The Post-Birthday World

“Sure, why not?”

As she negotiated the steps from their nook in high heels, each stair took such acute concentration that putting one foot before the other was like reciting a little poem. Again, that hand hovered at the small of her back, not touching.

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it—the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.

They strode the pavement a few millimetres closer than was quite the form. Fault, maybe nothing that evening had had anything to do with fault, but as for that short stroll down Charing Cross, she would feel sure in recollection that she was the one who’d walked fractionally too close to him.

Yet by the time the attendant retrieved the Jaguar, Irina was flustered. The easy flow of conversation in Omen had gagged to a dribble, their former awkwardness with each other restored in force. This was nuts. She’d had too much to drink (that was four large sakes). She couldn’t even remember what it felt like to get stoned, which precluded wanting to. She’d left the rhubarb-creams cooling on the counter, and needed to get the pies in the fridge. She was tired—or ought to be. Lawrence might ring; with no answer at two, he’d imagine something terrible had happened. Yet last-minute extrication would seem cowardly, and conclude Ramsey’s birthday on a note of rejection. Well, she could tell Lawrence if he rang that they’d hit one of those ludicrous traffic jams you found in London at the most improbable hours. Sometimes when you make a mistake, you just have to go with it.

The mood in the car was sombre. Rather than jaunting off to party, Irina might have been one of those rigid British kids of yore being dragged off to sit the eleven-plus, which could determine whether she ended up conducting heart-bypass surgery or scrubbing public toilets.

Most of Ramsey’s colleagues were raised in down-and-dirty enclaves like East Belfast, or the rougher bits of Glasgow. When snooker players from dodgy parts began to pull in winnings, the first thing they did was move out. But Ramsey was raised in Clapham, then properly rough-and-ready, but now a fatuous, self-congratulatory area full of pokey but surprisingly expensive terraced housing that would merit the label “twee.” Perhaps to maintain his proletarian street cred, once Ramsey had taken a few titles, the first thing he did was move to the working-class heartland of the Cockney East End.

Of course, you could hardly call it suffering. He owned a whole Victorian house on Victoria Park Road, the southern boundary of Hackney. Irina had been to the house a handful of times when collaborating with Jude, and it was here they had come to the verbal blows that severed the friendship. High on a kind of bloodlust, Jude had impugned a great deal more than Irina’s illustrations, castigating her for being such a “doormat” with Lawrence and deriding an enviable domestic contentment as “sleepwalking.” All because Irina had dared to suggest that Jude’s latest narrative, Big Mouth, was a little obvious (of her story—about a dog that barks all the time and no one can abide, until while he’s barking he inhales a tossed ball and can’t bark anymore, and then the whole family adores him—Irina had remarked, “Even kids will be able to tell that you’re just trying to get them to shut up”), not to mention illogical (“But Jude,” she had submitted tentatively, “if you inhale a ball you don’t stop talking, do you? You choke to death”). Jude had accused Irina of being “passive-aggressive,” a term widely misappropriated of late to mean “aggressive,” and cited her literalism about the ball as typical of the stodgy, hidebound universe that Irina had come to inhabit. As the Jaguar surged into the drive, the memory smarted.

Irina didn’t play the princess, and opened her own car door. Yet following Ramsey up the shadowy steps of his stoop still took on the sinister portent of a fairy tale, as if she were entering Oz or the castle of Gormenghast, where different laws applied, nothing was as it appeared, and the walls of libraries would fold back to reveal secret dungeons. She could hear the narrative of the last two minutes in that waltzing, emphatic cadence with which people compulsively read to children: Irina climbed the big steps to the tall man’s dark manor. The giant door creaked open and then closed behind her with a boom and a click.

Too late, the little girl remembered that her mother had warned her never, ever to get into a strange man’s car! True, Irina’s mother had never warned her not to go into a strange man’s house, especially when not safeguarded by her stalwart friend Lawrence. But that was because her mother had never imagined that her daughter was a moron.

The interior was still appointed with Oriental carpets and dark antiques, but some of the more valuable-looking pieces that Irina remembered were missing. For women, marriages foreclosed often resulted in an accumulation of booty; for men, these failed projects of implausible optimism were more likely to manifest themselves in material lack. It was hard to resist the metaphorical impression that women got to keep the past itself, whereas men were simply robbed of it. Here, a darker rectangle on the rug marked where the leather sofa once rested, and four deep depressions in the carpet evidenced the departure of a thick pink marble sideboard that Irina had once admired. Ghostly white squares on the cream-coloured walls hovered as the ultimate in abstract expressionism, whereas the original artwork that had once adorned the ground floor had been far more conservative. Yet Ramsey could afford to replace whatever Jude had made off with. Either he was attached to the image of himself as an ascetic, or keen to keep a grievance visually fresh.

Ramsey poured two generous measures of cognac. Jude having absconded with the sofa and armchairs, there was nowhere to sit. Said Ramsey, “Let’s go downstairs.”

Ah. The dungeon.

Irina trailed him to the basement. Ramsey switched on the lamp over his snooker table, which imbued the expanse of green baize and its gleaming mahogany frame with a sacred aspect, bathing the rest of the cavernous room in the subdued, worshipful glow of a cathedral. Dark leather couches lined his private parlour like pews, and Irina sipped gravely from her snifter as if from a communion chalice. This was the heart of the house, doubtless where Ramsey spent most of his time. The rack of cues caught the lamplight. A cabinet held dozens of trophies; in a row, six upright crystal runner-up platters from the World Championship grimaced across the top shelf like bared teeth. The walls were adorned with glassed posters of tournaments and exhibition games, from Bangkok to Berlin—décor that Jude had graciously allowed her ex to keep. Chances were that Jude had rarely ventured here, and Ramsey’s option on repairing downstairs had probably facilitated the marriage’s lasting a whole seven years. Irina felt admitted to a sanctum of sorts. The close, golden lighting, the otherworldly sumptuousness of the leather upholstery as she sank into it, and the plush, regal crimson pile under her sandals all enhanced the sensation of having entered a secret magic kingdom through a wardrobe or looking-glass.

Ramsey retrieved a medieval-looking wooden box. Though Irina had herself narrowed the distance between them on Charing Cross those few scandalous millimetres, he assumed a seat on the far opposite side of the couch, pressing into the arm. Reverently, he withdrew a packet of Swan papers, a one-sided razor blade, and a pewter pillbox, upending the box to spill its dark, dense lump onto the table before them. After slitting a Gauloise with the blade, he laid tobacco along a fag paper. Flicking his slender silver lighter, he wafted the hash over the flame, pinched a soupçon of softened resin, and sprinkled its grains evenly across the joint. The black specks dropping from his fingertips recalled dark potions that had sent Sleeping Beauty to her long slumber, or felled Snow White to the cold ground.

The joint he passed on to Irina, extending his arm since she was so far away, was exquisitely slim and uniform, tapering to a fine point. She acceded to two tokes, shaking her head strenuously when offered a third. Ramsey shrugged, and polished off the rest himself.

To whatever degree she had dreaded from Ramsey the long associative rambles that cannabis can induce, much less the whooping giggle-fits the drug seems to elicit only in movies, her foreboding was misplaced. Ramsey stood from the couch and proceeded to ignore her. He opened his case, assembled the cue, and centred a frame of balls. He broke delicately on the left-hand side. When he pocketed a loose red with a deep screw, the white cannoned into the cluster, scattering the reds into easy pickings.

Like the dope, the exhibition was juvenile. He’d asked her to his house, and had therefore some obligation to play the host. Dragging her to his basement for this display was the kind of childish bid to impress you should really have got beyond by forty-seven.

Be that as it may, Irina had only seen Ramsey play on TV, and in three dimensions the twelve-by-six-foot table yawned much larger than it appeared on screen. Up close, the accuracy of his shots, the surety of their selection, and the unearthly precision with which every pot set him up for the next ball seemed inhuman. As he swung from shot to shot, Ramsey’s black silk jacket wafted in the breeze from the open windows on the light well. The balls appeared to roll sweetly to their appointed pockets of their own accord, passing one another and missing by a hair, but never touching unless Ramsey planned to capitalize on the contact. The luminous balls as they swept the baize were mesmerizing; the colours seemed to pulse. The breeze lifted the fine hairs on Irina’s bare arms, the air once more neither warm nor cold. The marijuana resin seemed mild, and Irina wondered why she had let herself get so tied up in knots over the prospect of such a commonplace narcotic’s effects.

Ramsey had racked up another frame and Irina had taken an abstemious sip from her snifter, when—something happened. The dope, it turned out, was not mild. After only two tokes, it was not mild by a mile. The neutrality of the air gave way, and under the plain white blouse her breasts began to heat, like seat-warmers in expensive cars. Irina rarely thought about her breasts. Lawrence had cheerfully admitted that he “wasn’t a tit man,” and since her de facto husband never lavished them with any attention—never even touched them to speak of—Irina saw no reason to pay them any especial mind herself. Now they seemed to be rebelling against the neglect, for an infrared of her body would portray them in the molten vermilion that earlier that evening had flamed in the windows of St. Paul’s. Aghast, Irina was half-convinced they had begun to glow, and wrapped her arms across her chest, as she had the night before when risking, “When we talk, I feel naked” in Russian to Ramsey on the phone.

This feeling, of being wired with electric coils that some mischief-maker had switched on high, proceeded to spread. Her abdomen throbbed, sending waves of alarming warmth up to her diaphragm and down her thighs. Irina was chagrined. This was not a sensation that a decent woman had any business suffering in company. Though she conceded that her entire torso probably wasn’t blinking bright red like a railway crossing, she felt sure that her transformation from primly dressed illustrator to human torch would, in however insidious a fashion, begin to show.

Irina slowly turned her head to face the snooker table with trepidation, since in her untoward condition it seemed safest not to move a hair. Yet Ramsey appeared oblivious. His face was suffused with such restful concentration that she wondered if she’d done him a disservice; it looked bad, of course, like showing off, but surely this was just what he did when he got stoned, headed downstairs and shot practice frames, and this is exactly what he’d have done had Irina declined to come back to the house. He had yet to flick her sly, covert glances after a dazzling shot, to confirm that she’d been paying attention. After all, Ramsey’s faultless cuing had been heaped with all manner of praise since he was about eight years old, and it was not for his snooker game that he craved admiration. Funny that it had taken until this very moment to notice—and not in that clinical sense in which she had detailed it to herself before, the way a witness describes particulars like hair colour and height to the police, but really notice-notice—that Ramsey Acton was a rather striking man.

A quite striking man.

In fact, he was devastatingly—vertiginously—attractive.

It would not have been objectively apparent, although her eyes may have widened, bulged a bit, blackened in the centre. But however imperceptible its exterior manifestations, inside the turn she took was anything but subtle.

If Ramsey didn’t kiss her, she was going to die.

“Fancy trying a shot, to get the feel of it?” Ramsey proposed pleasantly, keeping the table between them. It was the first thing he’d said in half an hour.

As a girl, Irina had been wary of surly schoolboy cliques lurking down hallways, certain to make callous remarks as she passed that she had a face like a donkey. She’d experienced her share of test anxiety all the way through to university, and often blanked on answers she knew. She had tended to get fretful when boyfriends drove over the speed limit. Ordinarily she would be able to recall, albeit not at this moment, her anxiety that Lawrence wouldn’t ring again after the first time they’d slept together. In her professional life, she was all too familiar with the inclination to put off opening a publisher’s envelope, which might contain a clipped request that she please collect the fruits of six months’ labour from their crowded offices without delay. In London, she had been through her share of IRA bomb scares in the tube, though after so many hoaxes the chances of blowing up then and there had always seemed distant.

Point being, like most people, Irina was no stranger to fear. She knew what other people were referring to when they used the word. But until 2:35 on the sixth—nay, now the seventh—of July 1997, she may never before have been seized by raw, abject terror.

Summoned, Irina obeyed. Her will had been disconnected, or at least the petty will, the small, bossy voice that made her put dirty clothing in the laundry basket or work an extra hour in her studio when she no longer felt like it. It was possible that there was another sort of will, an agency that wasn’t on top of her or beside her but that was her. If so, this larger volition had assumed control. So eclipsing was its nature that she was no longer able to make decisions per se. She didn’t decide to join Ramsey at the table; she simply rose.

As she negotiated her way to Ramsey’s side, her sense that at any moment she might fall over did not seem to have been occasioned by high heels, hash, or cognac. The precariousness of her balance was in her head, like an inner-ear disorder. Apparently aircraft pilots can grow so discombobulated that they have no idea which direction is up or down. Especially before the advent of navigational instruments, many a pilot in a fog had turned his nose into a dive and ploughed straight into the ground. Even in today’s era of reliable altimeters, an amateur can still grow so convinced of his internal orientation that he defies the readout on his panel and flies into somebody’s house. When one cannot trust so primitive an intuition as which direction is up, surely one’s moral compass was equally capable of fatal malfunction.

As she drew towards Ramsey—whose figure was now traced by a thin, white edge, as if scissored from a magazine—the whole evening snapped into place. He had taken deliberate advantage of the fact that Lawrence was out of town. He had dazzled her with fine dining, and slyly introduced racy, sexual stories from adolescence. He had got her drunk, for centuries a grammatical construction beloved of women who are loath to take responsibility for doing the drinking. In kind, he had got her stoned. He had lured her to his house, where he put on a display of prowess at his snooker table that she might be blinded by his celebrity status. And now this “fancy trying a shot?” gambit took the biscuit. Ramsey, naïve? It was Irina who was naïve, a flighty, airheaded fool who was dropping into her seducer’s arms like an apple from a tree.

The revelation of Ramsey’s chicanery came too late. She couldn’t take her eyes from his mouth, and those grey-blue irises of a wolf, which Betsy had assured her that Ramsey was not. Standing sacrificially at his side, Irina presented herself for slaughter.

He handed her a cue off the rack, saying, “I’ve set up a shot, that red to the centre pocket.” Irina thought, You’ve set something up, buster, that is for damned sure.

Ramsey arranged her cue in her right hand. Leaning over the table, he demonstrated the proper position for sighting the shot. She did as she was told. As he murmured about how you had to “hit through the white” and not “pull back after contact,” she inhaled his breath, aromatic with brandy and toasted tobacco. When he reached behind her to adjust the angle of her cue, their fingers touched.

Yet in defiance of his own instruction that you mustn’t “pull back after contact,” his hand reflexively recoiled. When he urged her to move her grip further down the butt, he declined the pedagogic option of shifting her hand with his own. Turning her face to his, Irina was startled to confront an expression of idiotic innocence.

Irina finally twigged. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins? Ronnie “the Rocket” O’Sullivan? Jimmy “the Whirlwind” White? Without a doubt, many a snooker player was a rogue. They drank, they smoked, they whored; they never thought twice about “shagging another bloke’s bird.” And fair enough, Ramsey hoovered fags, had a taste for weed, and was no stranger to the bottle. But on one point he and his notorious competitors decisively parted ways. Ramsey Acton was a nice man. Maybe he did find her fetching; she could hardly hold that against him. But Irina had described her relationship as sound, satisfying, and permanent. And Ramsey was Lawrence’s friend.

If anyone was kissing anyone tonight, she would have to kiss him.

Even putting the momentous matter of Lawrence aside, the prospect was fraught. Ramsey might never have thought of her in that way at all. At the very least, she risked the mortification that Estelle must have felt when she tore off her shirt and the teenage Ramsey Acton fled in dismay to his bicycle.

Still, it could have been a small decision. Drunken, addled revellers often do things late at night for which they apologize in the morning with a reductive titter. But the minimizing of such moments was a matter for other people. For Irina knew with perfect certainty that she now stood at the most consequential crossroads of her life.

“I almost forgot,” she said with a shaky smile. “Happy birthday.”

chapter two

At the rattle of the key in the lock, Irina felt her pulse in her teeth.

“Irina Galina!” It wasn’t precisely a sobriquet. In a nod to the rhymey assonance of the Russian language, Irina’s mother had chosen Galina for her middle name, and Lawrence loved the boisterous, comical cadence of the double-barrel. Yet tonight his pet handle rang from the hallway with a grating singsong, as if she were an adorable Muppet on Sesame Street and not a grown woman.

Dropping his luggage, Lawrence poked his head into the living room. In a stroke, her heart fell. She thought, I have never before looked into that face and felt absolutely nothing.

The first time Irina ever laid eyes on Lawrence—having found her posting for Russian tutoring on a Columbia message board, he’d made an appointment for his first lesson—she opened the door of her West 104th Street apartment with an imperceptible double-take. She wouldn’t pretend to love at first sight, but she did register a familiarity, as if they had met before. Though his trim physique was buried in flannel and drooping denim, the face was arresting: sharply cut, cheeks hollowed from overwork, forehead curdled, deep-set eyes as big, brown, and imploring as a bloodhound’s.

Even then, Lawrence liked to think of himself as a self-sustaining unit, like a geodesic dome whose moisture infinitely recirculates and waters its own crops. Irina did soon grow to appreciate that Lawrence was an enterprising young man who had bootstrapped himself from the moneyed equivalent of trailer-park trash to the Ivy League. But what tore at her sympathy that first afternoon was the immediate apprehension that he was starved—that emotionally he was like one of those wild boys raised by chimps, who’d been subsisting in the forest on roots and berries. That first impression had never left her, of pleading and raw need, of an undercurrent of desperation of which Lawrence himself was unaware. Even the cockiness with which he had leaned, smirking, against the door frame had proven simply heartbreaking in the end, since his improbable incompetence at Russian justified no swagger. Over the proceeding years her sympathy had only deepened.

Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence’s face was familiar, it was killingly so—as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She’d been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises—or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence’s face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead. Strong, unapologetic nose: nothing. Boyishly tousled hair: nothing. Pleading brown eyes—

She couldn’t look in his eyes.

“Hey, what’s up?” said Lawrence, kissing her perfunctorily with dry lips. “Don’t tell me you’re just sitting here, not even reading.”

Just sitting here was exactly what she’d been doing. Her own mind having converted overnight into a home entertainment centre, she’d felt no need to reach for a book. In fact, the prospect of reading anything as demanding as a cereal box was risible.

“Just thinking,” she said weakly. “And waiting for you to come home.”

“Well, it’s coming up on eleven, right?” he said, returning to the hall to cart his bags to the bedroom. “Almost time for Late Review!”

Lawrence’s voice died quickly and left dead air, as if the very acoustics of their home had gone flat. Irina struggled to right her posture, but kept sagging into the cushions of her chair. She heard bustling from the bedroom. Naturally the instant he arrived he had to unpack. Always this tyrannical obsession with order.

When he shambled back to the living room, Irina couldn’t think of anything to say, and she wasn’t accustomed to having to “think of ” something to say to Lawrence.

“Okay,” she croaked. As if contaminated by Ramsey’s syncopated syntax, Irina’s timing was off, and her response to Lawrence’s proposal was minutes late.

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, let’s watch Late Review.”

There was too much space around their words. Irina visualized this ragged discourse as a mismatch of type-sizes and prints, like a kidnapper’s ransom note snipped jaggedly from different headlines. That she and Lawrence had ever carried a competent conversation now seemed incredible. She wondered what they used to talk about.