The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve known about that, you know. Your breath…”

  “You know I sneak two fags a week, and I’m oblivious to your having an affair for five years. What does that make me but a moron.”

  “No, it makes me careful. I wasn’t dropping clues, hoping to be found out. I’ve dreaded hurting you. I’ve gone to lengths not to.”

  “I’m supposed to feel flattered? That you cheated well? Because going to lengths not to hurt me is not fucking some other woman at all.” She had claimed that fabled moral high ground, but the air was thin up here, the landscape bleak, the company nonexistent. The moral high ground was a lonely steppe. She might have preferred a grottier lowland, slumming in the mud with everyone else.

  “Well, obviously,” he said, staring at his hands.

  There was no need to try to make him feel any more ashamed; she regretted that lengths remark, as if both she and Lawrence were ganging up on him. “Is that it?” she asked gently. “You were tired of being a choir boy?”

  “I felt—packaged. Boxed up, to other people, to myself. To you, even. I know this whole thing isn’t like me. And I’ve racked my brains over that. But I came to the conclusion that doing something that wasn’t like me was part of what drove me to it. I wanted to do something outrageous.”

  “But what you’ve done—are doing—isn’t outrageous. It’s commonplace.”

  “It hasn’t felt,” he admitted, “commonplace.”

  The assertion came with pictures, and she winced.

  “I guess I wanted something that was mine,” he added.

  All of Russia wasn’t enough? “I was yours.”

  “Something private.”

  “You mean secret.”

  “All right. Secret. Still, I don’t totally understand it,” he puzzled. “I love you.”

  “What about Bethany?” The woman had earned her way out of italics.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you tell her that you love her?”

  “Sometimes,” he said warily. “But only in—certain circumstances.”

  “In those—certain circumstances. With me. Has it been that crap?”

  “No, it’s been fine!”

  “A pretty feeble adjective for fucking the love of your life.”

  “Look, I don’t want to rub your nose in it. And you’re a great-looking woman, in addition to being a fantastic cook and an incredibly talented artist—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I don’t know why, but the longer you go on like that, the more it sounds insulting.”

  “The point is, with, um— Well, it’s different.”

  “It’s hotter.”

  “That’d be one way of putting it.”

  “You have another way of putting it?”

  “Not particularly,” he said glumly.

  Irina was not sure if the impulse behind her next question was to understand, or to hurt herself. Nor was she sure why she might want to hurt herself, or what she had done that should be punished. “Do you kiss her?” she whispered.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “The kind I want an answer to.”

  Flustered, he said, “Well, what do you think?”

  “Because you don’t kiss me.”

  “Oh, I do, too!” he objected.

  “Pecks don’t count. You haven’t really kissed me in years. So you kiss her instead. I think that hurts me more. I might be able to forgive you for fucking her a thousand times. I’m not sure I can forgive you for kissing her once.”

  She might have kept looking the other way, slipping the mobile quietly back into his jacket when she brought it back from the cleaners. Now, presumably, they had to do something. Which seemed wasteful. This was all about sex, yes? In all, it was a small transgression—wasn’t it? It should have been. It really should have been. Alas, the fact that it should have been didn’t mean it was.

  “I wish I could admonish you with what a loser she is,” Irina proceeded leadenly; none of what she was about to say was in her interests. “How she’s feckless, or uneducated, or dumb. How you two have nothing in common. How you’re used to being around people who care about the world and who actually read the newspaper, so with some airheaded bimbo with Nautilus-tightened deltoids you’ll get bored. How this is clearly some harebrained infatuation that won’t last five minutes—when it’s already lasted five years. Because none of that’s so, is it? She’s smart. She speaks six languages. She has a doctorate. Since she’s riding the same terrorism wave as you are, I assume her career is going great guns. You two have everything in common—more, I suppose, than we do. I’ve appreciated when you try to explain your research to me, and you make a credible show of caring what I think. But we can’t really get into it, all that intellectual sparring and meeting of minds. I’m an illustrator. Icing on the cake, you have the hots for her. You’re perfectly suited.”

  Meanwhile, Lawrence had dropped his chin, and shed two discreet tears—one for her, and one for him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had what I wanted more than anything in the world, and I messed it up.”

  She studied him. When he’d returned from that conference in Sarajevo, and she had the night before declined that very other life of which Lawrence had for the last five years been so generously availing himself, she had conjectured that the journey toward true intimacy was a decon-struction—a progressive discovery of the Other as not-you, of how little you understood your partner, an unknowing. Yet however often she may have challenged the kind of constraining generalizations that Lawrence now averred packaged and boxed him—that he was “kind” or “confident” or “regimented”—the one cornerstone of his character that she had never tried to dig up was that Lawrence James Trainer was loyal. In theory, then, they were now closer than they had ever been, because the process of unknowing was complete.

  IT MIGHT HAVE SEEMED odd to outsiders, but they slept together that night. Wearing clothes would have made a weird situation weirder, so they took them off—though somehow the surprise black-satin teddy no longer seemed appropriate. Irina drew Lawrence, Total Stranger, to her breast and stroked his hair. According to script, she should have been seething. Yet she couldn’t find the anger, and she looked for it long enough to conclude that it wasn’t there. She felt sorry for him. A peculiar but at length fortuitous choice. As it turned out, feeling sorry for Lawrence would prove a fleeting privilege, and she’d have all the time in the world to feel sorry for herself.

  When they woke that morning, she wondered if the anger might be lying in wait, and she would rise in a single motion to rail at Lawrence as he cowered in the bedsheets, screeching like a harridan possessed. But the rage wouldn’t come. She didn’t scream about how many lies he had told her, or pry masochistically into the methods of his subterfuge. She padded numbly to make coffee. She felt diminished, frightened, and defeated. More and more the whole sorry business felt obscurely her fault. Since Lawrence thought it was his fault, they shuffled the flat in mutual apology—deferent, solicitous. Lawrence didn’t care for any toast.

  On impulse, she saw him off for work downstairs, all the way to the pavement. They hugged. As she watched him slouch toward Borough High Street, Irina realized that, from the red flag of that mobile phone onwards, she had yet to cry. But once Lawrence reached the light and turned to give her another hangdog wave, she remembered that simple sequence from a few years before, when she’d run after him in the rain in socks, to hand off his trench coat, his ham sandwich—a memory sweet for its very ordinariness, a rare slice of normal life that she’d savored like pie. So when she lifted her hand to wave back, she could only manage to raise it waist-high, the strength required to bring it to her chest having failed her. The fingers waggled weakly, while the features of her face ran like ink in the rain. It wasn’t raining this morning, but it should have been. Because Lawrence never came back.

  IRINA SLIPPED INTO THE train, and miraculously got a seat. It was only six-thirty p.m. and for an eight p.m. engagement she had allowe
d too much time. Though there was always the Northern Line, which had a way of vacuuming the fat from your schedule like liposuction. Voilà, between London Bridge and Monument the train stuttered to a halt, its quiescent passengers no more startled than by the fact that on one more night the sun had set.

  The nature of her errand might be considered rash, although people who have nothing to lose may have lost, along with everything else, the capacity to be rash. True, she could have waited for a proper night’s sleep, but there was no telling when that might next be, and the very irrationality of her urgency helped to drive it.

  The evening before, she had gone through the standard paces because she hadn’t known what else to do with herself. She’d made dinner. The time came and went for Lawrence’s traditional arrival from work. By nine p.m., she returned the chicken breasts, stuffed with ricotta and wild-boar pancetta, to the fridge. She checked the answering machine, in case he’d rung while she was taking out the rubbish. Finally she thought to retrieve her e-mail, and the message from his office address was brief: “I don’t know how to say I’m sorry in a way that makes any difference. You have every right to be mad. I guess I won’t be coming home. Maybe we both need some time to think.” Considering to whose flat he had doubtless repaired, she didn’t imagine that he’d be doing a lot of thinking.

  She sat in her rust-colored armchair. She didn’t drink. She didn’t eat. She didn’t play Shawn Colvin. She sat.

  All night, she hunted feverishly for her fury. For five years Lawrence had been fucking the daylights out of his sassy, know-it-all colleague behind her back, and she did indeed have “every right to be mad.” Anger is protective; it holds the darker emotions at bay. Yet dejection and despair were bound to penetrate any feeble bramble of wrath, like intruders in Doc Martens crushing a narrow skirting of blackberry bushes around an unlocked house.

  On a lone thin wick did a flame of fury flicker, and she stared into it as if mesmerized by one lit candle on a cake.

  Ramsey’s forty-seventh birthday. That Gethsemane over his snooker table. She’d said no, hadn’t she. She’d averted her face, and fled to the loo, where she stared herself down in the mirror. So why hadn’t Lawrence done likewise? Why couldn’t Lawrence have confronted the same fork in the road, seen the harm that lay left, and determinedly chosen the right? And now look. She’d cheated herself for a fool’s rectitude. The electricity she’d felt with Ramsey that night, and revisited in tiny, jaw-juddering jolts at Bournemouth, the Pierre Hotel, had been like jamming two fingers into a live socket. But she’d denied herself. And for what.

  She must have dozed a couple of hours around dawn. She woke in the chair with a start; there seemed no time to lose. Might those two have waited, to give themselves time to think? Besides, Jude was the sort who would want a big production, even the second time around, and that took many months of planning. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Digging out the number, she moved with the jagged haste of Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate. Only after dialing did she realize that he might be playing the Masters in North London this week, and would need his sleep.

  “It’s Irina,” she said, her clarifying “Irina McGovern” a token of the fact that they hardly knew each other. She realized that she risked sounding like a nut, but among the many things she no longer cared about was sounding like a nut. “Have you gotten married?”

  A bleary pause; she had woken him up. “Oi, now that you mention it, I don’t seem to have got round to it.”

  In the rush of relief, she had to sit down. “I’d like to see you.” After fair enough, lemme get me diary, she cut him off. “How about tonight?”

  When he named a venue convenient for himself—Best of India on Roman Road—she was disappointed. Any restaurant that “finally,” as he remarked, had a liquor license was a dump. She had hoped for a reprise of Omen, that she might return to her own fork in the road and turn left. Likewise, her heart fell when he suggested that they meet at the restaurant; she was no longer worthy of retrieval in his Jaguar. “I’d give you a lift,” he added, “but I flogged the motor.” She was consternated. Sold that 1965 classic? Since the XKE was a part of her private landscape, he might have asked—much as when a tree splays on either side of a property line, you get permission from your neighbor before you fell it.

  Well, she wasn’t about to take the Ford Capri, little more than a four-year parking problem, and a gesture in retrospect intended to buy her off. So here she sat on the Northern Line, under the river, in the same navy blue skirt she’d worn to Omen, cursing herself for tossing the white blouse with the tear in the collar into the bin.

  It was February, not summertime, and as she emerged from the Central Line at Mile End the wind whipped, biting. That luscious July in 1997, the sky had been lambent until after ten; now, nearing eight, it had been pitch dark for three hours. That magical birthday—Oxo Tower to the left, Tower Bridge to the right, the dome of St. Paul’s catching the light up ahead—the vista of the Thames out the open window of the Jaguar had spread a picture-postcard reminder of how lucky she was to live in one of the most dramatic cities in the world. Yet the area around the Mile End tube stop was grungy, cluttered with rancid-smelling fried chicken joints, low-lit, and vaguely threatening. Traffic was heavy, the pedestrian signals short; aggressive drivers careered through the crosswalk, inches from her shoes. By two blocks up Grove Road, her gloved hands had grown cadaverously cold.

  The restaurant was drafty, and chintz of old Christmas tinsel still scalloped the cornice. Though she was a few minutes late, Ramsey, usually so punctual, was not yet in evidence. She took a seat, banging her hands together, and ordered a glass of house red, on so little sleep sure to go straight to her head. It had done just that by the time she’d nearly drained the glass, the door tinkled, and Ramsey sidled in at half-past.

  She was immediately struck that he looked off-color, almost yellow, and little remained of his hair. Some men lost it all at once, she supposed—though she was astonished that he’d gained weight. Oh, he wasn’t paunchy, but his face was bloated and blurred. Unless the light was playing tricks with the folds of his shirt, he’d grown those little breasts of the overindulgent. Heavy drinking? Once renowned for the swift, fluid grace of his break-building, presently Ramsey walked with a faint geriatric creak; he was still graceful, but painfully slow. “Sorry I’m late,” he apologized, kissing her cheek; his lips were chapped, his breath disagreeably sweet. “I’d an appointment that set me back.”

  The wine eased cutting to the chase. “You said on the phone that you hadn’t gotten married. Or yet, anyway. Is that still on?”

  “No,” he said. “Jude studied on it hard, like. What she’d have to be up for. I give the bird credit for knowing her limits. And I’d well rather she backed out when she did than get halfway in and then decide she couldn’t stick it.”

  “You make marrying you sound like such a trial.” Irina smiled teasingly. “Is it really that bad?”

  “Oi, make no mistake.” His return tease was minor-key.

  “Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” She dispatched the last few drops of acrid wine. “Actually, I take that back. I’m not sorry at all.” She banged the glass down like a gauntlet, and looked him in the eye.

  The gray-blue irises were overcast, his gaze distant. In his remoteness, Ramsey looked very wise, but in a way that made wisdom seem not altogether pleasant. A wise person, for example, doesn’t believe that he has to pick up any old gauntlet just because somebody flopped it on his table, and he said nothing. Self-consciously, she scanned the meager wine list. He let her take the initiative, and she ordered a merlot.

  “So how’s Anorak Man keeping?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Lawrence left for work yesterday morning, and never came home.”

  “That don’t sound like the bloke!” The energy of the exclamation seemed to cost him, and he sagged.

  “Yes, well. Lawrence seems taken lately with acting out of character.”

  “You worried,
pet? Rung the Met?”

  “There’d be no point to telling Missing Persons. I’ve a pretty good idea where he is.”

  The wine was uncorked with ridiculous flourish for a bottle that probably sold for £3 on the High Street, and Irina ran out of appetite for being coy. “He confessed two nights ago that he’s been having an affair with a colleague for nearly five years. He’s made himself scarce because he’s ashamed of himself. And maybe because he’s more in love with her than he admits. Or in lust, and I guess close up it’s hard to tell the difference.”

  “So sorry, love,” he said, and unlike her sorrow on his account, readily retracted, he did sound truly, deeply sorry. “Must be powerful hard on you.”

  It was hard on her. Though she had gone about arranging this meeting with fierce, hysterical determination, the image of Lawrence on the corner of Borough High Street waving good-bye, perhaps for the last time, was starting to intrude torturously on this interlude. Beneath the bloat, Irina could still discern the fierce lines and narrow contours of the face she’d once been dying to kiss. Yet his rumpled cotton shirt was misbuttoned, and he’d neglected a belt. Rather than arrive in that entrancing black leather jacket, he had bundled in wearing, of all things, a faded blue anorak. Unable to quite plug into the high voltage that had thrummed between them at Omen, she suffered from an awkward, groping sensation, as if clattering the thick brass bars of a British three-prong blindly against a socket cover in the dark.

  Eating didn’t much appeal, but she was grateful for the ritual of ordering a meal. She reflexively ordered a vindaloo, he a chicken tikka; not at her most diplomatic, she muttered something about the dish not really being Indian at all but a British invention, and awfully bland.

  “Only grub here I can stick. I don’t fancy self-torture.”

  “You don’t like chilies?” she said with amazement, and tossed off without thinking, “As a couple, you and I would be hopelessly incompatible.”

  “You reckon?” he said, with a returning lightness that got her hopes up.