did mean to, but I shouldn’t have. You just hurt my feelings. I had no idea that the way I talk gets on your nerves. I don’t think it’s all trying to fit in. I pick up a few British expressions because I like them.”

  “Oh, forget it. No big deal.” Lawrence detested this kind of talk.

  “I seem to be getting on your nerves a lot.”

  “No, you’re n
ot.”

  Well. So much for that.

  “Will you kiss me?”

  Lawrence looked at her blankly, as if she had asked him to stand on his head. He shrugged. “Okay.” One kiss, tight-lipped and brief.

  “No, really kiss me.”

  The full-bore kiss was foreign, but exciting for that, as if she were trysting with an illicit lover, and it was a tremendous relief. For a woman, barring one other point of entry that Irina found unpalatable, venturing into the moist, vulnerable cavern of a man’s mouth was her only route to getting inside. When Irina opened her eyes, she caught her mother’s gaze at the end of the hallway, shining with approval.

  AT DINNER, MINDFUL THAT Lawrence was paying, Raisa ordered only a main course. She asked what Irina and Lawrence did for fun in London, and Lawrence told her about taking Irina to her first snooker tournament last year. When Raisa didn’t recognize the word, he treated her to a detailed description, talking up how enormous the table was, and how many shots ahead you had to plan. She acted enthralled, asking loads of questions with the usual pumped-up enthusiasm. He explained that they knew one of the players, considered the consummate gentleman of the sport; he said their friend was a real celebrity in the UK, who was consequently very wealthy and took them out to lavish dinners a couple of times a year. Maybe it was the mention of money, since for once she seemed sincerely impressed.

  “The ethos is courteous, civilized, maybe most of all elegant,” Irina contributed.

  “Your friend Zeetos, he snappy dresser?”

  Irina smiled. “No, his name is Ramsey. The ethos means the overall atmosphere and set of values. Still—courteous, civilized, elegant? He has kind of a down-market accent, but actually, that describes Ramsey pretty well.”

  “This Rumsee—he handsome man, da?”

  “I guess,” said Irina, as if she’d never considered the question before. “And maybe you could call him a snappy dresser. Tasteful anyway. He’s very graceful, and tells wonderful stories.” She’d said more than she’d intended to, but for some reason whenever the subject of Ramsey arose she didn’t want to let it go. She added emphatically, “And he really likes Lawrence. I can’t help but find Ramsey a little boring, since I’m not that big of a snooker fan. But those two are best mates—I mean, best friends. They trade snooker anecdotes for hours. I hardly get a word in edgewise.”

  “You sure managed last time,” Lawrence muttered.

  “He sound just my type. Maybe I visit you in UK, you introduce me to this rich, famous snooker player, da? Fix up your old mama?”

  Maybe it was the image of Ramsey and her mother hitting the town hand-in-hand that drove Irina to drink, but her hand overshot the glass and splashed four ounces of the cheapest red on the list all over the white tablecloth. “Oh, nothing’s changed!” she cried, flustered. “I’m still a klutz!”

  “You can say that again!” said Lawrence. “For Pete’s sake, Irina, what a mess!” Mopping the wine with his napkin, he made the cleanup seem an enormous bother, moving the salt and pepper, candle, and flower vase. “She’s always been like this, right?”

  “Pravda,” her mother agreed with a collusive sigh.

  “In London, I pour her cabernet into sippy cups.”

  She hadn’t knocked over a glass for years. They were splitting a single bottle; humiliated, Irina rued having wasted a measure of wine she now sorely required.

  “When you go to Russia,” asked Raisa over coffee, “who you go with?”

  “Oh, it was a whole group,” said Lawrence. “From Blue Sky.”

  “These all men? With no wifes? Sound lonely, for whole month. Such shame that Irina could no come with you.”

  Why did she ever tell her mother anything? “It was a business trip, Mama. And I had my own work to do.”

  “It wasn’t all men. One fellow was a woman—well, that sounds incongruous—research fellow, I mean.” He added gratuitously, “She’s kind of annoying, actually.”

  “Irina tell me you work very hard these days.”

  “Afraid so. The American State Department has commissioned a survey on terrorism around the world, and it’s a huge project.”

  “When you get home?”

  “Oh, it’s getting to be about nine at night.”

  “This make very long day. And no so long to spend with Irina, da?”

  “She’s used to it.”

  “Nu… mozhet byt, she should get no used to it.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Irina. “Lawrence is ambitious. I won’t help him by nagging.”

  Raisa switched to Russian, and what she said translated roughly, “When I told you this afternoon that you should overlook the little things, I didn’t mean that you should overlook everything, yes?”

  Well, if Lawrence didn’t understand that, Irina didn’t, either.

  “MAN,” SAID LAWRENCE QUIETLY, flopping onto their bed that night. “How’d you like our friend Zeetos? Tell me she doesn’t get shit like that wrong on purpose. In fact, contriving to be underestimated is strategy. I’ve started to theorize that your mother’s English is secretly the match of H. L. Mencken’s. She just wants to entice you into saying stuff you think she can’t understand so you’ll blow your cover.”

  “That’s what you do around her with Russian,” said Irina, taking off her blouse.

  “You’d think that bag of bones could make a few inroads on her plate when she only ordered one course. What a loon! I swear she sneaks down to stuff her face with those Pepperidge Farm cookies when nobody’s looking. Otherwise she’d be dead.”

  “No, a subsistence diet slows your metabolism to a crawl.”

  “So is that what you’re doing? Keeping your metabolism up? I’ve never seen you eat so much in one day.”

  Irina clutched her blouse to her chest. “I hate being browbeaten, even tacitly, and maybe my rebellion went a little far today. But you’d rather starve to impress her. Every time we come back from Brighton Beach you’ve dropped three pounds.”

  “Is this more riding me for ‘trying to please’? Because those that’s-a-nice-dress-Mrs.-Cleavers are a joke. A joke for your benefit, so you’re supposed to get it.”

  “Of course I know you’re playing a game. But then you’re incredibly mean behind her back, and I wish you’d stop it.”

  “Would you keep your voice down?” he whispered. “This morning I was taking her part too much. Now I’m too mean to the broad. Which is it?”

  “It’s the combination I don’t like. It’s hypocritical.”

  “You know, I’m starting to wonder if on the tube I should have made you promise not to pick a fight with me.”

  “I’m not trying to pick a fight—”

  “Then don’t. Your mother’s just across the hall, and if we’re up till all hours having a shouting match we make ourselves look bad. Now, brush your teeth.”

  Maybe because he was working such long hours, for the last six months the frequency with which they’d been having sex had dropped—nothing precipitous, perhaps by one less night a week, still roughly sating Irina’s erotic appetite. But satisfying a need to come is one of a host of purposes the activity serves, a surprisingly minor one. Especially in the established relationship, its most vital function is reassurance. So once they were in bed and Irina reached around with a beseeching stroke of his hip, only for Lawrence to mumble something about jet lag and doze off, she was more than disappointed. She was nervous.

  SINCE THE NIGHT BEFORE they had neither fought nor fucked, Lawrence and Irina began Christmas Day well rested.

  “Dobroye utro milye!” Raisa cried gaily. “S Rozhdestvom vas!”

  Returned from another overkill run, Lawrence wiped the bottom of his coffee glass and set it on a saucer. In the early days, Irina had been grateful for the way he fell into lockstep with her mother’s lunatic sense of order. But there was nothing like the parental imprimatur to put the kibosh on your attraction to a man, and this morning his scurrying to wash and dry and put away the coffee glass before i
t was even cold was irritating.

  “Irina,” said Raisa with a pretense of lightness. “I mention this before, da? When you take shower, you drain soap dish and dry. You leave soap in puddle, it turn to jelly. Lawrence very good about this. Sometimes you forget.”

  Irina trudged back upstairs to drain the stupid soap dish, and then convened with Lawrence in their bedroom to wrap presents.

  Right before they’d left for New York, Lawrence realized that in Moscow he’d neglected to pick up anything for Raisa. “Oh, dear,” Irina had worried. “And you’ve been to the motherland. I’m afraid she’ll be offended.” Tentatively, she suggested that maybe the most diplomatic thing to do was to give her mother the Rostov choker.

  It’s funny how you can make an offer in all sincerity, and still be crushed when you’re taken up on it. On the heels of her proposal, Irina hoped frantically that Lawrence would insist she keep his gift, Raisa’s sensitivities be damned. Instead he commended her quick thinking, and promised to find her a replacement in due course.

  She didn’t want a replacement. Her very ingratitude on first receiving the present had guaranteed that her about-face before that taxi on Trinity Street would be total, and her attachment to the jewelry was now improvidently fierce. Thus when they spread their presents on the bed beside a pile of refolded wrapping paper from last year, Irina opened the attractive Twinings tea tin she’d found for the necklace and gazed inside possessively. “Do you still want me to give her the choker?”

  “I wasn’t the one who wanted to give it to her, you did. But yes, why not?”

  “I only thought… Well, you said you went shopping yesterday. I thought you might have found something else to give her instead.”

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t find much of anything. It was Christmas Eve, and a goat-fuck. If you were expecting me to buy something different, you should have said so.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said forlornly, and wrapped the tin herself.

  When she heard Tatyana arrive en famille, Irina trotted downstairs to greet them in the foyer. Tatyana dropped her carrier bags and opened her ample arms to enfold her only sibling. “Welcome back! I’m so thrilled to see you! I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks! And look at you, you’re looking fabulous!” Tatyana gave Lawrence an equally hearty hug. Thankfully, she had no idea that he thought she was an idiot.