The Post-Birthday World (9 page)

“Nuts, I don’t want to miss the beginning.” Lawrence reached for the remote.
“We’ve five minutes yet. Oh, and I almost forgot!” She sprang from her chair. “I made you a pie! Would you like a slice? Rhubarb-cream. It came out fabulous!”
“I don’t know,” he said, peering at her with the intense examination to which she had subjected Lawrence himself not long before. “I had a snack on the plane. . . .”
“I bet you spent all your free time in the hotel gym. And we’re celebrating.”
“Celebrating what?”
“That you’re
home,
silly!”
His head tilted. “What’s with you tonight? You’re so—bubbly. Sure that dope’s worn off?”
“What’s wrong with being glad you’re back?”
“There’s glad and glad. It’s late. You don’t usually have this much
energy.
Not sure I can keep up.”
“Tih ustal?”
she solicited, in their tender minor key.
“Yeah, pretty whacked.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been drinking?”
“No, not a drop!” she declared, wounded. “Though speaking of drops, would you like a beer with your pie?”
“Whatever you’re on, I guess I’d better have some, too.”
Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat.
“Krasny!”
Lawrence exclaimed when she set down his pie and ale.
“That’s ‘red,’ you
doorak,
” she said fondly. She always found Lawrence’s incompetent Russian adorable. Maybe because he was otherwise so sharp, and an Achilles’ heel was humanizing. Besides, his tin ear for Russian was a useful leveler. Without it, a PhD might have made her feel stupid, but he always humbly deferred to her mastery of the tongue. “ ‘Beautiful’ is
krasivy.
Red Square,
krasnaya ploshchad, da?
”
“Konyeshno, krasivy!”
He
knew
she was charmed by his mistakes, and this one was so primitive that he probably made it on purpose. “As in,
krasivy pirog
”—she gave his memory of the word for “pie” an appreciative nod—“or,
moya krasivaya zhena.
”
He mightn’t have legally married her, but whenever Lawrence used the word
wife
—which sounded more cherishing in Russian—Irina basked in the pleasure of being claimed. She understood his superstition about the institution. Sometimes when you tried too hard to nail something down you crushed it. Still, there were scenes in
ER
when a man would exclaim over a stretcher, “That’s my
wife
!” and Irina’s eyes would film. The word went to the center. “That’s my
partner
!” would never have made her cry.
Tucked into her armchair, Irina forked a first bite of pie with a sensation that all was right with the world—or her world, the only one that mattered at the moment. The creamy filling was balanced perfectly between tart and sweet, and struck a satisfying textural counterpoint with the crisp lattice crust.
Late Review
had just run its opening credits. Germaine Greer was on tonight, an articulate woman who had once been a knockout but who had aged honestly and was still classically handsome. She was that rare animal, a feminist with a sense of humor, who stuck to her guns but was not a pain in the ass. Moreover, this fifty-something writer radiated a compensatory beauty of wisdom and personal warmth. Germaine gave Irina hope for her own future and broadly bolstered her pride in her gender. The waft from the open windows was the ideal temperature, and for the time being Irina was able to put out of mind when last she reflected on that precise fulcrum of the neither too hot nor too cold. She was not a faithless hussy. Lawrence was home, and they were happy.
Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn’t sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something—when not a lie—the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.
She didn’t intend to be dire, or to detract from her pleasure in Lawrence’s return, Germaine Greer’s astute commentary on
Boogie Nights,
and the splendid rhubarb-cream. In fact, Irina reasoned that, for so much of the world to be roiling with war and animosity, there must be an international deficit of compelling men, BBC2 reception, and pie. Still, there was a weed in this garden, or none of her self-congratulation would have made itself felt. She had only been alerted to her own happiness by a narrow brush against an alternative future in which it was annihilated.
Whatever it was, that crossroads last night was one of the most
interesting
junctures she had arrived at in a long time, and the only person with whom she really wanted to talk about it was Lawrence, the one person with whom she couldn’t. The singular prohibition didn’t seem fair. On the other hand, it probably was. A don’t-make-waves constitution was one of the things that she and Lawrence, perhaps tragically, had in common. Irina didn’t like confessions, either—that is, other people’s— and Irina, too, wanted everything to be fine. For her to be able to introduce with the gravity the subject deserved,“I almost kissed Ramsey last night; I didn’t, but I wanted to, badly, and I think we should talk about why I might have wanted to,” without all hell breaking loose would have required a kind of work during the last nine years that they both had shirked. She hadn’t made the bed for that honesty, so she couldn’t lie in it. Or she had to lie in it, in the other sense of the word. That they could not hunker down right now and turn off the TV and come to grips with what exactly had happened last night was a grievous loss. At once, there seemed some sneaky connection between the fact that they couldn’t talk about it and the fact that it had happened at all.
“That looks worth seeing,” said Lawrence. “Though you might not be keen on the subject matter.”
“Why, do you think I’m a prude?”
“No, but porn isn’t up your alley.”
“
Boogie Nights
doesn’t look like pornography. It isn’t
mention versus use.
”
A logical fallacy,
mention versus use
entailed doing the very thing that you were pretending to eschew—for example, asserting, “I
could
say that’s none of your business,” when what you’re really saying is, “That’s none of your business!” As it applied to a panoply of ostensibly above-board and purely academic British “documentaries” on whoring and blue movies,
mention versus use
provided respectable cover for the standard sensationalist come-on of T&A—using
tut-tut
to disguise
tee-hee.
“It’s opening next week. Let’s go. . . . So!” she said gaily, switching off the TV. “Tell me about the conference.”
Lawrence shrugged. “A junket, basically. Except for the fact that I got to see Sarajevo, a total waste of time—”
“Yes, you say that about every conference. But what did you talk about?”
He looked agreeably surprised. “A lot of this ‘nation-building’ stuff has to do with the police. Whether you include the assholes, or ex-assholes—if there’s such a thing—and take the risk of giving them power and guns, or shut them out and take the risk of their still having power and guns and making trouble on the side. And, you know, whether you can impose democracy from without, or if it only sticks if it’s organic, so that no matter what kind of constitution you ram down their throats, as soon as your back is turned everybody reverts to type. In Bosnia, of course, there’s this big question of now NATO is in, how to get us out. Once you build up institutions all founded on the power of an international force, it’s sort of like setting a table and then seeing if you can rip the tablecloth out from underneath without breaking any dishes.”
Irina often drifted off when Lawrence talked about international relations—one of the things that Lawrence might say “all couples did,” since it was tempting to succumb to the hazardous impression that, whatever your partner was nattering about, you knew it already. This time she’d paid attention, and had been rewarded. Oh, she didn’t much care about Bosnia, a morass she had never understood. But he was so good at cutting to the chase; in his work, Lawrence’s very specialty was
the main thing.
“That’s a nice image,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said shyly. She should compliment him more often. Nothing meant more to him than her smallest kind word, and it cost her nothing.
“Was
Bethany
there?”
He put a look on his face as if he had to search the crowd in his mind, though he’d said on the phone that attendance was scant. “Mmm— yeah.”
“What was she wearing?”
“How’m I supposed to remember that?”
“Because my guess is, not very much.”
“I suppose she was
tarted up,
as you would say, as usual.”
“Someday I’m going to get you to admit that you find her attractive.”
“Nah,” he dismissed. “Never happen. A little trashy. Not my taste.”
Another fellow at the institute, Bethany Anders was a nicely put together little floozy with a brain. Tiny and almost always kitted out from head to toe in black, she wore leather microskirts and boots, patterned stockings, and voluptuous cowl collars; she’d a penchant for sleeveless blouses that displayed her shapely shoulders even in the dead of winter. Lawrence was right that her face looked a bit cheap; she wore stacks of makeup, and had big, pouty lips. Yet while this variety of feline prowled the alleyways of most big cities, they were not a dime a dozen in the think-tank biz, whose few female denizens inclined toward frump and paisley shirtwaists. So in the halls of Churchill House, Bethany stood out. Rather than act cool and distant, whenever Bethany crossed paths with Irina she was overfriendly—more grating than acting chilly by a yard.
It was thanks to
Bethany,
whose name Irina routinely pronounced in goading italics, that Lawrence was taking over a portfolio at the institute that nobody else wanted. Formerly a bastion of Cold War strategizing, after the fall of the Iron Curtain Blue Sky was overloaded with experts in Russian affairs. (With the fall of the Soviet Union, Irina, too, had experienced a sudden drop in status. Abruptly among the diaspora of one more harmless, economically flailing dung heap, she missed feeling dangerous.) Wanting to distinguish himself, Lawrence had been hitting the books on Indonesia, the Basque Country, Nepal, Colombia, the Western Sahara, the Kurdish region of Turkey, and Algeria. Having written extensively on Northern Ireland (whose pasty politicians must have clamored to be interviewed by a fox in stilettos),
Bethany
was teaching him the ropes, since to everyone else at Churchill House during an era of grand Clintonian optimism her pet subject was dreary, morally obvious, and tired beyond belief. If Lawrence wanted to research dumpy old terrorism, he was welcome to it.
Irina had misgivings about Lawrence taking on yesterday’s news, and some portion of her resistance concerned
Bethany
’s tutelage. But at least “Dr. Slag,” as Irina had dubbed her (or, in American, Dr. Slut), stimulated an elective jealousy that bordered on entertainment. The steadfast Lawrence Trainer was no more likely to stray than to walk out the door in polka-dot pajamas, and Irina was safe as houses.
“I think she fancies you,” Irina teased.
“Bullshit. She’d flirt with a doorstop.”
Lawrence was intellectually brassy but sexually humble—hence his chronic poor posture. Irina could never get it through his head that she
wanted
him to be attractive to other women, that she found the prospect exciting. If he, too, felt a little stirring once in a while, that was only redblooded, for surely she was not the only one who—
“Let’s go to bed,” she proposed, and picked up the pie dishes.
Lawrence grabbed the glasses, a last sip of wine left in hers as an emblem of renewed forbearance. “But I haven’t seen your new work!”
“Oh, that’s right—and I’ve been looking forward to showing you.” For Irina, the greatest satisfaction of finishing a drawing was to unveil it to Lawrence, and once they dropped off the dishes she led him into her studio.
“You remember the project, right?” she said. “
Seeing Red
? A little boy lives in a world in which everything is blue. And then he meets a traveler from another land in which everything and everyone is red, and it freaks him out. Naturally by the end they’re both thrilled to bits, and have learned to make purple. It’s another predictable story line, but an illustrator’s paradise. This afternoon, I got to red.”
“God, these blue ones are unbelievable. Reminds me of Picasso.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said bashfully. “Though it was challenging to get all those different shades in colored pencil. There’s a vogue right now in using the same materials that kids do, felt-tip markers, crayon—as if they could’ve drawn this, too.”
“I don’t
think
so.” Lawrence cheerfully admitted to having no artistic talent, and his wonder was genuine.
“Voilà.” She turned to the last drawing. “Red.”
“Wow!”
Something
had
happened that afternoon. Perhaps owing to the pentup feeling that issued from drawing for weeks in blue, the arrival of the crimson traveler had released something. Surrounded by indigo with a fine halo of luminous pink, the tall, spare figure was shocking. Almost scary.
“You’re so great,” said Lawrence with feeling. “I wish you could work with writers who were on a par.”