The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  She apologized, “It’s amazing I didn’t show up here with an armload of groceries and your dry cleaning.”

  “You’re not responsible for me anymore.”

  “That’s funny. I think I am. Once you assume a certain kind of responsibility, I’m not sure you’re at liberty to give it back.”

  “Sure you can,” he dismissed. “Look, I’ll be okay. As for our splitting up, it’s not so great. Not what I wanted. But I’ll get over it. They say it takes about a year.”

  “You’ve never set much store by what they say.”

  “Yeah. Chances are that’s horseshit.” Despite his pretense of practicality, he was having trouble looking her in the eye. He trained his gaze forty-five degrees to the left of her face, as if there were a third person sitting at the dining table. “By the way, I had an option on going to Russia this last month. Big Chechnya project, but I passed.”

  “I’m surprised. Why didn’t you go?”

  “Don’t let this swell your head, but—Russia’s too wrapped up with you. Even the language. I figured I’d hear, you know, Privyet, milyi! on the street and mistake it for your voice. Maybe if we’d been able to go to Moscow together… Spilt milk, I guess. Funny, I thought I was really interested in the place. When the grant came through for the project, I was excited at first. But without this—association… Turns out I don’t give a shit about Russia. Kind of weird.”

  “Nu shto zhe tak,” she sorrowed. Yet the language jarred, much like the dry garlic chutney, as staking a claim to an intimacy she had forsaken.

  “You know, I knew you’d be back,” said Lawrence. “Your illustrations of The Miss Ability Act are due at the end of next week, and you’re a pro.”

  “You remember my deadline?”

  “I remember everything that’s important to you, and for you.”

  “I’m a little behind on that project,” she admitted. “I got an extension.”

  “I’ve never known you to deliver a project late. But you can’t have drawn much the last several months. Unless moneybags has bought you a new set of art supplies.”

  “No, it’s been something of an impromptu holiday.”

  “Must have been some party. Your body’s thin, but your face is puffy.”

  “I told you, I need sleep.”

  “And you’re smoking.”

  “Just a little!”

  “I can smell it.” He pulled up short. This wasn’t the direction he’d have wanted their meeting to go. “I know you think I’m oppressive. But I just want you to take care of yourself. That’s all it’s about. Not trying to control you or something.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Guess you could tell me a thing or two about snooker now!” he said with false heartiness.

  She smiled with one side of her mouth. “More than I’d prefer.”

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “I didn’t wish for snooker. It came with the territory.”

  “I’m damned what you did wish for, but that’s my problem.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Good. I don’t.” He seemed to struggle with something, and succeed. “You can’t neglect your work, Irina. You’ll regret it. Chuck me, but keep that.”

  “It’s been a big change. I haven’t reached an equilibrium.”

  “Are you going to all his tournaments?”

  “So far,” she said cautiously.

  “If you don’t watch out he will eat you alive.” Lawrence assumed the voice of her conscience. That’s the role he’d always assumed, so no wonder she’d fled. One’s conscience is not always charming company.

  “You should trust me,” she said without thinking, since the repost was predictable.

  “I did.”

  Irina looked down. “I worry that I’ll never be the same again. I still don’t feel good. As in constant. Trustworthy.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you to stay with me out of virtue. As if you were doing me a favor.” He shrugged. “You should have done what you wanted.”

  “What I wanted wasn’t so simple.”

  “Sure it was.” His face lurched to one side like water in a bucket. Other people would read the expression as snide, but Irina could see it for a wrench of anguish that he was trying to disguise. “You wanted to fuck me, or some other guy.”

  “N-o-o… One of the things I wanted was to be a woman who keeps her word.”

  “We never got married. You didn’t break a promise.”

  “I think I did,” she said. “And I’ve always hoped to be a woman who loves the same man for a long time. Now I can’t have that anymore. Even if I stay with Ramsey until death us parts, I’ll always have left you. At first I was upset about betraying you; now I’m upset about betraying myself.”

  He had never been comfortable with this kind of talk, and he still wasn’t. “Don’t give yourself a hard time on my account. I’m a survivor.” His pronunciation was bitter, like, look at the clichés you’ve reduced me to. In fact, this whole scene seemed suddenly to embarrass him as the kind of melodrama that in the lives of others drew his contempt, and he stood up. “Want to get to it?”

  Irina slid her coffee onto the green marble coffee table. The little she’d drunk had soured her stomach. The picture of his pouring most of her Guatemalan dark roast down the drain after she’d left was unbearable. “I guess.”

  In the studio, several collapsed cardboard cartons leaned against her drawing table, atop which sat a roll of packing tape, a tape gun, and a black felt-tip marker, all still in their packaging from Ryman. There was a new portfolio for the drawings, too; he’d chosen an expensive brand.

  “All these packing things must have set you back,” she said. “You should let me reimburse—”

  “Don’t be stupid.” As he briskly assembled a box, Lawrence’s businesslike demeanor granted her permission to go about this task with a similar stoicism. If they got maudlin over every paintbrush, he implied, they’d be here for a week.

  “Lawrence, I can do this by myself.”

  “It’ll go faster with two of us,” he said grimly. “Go ahead, get a move on!”

  Irina rolled up her sleeves and focused on which materials she couldn’t live without, and which, like the craypas, had been a passing dalliance she was unlikely to use again. Directed to whole shelves of pencils, charcoals, and colored inks that had to go, Lawrence wrapped them into neat rolls of old Daily Telegraphs. He was an industrious man, even when going about the systematic destruction of his own universe. At length, they both seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being engaged in a project together again, and to grow wistful when the cartons were taped and labeled, the portfolios tied.

  “Don’t you want to take anything else?” He gestured at the prints on the walls.

  Irina recoiled. “No!” The notion of removing a single element of his familiar landscape was horrifying.

  “What about your clothes?”

  “I don’t know—there’s nowhere to put them. You know British architecture, there are hardly any closets, and Jude absconded with her wardrobes. I’ve picked up a few things, and Ramsey has—a lot of clothes.” Just then, the musical chairs of modern romance seemed if nothing else an organizational hash. Apparently the phenomenon most fueling real-estate demand in London was divorce, requiring two residences where once a single dwelling had sufficed. Wasn’t monogamy more efficient? How many times in your life do you really want to buy a blender?

  “He’s something of a dandy,” said Lawrence.

  “I know you—you mean a faggot.”

  “Wish he were.” He smiled. They were playing.

  Irina wandered to the bedroom and flipped through her thrift-shop finery, shabby compared to the gear that Ramsey had bought her, at whose price tags he never glanced. In fact, she’d felt self-conscious showing up this afternoon in a blouse that Lawrence had never seen. As the primary launderer of the pair, he was the intimate of her every sock, and was sentimental abou
t her most tattered tops. He’d spent £5 on a pretreatment preparation for the turmeric stains on that faded blue polo-neck, when the shirt itself had cost £1.50 at Oxfam. By lavishing so much care on the garments, he had come to own them more than she did, and Irina closed the wardrobe empty-handed.

  “One more thing,” Lawrence raised in the living room, not looking up from last week’s Economist. “Your mother. She’s called several times now. I palmed off some excuse about our being too strapped to come to Brighton Beach last Christmas, but she’s expecting us this year. You obviously haven’t told her we’ve split up. I don’t think it’s in your interests that I do the honors. So get it over with.”

  “She likes you,” Irina despaired.

  “And I can’t stand her, so? I don’t want to have to field any of these calls again.”

  “I’ll tell her.” Irina’s voice was steeped in dread.

  “Now, is Asshole coming to pick you up?”

  “No. I’m supposed to take a taxi.”

  “Supposed to. You’re taking orders now?”

  “I seem always to be taking orders from somebody.”

  Lawrence rang for a minicab, and negotiated with the dispatcher over finding a car with a large capacity trunk. (The exchange took longer than need be because Lawrence refused to say boot, and the dispatcher refused to understand trunk.) He carried the cartons downstairs, and wouldn’t let her haul a one. He waited with her at the curb, loaded the cab, and proffered a twenty to cover the fare.

  She hesitated. Twenty quid was too much, and Ramsey was rich. But demurring might imply that she didn’t need him now, or that the gesture hadn’t touched her. She accepted the bill. They faced each other on the pavement.

  “So far,” he said, “do you think you’re going to stick this out?” Something had changed. Lawrence was learning to ask about the main thing.

  The three words were difficult to lift from her mouth. “I think so.” Imagine how much harder it would be to tell him that she was married.

  “Be careful,” he said. He didn’t mention of what.

  “Careful would have been staying with you,” she said wanly.

  “Don’t drink too much!”

  “I won’t.”

  “Get some work done!”

  “I’ll get some work done.”

  “And stop smoking!”

  “I shall always wear my hat,” Irina sang from Amahl and the Night Visitors. The opera’s responsive parting between mother and son (Wash your ears! / Yes, I promise / Don’t tell lies! / No, I promise / I shall miss you very much…) had always raised the hairs on her neck.

  “You should take that CD,” said Lawrence. “You like to play it at Christmas.”

  Irina searched his face. “Why are you so nice to me?”

  “You were nice to me for almost ten years,” he said gruffly. “Why should that count for nothing just because it’s not going to be eleven?”

  13

  ONCE THE GOOD FRIDAY, Agreement was signed, Lawrence was called away almost nightly to rant about it on television. Naturally, awaiting his return, Irina tuned into whatever program on which he was to appear. He looked handsome in his brown suit—unsettling so—and his accelerating lucidity on camera unnerved her as well. You’d never have guessed that a few years before this overnight celebrity was working retail in bookstores and parked blackly on weekends before televised golf. Although she wouldn’t claim nostalgia for those dismal days, something was on offer when Lawrence was depleted or vanquished or sad that was simply not available when he was full of himself. And full of himself he certainly was. In making every effort to be “supportive,” had she created a monster? The more dazzlingly self-sufficient Lawrence became, the less he seemed to need her. Hence in bolstering his self-confidence all these years she may have been systematically eliminating her own job, like a member of a special in-house task force on corporate downsizing, whose final undertaking is to fire himself.

  So it was probably from this fear of becoming superfluous, and a nervousness about being demoted from equal partner to underling who microwaved dinner for the Great Man at midnight, that Irina found herself watching his interviews with a jaundiced eye. Lawrence was likely so negative about the agreement because he hadn’t seen it coming; the very week before Good Friday, he’d predicted that the impasse over cross-border bodies with executive powers would keep the parties fighting it out for years. He hated to be wrong. She couldn’t share his indignation over the prisoner releases. Their victims were dead; what more could be gained by keeping the culprits in jail? Lawrence scorned this kind of thinking, but weren’t a few shorter sentences a small price to pay for an end to all that killing? She’d never say aloud anything so unkind, but when he quoted whole sections of the agreement verbatim, he sounded smart-alecky, like the kid with all the answers, whom his classmates despise.

  Thus after several nights of the same drill, she treated herself to a channel on which Lawrence was sure not to appear—BBC1, currently broadcasting the British Open. As luck would have it, Ramsey Acton was playing. Ever since Bournemouth, Lawrence had been unaccountably less engaged by snooker; having thus seen precious little of the game for months, Irina had stored up an appetite for the sport. After so much sonorous pontificating about peace and paramilitaries, it was glorious to watch a man go about his business and keep his mouth shut. Since Lawrence had yet to raise the possibility of dining with Ramsey again, the odd televised tournament provided her only access to their old friend.

  There was no doubt about it: Ramsey cut a fine figure of a man. She may never have precisely regretted not kissing him on his birthday, but as she followed his clearance of 132, Irina renewed her appreciation for the temptation. He executed a series of uncanny long pots, ingenious doubles, and cracking plants with mesmerizing grace and savoir faire. Despite his faultless performance, a subtle suggestion in Ramsey’s demeanor—of bearing up more than bearing down, with the kind of courage that you see at funerals—reminded her of Lawrence in the bleak days of West 104th Street. Ramsey exuded a woundedness that made her want to reach through the glass and place a reassuring hand on his temple. So it was silly, she supposed, but Lawrence wasn’t back yet, and Irina indulged herself by resting her cheek on the cold screen.

  Only to spring back when Lawrence walked in the door. “The screen was dusty!” Hastily, she wiped the glass with her sleeve.

  “That’s Ramsey.”

  “Oh, you know you’re right!” she said brightly.

  “You’re not telling me that you see a guy on TV who we’ve had dinner with a couple of times a year since 1992, and you don’t recognize him.”

  “Well, of course, now that I’m paying attention, I recognize him…”

  “So now you can stop recognizing him,” said Lawrence. “The segment for Newsnight was prerecorded, and I’d really like to catch this one.”

  Without asking, Lawrence grabbed the remote and switched to BBC2. Irina’s shoulders drooped. Ordinarily she kept up with current events, but honestly, tonight the idea of yet another newscast bored her speechless. So she wasn’t being sardonic when she submitted, “But I don’t care about world affairs. All I care about is snooker.”

  BY THE BEGINNING OF May, Irina finally bullied her famous know-it-all partner into a Saturday constitutional. Their walks in Cornwall over Christmas had been overcast with her anxiety over his strange silence on some impending trip to Russia. Now that Lawrence hadn’t dropped word-one for over six months, Irina was beginning to relax about the whole business. Dandering past Buckingham Palace (incredibly, still littered with withered floral tributes to Diana), she reasoned that the Russia gig must have been canceled. Unfortunately, they had to cut short her favorite section of the walk, the circuit around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, because Lawrence had to find a loo—or, no, “had to take a dump,” a vulgar expression that made her cringe. Indeed, he was jubilantly explicit about his evacuations, and though she was as keen as the next woman on intimacy, surely reports on text
ure and buoyancy qualified as oversharing.

  Before they walked the last two blocks home, Irina noted that they needed a few things for dinner, and proposed a quick trip to the Tesco ten minutes south.

  “Okay,” said Lawrence. “I’ll meet you back at the flat, then.”

  “Why don’t you come with me?” While not rippling from a Nautilus like Bethany, Irina’s arms were firm from routinely hauling fortypounds of groceries by herself.

  “I hate shopping. You know that.”

  “It’s not my idea of a party, either. Do you think you’re above shopping? That it’s woman’s work?”

  “Division of labor. More efficient.”

  “We’re not a corporation, we’re a couple. And I’d appreciate the company.”

  Scowling, Lawrence reluctantly joined her. As soon as they hit Elephant & Castle—decked with a giant plaster elephant like a dipso hallucination, a shopping center of such suicidally depressing design that it was a wonder you didn’t dodge customers plunging off the roof on a daily basis—he began to plow several feet ahead as if to disassociate himself from the enterprise. When she caught up with Lawrence at Tesco, he was wrestling violently with a shopping cart. Unaccustomed to the acquisition of goods in this country, he did not understand that you had to slip a pound coin into the handle to release the cart.

  “What would you like for dinner?” asked Irina as she did the honors with the coin. For men, incompetence was a gambit: I’m terrible at this; you do it.

  “Everything you make is great, Irina,” he said wearily. “Whatever you want.” Lawrence’s idea of participation in meals was eating them. Division of labor.

  Thus when she proposed, “How about kung pao chicken?” he answered, “Fine,” flatly. Carte blanche command over the menu may have amounted to a dumb kind of power. But power too readily ceded seemed worthless.

  Picking her way nimbly between shoppers, Irina collected chilies, chicken thighs, an array of vegetables, as well as milk, cheese, ham, bread, and Coleman’s mustard. But she was constantly losing Lawrence, who would either careen down the aisle when it was clear, or loiter behind sullenly, refusing to ask anyone to move out of the way. So far it was more trouble to shop with Lawrence than without him—which was, of course, the point.