The Post-Birthday World (45 page)

Once Irina got down to the illustrations, she forgot all about envying Ramsey his long, boozy nights in bars, and stopped worrying about other women. Fatalistically she assumed that if he loved her he’d keep his pants zipped; besides, she knew in her bones that on this point her mother was wrong. While a few more pieces of furniture were still required to kit out the house, Irina was now contented to live without them. She often stayed up working late, and even fixing a sandwich was irritating. She drank less. She cut back on smoking.

Most of Irina’s previous work had specialized in carefully gradated, blended coloration and luxurious, Rembrandt-like fluctuation of hues— which took great time and care, and was one reason those “hasty” drawings had been noticeably deficient. The new illustrations were anything but careless. Yet with these new images she discovered the hard line and the bold contrast. Forms didn’t blend into the field, but fiercely stood their ground, brilliant red balls looming against a pulsating green backdrop. Because the story line focused on what Martin did professionally rather than on interpersonal drama, she designed each panel with no human figures; his parents were off the page, casting shadows over green carpet like cues over brightly lit baize. This absence of figures, and strong solids—the balls, the cue, the rails, the racks—meant she could draw on the resources of Russian constructivism, cubism, and abstract expressionism, and to imply the hurtling of objects through space she added dashes of futurism as well. As for medium, it was not the message, and she reached for whatever chalk, colored pencil, charcoal, or tube of acrylic would deliver the desired effect, and sometimes to achieve a perfectly hard line or bold blare of a single color she glued on razor-bladed swatches of glossy paper from adverts in

Snooker Scene.

For the astronaut story, the style was identical. The planets looked like snooker balls, the stars like constellations of reds by the balk cushion. Even Martin’s geometry homework resembled diagrams of complex fourcushion plays in

Snooker Scene.
Though she didn’t attend a single one of Ramsey’s tournaments for the rest of the season—not even the World— she felt more intimate with his occupation than ever before. It was always this way, that by drawing something she came to own it.

Irina kept the project under wraps. When Ramsey returned home between tournaments, he was forbidden to enter her studio on the top floor, and she chafed at the distraction of his incessant tiddles on her door. In fact, he began to get on her nerves.

For one thing, Ramsey was a festival of intestinal complaints. This is the sort of thing you never learn about a man until you live with him, but he was wont to spend up to an hour at a time in the loo with the door closed, sometimes three or four times a day; the mysteries he concealed therein she supposed she was better off spared. And vague colonic discomfort was only the beginning. He was getting tendonitis in his left arm. His lower back ached. He had a strange pain in his kidney—or was it his gall bladder?—which she dismissed privately as gas.

To Irina’s despair, just when she was getting rolling with the new illustrations, Ramsey canceled his trip to Asia in March because of a head cold. You would think the poor man had come down with bubonic plague. Lying abed sipping hot toddies, Ramsey posited that this was no “common” cold and might be pneumonia, or Legionnaire’s disease. Since his symptoms came down to a runny nose and a dry, forced-sounding cough, Irina proposed that maybe he was suffering the effects of too many Gauloises.

Irina was ordinarily a willing nurse, and went about fetching him toddies and tea, hankies and toast. But Ramsey made a demanding patient, and his instincts to play up his suffering made her sympathy come less easily than it might have had he evidenced some minimal measure of stoicism. So when she caught the cold as well, she stiff-upper-lipped it, going briskly about her day in the hopes of demonstrating a sturdier approach to illness. Alas, she merely convinced him that he had a far more lethal dose of what ailed them, while she must have pretty well “fought the bastard off.”

Fortunately, while the rest of Ramsey’s body languished at death’s door, one part of his anatomy was hale as ever. Separations stored up explosive sexual appetite, sparing them the sating or boredom that always threatens with too much of a good thing. The fire that ran in her veins with Ramsey in bed lit a match to the pages upstairs, and the balls and planets in her illustrations pulsed with an energy that, had anyone understood where it came from, could have gotten her arrested for trading in kiddie porn.

Miraculously surviving his head cold and back on the tour, Ramsey continued to phone home every night, but the calls often went funny. Irina was convinced that he was primarily jealous of a pile of paper. But big surprise, all their scrappy calls regarded Lawrence. Irina had slipped off to see Ramsey for months, had she not? Irina had lied to Lawrence, had she not? Her loss of moral standing was apparently permanent. For Ramsey was dead sure that she was seeing Lawrence on the sly while he was gone.

Which she was.

But she wasn’t carrying on with her ex in any sordid sense. They met for innocent cups of coffee. For them both, to rescue a postapocalyptic warmth was to redeem their decade’s investment as not having been sunk in a junk bond. Behold, they did like each other, even once the worst had come to pass. Why, there were afternoons when she met him for a cappuccino near Blue Sky that she forgot for moments at a go that they had ever broken up. He still talked about Kosovo, as he would have back in the day. Their only acrimonious meeting was the one in which he pointed out that he shouldn’t have had to learn she was married from Clive Everton on TV.
Her gratitude for what seemed a tentative forgiveness—as witnessed by his willingness to see her at all—was boundless. She had done the worst thing that it was possible to do to a person, in her view, and he would still sit across from her, ask after her work, even ask about the very scoundrel for whom she’d forsaken him. In his staunch loyalty to the prodigal, Lawrence was like fathers are supposed to be, and never are.
As he had the first time they met officially as exes, Lawrence still trained his gaze forty-five degrees from her face, allowing her to study him in wonderment without her contemplation being observed. At such times it came to her that he was a good man. That she was lucky to have known him, luckier to have known his love, and perhaps foolish to have risked everything a woman could ever dream of for everything and a little bit more.
Through this period she developed one other habit that she didn’t disclose to her husband, which didn’t involve Lawrence exactly. On occasional weekdays, with Lawrence sure to be at work, Irina would take a long walk south. Quietly, since she still had the keys (Lawrence may have let her keep them simply to spare himself the embarrassment of asking for them back) she would ease into the building on Trinity Street, and slip into her old flat. While she couldn’t help but notice anything changed or lying about, she told herself she wasn’t spying, for that was not her intent. She didn’t poke through Lawrence’s post or open his laptop. Sometimes she simply stood in the middle of the living room for minutes, or walked down the hall, glancing into the kitchen at the long rows of fading spices, touching the prints of Miró and Rothko, amazed that this diorama of her former life remained so intact that she could physically walk around in the past. Other times she sat in her old rust-colored armchair, glancing up at the drapes she had sewn, perhaps perusing the
Daily Telegraph
left on the green marble coffee table from that morning—though she was careful to remember its folding and orientation, and to replace it exactly as it had lain. She smoothed the rumples from her chair before departing, and since Lawrence never said anything, she supposed she was successful in making her presence unfelt.
It was a curious pastime. But on Victoria Park Road, she was surrounded by snooker posters and snooker trophies and snooker magazines. On these surreptitious trips to Borough Irina wasn’t really visiting Lawrence, but herself.
Meanwhile, Irina and her mother had still not spoken, and the impasse was now sufficiently entrenched that Irina couldn’t imagine what advent might dislodge it. While silence technically took no time at all, she was surprised to discover how draining it was on a daily basis. She and her mother were not-speaking in an active sense that required a great deal of energy, and Irina lost more than one night’s sleep tossing over whether the next time she saw her mother would be in an open casket. But the only way of making up to the woman would be to give ground on her cruel reading of Ramsey. Irina was at least able to keep tabs on the family through Tatyana, who seemed to enjoy her role as secret interlocutor. Irina fed her tidbits about Ramsey’s lucrative winnings and his rock-solid fidelity, but Tatyana liked to play both sides, and Irina could never be sure if her notes in bottles ever washed up on Brooklyn’s shore. Irina made every attempt to simply write her mother off, but Raisa would promptly write herself back on again, like graffiti sandblasted away by public authorities that promptly reappears the next day. Thus Irina was confronted with the maddening tenacity of the blood tie. Oh, you didn’t have to love each other; indeed, you could revile each other. But the one thing apparently not in your power was to demote a member of your family to the
unimportant.
In her solitude, it came as a shock to register that she had been utterly neglecting her friends. Now that she’d finally remembered them, like that last item on your grocery list that you dash back for while someone holds your place in the checkout queue, Irina wouldn’t have blamed any of them for huffing, “Oh, hubby’s off on tour,
now
you want to have dinner, when before we were expendable? No, thank you!” Fortunately, most of Irina’s friends had been around the romantic block, and regarded friendship holidays during which you restored or ruined your life as par for the course.
Yet these revivals of friendships were skewed. Last summer, she and Ramsey had gone over to Betsy and Leo’s for dinner. While superficially the occasion was a success—polite, solicitous; their hosts had gone to lengths over the food—in retrospect it was a disaster. Betsy liked Lawrence. Betsy missed Lawrence, and Betsy probably held it against Irina, just a little, that now when she had her friend over to dinner she didn’t get two for the price of one. She may also have felt wounded by the fact that Irina had failed to follow that advice not to “shoot her wad” on a “fancy, shiny gadget” that wouldn’t last, and clearly thought Irina had lost leave of her senses. Leo had held forth about the state of the music industry, but neither of them had even passing interest in snooker; Ramsey’s returning discourse on the rise of the attacking over the strategic game met an earnest attentiveness wildly at odds with Betsy’s casual social brutality when she was being herself. Both parties vowed on parting that they must do this again soon, didn’t mean it, and hadn’t.
Thus Irina decided, daily, to ring Betsy
tomorrow.
She shied from the disapproval, the incomprehension, and especially the diplomacy, which from Betsy would feel so unnatural. For that matter, a whole cadre of companions clearly regarded Irina’s running off with a snooker player as an attack of short-sighted intoxication that would end in tears. This whole pro-Lawrence contingent came in for short shrift. Melanie, by contrast, belonged to an opposing constellation of friends, who finally let fly that they had never been able to abide Lawrence, and who lauded Irina’s departure as the bravest, most life-affirming gesture she’d ever made. Somehow the latter group’s company proved the more pleasant to keep.
This year Irina was genuinely sorry when once more Ramsey failed to win the World. Worse, this year he was knocked out in the very first round, which (alas) brought him home earlier than usual. Militantly, for the months of May and June, when he was footloose and at her disposal, she completely ignored him during the day. She was closing on a finished draft.
Working flat-out, she met her private deadline with only a day to spare. For Ramsey’s forty-ninth birthday in July she led him upstairs, ushering him into the room from which he had been banished since January.
He slowly turned the drawings; intended for reduction, each sheet was two feet by three. At first his silence made her nervous, and she worried that he didn’t like them, or resented her incursion into his territory. Her fears were allayed by the dumbstruck expression on his face. He wasn’t talking because he was afraid to say anything lame. At last he must have resigned himself that he talked the way he talked. Turning the last panel of the astronaut story, he said solemnly, “This is fucking brilliant.”
That would do nicely.
They had a simple dinner at Best of India that night. After heaping the drawings with still more praise, Ramsey ventured, “I hate to sound thick as a post, since I know the story’s for nippers. But what’s it mean?”
“The idea is that you don’t have only one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one perfect course in comparison to which all the others are crap. The idea is to take the pressure off. Martin gets to express many of the same talents in each story, but in different ways. There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn’t want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”
Ramsey asked plaintively, “In the snooker story—why couldn’t he win the World?”
Irina laughed. “Because that would undermine my thesis. Snooker isn’t his sole destiny, even if it works out in many regards very well. And you don’t have to win the World to be a great snooker player, right?”
“Bollocks!” he said with a laugh, and clinked her glass.

Despite the lesson of the tale itself, “everything was all right” for Irina only after protracted tribulations. For months, she e-mailed JPEGs from publisher to publisher. More than one UK editor admired the work, but cited its production costs as too high. Moreover, she hadn’t a hope in hell of selling American editors on the idea, when it required explaining upfront as she had to her mother that no,