The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “I’m getting well knackered hearing all about how good and kind Anorak Man were—if he’s so bloody good and kind, go back to the gobshite!”

  She stood up. “You know, every time we have a fight—meaning, three times a week—you raise the stakes to whether we’re together at all. What was the point of getting married if it was only by way of presenting you with constant opportunity to threaten divorce? And it’s cheating. You’re like a poker player who bets towers of chips on every hand, so in order to call you the other player has to risk everything he has. Which, so long as we’re on the poker allusion, also means you’re bluffing!”

  “Bollocks, I’m bluffing!” Ramsey cried, springing from the sofa and jingling his car keys in her face. “I’ll drive you to sweet, adoring Anorak Man right now!”

  “Which is all by way of not talking about one problem in particular!” Irina shouted back. “Like, I have to get my stuff, and I won’t sneak into the flat behind Lawrence’s back. Or: yes, I’m in love with you, but I never said I’d never see Lawrence again just to make you feel safe. No! We always have to address the big question of whether we’re going to make it at all, so we never get around to the little questions that are the only ones you have a hope in hell of getting your hands on! It’s childish, Ramsey! Can’t get through those little questions and the big one is a moot point.”

  “Moot, what’s moot? You can stuff your moot right up your arse!”

  She burst out laughing. Apparently domestic discord was a sport. She’d been hopelessly out of shape last autumn, but the muscles were starting to come on. Maybe the best hope for this marriage wasn’t in gelling it into a harmonious aspic, but in learning to give as good as she got.

  Ramsey lassoed her waist and swept her to the couch. “Let’s go get you something bunged with chilies. That knocks your socks off. And everything else whilst we’re at it.”

  “Best of India. I’ll skip the main course and just eat pot after pot of lime pickle.”

  As Irina lay across Ramsey’s lap and caught her breath, he traced her moist hairline with a forefinger. “What’s with this spicy-food lark? What’s the draw?”

  Head flung back, she pondered the matter. “I like playing a line—between pleasure and pain. Like cheeses so high that they almost taste awful, but not quite. And with chilies, it’s also about sensation. Raw sensation. The extremity of it.”

  “Sensation, is it?” said Ramsey, sliding his hand under the waistband of her jeans. “I’ll show you sensation.”

  They never did make it to Best of India that night. But lime pickle or no, Irina would be playing a line between pleasure and pain for some time to come.

  FOR RAMSEY, TO PUT any point of contention permanently to rest was to throw something perfectly good away. Thus the question of how Irina might retrieve the tools of her trade was anything but settled, and consumed virtually every evening for the next few weeks. Exhausted by reiterations of how she really was over Lawrence and multiple assurances that she wasn’t conniving to arrange a romantic rendezvous and painstaking postmodernist deconstructions of just exactly what she’d meant by wanting to find out if he was “okay,” she negotiated a compromise: she would pick up her things at the flat on the Q-T while Lawrence was at work, but without Ramsey. Irina managed to impress upon him the horror all around if by any chance, however remote, Lawrence chose that of all afternoons to come home early, to find not only his estranged partner absconding with her possessions on the sly, but the scoundrel who had stolen her away. If she was appealing to Ramsey’s cowardice, she was also employing a skill that, absent his acquaintance, might forever have lain dormant.

  She lied.

  In truth, she had quietly e-mailed Lawrence from Ramsey’s computer. Their exchange was brief. Lawrence agreed to take an afternoon off, and meet her at the flat.

  The irony of sneaking around to see Lawrence just as she had once sneaked around to see Ramsey was not lost on her. But there was no chance in hell that she was going to covertly disappear herself from Borough, leaving Lawrence to experience entry into his own home like a sock in the jaw. Besides, what drove her most powerfully to arrange a meeting with Lawrence she was reluctant to explain. Ever since coming back from Sheffield, burning through the fog of sexual intoxication, a vision in the back of her mind had grown steadily more insistent.

  It is late. After eight p.m. or even nine. With no one to jump up at his return, to sally to the kitchen to make popcorn, he has no motivation to cut short his work, to which he has turned with a vengeance these last few months. Tonight, after lingering in the office, picking aimlessly through Web sites, at last he trudges the walkway along the Thames in the chill mizzle of a cold spring. Wearing faded black Dockers and a maroon-and-black striped button-down that Irina had always liked, he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his 50s reproduction baseball jacket, a present for his fortieth birthday. Maybe this jacket ought to have become repugnant to him. Instead, all her presents, freshly finite, have grown more precious. He will persist in wearing this jacket to work well past the point that it’s too warm for the season.

  The lights of the South Bank across the river glimmer with all the Shakespeare and Pinter that he once yearned to make time for. Now he cannot imagine getting up the gumption to see a play. By himself—no way. The slope of Blackfriars Bridge feels steeper than usual. Off to his left, Tower Bridge twinkles in the distance. Its fairy-tale turrets used to look, if not beautiful, at least hilarious, and now just look hokey. If the walk also seems longer than it once did, he would have it take longer still.

  Nearing the flat, he surveys the heavy postindustrial neighborhood with its Victorian remnants of red brick. He searches for his former sense of satisfied ownership, of having annexed a Dickensian domain far from trashy Las Vegas. To the contrary, he feels like a foreigner again, and wonders what he’s doing here. Moving to Britain had seemed a well-calibrated adventure at first. The natives at least nominally speak English. An American can get the nuances and really come to grips with the place. Yet now Britain feels like any old somewhere else, somewhere he doesn’t belong. He wonders if it’s time to pick up stakes and move back to the States. He still prefers the company of Americans, who don’t have broomsticks up their asses. And maybe shipping back to the US would keep at bay the confusing sensation he suffers almost nightly: an overweening ache to go “home” when he’s already there.

  He traipses to the first floor according to the Brits, which he insists on calling the second. He fumbles with his keys. The stairwell’s timer-light is out. It was always Irina who nagged the management company to make prompt repairs. Inside, the flat is also dark. He forgot to open the drapes this morning. Without the street lamps glowing through the windows, he gropes for the switch. The flat is not strictly silent. Past rush hour, the traffic on Trinity Street is still thick. But the rev of engines and irritable honk of horns outside don’t provide a reassuring sense of human bustle nearby. They merely press the existence of several million strangers he doesn’t give a shit about.

  Big surprise: he turns on the TV. Its yammer might have been a reminder of too many happier evenings squandered in front of the tube, but he is not a what-might-have-been kind of guy. BBC2 announces the upcoming broadcast of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. Most men in his position would hasten to change the channel. He decides to leave it on. He likes irony. He may even like to torture himself, though circumstance seems to be torturing him without his help. Besides, he doesn’t consider keeping snooker in the background an act of masochism. He’s staring reality in the eye. He may be running a distant risk of tuning into that miserable prick. But he’s a strong man. He could look the miserable prick in the eye, too. There’s always the danger that he will ram his fist through the screen. The satisfaction might be worth a few hundred quid. He likes the image. He saunters to the kitchen for a peanut-butter cracker.

  He has resolved to eat proper meals with vegetables. Yet so far by the time he gnaws through a handful of the
se peanut-butter crackers, he can’t get it together to steam broccoli. He stands over the cutting board to catch the crumbs. His eye roams the kitchen. The shelves by the stove are still lined with all those spices he hasn’t a clue what to do with—though apparently a good third of the array is for sprinkling on popcorn. The spices will get stale. Meantime the long rows of jars make passable wallpaper. Of course, every room in the flat is impressed with Irina’s hand. The only time he tried to participate in the décor was when he put his foot down about that green marble coffee table. Now look—he loves it. But it’s in the kitchen her presence is the most insistent. Arcane condiments from the West Indies and Thailand, when all he needs is mustard. The counter-encroaching clutter of pasta-maker, food processor, meat grinder, when one sharp paring knife will suffice. He could pile all this junk into boxes. He won’t.

  He roams back to the living room with a beer, semireclining, as ever, on the green couch; he has yet to sit in her armchair. It’s nice here. She did a good job, finding all this wacky secondhand furniture that somehow fits together, and for a song. What a cheapskate she was. Is? (That bastard is loaded.) If only he’d had advance warning, he’d have spent more money. On her. Gone places.

  This is the stuff people think on deathbeds. You know, why didn’t I max out my credit cards. Well, he’s not dead yet. Just ailing. He’ll get over it. These are still early days, and they have to be the worst. Think of it as any other discipline, like getting through all the other things you don’t want to do—revising the article on the Ulster peace process for that fool at the National Interest, crunches at the gym. As he ponders, pretty much every task in his day falls into the category of what he doesn’t want to do.

  Christ, she must have spent a solid week sewing those drapes, with linings and everything. Never made drapes before, and they came out like a pro’s. She was handy.

  Oddly, he finds reminders of her more consoling than painful. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. He knows that he should be angry. He knows that he probably is. He knows that he would be better off if he hated her, not necessarily a lot but a little. But he doesn’t want to and it doesn’t come naturally and it probably wouldn’t help after all. She’s a perfect idiot, and that’s a shame. But stupid is not the same as bad. Maybe that’s a distinction he might have allowed a while ago.

  He didn’t used to think like this—about how he feels. He prefers to think about what he’s doing, about what he’s going to do. But Irina doesn’t realize that not thinking about what you feel is not the same as feeling nothing. He doesn’t like to embarrass himself, and he had thought she understood. Apparently not. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a damn what he feels, though he has a hard time believing that. Anyway, as for this feeling crap, there is only one rule now, which he enforces with military discipline: he is at liberty to think about anything else he likes. But he is absolutely forbidden to imagine that she might come back.

  The snooker is not very riveting. He can’t tell if it’s the match itself—Graeme Dott, who looks about four years old, and that weasel Peter Ebdon, who’s always punching the air like an ass when he wins—or his state of mind. (Should Miserable Prick have been on air he might even have found the exercise in antipathy invigorating. Still, he is relieved to skip it. He was at the office for almost twelve hours today, and he’s tired.) Faced with this sport, he may always flinch a bit from now on. But he doesn’t see why he has to forswear snooker altogether. In fact, he resists its being taken from him along with everything else. Man, who would have guessed that such a harmless pastime would produce consequences so cataclysmic. Then, maybe if it weren’t that lying, narcissistic prick, it would have been some other creep. He himself is reliable, smart, decent—even Irina would agree—but maybe that’s just another way of saying that he’s the kind of man that sooner or later women leave.

  By the end of the evening, he has allowed himself one more beer. He resolves to cut his nightly consumption back down to one. He brushes his teeth. Her toothbrush is right where she left it. He has to remind himself to turn down the heat and chain the door, because these were Irina’s jobs. But overall, the course of his evening has not really changed much since she split. True, he eats too many peanut-butter crackers and Indian takeouts. He misses her cooking, but not quite as much as she might expect. Food isn’t that important to him, not nearly as important as it is to her. What he misses most of all—however sleazy this might sound—is her doing the shopping.

  And there is one standard ritual that he’s had to chuck. He tried going through the motions once, and it made him cry. So he can’t eat popcorn. The picture of a grown man bawling over a bowl of popcorn was too humiliating to repeat. He’d added too much salt anyway. The bottom of the batch had burned; the pop under the lid had been dull and fitful. The grudgingly exploded kernels were tight, and stuck in his teeth. In his throat, more like it.

  In bed, he reads a few pages, and considers jerking off. [It is here that Irina’s imagination was stymied; she never did know what went on in his head when he got hard, and she still didn’t.] He decides it’s too much trouble. He would have to go get a washcloth to keep nearby, or make a mess.

  He did plenty of work today, wrote a good ten pages on the piece for Foreign Affairs. He put in a heavy workout at the gym, and skipped lunch. He should be pleased with himself. But the only thing that pleases him is that one more day is over.

  The etiquette of such occasions was obscure, but Irina stayed on the safe side and knocked. She had a key, and the deference felt unnatural. At the last minute, she hurriedly slipped her wedding ring into her pocket. She should break the news gently when the time was right—and when would the time be right? When Lawrence opened the door, she experienced a mild shock: she’d never apprehended him before as a solidly middle-aged man. The last several months may have taken their toll. Or perhaps they had enabled her to see him as the age that he actually was.

  “Hi,” they both said shyly. Lawrence kissed her uncertainly on the cheek.

  “Coffee? Or would you rather start packing?” he offered.

  “Let’s have coffee first,” she said, though she didn’t want any. She trailed him to the kitchen. The flat was neat, and nothing had changed. Because this was his flat now, Lawrence would prepare the coffee. She hovered as he ground the beans.

  Whatever he was saying, it was impossible to pay attention. The flat itself was too distracting. To enter these rooms was to visit not only the past but an alternative present, and their sheer physical reality exerted an alarming pull, tantalizing her with the ease with which she might simply hook her bag on the rack and never return to Hackney. The flat held a secret that she needed to crack. As Lawrence made small talk, something about a washer on the hot-water tap, her glance ping-ponged from the spice rack to the Spanish anchovies to his fast-forward older face, frantically taking the measure of how she felt. What had this life been like? Was it deficient in some way; had it all been a sham? No… Life in Borough was simply different than life in the East End. Known, but anywhere and anyone you stayed with would become that. She did not feel unhappy here; they must have had an agreeable life together. It was a tad stuffy, pent up, but the verdict of her first reentry was that she could have left, and could have not. What good was that?

  “So,” said Lawrence once they’d carted their coffee to the living room in the usual glasses, though Lawrence hadn’t added quite enough milk to hers. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You look pale. And too thin.”

  “I’m underslept.” Embarrassed by what this might seem to imply, she added, “The last few weeks. We’ve had some conflicts. It takes hours to hash them out.” In fifteen minutes, she was already telling tales out of school.

  Lawrence had a stricter sense of decorum, and didn’t ask conflicts about what.

  “You and I never fought much,” she went on uneasily. “I’m not good at it.”

  His eyes sharpened. “He doesn’t hit you, does
he?”

  “No, never!”

  “If he ever lays a hand on you, I’ll break his thumbs.”

  She smiled. “The Hustler.”

  “Good pick-up. At least he hasn’t turned you into a complete idiot.”

  She sighed. “Oh, go ahead, have fun. You’ve earned it.”

  “I’ve earned nothing, it was dumped on me. And it’s not fun.”

  “I worry about you, Lawrence.”

  “What good does that do?”

  “No good. But it would be appalling if I didn’t. Don’t you worry about me?”

  “Habit’s hard to break.”

  “Speaking of habits, before I forget.” Irina rummaged her pocketbook. “I got you a present.” She handed him a plastic bag. “It’s tiny and stupid.”

  Lawrence pulled out the packet of a dark red mixture and looked at it uncomprehendingly. “Hey, thanks!” he said. He had no idea for what.

  “Popcorn seasoning,” she explained. “One of your favorites. It’s hard to find. I knew we were out”—the we was a slip, but correcting it would only make matters worse—“so when I came across dry garlic chutney in the East End, I picked you up a bag.”

  As he held the little packet limply in his lap, she realized that the gesture was misjudged. In her delight at locating the obscure masala in the Indian shop on Roman Road, she’d reminded herself that Lawrence’s sudden allergy to popcorn had merely materialized in her imagination. Surely, she’d reasoned, he still ate popcorn with a beer every night, because such a routinized man would take solace in ritual, in sameness. But now she suspected her initial intuition that the snack had overnight become anathema to him was probably accurate. The dry garlic chutney clearly depressed him. When he put it aside on the couch she even wondered whether as soon as she left he would throw it away, maybe taking it immediately to the wheelie bins out back the way he would quickly dispose of a chicken carcass, lest it begin to reek.