The Post-Birthday World (38 page)

That night Ramsey and Irina cozied in her old bedroom with the Hennessy XO, trying to keep their voices low. “Well, it seems safe to say,” Irina observed resignedly, “that you two aren’t getting on like a house afire.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s how she treats me—”

in my life. If that bird says
“Nonsense,” said Irina. “Of course you do.”
“Good on you, I reckon I do. I never been treated like more of a waster
snookers
one more time I’ve half a mind to sock her in the gob.”

“Well, Ramsey, most Americans—never mind Russians—know next to nothing about snooker, and have no idea the kind of status you enjoy in the UK. My mother is full of pretensions and in a lot of ways she’s a total fraud, but I’m pretty sure she’s not faking on this point: She’d never heard of snooker.”

“She’s still never heard of snooker.”

“That may be. But no matter how much you regale people with ‘In this other country, people who do this for a living are cultural icons,’ none of that sinks in when it doesn’t connect with their own experience. I could
tell
you about how handsome and revered John F. Kennedy was, but if you’d flat-out never heard of him, you couldn’t possibly grasp what it meant when he was assassinated, not one bit.”
“Who’s John F. Kennedy?” His deadpan lately was flawless.
She biffed him. “Stop it.”
“But never mind me. I cannot stick watching you scurry round the house, rushing to put the furniture legs in them special dents in the carpet, snatching up my water glass before I’m even finished and washing and drying and putting it back in its special place in the cupboard. I hook my jacket on a chair downstairs, and ten seconds later I look round and it’s disappeared. It’d be bad enough if it was her, but it was you! Why humor the bird? You play up to these daft bints and you just make them worse! If it was my own mum, I’d be flinging my suitcase full of gear all round the sitting room and filthifying as many dishes as possible, just so’s I can leave them crusty on the counter. And mind, pet, before I’m through here I’ll not only be grottying up the crockery, but chucking it!”
“I thought you were a
snookers
player, and now you want to play
bowls.
”
By turns wry, then confiding, their quiet debrief was so amicable that Irina let her guard down. Just about the time she was inclined to introduce her old bedroom to the depravity of adulthood, Ramsey raised,
casually
—just what did she mean tonight that she “still loved” Lawrence Trainer, “in a way”?
“In a way,” said Irina warily, knowing better than to add any new words because, no matter what they were, they would inevitably dig her deeper. “What I said.”
“I marry you,” he said, and Irina’s heart fell to the very floor, for she knew that voice, and he may have sounded moderate and reasonable and just, well,
interested
in a little
clarification,
but it was telltale, like the sound of an engine turning over once and dying and then once again and dying, but there was petrol in that tank and he was
just getting started.
“We’re out with your mum. Who I just met the day before. And you natter on to her. In front of your husband. About how you
love
another bloke?”
“
In a way,
I said. I was very clear, not in the way I love you. I was obviously talking about a feeling that I’m not ashamed of and that doesn’t threaten you in the slightest. Otherwise, why would I talk about it when you’re sitting right there?”
If the astute, objective side of Irina were hovering over the room watching this unfold, that good angel would have shouted, “SHUT UP!” For the worst thing she could do when these ructions got under way was to explain herself. To feed the flames. To add
more words.
But Irina was among other things polite. They were having a conversation, which seemed to oblige her to say things in return, even as she knew that every time she opened her mouth she breathed accelerant, and she’d be better off sealing it with duct tape.
Ramsey was already gearing up. “Whyn’t you stop and think how
humiliating
that is to your husband? In front of your mum! Who I’m meeting for the first bleeding time!”
“I don’t see what’s wrong with my saying that, when the feeling I’m talking about is round and warm and safe. I lived with Lawrence for almost ten years. You wouldn’t expect me to feel nothing for him, would you? I mean, God forbid that you and I should ever split up, but in the terrible event that we did, would you want me to come out the other side and feel nothing for you? Absolutely nothing?”
“There now, you see? Five minutes into this carry-on, and you’re leaving me!”
“I didn’t say anything about leaving you, it was just theoretical—”
“And not only do I have to sit there listening to my own wife coo about how she
loves
this other bloke, but I’m to take another bite of kabob while she swoons—
again,
I might add—how he’s ‘a wonderful man’ who she ‘won’t hear a word against’?”
It went on for
hours.
While Irina tried to keep her own voice to a hoarse whisper, Ramsey’s sotto voce hadn’t lasted two sentences, and in no time he was giving Raisa—whose bedroom was across the hall—a performance whose building bombast a ballerina with a soft spot for Tchaikovsky would have to admire. Whether she would continue to admire it at two, three, and four in the morning was another matter. “Would you please keep your voice down!” Irina would plead, her throat raw from screaming in a whisper. “She can hear every word you’re saying! How do you think this makes me look? Makes us look?” But Irina’s imprecations only inflamed him, so that back comes, full-voice, “What do I care what that dried-up bird thinks? Why do you? Is that all you can think about, keeping up appearances? When I put my heart on the line with you? Stuff what your mum thinks, I’m talking about what’s, to me anyway, a matter of life and death!”
The light behind the curtains was beginning to gray—and the bottle of Hennessy XO beginning to wane—by the time Irina collapsed on the bed and turned her back. The sun might be rising, but her head had gone black, and she no longer cared if her mother could hear her sobbing from across the hall. “You promised me,” she said, before sinking to a bleak sleep. “You
promised
me.”

When Irina dragged herself downstairs after two hours’ sleep she found her mother whisking a sponge around counters that were already clean, in a spirit of exceptional smugness. “

Dobroye utro, milaya!
” she cried gaily. “
S rozhdyestrom tebya!
”

“Yeah, Merry Christmas to you, too,” said Irina heavily. God, cheerfulness could be a form of assault.

“Sleep well?” The English was pointed.
Peering through the slits of her swollen eyelids, Irina briefly met her mother’s eyes. “Not especially.”
That was as close as they came to mention of the discordant palaver that must have kept Raisa from sleeping at all; she’d already worked out at the bar, and the royal-blue carpet in the front room showed the slashes of fresh, feverish hoovering, perhaps to remove Ramsey’s offending indentations. Nevertheless, last night’s quarrel was written all over Irina’s face, which was puffy and bleached. Her eyes were still red, and as she drooped over her coffee to let the steam condense on her face, her forehead clenched in a dull throb. She had a hangover, but of a particular kind. Ramsey had drunk almost all of the cognac, but Irina had had lavish opportunity in the last year to establish that, between crying and drinking, anguish was the far more ravaging the next morning. Her eyes were burning, her muscles stiff; her skin was tight, her saliva thick.
Yet Ramsey trotted down looking perfectly chipper. She’d no idea how he could kill half a bottle of cognac and not appear the worse for wear. Maybe a knack for metabolizing eighty-proof was one of the many talents that suited him to snooker.
Sometime during that two hours of sleep, he must have nudged the bedding out from under her and worked off her clothes, for she’d woken this morning naked, covered, and embraced head to toe by a warm, beautiful, affectionate man whose touch revealed that if they’d simply done this last night, touched instead of talked, they might have skipped that whole folderol and arisen well rested for Christmas to boot. When now he knelt beside her chair to fix her with those soft gray-blue eyes and kiss her lingeringly on the mouth, she was infused with a gush of gratitude, made no less powerful for her recognition that it was perverse. Being thankful to a man who’d made her cry because he was no longer making her cry duplicated the syndrome that Lawrence deplored in relation to IRA godfather Gerry Adams—lauded by his own prime minister and promoted as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize because he was
no longer
blowing the British Isles to kingdom come. Though Ramsey would never hit her, Irina worried that this was exactly what kept battered wives coming back for more: an addictive gratefulness that it’s over, a tenderness made precious for the very fact of having been so long withheld, and by the by, what public-service adverts for help-lines on TV never care to mention, the sex. This morning’s had been top-drawer.
Accordingly, when Ramsey stood she held on to his hand, using it to pull herself up. Raisa could disapprove of groping all she liked, but Irina stood in her husband’s arms and pressed her cheek to his chest not only because she needed the contact like a drug, but also to establish, firmly, that whatever her mother may have overheard, they had made up. Unfortunately, Raisa would have seen a thing or two over sixty-four years, including, in this neighborhood, more than one battered wife. When she looked over at the two wrapped in a clutch, her expression only ratcheted up another notch of knowing smugness, as if all this turnabout loveydovey merely confirmed the same devastating verdict she had reached conclusively at two a.m.
Irina faced the rest of the day with dread. Post-apocalypse on Victoria Park Road, she and Ramsey would have required nothing more of each other than unremitting physical contact, keeping a leg in a lap or a hand on a knee as they sipped rejuvenating coffee, intertwining fingers as they ventured for a quiet, shaky amble through the park, kept short as one would curtail the walks of cripples or convalescents. They would tender tiny favors or presents, Ramsey slipping off to return with an untried brand of hot sauce, while Irina matted the poster from the China Open to hang with the others downstairs. But today no delicate, mutually considerate ritual for the restoration of normal affections would present itself. It had to be fucking Christmas. Any time now, Tatyana and family would burst in with the fixings for a huge dinner at whose prospect Irina’s stomach lurched in revulsion. She wasn’t up to this. She wasn’t up to this at all.

As Irina had explained to Ramsey on the plane, until Tatyana was about twenty, she’d striven to become the reincarnation of their mother. Six years younger and not, like a certain someone, conceived in resentment, she seemed to have inherited all the fluidity and flexibility of which Irina had been cheated, and made a model ballet student. With rounder cheeks, more symmetrical features, and straight, even front teeth, of the two girls Tatyana was the more conventionally pretty. Though she wasn’t as tall as Raisa and had come by a more substantial bone structure from their father, she fought biology with some success by consuming so little that in comparison even Raisa seemed a healthy eater. The regime grew only more punishing after she began to grow breasts—protuberances, in ballet terms, against the law. She was admitted to a prestigious dance school in Manhattan, and Irina supposed that, if she were to let go of a competition over long ago, the story was sad. Tatyana had worked fantastically hard. And she did get impressively far, including a recital at Lincoln Center. But she was a little too short, and never able to starve off those hated mammaries to the satisfaction of the countless companies that never called her back after auditions. Tatyana’s crushing disappointment alerted Irina to the secondary tier of gifted also-rans that lined most of the arts with grief. Especially rarefied fields with few slots at the top fostered a whole cohort of talented people who worked very, very hard and who were very, very good, who deserved to be rewarded for their astonishing effort and achievement, and wouldn’t be.

Tatyana was also an object lesson in what happens to perfectionists who register with finality that they are laboring toward the unachievable. It’s an all-or-nothing mind-set, and, almost gleefully, Tatyana chose nothing. Still commuting to Hunter, Irina was home the night her sister announced that she’d quit, and would never forget watching that tiny girl prepare herself a massive plate of spaghetti. Their mother was horrified, but Irina thought it was glorious, half a pound of pasta slipping strand by strand down that painfully slender throat. Tatyana had wrested victory from the totality of her defeat, overthrowing not only her mother but herself.

She proceeded to renounce not only dance and hunger, but worldly ambition of any description. She wanted a husband, and she got one, within the year—a nice-looking second-generation Russian from the neighborhood, who worked construction. She wanted kids, and she got those, too—now ten and twelve. She wanted all the bagels, birthday cake, and borscht that she had denied herself for two decades, and had been making up for lost time ever since. Irina had always felt a little sorry for Tatyana’s husband, Dmitri, a quiet man with an air of bewilderment. His wife had leapt the species barrier—from bird, to cow.

You’d expect the younger girl’s fall from grace to alienate their mother’s affections. Rather: whereas first Tatyana flattered by imitation, now she flattered by contrast, and was thus seamlessly stitched up as the daughter closer to her mother’s heart.

Irina supposed that Tatyana was probably happier having turned her back on dance, as many people would probably be happier if they stopped torturing themselves with the American obligation to have a “dream.” Yet these perfectionist types never change their stripes altogether, and Tatyana had embraced domesticity with the same extremity as she had ballet. She was eternally quilting, canning, baking, upholstering, and knitting sweaters that nobody needed. Her officious conduct of motherhood gave off that whiff of defensive self-righteousness characteristic of contemporary stay-at-home moms. She was stifling, fussy, and overprotective, for if children were to redeem her existence, they would redeem it with a vengeance.