The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “Call me prejudiced,” said Lawrence, “but I think Ivan and the Terribles is fantastic.” He gripped Irina’s waist.

  In turn, Ramsey slid an arm around Jude’s shoulder, which he massaged with his left hand as if kneading a dry, resistant mass of pasta dough. Jude had never seemed very sensual—she was too tense, too highly strung—and didn’t appear to be enjoying the attentions. He had beautiful hands. Irina thought, What a waste.

  “So, you two”—she nodded at the couple—“are giving it another go?”

  Jude managed an anemic smile. “Authors are prone to sequels.”

  “Not a promising analogy, pet,” Ramsey chided. “Your average sequel is never near as good as the original.”

  “To be honest,” Jude said with that faintly hysterical laugh, rearranging her stance in such a way as to shuck Ramsey’s arm, “having a hard time topping your own success is generally only a problem when you had a success to begin with!”

  Irina was not sure what they had walked in on, and tried to turn to a neutral subject. “I’ve missed our birthday dinners,” she told Ramsey.

  “I have as well,” he said with feeling. “And didn’t you miss a corker last summer.”

  “I pulled out all the stops for Ramsey’s fiftieth,” said Jude. “Hired a room in the Savoy. Invited the whole snooker crowd, and not a few of the haut monde. To be quite honest, it was terribly dear! But everyone— everyone else—said it was the occasion of the year.”

  “I don’t fancy a lot of fuss,” Ramsey muttered.

  “Yes, sweetie,” said Jude with a pressed-lip smile. “Several thousand quid later, I got that message loud and clear.”

  “Hey, Ramsey!” said Lawrence, clapping the snooker player’s shoulder. “Congratulations on winning the championship!”

  “Cheers, mate,” said Ramsey lightly.

  “Lawrence and I watched the final on the BBC,” said Irina, omitting the fact that Lawrence had lobbied for CSI instead. “It was wonderful. And finishing with a 147!”

  “Don’t happen every day,” he conceded. “Shame our friend Jude here had to wash her hair.”

  “I had previous commitments!” said Jude with exasperation.

  “You didn’t go?” asked Irina in astonishment.

  “I’d have been there if I could have been. Though to be honest, snooker’s never been my cup of tea.”

  “Oh, I’ve only gotten more interested!” said Irina passionately.

  “It’s a bit different when you’ve not much choice.”

  Now a bona fide fan, Irina was mystified how Jude could hook up with a snooker pro and be so wearied by the sport. If she were with Ramsey Acton, she’d go to every match! But Irina had resolved to be gracious. “By the way, Jude—congratulations yourself!”

  “Sorry?” Jude seemed to have forgotten why she was here.

  “For being short-listed for the Lewis Carroll, of course.”

  “Oh, that!” Jude said absently. “Well, mine can’t possibly win.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just a presentiment.” Jude looked worn out. Round patches of rouge stood out like tiddlywinks; underneath her cheeks were surely drawn. “Yours, though. It has a proper chance. The illustrations are very clever.”

  Clever was a mile from good, its connotations cold and empty, and the conflict from five years ago came back in a rush.

  “I see you’ve moved on to computer graphics,” Jude added.

  “That’s right,” said Irina coolly. “The book’s sold surprisingly well.”

  “Yes,” said Jude with returning coolness. “It would.”

  “I think we all need a drink,” said Irina.

  As they filtered toward the wine, she fell into step with Ramsey, and drew him aside. “After all you told me at Omen,” she said quietly, “I’m surprised you’re back with Jude.”

  “At my age, I’m too knackered to make a new mistake. It’s easier to make the same one.”

  “But are things all right between you two?” Just as in Bournemouth four years before, they fell into a ready collusion. “She seems—jumpy.”

  “You mean, she’s acting like a right cow. This spot of good fortune—well, success don’t always have an improving effect on people.”

  “You should know. You must feel so satisfied. Finally winning that title.”

  “Remember what else I told you that night?” He knocked back his wine in a gulp. “I’m never satisfied. Get one thing you want, and it clears the way to seeing what else you’re missing.”

  She met his eyes. “And what would that be?”

  He looked back, but didn’t answer. “You know, something tells me you’re going to win this medal tonight.”

  He really shouldn’t have said such a thing to Jude’s competition. “I bet you’ve told the same thing to every girl on the short-list, you cad!”

  He didn’t smile. “I ain’t no womanizer. You should know better.”

  Their locked gazes had grown uncomfortable, but if she broke eye contact now she’d seem a coward. “Have you read Ivan?”

  “I read it.”

  “Did you understand it?”

  “I understood it.” As if to demonstrate as much, he didn’t deliver his next sentence as a non sequitur. “Irina, me and Jude’s planning to get remarried.”

  Irina glanced at her toes before looking up again. “I guess that’s very good news.” She shouldn’t have appended the I guess, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Leastways, maybe I’ll get the house in Spain back,” he said, but the effort at leavening failed. “And you’re married anyway, more or less. What else is a bloke to do? I reckon you’re greedy, pet. Like to have your cake, and make eyes at it as well.”

  It was the closest either had come to acknowledging that temptation on his forty-seventh birthday, and the moment was so ungainly that Irina was grateful for the intrusion behind her. “Irina Galina!” Only one person in the world pronounced that double-barrel without irony, and Irina turned to hug her mother with much fanfare.

  “Pozdravlyayu tebya!” Though Raisa congratulated her daughter, her plunging crimson gown indicated a little confusion as to which member of the family was the star of the hour. “A eto shtoza krasavets?”

  “The handsome man is Ramsey Acton, an old friend of mine. You remember, Lawrence and I mentioned him a while ago. The snooker player.”

  Irina was pulled away to meet the judges and press, and left her mother pulling the whole Passionate Russian Number on Ramsey, her hands gesticulating so broadly that she might easily have upended a passing platter of shrimp toast. Putting on a great show of fascination with snooker, Raisa laid on the Slavic accent with a trowel. As a ghastly alternative future flashed before her eyes, Irina was suddenly grateful that Ramsey was engaged.

  Thereafter, Irina found herself adjacent to an aristocratic man whose aura of being at sea stirred her compassion. She asked what had brought him here.

  “I happened to be in New York for a board meeting, and Jude Hartford asked me to attend,” he said in a plummy British accent. “But the lady’s barely said two words to me. And that snooker chap she’s with—bloody rude!”

  “Ramsey, rude?” said Irina incredulously. “You must have misunderstood.”

  “I fear I understood all too well, madam. Good-night, my dear. And good luck.”

  A nice man, but his story didn’t add up; Ramsey was the most polite, considerate man on earth. To wit, he caught Irina’s ear again. “I met your sister,” he said. “Bird rabbited on—”

  “Now, how can a bird rabbit?”

  “You’re a pedant, you are,” he said affectionately. “Bird banged on—that better?” (One grew inured to glottal stops in London, but back in the States his that be-ah? was charming.) “About how she was ‘only a housewife and mum,’ different to her sister who’s all famous and such. Never heard a bird so humble on the one hand, and so hacked off as well. Oi, and out of nowhere your woman starts waffling about how you was never cut out to be a mu
m yourself. How all you care about is your work, and larking about foreign countries, and if you was to have a sprog you’d leave it hanging upside down with marbles in its nose while you had to go and paint another daisy. Quite a sodding earful, that.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you figure? That you was warm, and decent, and smart, and I reckoned you’d make a blinding mum. That got her to shut it.”

  Irina laughed, and said without thinking, “I adore you!” as they were all called into dinner.

  AT THE LARGE ROUND table at the front, Irina and Lawrence were seated together, but Ramsey and Jude’s place cards were on the far opposite side. Irina had no idea how Lawrence did it; normal people would start the conversational ball rolling with something anodyne like, “I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of mayonnaise!” Yet in no time he had involved most of the table in a heated discussion of the new Bush administration. Ramsey wasn’t fussed about politics, period, so it didn’t strike her as peculiar that his bearing was stony. But she did find it noteworthy that Jude Hartford, Guardian subscriber and Old Labour zealot, said nothing.

  For hotel fare, the roast beef was impressively rare, and delicious. So it was a shame that Ramsey must have been feeling unwell; he wasn’t touching his dinner.

  While the opposite couple’s refusal to engage with the rest of the table made them seem standoffish, Ramsey had an excuse. He was a snooker player at a literary gathering, a fish out of water, and naturally a little shy. Jude was in her element, and should have been acting as interlocutor. What a difficult woman! Poor Ramsey. Irina hoped he knew what he was doing, patching things up with Jude.

  After the waiters cleared the table and the foundation director introduced each entrant with slides, Jude began whispering in Ramsey’s ear. Oh, for pity’s sake! The woman sits out the entire dinner not saying word one, and finally starts talking at the very point it’s time to shut up. Presumably Ramsey hadn’t any choice but to respond, though he’d surely be abashed about conversing during the director’s speech. If this were a snooker match, a referee would have ejected Jude from the hall.

  Once the slides from Ivan and the Terribles flashed on screen, Irina grew irate. She’d been looking forward to this occasion for months, and Jude’s carry-on was distracting. As the red-framed Etch A Sketch compositions were projected, Irina and Lawrence looked at each other and shook their heads. It was astounding that Jude would choose this of all junctures to pick a fight. Ramsey must have been mortified! He whispered in return, probably imploring her to please take up her grievance another time—rina met her old although any admonishments along these lines were unavailing. More astonishing still, when Jude’s illustrator’s drawings for The Love Diet followed, she didn’t even look at the screen, much less bother to listen to an admiring précis of her own book.

  The director requested the envelope. Lawrence clasped Irina’s hand, squeezing with the tight, moist grip of a child’s at the dentist. So compelling was the anxiety in his face—that carved, haunted, beautiful face—that Irina spent what they both prayed would be her moment of triumph looking not up at the podium but in Lawrence’s eyes.

  So convinced had she been of prevailing in this contest that her ears played tricks on her, and at first she could have sworn that she heard her own name distorted with a crackle of static through the PA. But the identity of the victor was written unmistakably across Lawrence’s face, which suddenly drained of blood and collapsed in a heap like a wet towel.

  It was the oddest thing. Though she had been foolish to get her hopes up, and thereby set herself up for a fall, Irina felt fine. Her smile at Lawrence was beatific. Like Jesus taking on the sins of the world, Lawrence seemed to have assumed the full weight of her disappointment. Her most immediate concern was for his own consolation, and she kissed his hand quickly before letting go, that they might both applaud the winner. Winner? Whatever the papers might say tomorrow, Irina McGovern had won this evening. For as she rose from her chair to join the standing ovation, she could not imagine any prize greater than the one she had won thirteen years earlier on West 104th Street.

  Jude had struggled to her feet, and was clapping, feebly, along with everyone else. Surely she understood that you weren’t supposed to applaud yourself? She looked confused, and at length did stop patting her hands together like limp flippers, but only to plop to her chair. Mouthing Congratulations! and Go on!, Irina met her old friend’s eyes, and was surprised to find them swollen and red. It was queer, feeling sorry for the only person at this table who had just pocketed $50,000 and the proceeds from selling perhaps one hundred thousand extra copies of her last book.

  Prodded by the director, Jude finally reported for duty as if skulking to the principal’s office. Her acceptance speech bordered on incompetent. While she did remember to thank Ramsey, to whom she wasn’t even married anymore, and with a shit-eating profuseness at that, she forgot to commend her illustrator or to thank the judges. She had a dazed, unfocused quality, as if surprised to find herself at an award ceremony when she had thought she was headed for the launderette. Usually so flamboyant and excitable, she mumbled sheepishly to the podium, as if she wished that this event were already over and that everyone would go away. If this was to pass for one of the best days of Jude’s life, Irina would hate to see the lousy ones.

  When the formal folderol was dispatched, Lawrence gave Irina a hug. “I’m really sorry,” he mumbled in her ear. “Your book was miles better, and it should have won.”

  On drawing apart, Irina, unlike the victor, was dry-eyed and cheerful. “Thank you. I know you think so, and that’s medal enough for me.”

  He studied her, disconcerted. “You really don’t seem that upset.”

  “I’m not. It was still exciting to be nominated, and I love you.” What a rare business: once in a blue moon to get your priorities straight.

  “Oh, you poor dear!” cried Tatyana, squeezing Irina so tightly that she couldn’t breathe. “You must feel simply wretched!”

  “I sure judges already regret their choice,” said Raisa regally. “That speech your friend give—ochen plokho. You win, you do better.”

  One of the judges approached her in the throng. The earnest middle-aged woman’s tender, concerned manner recalled Mrs. Bennington, her tenth-grade art teacher. “The foundation doesn’t award silver medals,” she said with a hand on Irina’s arm. “But you should know, dear, that you were the runner-up. The voting was very close.”

  “I appreciate that. But I’m afraid maybe I should have taken my partner’s advice.” Irina glanced up at him with a smile. “Lawrence thought strongly that I should have kept the ending simpler. Just stick-by-old-friends, without the extra twist. I was awfully bloody-minded about it. But I’m inexperienced as an author; I’m really just an illustrator.”

  “No, no!” said the judge. “I thought your ending was wonderfully enigmatic, and very true. Our problem was with the illustrations, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh! The Etch A Sketch thing…?”

  “The concept was delightful. And your technical execution was accomplished. But we weren’t happy with the computer-generated images. They were a little clinical—like the difference between an LP and a CD. If you had reproduced drawings on a real Etch A Sketch, dear, it’s possible that you’d have won.”

  “It’s all my fault,” said Lawrence morosely when the woman was gone. “I was the one who pushed you to try the computer.”

  “Don’t be silly. It should have, but using a real Etch A Sketch never occurred to me. Hilarious, really. I was a genius at Etch A Sketch when I was eight years old.”

  They stood in the queue to congratulate Jude, who still looked less as if she’d just won a prestigious award than as if she’d just drawn the Old Maid in a game of cards. Upstairs in their room, they had Consolation Sex, which, if Irina was still facing the wall, wasn’t half bad, and she even managed to persuade Lawrence to keep the light on. For one of the evening’s losers,
she was absurdly content, and fell vertiginously to sleep as if plunging from a tall building to the pavement.

  WHILE LAWRENCE SHIFTED THEIR bags the next day to the cheaper Upper West Side hotel provided by his upcoming conference on “global civil society,” Irina met Tatyana at a Broadway Starbucks.

  “You look pretty jovial,” said Tatyana after another sympathetic bear-hug. “Considering that you lost.”

  “Well, as they say, winning isn’t everything!” Irina said brightly.

  While Tatyana fetched their coffees, Irina suffered from a funny pining to talk to Lawrence, though they’d only parted an hour before. This yearning for his company in the middle of the day used to be a constant plague when he went off for work, and she missed it. These last few years, being separated had grown too easy. Her flush of gratitude last night had revived the sharper feelings of an earlier era, when the sound of his key in their front-door lock made her heart leap.

  “Got a little gossip,” she said when Tatyana returned. “Which you might share with Mama, to warn her off. That tall, thin chap she took such a shine to last night? He’s getting married.”

  “Ooh, she’ll be very put out!” Tatyana laughed. “She’s a dreadful flirt of course, with any man. But I haven’t seen her that entranced for ages. On the train home, I heard all about how elegant he was, how graceful, how she loved his accent. If you want to know the truth—maybe he did British accents back in the day—I think something about that guy reminded her of Papa. And she couldn’t stop going on about—what was it—snookers … ?”

  “Snooker. But you tell her he’s taken,” said Irina flatly. Honestly, the prospect of Raisa courting Ramsey Acton—much less the other way around—made her want to hurl.

  After Tatyana brought her sister up to speed with news of the family, she rounded on last night’s ceremony. “You must be so disappointed. Coming all the way to New York, only to have to applaud for someone else. And she’s a friend of yours, right? Or was? I wonder if that doesn’t make it worse.”