The Post-Birthday World (24 page)

Lawrence phoned early that afternoon. “Yo, Irina Galina! I’ve got a surprise!”

“You just spent ten grand on an engagement ring.”
“What, you trying to make my real surprise seem dinky?” “No, I’m trying to turn a point of contention into a joke. And if you
did any such thing, I’d have your head,
milyi.
”
“Anyway, I checked last night’s snooker results. Turns out that Ramsey
beat Hendry by a frame. After a slow start, seems it was a great match.” “Which I deprived you of. All over the trivial issue of whether we
should get married.” But her tone was good-humored.
“You can make it up to me,” said Lawrence. “Ramsey’s playing the
Big Baby tonight in the second round. If we get the 4:32 out of Waterloo,
we can just make it.”
It was meant to be a lovely little gesture of inclusiveness, compensation for his lackluster response to her marriage proposal. Curiously, her stomach tightened around her small lunch. “You mean . . . go to Bour
nemouth?”
“Yeah! You were hacked off when I wanted to go by myself, remember?”
Being hurt that he didn’t want her along was quite a different matter
from wanting to go. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I remember. Though the
weather . . .”
“
Eat
the weather,” said Lawrence. “I tried to raise Ramsey on his cell,
but it’s switched off—so I couldn’t get us comps. But I called to reserve
tickets, and lucked out; there were only a few left. I found us a hotel in
the area, so we can make a night of it.”
“So, what . . . then we eat out?”
“Well, obviously we should see if Ramsey’s free afterwards. He’d be
offended if we came and then didn’t try to hook up.”
“Not necessarily,” she said in a tone that Lawrence wouldn’t have understood.
“Get a few things together, and meet me at Waterloo information at
four-fifteen.”
Lawrence could be a little bossy.
After her self-congratulatory reverie this morning she didn’t want to
be conjuring sharp thoughts like
Lawrence could be a little bossy.
Though
she had a couple of hours before she needed to leave, the sudden change of
plans put her in such turmoil that continuing to draw was out of the
question. She hadn’t seen Ramsey Acton since that disquieting birthday
dinner in July, and she didn’t want to see him.
Lawrence wouldn’t care if she showed up at Waterloo wearing the
same rumpled clothes she had on, but abruptly the jeans felt grungy, the
voluminous sweater shapeless and unflattering. After burning through a
variety of outfits before the mirror, she wondered whether rocking up at
Ramsey’s match in an alarmingly short skirt of black denim, which flared
sassily from her thighs, and strapped 40s heels that with this skirt made
her legs in black nylons look a mile high might be inconsiderate of a man
who admitted that he was “lonely.” But hey, it wasn’t her fault if he
couldn’t find his own girl. Checking out the effect in the mirror before
she dashed out the door, she thought,
Good God—I look like
Bethany. She brisked to the station with their second sturdiest umbrella. At the
information booth, for once Lawrence didn’t ride her for dressing up, but
whistled thinly through his teeth; he seemed to like it when she looked
like
Bethany.
Having already purchased the train tickets, he imitated the
Cockney ticket seller as they located the platform—“Aynt no trines bick
to Loondun ofter tan-farty-throy, mite!” He had a good ear. Once they were ensconced in the carriage and it lurched off, she was
free to lie back and think of England. Out the window, poky houses with
yards the size of bathtubs gave way to sheep.
“Ramsey must be pretty pissed off with some of his press,” said Lawrence. “The guy beats the #1 in the game, and the coverage was snide.
This also-ran rep he’s got—it’s not as if he’s a
loser.
To stay in the game for
thirty years, you have to win a shitload of matches, even if he’s never
taken the championship.”
“I’m still worried about his future,” she said. “He can’t keep playing
forever, and then what’s he going to do?”
“Long as his hands stay steady and his eyesight holds, nothing’s forcing him to retire. Besides, he can always commentate for the BBC, do
endorsements.”
“I don’t see him as a commentator. He can be awfully inarticulate in
public. Product endorsements? Oh, great. When I picture his later life, it
seems depressing. I think having
been
something is sort of awful.” “Has-been beats never-was.”
“I know you have a thing for snooker,” she ventured. “But I’ve still
found your friendship with Ramsey hard to understand. You don’t seem
to have much in common with the man. You’re used to being around
people who read the newspaper.”
“You don’t get
male bonding.
And Ramsey tells great snooker stories.” “Don’t those stories ever get tired?”
“Alex Higgins throwing his own television out the window? You’ve
got to be joking.”

At the station in Bournemouth, Lawrence flagged a cab. While it was pleasant to be taken care of—not to have to bother her

pretty little head
about tickets, reservations, and taxis—passivity was enervating. Once they were off, too, Lawrence chatted up the taxi driver about the Grand Prix, while Irina sat silently alongside.

“Swish has seen better days, ain’t he?” said the cabbie. “But he’s old guard, and it’s bloody amazing the geezer’s still at the table—”

“Ramsey’s not only got staying power, but Ramsey’s got class,” Lawrence proclaimed. “O’Sullivan’s a whiner and a sore loser. Not to mention a moron.”
Irina winced. For all Lawrence knew, the cabbie was an O’Sullivan fan.
“Hear him caterwaul in the first round, like?” the taxi driver rejoined; Lawrence was lucky. “Never stopped whingeing—about the baize, the calls, the kicks. Made the ref clean the ball twice, he did. Nothing’s ever good enough for the Rocket.”
“The guy’s a prima donna, and he’s spoiled. Sometimes you can be too talented. He’s never had to work hard. When matches don’t fall in his lap, he busts into tears.”
“American?” the cabbie picked up.
“Las Vegas.” Lawrence happily claimed the town he detested if it added color to his bio, and leaned hard on his
R
s in a refusal to apologize for his accent. Since Americans in Britain were wont to feel cowed about their crass vowels and violent consonants, Lawrence’s unadulterated pronunciation surely displayed a strong sense of self. But for some reason, his aggressive skirl grated on her ear this evening.
“You Yanks don’t follow snooker much, am I right?”
Irina struggled forward. “No, in the US—”
“Not generally,” said Lawrence. “But I love snooker. Makes pool seem like something you’d play in a sandbox. And we’ve gotten to know Ramsey a little over the years, you know, friend of a friend? Helps give me a feel for the game.”
“You don’t say. How do you find him, mate?”
“Great guy. Modest. Incredibly generous.”
“Though he does have something of a chip—” Irina began.
“He has a sense of honor,” Lawrence plowed on. “A real man’s man.”
“Oi, from what I hear the bloke’s not unpopular with the ladies as well,” the cabbie leered. “Not quite the blade he once was, what with that gray around the temples. But you watch your woman about that fella. He’s more of an operator than he lets on.”
“I don’t know about that. He was married for several years. To an insufferable twit, I might add.”
When the cabbie let them off at the Bournemouth International Centre, Lawrence tipped him a whopping 30 percent—a benevolence that Irina knew full well hailed not from sympathy for hard-workers in service industries, but from gratitude that the driver had stooped to banter with his lowly passenger. Lawrence could come across as so brassy and arrogant, but in the odd excuse-me-for-living moment her partner’s emotionally emaciated upbringing poked through like a bone.
Much like Lawrence himself, the conference center was trying too hard. The bulky brick building’s materials were ostentatious, and Irina wondered if its designers had any idea that their project was failed and ugly. The tall, tinted windows overlooking the bay, which made the long, ghost-white pedestrian pier extending into the water look not only enticing but permanently out of reach, somehow recalled Lawrence as well. He seemed to peer at his own experience like Alice in Wonderland, after nibbling the wrong side of the mushroom and now much too tall to fit through the door, looking longingly at the tiny garden. On outings like this one they tried to have fun, and every minute positively ached with mutual good intentions. Yet unself-conscious, fully inhabited joy mysteriously eluded the man, and Irina yearned to give it to him like a present, to give him nothing less than his own life.
A burly character with a buzz cut behind them in the tickets queue was looking impatient. Frosty at first—
sir
this,
sir
that—the booking agent had warmed to Lawrence’s schmooze about the upcoming match, and was now conceding that, though the wager would pay little, he’d had to put his money on O’Sullivan. “Ronnie’s the future, mate!”
“Listen,” said Lawrence. “Any way you might get a message to Ramsey Acton?”
“This look like a Royal Mail office to you?”
“Mind if I go ahead, mister?” the man behind them finally intruded. “Just trying to return a ticket before it turns into a pumpkin.”
“No problem, no problem!” Lawrence demurred frantically. “Just thought I’d ask. Thanks a lot,” he said, in gratitude for tickets he’d paid for, adding to the beefy man in the queue, “And sorry about that, pal, really, sorry for keeping you waiting!”
He might have pressed his case about getting a note to Ramsey a
little
harder, and surely all that groveling was unnecessary.
This compulsive criticism was out of control, and she had to stop it.
Purbeck Hall was spacious, so once they found their seats she could not fathom whence derived this sensation of explosive claustrophobia. It had been kind of Lawrence to buy her an overpriced program, but she flapped it, reading nothing, just to keep from looking at his face. She couldn’t suppress a feeling of constraint, as if she were tied up, and when Lawrence reached over to push a strand of hair from her eyes she battled a ludicrous impulse to slap his hand. Yet it was only when Ramsey strode on stage that Irina realized this trip to Bournemouth wasn’t just a dubious journey in bad weather or a trip to see a sport she was tepid about when she’d rather stay home and work. It was a catastrophe.
A catastrophe, as in the definition of a collision: two objects trying to occupy the same space. As soon as Ramsey materialized, a feeling of wrongness permeated the hall, of an occurrence that shouldn’t be physically possible, like parallel lines meeting, or attending your own funeral. Suddenly the occasion felt off, out of kilter, like that uncertain period that precedes full-fledged nausea when you don’t yet accept that you’re going to be sick.
Although she’d suffered that little dolorousness on seeing Ramsey on television last night and feeling no pang of desire, on balance her neutral response to his broadcast image had been a relief. Yet now that he was loosed from the cage of the screen, Irina’s urge to reach out and rest her hands on either side of those narrow hips was overwhelming. As Ramsey assessed the lay of the balls after O’Sullivan’s break, her mind’s eye spontaneously fit her own hips into the cups of that barely broader pelvis. Over her own dead body, her head compulsively slipped two hands around the tight, delicately muscled back, up under the shirt, knuckles brushing the starched white fabric. Irina felt crazed. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. That attraction in July, it was bad and traitorous and stupid and just the result of too much drink; but now she was stone-cold sober. July was supposed to be a
one off.
She couldn’t have been more devastated if, after testing clean past the crucial five-year mark, a doctor had informed her sadly that a lethal cancer had recurred.
It seemed impossible that Lawrence couldn’t tell. But he didn’t appear distracted from the game by the fact that his partner was at this very moment having some kind of public sexual attack, with a flush rising— visibly, she was sure—from her clavicle to her hairline. She considered claiming to be suddenly indisposed and insisting they go straight to their hotel, except that now she’d laid eyes on Ramsey in the flesh—she thought that very phrase,
in the flesh
—it was too late.
Irina had sampled a smattering of illicit drugs in her youth, but she’d picked her spots—a few tabs of acid and mescaline, a little ecstasy and grass, the odd upper. She’d steered clear of heroin, crack, and crystal meth. Whether or not she’d prove susceptible to these more famously addictive substances, she theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn’t refuse, for which you’d sell your soul—and anyone else’s. There was no way of knowing which quantity would produce a permanent craving until you took it. As soon as you took it, even that single, investigative taste, you would have to have more. Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it. Presented with a palmful of tablets guaranteed to induce her own customized version of consummate bliss, she would scatter the pills to the winds.
Yet here was Ramsey Acton, propped on stage like an upended capsule concocted in some back-room laboratory as the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She’d had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.
However much a mess, Irina didn’t need the overhead monitor to keep track of the score. She could readily read the tide of play in the language of Ramsey’s body.
He was winning. His cuing was a model of economy; not a muscle moved that was not in the service of the shot. At rest, he was exquisitely still, demurring from even pro forma sips of water. Last night on TV, he’d looked so lifeless; he visibly didn’t give a damn. What he appeared to have clawed back for himself in the meantime wasn’t so much his cueing skills per se, but the very quantity that gave rise to them in the first place. He had made himself care. No mean feat, when she thought about it—to care violently about a bunch of little balls, and about whether in traversing a rectangular surface they bounced against one another in such a way as to land into holes.
Lawrence applauded frantically after every frame, obviously hoping to draw their friend’s attention to the fact that a certain couple was in the audience. Irina’s impulse was to the contrary, and she slumped in her second-row seat, praying that the stage lights didn’t cast enough ambient glow to illuminate their faces.
At the interval, Ramsey’s removal from her sight was a relief, for simply sitting in his presence was aerobic exercise. Despite a chill in the auditorium, her hairline was damp. Though Lawrence had piped “Ramsey!” as the players withdrew, their friend had disappeared without a backward glance.
“This is a fantastic match,” Lawrence proclaimed. “I bet right now O’Sullivan’s crawled back to his dressing room to bawl.”
Irina looked at him oddly. It wasn’t quite as if Lawrence were speaking a foreign language—she understood each individual word as it emitted from his mouth—but she could not make sense of them together. Heart skipping, skin slick, mind festering with so much soft-core porn that she could rent out videos, she was at an utter loss why Mr. Trainer seemed to be talking about, of all things, a snooker match.
“. . . You look bored,” said Lawrence, not concealing his disappointment.
“I’m not bored,” she said honestly.
“Then, so far, are you glad you came?”
Irina crossed her legs. They were her best feature; Lawrence seldom admired them. “It’s very interesting,” she said, and meant it, too. But then, acid rain was interesting, and Srebrenitza.
As the cheers rose when the players returned to the stage, Lawrence resumed his feverish clapping. Irina patted her hands inaudibly together, for form’s sake. Despite the moist mash of her applause, or perhaps because of it—as if Ramsey had a canine sensitivity to the very softest sound in the hall—before the lights had fully dimmed, he turned to look at the second row, sighting with the one-two of a knock-out combination first Irina McGovern, then Anorak Man beaming in the next seat.
He smiled.
But this was not the smile of ease, of expansiveness, of anticipatory triumph that one might expect from a sportsman in the advantaged position of six frames to two. Slight and asymmetrical, it had an element of the wan, the bittersweet, the self-mocking and sardonic. Disconcertingly for a player enjoying such a dramatic lead, it was a fender-bender, a
prang
of a smile, crumpled, a little twisted. It was a smile of defeat.
As if determined to coordinate his game with his facial expression the way some women accessorize outfits with pocketbooks to match their hats, Ramsey began to lose. It was dreadful to witness, like watching a compulsive gambler in the black squander his prodigious pile of chips until there’s nothing left to bet besides his house. After Ramsey folded in eight frames
on the trot,
Irina was left with the perplexing impression that not only was he losing on purpose, but that he was doing so to show off. The ritual sacrifice of his lead seemed to constitute the inverse of conspicuous consumption, the way some wealthy people try to impress you not with what they’ve got but with what they’re willing to throw away.
Irina was unsure if she was supposed to be flattered. Ramsey had, after his fashion, given her the Grand Prix—though
normal
men would try to impress a girl by
winning
it, would they not? For all his appearance of gentlemanly containment, there was something flamboyantly self-destructive about Ramsey Acton that was downright childish, and won or lost what was she supposed to do with the Grand Prix?
Once the rest of the audience had cleared off in the desultory spirit of leaving a sporting event that had started out cracking but ended rather crap, Ramsey tooled coolly out on stage with his untied dickie bow stringed around his neck and his pearl-colored waistcoat unbuttoned, hooking over his shoulder a short-cut black jacket whose leather looked thick enough to saddle a horse. After such a disgraceful performance, he should have been shuffling with rounded shoulders. Instead he peacocked toward their seats, wearing an unflappable expression that most people can only manage with dark glasses. The very ferocity of her annoyance angered Irina the more. The ex-husband of an estranged friend should elicit none but the mildest emotions of any stripe.
“Yo, Ramsey!” cried Lawrence, standing. “What happened?”
Ramsey exuded a ridiculous cheerfulness, moving with the celebrative lightness of a man who has just lost a great deal of weight. “I been at this donkeys’ years,” he said, squinting. “Sometimes I just lose interest. Can’t predict it. And can’t be helped.”
“When you lose interest in snooker,” said Irina, “do you get interested in anything
else
?”
“Whatever else would I be interested in,
ducky
?” He looked her in the eye.
“Listen,” said Lawrence, his glance flicking from Ramsey to Irina with an ear-pricked, wind-sniffing alertness that one rarely sees outside of wildlife programs. “We should probably check into our hotel. But according to the Internet, it’s not far from here. You available for a bite to eat?”
“If I’d have won, an appearance at the Royal Bath bar would be expected. But losing makes the colleagues nervous—they’re afraid they’ll catch it like crabs—so I’m free. We can swing by your hotel in the limo, and then make a night of it.” His gray-blue eyes glinted. “Sure I’m massive behind on Afghanistan.”
If it was a joke, it was at Lawrence’s expense. Before she fell in behind the two men, Irina muttered at Ramsey’s side, “Since when have you ever even heard of