The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Thus Irina decided, daily, to ring Betsy tomorrow. She shied from the disapproval, the incomprehension, and especially the diplomacy, which from Betsy would feel so unnatural. For that matter, a whole cadre of companions clearly regarded Irina’s running off with a snooker player as an attack of short-sighted intoxication that would end in tears. This whole pro-Lawrence contingent came in for short shrift. Melanie, by contrast, belonged to an opposing constellation of friends, who finally let fly that they had never been able to abide Lawrence, and who lauded Irina’s departure as the bravest, most life-affirming gesture she’d ever made. Somehow the latter group’s company proved the more pleasant to keep.

  This year Irina was genuinely sorry when once more Ramsey failed to win the World. Worse, this year he was knocked out in the very first round, which (alas) brought him home earlier than usual. Militantly, for the months of May and June, when he was footloose and at her disposal, she completely ignored him during the day. She was closing on a finished draft.

  Working flat-out, she met her private deadline with only a day to spare. For Ramsey’s forty-ninth birthday in July she led him upstairs, ushering him into the room from which he had been banished since January.

  He slowly turned the drawings; intended for reduction, each sheet was two feet by three. At first his silence made her nervous, and she worried that he didn’t like them, or resented her incursion into his territory. Her fears were allayed by the dumbstruck expression on his face. He wasn’t talking because he was afraid to say anything lame. At last he must have resigned himself that he talked the way he talked. Turning the last panel of the astronaut story, he said solemnly, “This is fucking brilliant.”

  That would do nicely.

  They had a simple dinner at Best of India that night. After heaping the drawings with still more praise, Ramsey ventured, “I hate to sound thick as a post, since I know the story’s for nippers. But what’s it mean?”

  “The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all the others are crap. The idea is to take the pressure off. Martin gets to express many of the same talents in each story, but in different ways. There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn’t want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

  Ramsey asked plaintively, “In the snooker story—why couldn’t he win the World?”

  Irina laughed. “Because that would undermine my thesis. Snooker isn’t his sole destiny, even if it works out in many regards very well. And you don’t have to win the World to be a great snooker player, right?”

  “Bollocks!” he said with a laugh, and clinked her glass.

  DESPITE THE LESSON OF the tale itself, “everything was all right” for Irina only after protracted tribulations. For months, she e-mailed JPEGs from publisher to publisher. More than one UK editor admired the work, but cited its production costs as too high. Moreover, she hadn’t a hope in hell of selling American editors on the idea, when it required explaining upfront as she had to her mother that no, snooker was not a card game. It began to look as if the fruit of her fevered endeavor would never see the light of day.

  Since misfortunes arrive in clumps—if misfortune this turn of the wheel could be counted—during the begging-bowl period of that autumn, Irina got pregnant. It’s true that, acting on some vague notion about giving her body a rest, when Ramsey was to be away for three weeks for the LG Cup she’d gone off the pill. Knocked out in the second round, he’d come home unexpectedly, and they’d used condoms. Well, one night excepted… From the day she’d lost her virginity with Chris, she’d always found penis-in-a-Baggie sex repellent. But for pity’s sake, she was forty-four! Hardly a goddess of fertility, and they’d only been lazy that one time! On the other hand, for a child to proceed from all that fucking had about it a genetic inevitability. A kid, after all, was the point.

  She first suspected that one of the tadpoles that had been straining to swim the channel had finally plunged home two days after Ramsey left for the UK Championship. As she trotted up and down the stairs, her breasts ached. When they grew only more swollen and tender, Irina took a home pregnancy test. Before she ever had the chance, per the directions, to balance the plastic white wand upright on the counter, a solid line in its window formed the unambivalent slash of a “Do Not Enter” sign. The fact that now of all times Ramsey wasn’t at her side vivified the style of motherhood that lay before her.

  Unless Ramsey quit the tour for keeps, for two-thirds of the year Irina would be a de facto single parent. She would get up for night feedings all by herself. She would lie abed with a child at her breast watching bad late-night TV. She’d shop alone for clothes and baby food, struggling to fit a stroller into the Jaguar. Ramsey would ring from time to time and ask her to put the baby on, and throw the child joyfully over his head on little visits, but for the most part she could look forward to little or no assistance from a father in Bangkok. He might take to parenthood as entertainment. Yet Ramsey was not responsible. He’d be the kind of father who rocked up with flashy toys but never came home with diaper-rash cream. All the aspects of parenthood that were a drag would land in her lap. The kid would resent Meanie Disciplinarian Mommy and idolize Indulgent Hardly-Ever-Home Dad, world-renowned snooker star—for Irina knew from experience with her own father that children reliably favor the parent in shorter supply.

  So she was touched, and amazed, and wondrous; she was also realistic. Nevertheless, the prospect of scraping her beloved’s baby into the bin like table scraps was intolerable.

  As Irina battled for footing, she hated the idea of telling Ramsey on the phone, and procrastinated—though as a consequence the calls they did have were halting and false. She was afraid that he’d be put out. He’d never talked up having a family, nor rued having sired no children with Jude. He might regard the pregnancy as an inconvenience or worse, and she worried that he’d no longer be attracted to her as she grew large.

  Her delay was fortuitous. Toward the end of the UK Championship, she began to bleed. Numbly she checked into hospital for a D and C. She only told him when it was over.

  Of course, she knew what he’d say: He was terribly sorry not to be with her during such an upsetting ordeal, and he promised to come home soon. But surely nature knew best. She was a little old to become a new mother; though he’d be careful not to injure her pride, he’d point out gently that she’d have given birth at forty-five. Taking a pregnancy to term might have been too hard on her, which her body had recognized. Wouldn’t the chance of birth defects have been awfully high? Why, often when you miscarry, it’s because there’s something wrong with the baby, and that’s why your system rejects it. And they hadn’t really been prepared at this stage of the game to raise a child, had they? Who would have grown to be a teenager with elderly parents. Of course, if they’d married twenty years earlier… But they hadn’t, had they? So maybe they’d been spared an agonizing choice. All this may have been true, but Irina was in no mood to hear it. She recoiled from the prospect of her husband’s unspoken but palpable relief.

  Ramsey surprised her. He said none of that, not even the part about being sorry not to be with her and coming home, though he would later upbraid himself for not doing so. At the time, all he could do was cry.

  SEEKING THE STANDARD COMPENSATION of the childless career woman, Irina did finally locate a small concern in London called Snake’s Head that was so taken with her snooker book that they would assume the costs of production, even if the advance on offer was risibly small.

  Frame and Match was published in September of 2000 to little fanfare. The company tried to capitalize on the fact that the author was married to Ramsey Acton, but hadn’t the
publicity budget to leverage the advantage. Reviews were appreciative but few. The print run was low, the cover price high, and Irina’s survey of Waterstone’s and WHSmith confirmed that only a handful had made it to the chains. But somehow, everything was all right. She had her ten author’s copies, which she doled out discerningly, to Betsy, to Tatyana, and—with reluctance—to her mother by post, a peace gesture of sorts. Irina wasn’t famous and she wasn’t raking in royalties; she hadn’t won the world. But she had spent her time doing something that she loved and that, to Irina at least, was beautiful.

  17

  THE NIGGLING SENSATION OF something being wrong or changed that had plagued Irina since Lawrence’s return from Russia gradually subsided. If he was hard on her for getting plastered at Christmas and denting her mother’s samovar, Lawrence had a powerful sense of decorum, and his dressing-down in such circumstances was only to be expected—as well as his insistence that they personally lug the thing into a local metalsmith and pay for the repair. Should indeed something have altered, the mind is merciful in such matters, and often cannot recall what it does not have. That period of subtle perturbation had been peculiar, like repeatedly detecting a flicker in the periphery of her vision, yet when she turned to stare directly where she thought something had moved, the vista stood stock-still. Thereafter, the very memory of sensing something amiss, too, blessedly evanesced, and her version of events became that everything was fine, everything had always been fine, and she had never thought otherwise.

  One was perpetually subjected to tales of “obsessive love” in cinema: the kind of romance in which you lose yourself in the other, flooding over your own boundaries to mingle indistinguishably with the oncoming waves from an opposite shore. Irina had no idea how such people ever got anything done—earned their keep, paid the bills, and shopped for dinner; in fact, you never saw them doing anything of the kind in movies. Too, the “consuming passion” was always portrayed as mutually destructive, as proceeding inexorably toward private Armageddon.

  In any event, Irina and Lawrence had embraced an alternative romantic model, one that mightn’t have made for riveting movies, but did make for a fruitful life. Lives. Separate, fruitful lives. Having no interest in “losing himself” in her or at all, Lawrence regarded the project in which they were engaged—and it was a project—as one of helping each other to become the finest discrete individuals as they could manage.

  Lawrence called her to her responsible, competent, professional self. Last June, she had delivered the portfolio for The Miss Ability Act well before deadline; each panel was exactingly wrought. While not knocked-on-butt agog, her editor had been firmly pleased and admiring. Known as reliable and meticulous, Irina remained in the good graces of one more company, and they were glad to offer her another contract for a small book already under way with another author—thanks to Lawrence’s productive nagging to always keep her eye on the next project.

  Because Irina hadn’t the background to be of use to Lawrence in his research on the Tamil Tigers, she helped him in return by cheerfully assuming the everyday burden of shopping and cooking. In fact, when he took her aside the January after they returned from Brighton Beach— confiding that he’d just as soon pick up lunch around Blue Sky, and spare her sending him off to work with a sandwich—she’d felt strangely hurt. The prepared meats section of the supermarket had occasioned a queer pang ever since.

  To Lawrence’s credit, the boost of his professional profile since the Good Friday Agreement last year spurred him to bolster Irina’s prominence in equal measure. He did not want a humble, subservient helpmeet who merely made sure that they never ran out of milk. The amount of time he dedicated to getting her up to speed in computer graphics was stupendous. As a belated Christmas present that she actually wanted, he bought her a new Apple, better for graphics than a PC, and all the necessary software.

  Meantime, Irina had been powwowing on another matter with Betsy for months. (She and Betsy had grown close—in contrast to Melanie, a lively but high-strung actress whose vivacity could turn acrid on a dime, and around whom Irina had always to remember to be a bit careful. Melanie’s bitter quip about what a homebody she’d become under Lawrence’s thumb sent a chill through the friendship for keeps.) Irina was, after all, a children’s book illustrator. In Betsy’s view, the one sure formula for “going forward” as a couple was to have a child. Now, there were no guarantees, at forty-four. But Irina wouldn’t be manipulated once more by Lawrence’s shrugging relationship to all the things in life that actually mattered. With his passive acquiescence, she tossed her pills into the medicine cabinet like throwing dice, then tried to put the matter from her mind. She would get on with her work, take supplements of folic acid, and see what happened.

  IT WAS LAWRENCE’S IDEA that after mastering the new software she consider authoring her own book. He decried the weak material she was forced to illustrate; if she couldn’t do better, she wouldn’t do worse. Fortified by his faith in her, Irina took the plunge.

  In girlhood, one of her favorite toys was her Etch A Sketch. As Irina recalled, when you were painstaking enough, and your sister didn’t come along and shake your picture upside-down out of sheer meanness, it was possible to improve on crude outlines, and pattern or even blacken whole solids. A trip to Woolworth’s confirmed that the classic toy was still in production, so the allusion wouldn’t be lost on modern-day children.

  It took many hours and calls to cybergeeks referred by friends, but eventually Irina got her software to approximate the line quality of an Etch A Sketch with staggering exactitude. Having perfected the technique at the keyboard, Irina set about drafting a story line to go with it:

  A little boy named Ivan has a best friend called Spencer. The two boys do everything together—build tree houses, go skateboarding, try to best each other in sack races. At school, they are so famously inseparable that their teachers insist on seating them rows apart, to prevent the two from whispering during lessons. But Ivan’s mother always knows to pour two glasses of milk after school, and slice two apples (which the upscale parents who bought these books would prefer to cookies), since Spencer was sure to come over every afternoon to play. Spencer is brainy, and often helps Ivan with his homework. After the work is done, they learn to make popcorn all by themselves—though on their first try, they forget the pot lid, and kernels fly all over the kitchen. Later the tale of the popcorn sailing through the room and landing in their hair, floating little white boats in the dishwater, becomes a story they love to retell on camping trips in the tent when it’s raining.

  But one day when Spencer is home sick, and Ivan is sorrowfully on his lonesome at school, Ivan meets another boy at recess. The new boy, Aaron, is tall, witty, and clever, as well as gifted at kickball. He seems to like Ivan especially much. Soon Ivan is having such a good time with his new friend that he forgets all about missing Spencer, and asks if Aaron would like to come over to his house after school.

  Ivan’s mother is surprised to see a different boy turn up with her son, but there is no telling about childhood friendships, so she serves them milk and fruit with no questions asked. Aaron and Ivan go outside to skateboard, and it turns out that Aaron knows all kinds of tricks that Ivan has never learned before. The truth is, Ivan is having even more fun with Aaron than he ever did with Spencer, quite.

  Suddenly Ivan looks up to find Spencer staring forlornly through the open gate of the backyard, where Aaron is teaching Ivan to do flips. Spencer must have started to feel better, and his mother had let him come over to play. Ivan will never forget the look on Spencer’s face before the boy turns and runs away.

  That night, Ivan feels terrible. He can’t eat his dinner. He can’t sleep, and tosses and turns until daylight. He keeps seeing the desolate expression on Spencer’s face, and remembering all the games they played together, all the homework that Ivan would never have been able to get right if it weren’t for Spencer’s help. And then he remembers the afternoon of the lidless popcorn, and b
ursts into tears.

  The next day at recess, Ivan pulls Aaron aside. Ivan confesses that he really likes Aaron, and thinks he’s the greatest skateboarder he’s ever seen. But Ivan already has a best friend. His old best friend may not be as good at skateboarding, and maybe they get a little bored with each other some afternoons, but that’s the way it is when you know somebody really well. Ivan says that Aaron will have to find someone else to play with, because he doesn’t want to feel as bad as he did last night ever again.

  But that is not the end of the story. A few weeks later Aaron does find another boy to play with, and in an afternoon they become best friends—the very best. In fact, they, too, are inseparable. And the name of Aaron’s new best friend is Spencer.

  That night, Ivan feels terrible.

  WHEN SHE SHOWED THE story to Lawrence, he was appreciative, but he had a problem with the ending. “Why don’t you just stop there?” he asked, pointing to where Ivan tells Aaron to find another playmate. “Lop off the rest, and you’ve got a solid, simple, unified story about loyalty whose point any kid could get.”