The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  Across the occupations, plenty of established professionals pass off the shoddiest work imaginable and are sometimes lauded for it. After all, most of the world doesn’t know the difference between the rare blaze of true genius and the derivative manufacture of the rank hack. But just her luck, Irina’s editor on The Miss Ability Act had to have integrity, which despite its noble reputation is a ghastly quality when you find yourself on its receiving end. On their return from Brighton Beach, Irina knew she was in trouble when she got not a phone call or e-mail, but a letter. In two terrifyingly short sentences, her editor informed her that another illustrator had been assigned to the project. The drawings were “unacceptable.” She heard the word in Mrs. Bennington’s voice.

  In fact, while the editor had been terse, the Mrs. Bennington in her head went on at some length. Admit it, she scolded. On an average day, you don’t get out of bed until noon; you go through half a pack of cigarettes and never less than a full bottle of wine. You read a newspaper at best once a week. Even during occasional erotic respites, you spend a disproportionate amount of your leisure time—assuming you have any other kind of time—thinking about sex. The only scrawls in your diary run, “Preston, RA v Ebdon, best of 13”—the landmarks of another person’s occupation. You had six extra months to complete one project, and you botched it. You are even more dissolute than your husband, who at least—haven’t you noticed?—still meets his obligations.

  The rejection was, as everyone seemed to say so incessantly those days, “a wake-up call.” That very night, Irina laid down the law. No, she would not come with Ramsey to the Benson & Hedges Masters. No, she would not come with him to the Regal Scottish Open. She had to stay home and work. Morosely, Ramsey acceded. They both knew that an era had closed. She would come to miss it.

  Thereafter, like most wives in this game, Irina accepted her fate as a snooker widow. Ramsey would return between tournaments when he could, but for weeks at a go Irina was pledged to knock about the four floors of Victoria Park Road on her lonesome.

  The half-hearted feelers she put out to authors were unavailing, and Puffin was a burnt bridge. For years she’d relied on Lawrence to pursue the side of her occupation that she detested, begging for more work. Too, she’d always depended on the structure and intent of someone else’s narrative for inspiration; in this sense, Irina really wasn’t an artist, but a natural illustrator. So perhaps the answer wasn’t to find another writer, whose plots were so frequently predictable and preachy, but to become one. Plenty of illustrators composed the text as well, and at least writing her own tale on spec would obviate any more of these humiliating e-mails.

  In Irina’s girlhood, one of her favorite dolls had a long, full skirt. When it was upright in one direction, the hair was tousled brown yarn, the dress a dark floral print. When it was upended, the skirt flipped over the brunette’s head to reveal a blond-haired alter ego, with a dress of light blue plaid.

  Irina conceived a storybook that flipped like that doll. On the front was the cover of one tale, on the back, upended, the cover of a second. The first story would proceed on the right-hand page, with captions at the bottom, while on the left was the second story upside down. Both stories would involve the same hero. Both stories would start at the same juncture in the hero’s childhood. But the tales would proceed differently, depending on how the protagonist resolved his initial dilemma. As for subject matter, once Irina arrived at it, she could only laugh.

  For eighteen months Irina had been watching bright refractive spheres streak across a lush green backdrop framed by mahogany rails. These images cropped up in her dreams, and she often saw primary-colored orbs when she closed her eyes. The pictures had gotten inside. She’d meant to be escaping from it, but in the end it made inexorable sense that the plot of her first illustrator-authored storybook would have everything to do with snooker:

  Martin is a prodigy at snooker from the instant he is tall enough to see over the table. But his parents believe that snooker clubs are dens of iniquity (or however you get across the concept of depravity to small children who are not supposed to know what it is, and most decidedly do). They are adamant that he not neglect his studies, because they want him to go to university, like his father. They forbid him to go near a snooker table. But Martin is already more accomplished at snooker than many of the grown-ups at his local. And he loves to play snooker more than any other thing. What is Martin to do?

  In one story, Martin defies his parents. He skips school to play snooker. He gets better and better, and sometimes makes the grown-ups very angry, because they don’t like being beaten by an upstart little boy. Since Martin seems bright, his parents don’t understand why his marks at school are so poor. Finally when a neighbor congratulates them on their son’s winning a junior tournament, they realize that the boy has flown in the face of their wishes. They inform him that if he does not turn his back on snooker, he will have to leave home. Martin feels he has no choice, and is now good enough at snooker to make money at it. Still, he misses his parents, and the pain that they are no longer speaking to him never seems to go away.

  Martin becomes a famous snooker player. He earns scads of money. He has many adventures. He makes lots of friends, even if people who play snooker are not always very smart, and sometimes they are a little boring. For that matter, sometimes Martin himself is a little boring, because he doesn’t really know very much about anything besides snooker. He neglected his schoolwork, and never went to university. There are good things and bad things about his life. It can get lonely, even if strangers often wave to him on the street. Once in a while even he gets a little tired of snooker. But it is still a wonderful game, and there is only so tired you can get of something you do very well. There are many peak moments. Since even people who are very, very good are not always going to be the very, very best, Martin never quite wins the World Championship, but that is all right. (This healthy note of realism was probably influenced by Casper’s Sacked Race.) He’s sorry that he hasn’t been close to his parents, who have never forgiven him for defying their authority. But when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his time doing something that he loves and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

  But if you flip the book over, the story proceeds very differently—or so it seems at first. At the crossroads, Martin decides to obey his parents. They are older than he is, and must know best. He is sorry to let snooker go, and at first he misses it badly, but he bears down on his studies, always does his homework, and brings home report cards with perfect marks. The things he learns are very interesting. The same knack that he displayed on the snooker table makes him excel at certain subjects at school. He is skillful at geometry. He is brilliant at calculating angles, and grasping mathematical relationships between objects. When he goes to university, he studies astronomy. Now instead of contemplating small red orbs on a field of green, he studies fiery planets on a field of black, but sometimes when photographs come back from exploratory missions to Mars or Venus the pictures are not so different from the ones you see when lining up a red with the corner pocket.

  Martin becomes an astronaut. (Whether this was a credible career trajectory, Irina wasn’t bothered; in a children’s book you’re granted wiggle room.) There are good and bad things about his life. His parents are proud of him, but he is often out in space for years at a time, and he gets lonely. Sometimes, even though to other people being an astronaut must seem exciting, it’s a little bit boring, checking the instruments day after day. Once in a while staring off into the stars he wonders what it would have been like if he’d played snooker instead. But he knows that sometimes you make a choice, and you live with the consequences, the nice bits and the not-so-nice. He is lucky to experience many peak moments. He loves taking off in a rocket, and landing with a splash in the ocean. He even comes close to winning a Nobel Prize, and though in the end it goes to someone else, that is all right. Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent hi
s time doing something that he loves and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

  Once Irina got down to the illustrations, she forgot all about envying Ramsey his long, boozy nights in bars, and stopped worrying about other women. Fatalistically she assumed that if he loved her he’d keep his pants zipped; besides, she knew in her bones that on this point her mother was wrong. While a few more pieces of furniture were still required to kit out the house, Irina was now contented to live without them. She often stayed up working late, and even fixing a sandwich was irritating. She drank less. She cut back on smoking.

  Most of Irina’s previous work had specialized in carefully gradated, blended coloration and luxurious, Rembrandt-like fluctuation of hues— which took great time and care, and was one reason those “hasty” drawings had been noticeably deficient. The new illustrations were anything but careless. Yet with these new images she discovered the hard line and the bold contrast. Forms didn’t blend into the field, but fiercely stood their ground, brilliant red balls looming against a pulsating green backdrop. Because the story line focused on what Martin did professionally rather than on interpersonal drama, she designed each panel with no human figures; his parents were off the page, casting shadows over green carpet like cues over brightly lit baize. This absence of figures, and strong solids—the balls, the cue, the rails, the racks—meant she could draw on the resources of Russian constructivism, cubism, and abstract expressionism, and to imply the hurtling of objects through space she added dashes of futurism as well. As for medium, it was not the message, and she reached for whatever chalk, colored pencil, charcoal, or tube of acrylic would deliver the desired effect, and sometimes to achieve a perfectly hard line or bold blare of a single color she glued on razor-bladed swatches of glossy paper from adverts in Snooker Scene.

  For the astronaut story, the style was identical. The planets looked like snooker balls, the stars like constellations of reds by the balk cushion. Even Martin’s geometry homework resembled diagrams of complex four-cushion plays in Snooker Scene. Though she didn’t attend a single one of Ramsey’s tournaments for the rest of the season—not even the World—she felt more intimate with his occupation than ever before. It was always this way, that by drawing something she came to own it.

  Irina kept the project under wraps. When Ramsey returned home between tournaments, he was forbidden to enter her studio on the top floor, and she chafed at the distraction of his incessant tiddles on her door. In fact, he began to get on her nerves.

  For one thing, Ramsey was a festival of intestinal complaints. This is the sort of thing you never learn about a man until you live with him, but he was wont to spend up to an hour at a time in the loo with the door closed, sometimes three or four times a day; the mysteries he concealed therein she supposed she was better off spared. And vague colonic discomfort was only the beginning. He was getting tendonitis in his left arm. His lower back ached. He had a strange pain in his kidney—or was it his gall bladder?—which she dismissed privately as gas.

  To Irina’s despair, just when she was getting rolling with the new illustrations, Ramsey canceled his trip to Asia in March because of a head cold. You would think the poor man had come down with bubonic plague. Lying abed sipping hot toddies, Ramsey posited that this was no “common” cold and might be pneumonia, or Legionnaire’s disease. Since his symptoms came down to a runny nose and a dry, forced-sounding cough, Irina proposed that maybe he was suffering the effects of too many Gauloises.

  Irina was ordinarily a willing nurse, and went about fetching him toddies and tea, hankies and toast. But Ramsey made a demanding patient, and his instincts to play up his suffering made her sympathy come less easily than it might have had he evidenced some minimal measure of stoicism. So when she caught the cold as well, she stiff-upper-lipped it, going briskly about her day in the hopes of demonstrating a sturdier approach to illness. Alas, she merely convinced him that he had a far more lethal dose of what ailed them, while she must have pretty well “fought the bastard off.”

  Fortunately, while the rest of Ramsey’s body languished at death’s door, one part of his anatomy was hale as ever. Separations stored up explosive sexual appetite, sparing them the sating or boredom that always threatens with too much of a good thing. The fire that ran in her veins with Ramsey in bed lit a match to the pages upstairs, and the balls and planets in her illustrations pulsed with an energy that, had anyone understood where it came from, could have gotten her arrested for trading in kiddie porn.

  Miraculously surviving his head cold and back on the tour, Ramsey continued to phone home every night, but the calls often went funny. Irina was convinced that he was primarily jealous of a pile of paper. But big surprise, all their scrappy calls regarded Lawrence. Irina had slipped off to see Ramsey for months, had she not? Irina had lied to Lawrence, had she not? Her loss of moral standing was apparently permanent. For Ramsey was dead sure that she was seeing Lawrence on the sly while he was gone.

  Which she was.

  But she wasn’t carrying on with her ex in any sordid sense. They met for innocent cups of coffee. For them both, to rescue a postapocalyptic warmth was to redeem their decade’s investment as not having been sunk in a junk bond. Behold, they did like each other, even once the worst had come to pass. Why, there were afternoons when she met him for a cappuccino near Blue Sky that she forgot for moments at a go that they had ever broken up. He still talked about Kosovo, as he would have back in the day. Their only acrimonious meeting was the one in which he pointed out that he shouldn’t have had to learn she was married from Clive Everton on TV.

  Her gratitude for what seemed a tentative forgiveness—as witnessed by his willingness to see her at all—was boundless. She had done the worst thing that it was possible to do to a person, in her view, and he would still sit across from her, ask after her work, even ask about the very scoundrel for whom she’d forsaken him. In his staunch loyalty to the prodigal, Lawrence was like fathers are supposed to be, and never are.

  As he had the first time they met officially as exes, Lawrence still trained his gaze forty-five degrees from her face, allowing her to study him in wonderment without her contemplation being observed. At such times it came to her that he was a good man. That she was lucky to have known him, luckier to have known his love, and perhaps foolish to have risked everything a woman could ever dream of for everything and a little bit more.

  Through this period she developed one other habit that she didn’t disclose to her husband, which didn’t involve Lawrence exactly. On occasional weekdays, with Lawrence sure to be at work, Irina would take a long walk south. Quietly, since she still had the keys (Lawrence may have let her keep them simply to spare himself the embarrassment of asking for them back) she would ease into the building on Trinity Street, and slip into her old flat. While she couldn’t help but notice anything changed or lying about, she told herself she wasn’t spying, for that was not her intent. She didn’t poke through Lawrence’s post or open his laptop. Sometimes she simply stood in the middle of the living room for minutes, or walked down the hall, glancing into the kitchen at the long rows of fading spices, touching the prints of Miró and Rothko, amazed that this diorama of her former life remained so intact that she could physically walk around in the past. Other times she sat in her old rust-colored armchair, glancing up at the drapes she had sewn, perhaps perusing the Daily Telegraph left on the green marble coffee table from that morning—though she was careful to remember its folding and orientation, and to replace it exactly as it had lain. She smoothed the rumples from her chair before departing, and since Lawrence never said anything, she supposed she was successful in making her presence unfelt.

  It was a curious pastime. But on Victoria Park Road, she was surrounded by snooker posters and snooker trophies and snooker magazines. On these surreptitious trips to Borough Irina wasn’t really visiting Lawrence, but herself.

  Meanwhile, Irina and her mother had still not spoken, and the impasse was now sufficiently entrenched that Ir
ina couldn’t imagine what advent might dislodge it. While silence technically took no time at all, she was surprised to discover how draining it was on a daily basis. She and her mother were not-speaking in an active sense that required a great deal of energy, and Irina lost more than one night’s sleep tossing over whether the next time she saw her mother would be in an open casket. But the only way of making up to the woman would be to give ground on her cruel reading of Ramsey. Irina was at least able to keep tabs on the family through Tatyana, who seemed to enjoy her role as secret interlocutor. Irina fed her tidbits about Ramsey’s lucrative winnings and his rock-solid fidelity, but Tatyana liked to play both sides, and Irina could never be sure if her notes in bottles ever washed up on Brooklyn’s shore. Irina made every attempt to simply write her mother off, but Raisa would promptly write herself back on again, like graffiti sandblasted away by public authorities that promptly reappears the next day. Thus Irina was confronted with the maddening tenacity of the blood tie. Oh, you didn’t have to love each other; indeed, you could revile each other. But the one thing apparently not in your power was to demote a member of your family to the unimportant.

  In her solitude, it came as a shock to register that she had been utterly neglecting her friends. Now that she’d finally remembered them, like that last item on your grocery list that you dash back for while someone holds your place in the checkout queue, Irina wouldn’t have blamed any of them for huffing, “Oh, hubby’s off on tour, now you want to have dinner, when before we were expendable? No, thank you!” Fortunately, most of Irina’s friends had been around the romantic block, and regarded friendship holidays during which you restored or ruined your life as par for the course.

  Yet these revivals of friendships were skewed. Last summer, she and Ramsey had gone over to Betsy and Leo’s for dinner. While superficially the occasion was a success—polite, solicitous; their hosts had gone to lengths over the food—in retrospect it was a disaster. Betsy liked Lawrence. Betsy missed Lawrence, and Betsy probably held it against Irina, just a little, that now when she had her friend over to dinner she didn’t get two for the price of one. She may also have felt wounded by the fact that Irina had failed to follow that advice not to “shoot her wad” on a “fancy, shiny gadget” that wouldn’t last, and clearly thought Irina had lost leave of her senses. Leo had held forth about the state of the music industry, but neither of them had even passing interest in snooker; Ramsey’s returning discourse on the rise of the attacking over the strategic game met an earnest attentiveness wildly at odds with Betsy’s casual social brutality when she was being herself. Both parties vowed on parting that they must do this again soon, didn’t mean it, and hadn’t.