The Post-Birthday World (13 page)

Picking up the remnants of cheese at the bottom of the bowl with a moistened forefinger, Irina considered that they were both in perfect health, and sometimes physical well-being could convert from the blank space between ailments to witting pleasure. Entering middle age, they remained a handsome couple; she’d survived a rash bout of chocolate-cappuccino cake, and she still wasn’t fat. No one close to her had recently died. Lawrence, grumbling over when this protracted segment on BSE would ever be over, was conspicuously alive. Dinner—the chicken had been marinating in a deadly Indonesian jerk sauce all afternoon—would be smashing.

Some years thanksgiving arrives in the lowercase, in July.
Nothing was wrong.
Most of all, the air between them was clear. She may have kept quiet about a couple of purely interior moments with Ramsey Acton over the weekend, but she had granted herself permission this afternoon to hold those slight cards close to her chest. If Saturday night’s disquieting temptation had sent a tremor through this flat, the earth had stilled again. It was surely not naïve to believe that neither she nor Lawrence was hiding any great secret from the other. Lawrence was not covertly gambling away their savings at OTB—if he said he went to the gym on his lunch hour, to the gym he went—nor was he going through the motions of heading to the office every day when in truth he’d been sacked months ago. Maybe she did sneak an occasional cigarette, but Irina was not popping amphetamines while Lawrence was at Blue Sky. She hadn’t developed a furtive morning sherry habit, or a stealthy dependence on Valium. Lawrence did not harbor a whole other family in Rome, whom he visited while pretending to attend a conference in Sarajevo. So while it was possible that a pizza delivery boy would press the wrong buzzer, there was no chance that their doorbell would be rung tonight by a sullen teenager whom Lawrence hadn’t admitted to siring years ago, who now wanted money. Irina wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Lawrence that her self-absorbed mother could no longer afford the upkeep of her house in Brighton Beach and would be moving into their spare bedroom next week. Lawrence wasn’t brooding through the news over how to break it to Irina that after all these years he had come to the realization that he was gay. And on Saturday night, Irina hadn’t kissed another man while Lawrence was away.

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On one more exasperating afternoon in August, Irina thumbed through the illustrations for

Seeing Red
up until the blazing arrival of the Crimson Traveler, gripped the pages by the corners, and ripped them from her drawing pad. Not allowing herself to reconsider, she immediately tore them in half, and crumpled the uninspired blue pictures into the bin. Only the new ones had life. Only the new illustrations were tolerable to her: those visited by a tall, terrifying figure from another world, whose rash, outlandish hues would blow the mind of any stunted visual pauper raised in the cramped, confining spectrum of midnight to cerulean. How had she ever borne drafting those first nine workaday pictures without red? Nevertheless, she would craft the blue ones again. The redrawn blues would pulse with need, with longing and deprivation, with all of the dolor and ache that gave “the blues” its emotional and musical connotations.

Though she told herself that she was simply being professional, the impatient disposal was still unnerving. What else formerly of such value, on which she had lavished painstaking care, might she suddenly tear asunder and cart to the trash because it was “workaday” and “uninspired”?

Meanwhile, just as Irina grew more expert at designing excuses for why she was out when Lawrence rang, Lawrence ceased to solicit them. By the end of the month, when once again she barely beat him back to the flat, no “Please hang up and try agains” would await her on the answering machine. If she wasn’t there, he didn’t want to know, so perhaps he didn’t want to know why, either.

She found his company unendurable.
Always a bit excessive, their dependence on television grew extravagant. Night after night they propped stuporously in their appointed seats, both glad of such a miraculous object—one that facilitated spending hours at a go in the same room without speaking, and at once cast this catatonic antisocial behavior as perfectly normal. Nervous of coming upon such a black hole in the schedule that they might be forced to turn off the set—say, a deadly confluence of
World’s Wildest Police Videos, Gardener’s World,
and
House Doctor
—Lawrence took to returning daily from work with a video.

Irina failed to follow the most primitive plot twists in the movies he rented. The visions that had begun that first phantasmagoric Sunday evening had only multiplied, furnishing far more transfixing drama than anything Lawrence dug up at Blockbuster. And visions they decisively were, as opposed to fantasies. She didn’t seem to concoct them like a fabulist, but to be subjected to them like Alex in

A Clockwork Orange,
arms bound, eyelids propped. She doubted she could stop them if she tried. But then—she didn’t try.

There is a knock on the door. It is late at night. They have not been expecting a guest. Irina sags. She is heavy with foreknowledge of who has come calling, and of what the visitor will require of her. Limp in her armchair, she is slow to rise. She follows Lawrence to the hall. On the landing stands Ramsey Acton, ramrod-straight and stock-still. He would never have traveled with his most treasured possession outside its case in real life. But in this solemn passion play, he is gripping his cue, planting the butt on the lino like a staff. Clad in black, he looks Old Testament, like one of the prophets. His blue-gray eyes are harrowing. They do not light on Lawrence, but stare directly over his shoulder to Irina. Ramsey’s refusal to acknowledge her partner’s presence does not seem rude. By implication—whatever the reason for Ramsey’s strange appearance at their door in a city where people do not customarily drop in on one another unannounced, much less at such an hour—it has nothing to do with Lawrence. Irina meets Ramsey’s eyes. They are
uncompromising.
No one says a word. Ramsey doesn’t need to. This is a summons. Should she fail to heed it, he will not be back.
The other recurrent vision was odder, because it never went anywhere. It just sat.

London’s night air is cooling at the close of summer. Irina takes her coat from the rack in the hall. Following Ramsey’s gaze, Lawrence turns to Irina as she draws on her wrap.

He looks mystified. He has not seen Ramsey Acton for over a year. He has no understanding of why the man would show up like this with no warning. Yet it is too late for explanations. She is sorry. In the oddest way, for Irina this has nothing to do with Lawrence, either. She picks up her bag from its hook. That is all she takes. It is all she will ever take. There is every likelihood that she will never return to this lovely flat again. Brushing silently past Lawrence, she slips to Ramsey’s side. His cool, dry hand slides around her waist. Finally Ramsey looks Lawrence in the eye. The one look transmits everything. All these weeks she has been petrified by the prospect of sitting Lawrence down one arbitrary evening and blurting what he most fears to hear. The hackneyed scene will no longer be required. Lawrence knows. He is reeling from learning too much too fast. His dizziness can’t be helped. He will have all the time in the world to regain his bearings—to piece together painfully why she must have snapped at him over so minor a matter as toast.

Ramsey tosses his cue lightly into the air and catches it at a midpoint, where it balances. The cue has transformed from Biblical staff to an implement more playful, like the cane in a tap dance by Fred Astaire. Gracefully, Ramsey turns her from the door. They walk down the stairs.

Ramsey and Lawrence are seated at the dining table in Borough. This is the same table at which they had consolidated the couple’s resolution last year—Lawrence’s resolution, really—that though their established foursome with Jude and her husband was no more, Ramsey would not be jettisoned from their friendship. How poignant: it is only thanks to Lawrence’s insistence that Ramsey has been rescued from social oblivion. Irina would have let the man slip from their acquaintance altogether. As if she knew, and had been leading herself not into temptation by sternly lashing the object of her unconscious desire to a little raft and letting it drift downstream. As if Lawrence had known also, and had run off to scoop Ramsey’s raft from receding waters as a gift for Irina—as if Lawrence were pimping for his own ersatz wife.

Wife.

The word forms the centerpiece of the mirage, like a bouquet on the table. Lawrence and Ramsey are sitting opposite, squared off. In the knock-on-the-door fancy, Lawrence seems irrelevant. In this one, it is Irina who doesn’t pertain. She is standing, exiled to the hallway. This is solely a matter between two men. Though the scene’s trappings are civilized—the dining table is a Victorian antique, the hand-sewn drapes are drawn and discreet—the feeling is Wild West, OK Corral. There could as well be a gauntlet on the table, and a pair of pistols.

Lawrence’s expression is tolerant. Whatever this is about, he will hear Ramsey out. Ramsey’s expression is simple, open.
Ramsey says to Lawrence, “I’m in love with your wife.”
This one line, that is the vision. It poses neither question nor solution. It merely frames a predicament. The scene stops there, for there is nowhere for it to go. Were the confrontation to carry on—Lawrence might say gruffly, “Well, that’s tough luck,” and Ramsey might return quietly, “Whose tough luck?”—the perfect impasse would remain. However little Irina herself “pertains,” Irina and only Irina has the power to move this encounter beyond face-off, to advance the plot.

Especially this second scenario was sufficiently trite that it ought to have embarrassed her. But she wasn’t embarrassed. It was too interesting.

I’m in love with your wife.
Irina wasn’t Lawrence’s wife. Yet the word arose in her mind’s eye because it was true. Whatever the law might dictate, Irina was Lawrence’s wife.

In the days she’d been capable of focusing on more than her own misery, Irina had registered what the dramas and thrillers of the sort that Lawrence fed their voracious VCR were abundantly about. In the main, films place protagonists in a moral quandary, or test their mettle with trials by fire. Yet few members of the audience ever confront the cinematic dilemma in real life. Most people don’t have to figure out how to blow the whistle on government conspiracies without getting themselves killed. Most people aren’t pledged to take an assassin’s bullet to protect the president. World War II is over, and the standard Western mother is not likely to have to choose between the lives of her two children in a concentration camp.

By contrast, there is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role—hero, heroine, or villain. Performance in this arena is as fierce a test of character as being tempted to sell nuclear secrets to Beijing. Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of life—whether to report cash income on your taxes—the stakes in this realm could not be higher. For chances are that at some point along the line you will hold in your hands another person’s heart. There is no greater responsibility on the planet. However you contend with this fragile organ, which pounds or seizes in accordance with your caprice, will take your full measure.

Irina had liked to think of herself as a decent person. Yet in this most telling of spheres her behavior had grown disreputable overnight. While she might have preferred to regard her two-timing as “out of character,” it is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing. Ipso facto, her furtive afternoons with Ramsey Acton were necessarily

in
character. For that matter, barring the onset of brain-wasting diseases like variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob, there may be no such thing as behaving “out of character.” Should what you get up to fail to comport with who you think you are, something is surely inaccurate (and likely optimistic) about who you think you are. Since Irina had not consumed enough British beef to blame vCJD, she was not therefore “a decent person,” but a duplicitous, traitorous tramp whose attachments were shallow, whose word, implicit or otherwise, meant nothing, and who was hell-bent on defiling the finest elements both of her life and in herself.

Yet every time her eyes found Ramsey’s face—which had a delightful way of changing ages depending on the light; since over the course of five minutes it could flicker from adolescent devil-may-care to middle-aged gravity, then on to the fatalistic resignation of an old-timer, she often felt in the presence, cradle-to-grave, of a whole man—she felt

good,
and not the indulgent, petty feeling-good of eating chocolate. When he touched her—and he needn’t cup her bare breasts or sidle fingers up under her skirt; holding her hand would do it, or resting his forehead on her temple—she experienced the sense of revelation that physicists must enjoy, when they believe they’ve finally put together that elusive theory of everything, located the one prion or quark that binds all matter. In the moment, it was impossible to conceive of this feeling as wicked. In Ramsey’s arms, her attraction to this remarkable snooker player (of all things) not only seemed “good,” made her “feel good,” but seemed an attraction to
The
Good—to an absolute that made all life worth living, rejection of which would be both morally reprehensible and inhuman. Only back in the Borough flat, and confronted with a man who had bestowed on her nothing but generosity and did not deserve to be repaid for his devotion with coldness and perfidy, did Irina feel unclean.

On the morning of August 31, Irina trotted once more numbly to the newsagent for a

Sunday Telegraph.
En route, she upbraided herself for imputing internal turmoil to strangers, for her fellow pedestrians seemed universally to look stricken. She allowed herself a touch of irritation at having to weave past so many laggards, trolling the sidewalks in a narcotic daze. More bizarrely, at the newsagent customers were murmuring to one another, as if all the rules of city life had been suspended for the day.