The Post-Birthday World (58 page)

As for the

other resources,
Irina put off making the call, but another mortgage payment was around the corner. She punched in the digits so slowly—7 . . . 1 . . . —that the system cut her off, and she had to start again.

“Mama?” Her voice was piping. “It’s Irina. . . . Listen, I know we’ve had our differences, but Ramsey is very sick. . . . Yes, I thought she would have told you. But what she doesn’t know is that we’re having some— money troubles. . . . Mama,

please
don’t I-told-you-so, this isn’t the time! . . . Yes, we do still have the house, and I guess, on my own account, I could give it up, but Ramsey—he’s so ill—and he loves this place—I can’t do that to him right now. So I was wondering—do you still have the car? . . . I’m sorry to have to ask, but I’d like you to sell it.”

By February, all anyone else could talk about was an impending war with Iraq, but Irina was contending with another invasion, and with weapons of mass destruction that had thus far proved far more manifest than Saddam Hussein’s. When Ramsey was confined to bed after chemo treatments, it had become an art, and a discipline, to continue to discern beneath the bloat the fierce lines and narrow contours of the face she had fallen in love with. He no longer grew the stubble that had abraded her chin back in the days and betrayed her waywardness to Lawrence; turned the brownish-yellow of ancient parchment, the skin even on his arms and legs was now baby-smooth and hairless. Yet from the slight white wisps remaining on his scalp, she could infer a full, raging head of hair, as with an elegant line drawing she could imply mass with a few pencil strokes. As the months had worn on, the project had grown paleontological—with only partial impressions in a great bland slab from which to reconstruct a rising pterodactyl. When he was too weak to get up she had learned to manipulate his bedpan without embarrassment, reminding herself that we’re all leaky vessels of blood and shit and piss, if we manage to disguise that fact for as long as possible behind a locked bathroom door.

Perhaps the hardest loss to accept was minor, or seemingly: the crème brûlée aroma that once wafted so enticingly from the base of his neck, that round, wholesome cloud of baking custard. As if the ramekin had been left in the oven on high, now the custard had curdled; the sugar had burnt. The drugs leeched off his skin with an acrid reek, and although when she kissed him the flavor was still sweet, it was sickeningly so.

Befogged by pain meds, he never seemed to forget who she was, but he could grow hazy on other details. One day last week he had flailed out of bed, convinced that he’d only half an hour to make it to Wembley to play the Masters or he’d be disqualified. (For the delusional, he was astute; that week the Masters was indeed under way in North London, leading Irina to conclude that the snooker circuit was hardwired deep in Ramsey’s brain.) So this one afternoon stood out. His gray-blue eyes no longer flecked with white caps, but calmed to clear, penetrable pools. He was weak but lucid, and the minutes at a go when she could truly talk to mission control had grown dear.

“Love?” he said, taking her hand as she sat on the edge of the bed. His metacarpus was papery, and poppled with premature liver spots. “There’s something I need to tell you before I ain’t able to tell you nothing.”

She loved the way he talked: tell you

nuffink.
“Okay, but don’t strain yourself.”
Defying her caution, he struggled to sit up, and she helped him arrange the pillows. “I owe you an apology, pet.”
“If it’s about the rows—”
“It ain’t about the rows. I been powerful selfish. Back when I first took you to Omen on my birthday”
—burfday—
“I ought to have paid the bill and drove you home.”
“And not kissed me over your snooker table? But that’s one of the most wonderful memories of my life!”
“I know I been jealous of Anorak Man,” he plowed on. “But it ain’t ’cause you been a slag. You been a good wife. I reckon in my gut I always knew you never shagged the bloke once we was married. But I still been so jealous I could taste it like metal in the mouth, like I were sucking on a 50p.”
“But I left Lawrence for you. Why has that never been enough?”
“’Cause you shouldn’t have done,” he said. “’Cause I know you made a mistake. You’d have been better off with Anorak Man and no two ways about it.”
“Oh, rubbish! The pain meds have gone to your head.”
“Don’t contradict me, woman. I ain’t been able to say this before, ’cause it fucks me up like. But there’s one upside to this checking-out palaver—”
She tried to protest, but he raised his hand. His strength was not likely to last, and she should probably let him talk.
“I can say the truth.” The
troof.
“I’m a waster, pet. About all I could ever offer you was my dick, which you seemed to fancy for reasons I could never rightly understand, and now it’s about as sexy as a mealy banger on cold mash. What’s worse, I burnt through all the dosh, and I’ll be leaving you nothing but bills and a house in hock. I can’t even leave you a World Championship trophy, ’cause you was right: I disgraced you at the Crucible. It were all my fault—what you said around 9/11, and you was bang on. But the trouble weren’t just the drink, pet. It weren’t just the Remy. It were that I love you too much, too much to stick. So much that I done a terrible thing, pet.
“Taking you off of Anorak Man was the biggest sin I ever done in my whole sodding life. I could see you was good together. And he was dead sound. Helped you with your work and such like, where I don’t know no children’s book editors from pork pie. He’d have took care of you, pet, and he’s clever, cleverer than me by a pole. He makes them political jokes I never get. Not even bad to look at, if you like that sort of thing. Always treat me proper as well, complimenting my game, keeping up with all them stats like my centuries and that. To thank him, I nick his bird—the bird what he loves more than the world, even if he ain’t always brilliant at showing it. But I got to have you for myself, ’cause I’m a selfish git. If there be any St. Whose-it sitting up at them pearly gates, that’ll be the first thing out of the geezer’s mouth: Why’d you take Irina? Why’d you take Irina from Anorak Man, you tosspot? How could you ruin that beautiful bird’s life?”
The soliloquy having exhausted him, he sagged down the pillows. She patted the sweat from his brow with a washcloth, and fed him a sip of water.
“Now, don’t you think that determination is up to me?”
“No,” said Ramsey staunchly. “Never met a bird that knows what’s good for her.”
“Is that so? Still, I get to take my turn, don’t I? And meanwhile, you
shut it.
Okay?” He grunted.
“First of all, screw all that
pearly gates
tripe when you’re still here. But maybe you’re right, that there are things we can say now that would have been harder before. Now, I grant you: Lawrence
is
‘dead sound.’ I’ve never made any bones about the fact that Lawrence treated me wonderfully well, and I know that’s been a burden for you. It would have been so much easier if he beat me or drank or philandered, and then I’d have been purely grateful to escape. I confess that I haven’t been purely grateful. You say that your greatest sin was taking me from Lawrence. Well, the greatest sin in my life was leaving him, and in truth I’ve never been quite the same person since. I’ve never thought of myself quite as highly again. I loved Lawrence; I know this isn’t easy for you to hear, but I still love Lawrence, although in a way that really shouldn’t make you jealous.
“On the other hand? If I didn’t kiss you over that snooker table, I’d never have known the highlights of my life. And it wasn’t only that one kiss, either; it was all the kisses. There have been single moments of kissing you, and fucking you . . . And in case you think it’s only that inexplicably attractive dick of yours, single moments like watching you saunter toward me on that stage in Purbeck Hall, slinging your black leather jacket . . . Seeing you sink a far red with the white tight on the cushion when Clive Everton has just announced that the shot is impossible . . . Hearing you duet with Ken Doherty through all five verses of ‘Snooker Loopy’ . . . Catching the look on my mother’s face when you flipped her those car keys in Brighton Beach . . . Dancing to Charlie Parker in the Plaza . . . Well, they’re worth, as you would say, the
whole kit.
The rows, the lonely nights with you in Bangkok, the fact that we suddenly don’t have any money. I’m not sure I’ve the right to say it was worth hurting Lawrence’s feelings so grievously, but it’s only wised me up to think of myself in a less flattering way—as a normal, flawed, inconsistent woman instead of a saint. Those moments, they were even worth—this. I still hope that you can make it through, my sweet, and that all these dreadful treatments are the worst of it. But even if you don’t. I’d still kiss you on your forty-seventh birthday. Knowing what I know, I’d still lean into your arms and kiss you over that snooker table, and willingly take the consequences, good and bad.”
Somewhere far too early in her monologue, he had fallen asleep.

�

In the penumbra of 9/11, everything seemed stupid. Dinner seemed stupid, and buying more paper towels seemed stupid. Hoovering seemed stupid. Illustration seemed stupid. Remembering that on Monday nights

ER
came on at ten o’clock seemed stupid, although they still remembered. Accordingly, a heavy, effortful sensation attended the pettiest of enterprises; indeed, the pettier the task, the more onerous its completion.

Only one thing did not shrivel into one of those mummified orts under the stove so inconsequential that even the mice ignore it, and that was Lawrence’s work. It may have seemed ever so slightly stupid to Irina before, but no more. He was a bit embarrassed to make good on his offhand assertion in Tas some years ago that “someone might as well cash in” on calamities that have already happened. But Lawrence had effectively been playing the same lottery combination for years, and finally his number had come up. Terrorism was no longer a tiresome sideline. Lawrence’s specialty had streaked to the top of the international agenda in the same number of seconds it had taken for those towers to come down.

Their claim on 9/11 was modest, and shared by millions of New Yorkers. They had merely been in the city at the time, and uptown at that; neither had lost family or friends. Yet gradually Lawrence asserted ownership. He had put in the spadework on this issue while most of his colleagues had dismissed terrorism as a longstanding bore, and had earned his share of what were, however appallingly, substantial occupational rewards.

Overnight, Lawrence was much in demand. He was pulled onto the same circuit of news programs that had solicited his expertise after the Good Friday Agreement, only this time he was waxing eloquent about a subject of worldwide concern, and not merely about a peace agreement in the back of beyond. The

Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
commissioned op-eds. Simon & Schuster signed him for a book about “new” versus “old” terrorism, which paid a six-figure advance. He got a raise at Blue Sky, suddenly nervous of losing him.

Thus by early 2003 Lawrence and Irina were amply provided for, and their two-bedroom rental began to feel cramped. Despite the runaway property market—in five years, London real-estate values had doubled— Irina proposed that they buy a house. She pointed out that you could still get a few decent deals around Ramsey’s neighborhood of Hackney and Mile End.

Lawrence’s noncommittal response echoed his reaction to her proposal that they get married six years before. His reaching for the very same phrases—

I guess so, If you want, I’m not especially bothered either way
—did not seem coincidental. These days anyone could opt out of a flimsy old wedding license, and meantime a fisherman’s eight-foot-square shack in Suffolk, with one toilet and no bath, was now listing for £250,000—that was $400,000. Thus in contemporary urban life, mutual investment in real estate
was
marriage—real marriage, the binding, frightening, complicated kind that precluded ready escape. No wonder Lawrence squirmed. But for pity’s sake, they’d been together for nearly fifteen years. He might stop hedging his bets.

It was the morning of Valentine’s Day, an occasion they’d gotten in the habit of acknowledging with no more than “Happy Valentine’s Day!” and a peck. A bad habit, and Irina had resolved in advance to do better this year.

Grabbing his overcoat, Lawrence hurried to the door, and she stopped him. “Don’t wear that sports jacket. You forgot, it has that grease stain on the lapel.” When he protested that he didn’t care, she insisted. “If I take it in today, I can get it back from the cleaners in time for your interview with

Dispatches,
and it’s your favorite for TV. Besides, you’re BMOC at Blue Sky now, and have no business looking like a slob.”

“No!” he said with a ferocity that took her aback. “I’m in a hurry, forget it! I’ll wear something else for

Dispatches
!”
“Lawrence!” Hands on hips, she was flummoxed. “I’m offering to take your jacket to the cleaners, which is a
favor,
remember? And that stain is very obvious. Just switch it for the blue one, which will look fine with that shirt.”
Standing in the hallway, he looked cornered, though why her offer to clean his jacket would make him feel hounded was beyond her. He removed the offending item with the slow, funereal motions with which he might have draped it across the glassy-eyed face of a pedestrian who’d been fatally run over. Even when she took it from him, he held on to it a little longer, and they almost ripped a seam.
On a whim admittedly trite, Irina went shopping at Anne Summers that morning. The idea was really more of a joke (if, it transpired, a pricey joke) than a serious bid to spice up their sex life, whose routine was now so ritualized that the introduction of any new element would be as revolutionary as Vatican II. Brusque sorts like Lawrence dismissed risqué undergarments as
Rocky Horror
camp. Still, she nursed a tiny hope that the black satin teddy might turn him on. To this day, she had no idea what
did
turn him on. One thing was sure: if he did get off on sexy lingerie, he’d never have told her.
Debating whether to keep it wrapped in the box or to surprise him by wearing it to bed, Irina checked the sports jacket for spare change or stray business cards, and was about to head off to the cleaners when she encountered a lump in the inside pocket.
A mobile phone.
An ordinary enough discovery, except for the fact that to her knowledge Lawrence didn’t own a mobile phone. He had certainly never given her the number. And they’d discussed the matter. While they could afford them, Irina regarded spending as akin to voting, and she resented the exorbitant UK price plans; British children were squandering such a large proportion of their meager resources on mobiles that chocolate sales had slumped. Since they were both easily contacted by landline, Lawrence had seemed in accord, so much so that she first assumed that he’d picked up someone else’s mobile left behind at some meeting, intending to return it.
To confirm as much, she turned the set on and pressed the phone book button.
Bethany.
Lacking a surname, presumably the listing was first for beginning with
B.
But as she pressed the down tab, she found only six more numbers entered into the permanent memory: Club Gascon, Irina, National Liberal Club, Omen, Ritz, Royal Horseguards Hotel.
Heart pounding, she scrolled up to the
B
entry, and hit send.
“
Yasha!
But why are you—?”
end.
Irina spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of suspension. There was an explanation, some temporary professional exigency that required this phone, perhaps provided by Blue Sky. She distracted herself by puzzling over the listing of Omen, the strange coincidence, and the inconsistency: Lawrence detested Japanese food. Her mind idled to her theory that the cuisine had latterly grown so popular for being light, and thus beloved of women for lunch.
On return home, earlier than usual, Lawrence was boisterous. “Hey, sorry I forgot this morning—happy Valentine’s Day!” His smack on the lips rebounded like a basketball. Her diffident father greeted his daughter with a similar springy terror, as if at any moment the cops would burst from the bushes and arrest him for incest. “I thought we could call Club Gascon, and ask if they have a cancellation.”
When she pointed out that he had therefore not planned the occasion in advance, he admitted that making a reservation had slipped his mind.
“A night at Club Gascon could run us 150 quid,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Hey, you only live once! And I thought that tight fist of yours had loosened up.”
It had. The financial objection was disingenuous. Since finding Club Gascon listed on that mobile, which exuded an alien, Kryptonite weakening in the pocket of her cardigan, she didn’t feel that their favorite
special-occasion restaurant belonged to them anymore. “I’ve already
thawed the chicken,” she said.
He didn’t press it. Club Gascon having cancellations on Valentine’s
Day was a farcical notion anyway, unless some other woman in this city
had also found a mysterious mobile in her partner’s sports jacket. Lawrence busied himself, tossing junk mail, studying the TV listings, dusting the dining table, though that was her job. He commonly came home
fagged, tight-lipped, and terse. Yet washing dishes, he delivered a rapid
nonstop monologue about the Bush administration’s maladroit alienation
of prospective UN allies on Iraq, whose invasion Lawrence both deplored
and seemed to be looking forward to. Then he dropped airily, “Take in
my jacket?” She said yes. “Thanks! You don’t have to pick it up. I’ll
do it.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said, and she caught him sneaking a
long look at her face as the water ran. But it was only when she said,
“Mind if we skip popcorn tonight? I’m not in the mood,” that his eyes
flecked with alarm.
They always had popcorn.
Its seasoning maybe—Thai
7-Spice or American Barbeque—but the bowlful itself in front of the
news had never been a question of mood.
Keeping her own counsel through dinner, Irina knew she should have
just come out and asked him about the phone; the longer she delayed
putting the question, the more malignant it seemed to grow. But dread is
a mighty discouragement, and after cleanup she even let him tune in the
Masters.
Though she’d grown into an avid snooker fan, this last season Ramsey
Acton had been mysteriously absent from the circuit, and her fascination
with the game had waned. She wasn’t familiar with the players in this
match, and felt no investment in who won. She had no idea why they
were watching this. Or rather, she did.
Yet tonight, Lawrence was glued to the screen. When she interrupted
with a comment on Paul Hunter’s girly hairstyle, he brushed her off.
“Would you
please
?”
“Please
what
?”
“Just—keep it down, so I can follow this!”
“You said a few years ago that you’d had it with this game,” said Irina. “Since when did you get so involved in a snooker match again?”
“Americans say
snooker
!” he exclaimed, rhyming the word with
looker.
“I’m sick to death of this pretentious wannabe Brit-speak! You’re a Yank just like me, and an American doesn’t watch
snoooooooooooooooooker
!”
The
OOO
s rang through the room. Irina fluctuated between injured, angry, and stunned. Gravely, she rose from her armchair, and switched off the set.
“Look, I’m sorry I used that tone of voice,” Lawrence backpedaled. “I’ve had a hard day, that’s all.”
Irina kept her back to him, bracing her hands on either corner of the TV. “I’ve had a hard day, too,” she said quietly.
“Come on!” he cried from the couch, resorting to the boisterousness with which he had first burst into the flat. “Turn it back on, and I promise I won’t be such a jerk.”
She turned around, blocking the black set, forcing him as she might have years before to look at his woman of an evening instead of that screen. “Lawrence. Why have you never told me you have a mobile, or given me the number?”
His face churned. That was the point, before he said a word, that he broke her heart. The contortion of those muscles paraded a
decision
over whether to tell her the truth. Once he finally spoke, Lawrence’s opting for the honesty route didn’t nearly compensate for the fact that candor had been a choice. For an alternative direction to have beckoned, it was probably well trod.
“I guess,” he frowned, “we have to talk.”
Irina sank into her armchair, and cursed herself. Had she kept silent, she might have won another precious day or two of normal life. Clearly that normal life was not really so normal, and hadn’t been for some time, but if lying to your partner was anathema, lying to yourself was bliss.
“You mean,” she said, and it really wasn’t fair that she was the one who had to say it, “about
Bethany.
”
“Yeah,” he croaked.
It had always been a joke. Putting the woman’s name in italics, speaking it with that droll hint of sarcasm. The jealousy had been a game.
She’d been jealous for fun, because it made Lawrence seem more attractive; it hadn’t been
serious.
Because Bethany—well,
Bethany
—the little
vixen was too OBVIOUS, wasn’t she? But then, if an Islamic iconoclast is
going to make war with the West, he’s not going to blow up a Rotary
Club in Nebraska, is he? He’s going to knock down the World Trade
Center. An African monomaniac isn’t going to hold free and fair elections; he’s going to rig the ballot and then declare himself president for
life. It’s what made the world such a bore really, the plodding predictability of it all, the fact that appearances, alas, are rarely deceiving, so that
when your partner works with an attractive woman who wears scandalously short skirts and flirts with him shamelessly, that’s the one he’ll have
an affair with,
dummy,
for you ignore
the obvious
at your peril. The burden of these scenes isn’t only their banality, but your obligation to solicit all the information that you don’t want to know. “How
long,” she said, “has this been going on?”
Again his face kneaded with that awful
deciding.
He might have allowed, “Only a few weeks,” and gotten away with it, but Lawrence did
seem to have registered that for him to have come clean on
the main thing
only to fudge the details would make this conversation utterly futile. “It’s
hard to say . . .” he stalled.
“I realize it’s hard to
say,
” she countered. “I doubt it’s hard to
calculate.
”
He continued to train his gaze at a right angle to her chair. “Five
years,” he said. “Or a little under.”
Irina looked at Lawrence blankly. She had no idea who he was. The few moments that followed were misleadingly silent, for in that
time a low rumble in her core built to that notorious roar of an oncoming
train that fleeing onlookers had described during the fall of the twin towers. Irina was abashed at the analogy, surely a vain misappropriation of
national tragedy, but the sensation of implosion was still akin. After all,
she had dully marveled watching CNN that September morning at how
effortlessly over the course of a few seconds a great feat of engineering,
the labor of many years, a tribute to tireless devotion and even love, had
been laid to waste. Likewise, the alliance in this living room had taken even longer to forge, and was equally a labor of love, yet was just as readily annihilated. If your own life is a self-contained city, then Lawrence was a tower at the prow of her island. With Lawrence felled—or the myth of Lawrence, as she had understood him only moments ago—her skyline was suddenly leveled and more plain. Certainly the feeling in this chair in the rubble of her personal apocalypse recalled that everything-is-stupid aftermath of 9/11, save that even on September 11 there had been one thing, one solitary thing, that hadn’t seemed stupid. Now that, too, was bagatelle.
“Why?” Another obligation, but because the question had to do with the inner workings of a total stranger, she was not sure that she cared.
“Well, I
could say
—”
She stopped him. “Mention versus use.”
His face was plowed into itself. “I don’t know.”
“You must have thought about it.” She was calm, albeit dead calm, sails slackened.
“Sometimes. Others, not at all. I keep things—separate. You know, I—”
“Oh, God, you’re not going to say
compartmentalize,
are you?”
“Uh—not anymore!” She didn’t smile. “I guess I didn’t like this feeling, like I was this regulation think-tank wonk, and, you know, solid, steadfast . . . a good doobie, a good soldier . . . I had the urge to be—bad.”
“It would have been easier on me if you’d just sneaked a couple of cigarettes,” she said dryly. In retrospect, her own dirty secret seemed hilariously, bitterly small.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’ve known about that, you know. Your breath . . .”
“You know I sneak two fags a week, and I’m oblivious to your having an affair for five years. What does that make me but a
moron.
”
“No, it makes me careful. I wasn’t dropping clues, hoping to be found out. I’ve dreaded hurting you. I’ve gone to lengths not to.”
“I’m supposed to feel flattered? That you cheated
well
? Because going to
lengths
not to hurt me is not fucking some other woman at all.” She had claimed that fabled
moral high ground,
but the air was thin up here, the landscape bleak, the company nonexistent. The moral high ground was a lonely steppe. She might have preferred a grottier lowland, slumming in the mud with everyone else.
“Well, obviously,” he said, staring at his hands.
There was no need to try to make him feel any more ashamed; she regretted that
lengths
remark, as if both she and Lawrence were ganging up on him. “Is that it?” she asked gently. “You were tired of being a choir boy?”
“I felt—packaged. Boxed up, to other people, to myself. To you, even. I know this whole thing isn’t like me. And I’ve racked my brains over that. But I came to the conclusion that doing something that wasn’t like me was part of what drove me to it. I wanted to do something outrageous.”
“But what you’ve done—are doing—isn’t outrageous. It’s commonplace.”
“It hasn’t felt,” he admitted, “commonplace.”
The assertion came with pictures, and she winced.
“I guess I wanted something that was mine,” he added.
All of Russia wasn’t enough? “I was yours.”
“Something private.”
“You mean secret.”
“All right. Secret. Still, I don’t totally understand it,” he puzzled. “I love you.”
“What about Bethany?” The woman had earned her way out of italics.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you
tell
her that you love her?”
“Sometimes,” he said warily. “But only in—certain circumstances.”
“In those—
certain circumstances.
With me. Has it been that crap?”
“No, it’s been fine!”
“A pretty feeble adjective for fucking the love of your life.”
“Look, I don’t want to rub your nose in it. And you’re a great-looking woman, in addition to being a fantastic cook and an incredibly talented artist—”