The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  “Well, as they say, winning isn’t everything.” Irina would have to suppress her impulse to confide; the scuttlebutt would get back to Brighton Beach. “It’s a bit of a letdown, is all I mean. To get what you’ve always wanted.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been more of a letdown to lose?”

  “Oh, probably. Make mine a cappuccino? And a muffin. I’m starving.”

  While Tatyana fetched sustenance, Irina considered that the person she really wanted to confide in was Lawrence; the fact that he was at large in this very city right now was a torture. Anyway, what did it matter. She would have to live without his counsel indefinitely now.

  “Got a little gossip,” said Irina brightly. “Lawrence is getting married.”

  “You don’t say! Who to?”

  Irina frowned. “Gosh. I forgot to ask.”

  “Pretty low-quality gossip, big sister. How do you feel about it?”

  Irina took a deep breath. “I’m happy for him. Very happy.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t sound that happy.”

  “Oh… I guess there’s something sad about it,” Irina allowed cautiously, the gross understatement turning this heart-to-heart to farce. “So final. The absolute end of an era. Whoever it is, she’s very lucky.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Lawrence came last night. I invited him, since he was in New York anyway.”

  “Wasn’t that awfully awkward?”

  “Oh, not at all,” Irina said heartily. “Ramsey is so socially adept, and we’re all grown-ups. In fact, Ramsey seemed glad to see Lawrence, and grateful on my account that he made an appearance. They’ve always liked each other. In no time, those two were nattering on about snooker, just like the old days.”

  “So how’s it going, with you and Ramsey?”

  “Fine,” said Irina flatly—and then decided, so long as she was lying, to do so with panache. “He was over the moon when I won the medal last night. Couldn’t stop singing my praises to other people. I was abashed. I tried to remind him that it was déclassé to brag about your own spouse, but he was so proud that he wouldn’t listen. He’s vowed to paint the town red when we get home.” And wouldn’t he, in a sense.

  When they parted, after an update on Dmitri, Raisa, and the kids, Tatyana cocked her head. “I still don’t get it. You’re in love, you won a big prize—and you look at death’s door. Your face is harrowed.”

  “It’s just makeup. I wore eyeliner last night and slept on it. Makes my eyes look ghoulish.”

  “Get some cold cream, then!”

  “I’ll do that,” Irina mumbled, though fairly sure that the darkness her sister had detected would not readily rub off.

  BY THE TIME IRINA returned to the Pierre late afternoon, Ramsey had showered and packed. He seemed to have gotten with the program, and said no more than she did—i.e., nothing. Meeting her eyes, his own flashed with undiminished anger. She absolutely refused to feel attracted to him. As she took refuge in the officious logistics of checkout, the clench of her jaw gave her a headache. In the taxi to JFK, the departure lounge of Terminal 4, and the cabin of the 747, they continued to observe the protocol of speaking only necessities to the driver and flight attendants, and not a word to each other. By the time they tucked back into the Jaguar at Heathrow’s long-term parking at ten a.m. London time the next day, muteness had grown habitual, and almost relaxing.

  Irina’s signal to stop for milk on the way home proved fortuitous. Once she closed the door on Victoria Park Road behind her, it would not open again for a solid two days.

  “I’M STILL WAITING FOR my apology,” she announced in the foyer, back to the door.

  Ramsey dropped his carry-on from a greater height than seemed necessary. “A bird could grow gray waiting for the likes of that. And when do I get mine?”

  “When hell freezes”—she clipped past him to the kitchen to store the milk in the fridge—“and pigs fly.”

  In retrospect, the dispute may have turned into such a marathon because it departed from orthodox form. Customarily, Ramsey made an accusation; Irina defended herself; Ramsey made the accusation again. The sheer monotony ensured that even Ramsey would finally get bored. But this time, Irina took the initiative, and fired the opening volley herself.

  “Who do you think you are?” Hands on hips, she had located the deepest register in a voice that was always husky. As Ramsey drew up to his full six-three in the kitchen doorway, chin at a pugnacious tilt, she was glad for the two-inch boost of her high heels. “I have spent hours, and hours, and hours listening to you despair about how underappreciated you are, about how no one gives you credit for originating the ‘attacking game’ that’s now become standard practice among younger players. About the awful injustice of how little money you won in the early days, when the purses were minuscule, and now these upstarts walk off with a hundred grand just for making it to the semis. About how terrible it is that Snooker Scene hasn’t done a profile of you in ten years. I’ve gone to tournament after tournament—and all you can remember is the matches I missed. But do we ever sit at dinner and talk about my disappointments? No! I worked my ass off for Frame and Match. I was paid a pittance for it, and the print run and distribution were abysmal. But have you heard me keening every night about how underappreciated I am? Have you had to listen to me moan on and on about the fact that I’ve toiled my whole life in relative obscurity? No! So finally, for the first time ever, something good happens to me, I get a little credit, one day in the sun. I ask you to come with me to celebrate something that I’ve achieved, and you sabotage the whole event! Whispering all that poison in my ear, and refusing to eat anything while drinking like a fish? Bickering even through the announcement of the winner so I can’t even hear it, and at the very moment I should have been feeling on top of the world I feel like a fool? It was an act of vandalism! The oldest power-play in the book, too—Don’t get uppity, bitch, because no matter how famous you get, I can always make your life hell. You didn’t care that I was short-listed, and you didn’t care that I won! All you cared about was the fact I’d invited Lawrence, who had every right to be there, and whom I had every right to invite! And if that offended you, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Sunday night had nothing to do with you. A concept that is obviously alien. Everything has to be about you, you vain, narcissistic bastard! Well, Sunday night was supposed to be about me.”

  It was, in snooker terms, a spectacular clearance, but unfortunately this occasion would prove their personal World final, and she had only taken one frame. Just like Sheffield’s, this match was slated for two days and two nights, and Irina hadn’t the stamina to keep sinking the same angry reds over and over again. There was no getting around the fact that Ramsey was the real pro at this game, and was far more accustomed to keeping his composure while his opponent got in all manner of splendid shots, confident that one slip or rerack would let him back in. As she caught her breath by the fridge, Ramsey took his cue for his own visit.

  “Fair play,” he said. “But why’s your day in the sun got to be my own day in the shade? You totally ignored me! At them tournaments my own wife stoops to show up, I introduce you round, I fetch you a drink, I keep my arm around you, don’t I. I never wiggle out from under, like, Don’t touch me, you animal! for all the world to see—”

  “You were hurting my arm! And I had other people to talk to. For a single evening, you were not the center of my universe, and that’s what you couldn’t stick!”

  “—Least of all have I ever asked some other bird along what I used to fancy, and to be honest still fancy like mad, hovering off in the corner like, speaking our own private language, having a laugh at what a waster you are!”

  Later, at this point Irina’s recollection would begin to fragment. Bits and pieces: Apparently Lawrence had always been lurking in the background as the real tenant of her affections. Ramsey refused to believe that Lawrence “just happened” to be in town, and was sure that the predator had flown all the way
from London to impress her. Anorak Man, in this version of events, had for years been lying in wait, ready to pounce the moment relations with her husband showed signs of strain. And what was this about “hoping Jude didn’t mind” that she and Ramsey had married? Was their marriage something to apologize for, to be ashamed of? Her hug with Lawrence after the award ceremony converted to “throwing herself into his arms.” Lawrence’s “bracing” Ramsey after the ceremony developed over the course of a day into “issuing that death threat.” He’d thought he’d found enduring love, and now he found himself party to the same “second-rate, two-timing rubbish” that everyone else settled for, in preference to which he’d rather be by himself. As for convincing Ramsey that when he caught her outside the flat in Borough Lawrence was actually in Dubai, Irina was sent decisively back to square one, and rerunning the entire palaver from Sheffield must have absorbed at least three or four hours on Tuesday night. Over the course of those two days Ramsey assembled a veritable retrospective of her transgressions in the post-birthday world: arranging “appointment TV” to ogle Lawrence on the news, “declaring her love for Anorak Man” in front of her mother, “running him down” to other players in Preston—all the way back to You should have packed a bag.

  Throughout, Irina refused to play her trump card: that, Ramsey’s raving fantasies to the contrary, Lawrence was getting married. The news still ached, and it was private. She would not violate the personally sacred by flinging it like a rolling pin.

  Meanwhile, the house on Victoria Park Road might as well have twisted into the sky like Dorothy’s, and nothing from the rest of the world so much as sailed past the windows. She wasn’t about to launch out for a Daily Telegraph, and turning on the television under the circumstances would have been an act of inflammatory hostility the proceedings could ill afford. Likewise checking e-mail was out of the question, even if Irina yearned to click through the host of congratulations surely hovering in cyberspace. The telephone rang around three p.m. on Tuesday, and for some reason continued to do so at regular intervals for the rest of the afternoon, but picking up the phone mid–spousal harangue was hardly politic, and more than once when the ringing resumed, Irina, in tears, wasn’t fit to answer. By early that evening she jerked the receiver off the hook to shut the bloody thing up.

  Since it is the beginnings and endings of most great sporting events that one remembers, Irina later retained her most coherent memory of the last frame.

  It was coming up on dawn of Thursday morning, and if there is always something queasy about that indeterminate time of day, like coffee lightened with skim milk, the dull graying through the cracks in the curtains was especially sickening when it signaled the close of a second sleepless night, following on the one before, during which Irina had only dozed on the plane. To say she was hallucinating with exhaustion would overplay the matter, but she was certainly losing sight of what purpose all this verbal laying waste was meant to serve.

  Ramsey had sunk into one of his maudlin phases. He had given her everything, his whole being, saving nothing out for himself. He had even sacrificed what meant most to him in all the whole world, the championship final—

  “What do you mean,” said Irina, lifting her head blearily from the kitchen table. “How do you figure that?”

  “I catch you shagging Anorak Man the day before, I ain’t going to play proper snooker, am I. It’s a wonder I knew which way round to point the cue.”

  “Yes, it’s a wonder, since you were stinking drunk!” So many times had Irina repeated her explanation about having only been “visiting herself” that Saturday in Borough that it had come to sound absurd to her own ears, and she had learned to skip it.

  “I were blind with grief, pet. Them first two sessions, all I could see is you and Anorak Man, groping in that bed upstairs—”

  “After a bottle and a half of Remy, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face! Can we get this straight? Are you seriously holding me accountable for that fiasco in Sheffield?”

  Ramsey glared with matching incredulity. “What, or who, drove me to drink? Are you seriously not holding yourself accountable for the biggest public disgrace of my life? Ducky, you are dead lucky your Ramsey Acton is a forgiving man!”

  It was amazing that after all this time Irina could still marshal the energy for outrage, but they do not make adrenaline for nothing. Moreover, he had released from embargo all that she had not let fly back in May.

  “You disgraced yourself! And furthermore, you disgraced me! Do you think it was easy for me to watch my own husband stagger around the table unable to get a ball within two feet of a pocket? The while looking like a dog’s dinner—clothes crumpled, hair like a dish mop? All those rude remarks you made to O’Sullivan—I wanted to crawl in a hole and die! Forgiveness—I have ladled you forgiveness in buckets!”

  “In the charmed universe where I had a loyal wife what didn’t mess about with another bloke the day before, I’d have wiped the floor with that wally O’Sullivan, no two ways about it!”

  “In the charmed universe where you took your own wife’s word, maybe you would have won the final. But I will not take responsibility for your mistrust!”

  “I handed you my trophy on a plate. And mind, ducky, you’d not have won that sodding medal in New York, if it wasn’t for me.”

  Irina’s mouth gaped. “Not only did I lose your trophy for you—but you won my medal for me. How does that work?”

  “I gave you snooker. No snooker, no Frame and Match, and no poncy medal, neither.” Neever.

  “You gave me snooker? Well, can I please give it back? Because I am sick of snooker, sick to death of snooker, I’m sick of the very word snooker, and if I never saw another snooker match in my entire life I would face east and kiss the floor!”

  Ramsey turned white. He stood and cornered on his heel, marching to the basement door. She first assumed that he had fled to his lair to escape his own violent impulses. But violence comes in as many flavors as ice cream, and within the minute he emerged carrying Denise. With nauseous deliberateness, Ramsey propped a foot on a kitchen chair, and cracked his cue of thirty-three years across its back.

  THE MURDER OF IRINA’S rival had the one merit of releasing all the tension from the room. The very air seemed to slacken, the ticking of the clock over the Aga cooker to grow more sluggish. The sun had risen, its streams through the curtains mockingly bright.

  Irina dragged from her chair to make coffee, wincing as the grinder let loose its banshee wail, as if mourning the demise of a fellow inanimate object. She discovered that they were out of milk.

  “I can’t drink straight espresso on an empty stomach,” she said leadenly. “I’m going to head out for a few things. Do you want anything?”

  The halves of his splintered cue clutched in each hand, Ramsey shook his head. Thank heavens he made no bid to come along.

  When Irina walked outside into the crisp morning air, she went into shock that there was an outside. Yet it wasn’t the great outdoors that produced this sense of relief, but getting away from Ramsey.

  When she checked out at Safeway, the familiar clerk didn’t meet her eyes. Par for the course in commercial exchanges these days—so it was more curious that, after gathering herself, the clerk did meet Irina’s eyes, soulfully full-bore. She placed the change in Irina’s hand with solemnity, the way one pressed a coin into a child’s moist outstretched palm in the days when kids were still awed by a quarter. “Cor,” said the girl, “I’m awful sorry, like. I reckon I don’t know what else to say.”

  Baffled, Irina didn’t know what else to say, either. Perhaps the change was incorrect, but she’d already plunged it into the pile in her pocket. How badly could she have been cheated if she’d only given the girl a pound? She shrugged, and a mutter of “No harm done” seemed to cover the bases. Or it should have, but the peculiar look the girl shot her in return was piercing.

  The open-air market on Roman Road was already under way, and Irina was in no hurry to
return to the kitchen where Ramsey would be still holding the two halves of his life in each hand. So she headed for her regular vegetable seller, and picked out some runner beans. Smiling at the merchant, she thought her face might crack; her lips hadn’t curved upward for days.

  When Irina had first strolled Roman Road on Ramsey’s arm, locals were cool; the East Enders were resentful about ceding the neighborhood’s national treasure to an American. But she didn’t trade on her status, and gradually they had seemed to warm. Nevertheless, when she presented her basket of produce to the beefy man behind the cart, he, too, looked her searchingly in the eyes with an intensity that was unnerving. “Blimey,” he said. “Terrible thing, innit?”

  Maybe there’d been an accident or fire nearby, but honestly she was so depleted, so underslept, and so increasingly tortured by the implications of that splintered stick of ash back in the kitchen, that she hadn’t the energy to care about some strangers’ misfortune. It wasn’t pretty, but on days like this the whole world could go to hell and she couldn’t be bothered. No harm done wouldn’t work this time, so she settled for a neutral mmm.

  “Here now, you take that,” said the vegetable seller, selecting three enormous navel oranges and putting them in her bag.

  “Oh, but you needn’t—”

  He added an avocado. She thanked him, and though she’d been pleased with herself for gaining acceptance in the area, she hadn’t realized her progress had been so considerable as to extend to free fruit. Touched, she had ambled halfway back down the road before, as an afterthought, she ducked into a newsagent to pick up a Telegraph.

  Standing before the row of broadsheets, Irina, already pale, went paler.

  It is possible she began to weave; she certainly felt faint, though not from lack of sleep.

  Catatonic at the kitchen table, Ramsey still clutched his shattered cue. In silence, she slid the stack of newspapers onto the table, pushing his ashtray slagged with cigarette butts out of the way. In the photo on the uppermost front page, angled gray beams resembled the ashy fag-ends in close-up. Irina bowed her head. Tears—the only ones worth shedding amid a septic tank of wastewater spilled these last two days—spattered the photograph.