The Post-Birthday World

by Lionel Shriver

  She did come across the electric clippers last week, recalling the only time she cut his hair. There is something sensual about cutting a man’s hair, intimate, animal, like a chimpanzee’s grooming of burrs from the coat of her mate. She’d gloried so in the project that he grew impatient. The cut came out too short in the front, and he’d announced peremptorily that next time it was back to the Algerian barber on Long Lane. The clippers were an emblem, therefore, of a failed experiment, and of an afternoon on which he’d not been kind. So it didn’t make a lot of sense to have switched on the appliance, to have gripped the vibrating column—it stirred her like a sexual aid—but you could apparently wax nostalgic about bad memories. It hadn’t made a lot of sense, either, when she’d bowed her head onto his small oak desk—he’d taken his computer with him that morning; he had known that he wasn’t coming back. Resting her forehead on the wood, the way Muslims touch the floor when they pray, she’d petted that desk like a dog. But then, it was very late, and that was before she’d run out of vodka.

  If she knows she should be angry, outrage would further wear her out. Besides, she does not for a moment believe that Lawrence delighted in his subterfuge. He may well have revulsed himself, but in so doing he had also interested himself—in himself—and fascination was much more likely Lawrence’s downfall than delight. Moreover, a sense of complicity in her fate has done nothing but compound. Granted, on a few evenings she’d made an effort to shift the program in bed. She’d made that bid or two to get him to make love to her while looking her square in the eye. She’d asked him about his fantasies. But she hadn’t tried very hard. She’d been afraid, though of what? She’d been lazy. So she can’t get up a head of steam over that tart at Blue Sky. If it hadn’t been Bethany Anders, it would have been some secretarial floozy who wasn’t as smart. Because as it transpired, Lawrence didn’t like fucking turned to the wall any more than she did. As it transpired, Lawrence had missed kissing, too. His pursuit of Bethany made Lawrence seem less virtuous, but more ambitious.

  Simply vanishing like that had been brutal, and she should be angry about that, too. Still, he did ring up soon after, to apologize. And she understands. Lawrence may have toyed with being “bad.” But he is at core a staunchly moral person. Ergo, the one thing he cannot bear is being in the wrong. He might be able to face her. He cannot face himself. It is his sole cowardice.

  Irina thinks a lot about what she feels. By her third glass and fifth fag, Lawrence’s more practical conventions commend themselves. Pretty soon she will have to nip all this feeling in the bud, and start deciding what to do.

  Another slab of Port Salut. Of course, the most sensible solution to feeling peckish this time of night would be popcorn. Even for the slightly drunk, the high-fiber, low-fat snack would take five minutes to fix. Scores of seasonings beckon from the spice rack. But she tried going through the motions once. Blossomed like a wedding bouquet, the untouched bowlful made her cry. There are four unopened bags of kernels in the cupboard, and at some point she’ll throw them away.

  Unsteadily, she turns off the tube, chains the door, turns down the heat. These small rituals and even brushing her teeth she no longer takes for granted. Only recently has she not woken to unwashed highball glasses and smeary knives in the sink, her teeth furred, the whole flat chidingly toasty, the heat having run full-blast all night. The self-control required to get herself to bed, and once in, to get out again, she has had to rebuild from scratch, like a stroke victim relearning the words weather and pail.

  Under the winter duvet, now too hot, she considers masturbating, but declines. She doesn’t know what to fantasize about anymore. And this is crazy, but the unfathomable, half-painful sensation of sexual arousal now seems faintly evil.

  She flips a few pages of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and registers nothing. Par for the course, and clinching today’s perfect score of zero accomplishments from morning to night. That arduous walk to Hampstead Heath was not only fruitless, but visually blighted: she kept mistaking a curled brown leaf for excrement, white flowers in a meadow for trash. Following on such an unproductive afternoon, she should be disgusted with herself. But she is not. She is well pleased. By hook or by crook, one more day is over.

  22

  “I JUST MET RAMSEY’S parents for the first time,” said Irina, twirling the stem of her wine glass. “They were nice—very British and civilized. But I’ll tell you what was hilarious: they don’t talk like Ramsey at all. None of this South London d’ya fink? and baffroom and I kant do it, neever. Perfectly BBC. His father is a history professor at Goldsmiths College, and could practically stand in for Paxman.”

  “So was Ramsey’s accent put on?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, not put on. Learned, is all.”

  “Yeah,” said Lawrence. “I bet it doesn’t help you in snooker, with the lads, to sound like Jeremy Paxman.”

  “Still, what’s heartbreaking?” she said. “I bet it would have meant a hell of a lot more to Ramsey if they’d skipped his funeral, and come to one World Championship final.”

  Their storied restaurant so enticingly around the corner from the church, Irina and Lawrence had slipped off after the service for a quick drink at Club Gascon. Otherwise Lawrence would have melted away, since some things don’t change; he still hated social occasions of any description. So she’d been unable to cajole him into attending the big memorial do later that afternoon.

  “Are you sure?” she’d pressed. “Stephen Hendry, Ronnie O’Sullivan, John Parrot—all the snooker stars will be there.”

  “Nah,” he’d said. “I’m not family or a close friend; I’d just feel uncomfortable.” It had been nice of him to come to the funeral, though. Ramsey would have been touched.

  “What do you think’s behind all that?” he wondered. “The parental standoff?”

  “Oh, I guess they warned him if he dropped out of school and pursued this absurd snooker lark he’d ruin his life. Then he ends up on TV for thirty years. Some people just can’t stand to be wrong. You should know. You’re not that different.”

  “Hey, did you get a load of Jude?”

  Irina laughed. The sensation was such a relief that it also served as a reminder that she hadn’t been doing much laughing for quite some time. “I know! God, what a drama queen! All that sobbing and flopping about! Anyone looking on would have thought she was the widow, and not an ex he divorced eight years ago.”

  “She’s a pill,” said Lawrence, with a viciousness that used to bother her so much, and now seemed strangely sweet. “Using somebody’s death as an occasion to draw attention to yourself is totally low-rent. Hey, do you want something to eat?”

  “With the memorial thing… We don’t have time, but thanks.”

  He squinted. “You’re too thin.”

  “Well. You can imagine, with everything… You know, the last several months… Baking rhubarb-cream pies hasn’t been at the top of my agenda.”

  “I guess you’ve had a pretty hard time.”

  “Yup,” she said. “I have.”

  Of course, this week she’d been ragged. For the living, death is thievery, and she’d suffered a householder’s outrage just as surely as if someone had busted in and stolen her stereo. But there were respites. Just now she felt tranquil, reflective. There was something to this mortality business. It made life seem so big and sad and strange. Funny, how the most glaring fact staring you in the face from the crib had a tendency to slip the mind. For most of her life, she’d had to drag it out for contemplation from time to time as a discipline, the fact that everybody dies. So funerals were an opportunity of sorts, sitting you in the pew to face the music. Too, she was so happy to see Lawrence. They’d not met for such a long time. The feeling between them had an unexpected repose, an improbable ease.

  “Ramsey,” said Lawrence. “He was all right.”

  “Ramsey,” said Irina, “was what I would call a lovely man. You’re what I would call a fine man.”

  “Oh, I don’t know
how fine,” he said, looking away.

  “No, you are,” she insisted firmly. “A fine man. An interesting distinction, don’t you think?”

  “So what do women prefer? For their men to be fine ? Or luuuuvly?”

  “Oh, whichever a woman ends up with, she’ll wonder if she wouldn’t rather have the other.”

  “I’m afraid I said a few things about Ramsey along the way that I feel bad about now.”

  “You had your reasons.” She patted his hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Touching him, however briefly, felt foreign, yet this was a man with whom she had had sexual intercourse for years. But when you split, you rammed intimacy into reverse. She’d seen him pee thousands of times, but now if he went into the loo and it was just the two of them, she bet he’d close the door.

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted this to you outright,” said Irina. “I’ve always wanted you to think of me as ambitious—you know, a serious professional and all. And I do—or I used to, and I suppose I will again—enjoy what I do, and try to do it well. But the truth is, there’s only one thing I’ve ever really wanted more than anything else, and it isn’t professional success. I could live without that. The only thing I can’t live without is a man. That must sound dreadful, out in the open! But at the risk of sounding gormless, I wanted true love that lasts. I think even growing old could be interesting so long as I got to do it alongside someone else. I wanted companionship. Maybe not to the last dying breath; someone has to go first. But at least into my seventies? The thing is—I thought that was a modest ambition. I thought setting my sights that low, I had some chance of getting what I wanted. And now even with so meager a goal, I’ve failed it. I can bear being on my own, don’t misunderstand me. It’s okay. But I didn’t think I was asking that much, Lawrence. Especially since I was willing to make a compact with the universe that I’d sacrifice everything else for it—money, fame, prestige; saving the world, finding a cure for cancer. So I feel cheated. All I asked was to stroll into the sunset with a hand to hold, and I’m denied even that.”

  Lawrence had been through his own trial by fire, and the annealed version was more thoughtful. He stroked his chin. “Maybe it isn’t a modest ambition. Maybe you were asking for the moon.”

  She smiled. She liked him.

  “Besides,” he added, “just because a relationship doesn’t last forever, doesn’t see you to your seventies or to until you croak, doesn’t make it meaningless. If it did, then everything would mean squat. What lasts forever? Nothing and nobody. Look at us. I think we had a damned good stretch together. That’s more ‘companionship’ than most people get.”

  She took only the tiniest sip of white wine. It was midafternoon, the memorial do was bound to be boozy, and she’d been trying to keep a lid on her drinking. “You know, the last few days it’s preyed on me. On average, women outlive men by six or seven years, right? Of course, it’s the last thing you think about when you’re falling in love. But for a woman—one of the most important things you choose when you pick a mate is whom you’ll help die.”

  “I won’t need any help,” he said with a grin.

  “Oh, yes you will. And I hope you get it.” She fought back the urge to light a cigarette. Submitting to Lawrence’s scowling disapproval might have been nostalgic, but she was trying to keep a lid on the fags, too. “What I just told you. About wanting a partner above all else. Is that a girl thing?”

  “Nah,” Lawrence dismissed with a sweep of his hand. “Men just won’t admit it.”

  “Thank you. I’ve always felt a little bad about it. Weak.”

  “It’s a good weakness,” he said heartily. For Lawrence to conceive of any weakness as “good,” he must really have changed. “It’s the nicest thing about you.”

  In truth, she had also felt bad for quite a while about failing her own high-flown romantic notions. For years she had loved Lawrence Trainer and Ramsey Acton at the same time. That had seemed to cast suspicion on the integrity of both affections, leaving each dilute. But perhaps instead she was doubly blessed, and her passion hadn’t been divided in half, but multiplied by two. After all, it had always been frustrating: if you put the two of them together—Lawrence’s discipline, intellect, and self-control, Ramsey’s eroticism, spontaneity, and abandon—you’d have the perfect man.

  “I’ve sometimes wondered whether it really matters all that much, whom you choose to live with, or to marry,” she mused. “After all, there’s something wrong with everybody, isn’t there? Ultimately, we all settle.”

  “Oh, it matters,” he snorted readily.

  “I should have asked you before. How’s it going with Bethany?” The italics were for old times’ sake.

  He raised his eyebrows, then dropped them in defeat. “Not great.”

  “I’m sorry.” She surprised herself with the sincerity of her regret.

  “She sort of—moved out.”

  “Sort of.”

  “She thinks I’m stodgy.”

  “You are stodgy. It’s adorable. You’ll be a grumpy, irascible old man.”

  “I’m already grumpy and irascible.”

  “So you’re precocious.”

  Reluctantly, she signaled for the bill; she had to get going. The memorial gathering was all the way down in Clapham, at Rackers, Ramsey’s old snooker club. As they idled out the door, Irina asked, “How’s the terrorism biz?”

  “You read the papers,” he said. “Thriving. How about you? Anything on the docket?”

  “Oh, I’ve been thinking about moving back to the States. Leaving the ghosts behind.”

  “Doesn’t always work,” he said lightly. “Ghosts sometimes follow you. I’ve been thinking about moving back to the States myself.”

  Out in the summer air, in Smithfield Square, she treated herself to a good look at Lawrence—from some residual embarrassment, they hadn’t quite gazed at each other directly during this whole encounter—and took the measure of her feelings. She loved him, but that wasn’t good enough. The word love was required to cover such a range of emotions that it almost meant nothing at all. Since the love we distill for each beloved conforms to such a specific, rarefied recipe, with varying soupçons of resentment, pity, or lust, and sometimes even pinches of dislike, you really needed as many different words for the feeling as there were people whom you cared for in your life.

  This love was unusually round. She loved all of Lawrence, as he was— including his harshness with other people, his bad posture, his dependency on television, a pernicious emptiness that all those years together she’d never been able to fill. At once, she sensed a slackening. Romantic love is a taut rope, and in some respects a fight, for you are always thrashing against, if not the beloved per se, your own undignified enslavement to someone else. It was possible that a different kind of love awaits, once you’ve called the tug-of-war a draw—one that’s loose and kind and safe, a love that’s relaxing and quiet and easy, like leaning back with a tall vodka-and-tonic and putting your feet up on a porch rail after an exhausting afternoon of sport. Yet it was equally possible that by at last embracing Lawrence in his entirety, by no longer battling the many shortcomings she would fix, by no longer being infuriated by the numerous regards in which he failed an ideal, she had given him up.

  “I don’t know why I have an urge to tell you about this, it was such a long time ago,” she said at last. The silence had been making him nervous, and if she didn’t head him off he was sure to start chattering about al-Qaeda. “But do you remember when you were away at that conference in Sarajevo? You pushed me to have dinner with Ramsey on his birthday, and I didn’t want to go.”

  “Yeah, dimly. And?”

  “There was a moment, that night. I was overcome with the desire to kiss him. That may sound like a small temptation, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t been given to kissing other men, or even wanting to kiss them. In fact, I had the unshakable conviction, at that juncture, that I was facing, strangely, the biggest decision of my life
. Does that sound crazy? It’s haunted me ever since.”

  “Well. Did you make the right choice?”

  “Yes,” she determined, with a little frown. “I think so.”

  About the Author

  LIONEL SHRIVER is the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the winner of the 2005 Orange Prize. Her other books include Game Control, A Perfectly Good Family, and Double Fault. She lives in London.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Other Works

  ALSO BY LIONEL SHRIVER

  We Need to Talk About Kevin

  Double Fault

  A Perfectly Good Family

  Game Control

  Ordinary Decent Criminals

  Checker and the Derailleurs

  The Female of the Species

  Copyright

  THE POST BIRTHDAY WORLD. Copyright © 2007 by Lionel Shriver. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.