The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  The audience dispersed. Minions collected programs and sweet wrappers, shooting her curious looks. Ramsey would be doing his interview with the BBC. Seat 2F was, as they say in the detective trade, her “PLS”—point last seen. Sometimes when two people are trying to find each other, the best thing one of you can do is stay put. She’d come a long way in every sense today, and the prospect of wandering the conference center and forlornly failing to intersect with a certain snooker player only to end up in a Novotel whose room service had cut off at ten p.m. was unbearable.

  The wait provided the leisure to fret over her appearance. Not wanting to subject Lawrence to watching her dress up for having sex with another man, this morning she’d grabbed her black jeans, woven velour sweater, and black tennis shoes—all of which she’d been wearing the previous afternoon. Had been wearing, in fact, for three days running, so the clothes were stale. The jeans fit her all right, but their cut was unfashionable; the sweater was huge. Worse, the dark, morose outfit had gotten soaked in the London downpour, and had only dried to the point that it made her itch. Evaporation had given her a chill, and she couldn’t stop trembling. The clasp of her clammy hands looked jarringly pious. Grooming in public was frowned upon, but the urge to comb her hair grew obsessive.

  She also needed to get her head showered in not only the literal but the colloquial sense. She needed to get a grip. She was waiting for Ramsey, but all she could think about was Lawrence. She wondered if he’d eaten anything. She wondered if he’d made himself popcorn, though he didn’t know the right oil-to-kernel ratio or the ideal flame setting on the range. She wondered if he’d changed clothes after standing out in the rain that afternoon. She wondered what it was like to walk out of a love nest, and back into a bachelor pad. Likely you didn’t think in trashy expressions like love nest and bachelor pad. She fought the impulse to find a pay phone and ring home—how could Trinity Street not still seem like home?—and ask if he was all right, or grant him official permission this of all nights to pour a stiff second drink. She wanted to blurt into the receiver that she loved him, which under the circumstances was inane, or even insulting.

  Fifteen minutes passed. The ushers might have shooed her away, if not for a seized quality to this remnant in the second row—the weird clutch of her hands, that huddled posture of the homeless—which made her seem, if not dangerous, at least difficult.

  Unceremoniously, there he was. On stage. In the usual pearl waistcoat, though he’d taken off the bow tie. When he slung a black leather jacket over his shoulder, white-gold cufflinks caught the house lights. As her gaze rose, Irina realized that for her to be sitting alone in a deserted conference-center auditorium in Bournemouth, it was absolutely crucial that at this moment she be flooded with love. If she was not head over heels for this man, she had no business in this incongruous setting, far from another man whose heart this very night was breaking in two. So when she did meet Ramsey’s eyes, she checked and double-checked her reaction, like patting her coat pockets up and down in a gathering panic to find her wallet.

  Pat-pat-pat. No wallet. He looked like a perfectly pleasant gentleman nearing fifty who just happened to be a total stranger.

  With the same infuriating languor that had defeated Ronnie O’Sullivan, Ramsey headed for an aisle, and threaded down the row to sit beside her. He propped his long legs on the seat in front, and knocked his head back. He reached for and held her hand, sharing the armrest between them. His clasp was dry from cue chalk. He closed his eyes.

  “Crikey,” he said. “Your hands are cold.”

  “I forgot my gloves.” She propped her legs in parallel and stared at the ceiling.

  Ramsey continued to recline, motionless, holding her hand but without squeezing or fiddling with her fingers. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was praying.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  “How can you tell? Your eyes are closed.”

  “I can tell.”

  “I look awful. I’m sorry.” The knot in her stomach loosened a bit. She’d been braced for a frontal assault, tongue-down-throat. Passive hand-holding was just right.

  “I’m not in very good shape,” she said.

  “I could see that. Straight away.”

  “I’ve been wondering if I should be trying to catch the last train to London, actually.” Ramsey always made her say what she was thinking. Queer that felt so novel.

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “You’d seen me. I couldn’t.”

  “Still can. I’ll give you a lift to the station if you like.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve made the right decision.” It would take some time for it to come home that she might never know.

  “Sounds to me like you ain’t made one.”

  “Oh, I made one. I’m here, aren’t I?”

  Ramsey opened his eyes, turning his head slowly toward her but keeping it rested on the seat, as if he knew that she could withstand introduction to the man with whom she was supposedly in love only by the smallest of increments. “Telling him—were it bad?”

  “In some ways, not bad enough. Which made it worse.”

  “Did he get angry?”

  “Not at first. Later, but he’d earned that.”

  “What’d he say when you clued him up it was me?”

  “I think you’re off his Christmas card list,” she elided.

  “I’ll miss him, a bit,” said Ramsey wistfully. “Anorak Man.”

  “I’ve never felt this way before,” she said. “I’m not the battered-wife type. But I really wanted him to hit me. Hard. It would have been easier.”

  “Sounds like he hit you in other ways.”

  “He hit me with the fact that he adores me, and that’s not the kind of violence you can hold against people. He’s a wonderful man. I guess I’d forgotten. This would be so much easier if he weren’t a wonderful man.”

  “I’m a right wonderful man as well,” Ramsey reminded her.

  “I know. It’s hell, frankly. And not fair. There are so few of you out there. I have an embarrassment of riches. It seems greedy. Other women would have every reason to feel resentful that I’m taking more than my share.”

  Tentatively, she rested the hollow of her temple against the ball of his shoulder. His white shirt was damp; it must have been hot, under the stage lights. As if soothing a skittish animal, Ramsey curved his arm around her, resettling her head carefully into the crook of his neck. Then he paused, letting her get used to the contact the way you let an unbroken horse accustom itself to the weight of a blanket before you add a saddle.

  “This is going to sound stupid,” she said into his stiff, open collar. “But I love him.” She had to tell someone, even the worst possible person.

  “I know,” he said, and she admired more than she could say that he absorbed this without flinching, like taking a bullet for the president.

  “I liked seeing you play,” she mumbled. “I’m glad you won.”

  “I ain’t fussed either way.”

  “But you’re only not fussed about winning when you win.”

  He chuckled. “You got a good feel for this shite.”

  “That was sly,” she commended, “the way you messed with O’Sullivan’s head.”

  “He’s dead easy to read,” said Ramsey, closing his eyes again.

  “Meaning he’s just like you?”

  “Like I were.”

  “Must have cost your pride,” she said. “All those safeties.”

  “I passed Ronnie on his way out of his press conference. Looked at me daggers, he did. Said I ‘played like an old lady.’”

  An air of normalcy permeated the chitchat, as if the two had been debriefing after snooker matches for years. Not that it felt ordinary. It just felt simple.

  THE WHITE LIMO THAT drew up to the stage entrance brought back her childhood, when the family’s economy exhibited the same all-or-nothing quality of O’Sullivan’s ego. Her mother’s ballet lessons were hand-to-mouth; the b
ig infusions of cash were from her father’s sporadic dialogue-coaching gigs. When one of these sleek white whales pulled up to their old apartment house on the Upper West Side to collect her father for the airport at five a.m., she was awed as a little girl, and frustrated that it was too early for her friends to see. Older, she shared her mother’s despair that the studio didn’t have him take a taxi and issue a check for the difference, helping to cover next month’s rent. A limo did nothing that a car couldn’t, and had trouble turning corners at that; if one of the primary perks of being rich was merely looking it, the real benefits of wealth were thin on the ground. She couldn’t help but be impressed by the fuss made over Ramsey, but she didn’t want to be impressed by it.

  As if to demonstrate not only money’s limits but its sacrifice, the limo traveled the half-mile to the Royal Bath Hotel along the coast road, while Irina stared longingly at the beach, whose pure white sand glowed in the moonlight even through tinted windows. How much more delicious, to have strolled hand-in-hand beside the bay. But Ramsey required shepherding from the madding crowd, and a posh comportment was expected.

  Thus far disheartened by the garish contemporary appointments of Ramsey’s occupation, Irina was relieved when they arrived at the Royal Bath: it was old. Not to mention immense, white and lambent like the beach, bespeaking a bygone era of knee-length bathing costumes and parasols. One of those palatial institutions where it always seemed time for tea. Though the evening would not, however liquid in nature, sponsor a great deal of tea.

  The hotel staff fell over themselves congratulating Ramsey on his victory over O’Sullivan. Yet offers to carry his cue case were unavailing; Ramsey’s hands-off included Irina herself. Denise was destined to be the other woman in this relationship.

  Ramsey issued her into a large suite on the top floor, which overlooked the bay. Checking out the view, she played the silky tasseled tie-backs on the heavy maroon drapes through her fingers. In the outer sitting room, the hotel had placed a birds-of-paradise bouquet on the mahogany coffee table, with a congratulatory card. When she excused herself to the loo, she rinsed her hands under gold-plated faucets, wiping them on one of the fat white towels, in ostentatious supply. The terry-cloth shower curtain was embroidered with a color reproduction of the imposing Royal Bath as seen from the beach. The hotel’s opulence may have been at odds with the down-and-dirty ethos of Ramsey’s sport. Yet from whatever rat holes they had crawled, these days successful snooker players lived high. When she emerged, the manner in which Ramsey tossed his waistcoat on the brocade spread, then grabbed two champagne splits from the minibar fridge, which listed on a nearby card as £15 apiece, was decidedly blasé.

  Ramsey stood beside the bed with his shirt half-unbuttoned to expose a triangle of his chest. Though women traditionally swoon over well-developed pectorals, it was the very subtlety of the slight mounds that Irina found mesmerizing, and that made her long to touch them. His hairless, creamy torso was that of a boy on the high school swim team.

  As she kicked off her tennis shoes and slid onto the king-sized mattress, Ramsey shot her a sharp glance, glugging champagne into water glasses with all the ceremony of Diet Coke. “You came here with fuck-all? Not even a change of clothes?”

  “What I had in mind,” she said shyly, “more involved taking them off.”

  “Your message,” he continued. “I sussed out that you left Lawrence. Not excused yourself for a dirty weekend. Am I getting the wrong picture?”

  “No.” Irina frowned. Why at this of all junctures was he looking for trouble?

  “So why didn’t you pack a bag? Since, unless I flatter myself, I assume you left for keeps, a great massive bag at that?”

  Irina looked down. “Lawrence was there. I couldn’t force him to watch me load up a suitcase—with clothes that he’d washed and folded. It was too mean.”

  “It’s what was happening, innit? You was leaving him. When you don’t take a fresh pair of knickers, you give him the wrong idea. Like, never you mind, mate, I’ll be right back. Make him watch you bung in the frocks, he gets the message. This way the poor bloke can tell himself you’ll rock back up any time now, ’cos you need your shampoo.”

  “I can buy more shampoo,” she said warily, hugging her knees.

  “You worry about being mean to Anorak Man. What about being mean to me?”

  Irina’s frown was now entrenched, and if she kept her forehead in this clutch for much longer she’d get a headache. “I just left another man for you. This very afternoon. I’m not sure how that’s an act of cruelty, except to Lawrence.”

  He wouldn’t let it go. “You walk out on a bloke, you get your theater right. Your trappings. You stand at the door and you wave good-bye with a bag.”

  Irina felt the rise of an emotion so rare of late that she almost didn’t recognize it. But if she wasn’t mistaken, that was rage. “I’ve had a hard day, Ramsey. And that’s by way of employing your famous British understatement.”

  “That match with O’Sullivan weren’t no doddle neither.”

  She straightened her back. “You played a game today. I left a man. A man who’s been nothing but kind to me for nearly ten years. I’m not sure I’d put repudiating him in the same class as entertainment.” There was an edge in her voice that she wasn’t accustomed to hearing. It was interesting.

  “I’m chuffed you hold my profession in such high regard.”

  “I didn’t say anything about what regard I hold your profession in, high or low.”

  “I got the message.”

  “You’re getting nothing.”

  Ramsey stood a good ten feet away, having already slugged his champagne. Irina was bunched on the bed. This was a game, too, not one she’d played before.

  “Why are you doing this,” she said.

  “Doing what.”

  “You know.”

  “You should have packed a bag,” he said.

  “Doing that.”

  His expression resembled a dog’s with a rope in its mouth. Pull on the other end, and he’d just tug harder. “I want to know why you didn’t. It seems flighty. Not serious. Like you ain’t really here. Like you’re planning to go back.”

  Well, there had indeed been no purpose served by the one-hundred-mile journey from Waterloo if they could not close the last ten feet. Irina’s body went limp. She dragged her legs off the bed like the overstuffed hold-all that, criminally, she’d neglected to pack. She pulled on her wet tennis shoes, which had shrunk in the rain and felt tight. They were unpleasant.

  “This was a mistake,” she said to the shoes, having difficulty tying bows through large, exasperating tears. “Maybe there’s still a train back to London.”

  Wiping her eyes impatiently, she stepped toward the sitting room. Ramsey took an unsteady step to bar her way.

  “Let me go,” she said wearily.

  For a moment he tippled on the brink. She could see the indecision in his face, as his mind prepared yet another belligerent assertion that she should have packed a bag, then, almost whimsically, thought better of it. With a fluidity that belied Lawrence’s characterization of weakling, Ramsey reached under her arms and swept her over his head. Lowering her slowly, he slid her body against his until her mouth descended to within a hair of his lips.

  “Are we having a fight?” She inhaled the champagne and tobacco on his breath.

  He considered the matter. “No.”

  “Then what would you call it?”

  “I don’t see why we got to call it anything.”

  “How about ‘wasteful’?”

  Just before she kissed him, Irina had the presence of mind to flag the last five minutes for future reference.

  WHEN SHE STIRRED THE next morning, or what she took for morning, it was difficult to remember having sex the night before. Not because it had been drunken; she’d not even finished her split of champagne before they sank into bed. Rather, because something about fucking Ramsey was mysteriously unretainable.

  Twistin
g to read the clock, Irina discovered that it was two p.m. Wakening, she grew conscious of her body as the worse for wear. Ah: the shank of last evening swam into focus. After the sweat had dried, Ramsey had allowed that after such a high-profile upset, he’d be expected to put in an appearance at the bar of this hotel, where most of the other Grand Prix entrants were staying. More’s the pity for Irina’s head, the bar had a late license, and they must have spent a couple of hours schmoozing with Ramsey’s colleagues downstairs. Irina hadn’t eaten all day, and no one ever got around to food. After one night in Ramsey’s care, she was already, as Lawrence would remonstrate, on the Alex Higgins diet.

  Ramsey had spent the whole time in company with his arm around her, and Irina had relished the public claiming. Nonetheless, the rapid banter of the players and their managers, the clamor of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish accents, and the multiple allusions to notorious fluke pots all left her feeling in over her head, and she spoke little. Clinging to Ramsey without contributing much by way of conversation made her feel ornamental, and in dank jeans and an oversized sweater not much of an ornament at that. Resorting to Lawrence’s brand of social survival, at one point she’d tried to engage Ken Doherty in a discussion about Northern Irish politics, since he hailed from the Republic. But Doherty had excused himself anxiously for another round as soon as he could drain his glass.

  Ramsey himself was a surprise. He’d been so shy in foursomes with his wife the writer and Lawrence the think-tank wonk that she’d assumed he was socially quiet. Yet slumming with his own kind, Ramsey was garrulous, funny, and at his ease, leading the whole crowd in a rendition of some zany, interminable song called “Snooker Loopy.” It had been heartening to learn that Ramsey had a reputation with his colleagues as a life of the party. But if last night was anything to go by, there was only so much party she could take.

  It would be dark in four hours, and the day was already a washout. So Irina curled into Ramsey’s alabaster chest and kissed the bridge of his nose to wake him. After all, when you couldn’t quite remember what something felt like, the simplest way to refresh your memory was to do it again.