The Post-Birthday World (20 page)

They got back home in plenty of time for the Grand Prix replays at eleven-thirty, and Irina made popcorn. She’d gone quiet, though Lawrence didn’t seem to notice.

Having not laid eyes on Ramsey since that haunting birthday night, she was curious how she’d react to his face. When he entered the arena, she had to remind herself that she knew him. Ramsey looked older than she remembered, almost haggard. That night in July his face had been animated with adolescent mischief, especially when he’d spoken of Denise, his faithful girlfriend at sixteen whom he’d walk home from his Clapham snooker club, and they’d kiss on the Common. He’d once mentioned that Denise was the name of his cue, a fact that now left a peculiar residue of jealousy, though only a trace.

Surely it was a relief that her flush of forbidden passion did not return. She should be grateful to feel little more than vague good wishes for his performance. The fact that Ramsey Acton was an attractive man had been safely restored to the abstract. In tandem, she was plagued by an enigmatic sense of loss. Usually one rues the fact that a desire has gone ungratified. Yet maybe the commodity more precious than its fulfillment was the desire itself. This kind of thinking was subversively un-American; the Western economy thrived off of the insistent, serial satisfaction of cravings. Still, perhaps the whole tumbling cycle of wanting and getting was wrongheaded. Desire was its own reward, and a rarer luxury than you’d think. You could sometimes buy what you wanted; you could never buy wanting it. While it might be possible to squelch a desire, to turn from it, the process didn’t seem to work in reverse; that is, you couldn’t make yourself yearn for something when you plain didn’t. It was the wanting that Irina wanted. She longed to long; she pined to pine.

His manner curiously leaden, Ramsey built his break with the dispirited lethargy of an underpaid laborer sandbagging a seawall. You’d never guess that this was a sport he’d hungered to play professionally since he was seven years old. Moreover, here was a player renowned for audacity, yet who dawdled through several visits playing safeties, demurring from the very long pots for which he was famous. Although commentators conventionally commended discretion, the voice-overs were tinged with disappointment.

“That shot was well prudent, Clive,” Dennis Taylor observed. “Still, the Ramsey Acton of the 1980s would never have been able to resist that far red to the corner pocket.”

“What’s wrong with Ramsey?” said Irina. “He seems so phlegmatic, so—apathetic. Do you think he’s depressed?”

Lawrence grunted.
“. . . What’s a ‘plant’?”
“Hitting another ball to hit the object ball,” Lawrence said tersely.
“. . . How do they decide who breaks first?”
“I think it’s a coin toss.”
“Is winning the break-off considered an advantage in snooker?”
“Irina, could you
please
keep it down, so I can follow this!”
“Well, how am I ever going to care about snooker if I don’t understand it?”
“The best way to learn about snooker is to PAY ATTENTION TO THE FRAME!”
His abrasive tone jarred her from a larger complacency. Hitherto, it had not come home to her what, exactly, had happened this evening. She marched to the set and switched it off.
“Hey, I’m sorry I raised my voice, but why does that mean we have to stop watching the match, huh? Don’t be a baby.”
“I’m sure you’d like to forget, and however incredibly I almost did, too, but at dinner tonight
I asked you to marry me.
”
Lawrence crossed his arms. “So?”
“You neglected to say yes or no.”
Clearly he’d say whatever would get the TV back on. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah.
Okay.
”
She plopped into her armchair. “That’s my answer then.
Okay
equals
no.
”
“I guess you’re not too great at math. I don’t know in what calculus
okay
equals
no.
”
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “You’re a very traditional man, and I should never have taken it upon myself to propose. I should have waited until you’re ready to get down on the floor with roses and a ring—though that would probably involve betrothal in a long-term-care home, when you’re too old to get back off your knees without the assistance of a burly nurse.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I said yes. Why are you upset?”
“I’m not upset.” Surprisingly, she wasn’t. “But you didn’t say yes, you said
okay.
And no self-respecting woman is going to marry a man who says
okay.
If the prospect of marrying me doesn’t present itself as the one thing you want to do more than anything in the world, then forget it.”
“But it’s fine with me!”
“
Fine.
See? The truth is that you couldn’t bear taking off a whole Saturday afternoon merely to get married when you could be catching up at Blue Sky. Anyway. It’s too late.”
Lawrence may have been regretful about missing the Grand Prix, but he didn’t wish to hurt her feelings. Thus he lavished some minutes on explaining his reservations about his own parents’ marriage, his reluctance to change anything for the very fact of being so happy with Irina already, and his “willingness” to get married if that would mean something to her, totally missing the point, as ever, that the idea was for it also to mean something to him.
Meanwhile Irina stayed with this thought that by now a wedding was
too late.
There may have been a time to have saluted their having found each other, maybe to have invited their friends to the occasion, at whatever expense. But had that time ever arrived, it had passed. Like those embarrassing renewals of vows in middle age, now the gesture would only read, to themselves and to others, as a desperate effort to revive something that was therefore implicitly moribund. Which it was not. It was not dead or dying. It was simply quiet.
It was—what it was. Her relationship to Lawrence had gone the way it had gone, and there was no purpose in trying to wrench it into something else. It was contented, it was steadfast, it was companionable. She could trust him with her life; she
had
trusted him with her life. But tearful promises at the altar and that voracious desire to swallow a man whole that she had bumped into by sheer accident in July were not part of the package.
She let Lawrence babble on with all his excuses and apologies until he ran out, but remained firm in taking the whole proposition back, until he was indeed asking her to marry him, comically, on bended knee, while she was the one who adamantly refused. Finally she restored him to his couch, and insisted on making a new batch of popcorn, since the halffinished bowl had gone cold. Nestling into her regular armchair once the debacle seemed officially over, she was not even tempted to cry.
Maybe she should have been.

�

By the time she got to the corner of what was, until two minutes ago, the street on which she lived, Irina had registered that her hasty departure was not well planned. This jacket was too light for the cutting October wind; the fabric wasn’t waterproof, and it was raining. Her raincoat was still hooked on the hallway rack, snug in the possession of a man who had once held her in the highest esteem, and now had every reason to despise her. Whether he did or didn’t they would both have agonizing leisure to contemplate, unless she turned around right now, damp with remorse, to beg his forgiveness, and swear that her dalliance with the improbable— no, Lawrence’s word was “laughable”—romantic object of Ramsey Acton had been nothing short of an attack of middle-aged insanity.

Oh, maybe she was off her nut, Irina thought morosely, standing on the corner, though the light was green. But even insanity was

her
insanity, and commanded an imbecilic loyalty of its own.

The cold truth was—the light turned red again—she had no idea where she was going. Given the run of the balls in those first two frames, Hendry had doubtless defeated Ramsey, who would therefore have headed home if not last night then this morning. But she’d no notion how long a drive it was from Bournemouth to the East End. Besides, the poor man hadn’t a clue that his would-be lover was brooding over his whereabouts while standing drenched and desolate on a Borough street-corner. Ignominiously defeated in the first round, Ramsey may even have headed to some grotty pub near the venue to drown his sorrows. She resolved to rouse him on the phone, though with an undertow of pessimism, for Ramsey could rarely be bothered to keep his mobile switched on.

By the time she spotted the phone box across Borough High Street, the light was once more red. At the risk of turning into a pillar of salt, Irina looked longingly back over her shoulder. In front of their building her eyes found no less than Lawrence himself.

“Where are you going?” he cried. “Do you even know where he is?” “Don’t worry! That’s my problem!” she shouted plaintively. But having for so long considered her problems his as well, Lawrence could not

stop worrying
on a dime. In kind, since it was midafternoon and Lawrence had yet to eat, she had to keep herself under the circumstances—she was leaving him—from chiding on the corner,
Lawrence Lawrensovich, go make yourself a sandwich!
A deep-seated sense of being accountable for each other’s crude well-being seemed to survive flagrant betrayal perfectly intact.
As if to demonstrate, Lawrence added, “You’re getting soaked! You’re not dressed for this! You’ll get cold! And you don’t even have your toothbrush!”
“I’ll manage!” she asserted, knowing full well that Lawrence did not credit her with the wherewithal to negotiate the outside world without his help. It wasn’t only that he was condescending; he wanted to be needed.
Short but effectively infinite, the single city block between them engendered the unbreachable quality of an airport security barrier, and recollected many a more cheerful parting when Lawrence had seen her off at Heathrow to visit family and friends in New York. He always stood on the opposite side of the metal detector, smiling and waving encouragingly until she’d retrieved her carry-on and had turned with a last returning wave to find her gate. Who was it who’d said not long ago, “Everyone wants to be taken care of ”? Whatever his shortcomings, Lawrence had always taken care of her—to excess, but that could hardly qualify as a failing. Why, how extraordinary, for such a practical man, to routinely escort her all the way to Heathrow an hour and a half on the tube, and once she was safely rested in the care of British Airways to schlep an hour and a half back by himself. Those long homeward trips could only have been boring and sorrowful. His thanks?
We have to talk.
For the second time in less than a day, Lawrence was crying. This frequency was so anomalous that it was strange she was able to tell in a downpour. But Lawrence’s face ordinarily exhibited the jagged chiaroscuro of a woodblock print, its eye sockets dark, cheekbones highlit, the cuts from the nostrils to the corners of his scowling mouth sharp and severe. Now the portrait had melted, its slashing lines gone blurry and soft, as if the black ink were running in the rain. His commonly firm, pressed lips were parted and unsteady. When he waved good-bye one last time, he could only raise his hand waist-high, as if despite daily trips to the gym he hadn’t the strength to bring it to his chest. The fingers waggled weakly, and Irina wished she were dead.
Ramsey. It was Ramsey who’d said that everyone wants to be taken care of.
She couldn’t remember what Ramsey looked like. Nor could she remember why she was venturing out ill-clad in miserable weather when she had a nice warm home a few steps away, installed with a nice warm fellow. Presently her not-quite-affair felt like a book she had barely begun that she was free to put down. Irina didn’t understand herself. Except that as a reader she was prone to dispatch books she’d begun. She was a thorough person. To have pursued those treacherous assignations for over three months, and to have so anguishingly revealed her errant desires to Lawrence, only to turn tail and say oh, never mind, let’s have lunch, violated her conviction that you should finish any job you start. Anyway, she thought.
It’s beyond my control.
Irina waved forlornly back. Clutching her sodden jacket, she ran across the street, desperate to take herself out of his line of vision as a kindness.
The phone box reprieved her from the elements, but relief was shortlived. She only got Ramsey’s voice mail, and her message bordered on incoherent—something like, “Darling, I’ve done it, I’m all yours now, but I have no idea where you are . . .” and without a mobile herself she couldn’t leave a call-back number. Moreover, she worried that “I’m all yours now” sounded burdening. Lawrence had just this morning raised the issue of Ramsey’s reliability. It was one thing to carry on with
anover bloke’s bird
on the sly, quite another to accept responsibility for the woman lock-stock-and-barrel with no invigorating rivalry to keep you interested. Lawrence’s cynicism was infectious—especially once she’d rung Ramsey’s landline in Hackney. No pick-up, and no answering service.
She could always ring Betsy for refuge, but the purpose of this rash departure wasn’t to throw herself into an Ealing guest bed. Trying to be resourceful, she ducked into the newsagent for an
Evening Standard,
in which a small article in the sports section reported on the Acton-Hendry “upset” in Bournemouth. Why, Ramsey had beaten Hendry after all, in a closely fought contest that lasted four hours. She should have been there, clapping feverishly when he prevailed, toasting his achievement while tucked under his arm in a bar. Turning a blind eye to the article’s snide quip—“While Ramsey Acton is mooted to be staging a comeback, Swish has been ‘coming back’ for the last ten years and so might reasonably be expected to have got here by now”—she seized on the fact that Ramsey’s second round against Ronnie O’Sullivan was scheduled for tonight at seven-thirty. Even in a country passionate about sports, the Pakistani vendor may have been disconcerted by a customer moved to tears by snooker scores. She’d found him.
Irina bought a flimsy umbrella and managed to break only three of its eight spines while battling the wind on the fifteen-minute walk to Waterloo Station. Frugality so ingrained, it never occurred to her to take a taxi.
Struggling to decode a rapid-fire Cockney made all the more incomprehensible by sheer surliness, she gathered from the ticket seller that the next train to Bournemouth would leave an hour hence. Riddled with requests that the irritable man repeat himself, even this purchase left her dejected; it was just the sort of logistic that Lawrence always took care of. She retired to a hard bench, the high iron ribs of the railway station putting her in mind of having been swallowed by a whale, and breathed into her icy hands. Good Lord, she’d neglected to bring a pair of gloves, which for a woman with Raynaud’s disease in October was a damned sight more foolhardy than leaving the flat without her toothbrush.
Now severed from the sustenance of one man and not yet entrusted to the safekeeping of another—for the moment, officially homeless—Irina was visited by a sensation both profoundly female and, for this day and age, deplorable. She felt
unprotected.
An independent income and separate bank account didn’t make a dent in this impression of mortifying vulnerability. That she felt deserted was inane; she had walked out on Lawrence herself. That she felt a rising petulance toward Ramsey for having his mobile switched off was irrational; he’d no reason to expect her call. In her younger days, she’d have found being thrown on her own wits in a European city exhilarating. Older, she was wiser to the woes that could fall abruptly from the sky like weather, and all that feminist brouhaha aside, a woman was safer—plain safer—when she made a survival pact with a male of the species. The feeling on that bench was animal, of having done something biologically stupid.
It would have been sensible to ring Ramsey repeatedly until he answered. Yet she was low on change; ringing a mobile from a UK pay phone cost nearly a pound a minute. Besides, now she wanted to surprise him. Of course, underlying this impulse to “surprise” was fear—that Ramsey would not be pleasantly surprised. That he fancied her only so long as she remained unattainable. That his talk of marriage had been insincere, because that’s what he thought every girl would want to hear. That he really was a feckless (Lawrence’s word) sleazebag opportunist. That Irina had therefore just made the biggest mistake of her life.
On the train, where she sacrificed the small succor of her wet jacket in order to pile it on the next seat and discourage company, Irina’s feeling of frailty gave way to a sense of security so sumptuous that she’d have been happy to never arrive anywhere, ever. She was cosseted on all sides by a snug rectangular box whose steady chug lulled her like a crib with rockers. Although in the
pre-birthday world
she’d sometimes squandered her solitude on concocting recipes that would employ wild garlic, right now her head swam with a great deal more than what to make for dinner.
To her astonishment, on the heels of
We have to talk,
no torrent of recriminations had ensued. Rather than take her faithlessness to task, Lawrence had assumed all the blame for their relationship’s shortcomings—head bowed, shoulders humped, knees pressed, while slow, fat tears dropped on his crooked wrists. His gentle, inward collapse resembled those skillful demolitions of large derelict buildings, whose charges are set in such a way that the bricks cave inward; aside from accumulating an elegiac layer of dust, surrounding structures remain unharmed. Since most self-destruction of the personal variety sucks everything and everyone in the vicinity into the rubble, the spectacle on the sofa was not only terrible to witness, but wondrous: an implosion so complete, which yet left his onlooker unscathed.
Why, at the start he’d been so loath to reproach her for straying that she was abashed, for it was never her intention to get off scot-free. But Lawrence insisted that their incremental alienation was all his fault. He loved her more than his life, but how could she appreciate the scale of his feelings, with the perfunctory expression he gave them? Long ago he should have asked her to marry him, and that was his fault, too. He knew he was too tight, too regimented—obsessed with order and control, with doing the same thing the same way day after day—and he had allowed them to get into a rut. They should have taken more trips together, hopped the Eurostar to Paris. He shouldn’t have imposed so on her graciousness in the kitchen, and ought to have taken her out to dinner more often.
“But I loved making you dinner,” she’d objected. “That wasn’t the problem.” Horribly, she was already speaking of their relationship in the past tense.
“What is it, then?”
“You stopped kissing me.”
She had surprised herself. For months she’d been compiling cruel mental lists of her partner’s deficits: he was harsh with other people, watched too much television, dwelt excessively on the cold externals of life like politics at the expense of the spirit. She was startled to discover that all along only one deficiency had mattered. One so seemingly slight, so remediable as well. Were Lawrence to lean to her lips, could she forget about Ramsey, would all be well? Except for the stark, dumb fact that she no longer wanted to kiss Lawrence. She wanted to kiss Ramsey.
Lawrence did not dismiss her lone complaint as minor. His parents, he explained, were never physically demonstrative, not with their children, not with each other. When prodded, he’d tried to remember to kiss her more often, and he wasn’t sure why he never kept it up, because he liked it. But he’d grown shy. Strong emotion embarrassed him, and maybe frightened him a little. It made him feel weak. It didn’t seem manly.
“Passion,” said Irina, “is the manliest thing on the planet.”
This was exactly the kind of conversation that the two of them should have been having, and could have been having, and that might have prevented her from closing those fateful few inches over Ramsey’s snooker table in July. Now that they’d finally learned to talk to each other, it was too late.
Prepared for an onslaught of rage and vilification, instead Irina had been showered with generosity and remorse. By two a.m., it had seemed only natural that they go to bed together. Though there’d been no question of sex, they slept naked in each other’s arms, Lawrence never once complaining that he was hot.
Thus she woke in a state of complacency. She’d been braced for the worst, and now the worst—in its way, unexpectedly moving and lovely— was over.
Not so fast.
The night before, Lawrence had never asked the identity of his rival, though she’d been willing to reveal it. Perhaps Lawrence wasn’t ready, and had to take his poison in small sips. But that morning he rose from the pillow in a single rearing motion that somehow recalled that oftquoted
I fear we have awoken a sleeping giant
metaphor about the United States after Pearl Harbor.
“All right,” he snarled.
“Who is it.”
Irina pulled the sheets to her breasts. The name weighed so heavily in her mind, but when she croaked the syllables aloud it sounded flimsy.
“Ramsey Acton?”
Lawrence employed the same tone of appalled incredulity as Betsy in Best of India. Twice didn’t quite make a pattern, but the symmetry was forbidding. He bundled furiously out of bed. “Are you out of your
mind
?”
This morning, there would be no regrets that he hadn’t taken her to Paris.
She’d sworn the night before, truthfully, that she and The Other had never had sex. Yet despite Lawrence’s standard-issue masculinity, this formal rectitude made no difference to him. Her legalistic chastity had served only to make her feel better but protected Lawrence not a whit. Thus whipping on his jeans he growled, “Christ, you shoulda let him drill you a few times and gotten it out of your system. I thought maybe you’d found a
credible
alternative, and not some
loser.
This hare-brained infatuation won’t last five minutes! He’s not bad-looking, and he has a greasy, superficial charm. But Irina! You have
absolutely nothing in common
with the guy!”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said quietly, drawing on her clothes.
“Then I will! You have no interest in snooker whatsoever! Do you just like latching onto a celebrity? Because if so, you could’ve done better. He’s a has-been! You saw the way he played last night. He used to be considered daring, and now he’s just reckless. Banging the cue ball around the table like demolition derby—”
“He wasn’t himself. He knows I’ve been trying to decide what to do, and I think the situation’s got him rattled.”
“How
flattering,
” said Lawrence. “But even if he keeps a hand in, how long will you be able to stand watching frame after frame? You know he’s going to expect you to be all ga-ga and follow his every pot. Forget having your own life as an illustrator. You’ll be his groupie! Is that what you want?”
“I guess I’d expect to keep up with his progress—”
“Progress?”
Lawrence railed. “Try ‘decline’! Do you have any idea what you’re getting into? That man is
vain.
He used to be a star, and he’ll expect you to treat him as if he’s still a star. Not only will you become a portable brass band, but you’ll have to collude in his self-delusion! He’s a rampant narcissist, and you’re looking at a lifetime of long-winded, backward-looking