The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “I have never—” Her breath caught. “I have never—” She tried again. “I have never been so ashamed.”

  19

  IT WAS AT IRINA’S urging that she and Lawrence watched the 2001 championship final between Ramsey and Ronnie O’Sullivan, for her partner’s romance with snooker seemed permanently to have waned. Granted, they’d not seen Ramsey for three and a half years, and he probably qualified as no more than someone they used to know. As they watched the first evening session, she wondered if Ramsey had found another woman yet, and couldn’t shake the hope, both absurd and unkind, that he hadn’t. Ramsey had become a funny mental dependency, as if another life were running alongside this one, perhaps no better or worse but certainly different, and she liked to reach out and touch it from time to time, like dipping her hand into the river from a canoe.

  Ramsey was, as ever, impeccably turned out—closely shaven, not a hair out of place, his gear pressed, his pert dickie-bow in perfect parallel with the floor. The loutish-featured O’Sullivan may have been touted as a Reformed Character, but even in biddably traditional attire couldn’t help but look in comparison like a slob. Ramsey’s motions at the table were sure, smooth, and steady, and while they both played fast, Ramsey seemed brisk, O’Sullivan impatient. Ramsey sank superb pots, but never at the sacrifice of position, whereas Ronnie couldn’t resist spectacular shots designed to impress that netted him a single point. Though O’Sullivan was never overtly rude, the older player’s exquisite deportment—Ramsey always tapped the rail appreciatively whenever his opponent racked up a fine clearance—seemed to drive the younger man to a contrasting churlishness. In his chair, the Rocket slouched, allowing his expression to wash with boredom or annoyance. He spent one of Ramsey’s more stylish clearances with a towel draped over his face—presumably to retain concentration, but more likely to keep from having to watch. Though Clive Everton observed that Ramsey’s ranking had progressively deteriorated over the last three years, Irina had a gut sense that their old friend had finally arrived at his day in the sun.

  “I think he’s going to win,” Irina predicted at the end of the first night, with Ramsey up ten frames to six. For Irina, the commercial success of Ivan and the Terribles had issued in a sumptuous era of well-wishing and optimism on others’ accounts.

  “No way,” said Lawrence, whose brief newscast celebrity around the Good Friday Agreement had effected no such transformation. “The poor bastard’s cursed. And how old is the guy now? Has to be past fifty. It’s over.”

  The bookies agreed with Lawrence, and before the final had put the odds of Ramsey’s victory at eight to one. Yet Ramsey held his lead the next afternoon, and went into the fourth session fourteen frames to ten.

  She cajoled Lawrence into watching the last session together the following night. O’Sullivan wasn’t being a baby for once, and as Everton said “dug down deep”; before the interval, he narrowed Ramsey’s advantage to fifteen-thirteen. Not conventionally engaged by sport of any description, Irina was now so excited that she couldn’t sit still, bouncing up from her armchair to pace the carpet with leonine restiveness. Once the score notched to sixteen-fifteen, and then drew even at sixteen apiece, she became so agitated that the game was almost too painful to watch.

  “What’s with you?” asked Lawrence from his sofa. “It’s only a snooker match.”

  “Time was you’d never have said only a snooker match, milyi. Besides, this is electrifying as personal drama. Ramsey must have been playing this game for over thirty years. It’s his life’s dream to win this tournament. Now he’s within two frames… One frame! It’s seventeen-sixteen! Can you believe this?”

  Irina was literally jumping up and down, and the television audience was doing the same. Ramsey’s boosters may have reduced in number over the years, but every snooker fan knew the story of Ramsey the Runner-Up. Like Lawrence, most accepted the myth that he could never win this title, that he was cursed. The prospect of Swish breaking the spell, like Sleeping Beauty discovering the alarm clock, produced a groundswell of exhilaration even among the members of the audience wearing “Rother-ham for the Rocket!” T-shirts.

  Along with the crowd, Irina groaned and covered her face with her hands when Ramsey missed an easy red, and let O’Sullivan in. This was exactly the kind of sudden, inexplicable lapse under pressure that had lost him six finals before. As O’Sullivan cleaned up to level the match again, Lawrence chided, “I’m telling you, Ramsey can’t do it. Something in him must not want to. His whole identity is wrapped around being this not-quite. If he ever took the championship, he’d wake up the next morning having no idea who he was. Just you watch. He’ll botch it.”

  “Wanna bet?” said Irina. “A thousand dollars.”

  “Get out.”

  “One large.” That ample advance on Ivan and the Terribles, with another six-figure contract in the pipeline, was teaching her the heady joys of profligacy.

  “Okay!” said Lawrence. “But you’ll be sorry.”

  Irina was already not sorry. Even if Ramsey did bollix the deciding frame, marshaling such fierce belief in their old friend felt splendid, and seemed to improve his karmic odds.

  “Now, that is unfortunate!” intoned Clive Everton. O’Sullivan was feeling the pressure himself, and his heavy-handed break-off had left a red available to the corner pocket. He sulked back to his chair, where it was best he got comfortable, for Ramsey not only potted that red, but proceeded to pick its little friends off the pack as if denuding a cluster of grapes on a summer afternoon.

  For the spectator, there are two kinds of sportsmen: those you trust, and those you don’t. It is likely the divide correlates with whether the sportsman trusts himself, but in any event watching a player in whom you have imperfect faith fosters anxiety. Watching the kind who has it, whatever it is, and knows he has it, is relaxing. Indeed, certain characters so consistently engender an unswerving confidence in their audience that all the tension leaves the game, and they attain a reputation as dull. Given his history, Irina would have classified Ramsey Acton, in this situation, as the kind of player who made you nervous.

  Yet with $1,000 riding on his performance, as the break built to forty, forty-one, forty-eight, Irina resumed a comfortable loll in her armchair. As he approached the magic number at which O’Sullivan would need snookers, her apprehension should have been building unbearably; yet at sixty-four, sixty-five, and seventy-two Irina felt only more languidly at her ease. At seventy-three, Ramsey needed one more color to have victory assured, and he potted it. Just like that. Just as she knew he would. It was the easiest grand she’d ever trousered.

  The crowd clapped wildly. Irina smiled serenely at Lawrence. The referee hushed the audience. Its result may have been conclusive, but the frame wasn’t over.

  “I say,” said Clive Everton. “Ramsey Acton may have a chance at a 147!”

  Snooker’s Holy Grail, unusual at the practice table and supremely rare under tournament conditions, a 147, or maximum, is the highest score it is possible to rack up on a single break. Indeed, Ramsey had played off the black for the entire visit so far, and meanwhile the remaining reds were spread like a whore’s legs. Thus Ramsey Acton purled around the table with the luxuriousness of having already won, and once he exceeded 100 the audience went bananas. O’Sullivan’s fans had forsaken their idol wholesale; the largely working-class crowd had abandoned the sport’s hushed, courtly conceit and reverted to type. The referee seemed to have resigned himself that hounding this rough-and-tumble rabble into silence would be like trying to shove a pit bull into a dress. Oh, a 147 was just icing on the cake; it wasn’t necessary. But then, neither was snooker.

  When the last black went in to complete the maximum, the crowd erupted, and the cheers and catcalls lasted two or three minutes. The news had been dominated for months by awful public barbecues to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, whole herds crisping on hillsides while stalwart Yorkshire farmers wept like babies and rural suicides mounted; how rarely these days
did anything lovely air on television.

  “I wonder if it isn’t a little bit of a letdown,” Irina mused. “Getting just what you’ve always wanted.”

  “Losing would be more of a letdown,” said Lawrence. “Ask me. I just lost a thousand bucks.”

  “Donate it to the charity of your choice. There must be some fund for retired snooker players down on their luck…. Look at him! It’s so touching. He’s not blubbing, and he’s doing a good job of holding them back—but I swear he has tears in his eyes.”

  Academically, she recognized how important it would be for Ramsey to have a woman with whom to share the crowning achievement of his career. But when in the hubbub following the trophy presentation no lithe, glowing little number threw her arms around that lean race-horse neck, Irina was privately pleased.

  THE ATTAINMENT OF ANY life’s dream was doubtless seeded with an insidious emptiness, a now-what? sensation sufficiently unpleasant as to induce a retarded nostalgia for the days when you were still tantalized by what you thought you wanted. Yet Ramsey surely preferred contending with the fact that the silver urn he clutched that night at the Crucible was just a cold, useless hunk of metal to the alternative whereby the useless hunk of metal belonged to someone else. In kind, even if in the moment the accolade might feel no more rewarding than the “moon ring” at the bottom of Cap’n Crunch, Irina herself had always yearned to win a prize. The longing felt childish. It was childish. In fact, it was the very grade-school nature of the yen—like Spacer’s pining to win a blue ribbon in his sack race—that made it so tenacious.

  So when the call came in from her editor at Transworld an afternoon in latter May informing her that Ivan and the Terribles had been short-listed for the Lewis Carroll Medal, Irina acted like a ten-year-old. She twirled around her studio. She cried, “Oh, rah, rah, rah!” and did not care if the neighbors could hear. But none of this gallivanting was doing it for her; the experience still wasn’t quite happening. The news would only arrive in a profound sense once she delivered it to Lawrence.

  The telephone seemed wasteful. She grabbed her jacket, and flew out the door. On the way to Blue Sky, her stride grew so long and light that for short distances she broke into a run. In the lobby of Churchill its connotations cold anHouse, she begged the receptionist not to forewarn her “husband” of her presence—everyone here thought they were married—because she wanted to surprise him.

  She surprised him. The door to his office was closed, but no de facto wife should have to knock.

  Something wasn’t quite right. Surely those two ought to have been sitting on either side of his desk, or contemplating his computer screen. Even if they were conferring together on the couch, shouldn’t there be papers? Although it wasn’t that the duo was too cozy; by the time she got the heavy door open, they were sitting bizarrely far apart.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Lawrence in a strangled voice.

  “Funny,” said Irina lightly. “I was about to ask the same thing about Bethany.”

  “Oh, just consulting about work stuff,” said Bethany brightly, standing and smoothing her tiny skirt. “It would bore you. Ta, Yasha!” With a blazing smile at Irina, the little tart swished out the door.

  Irina had arrived with wonderful news. In willing that its delivery would be wonderful, she struck out the last sixty seconds in her head with a dark line of Magic Marker, like one of those redacted manuscripts of declassified documents issued to satisfy Freedom of Information requests. She even deleted the fact that Bethany had a special name for Lawrence—a Russian diminutive for a middle name with which Bethany had no reason to be acquainted. Bethany and Lawrence were colleagues. These people were surely in and out of each other’s offices all the time.

  Given the cheerful nature of her errand, she even managed to put out of mind her running grudge over the fact that the illustration from Seeing Red that she’d framed in glass for Lawrence’s Christmas present two and a half years ago was still propped against the wall—though she had lugged it here herself. Blue Sky was fussy about not putting holes in the plaster, and Lawrence had never gotten round to asking the housekeeping staff to run a wire from the cornice.

  So she told him. He hugged her, and proposed a fabulously expensive dinner to celebrate that very night. He declared his utter confidence that she would win. Only in his arms did the honor come home.

  ALTHOUGH WHILE DRESSING FOR the reception in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue Irina was understandably nervous, the scale of her anxiety seemed disproportionate. Try as she might to protect herself from getting her hopes up, she knew in her gut that Ivan and the Terribles would clinch this prize. So the source of her fretfulness while she wrestled with her unruly hair had little to do with girding for defeat.

  By unhappy coincidence, Jude Hartford was also short-listed for the Lewis Carroll. Ever since Irina had spotted her name in the Telegraph article about the award she’d been trying to fashion an attitude with which to confront the woman. Curiously, Irina couldn’t cite a single romantic breakup over which she still harbored strong feelings of any kind—be they good-riddance or good wishes. By contrast, the rare friendship that had blown up in her face left a jagged edge that for years later she could still run her tongue over like a broken tooth. Friendships aren’t supposed to take on the apocalyptic structure of romance; like old soldiers, they might fade away, but never die. Breakups like the one Irina went through with Jude, replete with the harsh words and total renunciations of a lovers’ quarrel, defied the natural order. Mortal clashes between friends have about them a savage gratuitousness; romantic partings, in retrospect, a soothing quality of the inevitable. Thus Irina’s umbrage even after five years still felt raw.

  “Hey, that is one hot dress,” said Lawrence.

  Irina bit her lip. “You don’t think it’s too short?”

  “Hell, no. You’ve got a whole two inches before the hem hits crotch.”

  “It’s more low-cut than I realized in the store. Maybe I should wear that little black jacket.”

  “Don’t. You look sexy.”

  Irina was surprised; he’d usually say cute. “I thought it makes you uneasy when I look sexy.”

  “That’s a load of horseshit. Where’d you get that idea?”

  “You don’t like it when I dress up.”

  “I don’t like it when I have to dress up.”

  “Speaking of which…” She gave the familiar dark Dockers and threadbare button-down with no tie a disparaging once-over. He was such a handsome man if he just stood up straight and made an effort! “I hate to break it to you, but I think most of the men will be wearing tuxes.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure to feel sorry for them, then. Are you edgy about seeing Jude?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “I haven’t a clue what to say to her.”

  “Tell her to go fuck herself. Tell her that you’re more talented than she is, and smarter than she is, and that you’re incredibly relieved not to have to listen to her tired liberal bromides at dinner anymore. Tell her that you’re going to win tonight, and that The Love Diet is the most pathetic piece of PC crap you’ve ever seen. Just because she can’t keep her hands off the Twinkies doesn’t mean that every pork-wad kid in the country should lu-u-v themselves, and that it’s okay to be overweight.”

  “Actually, the book is practically Atkins for eight-year-olds. But thanks for your diplomatic advice.” Lawrence had a way of siding with Irina in such extremity that he drove her to her own adversary’s defense.

  Indeed, Lawrence hadn’t read the competition carefully. Jude’s storybook was about a chunky little girl who grows so smitten by a boy at school that she cannot eat. Never a worthy object for her affections, the little boy is unremittingly chilly and difficult. Yet meantime the protagonist slims down so in her lovelorn state that every other boy in her class is stuck on her—happy ending.

  TRAILING APPREHENSIVELY BEHIND LAWRENCE, Irina entered the events room to mark Jude’s presence at the far end by the dri
nks table—in a form-fitting evening dress, looking amazingly svelte. But it wasn’t sighting Jude that hit her midsection like a right hook.

  The sensation recalled Irina’s real-life version of Jude’s little storybook. In junior high school before her braces came off, she would often walk into the cafeteria and spot the handsome student-council president, on whom she’d had a torturous crush for three years straight. She’d sit nearby but never at the same table, straining to overhear his conversation while feeling so self-conscious of her own that she could barely ask her girlfriend what she thought of the tuna-melt. In those days, it was rational to be anxious—of drawing attention to herself; of not drawing attention to herself. Yet at forty-six, she could not put her finger on why this unexpected apparition in the Pierre Hotel would likewise stab her stomach to the point of nausea. In any event, that tall, tuxedoed gentleman at Jude Hartford’s side was none other than Ramsey Acton.

  As she and Lawrence advanced, neither of their old friends seemed to notice them, so intently were they engaged with each other in hushed, urgent-sounding tones. Ramsey’s hand on Jude’s arm confirmed that they’d gotten back together. Irina felt a curious little sag.

  Jude looked up with a distracted, harried expression. “Oh, hi there!” Her delivery was aerated as ever, but her eyes were vacant. They did the whole cheek-kissing thing; pecking Ramsey, Irina lingered to inhale.

  “Just like old times!” Irina said with nervous gaiety. “Our old foursome is back.”

  “Yes, it’s quite a coincidence,” said Jude aimlessly.

  “Well, maybe it isn’t,” said Irina, straining to be generous. “Maybe it’s just talent—both being talented… You know, cream rising to the top.” She hated herself for acting as if all that acrimony had never happened. But the twist of Jude’s face implied that she truly couldn’t recall the ugliness of their last encounter, being much more absorbed by some misery in the present.