The Post-Birthday World (11 page)

“I won’t be your bit on the side.”
“I don’t want to have an affair either.”
“Then what do you want?”
At that instant, Irina might have been spirited blindfolded in a car,

then released to a neighborhood of London that she didn’t recognize. How did she find her way home? It was an interesting area from the looks of it, so did she

want
to go home? She’d been kidnapped. Now Stockholm syndrome had set in, and she was fond of her captor.

“I want to see you as soon as possible.”

Another roaring sigh. “Is that smart?”
“It has nothing to do with intelligence.”
He groaned, “I’m dying to see you as well.”
“I could take the tube up. Mile End, right?”
“A lady like you got no business on the tube. I’ll call by.” “You can’t come here. Yesterday. You shouldn’t have come here, either.

You’re too recognizable from television.”

“See what this is like? It’s a horror show! Like an affair already, with
out the good bit.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“You know the alternative.”
“That is not an option. I have to see you.” A whole new side of herself,
this willfulness. It was heady.
“It’s a long walk from the tube.”
“I’m a sturdy creature.”
“You are a rare and delicate flower to be kept from the crass, covetous
eyes of East End low-life.” He was only half-joking. “What about Lawrence?”
“He’s at work. He rings here during the day, but I could say I went
shopping.”
“You’ll have nil to show for it.”
“A walk, a fruitless trip to the library? I could get my messages remotely from your house, and ring him back.”
“You ain’t very good at this.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“Most of them office phone systems give a read-out of the number
what’s rung up. Your—” He was clearly about to say
husband.
“—Anorak
Man got a memory for figures. Like my own phone number. I should get
you a mobile.”
“That’s a nice offer, but Lawrence and I have already decided that
they’re too expensive. He might find it. I’d have a terrible time explaining why I had one. My, there are a thousand ways to be found out, aren’t
there?”
“Yeah. Even when there ain’t nothing to find.”
“Your birthday? You would call that nothing? If I were yours?” “You are mine,” he said softly. “Last night. You slept with him, didn’t
you.”
“Obviously I
slept
with him. We share the same bed.”
“That ain’t what I mean and you know it. He’s been out of town. A
bloke’s been out of town and he comes home, he shags his wife.” He went
ahead and used the word.
“All right, then. Yes. If I didn’t want to, he’d know something
was up.”
“I don’t like it. I ain’t got no right to say that, but I don’t like it.” “I didn’t, either,” she admitted. “I only—got anywhere by thinking
about you. But it was foul, imagining another man.”
“Best you’re in his arms thinking about me than the other way round,
I reckon.”
“Being in your arms and thinking about you appeals to me more.” “So when can you get your luscious bum to Mile End?”
The pattern was probably typical: you spent the abundance of the call
talking about how you shouldn’t be doing this, and its tail-end discussing the particulars of how you would. It would’ve been nice to feel special.

On the tube, people stared. Both men and women. It wasn’t her short denim skirt and skimpy yellow tee that were turning heads. She had a look. Her fellow passengers mightn’t have identified the look per se, but they recognized it all the same. People had babies all the time, coupled all the time, yet the look must have been rare.

Sex was rare.
You’d never know it, from the hoardings overhead in this carriage—the bared busts promoting island holidays, the come-on toothpaste smiles. But the adverts were meant to torment commuters with what they were missing.

This was not a journey that Irina McGovern had ever expected to take. However firmly resolved to keep her skirt zipped, she wasn’t fooling herself. She was taking the train to cheat.

With no explanation over the loudspeaker, the train lurched to a standstill. Sitting for fifteen minutes under a quarter-mile of rock was so commonplace on the Northern Line, the city’s worst, that none of the passengers bothered to look up from their

Daily Mail
s. In relation to the eccentricities of Underground “service,” regular riders would have long since passed through the conventional stages of consternation, despair, and long-suffering, and graduated to an imperturbable Zen tranquility. One could alternatively interpret the passengers’ expressions of unquestioning acceptance as sophisticated, or bovine.

Yet the train gave Irina literal pause. First Ramsey and now this very carriage was insisting,

You have to stop.
Unbidden, a memory tortured from a few years before, when she and Lawrence has been sharing their traditional bowl of predinner popcorn. Recently moved into the Borough flat, they weren’t yet in the habit of grabbing blind handfuls in silence in front of the Channel 4 news.
“Obviously, there are no guarantees,” she’d mused, searching out the fluffiest kernels. “About us. So many couples seem fine, and then, bang, it’s over. But if anything happened to us? I think I’d lose faith in the whole project. It’s not that we’ll necessarily make it. But that if we don’t, maybe nobody can. Or I can’t; same difference.”
“Yeah,” Lawrence agreed, tackling the underpopped kernels that she’d warned him could damage his bridgework. “I know people say this, and then a couple of years later they’re raring to go again, but for me? This is it. We go south? I’d give up.”
The feeling had been mutually fierce. For Irina, Lawrence had always been the ultimate test case. He was bright, handsome, and funny; they were well suited. They’d made it past the major hurdles—that ever-rocky first year, Lawrence’s professional foundering before he found his feet at Blue Sky, several of Irina’s illustration projects that never sold, even moving together to a foreign country. It should be getting easier, shouldn’t it? Coming up on ten years, it should be a matter of coasting. They’d worked out the kinks, smoothed out serious sources of friction, and their relationship should be gliding along like one of those fancy Japanese trains that ride on a pillow of air. Instead, with no warning, they had jolted to a dead stop between stations, to stare out windows black as pitch. Overnight, their relationship had converted from high-tech Oriental rail to the Northern Line.
Why hadn’t anyone warned her? You couldn’t coast. Indeed, her very sense of safety had put her in peril. Ducking into that Jaguar in a spirit of reckless innocence, she wasn’t looking over her shoulder, and it was the unwary who got mugged. That was exactly how she felt, too. Mugged. Clobbered. She might as well have taken that rolling pin on Saturday afternoon and bashed her own brains in.
Unceremoniously, the train shuddered, chugged forward, and gathered speed. Her respite, the Underground’s graciously sponsored interlude for second thoughts, drew formally to a close. These other passengers had places to go, and couldn’t wait indefinitely for a lone, well-preserved woman in her early forties to get a grip.
If Lawrence was indeed the test case, and thus to go terminal with Lawrence was to “lose faith in the whole project,” she was hurtling through this tunnel toward not romance, but cynicism.

It was really rather wretched, thought Irina as she scuttled with trepidation from the Mile End tube stop up Grove Road, that you couldn’t will yourself to fall in love, for the very effort can keep feeling at bay. Nor, if last night’s baffling blankness on Lawrence’s arrival was anything to go by, could you will yourself to stay that way. Least of all could you will yourself

not
to fall in love, for thus far what meager resistance she had put up to streaking toward Hackney this morning had only made the compulsion more intense. So you were perpetually tyrannized by a feeling that came and went as it pleased, like a cat with its own pet door. How much more agreeable, if love were something that you stirred up from a reliable recipe, or elected, however perversely, to pour down the drain. Still, there was nothing for it. The popular expression notwithstanding, love was not something you made. Nor could you dispose of the stuff once manifested because it was inconvenient, or even because it was wicked, and ruining your life and, by the by, someone else’s.

Even more than that kiss over the snooker table—and the proceeding eighteen hours had effectively constituted one long kiss—today she was haunted by that deathly moment when Lawrence had walked in the door and she felt nothing. Its disillusionment grew more crushing by the hour. She wasn’t disillusioned with Lawrence; it wasn’t as if the scales had fallen from her eyes and she could suddenly see him for the commonplace little man he had always seemed to others. Rather, with the turn of a house key, every romantic bone in her body had been broken. Her faithfulness and constancy with Lawrence had long formed the bedrock of her affection for her own character. This was the relationship that had been torn asunder. The weekend’s transgression had violated the fundamental terms of her contract with herself, and disillusioned her with herself. She felt smaller for that, and more fragile. She felt ordinary, and maybe for the first time believed the previously outlandish myth that like everyone else she would get old and die.

Yet as she advanced, a spell descended. Victoria Park had a fairy-tale quality, with its quaint, peaked snack-pavilion, its merry fountain splashing in the middle of the lake, the long-necked birds taking wing. Children patted the water from the shore. With every step through the park, the frailty that had hobbled her up Grove Road fell away. She felt young and nimble, the heroine of a whole new storybook, whose adventure was just beginning.

Moreover, as she drew closer to her turn onto Victoria Park Road, something alarming was happening to the landscape.

In 1919, on top of Copps Hill in Boston, a ninety-foot-wide storage vat for the production of rum burst its seams and sent 2.5 million gallons of molasses flooding onto the city. The wall of molasses rose fifteen feet high and reached a velocity of thirty-five miles per hour, drowning twenty-one Bostonians in its wake.
In much the same manner, a wave of engulfing sweetness was breaking over Victoria Park, lotus trees glistening with such a sugary gleam that she might have leaned over and licked them. The dark lake stirred deliciously, like a wide-mouthed jar of treacle. The very air had caramelized, and breathing was like sucking on candy. Without question, the vessel bursting its seams and coating the whole vicinity with syrup was that house.
Ascending the gaunt Victorian’s steep stone steps, she felt a stab of apprehension. As of her callous apathy when Lawrence walked in last night, Irina’s affections were officially unreliable. She was, after all, a shrew now, who shouted at hardworking wage-earners for wanting a piece of toast—a fickle harpy who took fancies one minute, and went cold the next. Ramsey had seemed all very fetching on Sunday, but this was Monday. There was no certainty that the countenance she confronted across this threshold would foster anything but more barbarous indifference.
Yet, today anyway, this apparently was not the case. That face: it was
beautiful.
Slipping his long, dry fingers along the bare skin under her short-cut tee, he slid them round to the small of her back, where not long ago they had hovered so tantalizingly, not touching. She emitted a little groan. He swept her through the door.

She barely beat Lawrence home. The answer-phone light was blinking. Yanking a comb through her tangled hair, she pressed play. “Please hang up and try again. Please hang up and try again”—pleasant but insistent, the British female voice pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain.” Through some peculiarity of Blue Sky’s phone system, this was the recording that consumed the full thirty-second limit on the machine whenever Lawrence rang up and didn’t leave a message. He seemed to have taken the woman’s advice. As “Please hang up and try again” droned in a demented nonstop singsong, she counted: he had rung five times.

Behind her, the lock rattled, sending her heart to her throat. “Irina?” It had only been a day, but he had already dropped the lilting addition of her middle name. “Hey!” He dropped his briefcase in the hall. “Where have you been all afternoon?”

“Oh,” she scrambled, “running a few errands.”

Wrong. People who have lived together for years were never “running errands.” She could have said she was at Tesco because they were low on Greek yogurt, or at the hardware store at Elephant & Castle because the lightbulb in the studio desk light had burnt out—

that’s
what you say to the man you live with. Because Irina knew all about the exactingly particular nature of domestic reportage, her failure to heed its form was tantamount to wearing a sandwich board that announced in big block letters, BEHOLD MY CHEATING HEART. Then again, she may have envied many a talent—her sister’s for ballet, Lawrence’s for politics. But a knack for duplicity? She didn’t
want
to get good at this.

“I thought you were all hot to trot to get some work done today.” “I don’t know. It just wasn’t flowing. You know how that is?” “Since you’re suddenly so secretive about your drawings, no I don’t

know.” She followed him limply to the kitchen, where he fixed himself a peanut-butter cracker. His motions were jagged. Those five unanswered messages had stuck in his craw.

“Anything up today at Blue Sky?”

“It’s mooted the IRA ceasefire will be reinstated soon.” His tone was clipped. “But nothing that would interest you. . . . What are you wearing that getup for?”
She crossed her arms over her exposed midriff, a style that seemed suddenly too young. “Felt like it. It’s started to bother me that I wear rubbish all the time.”
“Americans,” he snarled, “say
trash.
”
“I’m half Russian.”
“Don’t pull rank. You have an American accent, an American passport, and a father from
Ohio.
Besides, a Russian would say
khlam,
or
moosr.
Not
rubbish, da?
” When no longer trying to please, Lawrence’s Russian improved dramatically.
“What’s—” Yet another British expression,
What’s got up your nose?
would only rile him further. “What’s bothering you?”
“You took my head off this morning because you were so anxious to get to work. I called around ten, it was busy, and by ten-thirty you were already gadding about. As far as I can tell, you’ve been out all day. Have you gotten anything done? I doubt it.”
“I’m a little blocked.”
“You’ve never indulged in that arty-farty—
rubbish.
A real pro sits down and does the job, whether or not she
feels like it.
Or that’s what you used to say.”
“Well. People change.”
“Apparently.” Lawrence scrutinized her face. “Are you wearing
lipstick
?”
Irina almost never wore makeup, and wet her lips. “No, of course not. It’s been, you know, a little warm. Just chapped is all.”
When Lawrence left to turn on the Channel 4 news, Irina slipped into the loo to check her face. Her lips were a bruised cherry-red; her chin was rug-burn pink. Ramsey had needed a shave. Maybe she’d been lucky. Lawrence hadn’t remarked on her chin, or detected white wine on her breath. They’d polished off two bottles of sauvignon blanc, while Ramsey had insisted on playing her a flecked video of some famous 1985 snooker match on his flat-screen TV in the basement—which could not compete with the sport on his couch. Though she’d only managed a bite of the smoked salmon and beluga, the fish might still linger, and she’d cadged more than one of Ramsey’s Gauloises. Not taking any chances, Irina brushed her teeth. It wasn’t her custom to brush her teeth at seven p.m., but she could always claim to have burped a little stomach acid or something. Discouragingly, even when you didn’t want to get good at this sort of thing, you got good at it anyway.
It wasn’t like Lawrence not to sniff out the wine. He had a nose like a hound. That meant he may have noticed her chin, too, and the hint of smoked fish. In the living room, his concentration on Jon Snow was excessive.
“I’ll have the popcorn in a minute!” she said brightly from the doorway. “And for dinner, how about pasta?” She’d forgotten to take the chicken out to thaw.
“Whatever.” One more report on mad cow disease could not have been that compelling. The British government had been slaughtering those poor animals by the tens of thousands for months.
“I could make the kind with dried chilies and anchovies that you especially like!”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked over and smiled, gratefully. “That would be great. Make it hot. Make it a killer.”
Pasta was far more than she need have offered. He was already accepting crumbs.