The Post-Birthday World (23 page)

The white limo that drew up to the stage entrance brought back her childhood, when the family’s economy exhibited the same allor-nothing quality of O’Sullivan’s ego. Her mother’s ballet lessons were hand-to-mouth; the big infusions of cash were from her father’s sporadic dialogue-coaching gigs. When one of these sleek white whales pulled up to their old apartment house on the Upper West Side to collect her father for the airport at five a.m., she was awed as a little girl, and frustrated that it was too early for her friends to see. Older, she shared her mother’s despair that the studio didn’t have him take a taxi and issue a check for the difference, helping to cover next month’s rent. A limo did nothing that a car couldn’t, and had trouble turning corners at that; if one of the primary perks of being rich was merely looking it, the real benefits of wealth were thin on the ground. She couldn’t help but be impressed by the fuss made over Ramsey, but she didn’t want to be impressed by it.

As if to demonstrate not only money’s limits but its sacrifice, the limo traveled the half-mile to the Royal Bath Hotel along the coast road, while Irina stared longingly at the beach, whose pure white sand glowed in the moonlight even through tinted windows. How much more delicious, to have strolled hand-in-hand beside the bay. But Ramsey required shepherding from the madding crowd, and a posh comportment was expected.

Thus far disheartened by the garish contemporary appointments of Ramsey’s occupation, Irina was relieved when they arrived at the Royal Bath: it was old. Not to mention immense, white and lambent like the beach, bespeaking a bygone era of knee-length bathing costumes and parasols. One of those palatial institutions where it always seemed time for tea. Though the evening would not, however liquid in nature, sponsor a great deal of tea.

The hotel staff fell over themselves congratulating Ramsey on his victory over O’Sullivan. Yet offers to carry his cue case were unavailing; Ramsey’s hands-off included Irina herself.

Denise
was destined to be the other woman in this relationship.

Ramsey issued her into a large suite on the top floor, which overlooked the bay. Checking out the view, she played the silky tasseled tie-backs on the heavy maroon drapes through her fingers. In the outer sitting room, the hotel had placed a birds-of-paradise bouquet on the mahogany coffee table, with a congratulatory card. When she excused herself to the loo, she rinsed her hands under gold-plated faucets, wiping them on one of the fat white towels, in ostentatious supply. The terry-cloth shower curtain was embroidered with a color reproduction of the imposing Royal Bath as seen from the beach. The hotel’s opulence may have been at odds with the down-and-dirty ethos of Ramsey’s sport. Yet from whatever ratholes they had crawled, these days successful snooker players lived high. When she emerged, the manner in which Ramsey tossed his waistcoat on the brocade spread, then grabbed two champagne splits from the minibar fridge, which listed on a nearby card as £15 apiece, was decidedly blasé.

Ramsey stood beside the bed with his shirt half-unbuttoned to expose a triangle of his chest. Though women traditionally swoon over well-developed pectorals, it was the very subtlety of the slight mounds that Irina found mesmerizing, and that made her long to touch them. His hairless, creamy torso was that of a boy on the high school swim team.

As she kicked off her tennis shoes and slid onto the king-sized mattress, Ramsey shot her a sharp glance, glugging champagne into water glasses with all the ceremony of Diet Coke. “You came here with fuckall? Not even a change of clothes?”

“What I had in mind,” she said shyly, “more involved taking them off.”

“Your message,” he continued. “I sussed out that you left Lawrence. Not excused yourself for a dirty weekend. Am I getting the wrong picture?”
“No.” Irina frowned. Why at this of all junctures was he looking for trouble?
“So why didn’t you pack a bag? Since, unless I flatter myself, I assume you left for keeps, a great massive bag at that?”
Irina looked down. “Lawrence was there. I couldn’t force him to watch me load up a suitcase—with clothes that he’d washed and folded. It was too mean.”
“It’s what was happening, innit? You was leaving him. When you don’t take a fresh pair of knickers, you give him the wrong idea. Like, never you mind, mate, I’ll be right back. Make him watch you bung in the frocks, he gets the message. This way the poor bloke can tell himself you’ll rock back up any time now, ’cos you need your shampoo.”
“I can buy more shampoo,” she said warily, hugging her knees.
“You worry about being mean to Anorak Man. What about being mean to me?”
Irina’s frown was now entrenched, and if she kept her forehead in this clutch for much longer she’d get a headache. “I just left another man for you. This very afternoon. I’m not sure how that’s an act of cruelty, except to Lawrence.”
He wouldn’t let it go. “You walk out on a bloke, you get your theater right. Your trappings. You stand at the door and you wave good-bye with a
bag.
”
Irina felt the rise of an emotion so rare of late that she almost didn’t recognize it. But if she wasn’t mistaken, that was rage. “I’ve had a hard day, Ramsey. And that’s by way of employing your famous British understatement.”
“That match with O’Sullivan weren’t no doddle neither.”
She straightened her back. “You played a
game
today. I left a
man.
A man who’s been nothing but kind to me for nearly ten years. I’m not sure I’d put repudiating him in the same class as entertainment.” There was an edge in her voice that she wasn’t accustomed to hearing. It was interesting.
“I’m chuffed you hold my profession in such high regard.”
“I didn’t say anything about what regard I hold your profession in, high or low.”
“I got the message.”
“You’re getting nothing.”
Ramsey stood a good ten feet away, having already slugged his champagne. Irina was bunched on the bed. This was a game, too, not one she’d played before.
“Why are you doing this,” she said.
“Doing what.”
“You know.”
“You should have packed a bag,” he said.
“Doing that.”
His expression resembled a dog’s with a rope in its mouth. Pull on the other end, and he’d just tug harder. “I want to know why you didn’t. It seems flighty. Not serious. Like you ain’t really here. Like you’re planning to go back.”
Well, there had indeed been no purpose served by the one-hundredmile journey from Waterloo if they could not close the last ten feet. Irina’s body went limp. She dragged her legs off the bed like the overstuffed hold-all that, criminally, she’d neglected to pack. She pulled on her wet tennis shoes, which had shrunk in the rain and felt tight. They were unpleasant.
“This was a mistake,” she said to the shoes, having difficulty tying bows through large, exasperating tears. “Maybe there’s still a train back to London.”
Wiping her eyes impatiently, she stepped toward the sitting room. Ramsey took an unsteady step to bar her way.
“Let me go,” she said wearily.
For a moment he tippled on the brink. She could see the indecision in his face, as his mind prepared yet another belligerent assertion that she
should have packed a bag,
then, almost whimsically, thought better of it. With a fluidity that belied Lawrence’s characterization of weakling, Ramsey reached under her arms and swept her over his head. Lowering her slowly, he slid her body against his until her mouth descended to within a hair of his lips.
“Are we having a fight?” She inhaled the champagne and tobacco on his breath.
He considered the matter. “No.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“I don’t see why we got to call it anything.”
“How about ‘wasteful’?”
Just before she kissed him, Irina had the presence of mind to flag the last five minutes for future reference.

When she stirred the next morning, or what she took for morning, it was difficult to remember having sex the night before. Not because it had been drunken; she’d not even finished her split of champagne before they sank into bed. Rather, because something about fucking Ramsey was mysteriously unretainable.

Twisting to read the clock, Irina discovered that it was two p.m. Wakening, she grew conscious of her body as the worse for wear. Ah: the shank of last evening swam into focus. After the sweat had dried, Ramsey had allowed that after such a high-profile upset, he’d be expected to put in an appearance at the bar of this hotel, where most of the other Grand Prix entrants were staying. More’s the pity for Irina’s head, the bar had a late license, and they must have spent a couple of hours schmoozing with Ramsey’s colleagues downstairs. Irina hadn’t eaten all day, and no one ever got around to food. After one night in Ramsey’s care, she was already, as Lawrence would remonstrate, on the Alex Higgins diet.

Ramsey had spent the whole time in company with his arm around her, and Irina had relished the public claiming. Nonetheless, the rapid banter of the players and their managers, the clamor of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish accents, and the multiple allusions to notorious fluke pots all left her feeling in over her head, and she spoke little. Clinging to Ramsey without contributing much by way of conversation made her feel ornamental, and in dank jeans and an oversized sweater not much of an ornament at that. Resorting to Lawrence’s brand of social survival, at one point she’d tried to engage Ken Doherty in a discussion about Northern Irish politics, since he hailed from the Republic. But Doherty had excused himself anxiously for another round as soon as he could drain his glass.

Ramsey himself was a surprise. He’d been so shy in foursomes with his wife the writer and Lawrence the think-tank wonk that she’d assumed he was socially quiet. Yet slumming with his own kind, Ramsey was garrulous, funny, and at his ease, leading the whole crowd in a rendition of some zany, interminable song called “Snooker Loopy.” It had been heartening to learn that Ramsey had a reputation with his colleagues as a life of the party. But if last night was anything to go by, there was only so much party she could take.

It would be dark in four hours, and the day was already a washout. So Irina curled into Ramsey’s alabaster chest and kissed the bridge of his nose to wake him. After all, when you couldn’t quite remember what something felt like, the simplest way to refresh your memory was to do it again.

�

By the time Lawrence would be getting to the corner, Irina had registered that his hasty departure in this downpour was not well planned. Perhaps clinging a bit after their confrontation over marriage last night, he’d lingered at breakfast, then grabbed a light jacket as he raced out the door. Snatching his trench coat, she ran downstairs, glad that Lawrence had missed the light and was still waiting to cross Borough High Street.

“Hey, Anorak Man! You’re getting soaked!” she shouted from their stoop, waving the coat. “You’re not dressed for this! You’ll get cold!”

The light had turned, and he was late. “I’ll manage!” he cried.
In her other hand she waved the clincher, a Ziplocked ham-and-cheese beading in the rain. “But you forgot your lunch!”
After mutual hesitation, they both ran to the other, closing the block between them in a comic reprise of lovers dashing slo-mo through a field—only Irina wasn’t leaping barefoot through clover, but scampering across gritty, wet London pavement in socks.
“Are you out of your
mind
?” asked Lawrence. “You’re not wearing any shoes!”
“I have a nice warm home to go back to,” she said, pulling off his jacket—an
anorak,
in fact—helping him into the overcoat, and handing off their sturdiest umbrella. “I can change my socks.” After tucking the Ziploc in the ample pocket of the trench coat, Irina took the umbrella back, opened it, and set it in his free hand. She wiped off the droplets beaded in his eyebrows, slicked his matted hair back from his forehead, and smiled.
“Thanks,” he said, holding the umbrella to shelter them both. With a look of having just remembered something, he leaned over and kissed her. It was a small kiss, closed-mouthed and chaste, but tender.
One of those many interstitial sequences that didn’t tell well:
Lawrence left for work in a jacket that wasn’t waterproof, and I ran after him in the rain with his overcoat and lunch.
Little wonder that Irina began dinners with friends like Betsy at a loss for stories. But these moments were the stuff of life, and they were the stuff of a good life.
Irina shivered back to the flat. Padding the hall to find dry socks while leaving wet footprints on the carpet, she reflected that the larger tale of their duo probably didn’t
tell well,
either. The only unconventional element in their lives together was this stint of expatriatism, but with Americans in London a dime a dozen,
Several Years in the UK
would never make a best-selling memoir. They were not waiting for anything in particular to happen. Presumably Lawrence would continue to establish himself in the think-tank biz—make more money, perhaps join the rotation of talking heads on the television news. Presumably Irina would continue to reap muted acclaim; who knows, maybe she’d win a prize. Likely they’d move back to the US in time, but Irina was in no rush. They hadn’t quite decided the question of childbearing, though whichever way they resolved the matter they’d not make history. Eventually they’d grow elderly and have health problems. In some ways, their lives together amounted to one big lamb-stuffed vine leaf. Why, look: the upshot of last night’s marriage palaver was that they’d keep on doing what they’d been doing.
What a shock.
She tidied the toast-and-coffee dishes, then fetched the post, sifting supermarket offers for bills. Rain splatted the windowpanes, but the building was old and solid and they’d never had a problem with leaks. Treating herself to an upward nudge of the thermostat, she slipped a cassette of Chopin nocturnes into the stereo and nestled into her chair at the dining table to write checks. Her black woven velour sweater was a little dirty and oversized, but thick and soft. She felt
protected.
Snug in the flat for the rest of the day while it bucketed outside put her in mind of camping in Talbot Park with her best friend at age fourteen. After their wiener roast, the sky had blackened; in high winds, she and Sarah barely managed to pole and spike the tent. Zipping the flaps as a torrent unleashed, the two girls had unfurled their sleeping bags and grinned. Only a thin nylon interface separated them from misery, its very tentativeness intensifying Irina’s conscious gratitude for refuge. They’d played gin rummy with a flashlight while the rain lashed their flimsy dome, the seams overhead barely beginning to glisten. Still, the seams gloriously held, the pelting resonating in their ad hoc home, replete with books, a transistor radio, and a thermos of minestrone. The overnight in Talbot Park was a touchstone of sorts. That evening she’d experienced an explosive joy for the simple fact that she was warm and dry.
For most Americans, the sensation of safety was an unmindful default setting, the least you could expect, or the worst. “Security” was often cited disapprovingly as the reason that some women stayed in bad marriages, implying,
security
meaning money, an arrangement just shy of prostitution. Too, folks who opted for
security
supposedly traded adventure and spontaneity for a spiritual subsistence that was pat and dead. But for Irina and Lawrence, achieving any semblance of security had been hard work. Safe haven was probably hard-won for most people, whose refuges were far frailer than they appeared—not so different from that Talbot Park tent, and as readily flattened by a gust of circumstance: a plant closure, a dip in the markets, a flood during the one month that the house was freakishly uninsured. It stood to reason, then, that
security
was a more precious commodity than its plodding reputation would suggest—and that it was profligate to treasure safety only in retrospect.
Not only had Lawrence earned a doctorate in international relations from an Ivy League school after growing up in a desert in more than one sense, but he didn’t have a job out of school. For their first three years together he churned out applications to universities, journals, and think tanks galore while part-timing in bookstores. Here and there he’d have an article or op-ed accepted, but for the most part it was three solid years of rejection. He spent his weekends glowering at televised golf. For all that time, they had no reason to anticipate that at long last salvation in the form of a crisp, letterheaded envelope with postage stamps of Queen Elizabeth would ever perch in their mailbox. Meanwhile, every unexpected expense, even a broken toaster, prompted a crisis.
For her own part, the road to illustration had run neither straight nor smooth. Tormented over her buck teeth, Irina had been a reclusive child who often drew alone in her room after school. She’d kept a pictorial journal with printed captions since she was ten (“Irina has to tip-toe passed the stoopid studio or she’ll get in big trouble”; “Mama’s ballet students are rilly stuck up”), but narcissistic, self-dramatizing parents had left her allergic to the arts. So she hadn’t gone to college at Pratt or Cooper Union but Hunter, capitalizing (a little lazily) on her background by majoring in Russian. She’d first earned her crust by translating dry Russian seismology texts, and tripped over illustration by accident.
In her late twenties, she’d been living with a brooding, volatile divorcé named Casper, a frustrated novelist (if there’s any other kind) on the Upper West Side with joint custody of a seven-year-old daughter. Inspired by the library books he checked out for his little girl, like a legion of naïve novelists before him he figured that in comparison to literary fiction the children’s market would be a cinch to crack. Since Irina had continued to draw idly in her journal evenings, he proposed that they collaborate.
Convinced that it was never too early to introduce kids to the “real world,” Casper wrote a story about a little boy named Spacer (a less-thanapt anagram of the author’s name) who wants more than anything in the world to win the sack race on Sports Day at his school. The boy practices and practices in his backyard (for Irina, drawing all those different sacks—not only the traditional potato sack, but duffels, sleeping-bag covers, those lovely white-and-orange carrier bags from Zabar’s—had been great fun). But when the big day arrives, Spacer doesn’t win the race. He doesn’t even place.
Yet Casper refused to wrap up his tale with any tried-and-true moral, like it’s not whether you win or lose. He was adamant the story not suggest that Spacer just needed to try harder, or that Spacer might prevail next year. Rather, the narrative underscored that Spacer had tried as hard as he could but his best wasn’t good enough. Casper wouldn’t allow that his protagonist was somehow a finer character for learning to lose graciously, nor would he let the poor kid off the hook by at least downgrading the importance of sack races in general. Casper’s idea that you teach kids point-blank that sometimes you don’t get what you want,
period,
was, um, sophisticated she supposed, but a little brutal. While she was also able to head off titles like
The Loser
and
Little Engine That Couldn’t,
his final choice,
Sacked Race,
was no more inviting.
The text was roundly rejected. Yet to her astonishment, one editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux expressed interest in the illustrator. Although the selective come-hither spelled the end not only of the collaboration but of the relationship, doodling on her lonesome with colored pencils sure beat translating papers on plate tectonics.
It wasn’t easy, though, and it still wasn’t. For long periods she’d had to illustrate on spec, and several of these projects never saw the light of day. Even now, after eight published picture books, her work was not widely known. Only thanks to Lawrence’s patient encouragement had she never given up.
Point being, there’d been nothing exhilarating about tippling on the edge of professional oblivion. More recently, there was nothing boring about being able to pay the phone bill.
Not
being able to pay the phone bill had been boring as could be.
But it was in the romantic realm that Irina was particularly flummoxed why anyone would exalt unremitting peril. What was dreary about being confident that on the average evening your partner would come home? Irina’s most profound sense of safety hailed from the solidity of her bond with Lawrence, which she pictured visually as one of those sisal ropes that tether ocean liners—weathered a shade gray by the elements, but six inches thick and multiply wound on a one-hundred-pound brass cleat. Lawrence would never leave her. Lawrence would never cheat on her. Irina never rifled Lawrence’s post or went through his pockets, not because she was gullible or afraid of being caught, but because she knew with certainty that there was nothing to find. In turn, she would never leave Lawrence nor, that bizarre brush with temptation in July notwithstanding, cheat on him, either. Barring an untimely auto accident, that they would grow old together wasn’t simply an aspiration; it was a fact. She’d bet the farm on it. Now, that was real
security,
regardless of whether Lawrence lost his job or her illustration prospects dwindled. She was damned if she understood why anyone would prefer to get up in the morning and confront the snarl, “All right!
Who is it
?” She failed to see the entertainment value in one of you flouncing out the door with no promise of ever coming back.
So, Irina considered over the electric bill, did their difference over marriage last night qualify as a “fight”? Funnily enough, she rather hoped that it did. Curious, this hunger she sometimes felt for conflict, since the odd affray seemed to lend their lives the grain and marble of fine red meat. Yet she could count the instances that she and Lawrence had conducted proper set-tos with fingers to spare.
There was memorable aggro over the coffee table of green Italian marble that she’d located at the Oxfam outlet in Streatham, whose installation Lawrence had resisted with disproportionate ferocity—being convinced from her description that it was garish. Willfully, she bought the table over his objections, though the deliveryman would only prop it in the lobby on the ground floor. Lawrence refused to help in protest, and alone she hauled the heavy slab to their first-floor flat stair by stair. Silently she slid it before his beloved sofa of a like shade. “Huh,” he said sheepishly. “Kind of brings the whole room together, doesn’t it?”
In kind, when he was offered the research fellowship in London, she was happy for him of course—but irked that she’d no say in the matter, regardless of her attachment to New York. But in short order she loved London, relished living abroad, and conceded cheerfully that he’d been right to accept the post.
Thus their few clashes had clustered around issues of dominion: who was the boss and of what. Resolutions involved the division of territory. Indeed, most couples seemed to carve up the world like rival colonial powers divvying the spoils of conquest. Much as Germany got Tanzania and Belgium the Congo, Irina ruled the aesthetic, and Lawrence the intellectual. She spoke with authority about the appalling lineup for the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery this year, he with authority about New Labour’s inconsistent immigration policies.
Granted, the perpetual peacetime that yawned before them was potentially stultifying. Yet with her parents constantly at each other’s throats, Irina’s childhood had been anything but oppressively serene. The hurtle of porcelain may have provided a brittle thrill, but now Irina and her sister would inherit only a few stray pieces of the cobalt china that their maternal grandmother had improbably wheeled out of the Soviet Union in a tea chest when fleeing Hitler’s armies and all the way to a Russian enclave of Paris. Did their mother go to the trouble of shipping that tea chest when she emigrated to the US, merely to ensure that she and her husband would fling dishes of the finest quality? Imagine, that china surviving the clash of civilizations, but not one lousy marriage.
As for what Irina’s parents fought about—money, of course; her father refused to sell insurance when dialogue coaching dried up just so Raisa could buy another $300 A-line from Saks. There were fights involving jealousy, although Raisa was generally enraged that, when she mentioned a handsome widowed father of a ballet student on costly calls to California, her husband didn’t get jealous enough. They didn’t like each other much. Since even minor disputes tended to expose this unpleasant truth, Irina resisted romanticizing the “tempestuous relationship” for its queasy injections of excitement.
She and Lawrence were contented together. If that was a problem, she could live with it.