The Post-Birthday World (33 page)

For Ramsey, to put any point of contention permanently to rest was to throw something perfectly good away. Thus the question of how Irina might retrieve the tools of her trade was anything but settled, and consumed virtually every evening for the next few weeks. Exhausted by reiterations of how she really

was
over Lawrence and multiple assurances that she
wasn’t
conniving to arrange a romantic rendezvous and painstaking postmodernist deconstructions of just exactly what she’d meant by wanting to find out if he was “okay,” she negotiated a compromise: she would pick up her things at the flat on the Q-T while Lawrence was at work, but without Ramsey. Irina managed to impress upon him the horror all around if by any chance, however remote, Lawrence chose that of all afternoons to come home early, to find not only his estranged partner absconding with her possessions on the sly, but the scoundrel who had stolen her away. If she was appealing to Ramsey’s cowardice, she was also employing a skill that, absent his acquaintance, might forever have lain dormant.

She lied.

In truth, she had quietly e-mailed Lawrence from Ramsey’s computer. Their exchange was brief. Lawrence agreed to take an afternoon off, and meet her at the flat.
The irony of sneaking around to see Lawrence just as she had once sneaked around to see Ramsey was not lost on her. But there was no chance in hell that she was going to covertly disappear herself from Borough, leaving Lawrence to experience entry into his own home like a sock in the jaw. Besides, what drove her most powerfully to arrange a meeting with Lawrence she was reluctant to explain. Ever since coming back from Sheffield, burning through the fog of sexual intoxication, a vision in the back of her mind had grown steadily more insistent.

It is late. After eight p.m. or even nine. With no one to jump up at his return, to sally to the kitchen to make popcorn, he has no motivation to cut short his work, to which he has turned with a vengeance these last few months. Tonight, after lingering in the office, picking aimlessly through Web sites, at last he trudges the walkway along the Thames in the chill mizzle of a cold spring. Wearing faded black Dockers and a maroon-andblack striped button-down that Irina had always liked, he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his 50s reproduction baseball jacket, a present for his fortieth birthday. Maybe this jacket ought to have become repugnant to him. Instead, all her presents, freshly finite, have grown more precious. He will persist in wearing this jacket to work well past the point that it’s too warm for the season.

The lights of the South Bank across the river glimmer with all the Shakespeare and Pinter that he once yearned to make time for. Now he cannot imagine getting up the gumption to see a play. By himself—no way. The slope of Blackfriars Bridge feels steeper than usual. Off to his left, Tower Bridge twinkles in the distance. Its fairy-tale turrets used to look, if not beautiful, at least hilarious, and now just look hokey. If the walk also seems longer than it once did, he would have it take longer still.

Nearing the flat, he surveys the heavy postindustrial neighborhood with its Victorian remnants of red brick. He searches for his former sense of satisfied ownership, of having annexed a Dickensian domain far from trashy Las Vegas. To the contrary, he feels like a foreigner again, and wonders what he’s doing here. Moving to Britain had seemed a well-calibrated adventure at first. The natives at least nominally speak English. An American can get the nuances and really come to grips with the place. Yet now Britain feels like any old somewhere else, somewhere he doesn’t belong. He wonders if it’s time to pick up stakes and move back to the States. He still prefers the company of Americans, who don’t have broomsticks up their asses. And maybe shipping back to the US would keep at bay the confusing sensation he suffers almost nightly: an overweening ache to go “home” when he’s already there.

He traipses to the
first
floor according to the Brits, which he insists on calling the second. He fumbles with his keys. The stairwell’s timer-light is out. It was always Irina who nagged the management company to make prompt repairs. Inside, the flat is also dark. He forgot to open the drapes this morning. Without the street lamps glowing through the windows, he gropes for the switch. The flat is not strictly silent. Past rush hour, the traffic on Trinity Street is still thick. But the rev of engines and irritable honk of horns outside don’t provide a reassuring sense of human bustle nearby. They merely press the existence of several million strangers he doesn’t give a shit about.

Big surprise: he turns on the TV. Its yammer might have been a reminder of too many happier evenings squandered in front of the tube, but he is not a what-might-have-been kind of guy. BBC2 announces the upcoming broadcast of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield. Most men in his position would hasten to change the channel. He decides to leave it on. He likes irony. He may even like to torture himself, though circumstance seems to be torturing him without his help. Besides, he doesn’t consider keeping snooker in the background an act of masochism. He’s staring reality in the eye. He may be running a distant risk of tuning into that miserable prick. But he’s a strong man. He could look the miserable prick in the eye, too. There’s always the danger that he will ram his fist through the screen. The satisfaction might be worth a few hundred quid. He likes the image. He saunters to the kitchen for a peanut-butter cracker.

He has resolved to eat proper meals with vegetables. Yet so far by the time he gnaws through a handful of these peanut-butter crackers, he can’t get it together to steam broccoli. He stands over the cutting board to catch the crumbs. His eye roams the kitchen. The shelves by the stove are still lined with all those spices he hasn’t a clue what to do with—though apparently a good third of the array is for sprinkling on popcorn. The spices will get stale. Meantime the long rows of jars make passable wallpaper. Of course, every room in the flat is impressed with Irina’s hand. The only time he tried to participate in the décor was when he put his foot down about that green marble coffee table. Now look—he loves it. But it’s in the kitchen her presence is the most insistent. Arcane condiments from the West Indies and Thailand, when all he needs is mustard. The counter-encroaching clutter of pasta-maker, food processor, meat grinder, when one sharp paring knife will suffice. He could pile all this junk into boxes. He won’t.

He roams back to the living room with a beer, semireclining, as ever, on the green couch; he has yet to sit in her armchair. It’s nice here. She did a good job, finding all this wacky secondhand furniture that somehow fits together, and for a song. What a cheapskate she was. Is? (That bastard is loaded.) If only he’d had advance warning, he’d have spent more money. On her. Gone places.

This is the stuff people think on deathbeds. You know, why didn’t I max out my credit cards. Well, he’s not dead yet. Just ailing. He’ll get over it. These are still early days, and they have to be the worst. Think of it as any other discipline, like getting through all the other things you don’t want to do—revising the article on the Ulster peace process for that fool at the
National Interest,
crunches at the gym. As he ponders, pretty much every task in his day falls into the category of what he doesn’t want to do.

Christ, she must have spent a solid week sewing those drapes, with linings and everything. Never made drapes before, and they came out like a pro’s. She was handy.

Oddly, he finds reminders of her more consoling than painful. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. He knows that he should be angry. He knows that he probably is. He knows that he would be better off if he hated her, not necessarily a lot but a little. But he doesn’t want to and it doesn’t come naturally and it probably wouldn’t help after all. She’s a perfect idiot, and that’s a shame. But stupid is not the same as bad. Maybe that’s a distinction he might have allowed a while ago.

He didn’t used to think like this—about how he feels. He prefers to think about what he’s doing, about what he’s going to do. But Irina doesn’t realize that not
thinking about
what you feel is not the same as feeling nothing. He doesn’t like to embarrass himself, and he had thought she understood. Apparently not. Or maybe she just doesn’t give a damn what he feels, though he has a hard time believing that. Anyway, as for this feeling crap, there is only one rule now, which he enforces with military discipline: he is at liberty to think about anything else he likes. But he is absolutely forbidden to imagine that she might come back.

The snooker is not very riveting. He can’t tell if it’s the match itself— Graeme Dott, who looks about four years old, and that weasel Peter Ebdon, who’s always punching the air like an ass when he wins—or his state of mind. (Should Miserable Prick have been on air he might even have found the exercise in antipathy invigorating. Still, he is relieved to skip it. He was at the office for almost twelve hours today, and he’s tired.) Faced with this sport, he may always flinch a bit from now on. But he doesn’t see why he has to forswear snooker altogether. In fact, he resists its being taken from him along with everything else. Man, who would have guessed that such a harmless pastime would produce consequences so cataclysmic. Then, maybe if it weren’t that lying, narcissistic prick, it would have been some other creep. He himself is reliable, smart, decent—even Irina would agree—but maybe that’s just another way of saying that he’s the kind of man that sooner or later women leave.

By the end of the evening, he has allowed himself one more beer. He resolves to cut his nightly consumption back down to one. He brushes his teeth. Her toothbrush is right where she left it. He has to remind himself to turn down the heat and chain the door, because these were Irina’s jobs. But overall, the course of his evening has not really changed much since she split. True, he eats too many peanut-butter crackers and Indian takeouts. He misses her cooking, but not quite as much as she might expect. Food isn’t that important to him, not nearly as important as it is to her. What he misses most of all—however sleazy this might sound—is her doing the shopping.

And there is one standard ritual that he’s had to chuck. He tried going through the motions once, and it made him cry. So he can’t eat popcorn. The picture of a grown man bawling over a bowl of popcorn was too humiliating to repeat. He’d added too much salt anyway. The bottom of the batch had burned; the pop under the lid had been dull and fitful. The grudgingly exploded kernels were tight, and stuck in his teeth. In his throat, more like it.

In bed, he reads a few pages, and considers jerking off.
[It is here that Irina’s imagination was stymied; she never did know what went on in his head when he got hard, and she still didn’t.]
He decides it’s too much trouble. He would have to go get a washcloth to keep nearby, or make a mess.

He did plenty of work today, wrote a good ten pages on the piece for
Foreign Affairs.
He put in a heavy workout at the gym, and skipped lunch. He should be pleased with himself. But the only thing that pleases him is that one more day is over.

The etiquette of such occasions was obscure, but Irina stayed on the safe side and knocked. She had a key, and the deference felt unnatural. At the last minute, she hurriedly slipped her wedding ring into her pocket. She should break the news gently when the time was right—and when would the time be right? When Lawrence opened the door, she experienced a mild shock: she’d never apprehended him before as a solidly middle-aged man. The last several months may have taken their toll. Or perhaps they had enabled her to see him as the age that he actually was.

“Hi,” they both said shyly. Lawrence kissed her uncertainly on the cheek.

“Coffee? Or would you rather start packing?” he offered.
“Let’s have coffee first,” she said, though she didn’t want any. She trailed him to the kitchen. The flat was neat, and nothing had changed. Because this was his flat now, Lawrence would prepare the coffee. She hovered as he ground the beans.
Whatever he was saying, it was impossible to pay attention. The flat itself was too distracting. To enter these rooms was to visit not only the past but an alternative present, and their sheer physical reality exerted an alarming pull, tantalizing her with the ease with which she might simply hook her bag on the rack and never return to Hackney. The flat held a secret that she needed to crack. As Lawrence made small talk, something about a washer on the hot-water tap, her glance ping-ponged from the spice rack to the Spanish anchovies to his fast-forward older face, frantically taking the measure of how she felt. What had this life been like? Was it deficient in some way; had it all been a sham? No . . . Life in Borough was simply different than life in the East End. Known, but anywhere and anyone you stayed with would become that. She did not feel unhappy here; they must have had an agreeable life together. It was a tad stuffy, pent up, but the verdict of her first reentry was that she could have left, and could have not. What good was
that
?
“So,” said Lawrence once they’d carted their coffee to the living room in the usual glasses, though Lawrence hadn’t added quite enough milk to hers. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You look pale. And too thin.”
“I’m underslept.” Embarrassed by what this might seem to imply, she added, “The last few weeks. We’ve had some conflicts. It takes hours to hash them out.” In fifteen minutes, she was already telling tales out of school.
Lawrence had a stricter sense of decorum, and didn’t ask conflicts about what.
“You and I never fought much,” she went on uneasily. “I’m not good at it.”
His eyes sharpened. “He doesn’t hit you, does he?”
“No, never!”
“If he ever lays a hand on you, I’ll break his thumbs.”
She smiled. “
The Hustler.
”
“Good pick-up. At least he hasn’t turned you into a complete idiot.”
She sighed. “Oh, go ahead, have fun. You’ve earned it.”
“I’ve
earned
nothing, it was dumped on me. And it’s not fun.”
“I worry about you, Lawrence.”
“What good does that do?”
“No good. But it would be appalling if I didn’t. Don’t you worry about me?”
“Habit’s hard to break.”
“Speaking of habits, before I forget.” Irina rummaged her pocketbook. “I got you a present.” She handed him a plastic bag. “It’s tiny and stupid.”
Lawrence pulled out the packet of a dark red mixture and looked at it uncomprehendingly. “Hey, thanks!” he said. He had no idea for what.
“Popcorn seasoning,” she explained. “One of your favorites. It’s hard to find. I knew we were out”—the
we
was a slip, but correcting it would only make matters worse—“so when I came across dry garlic chutney in the East End, I picked you up a bag.”
As he held the little packet limply in his lap, she realized that the gesture was misjudged. In her delight at locating the obscure masala in the Indian shop on Roman Road, she’d reminded herself that Lawrence’s sudden allergy to popcorn had merely materialized in her imagination. Surely, she’d reasoned, he still ate popcorn with a beer every night, because such a routinized man would take solace in ritual, in sameness. But now she suspected her initial intuition that the snack had overnight become anathema to him was probably accurate. The dry garlic chutney clearly depressed him. When he put it aside on the couch she even wondered whether as soon as she left he would throw it away, maybe taking it immediately to the wheelie bins out back the way he would quickly dispose of a chicken carcass, lest it begin to reek.
She apologized, “It’s amazing I didn’t show up here with an armload of groceries and your dry cleaning.”
“You’re not responsible for me anymore.”
“That’s funny. I think I am. Once you assume a certain kind of responsibility, I’m not sure you’re at liberty to give it back.”
“Sure you can,” he dismissed. “Look, I’ll be okay. As for our splitting up, it’s not so great. Not what I wanted. But I’ll get over it. They say it takes about a year.”
“You’ve never set much store by what
they
say.”
“Yeah. Chances are that’s horseshit.” Despite his pretense of practicality, he was having trouble looking her in the eye. He trained his gaze forty-five degrees to the left of her face, as if there were a third person sitting at the dining table. “By the way, I had an option on going to Russia this last month. Big Chechnya project, but I passed.”
“I’m surprised. Why didn’t you go?”
“Don’t let this swell your head, but—Russia’s too wrapped up with you. Even the language. I figured I’d hear, you know,
Privyet, milyi!
on the street and mistake it for your voice. Maybe if we’d been able to go to Moscow together . . . Spilt milk, I guess. Funny, I thought I was really interested in the place. When the grant came through for the project, I was excited at first. But without this—association . . . Turns out I don’t give a shit about Russia. Kind of weird.”
“Nu shto zhe tak,”
she sorrowed. Yet the language jarred, much like the dry garlic chutney, as staking a claim to an intimacy she had forsaken.
“You know, I knew you’d be back,” said Lawrence. “Your illustrations of
The Miss Ability Act
are due at the end of next week, and you’re a pro.”
“You remember my deadline?”
“I remember everything that’s important to you, and for you.”
“I’m a little behind on that project,” she admitted. “I got an extension.”
“I’ve never known you to deliver a project late. But you can’t have drawn much the last several months. Unless moneybags has bought you a new set of art supplies.”
“No, it’s been something of an impromptu holiday.”
“Must have been some party. Your body’s thin, but your face is puffy.”
“I told you, I need sleep.”
“And you’re smoking.”
“Just a little!”
“I can smell it.” He pulled up short. This wasn’t the direction he’d have wanted their meeting to go. “I know you think I’m oppressive. But I just want you to take care of yourself. That’s all it’s about. Not trying to
control
you or something.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Guess you could tell me a thing or two about snooker now!” he said with false heartiness.
She smiled with one side of her mouth. “More than I’d prefer.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“I didn’t wish for snooker. It came with the territory.”
“I’m damned what you did wish for, but that’s my problem.”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Good. I don’t.” He seemed to struggle with something, and succeed. “You can’t neglect your work, Irina. You’ll regret it. Chuck me, but keep that.”
“It’s been a big change. I haven’t reached an equilibrium.”
“Are you going to all his tournaments?”
“So far,” she said cautiously.
“If you don’t watch out he will
eat you alive.
” Lawrence assumed the voice of her conscience. That’s the role he’d always assumed, so no wonder she’d fled. One’s conscience is not always charming company.
“You should trust me,” she said without thinking, since the repost was predictable.
“I did.”
Irina looked down. “I worry that I’ll never be the same again. I still don’t feel
good.
As in constant. Trustworthy.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to stay with me out of virtue. As if you were doing me a favor.” He shrugged. “You should have done what you wanted.”
“What I
wanted
wasn’t so simple.”
“Sure it was.” His face lurched to one side like water in a bucket. Other people would read the expression as snide, but Irina could see it for a wrench of anguish that he was trying to disguise. “You wanted to fuck me, or some other guy.”
“N-o-o . . . One of the things I wanted was to be a woman who keeps her word.”
“We never got married. You didn’t break a promise.”
“I think I did,” she said. “And I’ve always hoped to be a woman who loves the same man for a long time. Now I can’t have that anymore. Even if I stay with Ramsey until death us parts, I’ll always have left you. At first I was upset about betraying you; now I’m upset about betraying myself.”
He had never been comfortable with this kind of talk, and he still wasn’t. “Don’t give yourself a hard time on my account. I’m a
survivor.
” His pronunciation was bitter, like, look at the clichés you’ve reduced me to. In fact, this whole scene seemed suddenly to embarrass him as the kind of melodrama that in the lives of others drew his contempt, and he stood up. “Want to get to it?”
Irina slid her coffee onto the green marble coffee table. The little she’d drunk had soured her stomach. The picture of his pouring most of her Guatemalan dark roast down the drain after she’d left was unbearable. “I guess.”
In the studio, several collapsed cardboard cartons leaned against her drawing table, atop which sat a roll of packing tape, a tape gun, and a black felt-tip marker, all still in their packaging from Ryman. There was a new portfolio for the drawings, too; he’d chosen an expensive brand.
“All these packing things must have set you back,” she said. “You should let me reimburse—”
“Don’t be stupid.” As he briskly assembled a box, Lawrence’s businesslike demeanor granted her permission to go about this task with a similar stoicism. If they got maudlin over every paintbrush, he implied, they’d be here for a week.
“Lawrence, I can do this by myself.”
“It’ll go faster with two of us,” he said grimly. “Go ahead, get a move on!”
Irina rolled up her sleeves and focused on which materials she couldn’t live without, and which, like the craypas, had been a passing dalliance she was unlikely to use again. Directed to whole shelves of pencils, charcoals, and colored inks that had to go, Lawrence wrapped them into neat rolls of old
Daily Telegraph
s. He was an industrious man, even when going about the systematic destruction of his own universe. At length, they both seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being engaged in a project together again, and to grow wistful when the cartons were taped and labeled, the portfolios tied.
“Don’t you want to take anything else?” He gestured at the prints on the walls.
Irina recoiled. “No!” The notion of removing a single element of his familiar landscape was horrifying.
“What about your clothes?”
“I don’t know—there’s nowhere to put them. You know British architecture, there are hardly any closets, and Jude absconded with her wardrobes. I’ve picked up a few things, and Ramsey has—a lot of clothes.” Just then, the musical chairs of modern romance seemed if nothing else an organizational hash. Apparently the phenomenon most fueling realestate demand in London was divorce, requiring two residences where once a single dwelling had sufficed. Wasn’t monogamy more efficient? How many times in your life do you really want to buy a blender?
“He’s something of a dandy,” said Lawrence.
“I know you—you mean a faggot.”
“Wish he were.” He smiled. They were playing.
Irina wandered to the bedroom and flipped through her thrift-shop finery, shabby compared to the gear that Ramsey had bought her, at whose price tags he never glanced. In fact, she’d felt self-conscious showing up this afternoon in a blouse that Lawrence had never seen. As the primary launderer of the pair, he was the intimate of her every sock, and was sentimental about her most tattered tops. He’d spent £5 on a pretreatment preparation for the turmeric stains on that faded blue poloneck, when the shirt itself had cost £1.50 at Oxfam. By lavishing so much care on the garments, he had come to own them more than she did, and Irina closed the wardrobe empty-handed.
“One more thing,” Lawrence raised in the living room, not looking up from last week’s
Economist.
“Your mother. She’s called several times now. I palmed off some excuse about our being too strapped to come to Brighton Beach last Christmas, but she’s expecting us this year. You obviously haven’t told her we’ve split up. I don’t think it’s in your interests that I do the honors. So get it over with.”
“She likes you,” Irina despaired.
“And I can’t stand her, so? I don’t want to have to field any of these calls again.”
“I’ll tell her.” Irina’s voice was steeped in dread.
“Now, is Asshole coming to pick you up?”
“No. I’m supposed to take a taxi.”
“Supposed to. You’re taking orders now?”
“I seem always to be taking orders from
somebody.
”
Lawrence rang for a minicab, and negotiated with the dispatcher over finding a car with a large capacity trunk. (The exchange took longer than need be because Lawrence refused to say
boot,
and the dispatcher refused to understand
trunk.
) He carried the cartons downstairs, and wouldn’t let her haul a one. He waited with her at the curb, loaded the cab, and proffered a twenty to cover the fare.
She hesitated. Twenty quid was too much, and Ramsey was rich. But demurring might imply that she didn’t need him now, or that the gesture hadn’t touched her. She accepted the bill. They faced each other on the pavement.
“So far,” he said, “do you think you’re going to stick this out?” Something had changed. Lawrence was learning to ask about
the main thing.
The three words were difficult to lift from her mouth. “I think so.” Imagine how much harder it would be to tell him that she was married.
“Be careful,” he said. He didn’t mention of what.
“Careful would have been staying with you,” she said wanly.
“Don’t drink too much!”
“I won’t.”
“Get some work done!”
“I’ll get some work done.”
“And
stop smoking
!”
“I shall always wear my hat,”
Irina sang from
Amahl and the Night Visitors.
The opera’s responsive parting between mother and son
(Wash your ears! / Yes, I promise / Don’t tell lies! / No, I promise / I shall miss you very much . . . )
had always raised the hairs on her neck.
“You should take that CD,” said Lawrence. “You like to play it at Christmas.”
Irina searched his face.
“Why are you so nice to me?”
“You were nice to me for almost ten years,” he said gruffly. “Why should that count for nothing just because it’s not going to be eleven?”