The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  The hall was growing packed, and the event’s organizers pulled both couples away to meet the foundation directors, journalists, and judges. Although Irina read apology in the judges’ eyes (sorry, but we didn’t vote for you), they did all heap praises on Frame and Match, talking up the vibrancy of the colors, the freshness of her material… Starved of serious approbation for most of her career, Irina was perplexingly deaf to the tributes. Compliments were empty calories, like popcorn.

  She explained to the group that the lipstick-red, the lemony yellow, and the creamy green merely duplicated snooker balls as faithfully as she knew how. “As a matter of fact,” she added, “snooker first took off in the UK as a spectator sport because of the advent of color television. The BBC needed programming that was literally colorful. So the show Pot Black was born, the players became national celebrities, and what started as a haphazard, mostly amateur game got organized into rankings and tournaments and high-stakes purses.”

  Jude’s expression was pitying: Oh, my poor darling, you have had an earful.

  “Ramsey”—Irina pulled him forward—“was on Pot Black all the time!” Alas, she only put him on the spot. The group could follow up with no better than, “So you’re a snooker player!” and Ramsey could return with no better than, “Yeah.” Silence.

  In the midst of this conversational maw, Lawrence made his entrance.

  Obviously, Irina might as well have invited a suicide bomber from the West Bank, or the Mask of the Red Death. But the moment she met Lawrence’s deep-set brown eyes from across the room, they flushed with a warmth that put out of mind, however temporarily, the scale of her mistake. Ramsey’s gray-blue irises could wash oceanic, as available as open water, but something about their very color gave them also the terrifying capacity to go cold. Yet despite the scorn that often issued from Lawrence’s mouth, it was in the nature of that particular shade of umber that his eyes could express a limited set of emotions: tenderness, gratitude, injury, and need. When they lived together she had often chafed at the shabbiness of his dress; now those familiar dark Dockers and the threadbare button-down with no tie made her smile. In fact, everything about Lawrence that once vexed her now entranced her instead. She loved his fundamental humility, at such odds with his intellectual bluster as The Expert. She loved his slumped, unassuming posture. She loved the fact that at an occasion of this nature he could always be relied upon to hold up his end of things; you could throw Lawrence into any social pool, and he would swim. She loved his rigidity and discipline, all just a cover for a raging terror of the gluttony, intemperance, and sloth that would surely ensue should he ever step off the straight and narrow. She loved that Lawrence Trainer was truly able to be “happy for” another person’s good fortune, and his demeanor as he advanced glowed with his present happiness for hers. Lastly, while she may long before have lost touch with the urge to tear off his clothes, she still loved his face. She loved his carved, haunted, beautiful face.

  It was a toss-up whether Ramsey would find the more unforgivable her invitation to Lawrence in the first place, or her expression when he walked in. Either way, when she glanced at her husband, Ramsey’s eyes had made ready use of their capacity to go cold.

  Lawrence diffidently pecked her cheek. “Congratulations!”

  “Thank you,” she said. Ramsey put his left arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight, his hand mashing her upper arm. “Ramsey? Lawrence happened to be in town, and so I asked him to come.”

  “Happened to be in town. Ain’t that lucky.”

  “Hey, Ramsey!” Lawrence heartily shook Ramsey’s free hand. “No hard feelings. Really, it’s great to see you.”

  “Anorak Man,” said Ramsey. With Irina, the epithet had morphed to caustic slur, a token of his refusal to dignify her former partner with a proper name; to Lawrence’s face, the handle inevitably resumed a measure of the affection with which it had first been coined. But Ramsey didn’t want to feel any of his old fondness for Lawrence. Even less did he wish to confront the awful truth that Lawrence Trainer was a nice man.

  “Hey, congratulations on making it to the final in Sheffield this year!” said Lawrence. “What does that make, eight?”

  “You should know.” Ramsey could hardly talk, so furious was he to be having this conversation at all. “You’re the boffin.”

  This mashing business with Ramsey’s left hand had grown actively unpleasant. “Lawrence, let me get you your one glass of wine,” said Irina, discreetly disengaging from her husband’s clasp. In science fiction, when parallel universes collide, the molecular integrity of the whole world is often imperiled, and now she knew why.

  “Listen,” said Lawrence quietly beside the bar service. With twenty feet separating the two men, the atomic particles of the room settled again. “I checked out your competition at Barnes and Noble. Man, you’re a shoo-in! Those other entries totally suck! I mean, get a load of that piece of shit that Jude wrote—and now that I get a look at her, load is the word. When I came across the title, I bust a gut!”

  In Children of Size, a chunky little girl is smitten by a boy at school, and to win his favor she goes on all manner of diets. Hungry all the time, the once cheerful protagonist grows peevish. The tenant of her affections finally bewails that he had been smitten with her as well, until she became so unpleasant. Behold, he likes a bit of heft. The little girl learns to eat sensibly and to love her own body, even if she would never be thin—happy ending.

  “You know, Ramsey didn’t seem too thrilled I showed up,” said Lawrence. “I could just have a quick drink and go. I don’t want to ruin the evening for you. It’s your night.”

  “Davay gavoreet po-russki, ladno?” she asked, and continued in hushed Russian. “Yes, it’s my night. Which means I should be able to have you here if I want to. And you belong here. You kept me going in illustration through some tough years. Please don’t go. Please?”

  “I’ll stay if you want me to,” he assured her. “But why is he still so touchy, after all this time?” Lawrence’s Russian was surprisingly fluid.

  “Mozhet byt potomy shto on vidit shto yavsyo yeshcho tebya lyublu.”

  Embarrassed, Lawrence switched to English again. “You only love me in a way. Maybe you should tell him I’m getting married. That might make him feel better.”

  Irina cocked her head. “Would I be making that up?”

  Lawrence said softly, “Nyet.”

  Irina glanced at her toes before looking up again. “Congratulations. I guess that’s good news.” She shouldn’t have appended the I guess, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Da, na samom dele,” he said fervently. “Very good news. I hope you don’t feel bad that you and I, that we never— We didn’t get married but maybe we should have, and this time around I’m going to do it right.”

  “Lawrence Trainer!” shrieked the refreshments tent. “Look at the pair of you, like old times! Why, our old foursome is back! Just a tad mixed up, that’s all.”

  “Hi, Jude,” said Lawrence wearily. He could never stand Jude Hartford.

  Jude introduced Duncan, and the toff went into his somnambulant spiel about how absolutely inexpressibly thrilling it was to meet yet another guest about whom he didn’t give a damn. Without missing a beat Lawrence returned, “Indeed, frightfully, frightfully delightful to make your acquaintance as well, old bean,” getting the geezer’s accent to a tee. For the first time at the reception, something stirred in those muddy eyes, and Duncan seemed to wake up.

  “I say,” said Duncan. “Taking the piss, are we?”

  “Got that right,” said Lawrence flatly, and turned away.

  “I adore you,” Irina whispered.

  “You used to,” said Lawrence lightly. “And why not? I’m adorable.” Something had loosened in him—it was no longer difficult for him to see her—and Irina realized that he had finally let her go.

  FOR THE SIT-DOWN DINNER in the adjoining room, the Lewis Carroll contestants and their escorts were seated together at
a large round front table. Just her luck, Irina’s place card was positioned between Ramsey and Duncan. Lawrence was sitting at another table nearby, and Irina kept him wistfully in the corner of her eye, noting how readily he engaged the guests on his either side in heated conversation. Politics, no doubt—Nepal, Chechnya, who knows. Funny, she’d once been irked by the way he took over socially; now she was charmed to bits.

  When she asked after the nature of his work, Duncan said that he “dabbled in a few investments,” ergo he and the Queen had divvied up the better part of England between them. Irina said, “I can’t say I’ve ever been very interested in finance,” to which he replied, “Makes the world go round, my dear,” and she snapped, “Not mine.” There is nothing quite so icy as two people being patronizing to each other, and Irina, usually a good conversational soldier, concluded abruptly that life was too short.

  But Ramsey wasn’t providing much by way of salvation. His bearing was stony. His wine glass was drained, and she wished the waiters weren’t so attentive to refills. She’d married a man who detested small talk, and who never felt at ease outside the rarefied world of snooker, but Ramsey’s fish-out-of-water performance this evening was extreme even by the minimal social standards she had learned to apply to him. Well before her Great Sin was revealed with the arrival of a certain someone, he had barely spoken to a soul, and so far this was like navigating a formal dinner with a houseplant.

  “I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of mayonnaise.”

  Ramsey stared her down with dull incredulity.

  “The salmon terrine’s not bad,” she said helplessly, “if you scrape it off.”

  A waiter whisked away Ramsey’s starter untouched. When he proceeded to ignore his main course as well, eyes cut toward him askance.

  “Not touching your dinner,” she whispered. “It’s a little embarrassing.”

  “I am embarrassing you?” he muttered bitterly.

  To ruin her own evening, she would have to ask. “Okay. What’s wrong.”

  “You humiliated me.”

  The rest of the table having written the pair off as standoffish or bashful, with luck she could bury the tiff beneath their chatter. “I’d have thought your wife being nominated for a prestigious award would have made you feel proud instead. My mistake.”

  “Oi, you made a mistake, all right. Count on it.” With a raised eyebrow, a waiter cleared off his untouched plate, while a second topped up Ramsey’s wine.

  “May I hazard a guess that this hunger strike has something to do with my having invited Lawrence?”

  “What do you think?”

  As the waiters cleared the rest of the table, Irina accidentally caught Jude’s eye. In any fantasies about a chance encounter like this evening’s, Irina had conjured a gentle display of how perfectly suited she and Ramsey were for each other, how hopelessly in love. This is what it looks like, she would have liked to imply, when Ramsey Acton has found the right woman: he is relaxed, jubilant, sometimes hilarious, and physically exquisite. In this sense, though only in this sense, would Irina have enjoyed making Jude Hartford jealous. But presently Jude’s eyes stabbed instead with supercilious pity. This was not a revolutionary Ramsey, a centered, self-possessed, celebrative man who had truly learned, if late in life, to squeeze the orange; this was a Ramsey that Jude knew all too well. Indeed, her face glowed with the smug relief of having successfully passed along the Old Maid in a game of cards.

  The proceedings on the dais got under way, the director of the Lewis Carroll Foundation presenting each entry with a brief biography of the authors and illustrators. As Irina’s book was introduced, Ramsey continued to mutter furiously that it was “bad enough” that she had asked Anorak Man to a public dinner, but that it was especially outrageous to have the “shambolic state of his marriage” paraded before his ex-wife. As Ramsey leaned into her ear, his head blocked her view of the projections of Frame and Match.

  “Lawrence was a big booster of my career,” she whispered; it was increasingly impossible to disguise the fact that they were having a row. “It’s appropriate for him to be here.”

  “Appropriate,” Ramsey mumbled, “is you showing up at a do with your husband, full stop. And how’d you like your man having a go at me over the World final?”

  “He wasn’t having a go, he congratulated you for getting so far!”

  As the foundation director had asked for the envelope, Ramsey’s harsh whisper was so close to her ear that it hurt. “He was rubbing my nose in them first two sessions, all wink-wink like, I saw you fall flat on your arse, I watched you get stuffed—”

  “Please stop!” She’d been holding it back for the last hour, like sticking her finger in a dike, but the floodwaters were now too high, and despite herself Irina began to cry.

  “I saw your face tonight,” Ramsey continued, undeterred. “All soft and wobbly. The secret rabbiting in Russian. You’re still in love with him! You’re still in love with the bloke, and our marriage is a laugh!”

  The audience burst into applause, and then rose for a standing ovation. Wiping her eyes hastily, Irina struggled from her chair and tugged Ramsey up with her, though she had missed the announcement of the winner altogether. It was a little ugly, but she prayed that the victor wasn’t Jude, and was guiltily relieved when she saw Jude applauding with everyone else. Irina’s own clapping was fatigued. While she had previously dreaded having to feign joy on another contestant’s account, now she really was glad—that this cataclysmic occasion would soon be over. Nevertheless, the ovation did seem to be going on an odiously long time, and as she glanced around the table all the other candidates were applauding, too, and mouthing things at her that she didn’t understand. Finally the applause died down; while a few elderly guests resumed their seats, everyone else remained standing. Well, let them, but Irina was wrung out, and led the way by plopping back into her chair.

  “Ms. McGovern,” said the director, and the audience emitted an uneasy chuckle. “As we understand it, no one else has been nominated to accept the medal in your place.”

  Irina’s face burned, her body needling head to toe. She looked in a panic around the table to make sure that she hadn’t misunderstood, and everyone nodded encouragingly and smiled. She edged unsteadily from her chair and meekly climbed the stairs. The beaming officiator looped her neck with a golden disc the size of an all-day sucker.

  “Th-thank you,” Irina stuttered too close to the mic, and it buzzed. Her mind was a blank, or almost. That is, there was only one person she wanted to thank. Only one person who had supported her through the long lean years of no prizes. One person who had always urged her to believe in her talent, who had marveled at the drawings in her studio at the end of his own hard day. And of all those gathered here, there was only one person whom she had better not thank if she knew what was good for her. All right, but she would not, absolutely would not thank instead the man who had just single-handedly destroyed this occasion, and as a consequence left it at thank you, period, and stumbled away.

  IN THE FLURRY OF handshaking that followed, Lawrence hung humbly back. When he finally took his turn in the receiving line, he tried first to simply shake her hand like the others, but Irina was having none of that, and hugged him close. While she hoped that her reddened, puffy eyes would be mistaken for having wept tears of joy, when they disengaged he took a hard look at her face; he hadn’t lived with her for nearly a decade for nothing. Squaring up to Ramsey, who was propped at her side with all the animation of an umbrella stand, Lawrence may not have grabbed Ramsey’s lapels, but his aggressive stance seemed to indicate that he’d thought about it.

  “If you don’t treat her right,” said Lawrence through his teeth, “so help me God, I will punch your lights out.” With a graze of Irina’s temple, he was gone.

  A touching bit of chivalry, but it would cost her.

  “YOU’RE DRUNK,” SAID IRINA in the elevator. “We will not talk about this now.”

 
; “That so. And when will my princess deign to resume our chat?”

  “If we have to continue this disagreeable exchange, we will not do so until we get back to London. Until then I don’t care what you say, I will not participate.”

  Irina was true to her word. She was stoically deaf to Ramsey’s multiple attempts to get a rise out of her, and the only sounds she emitted in their hotel room were the pock of dental floss and rasp of her toothbrush. She tugged off her dress, unrolled her tights, and crawled into bed. As she reached for the light, Ramsey asked plaintively, “Not even going to say good-night, pet?” The crisp flip of the switch spoke for her. Slumber had always been out of the question when matters between them were the slightest bit out of whack, but tonight she dropped to sleep like plunging from a tall building to the pavement.

  For the following Monday, Irina had arranged to meet her sister for coffee, and when she left the room Ramsey was still sleeping off however many bottles of wine had substituted for a roast beef dinner. The hasty tête-à-tête was meant to make up for the fact that not only her mother but Tatyana had given the Lewis Carroll dinner a miss, explaining that their mother would regard her attendance as taking her sister’s side. By the time they met in a Broadway Starbucks, Irina was only grateful for Tatyana’s absence the night before. Her sister was an unreliable ally, and would have savored relating Ramsey’s drunken distemper to their mother, since it seemed to confirm everything Raisa had intuited the instant she met the man.

  “You don’t look so hot,” said Tatyana after the usual bear-hug. “Considering that I read in the Times this morning that you won.”