The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  9

  BY THE TIME LAWRENCE would be getting to the corner, Irina had registered that his hasty departure in this downpour was not well planned. Perhaps clinging a bit after their confrontation over marriage last night, he’d lingered at breakfast, then grabbed a light jacket as he raced out the door. Snatching his trench coat, she ran downstairs, glad that Lawrence had missed the light and was still waiting to cross Borough High Street.

  “Hey, Anorak Man! You’re getting soaked!” she shouted from their stoop, waving the coat. “You’re not dressed for this! You’ll get cold!”

  The light had turned, and he was late. “I’ll manage!” he cried.

  In her other hand she waved the clincher, a Ziplocked ham-and-cheese beading in the rain. “But you forgot your lunch!”

  After mutual hesitation, they both ran to the other, closing the block between them in a comic reprise of lovers dashing slo-mo through a field—only Irina wasn’t leaping barefoot through clover, but scampering across gritty, wet London pavement in socks.

  “Are you out of your mind?” asked Lawrence. “You’re not wearing any shoes!”

  “I have a nice warm home to go back to,” she said, pulling off his jacket—an anorak, in fact—helping him into the overcoat, and handing off their sturdiest umbrella. “I can change my socks.” After tucking the Ziploc in the ample pocket of the trench coat, Irina took the umbrella back, opened it, and set it in his free hand. She wiped off the droplets beaded in his eyebrows, slicked his matted hair back from his forehead, and smiled.

  “Thanks,” he said, holding the umbrella to shelter them both. With a look of having just remembered something, he leaned over and kissed her. It was a small kiss, closed-mouthed and chaste, but tender.

  One of those many interstitial sequences that didn’t tell well: Lawrence left for work in a jacket that wasn’t waterproof, and I ran after him in the rain with his overcoat and lunch. Little wonder that Irina began dinners with friends like Betsy at a loss for stories. But these moments were the stuff of life, and they were the stuff of a good life.

  Irina shivered back to the flat. Padding the hall to find dry socks while leaving wet footprints on the carpet, she reflected that the larger tale of their duo probably didn’t tell well, either. The only unconventional element in their lives together was this stint of expatriatism, but with Americans in London a dime a dozen, Several Years in the UK would never make a best-selling memoir. They were not waiting for anything in particular to happen. Presumably Lawrence would continue to establish himself in the think-tank biz—make more money, perhaps join the rotation of talking heads on the television news. Presumably Irina would continue to reap muted acclaim; who knows, maybe she’d win a prize. Likely they’d move back to the US in time, but Irina was in no rush. They hadn’t quite decided the question of childbearing, though whichever way they resolved the matter they’d not make history. Eventually they’d grow elderly and have health problems. In some ways, their lives together amounted to one big lamb-stuffed vine leaf. Why, look: the upshot of last night’s marriage palaver was that they’d keep on doing what they’d been doing. What a shock.

  She tidied the toast-and-coffee dishes, then fetched the post, sifting supermarket offers for bills. Rain splatted the windowpanes, but the building was old and solid and they’d never had a problem with leaks. Treating herself to an upward nudge of the thermostat, she slipped a cassette of Chopin nocturnes into the stereo and nestled into her chair at the dining table to write checks. Her black woven velour sweater was a little dirty and oversized, but thick and soft. She felt protected.

  Snug in the flat for the rest of the day while it bucketed outside put her in mind of camping in Talbot Park with her best friend at age fourteen. After their wiener roast, the sky had blackened; in high winds, she and Sarah barely managed to pole and spike the tent. Zipping the flaps as a torrent unleashed, the two girls had unfurled their sleeping bags and grinned. Only a thin nylon interface separated them from misery, its very tentativeness intensifying Irina’s conscious gratitude for refuge. They’d played gin rummy with a flashlight while the rain lashed their flimsy dome, the seams overhead barely beginning to glisten. Still, the seams gloriously held, the pelting resonating in their ad hoc home, replete with books, a transistor radio, and a thermos of minestrone. The overnight in Talbot Park was a touchstone of sorts. That evening she’d experienced an explosive joy for the simple fact that she was warm and dry.

  For most Americans, the sensation of safety was an unmindful default setting, the least you could expect, or the worst. “Security” was often cited disapprovingly as the reason that some women stayed in bad marriages, implying, security meaning money, an arrangement just shy of prostitution. Too, folks who opted for security supposedly traded adventure and spontaneity for a spiritual subsistence that was pat and dead. But for Irina and Lawrence, achieving any semblance of security had been hard work. Safe haven was probably hard-won for most people, whose refuges were far frailer than they appeared—not so different from that Talbot Park tent, and as readily flattened by a gust of circumstance: a plant closure, a dip in the markets, a flood during the one month that the house was freakishly uninsured. It stood to reason, then, that security was a more precious commodity than its plodding reputation would suggest—and that it was profligate to treasure safety only in retrospect.

  Not only had Lawrence earned a doctorate in international relations from an Ivy League school after growing up in a desert in more than one sense, but he didn’t have a job out of school. For their first three years together he churned out applications to universities, journals, and think tanks galore while part-timing in bookstores. Here and there he’d have an article or op-ed accepted, but for the most part it was three solid years of rejection. He spent his weekends glowering at televised golf. For all that time, they had no reason to anticipate that at long last salvation in the form of a crisp, letterheaded envelope with postage stamps of Queen Elizabeth would ever perch in their mailbox. Meanwhile, every unexpected expense, even a broken toaster, prompted a crisis.

  For her own part, the road to illustration had run neither straight nor smooth. Tormented over her buck teeth, Irina had been a reclusive child who often drew alone in her room after school. She’d kept a pictorial journal with printed captions since she was ten (“Irina has to tip-toe passed the stoopid studio or she’ll get in big trouble”; “Mama’s ballet students are rilly stuck up”), but narcissistic, self-dramatizing parents had left her allergic to the arts. So she hadn’t gone to college at Pratt or Cooper Union but Hunter, capitalizing (a little lazily) on her background by majoring in Russian. She’d first earned her crust by translating dry Russian seismology texts, and tripped over illustration by accident.

  In her late twenties, she’d been living with a brooding, volatile divorcé named Casper, a frustrated novelist (if there’s any other kind) on the Upper West Side with joint custody of a seven-year-old daughter. Inspired by the library books he checked out for his little girl, like a legion of naïve novelists before him he figured that in comparison to literary fiction the children’s market would be a cinch to crack. Since Irina had continued to draw idly in her journal evenings, he proposed that they collaborate.

  Convinced that it was never too early to introduce kids to the “real world,” Casper wrote a story about a little boy named Spacer (a less-than-apt anagram of the author’s name) who wants more than anything in the world to win the sack race on Sports Day at his school. The boy practices and practices in his backyard (for Irina, drawing all those different sacks—not only the traditional potato sack, but duffels, sleeping-bag covers, those lovely white-and-orange carrier bags from Zabar’s—had been great fun). But when the big day arrives, Spacer doesn’t win the race. He doesn’t even place.

  Yet Casper refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it’s not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year.
Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn’t good enough. Casper wouldn’t allow that his protagonist was somehow a finer character for learning to lose graciously, nor would he let the poor kid off the hook by at least downgrading the importance of sack races in general. Casper’s idea that you teach kids point-blank that sometimes you don’t get what you want, period, was, um, sophisticated she supposed, but a little brutal. While she was also able to head off titles like The Loser and Little Engine That Couldn’t, his final choice, Sacked Race, was no more inviting.

  The text was roundly rejected. Yet to her astonishment, one editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux expressed interest in the illustrator. Although the selective come-hither spelled the end not only of the collaboration but of the relationship, doodling on her lonesome with colored pencils sure beat translating papers on plate tectonics.

  It wasn’t easy, though, and it still wasn’t. For long periods she’d had to illustrate on spec, and several of these projects never saw the light of day. Even now, after eight published picture books, her work was not widely known. Only thanks to Lawrence’s patient encouragement had she never given up.

  Point being, there’d been nothing exhilarating about tippling on the edge of professional oblivion. More recently, there was nothing boring about being able to pay the phone bill. Not being able to pay the phone bill had been boring as could be.

  But it was in the romantic realm that Irina was particularly flummoxed why anyone would exalt unremitting peril. What was dreary about being confident that on the average evening your partner would come home? Irina’s most profound sense of safety hailed from the solidity of her bond with Lawrence, which she pictured visually as one of those sisal ropes that tether ocean liners—weathered a shade gray by the elements, but six inches thick and multiply wound on a one-hundred-pound brass cleat. Lawrence would never leave her. Lawrence would never cheat on her. Irina never rifled Lawrence’s post or went through his pockets, not because she was gullible or afraid of being caught, but because she knew with certainty that there was nothing to find. In turn, she would never leave Lawrence nor, that bizarre brush with temptation in July notwithstanding, cheat on him, either. Barring an untimely auto accident, that they would grow old together wasn’t simply an aspiration; it was a fact. She’d bet the farm on it. Now, that was real security, regardless of whether Lawrence lost his job or her illustration prospects dwindled. She was damned if she understood why anyone would prefer to get up in the morning and confront the snarl, “All right! Who is it?” She failed to see the entertainment value in one of you flouncing out the door with no promise of ever coming back.

  So, Irina considered over the electric bill, did their difference over marriage last night qualify as a “fight”? Funnily enough, she rather hoped that it did. Curious, this hunger she sometimes felt for conflict, since the odd affray seemed to lend their lives the grain and marble of fine red meat. Yet she could count the instances that she and Lawrence had conducted proper set-tos with fingers to spare.

  There was memorable aggro over the coffee table of green Italian marble that she’d located at the Oxfam outlet in Streatham, whose installation Lawrence had resisted with disproportionate ferocity—being convinced from her description that it was garish. Willfully, she bought the table over his objections, though the deliveryman would only prop it in the lobby on the ground floor. Lawrence refused to help in protest, and alone she hauled the heavy slab to their first-floor flat stair by stair. Silently she slid it before his beloved sofa of a like shade. “Huh,” he said sheepishly. “Kind of brings the whole room together, doesn’t it?”

  In kind, when he was offered the research fellowship in London, she was happy for him of course—but irked that she’d no say in the matter, regardless of her attachment to New York. But in short order she loved London, relished living abroad, and conceded cheerfully that he’d been right to accept the post.

  Thus their few clashes had clustered around issues of dominion: who was the boss and of what. Resolutions involved the division of territory. Indeed, most couples seemed to carve up the world like rival colonial powers divvying the spoils of conquest. Much as Germany got Tanzania and Belgium the Congo, Irina ruled the aesthetic, and Lawrence the intellectual. She spoke with authority about the appalling lineup for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery this year, he with authority about New Labour’s inconsistent immigration policies.

  Granted, the perpetual peacetime that yawned before them was potentially stultifying. Yet with her parents constantly at each other’s throats, Irina’s childhood had been anything but oppressively serene. The hurtle of porcelain may have provided a brittle thrill, but now Irina and her sister would inherit only a few stray pieces of the cobalt china that their maternal grandmother had improbably wheeled out of the Soviet Union in a tea chest when fleeing Hitler’s armies and all the way to a Russian enclave of Paris. Did their mother go to the trouble of shipping that tea chest when she emigrated to the US, merely to ensure that she and her husband would fling dishes of the finest quality? Imagine, that china surviving the clash of civilizations, but not one lousy marriage.

  As for what Irina’s parents fought about—money, of course; her father refused to sell insurance when dialogue coaching dried up just so Raisa could buy another $300 A-line from Saks. There were fights involving jealousy, although Raisa was generally enraged that, when she mentioned a handsome widowed father of a ballet student on costly calls to California, her husband didn’t get jealous enough. They didn’t like each other much. Since even minor disputes tended to expose this unpleasant truth, Irina resisted romanticizing the “tempestuous relationship” for its queasy injections of excitement.

  She and Lawrence were contented together. If that was a problem, she could live with it.

  LAWRENCE PHONED EARLY THAT afternoon. “Yo, Irina Galina! I’ve got a surprise!”

  “You just spent ten grand on an engagement ring.”

  “What, you trying to make my real surprise seem dinky?”

  “No, I’m trying to turn a point of contention into a joke. And if you did any such thing, I’d have your head, milyi.”

  “Anyway, I checked last night’s snooker results. Turns out that Ramsey beat Hendry by a frame. After a slow start, seems it was a great match.”

  “Which I deprived you of. All over the trivial issue of whether we should get married.” But her tone was good-humored.

  “You can make it up to me,” said Lawrence. “Ramsey’s playing the Big Baby tonight in the second round. If we get the 4:32 out of Waterloo, we can just make it.”

  It was meant to be a lovely little gesture of inclusiveness, compensation for his lackluster response to her marriage proposal. Curiously, her stomach tightened around her small lunch. “You mean… go to Bournemouth?”

  “Yeah! You were hacked off when I wanted to go by myself, remember?”

  Being hurt that he didn’t want her along was quite a different matter from wanting to go. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I remember. Though the weather…”

  “Eat the weather,” said Lawrence. “I tried to raise Ramsey on his cell, but it’s switched off—so I couldn’t get us comps. But I called to reserve tickets, and lucked out; there were only a few left. I found us a hotel in the area, so we can make a night of it.”

  “So, what… then we eat out?”

  “Well, obviously we should see if Ramsey’s free afterwards. He’d be offended if we came and then didn’t try to hook up.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said in a tone that Lawrence wouldn’t have understood.

  “Get a few things together, and meet me at Waterloo information at four-fifteen.”

  Lawrence could be a little bossy.

  After her self-congratulatory reverie this morning she didn’t want to be conjuring sharp thoughts like Lawrence could be a little bossy. Though she had a couple of hours before she needed to leave, the sudden change of plans put her in such turmoil that continuing to
draw was out of the question. She hadn’t seen Ramsey Acton since that disquieting birthday dinner in July, and she didn’t want to see him.

  Lawrence wouldn’t care if she showed up at Waterloo wearing the same rumpled clothes she had on, but abruptly the jeans felt grungy, the voluminous sweater shapeless and unflattering. After burning through a variety of outfits before the mirror, she wondered whether rocking up at Ramsey’s match in an alarmingly short skirt of black denim, which flared sassily from her thighs, and strapped 40s heels that with this skirt made her legs in black nylons look a mile high might be inconsiderate of a man who admitted that he was “lonely.” But hey, it wasn’t her fault if he couldn’t find his own girl. Checking out the effect in the mirror before she dashed out the door, she thought, Good God—I look like Bethany.

  She brisked to the station with their second sturdiest umbrella. At the information booth, for once Lawrence didn’t ride her for dressing up, but whistled thinly through his teeth; he seemed to like it when she looked like Bethany. Having already purchased the train tickets, he imitated the Cockney ticket seller as they located the platform—“Aynt no trines bick to Loondun ofter tan-farty-throy, mite!” He had a good ear.

  Once they were ensconced in the carriage and it lurched off, she was free to lie back and think of England. Out the window, poky houses with yards the size of bathtubs gave way to sheep.

  “Ramsey must be pretty pissed off with some of his press,” said Lawrence. “The guy beats the #1 in the game, and the coverage was snide. This also-ran rep he’s got—it’s not as if he’s a loser. To stay in the game for thirty years, you have to win a shitload of matches, even if he’s never taken the championship.”