The Post-Birthday World

With practiced dexterity and Irina’s numb cooperation, Lawrence slipped in from behind. It was, they had both agreed, a nice angle. But Lawrence may have had an angle on intercourse in more than one sense. Before the protocol had settled, they’d tried the usual assortment of positions. But it hit her now—how awful, that it had taken last night, of all things, to notice—that amid the several options available nothing had obliged them to choose this posture in particular and stick with it. Moreover, the selection of a front-to-back configuration as the only way they would make love for, prospectively, fifty-some years was Lawrence’s doing, and the choice wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t arbitrary—it wasn’t just how they ended up making love, willy-nilly, the way she had ended up wearing that navy skirt and raggedy white blouse to dinner last night, because that was the outfit she’d been trying on when the buzzer sounded. They’d been doing it for nearly nine years this way and she should never have allowed this position for more than a time or two and now it was too late to object and that was tragic. She had passively capitulated to Lawrence’s weakness, to his real weakness and not the kind of weakness he feared, like atrophied pectorals or abdication in an argument about appeasement of the IRA.

This was what the coward in Lawrence had opted for: That they never kiss. That they never look at each other. That he see only the blurred profile of her head; that she always stare at the wall. That she never be permitted to meet those imploring brown eyes and watch them get what they begged for. Though in the West 104th Street days they had lit candles on the bed stand, now it was always dark, as if for good measure—as if being faced toward white plaster weren’t impersonal enough. The irony was that Lawrence loved her. But he loved her too much. He loved her so much that it was scary, and he would no more gaze into her eyes while they were fucking than stare into the face of the sun.

Per custom, after a couple of minutes Lawrence reached quietly for her nether regions, circling and homing in on central command. His earnest manipulations were never quite right of course—never quite, exactly right. But to be fair, there was something inscrutable about that recessive twist of flesh, if only because the clitoris was built on an exasperatingly miniature scale. For a man to get a woman to come with the tip of his finger required the same specialized skill of those astonishing vendors in downtown Las Vegas, who could write your name on a grain of rice.

Because one millimetre to the left or right equated geographic ally to the distance from Zimbabwe to the North Pole. Little wonder that many a lover from her youth who had imagined himself nearing the gush of Victoria Falls had, through no fault of his own, been paddling instead the chill Arctic of her glacial indifference. To make matters worse (and again the distinction was a matter of a hair’s width), the dastardly little scrap was capable of inducing not only bliss but blinding pain—total-turnoff, back-to-Go-do-not-collect-$200 pain—and how could anyone negotiate such a perilous node with any confidence if he didn’t have one? She had sometimes thanked her lucky stars that she was not a man, faced with this bafflingly twitchy organ whose important bit measured not a quarter of an inch across, when chances were that the woman herself couldn’t tell you how it worked. It would have been unreasonable, therefore, to take issue with the disappointment of a tad off this way or that, and given that the whole project was fundamentally impossible, Lawrence was surprisingly good at it.

Tonight, however, Irina couldn’t catch the wave. Too much of her attention was focused on trying not to cry. And the truth was that she was fighting her own pleasure. For once, the off-ness, it didn’t have to do with his middle finger being just a smidgen too far down. It was wrong; it felt wrong, even wrong as in morally wrong. But if she didn’t come, Lawrence would know she hadn’t come, and more to the point he would know that, while he was in Sarajevo, something had happened.

It was even more wrong, what she did, to get where she had to go; it was fiendish.

Irina had indulged her share of fantasies. She had imagined “a” man doing this or that, or even, though she had never admitted as much to anyone else, “a” woman; there were only two sexes, after all, and to keep yourself amused you had to use all the combinations at your disposal. Yet these throwaway figures were always faceless, like mannequins with the heads lopped off. She had never before conjured one man, a real man, a man you could ring on the phone, with an address, a preference for hot over cold sake, a long face, and a black silk jacket. A tall, willowy man, with thin lips and grave eyes and a mouth of such infinite depth, with such an inexhaustible array of recesses, that kissing him was like touring the catacombs of Notre Dame. Last night it had felt less as if she’d slipped her tongue into his mouth than as if her entire body had crawled into the maw. It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars.

She had only kissed him. So why was the modesty of her transgression such negligible solace? The skirt had twisted, but she’d kept it on. The blouse had ripped that little bit further, but she’d never let him lift it. Let him? He hadn’t tried. He had, to do Ramsey justice, tried only to stop. Which she should have also, she should have tried to stop, but she didn’t try, did she, or hard enough, because she hadn’t stopped, had she, and when you try hard enough you succeed, don’t you? You succeed. It was true that she hadn’t pulled his T-shirt from the waist of his trousers and smoothed up the flat of his bare stomach to the mounds of his chest. But she’d wanted to, and now there was no stopping her mind, her wretched, unprincipled mind, from making up for lost time. She hadn’t unclasped his thick leather belt, with its heavy pewter buckle. She hadn’t unfastened the button at his waist, or edged the zip, tooth by tooth, to its nadir. He had said, “We can’t do this,” in defiance of the fact that they clearly could because they were. Sometimes, more accurately, “We shouldn’t do this,” a point on which their agreement remained shamefully theoretical. Later, plaintively, a helpless railing at the gods for smiting the poor man with what he most perfectly could not resist and most certainly ought to: “But I like Lawrence!” Nevertheless, if firmly belted, buckled, buttoned, and zipped away, the captive baton that had rounded neatly against the socket of her hipbone had given every indication that, if the spirit was reluctant, something else was very, very willing.

Still, she hadn’t fucked him, had she? She hadn’t fucked him, because that would be wrong. But she’d wanted to. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him more than she had ever wanted to fuck any man in her life. She wanted to fuck him, and not “make love” to him either, she wanted to fuck him. It was all that she could do to keep from shouting as much out loud, and Irina gnashed a bit of pillowcase between her teeth. She was dying to fuck him. She could see it. She could almost feel it now. She could feel it. It was not only one of the things she wanted, it was the only thing she wanted, to fuck him. That was the only thing in the whole bloody world she wanted and she would always want it, too, not just once, but over and over, to fuck him. And she knew that she’d do anything, give up everything, humiliate herself to fuck him and if he ever refused her she could see herself begging, on her knees, begging him, please—

“Wow,” said Lawrence.

Irina was covered in sweat, and it took a minute for her breathing to steady, and for the nuclear mushroom behind her eyes to recede. A considerate man, Lawrence was usually into ladies-first, but her enthusiasm had spurred him; he, too, had finished, whenever that was, and she hadn’t noticed.

“I guess you really missed me,” he said, giving her a final squeeze.

“Mmm,” she said.

Sleep remained at bay, even as Lawrence began lightly to snore. Irina was disconsolate. Lawrence didn’t know, and he never had to know. Not about last night, and not about tonight, either. But she still held herself accountable, and not only for her perfidy on Victoria Park Road, but for the more considerable infidelity a few minutes ago in her head. That was the whole theory behind mental kindness, wasn’t it? That on any Judgment Day worth its salt, you wouldn’t merely be confronted with whom you insulted or what you stole, but with the whole unspooled videotape of your tawdry little mind from birth to lights-out. Before tonight, Irina had never pictured fucking another man—not a real man, a man they knew. Now not only had she kissed another man while her partner was trustingly out of town, but tonight she fucked him. Forget clinging to cheap literalism. She had cuckolded Lawrence in his own bed.

Nothing could ever be the same again. How pathetic, that at Omen she had worried about “vandalizing” a deluxe sashimi platter with extra yellowtail, while remaining coolly oblivious to smashing up nine years’ worth of mutual devotion in a single reckless night. With one kiss, she had sent the greatest achievement of her life crashing to the floor in a million pieces, like the countless vases and crystal pitchers that she had clumsily upset as a girl. At forty-two, she was still clumsy, but worse, brutally so, purposely so. Yet maybe there was justice after all. As Lawrence slumbered faithfully beside her, she looked at the soft shadow of his face on the pillow, and felt stone-cold. While bull-in-a-china-shopping through this weekend, she had broken not only their covenant, but her own heart.

A grown woman should be able to stop herself. Adulthood was about thinking things through. Now she hadn’t looked before she leapt, and everything was ruined. She had kissed her life good-bye. Even as she whipped herself for being an awful, empty, selfish shrew undeserving of the abiding love of an intelligent, loyal man like Lawrence, she was afflicted again by visions, of the black belt, the silk jacket.

For forty-two years, Irina had lived with the consequences of everything she had ever done. She’d taken her punishment for spitefully hiding her sister’s ballet slippers the night before a recital. When Columbia had accidentally added an extra zero to her cheque for tutoring undergraduates and she spent the money, she’d paid back every dime when they caught the error, taking out a loan on her credit card at 20 percent. She had faced down the disagreeable results of every confidence betrayed, every hurtful remark blurted, every poorly drafted illustration irrevocably published for the world to see. Surely it was asking little enough, this once, to turn back the clock—not years or anything, nor months nor even weeks, but barely a day. Once again they would lean in tandem over the snooker table, inches apart, as Ramsey demonstrated how to brace the cue. Drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina looked temptation square in the face, smiled bravely, and withdrew.

chapter two

To Irina’s mind, it was the most underrated of symphonies: the jingle of the ring, the hard rasp, the clop of the bolt withdrawing, open-Sesame. The soft brush of wood against carpet. Engrossed in her reading, she had turned down Shawn Colvin, the better to keep her ear cocked. Curled impatiently in her armchair, she had more than once brightened in a false start as neighbours tromped past the flat and on upstairs. At last there was no mistaking the bold assertion of dominion, of access, of belonging, into their escutcheon. These were the unsung peak moments of domestic life: those Pavlovian leaps of the heart on an ordinary night when your beloved walks in the door.

“Irina Galina!”

Still in the hallway, he missed the flush of her smile, though there would be others. Only Lawrence would be able to redeem a middle name otherwise a mocking misnomer. Galina Ulanova was the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina in the 1940s, and Irina’s squat pliés (before her mother gave up on her altogether) had conspicuously failed to live up to her namesake. She’d always hated that name, until Lawrence converted it first to joke, and then, if only because she now associated it with his voice, to joy.

“Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she cried, completing a responsive ritual that never grew tired. As for the sardonic patronymic, his father’s name was Lawrence also.

“Hey!” He kissed her lightly, and nodded at the stereo. “The usual tear-jerking soundtrack.”

“That’s right. I do nothing while you’re gone but sob.”

“What are you reading?”

“Memoirs of a Geisha.” She teased, “You’d hate it.”

“Oh, probably,” he said airily, returning to the hall. “What don’t I hate?”

“Come back here!”

“I was just going to unpack.”

“Sod unpacking!” While Lawrence maintained a militantly American vocabulary as a point of pride, Irina appropriated British lingo whimsically, and even, after seven years here, as a matter of right. “You’ve been gone for ten days. Come back and kiss me properly!”

Though Lawrence duly dropped his bags again and U-turned to the living room, his expression as she looped her wrists about his neck was perplexed. He tried for a closed-mouth kiss, but Irina was having none of that, and parted his lips with her tongue. So rarely had they locked mouths in these latter years that their tongues kept smashing into each other, as at ten she would bumble into partners during a pas de deux. Unpracticed, he pulled back prematurely, stringing spittle between their lips—not cinematic romance. Lawrence glanced at her askance. “What’s got into you?”

She would rather not say. She was not planning to say, and didn’t. “You call me your ‘wife.’ Well, that’s what husbands do, when they come home. They kiss their wives. Sometimes they even enjoy it.”

“It’s coming up on eleven,” he said, launching back down the hall with his bags. “Thought you might want to watch Late Review!”

He was a hard case.

When Lawrence sprawled on the couch after unpacking, she took a moment to study his face. The feeling it induced was gratitude, if only for her own restraint. Last night had been close, as close a call as ever she had encountered, and a fleeting shadow crossed her mind, of that other life in which she could only look at Lawrence in guilt and shame and frantic desperation to cover her tracks. The contrasting cleanliness would have been even more refreshing had she intended to tell him everything, but she and Lawrence had been leaving something out—it was hard to identify what—for long enough that to gush that she had nearly kissed Ramsey Acton last night and then thought better of it would have been dangerous, however wryly she recounted the moment. To recount it wryly would entail a gross distortion anyway, and unless she related the crisis as the Gethsemane it had been there’d be no point. Fully truthful, she’d make him anxious, and create a wariness of Ramsey forever after. It was Lawrence’s friendship with Ramsey as well as her own with Lawrence of which she had been mindful when she’d wished the snooker player happy birthday and then excused herself hastily, in a panic, to the loo.

Curiously, contemplating Lawrence she felt less the recognition of when they met than the mystery of his eternal unfamiliarity. There was a discomfort in Lawrence that his bluster would disguise, and in truth she was never quite sure what really went on in his head. As striking as the planes in that drastic face, they were like theatre flats that shut you from the pulleys behind the scenes. She even thought tentatively, He looks a trace melancholy.

There was no doubting that Lawrence’s was a beautiful face, or better than beautiful; fascinating. The kind you could dive into like dark water and get lost. She felt privileged to be allowed to study it, and to follow the unexplained clouds as they crossed his countenance and then dispersed with the changeability of island weather. It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known—as if progressive intimacy didn’t involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant. To whatever degree she had been assembling a vivid portrait of Lawrence Trainer’s nature, its refinement was all about deconstruction. She would no sooner limn this or that quality than rub it out for being wildly inaccurate or cartoonlike in its simplicity or exaggeration. He was kind; no, sorry, he was savage. He was selflessly devoted to her; to the contrary, he held something back in a way that was decidedly selfish. He was sure of himself; uh-uh, how could she buy into that superficial confidence when it was obvious that he was achingly insecure? At once, Lawrence was kind, he was devoted, and some portion of that assurance drove to his core. Were her mental picture of Lawrence an illustration on her drawing table, it would after over nine years appear a messy smudge of erasures. Maybe by the time she was eighty-five she would approach the limit of having absolutely no idea who Lawrence was, when before she might have listed out “character traits” as if together they amounted to a man. Maybe arriving at this state of being stymied was an achievement. Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you—and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.

“What are you looking at?”

“You.”

“Seen me before.”

“Sometimes I forget what you look like.”

“Been gone ten days, not ten years.” Lawrence glanced at his watch. It wasn’t eleven.

“You haven’t asked me how it went last night, with Ramsey.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.” She sensed Lawrence had not forgotten.

“We had a much nicer time than I expected.”

“Talk about snooker? At least I’ve primed you enough that you should have been able to keep your head above water.”

“No, we hardly talked about snooker at all.”

“What a waste! Who else do you know who’s a professional snooker player? You could have at least gotten the dope—the literal dope—on Ronnie O’Sullivan.”

“Ramsey’s not only a snooker player. He’s a person.” Deftly, she chose person over man. “He seems more at ease one-on-one.”

Lawrence shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

“Lots of people.” She could see that Lawrence was jealous. But she wanted to laugh. Lawrence was jealous over Ramsey. Lawrence had title to Ramsey, and her evening with his snooker buddy was meant to have been awkward. Irina had been sent on a mission to maintain Lawrence’s own friendship with Ramsey by proxy, but was supposed to learn her lesson along the way: that she and Ramsey were chalk and cheese, and that she was incapable of engaging in the jubilant snooker banter that only Anorak Man could furnish. Ramsey was meant to have learned his lesson as well: that while Irina might be nice to look at, shapely legs know nothing of Stephen Hendry’s renown for mastery of side pockets, and at the end of the day her partner was much more fun. Alas, these lessons had not proceeded as their architect had planned.

Of course, the evening had been plenty awkward, leaving her unnerved, even shaken, but also intrigued. What was that, what had happened? Whence this improvident urge to fasten her mouth on the wrong man? After Ramsey had given her a lift home—the ride having proceeded in petrified silence—she’d battened herself into the flat, flipping the top bolt, drawing the chain, and leaning with her back against the door, palms pressed flat, as if something were trying to get in. Breathing a bit too heavily still, she had assured herself that the high voltage in that basement snooker hall must already be dissipating to static electricity. Brushing her teeth before bed, she’d envisaged the relief of waking prudently by herself in her as-good-as-marital bed this morning—having done nothing disreputable, nothing that she had to hide from Lawrence or might be tempted to divulge in a confessional rush, after which he would never quite trust her again. Surely once she was straight, sobered up, and well rested, her scandalous impulse while leaning over that fancy match-grade snooker table would shrink to drunken, stoned idiocy, to mere naughtiness, to a delusional infatuation that—there is a God—she’d had the eleventh-hour sense to squelch. In the plain light of day, she would take the strange evening under advisement, as testimony that she should stay away from drugs, that she should drink moderately, that she missed Lawrence and needed to get laid. Over coffee, she had told herself, rinsing her mouth, you’ll shake your head in dry amusement and go ha-ha-ha.

Yet sipping her cappuccino this morning, she’d regarded her near miss with awe and respect. It hadn’t shrunk. To the contrary, what had appeared beforehand as a merely diverting flirtation on Ramsey’s part, one that could prove embarrassing or inconvenient for Irina, had only grown larger as she approached it. Last night had been like groping about in a fog and expecting to bump into a low stone wall, and instead banging her nose smack against an Egyptian pyramid. Whatever she had run up against on Victoria Park Road, by accident, in innocence, and however wisely she had about-faced and soldiered in blind lockstep in the opposite direction, it was big. Briefly, a whole other life had opened up before her, and the fact that she declined to avail herself of it could not eradicate the image.

One other memory had haunted her all day. At the end of that lift home, Ramsey had drawn into the lay-by in front of this building. He should have kept the motor running, to indicate that at three he had no expectation of being asked up “for coffee”. Instead he switched off the engine, and sat for what seemed a terribly long time—though it wasn’t—hands at rest in his lap with a dead quality. They were exquisite hands, with long, sinuous fingers and slender metacarpi, more those of a musician than a sportsman. Yet they lay on his thighs with corpselike inertness, the delicate dusting of blue cue chalk creased in his cuticles, lending them a ghoulish hue. He stared straight through the windscreen, his face, too, at rest, almost empty; he might have been contemplating a list of groceries to pick up on the way home at a twenty-four-hour Tesco. Irina as well made no move to get out of the car.

But that wasn’t the memory that lingered so. After a beat, they had both resumed animation, and Ramsey got out. Irina remained seated, because she could tell he preferred to come round. He was a gentleman. He opened her door with the gravity of a chauffeur ushering the bereaved from a hearse. As ever, that hand hovered at the small of her back as she walked half a pace ahead. Yet as she rooted for her keys and proceeded to the door, she turned to find him still standing in the street—as if to take the next step onto the kerb was to cross a line in the sand. Since he remained ten feet away and gave no indication of coming closer, that took care of any discomfiting question of a farewell peck on the cheek.

The two matching Georgian squares on which Lawrence and Irina lived were registered buildings, and in order to so much as change the outside colour of the window frames from black to white their management company had to ask permission from the National Trust. (They said no.) So pristinely preserved was this estate that production companies like Merchant-Ivory often used it as a backdrop for historical films. Thus while standard aluminium London street lamps glared a rude orange, the lantern to Ramsey’s left was an iron reproduction gaslight from the nineteenth century. The bulb was flame-shaped, its glow antique. Cast in this theatrical light, golden on one side with his other half in shadow, Ramsey himself could have been acting in a period drama; his uncompromising verticality seemed a posture from an earlier age. Tall, gaunt, and darkly clad, his figure evinced a brooding solemnity she associated not with Snooker Scene but Thomas Hardy.