The Post-Birthday World (29 page)

“The point is, you was focusing on the negative,” said Ramsey. “On what I’ve not won. I might add, the

only
tournament I’ve not won. You got to understand, this game is half mind-fuck. When them blokes come to the table, I don’t want them thinking,
Oi, Ramsey Acton, that old-timer, this’ll be a cakewalk.
I want them dropping their trousers in fear. I want them remembering, this geezer’s won near every ranking tournament known to man. If I’m intimidating that gives me the edge. They talk to the bird and she shovels out the excuses—like there’s something what needs excusing—I lose the edge. I know you didn’t mean to. But you done me a powerful lot of damage tonight.”

“I was trying to be sociable,” she mumbled. “I don’t know these people. I don’t know much about snooker. I was trying to get on. I want you to be proud of me. I never intended to embarrass you.”

“I didn’t say you embarrassed me. I said you damaged me.” This was classic. He would press an advantage one step further than seemed necessary or kind—thereby, as the Brits might say,

over-egging the pudding.
Of a habit anything but sweet, Americans would describe it more brutally as
putting the boot in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Though I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.”

“That’d be a right wick apology, then.”
Ramsey continued to stand aloof, several feet from the bed. Already a trademark of their relationship, there was either
not a fag paper
between them, or they were light-years apart. There was no in-between. With Lawrence, there’d been nothing but in-between, and this new inch-asgood-as-a-mile was difficult to adapt to. She was reminded of the game of trust popular in the 60s, in which you extended both arms and fell deadweight backwards, expressing blind faith that your partner would catch you. Either Ramsey was right there, not allowing her to drop a half-inch, or he turned heel and she slammed smack on the floor.
“What am I supposed to say to these people?” she asked dismally. “I’ll say whatever you want.”
“That my form’s coming on. That you never seen me play better.”
“That sounds like something your friend Jack would put out in a press release.”
“Fair enough. Then tell them I got a really, really big dick.”
She looked up. He was smiling. His zip was down. He did have a big dick.
One flying lunge from six feet, and the confrontation was over. Her release from his displeasure was like finally being allowed to go and play after sitting in the corner in a dunce cap. For much like the unwritten etiquette of the telephone, whereby it is the caller’s implicit prerogative to wrap it up, only Ramsey could end what Ramsey had started. Since Irina never started anything, that left Ramsey as the sole gatekeeper of their garden, from which she was cruelly exiled and into which she was graciously readmitted, at his whim.
* * *
When the promised fortnight break finally arrived around Christmas, after Bingen am Rhein, Ramsey wheedled her into a getaway holiday in Cornwall—though by this point what she really needed to get away from was more holiday.
Their first afternoon on the rocky, desolate southwest coast, Ramsey led her to their rental car, and wouldn’t explain. He drove to Penzance— as in pirates of—to a poky municipal building. Although she did remember signing something preliminary during a giddy three a.m. tussle in November, only when she read the placard did she realize what he was up to. “But I look a dog’s dinner!” He said she looked beautiful, as always. “But I haven’t bought you a ring!” Ramsey frowned, patting his pockets, then spotted a bit of flotsam in the gutter. He pressed her palm with a round piece of discolored steel with two blunt prongs. “I reckon it’s a radiator hose-clip,” he explained.
“Ramsey, I can’t marry you with some car-part off the street!”
“Pet, you can marry me with a twist-tie, or a knackered rubber band. Look here”—he demonstrated—“fits just right. I’ll never take it off, promise.”
The official inside was irritable, perhaps having hoped to make it a short day and do some Christmas shopping; to Ramsey’s obvious annoyance, the short, plump woman with bad teeth didn’t seem to recognize who’d walked in. They filled out some forms. It was over in ten minutes. Ramsey had bought a ring; he assured her it wasn’t at all expensive, and he was probably lying.
Although Irina hadn’t dreamt of white tulle and three-tier cakes, this “wedding” had been no-frills by the most modest of standards. On the other hand, maybe it was the medium course that was squalid—having a cake but not an especially tasty one, springing for a dress but off the rack. She could see the merit in either blowing £20,000 on five hundred of your closest friends, or tying the knot on a rainy afternoon with a radiator hose-clip. Indeed, the latter approach had the benefit of focusing not on a single day, but on the rest of your life. Ramsey wasn’t keen on
getting
married, but he was keen on
being
married, ultimately the greater compliment.
Irina walked out in a daze. She and Ramsey were married. They’d been together for less than two months.
After following her “husband”—it would take time to ease into the word—to the Regal Welsh Open in Newport, the B&H Masters at Wembley, and the Regal Scottish Open in Aberdeen, she would have been judicious to have resisted Ramsey’s imprecations to keep tagging along and to have knuckled down to her own work. But he begged her so winningly. She was touched by his fervid gratitude to at last have company in a life that she could now appreciate had been grueling and lonely. Colleagues were also rivals, and you could never be wholehearted friends with your structural foe. The connection between the two of them was so total, but also so fragile—on or off like a switch—that she feared inserting whole fortnights of insulating separation into their idyll. Besides. She had never been to China.
Outwardly, Irina appeared a hopeless girlie pushover, standing by her man; in truth she was driven by the selfish, insatiable greed of an irretrievable junkie. She was shooting up with Ramsey Acton twice a day, and the prospect of going cold turkey for the length of an entire tournament was too desolate to contemplate.
Yet as many an addict must, she found that a floating, disconnected vagueness began to fog her head, especially on the rare afternoons that Ramsey tore himself away to hone his game. Alone, she no longer understood what to do with herself or quite who she was. Thus over Ramsey’s protests she demurred from taking his surname, not from feminist zeal but because she could not afford it; the appellation
Irina Acton
would make official the very vanishing act at which she was already getting too much practice. She flapped magazines instead of reading books, sometimes poured a wine miniature from the minibar rather earlier than she should have, and awaited Ramsey’s return with a jittery impatience peculiar for a freelance artist accustomed to working long hours on her own. Growing ever more adept at snooker banter—and at keeping her remarks sufficiently anodyne that she did not get it in the neck later in the hotel—should have been gratifying; it was actually disquieting. Her new expertise was grafted on, artificial. She was learning to talk energetically and at length when addressing a subject about which she cared little. Or she cared about snooker only because she cared about Ramsey, and the transitive relationship was weak. He’d been generous to include her so utterly in his world, but
in
clusion could slyly morph to
oc
clusion. Some days this warm envelopment into the snooker fold seemed a guise under which she was being steadily colonized, consumed, co-opted.
Irina McGavin,
famed new consort of snooker legend Ramsey Acton, was coming along great guns.
Irina McGovern,
illustrator of gentle enough success never to have made it into a gossip column spelled correctly, was in mortal danger.

�

After returning with Lawrence from the Grand Prix in Bournemouth, Irina was haunted by a question that she’d wanted to ask for ages, but not having done so for so long made it harder to put. On the first night back home, when the two snuggled into bed, she couldn’t enjoy their goose-down burrow, much less the subsequent sex—because the whole time she was working herself up to asking what she wanted to ask, failing to ask it, then berating herself for being such a coward now that it was time to sleep. It wasn’t obvious why Bournemouth should have occasioned such a flaming recrudescence of an old curiosity, or why this line of inquiry seemed so frightening.

At length the embarrassment of her timidity exceeded the embarrassment of the question itself. Early the fourth evening she vowed that by lights-out she would put this

perfectly harmless question
to her partner, rehearsing the solemn covenant so fiercely through the preparation of dinner that she burned the garlic for the eggplant. She paid no attention to the Grand Prix’s third round into which Lawrence predictably tuned after they ate. Anyway, Ramsey wasn’t in it.

Locks. Thermostat. Floss—like a countdown. Lawrence plopped into bed and reached for his book. Irina slid next to him, exasperated with herself because her pulse was pounding and this was ridiculous.

“Lawrence,” she said, too gravely; she had wanted to impart an air of idle musing. “I was wondering—what do you think about when we make love?”

The following week, Irina insisted on attending a lecture Lawrence was giving at Churchill House. He was clearly pleased.
Wrong!
They never said “make love,” which Lawrence considered sappy.
He turned his head with a slight jolt, taking longer than need be to mark his place. “Well, obviously about fucking you, what do you think?”
Her heart fell. Now she understood what she’d been afraid of. That he would lie. That, having lied, he would stick to his story, and she could never ask him again. She realized too late that she’d only have had a chance at getting a straight answer, an unsafe answer, by raising the matter breathlessly in the heat of passion (such as it was, facing the wall), and not during the prosaic lights-on of the night’s last few pages.
Sensing her one and only opportunity slipping rapidly out of reach, she pressed, “You don’t ever have sexual fantasies?”
“I wouldn’t say I’ve
never
had a sexual fantasy, of course not.”
“Then what are they about?”
He looked annoyed. “Sex, obviously!” If all this stuff was so
obvious,
it was a wonder that so many books and movies and sociological studies were squandered on its examination.
“But you never have fantasies while we’re fucking? Only by yourself.”
“I don’t do anything
by myself,
I have you.”
The lies were stacking. She did not believe that he practiced perfect abstinence in a private regard any more than she believed that the only thing that turned him on was straight-up, by-the-book intercourse.
“Why,” he added, “do you do anything
by yourself
?”
“Why would I?” she said, with a flash of defiance. “As you said, I have you.”
Stalemate.
“You don’t even—” she tried again. “For example, fellatio. Which we used to do, but sort of quit. The idea of that—doesn’t appeal to you, in your head?”
“Oh, that’s a typical adolescent thing. All boys are into it. It’s a phase.” Lawrence often took refuge in the general, in the hopes that you wouldn’t see the tree for the forest.
“Do you wish we still did that?”
“Not really. It makes me feel self-conscious. Serviced. And it seems a little degrading. To you. I don’t like that.”
How very upstanding.
“But I’m getting the impression that you do have fantasies,” he said. “When we’re fucking. Since you assume I do.”
“Maybe.” She had instinctively withdrawn up on her pillows. While the conversation was technically about “intimacies,” the distance between their bodies was greater than usual, and they were not touching. “Once in a while.”
“So what are they about?”
Enter the final answer to why she’d been leery of opening the pornographic Pandora’s Box: that he would turn the tables. But, what—he would admit only to conjuring the kind of seemly relations written up in “marital guides” from the 1950s, and she would admit to fantasizing about eating pussy? She would regale him with an X-rated catalogue of sickness through the ages, thinking about a man jerking off all over her face or forcing himself into her mouth and making her drink come?
Get real.
“Well—
obviously,
” she said, “about fucking.”
“Why would you fantasize about something you’re actually doing?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not called fantasizing in that case.”
“So why did you ask me that?”
“I was just curious,” she said morosely. “People are different.”
“I may have my eccentricities when it comes to how I’d sort out the Irish Question, but in this area I think I’m pretty conventional.”
Surely it was more conventional in
this area
to be privately consumed with forcing your woman to eat come than it was to exclusively get off on the idea of standard coitus. Irina folded on her side, and Lawrence went back to reading. After a few minutes he turned out the light, and nestled behind her, running a tentative hand over her shoulder. “It sounded as if you were in the mood.”
“Mmm,” she hummed. If in some regards he was a total stranger, he was determined to remain one. Sexual fantasy was by its nature undignified, and—tragically—it was more important to Lawrence to be respected than to be known.
While Irina could never prove outright that his claim to what went on in his head during sex was cover, like many a poker bluffer he had a tell, which in this case was a certain belligerent barometer needle whose pressure reading sat stolidly at zero. Lawrence the person could go through the motions of cozying up to his lover, but his penis felt a million miles away and didn’t like being lied for. No matter how insistently he rubbed against her buttocks, it refused to cooperate with its deceiving master.
“I must be tired,” he said at last.
“That’s okay. Maybe tomorrow,” she whispered, and turned to kiss his forehead. She could tell he was unnerved. Throughout their years together, he’d never failed to summon an erection on demand, one reason that she was fairly confident that he did have fantasies, and bloody good ones if they did the trick every time. The lone exception was the very first night they slept together. The following morning, wearing only sagging briefs with crenellated elastic, Lawrence had shuffled out to her kitchen where she was preparing coffee, and looked dejectedly at his feet. “But I like you
so much
!” he said plaintively. Lifting his chin, she’d smiled and said, “I think that’s the problem.” Although sexual dysfunction wasn’t usually subject to nostalgia, she cherished the memory. From Mr. Confidence, impotence had been a compliment.
Snugging his arm reassuringly between her breasts, Irina couldn’t sleep right away. Why couldn’t he be honest about what got him off? And why did she lie to him in return?
The self-evident answer was shame, but of a particular shade. Maybe what made “I think about you jerking off in my face” shameful wasn’t its outrageousness but its comedy. Out in the open, it sounded silly. Tacky, and not even inventive enough to make it into the
Hustler
letters column.
More crucially still, perhaps the impulse to lie about what drove you privately wild (and Lawrence was not alone; previous lovers had shared what they “liked,” but almost never what they honestly
thought about
) derived from a prudent desire to preserve the inexplicably mystical power of these sordid vignettes. You relied on those little stories, however risible they sounded when uttered aloud, as keys to the kingdom, and the idea of eroding those keys by exposing them to the acid of ridicule threatened banishment from your own pleasure palace. Reflected in another set of eyes as laughable, ugly, clichéd, or dirty not in an arousing way but dirty as in defiling, they might cease to turn the lock. Even preserved safely in her head, Irina’s own fantasies had still systematically worn out, and lately she’d had a beastly time coming up with something new. (Whatever did one think about at eighty-five, having run through every orifice and excretion that the body affords? Even depravity is finite.) Little wonder, then, that Lawrence played his erotic cards close to his chest, or that at the very thought of disclosing those cards his penis had recoiled in horror. Still, she felt cheated. She would have found his fantasies exciting. If nothing else, she needed to borrow one.