The Post-Birthday World (44 page)

In turn, Lawrence fetched his own present from under the tree, and Irina’s heart leapt when she saw that it was small.
That’s
why he’d gone shopping yesterday! If they would still give her mother the choker, he was determined to compensate her loss with a necklace equally lovely on this very day. He was so kind!
Inside the package was a set of keys.
“Merry Christmas! I bought you a car.”
As she stared at the keys in dumbfounded silence, he went on. “Well, us a car, but I’ll still walk to work, so you can have it during the day. So you can shop at the bigger Tesco on Old Kent Road, and not drag bags from Elephant and Castle. It’s nothing flashy, a used Ford Capri, but the 1995 model was rated highly in
Consumer Reports
. . .”
It would be impolitic to submit that she really wasn’t bothered about lugging bags from Elephant and Castle. Even a used car was a major financial undertaking, what with the insurance, petrol, and parking, and the present smacked of executive decision. It was nice to be surprised, but she might have preferred to be consulted. After she kissed him in thanks—and he mumbled, “Whoa, don’t light a match near your mouth!”—Irina grew further perturbed over the fact that she’d never dropped word one about wanting a car. Thus even more than high-handedness the gift smacked of brute expenditure, as a substitute for something more precious, if not in the fiscal sense.
Aside from the choker, tendered with regret, was there to be no present this Christmas that didn’t fall flat? She’d expected at least the Discman they’d bought the children to go down a treat. But Tatyana had whispered in the kitchen that the kids had been campaigning for a Sony PlayStation for months, and the platform was too costly; by the time Sasha unwrapped the Discman, the blanket under the tree was denuded, and it was crushingly apparent that no one had obliged. Sensing his letdown, Irina talked up the accompanying Alanis Morissette album,
Jagged Little Pill,
helping Sasha to fit it into the portable CD player while Tatyana laid out dessert—just in case there was anyone left in the family who didn’t yet want to throw up.
Oh, Alanis Morissette was probably more up Irina’s alley than Sasha’s, who at twelve would be tepid on music by a girl. But Morissette’s go-italone fuck-you suited her mood at the moment. With the wrapping stashed for next year, booty stacked beside each chair, the carpet was clear. In a wild departure from her wallflower past—if only to shuck the pervasive disappointment with which the room was imbued, and to court a sensation of lightness after being surrounded by all that food—Irina began to dance.
She was unable to entice Sasha to join her—he was at an awkward age, and shy—much less could she tempt spoilsport Lawrence to become her
partner
in the sense that the previous generation would have meant. But never mind them. What a waste all these years, to have ceded such an exhilarating pastime to her mother and sister, when for both it was primarily a source of suffering. True, she was a
tad
unsteady on her feet. Unschooled, and lacking even the latent muscle memory of a raucous youth, Irina jigged the parlor in an eclectic style, snatching moves from disco, jitterbug, and boogie. She sang along with the lyrics loudly enough to drown Lawrence’s grumbling on the sidelines, “Irina, you’re making a fool of yourself.” Mischievously, to punctuate one wailing refrain she extended a leg backwards into an arabesque.
And knocked over the samovar.
“Lawrence,” said Raisa in that spilt-milk voice over which, in defiance of the standard axiom, Irina had cried plenty as a girl. “
Pozhaluysta.
Could you control my daughter?”
He could. And he did.

�

If in the previous year Irina had gloriously overthrown the tyranny of her own stinting, purposeful nature, in the year following she tried strenuously to reinstate the same strict, diligent woman whom she had once come to resent. As in most revolutions, creating chaos is a cinch, restoring order thereafter an undertaking both dreary and monumental. But however oppressive one’s own character can become, long enough as someone else, you begin to miss it.

She had instigated a similar revolution in tenth grade. The summer before, her braces had been removed. When she smiled, her front teeth no longer shelved grotesquely over her lower lip, and the most agreeablelooking people smiled right back. Little by little she had learned to hold her head high, to stroll from her hips, and to meet the gazes of upperclassmen with the brazen challenge of a budding vamp. Yet this revelation was destined to unfold in slow motion, for only that moment on the sixth of July when she leaned into Ramsey Acton and this handsome desirable kissed her back was the process of realizing she was no longer an eyesore complete.

Since childhood pariahs often court compensatory approval from adults, Irina had always been a straight-A student. But now the cool people with low-slung jeans, long hair, and miasmic Indian cottons that had bled in the wash were enticing her to their basement stairwells, where they proffered joints as tight, slender, and tapered as Ramsey’s cue. She experimented wickedly with skipping class. Trading on her upstanding reputation with an embarrassed mumble to teachers about getting her period, she got away with it, too.

But there came a time to pay the piper. Toward the end of sophomore year, her art teacher was organizing a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art, and qualification for the privilege required meeting a minimum academic standard. Voice steeped in disappointment, Mrs. Bennington had announced to the whole class that Irina McGovern’s grades were too low for her to qualify. As one, her classmates turned in amazement toward this hitherto goody-two-shoes, and whatever shred of street cred her newly disreputable GPA may have garnered failed to compensate for the shame. What had she done? Who was this tearaway fuckup, where once sat an honors student? Irina had bartered her dignity for fun.

Thus her experience that January had an unpleasantly familiar texture. It had been mortifying enough for the straight-A student to ask Puffin for an extension. And while technically she’d met the deadline, deep down inside she knew those drawings were not “hasty.” They were terrible.

Across the occupations, plenty of established professionals pass off the shoddiest work imaginable and are sometimes lauded for it. After all, most of the world doesn’t know the difference between the rare blaze of true genius and the derivative manufacture of the rank hack. But just her luck, Irina’s editor on

The Miss Ability Act
had to have integrity, which despite its noble reputation is a ghastly quality when you find yourself on its receiving end. On their return from Brighton Beach, Irina knew she was in trouble when she got not a phone call or e-mail, but a letter. In two terrifyingly short sentences, her editor informed her that another illustrator had been assigned to the project. The drawings were “unacceptable.” She heard the word in Mrs. Bennington’s voice.

In fact, while the editor had been terse, the Mrs. Bennington in her head went on at some length.

Admit it,
she scolded.
On an average day, you don’t get out of bed until noon; you go through half a pack of cigarettes and never less than a full bottle of wine. You read a newspaper at best once a week. Even during occasional erotic respites, you spend a disproportionate amount of your leisure time—assuming you have any other kind of time—thinking about sex. The only scrawls in your diary run, “Preston, RA v Ebdon, best of 13”—the landmarks of another person’s occupation. You had six extra months to complete one project, and you botched it. You are even more dissolute than your husband, who at least—haven’t you noticed?—still meets his obligations.

The rejection was, as everyone seemed to say so incessantly those days, “a wake-up call.” That very night, Irina laid down the law. No, she would not come with Ramsey to the Benson & Hedges Masters. No, she would not come with him to the Regal Scottish Open. She had to stay home and work. Morosely, Ramsey acceded. They both knew that an era had closed. She would come to miss it.

Thereafter, like most wives in this game, Irina accepted her fate as a snooker widow. Ramsey would return between tournaments when he could, but for weeks at a go Irina was pledged to knock about the four floors of Victoria Park Road on her lonesome.

The half-hearted feelers she put out to authors were unavailing, and Puffin was a burnt bridge. For years she’d relied on Lawrence to pursue the side of her occupation that she detested, begging for more work. Too, she’d always depended on the structure and intent of someone else’s narrative for inspiration; in this sense, Irina really wasn’t an artist, but a natural illustrator. So perhaps the answer wasn’t to find another writer, whose plots were so frequently predictable and preachy, but to become one. Plenty of illustrators composed the text as well, and at least writing her own tale on spec would obviate any more of these humiliating e-mails.

In Irina’s girlhood, one of her favorite dolls had a long, full skirt. When it was upright in one direction, the hair was tousled brown yarn, the dress a dark floral print. When it was upended, the skirt flipped over the brunette’s head to reveal a blond-haired alter ego, with a dress of light blue plaid.

Irina conceived a storybook that flipped like that doll. On the front was the cover of one tale, on the back, upended, the cover of a second. The first story would proceed on the right-hand page, with captions at the bottom, while on the left was the second story upside down. Both stories would involve the same hero. Both stories would start at the same juncture in the hero’s childhood. But the tales would proceed differently, depending on how the protagonist resolved his initial dilemma. As for subject matter, once Irina arrived at it, she could only laugh.

For eighteen months Irina had been watching bright refractive spheres streak across a lush green backdrop framed by mahogany rails. These images cropped up in her dreams, and she often saw primary-colored orbs when she closed her eyes. The pictures had gotten

inside.
She’d meant to be escaping from it, but in the end it made inexorable sense that the plot of her first illustrator-authored storybook would have everything to do with
snooker
:

Martin is a prodigy at snooker from the instant he is tall enough to see over the table. But his parents believe that snooker clubs are dens of iniquity (or however you get across the concept of depravity to small children who are not supposed to know what it is, and most decidedly do). They are adamant that he not neglect his studies, because they want him to go to university, like his father. They forbid him to go near a snooker table. But Martin is already more accomplished at snooker than many of the grown-ups at his local. And he loves to play snooker more than any other thing. What is Martin to do?

In one story, Martin defies his parents. He skips school to play snooker. He gets better and better, and sometimes makes the grown-ups very angry, because they don’t like being beaten by an upstart little boy. Since Martin seems bright, his parents don’t understand why his marks at school are so poor. Finally when a neighbor congratulates them on their son’s winning a junior tournament, they realize that the boy has flown in the face of their wishes. They inform him that if he does not turn his back on snooker, he will have to leave home. Martin feels he has no choice, and is now good enough at snooker to make money at it. Still, he misses his parents, and the pain that they are no longer speaking to him never seems to go away.

Martin becomes a famous snooker player. He earns scads of money. He has many adventures. He makes lots of friends, even if people who play snooker are not always very smart, and sometimes they are a little boring. For that matter, sometimes Martin himself is a little boring, because he doesn’t really know very much about anything besides snooker. He neglected his schoolwork, and never went to university. There are good things and bad things about his life. It can get lonely, even if strangers often wave to him on the street. Once in a while even he gets a little tired of snooker. But it is still a wonderful game, and there is only so tired you can get of something you do very well. There are many peak moments. Since even people who are very, very good are not always going to be the very, very best, Martin never quite wins the World Championship, but that is all right. (This healthy note of realism was probably influenced by Casper’s

Sacked Race.
) He’s sorry that he hasn’t been close to his parents, who have never forgiven him for defying their authority. But when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his time doing something that he loves and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

But if you flip the book over, the story proceeds very differently—or so it seems at first. At the crossroads, Martin decides to obey his parents. They are older than he is, and must know best. He is sorry to let snooker go, and at first he misses it badly, but he bears down on his studies, always does his homework, and brings home report cards with perfect marks. The things he learns are very interesting. The same knack that he displayed on the snooker table makes him excel at certain subjects at school. He is skillful at geometry. He is brilliant at calculating angles, and grasping mathematical relationships between objects. When he goes to university, he studies astronomy. Now instead of contemplating small red orbs on a field of green, he studies fiery planets on a field of black, but sometimes when photographs come back from exploratory missions to Mars or Venus the pictures are not so different from the ones you see when lining up a red with the corner pocket.

Martin becomes an astronaut. (Whether this was a credible career trajectory, Irina wasn’t bothered; in a children’s book you’re granted wiggle room.) There are good and bad things about his life. His parents are proud of him, but he is often out in space for years at a time, and he gets lonely. Sometimes, even though to other people being an astronaut must seem exciting, it’s a little bit boring, checking the instruments day after day. Once in a while staring off into the stars he wonders what it would have been like if he’d played snooker instead. But he knows that sometimes you make a choice, and you live with the consequences, the nice bits and the not-so-nice. He is lucky to experience many peak moments. He loves taking off in a rocket, and landing with a splash in the ocean. He even comes close to winning a Nobel Prize, and though in the end it goes to someone else, that is all right. Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his time doing something that he loves and that, to him at least, is beautiful.