The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  An opening line of dazzling originality might have made for more sophisticated dramaturgy. Yet at crucial turning points—when the otherwise laudable goal of sparkling repartee comes a distant second to clarity—one is apt to rely on the established codes of one’s culture. Thus Irina fell back on the pat American prelude to cataclysm:

  “We have to talk.”

  In his lacerating attacks on colleagues, his lashing contempt for the copious morons in his surround, Lawrence perpetually exuded a barely contained violence. While he had never struck her, she’d never given him reason to. Consequently, when Irina had contemplated the scene that now inexorably unfurled in their living room, it had crossed her mind that Lawrence could well be moved to take a hard swing at her jaw. Yet however much she had despaired that her partner was a known quantity—however often since July she had supposed that their lives together had gone flat if only because a relationship is among other things a research project, and now that she’d reached the end of her private doctorate on Lawrence James Trainer there was nothing left to find out—Irina was mistaken. Curling on the couch, he whimpered in a small, childlike voice that she had never heard before, “I had what I wanted more than anything in the world, and I messed it up.”

  Any images she might have conjured of being beaten about the head or slammed against the wall revealed themselves as the stuff of fantasy, not what she feared, but what she craved. Because what he did instead of hit her was far more brutal.

  He cried.

  7

  THROUGH THE BUCOLIC AFTERNOONS of August, Irina labored diligently in her studio. When Lawrence rang on pretexts, she was always touched to hear from him, but there was little to say. The work was going okay. Okay wasn’t good enough. While she had reluctantly cast the drawing aside for its dissimilarity to its companions, she kept that illustration of the Crimson Traveler tacked above her drawing table as a reminder of an elusive quality that was retreating from reach. It had a fire to it, a vividness and excitement that none of her work had exhibited since. The pictures she drew lately were well wrought, and sometimes lovely. But they did not take her breath away. The Crimson Traveler had been a brief visitation, and he had not come back.

  One afternoon when the drawing on her table bored her intensely, she slipped off to the bedroom to get a certain restlessness out of her system. It was rarely necessary to let off steam below the waist on her lonesome, given the regular schedule of passable orgasms that life with Lawrence afforded. But Irina was fidgety right now, and Lawrence wasn’t here. Even if he were, she couldn’t remember when they last had sex in the afternoon—abstention from which may constitute the definitive juncture at which courtship is over.

  There is always a peculiar interim, in between the level-headed decency of daily toil and the dementia of private abandon, in which one resolves, while still of sound mind, to get off one’s head. In kind, she had faced down many a deceptively tiny pill or blotted tab of paper in her youth, and decided, in a state of utter self-possession, to abdicate that possession—to invite irrational states like paranoia or unjustified exultation, to make straight lines bend. But to abdicate one’s own sanity is not, strictly speaking, a sane thing to do, so at the point she decided to masturbate she had entered a nether-region one step from reason toward madness.

  Irina was not entirely comfortable with this activity. Although releasing a little tension solo hardly equated to making it with another man, she had a feeling that Lawrence wouldn’t like it. Cheating on Lawrence with herself seemed, in some respect she couldn’t articulate, the ultimate adultery.

  She had never asked if he indulged himself along the same lines; she rather hoped that he did. She knew so little about what went on in his head when they made love (little, hah!—she knew nothing). For his sake and theirs, best that he maintained a secret pornographic cave in it, shelved with lascivious videos that he could rent for free.

  Besides, in her twenties the image of a man jerking off had been a chief turn-on. Why was that? Were her own sensations any guide, sex with another person was never quite right—never quite exactly right. She had loved the idea of it being exactly right—of a man blind with his own pleasure. And autoeroticism was the inmost sanctum, the veritable definition of the private. Any number of lovers from times past had proven game for all the standard variations and then some, but the one thing they never volunteered to do—with one memorable exception—was jerk off in view. Yet this was the initial discovery from which all sex hailed; it was the source. Most boys would have masturbated hundreds of times before they ever encountered a girl in the flesh, and adolescent wanking is famously hallucinogenic. The awkward fumbling that characterizes the abundance of cherry-losing episodes must be almost universally a disappointment in comparison. Even through adulthood, surely plenty of men continued to experience far greater ecstasy pumping over the toilet with make-believe partners than bedding real women with cellulite and an irritating compulsion to insert “actually” at the beginning of every sentence. Funny, that. Since the same might also be said of women, it was curious why anyone bothered with fucking at all.

  Yet this afternoon as she lay atop the bedspread with her jeans pulled down, Irina’s preparatory strokes were listless. She remained sane. So far this was every bit as dull as filling in the monotonous maroon bricks of her crippled protagonist’s house.

  She applied herself with more vigor, but succeeded in little more than making her labia sore. She could not shed a self-conscious embarrassment, the image of her body on the bed, hands clutched between her legs, the rumpled jeans, the tennis shoes scuffing the white chenille. She felt silly. There was something paltry about women, doing this—shamefully minor, fitful. She envied men the flamboyance of their display. They got to watch a part of themselves formerly small and shriveled and drooping go all hard and big and high. They got to see their own excitement, red, aggressive, and bursting. They could hold it in their hands, seize it, squeeze the three-dimensional fact of their desire. A little snuffling and rustling on top of the bedclothes couldn’t compare. Coming, men had something to show for themselves. It wasn’t fair.

  She needed to think of something, concoct some illicit pictures to get off, because otherwise she might more profitably apply these energies to scrubbing porcelain in the loo. Yet summoning any visions with a man in them left her unmoved. Somehow having sex with Lawrence night after night, daily seeing him naked on the way to a shower, had made an appendage, previously so exotic, infinitely accessible and therefore plain, like an arm or a toe. There was always that door in her head that she had refused, to this day, to open, but it had been locked tight for so many weeks now that the plaster seemed to have seeped into the cracks and now there was nothing available but a blank wall. She wondered idly what had lain behind it.

  Giving herself permission to be very, very bad—and this exercise was pointless if she weren’t allowed to be bad—Irina conjured what had become, in the latter years with Lawrence, an old standby: your basic open beaver, on which she mentally fastened her mouth. Yet even at her most intoxicated, a corner of her mind was eternally uneasy with this fantasy—not only uneasy, but confused by it. She had nothing against such people, of course, but she didn’t consider herself a lesbian, and had never fancied another woman, much less fallen in love with one. Moreover, this latter-day proclivity made no historical sense. In younger days, her exclusive fixation on the penis had bordered on nymphomania. Were she to picture a secret assignation with a bona fide rug-muncher, she saw herself standing fully clothed, looking at some strange woman like a fence post, making nervous conversation about the hotel-room décor. Out of obligation, maybe she would try a closed-mouth kiss—which would be repulsively soft and too wet, and have the erotic effect of kissing overcooked okra. Gathering her things quickly, she would apologize profusely to this perfectly nice lady for having made a terrible mistake.

  Further, the fantasy genitals were always floating in space; they had no larger body attached, nor a face. Though sh
e was at last beginning to climb into a state that could pass for arousal, Irina’s reverie was interrupted by an unwelcome revelation that came into her head like one of those crackly announcements on the Northern Line: she was simply imagining herself. Lawrence, by being both infinitely on offer in a physical sense and yet inaccessible in every other, had unwittingly turned his whole sex into a big bore. Because she was an incurable hetero after all, Irina McGovern’s sexual universe had subsequently shrunk to Irina McGovern, period.

  It wasn’t enough. Her vagina coiled, shuddered, and relaxed. That was no orgasm. It was a stop, a thudding halt—as unceremonious as the jolt and sudden stillness of a train stalled under the Thames. No little mystified, Irina looked around the pleasant bedroom, and down at the jeans scrunched around her knees. She wriggled them up, fastening her belt buckle with a pragmatic that’s-that. She hadn’t come. Nevertheless, the afternoon’s entertainment was over.

  Strange, how upsetting that was. In her long resourceful private life, Irina had never failed to round off an occasion of this nature with satisfactory results, and she could first remember masturbating at the age of four. What a weird thing to have grown incompetent at. But whether the lesbo daydream was a visual objectification of herself or she really was a raging but repressed pussy-eating dyke, the fantasy was about as tired as the pale, flannelled denim of these secondhand jeans. It was all worn out.

  Too disquieted to return to work, Irina treated herself to a walk instead, venturing toward London Bridge to head for the City. Ritually, she tsked at the proliferation of slick luxury housing developments that were ruining Borough’s gritty Dickensian atmosphere, walking cautiously around scaffolding piled with teetering breezeblocks. Evading the bumper of a lorry that ran the light at Trinity Street only by running to the curb full-tilt, she grumbled about the execrable standard of driving in this city. Londoners had no respect for pedestrians, and given the risks of strolling two blocks in your own neighborhood you might as well have gone skydiving instead.

  A more reflective state of mind soon descended. Bus-shelter adverts struck her as alien—the salacious appeals, the busty women promoting products. Nearly every campaign had something to do with sex, and for the life of her Irina couldn’t understand why. The old in-out, it seemed so known and done before. What was the big deal? Groping couples seemed inexplicably occupied, and she wondered why they didn’t go to the Imperial War Museum instead, or sit in the library to read books on Georgian architecture.

  Lawrence’s libido was strong for his age, and she was fortunate. Yet the hard truth was that on evenings he made it known through their codified stretch and yawn that tonight he’d rather go straight to sleep, Irina was often relieved. The sensation made her feel like her mother (who devoted herself to looking ravishing, yet seemed to regard sex itself as a messy annoyance; she preferred the perks—the power, the attention, and the envy of other women, not least of all her own daughters’). Irina’s growing inclination to get out of the whole folderol duplicated the put-upon sexuality of previous generations, whose women purportedly regarded coitus as “a wifely duty,” the onerous price of financial support. Imagine, she had risked all manner of punishment by climbing out her bedroom window in Brighton Beach at eighteen to seek out the dubious attentions of boys with pimples. Now that she could fuck her heart out by sidling three inches to the left on any ordinary evening, she’d rather skip it.

  Maybe this was what it was like, getting older. You tired of sex, even of good sex, the way you’d tire of a good spaghetti carbonara if you ate it three times a week. Or maybe there was such a thing as sexual laziness, to which she’d fallen prey. In most regards she was industrious; she never purchased precut carrots. But ecstasy, too, was an effort.

  Lost in contemplation, Irina looked up in surprise; why, she was nearly to the East End.

  ON THE MORNING OF August 31, after comforting a disconsolate tenant on the stairs for twenty minutes to little effect, Irina returned to the flat, clutching the Sunday Telegraph. “You’re not going to believe this! Diana!”

  “What’s that cow up to now?” said Lawrence.

  Irina recognized the lowered head and first wicked bat of his eyelashes, and waved frantically. “Don’t start! Not this morning! You’ll regret it!”

  “I’d love to help the underprivileged—”

  “Stop it! Enough! She’s dead.”

  As Irina read aloud the lead paragraph, she felt sorry for Lawrence. This was not destined to be his news story. There was nothing to be but sad. Princess Diana mightn’t have been very bright, but she didn’t deserve to die. Aside from some questionable lesson about how maybe the paparazzi shouldn’t be so zealous in the pursuit of celebrities, itself not a Lawrence-esque sentiment, no meaty moral emerged into which he might sink his teeth. Lawrence could only stand on the sidelines and be blandly sympathetic with everyone else.

  Call her perverse, but for Irina feeling straight-up sad that something bad had happened came naturally.

  IT WAS DIFFICULT TO think of anyone to whom Irina might comfortably confide, “I’m a little unnerved, because the other day I masturbated and couldn’t come.” The lone candidate was Betsy Philpot, whose candor bordered on uncouth.

  Betsy and Leo had two kids, and unlike a certain layabout freelancer, both worked nine-to-five jobs. So Irina insisted on making the journey to Ealing. Betsy put up a half-hearted protest, then selected a curry joint two blocks from her house.

  The trip out was the usual nightmare, and Irina was forty minutes late. When she lit into the travails of the Piccadilly Line, Betsy cut her off.

  “Life’s short, and tonight’s shorter. Haven’t you mastered London etiquette yet? No one wants to hear tube stories. You’re here. Which, given the state of the Underground, alone proves the existence of God. Have a drink.”

  Often inclined to have just a bit more wine when out from under Lawrence’s disapproving eye, Irina poured herself a glass of red from the carafe that was conspicuously abstemious. Over poppadoms, she asked about Betsy’s new publishing projects, the chances that Leo would keep his job, and the two boys’ progress in school, meanwhile decimating the basket. “Oh, dear,” Irina remarked, piling the last poppadom high with spicy raw-onion relish. “Maybe we should order another basket. You’ve hardly had any.”

  “That’s because I’ve done all the talking.”

  “Fine by me,” said Irina. “Honestly, sometimes I hesitate to see friends just because I can’t imagine what I’d talk about. ‘I finally found the perfect color yellow for the rubber duck in the bathtub’ doesn’t make for sparkling repartee.”

  “There’s always current events.”

  “If I want to talk about articles in the newspaper, I can stay home.”

  “Don’t you and Lawrence discuss anything else?”

  Irina frowned. “Not really. Oh, and TV. Lawrence can go on at length about the merits of Homicide over Law and Order.”

  “Don’t you ever talk about how you feel?”

  “What’s to feel?”

  Betsy cocked her head. “You’re a robot?”

  “Lawrence is interested in the world outside himself. What happens, what might happen, and how to stop it.”

  “What about you? What are you interested in?”

  “Well. The same thing, I guess. I try to keep up.”

  “So you really do want to talk about whether the IRA ceasefire is going to hold.”

  “We could do worse. What else is there?” For the life of her, Irina couldn’t understand why this sentiment came across as nihilistic, and she was glad to be interrupted by a waiter taking their order. She did ask for more poppadoms, as well as basmati rice, chapatis, samosas, a chicken vindaloo, and a vegetable side-dish.

  “The army we are feeding is, I assume, camped outside?” Betsy had stuck with a lamb korma, period.

  “I’m starving. I don’t know why, but for weeks now I’ve been ravenous.”

  “You do look—healthy.”

  It was
her mother’s code word. “You mean fat!”

  “No, a fuller figure suits you!” Betsy backpedaled. “Sometimes you look waiflike.”

  Betsy was right; Irina didn’t want to squander their time on the IRA ceasefire. Between samosas, she hazarded, “Anyway, back in July, something—happened to me.”

  “You did find the perfect yellow for the rubber duck.”

  “I almost kissed someone.”

  “Almost? Honey, you really do need something to talk about.”

  “I didn’t do it, but I was awfully tempted. I feel as if I narrowly averted disaster.”

  Betsy burst out laughing. “Irina, you’re such a little straight-laced moralizer! I bet you’re one of those people who finds an error on her statement in her favor, and immediately calls the bank.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. I’ve never felt powerfully drawn to another man since Lawrence and I got together.”

  “That’s astonishing.”

  “Loyalty starts in the mind.”

  “So you’ve sinned in your heart?”

  “Jimmy Carter was onto something.”

  “Why didn’t you do it? Might have been good for you. I’ve ended up necking at the occasional book launch with too much free wine. You sober up, can’t meet the guy’s eye in the hallway for a few days, and laugh it off. Keeps the blood running.”

  “Oh, don’t pretend to be so hard, Betsy. It doesn’t wash. This moment, it really bothered me. I didn’t think it should be possible.”

  “How’s the nooky side of things with Lawrence? Fallen off?”

  “No, it’s fine! Though routinized, obviously.”

  “Why ‘obviously’?”

  “Well, all couples pretty much do it the same way every time.”

  “How do you know?”

  Irina stopped herself from saying, Lawrence says so. “Common knowledge.”