The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Exhausted at three a.m. London-time, after too much wine on the plane and too little sleep while meeting the deadline for The Miss Ability Act, Irina sank—insofar as it was possible to sink into such uncomfortable furniture—into one of the parlor’s red velveteen chairs. Deserting a nice man for a raffish snooker player was sufficiently scandalous behavior to cast her in the liberating role of black sheep. So why had she still felt bound by the convention of coming home for Christmas? Ramsey was the only man who had ever made her feel beautiful. Her mother always made her feel dowdy, unfit, and mousy by comparison. On the boardwalk, men still stared at Raisa’s calves. While Irina was proud of her mother, in a way, there wasn’t much point in presenting her husband with this statuesque paragon of muscle—with a slimmer waist, higher cheekbones, and more lustrous bound black hair—only to show herself up.

  When the other two returned, Ramsey ran his hands over her shoulders and kissed the hollow behind her earlobe. Her mother’s eyes sharpened. Raisa didn’t approve of “groping” in public. No matter how obvious it appeared to Irina that behind that stern glance of reproach lay jealousy, Raisa herself would never recognize her sense of decorum as the bitter fruit of sexual neglect. In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what makes them tick are surprisingly useless. Censure registered, Raisa excused herself coolly to the kitchen.

  As the matching red velveteen chair was insensibly positioned so that one of the shelves supporting Raisa’s hideous porcelain figurines jutted into your neck if you leaned back, Ramsey pulled it four inches forward before taking a seat. As the legs sank into fresh royal-blue carpet, Irina’s eyes widened in alarm. When soon thereafter Ramsey popped upstairs to the loo, she shot up and restored his chair to its previous position.

  Ramsey returned, having retrieved the Hennessy XO. He looked at the chair.

  “You don’t know the drill,” Irina whispered. “She’ll go bananas if you make new depressions in the carpet!”

  “I don’t fancy learning the drill,” said Ramsey, full-voice. He yanked the chair back out a good foot—that would make a second set of criminal indentations in the pile—and slid back into the seat with his long legs extended, as if hoping that someone would trip over them. He reached for his Gauloises. Irina made frantically slashing motions. With an eye-roll, he put them back.

  Raisa entered with a tray, the presentation of which, with its glasses resting in filigreed silver holders, was the whole point, since nobody wanted any tea. As for the plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies, it was meant to cameo the fact that Raisa wouldn’t have one. Setting the tray on the coffee table, she looked steadily at the legs of Ramsey’s chair. Held any longer, her gaze would have set the carpet fibers on fire.

  “So, R-rumsee,” Raisa began after she’d poured a round. “What you do for living?”

  “I’m a snooker player.”

  “Snookers,” Raisa turned around in her mouth. “This—game?”

  “It’s a game,” said Ramsey tolerantly.

  “Card game? Like bridge?”

  “The closest thing to snooker in the US is pool,” Irina intervened. “You know, when you hit balls with a stick into pockets on a green table?” She rued the fact that her description made all forms of billiards sound inane, but there was no limit to the English words that her mother would pretend not to know. Why Raisa imagined that to live in a country for decades and still have little command of the language seemed charming was anyone’s guess. Honestly, every day she must have walked around this house practicing dropping her articles, expunging every form of the verb “to be,” and converting each hard Th to Z and W to V: “Zis—game? Vat you do for living?” For a smart woman to maintain this degree of just-off-the-boat authenticity after forty-some years of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries, Reader’s Digest sweepstake mailings, PBS miniseries, and screaming ads for Crazy Eddie’s would be hard work.

  “You play this—snookers,” Raisa directed to Ramsey, “for money?”

  “Da,” said Ramsey. “I play snookers for money.”

  “But you only make this money when you win?”

  “Spot on, Mum. I only get paid when I win.”

  “Ramsey wins a lot, Mama.”

  “So you no know until you play your—snookers”—Raisa never took her eyes off Ramsey—“if you have fat pocket or you have nothing.” (Nozzing.)

  “That’s a fair cop,” said Ramsey neutrally; he seemed to be enjoying this.

  “Mama, you don’t get it! In the UK, Ramsey’s famous. The pool analogy, it’s not helpful. Snooker is a big deal in Britain. The players are superstars. They’re on TV all the time. Ramsey can’t walk down the street without five people asking for his autograph…” She was speaking into a void.

  “You ever think, Rumsee, you get real job?”

  “When hell freezes, I reckon.” Playing his part to the hilt, Ramsey knocked back his cold tea, then reached for the cognac beside his chair. He peeled off the lead strip, popped the ornate cork, and poured a triple. “Can’t see nipping off to an office or such. See, Irina and me fancy a bit of a lie-in mornings. As a rule, I’ll have got so dishmopped the night before”—Ramsey took a demonstrative slug—“it takes most of the day to get my head right.”

  Raisa rose stiffly to remove the tea things.

  “That’s it, we’re going to bed,” Irina announced, massaging her temples.

  “Oi, the party’s just getting started!” cried Ramsey, laying on the South London with a trowel; started came out stah-id.

  “For you maybe,” said Irina. “This isn’t my idea of a party.”

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU BACK me up?” Irina whispered once they’d repaired to her old bedroom. “I say you’re famous, and you leave me swinging in the wind! She probably thinks you’ve dazzled me with a few shiny trinkets and your posh clothes, so now I’ve deluded myself that I’ve married a celebrity instead of two-bit hustler!”

  Ramsey rolled back on the bed and chuckled. “I were winding her up is all. Joke’s on your woman, innit?”

  “No, the joke’s on me,” she grumbled, nestling next to him. “But it may not matter. I think you already blew it. She expects a lot of brown-nosing, a real snow job. For my mother, to have flattery withheld is tantamount to being insulted.”

  “What am I meant to say, like?”

  “Any man who walks in here is immediately supposed to start going on about how gorgeous she is and what incredible shape she’s in and how it doesn’t seem possible that she’s old enough to have a daughter in her forties.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t, would I? ’Cause she looks like a bloody cadaver!”

  Irina sat up. “You don’t think she looks pretty good? For sixty-four?”

  “That bird looks every year of sixty-four and then some. She’s so skinny she makes the skin crawl, and her face is hard—with that ghoulish smile what barely moves. Fair enough, she’s her parts in the right place, and them parts is nicely wrapped. But she’s sexless, pet. I’d rather shag a cold baked spud. Your mum’s not got a patch on you, pet. Ain’t you figured it out yet? Why she’s always having a go at you, like you told me? She’s scared of you ’cause you’re beautiful. And she’s made bloody well sure that at least you don’t know it.”

  “Well, you never saw her in her heyday—”

  “Don’t need to,” Ramsey cut her off. “You was always the bigger knockout. And don’t you forget it.”

  Irina smiled and kissed him gratefully, but it was funny; she didn’t want what he said to be true. Maybe she didn’t see her mother quite objectively. Yet when she was a little girl her classmates were in awe of her mother, and could never fathom how a buck-toothed ugly duckling could have issued from such a swan—impeccably groomed, imperial in manner, and dressed like Audrey Hepburn. That was the picture of Raisa that she wanted to keep. The alternative vision of an emaciated, pinch-faced neurotic growing
old alone was anathema.

  “NO BREAKFAST?” RAMSEY ASKED the next morning, which was Christmas Eve.

  Irina was perched at the kitchen table over the New York Times with a lone glass of coffee, whose bottom she had carefully sponged before setting it first in a saucer, then on a coaster. In preference to explaining that in this household eating was a sign of weakness, she waved him off with a mumble about not being hungry.

  Naturally Raisa had been up since dawn, having already worked out at the bar for hours. She was still wearing white tights with cherry-red leg-warmers and matching ballet shoes, whose familiar tap on the lino brought back a whole childhood’s worth of inadequacy.

  Ramsey was having none of this austerity lark. When his mother-in-law asked if he’d like toasted black bread he said fine, or scrambled eggs, too, and he said brilliant, and he turned a blithe blind eye to her rising horror when he accepted sausage as well as a side of kasha.

  “Bozhe,” said Raisa as she rushed perkily around the kitchen pretending not to feel put-upon. “When I here just me, I go to shops on Avenue and come home with one little sack! Now, with man in house! Whole sack, gone, in one day. So nice, tak mylo, to have appetite in house again. Like your father, Irina—who eat like bear!”

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” said Irina; the one advantage of her mother’s sledgehammer subtlety, you never had to rack your brains to figure out what she was getting at. “If you’d like us to reimburse you for the groceries, I’m sure that can be arranged.”

  “Chepukha, Irina, I no mean that!”

  “Sure you didn’t.”

  Ramsey had gnawed through three pieces of toast before he noticed Irina’s hands. “Oi, what’s with the gloves?”

  It was awkward to turn the pages of the paper. “You know, Raynaud. It’s frigid in here. It’s always frigid in here, so I brought several pairs. Thought I’d save the red ones for Christmas.”

  “You make no notice, Rumsee,” said Raisa huffily. “Irina wear gloves so her mama feel bad. Big making-point no work if we ignore her.”

  “But she’s dead on,” said Ramsey. “I’m freezing my bollocks off. Why don’t we crank up the boiler?”

  “Because you should see gas bill!” said Raisa, wiping counters feverishly. “K tomu zhe, little nip in air keep you awake. Good for circulation, da?”

  “No, Mama”—Irina kept her voice flat—“my circulation is just what living in a meat locker is not good for.”

  “Wake up in morning and exercise, Irina, you stay warm all day!”

  “What’s the sodding thermostat set at?” Ramsey had removed one of Irina’s gloves and was rubbing her chill fingers between his palms.

  “Oh, something Arctic. It’s in the living room.” When he walked down the hall, she called after him, “But Ramsey—!”

  He came back. “What’s your sixty in Celsius?”

  “Sixteen?” Irina supposed. “Maybe more like fifteen.”

  “That’s bleedin’ savage!”

  Irina lunged after him and grabbed his arm in the hall. “Don’t,” she whispered. “I had the presumption to boost it a couple of degrees once, and you wouldn’t believe the row. It’s not worth it. I can wear gloves. I don’t mind.”

  “I fucking well mind.” Ramsey strode back into the kitchen and announced as Raisa sponged maniacally around his half-eaten breakfast, “Tell you what. I don’t fancy my lovely wife trussed up like an Eskimo just to read the paper.” He fished out his wallet, and threw four $50 bills on the table. “That should cover a day or two of your gas bill, ’ey?”

  “Nyet, this too much, you must take back!” Raisa protested, waving the bills. “No money for gas, you my guest!”

  “Keep the change.” Ramsey strolled off to the parlor, and Irina looked on in amazement at his brazen apostasy as he twisted the thermostat to 75.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, IRINA SHOWED Ramsey around Brighton Beach, disappointed when nothing about the area piqued his curiosity. His eyes searched blankly the line of shops under the el, their marquees printed in Cyrillic, their help-wanted signs in windows specifying, “Must speak Russian!” He was polite enough when she led him into stores full of imports from Israel and the Baltics, with their long counters of smoked fish and shelves of black bread. He did engage briefly when they stopped at a caviar store, where he bought two ounces of beluga for Christmas dinner in the spirit of generosity-as-act-of-aggression that was beginning to typify his approach to her formidable mother. Yet Ramsey Acton’s point of entry into any environment was terribly specific. When his eyes swept her old neighborhood, they were compulsively scanning, in vain, for a snooker club.

  Irina picked up a few things to forestall (temporarily) her mother’s resentment, making small-talk with the cashiers. For over a year she’d spoken so little Russian, a language that allowed for the torrential emotions that English was too angular to express. Lawrence comprehended more than he could speak, and she missed rolling through a Slavic diatribe about London’s larcenous water bills and being roughly understood. Ramsey often asked her to “talk Russian” in bed, but to him the susurrant murmur was gibberish.

  They had arranged to meet her mother for lunch at one of the boardwalk’s outdoor cafés in December zipped up with plastic sheeting. When they arrived, Raisa was already regally seated at a prominent table. Her form-fitting dress was a rich billiard green, as if in unwitting tribute to Ramsey’s profession, and maybe if she hadn’t accessorized the gear to death with accents of an identical midnight blue the outfit might have passed for classy. For that matter, after encountering on the boardwalk countless old bags wrapped in fake leopard-skin coats and dragging yappy little dogs, Irina was able to see her mother as a beacon of tastefulness in comparison.

  Irina opted for a salad. Raisa made do with two tiny toast points laced with salmon caviar. Ramsey ordered pickled herring, lamb-and-rice soup, a refill of the bread basket, chicken Kiev, and a beer. Raisa often enjoyed watching other people gorge themselves, but the injustice of this conspicuous consumption would grate. Ramsey ate like a pig and Ramsey wasn’t fat.

  He asked respectfully about her history as a ballerina, allowing Raisa to drop, again, that it was getting pregnant with Irina that had brought her professional dance career to a close. When he inquired after her teaching, she vented her disgust that these days American children had no discipline, no tolerance for pain, and no capacity to forgo a Ho-Ho in the service of art.

  “You find anyone to play snookers with?” she said, as one might ask a five-year-old if he had found a little friend to play marbles.

  “After playing four tournaments near back-to-back,” he said levelly, “winning one and making the finals in three, I reckon I can take a few days off from snookers.”

  No pick-up.

  After downing his third beer and virtually throwing his Platinum MasterCard at the poor waiter, Ramsey announced that he’d an errand to run. Since his reputation as a gentleman on the circuit was not entirely a pose, he did remember to fold his napkin, place his fork tines-down across his plate, and wish Raisa a pleasant afternoon. Nevertheless, he steamed off in what was, to Irina, a state of undisguised fury.

  “Your husband,” said Raisa in his wake. “He have nice table manners.”

  That damning-with-faint-praise was all the comment that Raisa deigned to pass for the remainder of the day on her daughter’s choice of mate, though Ramsey’s absence that afternoon provided ample opportunity to express approval or share private reservations. Raisa may have been forced into retirement as a dancer at twenty-one by the horrifying burgeoning of her first child, but she was still a performer to the core, and dramatic pronouncements would be squandered on an audience of one.

  RAMSEY RETURNED WEARING THE composed determination that Irina recognized from tournaments. He took his wife and mother-in-law out to dinner at a swank (if garish) restaurant on the Avenue. Raisa ordered generously for herself, which Irina knew better than to take as a good sign. The point of each dish was that her mother wouldn’t�
��the conceit ran, couldn’t—finish it.

  Raisa regaled Ramsey with tales of his wife’s artistically precocious childhood. A mother was supposed to brag like this to a new son-in-law, but maybe that’s what made Irina uncomfortable with the hard sell. Raisa was following protocol. She seemed less proud of her daughter than proud of herself for being proud. Besides, Irina would have been powerfully more touched had her mother dwelt instead on her substantial achievements as a grown-up.

  By the main course—of her cutlet, Raisa would eat three bites—the conversation curled. “Nu, rasskazheetye,” she said. “How you two meet?”

  “I used to collaborate with Ramsey’s first wife,” said Irina.

  “Bozhe.” Raisa raised her eyebrows. “As Americans say, the plot thickens.”

  Good Lord, she used an article. Irina wanted to pin a ribbon on her mother’s chest. “No, Mama, the plot’s not that thick. When Ramsey was married to Jude, we were only friends. Lawrence and I used to dine with them a couple of times a year.”

  Unfortunately, Irina’s introduction of the L-word granted Raisa implicit permission to use it too. “Tak,” she said, “Rumsee—you and Lawrence friends?”

  “We was friends,” said Ramsey tolerantly.

  “But no more,” said Raisa.

  “No, you couldn’t say just now we’re best mates.”

  “And Irina”—Raisa’s gaze shuttled between them—“how Lawrence do? He sad?”

  “Lawrence,” Irina borrowed from that anguishing cup of coffee in Borough, “is managing.”

  Ramsey looked at his wife. As she’d ostensibly not seen Lawrence since she left him, shouldn’t she have said she had no idea? Caught in the middle, Irina was irked. She might have willingly answered her mother’s questions in private this afternoon, but in private they’d have meant something else.