“What’s all this?” he complained as the cartload mounded.
“Your lunches, among other things. Where do you think your sandwiches come from, fairies?” The subject left a shadow. She wondered what happened to those sandwiches if he was really eating lunch with Bethany at Pret a Manger.
Their timing was poor. The after-work crowd had hit the shop, and the queues for checkout stretched fifty feet into the aisles. Lawrence kept looking at his watch, turning steadily purple. As they inched toward the front, he refused to crack a smile, even when she read off the supermarket’s comically exotic flavors of potato chips—“Chargrilled Steak and Peppercorn Sauce,” “Creamy Chicken Pasanda and Coriander,” “Slow-Roasted Lamb and Mint,” “Peking Spare Rib and Five Spice”—which conjured a whole meal from a handful of carbs and twelve hundred calories in fat.
“How about ‘Roast Turkey and Stuffing, Candied Yams, Overcooked Brussels Sprouts, and a Glass of Cabernet-Merlot’ crisps?” she proposed. “Or ‘Salmon with Rocket, Cheesecake with Coffee, and a Double Measure of Hennessy XO While Wearing a Red-and-Black Smoking Jacket and Watching Reruns of Yes Minister’ crisps? I bet they could even add an ashy aftertaste of a postprandial fag.”
Lawrence wasn’t playing.
“Fuck,” he said once they were finally outside again. “I’d rather starve.”
“You would starve if I didn’t wait in queues like that two or three times a week.”
“I don’t know how you stand it. If it were up to me, I’d live on peanut-butter crackers and beer from the minimart.”
“Not living with me you won’t. But don’t worry, I’ll never ask you again. Tesco is obviously too grubby for Mr. Fancy Conflict-Resolution Expert.”
Hence the mood, on return to the flat, was a little sour. Yet long ago weary of her experiment, and now convinced that matter had been shelved, Irina decided it was time to put that vixen’s mischievous rumor to rest.
“So,” she said casually, deboning chicken thighs as Lawrence washed dishes. “I overheard a mention at Blue Sky a while back. Something about a trip to Russia?”
“Oh.” He intently sudsed a water glass that only needed rinsing. “I thought I told you.”
A piece of cartilage took similar concentration to cut out. “You know you didn’t.”
“Well—guess I was putting it off.”
“I guess you were. How long are you going for?”
“About a month.”
“A month!” Irina’s knife paused. “When is this?”
“Couple weeks from now.”
“When were you going to tell me, packing for the plane?”
“Tonight, actually, if you hadn’t brought it up.”
“That’s easy to say now.”
“I wasn’t going to just disappear.”
Ripping the skin off another thigh, Irina pondered once again how difficult she found it to simply say to Lawrence what she was thinking as she was thinking it. She pushed herself to ask boldly, “Have you not considered my coming along?”
“Nah,” he dismissed, sloshing rinse water onto the floor. “You’d be bored.”
“It’s my country. Why would that bore me?”
“It can’t be your country if you’ve never been there. And you’ve said yourself that you try to put as many miles as possible between you and your ‘heritage.’”
“I try to put as many miles as possible between me and my mother,” said Irina, chopping chilies. “And I’ve never bought her sentimentality about a place she left when she was ten. That doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t interest me.”
“Forget it. Your coming along would cost a fortune. Hotels in Moscow are larcenous for foreigners—and don’t imagine that you’d be considered anything but.”
“I earn my own money; I could pay for it. Besides,” she added shyly, carving out a pocket of chicken fat, “maybe I could get paid something for being your translator.”
“The Carnegie grant covers the cost of a translator, who’d be more experienced. And we’re trying to arrange a side trip to Chechnya. You’d never get security clearance.”
“I wouldn’t have to come to Chechnya. I could stay behind in Moscow.”
“Irina, you’re not thinking! You have work to do. This should be a great opportunity to bear down while I’m gone.”
“I’m ahead of schedule for Puffin already, and I could bring my drawing kit along.”
“You’re not going to be productive holed up in some hotel!” said Lawrence, mashing peanut butter on a cracker. “And if you were, then there’d be no point in your being in Russia to begin with.”
So far this conversation was reminiscent of the Peter, Paul and Mary ballad “Cruel War,” in which a girl appeals repeatedly to her soldier lover to allow her to come with him into battle. She makes a variety of arguments, offering, for example, to tie back her hair and don a uniform to pass as his comrade. The refrain, Won’t you let me go with you? is regularly followed by the mournful, No, my love, no—albeit mournfulness was noticeably absent from Lawrence’s own discouragements. As Irina recalled, the girl’s beseechings are all in vain, save the last—and she scrambled for the successful verse. Lawrence, oh Lawrence! (okay, the soldier’s name in the song was Johnny, but the substitute had a ring) I fear you are unkind! / I love you far better than all of mankind / I love you far better than words can e’er express / Won’t you let me go with you? Finally, soft and sibilant: Yes, my love, yes.
“But I love you,” Irina blurted, realizing as she did so that sappy folk songs weren’t an optimal source of inspiration when cajoling a wiseass like Lawrence Trainer. “I can’t make you take me with you, and I’ll understand if you don’t. But I’ll miss you. I don’t want us to be apart for a month.”
Alas, Yes, my love, yes was not forthcoming.
“I don’t, either,” he said. “Still, we both gotta do what we gotta do, right? And nobody travels on business with wives or girlfriends anymore. This’ll be a boy thing.”
“If it’s a boy thing, does that mean that Bethany isn’t coming?”
“Bethany’s not somebody’s wife. She’s a research fellow.”
Irina grabbed yet another fistful of chilies. “You mean she is coming.”
“I don’t know—maybe.”
“You do too know! And maybe means yes!”
“What’s it matter? She speaks perfect Russian—”
“So do I!”
“But you are not a fellow at Blue Sky, you are not up on the separatist war in Chechnya, and you are not covered by a grant from Carnegie!”
“You forgot to mention that I’m also not a slag.” The pile of chopped chilies was now mountainous even by Irina’s immoderate standards, and glistened with evil intent.
“Look, we’ll be doing interviews all day, and you’d feel like a third wheel.”
“You just want to have your own special thing!” Irina exploded. Briefly, the image beckoned of sweeping all the preparations for dinner dramatically onto the floor—but they were not that kind of couple. “You know I could come as long as we paid my way, and you’ve said that I’m pretty good at holding up my end of things with your think-tank cronies. But you won’t let me because you want to have Russia all to yourself, so that it’s yours and not mine!”
Propped against the counter, Lawrence blinked. It was not their habit to put subtext on the table, any more than it was Lawrence’s habit to concede that there was one. “If,” he said after a pause, “I would like to have my own special thing, what is wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said defeatedly, surveying the makings of kung pao chicken with no appetite. “Except that the alternative would be to do something together, and have Russia as something we have in common, instead of a place you’ve colonized for yourself because you got there first.”
“Irina,” he said with unusual earnestness. “It’s important that we both maintain our independence.”
“I don’t think that’s our problem, maintaining independence.
”
“I wasn’t aware we had a problem.”
“No,” she said sorrowfully. “You wouldn’t be.”
If the purpose of spicy cuisine was to play a line between pleasure and pain, it was apparently possible to tip full-tilt over to pain, period. The chicken turned out hot beyond precedent, and neither managed more than a few bites.
THE FORTNIGHT’S LEAD-UP TO Lawrence’s departure for Moscow was civil but strained. Irina never took back what she said about his own special thing or softened her sense of injury over not being invited. When it was time for him to leave for Heathrow, they both agreed it wasn’t sensible for Irina to accompany him to the airport. As he watched for his cab out a living-room window, Lawrence asked with seeming idleness, “So— do you think you’ll see some people while I’m gone?”
“Sure, I suppose.”
“Well—like who?”
Irina tilted her head quizzically. “Betsy. Melanie. The usual suspects.”
“And I guess you’ll see your editor. And that author you’re working with.”
“That’s right.” This was filler dialogue, and she was perplexed why he drew it out. He knew her friends, and as for which she elected to consort with in his absence, she’d be bound to tell him as these occasions arose when they spoke on the phone.
“Anyone else?” His expression was so anxious that she got it.
In another life, or in another relationship, Irina might have been able to reassure him expressly. But for the same reasons that Lawrence wouldn’t own up to what he thought about when they had sex (whatever those were), she and Lawrence had never discussed what lay at the heart of that night in Bournemouth last autumn, much less the Gethsemane of Ramsey’s forty-seventh birthday. Were they ever to do so, this was not the time and place—the air crackling between them for weeks, Lawrence’s cab due any moment. Nevertheless, Irina did hold his eyes an extra beat, and imbued her response with a gravity that she prayed he understood: “No.”
The flicker of relief in his face seemed to indicate that the interchange had been a success, though there was no way to know for sure.
WHILE LAWRENCE WAS IN Russia, Irina was very productive. Because she was mad at him, she didn’t pine, and never wandered the flat with that floating, disconnected vagueness that had sometimes afflicted her while he’d been in Sarajevo. She rose promptly with an alarm, tidying up the coffee grains after the pot was on, sweeping militantly to her studio with her cup. So dutifully did she toil over her drawing table that the illustrations for The Miss Ability Act were in danger of getting overworked, and she completed the project well before its due date. On long walks late afternoons, she didn’t stroll so much as march. She made time to see friends two or three nights a week, injecting these evenings with such vivacity that Betsy remarked on her good form. She was careful to keep her alcohol intake moderate, and to eat sensibly, though couldn’t resist the odd cigarette as a token of up-yours-Lawrence defiance.
In all, she was an efficient little mechanism, who had her own work and her own friends, and the fact that in Lawrence’s absence she was just fine, thank you very much, provided a mean satisfaction. Still, there was a thin, brittle feeling to this just-fineness, as if she’d turned into one of those dry Scandinavian crispbreads that never have enough salt. If her evenings of a readily dispatched bacon sandwich were refreshingly simple, they were too simple. Maybe it was embarrassing for an emancipated woman of the 1990s, but Irina was possessed of a profound drive to do for someone else, and when it was merely a matter of taking out her own rubbish, acting on her own desire for an oatcake and slice of cheddar, half the time she couldn’t be bothered.
When she masturbated on restless afternoons, the physical gratification was technically more pronounced than when she was forced to depend on Lawrence’s poignantly flawed ministrations. Yet even here, the simplicity made for thin gruel. Maybe some measure of what made sex with someone else so much more interesting was what was wrong with it. The most thunderous orgasm still seemed trifling unshared, and unlike the drifting bask that followed on proper sex, in private there was no afterglow. She missed postcoital smugness—that unspoken mutual congratulation over a job well done.
Thus her very one-two-three competence at solitude throughout the month served only to demonstrate that, living by yourself, this was as good as it got, and that wasn’t good enough by a yard. Returning from walks to an empty flat, she couldn’t tell Lawrence about the irksome invasion of American evangelicals at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, drowning out the crusty soapbox socialists who, post-Blair, had become quaint, for-tourists-only anachronisms, like the classic red phone-box. Untold, stories didn’t seem quite to have happened. Inexorably, then, Irina was once again thrown back on her understanding of herself as a woman who craved, more than professional kudos, material prosperity, the respect of peers, or the camaraderie of close friends, a man. If that made her small-minded, biologically trite, unrealized as an individual, or lacking in self-respect, so be it.
Said man, however, was incommunicative, even for Lawrence. He blamed the sparseness of his phone calls on a hectic schedule, but their few conversations yawned with so many gaps of silence that she sometimes imagined that the connection had failed. Of course, Lawrence never liked talking on the phone, and if his discourse comprised meetings recounted or set-piece recitations of the historical justifications for Chechen secession, he always took refuge in facts. They were inept enough at addressing touchy subjects face-to-face, so the rift she’d opened between them over this trip was hardly going to be bridged in short, expensive phone calls from a Moscow hotel. At least he didn’t take umbrage at her forceful iterations of how swimmingly her life was proceeding in his absence; why, she rather wished that he would. Times past, they had both had trouble issuing that most difficult of romantic licenses: permission to have fun without you. For her own part, Irina had to make herself sound interested in his adventures. Why hadn’t he wanted her along? Why was the stingy thrill of annexing her country for his own not outweighed by the benefits of annexing all that tundra for them both?
THE MUSIC OF THE front-door lock was off-key. The usual jingling symphony of his key ring jangled the still afternoon air; the rake of metal in the escutcheon was abrasive. Now accustomed to having the flat to herself, Irina felt invaded. It was Lawrence’s flat, too, she told herself, and there was nothing presumptuous about his walking in without knocking. She waited for his traditional mating call—Irina Galina!—to resonate down the hall, but heard only a shuffle and slam. He lumbered into the living room and unshouldered his bags. Though washed out, he looked younger than she remembered, and he had definitely lost weight.
“Hey!” He pecked her cheek, and didn’t meet her eyes.
For intimates even small partings are estranging, but for a moment the distance between them seemed so great that this might have been a first awkward platonic reunion after a harrowing breakup. “Hi,” she said shyly, and offered, “Coffee? Or would you prefer to start unpacking?”
“Sure, let’s have coffee first.” He trailed her to the kitchen, looking around with the nervous curiosity of a guest who had only been here once before and did not quite remember the location of the loo. Doubtless he was just confirming with his usual paternalism that she’d hoovered the carpet. But idling as she ground the beans, he did seem distracted, making her running commentary about problems she’d been having with the hot-water tap feel like tiresome domestic prattle. Still, someone had to say something. For pity’s sake, a month in Russia should hardly leave one at a loss for words.
“So,” she said once they’d carried their coffee to the living room. Lawrence looked at his glass critically. He liked it with less milk. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, fine,” he said.
“You look pale. And thinner.”
“I’m underslept,” he said. “The last few nights. The group’s had some conflicts, over our sympathy, or lack of it, with the Chechens. It’s taken hours to hash them o
ut. As for thinner, well, you know the food in Russia.”
“No, as a matter of fact I don’t. I’ve never been there.”
“I’m here ten minutes, and you want to fight?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound pointed. I don’t want to fight. If nothing else, I’m no good at it.”
“You got pretty good at it before I left.” It was Lawrence who seemed to want to fight. He kept his gaze trained forty-five degrees to the left of her face, as if there were a third person sitting over at the dining table. He wasn’t drinking his coffee.
“Well, you’ll be pleased to learn that Betsy’s on your side. She said, ‘Hey, it’s a business trip!’ And pointed out that if I really wanted to go to Russia so much, I could pick up and go on my own.”
“She’s right.”
“I know. It was annoying.” She took a sip. “Though I doubt I’ll go. Ya nye khotela syezdit v Rossiyu. Ya khotela syezdit v Rossiyu s toboy.”
“Irina, would you give it a rest?” he exclaimed.
She flinched. She’d tried to deliver the thought with conciliating tenderness. Yet in I didn’t want to go to Russia, I wanted to go to Russia with you he could only hear nagging. “I’m sorry. Drawing is very involving in a way, but my work is all in a room sitting, and sometimes I envy your going interesting places and meeting new people.”
“Well, that’s not my fault. If you want a more adventurous professional life, do something else.”
It was disconcerting; they were both basically saying the same thing, yet concurrence staunchly took the form of dispute. Even when she bowed her head and said, “I know it’s not your fault. That’s what I’m saying,” they still didn’t seem on the same side. She gave up, and changed the subject.
“By the way, my mother already wants to know if we’re coming for Christmas.”
The Post-Birthday World Page 34