The Post-Birthday World (34 page)

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Once the Good Friday Agreement was signed, Lawrence was called away almost nightly to rant about it on television. Naturally, awaiting his return, Irina tuned into whatever program on which he was to appear. He looked handsome in his brown suit—unsettling so—and his accelerating lucidity on camera unnerved her as well. You’d never have guessed that a few years before this overnight celebrity was working retail in bookstores and parked blackly on weekends before televised golf. Although she wouldn’t claim nostalgia for those dismal days, something was on offer when Lawrence was depleted or vanquished or sad that was simply not available when he was full of himself. And full of himself he certainly was. In making every effort to be “supportive,” had she created a monster? The more dazzlingly self-sufficient Lawrence became, the less he seemed to need her. Hence in bolstering his self-confidence all these years she may have been systematically eliminating her own job, like a member of a special in-house task force on corporate downsizing, whose final undertaking is to fire himself.

So it was probably from this fear of becoming superfluous, and a nervousness about being demoted from equal partner to underling who microwaved dinner for the Great Man at midnight, that Irina found herself watching his interviews with a jaundiced eye. Lawrence was likely so negative about the agreement because he hadn’t seen it coming; the very week before Good Friday, he’d predicted that the impasse over

cross-border bodies with executive powers
would keep the parties fighting it out for years. He hated to be wrong. She couldn’t share his indignation over the prisoner releases. Their victims were dead; what more could be gained by keeping the culprits in jail? Lawrence scorned this kind of thinking, but weren’t a few shorter sentences a small price to pay for an end to all that killing? She’d never say aloud anything so unkind, but when he quoted whole sections of the agreement verbatim, he sounded smart-alecky, like the kid with all the answers, whom his classmates despise.

Thus after several nights of the same drill, she treated herself to a channel on which Lawrence was sure

not
to appear—BBC1, currently broadcasting the British Open. As luck would have it, Ramsey Acton was playing. Ever since Bournemouth, Lawrence had been unaccountably less engaged by snooker; having thus seen precious little of the game for months, Irina had stored up an appetite for the sport. After so much sonorous pontificating about peace and paramilitaries, it was glorious to watch a man go about his business and keep his mouth shut. Since Lawrence had yet to raise the possibility of dining with Ramsey again, the odd televised tournament provided her only access to their old friend.

There was no doubt about it: Ramsey cut a fine figure of a man. She may never have precisely regretted not kissing him on his birthday, but as she followed his clearance of 132, Irina renewed her appreciation for the temptation. He executed a series of uncanny long pots, ingenious doubles, and cracking plants with mesmerizing grace and savoir faire. Despite his faultless performance, a subtle suggestion in Ramsey’s demeanor—of bearing up more than bearing down, with the kind of courage that you see at funerals—reminded her of Lawrence in the bleak days of West 104th Street. Ramsey exuded a woundedness that made her want to reach through the glass and place a reassuring hand on his temple. So it was silly, she supposed, but Lawrence wasn’t back yet, and Irina indulged herself by resting her cheek on the cold screen.

Only to spring back when Lawrence walked in the door. “The screen was dusty!” Hastily, she wiped the glass with her sleeve.

“That’s Ramsey.”
“Oh, you know you’re right!” she said brightly.
“You’re not telling me that you see a guy on TV who we’ve had dinner with a couple of times a year since 1992, and you don’t recognize him.”
“Well, of course, now that I’m paying attention, I
recognize
him . . .”
“So now you can stop recognizing him,” said Lawrence. “The segment for
Newsnight
was prerecorded, and I’d really like to catch this one.”
Without asking, Lawrence grabbed the remote and switched to BBC2. Irina’s shoulders drooped. Ordinarily she kept up with current events, but honestly, tonight the idea of yet another newscast bored her speechless. So she wasn’t being sardonic when she submitted, “But I don’t care about
world affairs.
All I care about is
snooker.
”

By the beginning of May, Irina finally bullied her famous knowit-all partner into a Saturday constitutional. Their walks in Cornwall over Christmas had been overcast with her anxiety over his strange silence on some impending trip to Russia. Now that Lawrence hadn’t dropped wordone for over six months, Irina was beginning to relax about the whole business. Dandering past Buckingham Palace (incredibly, still littered with withered floral tributes to Diana), she reasoned that the Russia gig must have been canceled. Unfortunately, they had to cut short her favorite section of the walk, the circuit around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, because Lawrence had to find a loo—or, no, “had to take a dump,” a vulgar expression that made her cringe. Indeed, he was jubilantly explicit about his evacuations, and though she was as keen as the next woman on intimacy, surely reports on texture and buoyancy qualified as

oversharing.

Before they walked the last two blocks home, Irina noted that they needed a few things for dinner, and proposed a quick trip to the Tesco ten minutes south.

“Okay,” said Lawrence. “I’ll meet you back at the flat, then.” “Why don’t you come with me?” While not rippling from a Nautilus like

Bethany,
Irina’s arms were firm from routinely hauling forty pounds of groceries by herself.
“I hate shopping. You know that.”
“It’s not my idea of a party, either. Do you think you’re above shopping? That it’s woman’s work?”
“Division of labor. More efficient.”
“We’re not a corporation, we’re a couple. And I’d appreciate the company.”
Scowling, Lawrence reluctantly joined her. As soon as they hit Elephant & Castle—decked with a giant plaster elephant like a dipso hallucination, a shopping center of such suicidally depressing design that it was a wonder you didn’t dodge customers plunging off the roof on a daily basis—he began to plow several feet ahead as if to disassociate himself from the enterprise. When she caught up with Lawrence at Tesco, he was wrestling violently with a shopping cart. Unaccustomed to the acquisition of goods in this country, he did not understand that you had to slip a pound coin into the handle to release the cart.
“What would you like for dinner?” asked Irina as she did the honors with the coin. For men, incompetence was a gambit:
I’m terrible at this; you do it.
“Everything you make is great, Irina,” he said wearily. “Whatever you want.” Lawrence’s idea of participation in meals was eating them.
Division of labor.
Thus when she proposed, “How about kung pao chicken?” he answered, “Fine,” flatly. Carte blanche command over the menu may have amounted to a dumb kind of power. But power too readily ceded seemed worthless.
Picking her way nimbly between shoppers, Irina collected chilies, chicken thighs, an array of vegetables, as well as milk, cheese, ham, bread, and Coleman’s mustard. But she was constantly losing Lawrence, who would either careen down the aisle when it was clear, or loiter behind sullenly, refusing to ask anyone to move out of the way. So far it was more trouble to shop with Lawrence than without him—which was, of course, the point.
“What’s all this?” he complained as the cartload mounded.
“Your lunches, among other things. Where do you think your sandwiches come from, fairies?” The subject left a shadow. She wondered what happened to those sandwiches if he was really eating lunch with
Bethany
at Pret a Manger.
Their timing was poor. The after-work crowd had hit the shop, and the queues for checkout stretched fifty feet into the aisles. Lawrence kept looking at his watch, turning steadily purple. As they inched toward the front, he refused to crack a smile, even when she read off the supermarket’s comically exotic flavors of potato chips—“Chargrilled Steak and Peppercorn Sauce,” “Creamy Chicken Pasanda and Coriander,” “Slow-Roasted Lamb and Mint,” “Peking Spare Rib and Five Spice”—which conjured a whole meal from a handful of carbs and twelve hundred calories in fat.
“How about ‘Roast Turkey and Stuffing, Candied Yams, Overcooked Brussels Sprouts, and a Glass of Cabernet-Merlot’ crisps?” she proposed. “Or ‘Salmon with Rocket, Cheesecake with Coffee, and a Double Measure of Hennessy XO While Wearing a Red-and-Black Smoking Jacket and Watching Reruns of
Yes Minister
’ crisps? I bet they could even add an ashy aftertaste of a postprandial fag.”
Lawrence wasn’t playing.
“Fuck,” he said once they were finally outside again. “I’d rather starve.”
“You would starve if I didn’t wait in queues like that two or three times a week.”
“I don’t know how you stand it. If it were up to me, I’d live on peanut-butter crackers and beer from the minimart.”
“Not living with me you won’t. But don’t worry, I’ll never ask you again. Tesco is obviously too grubby for Mr. Fancy Conflict-Resolution Expert.”
Hence the mood, on return to the flat, was a little sour. Yet long ago weary of her experiment, and now convinced that matter had been shelved, Irina decided it was time to put that vixen’s mischievous rumor to rest.
“So,” she said casually, deboning chicken thighs as Lawrence washed dishes. “I overheard a mention at Blue Sky a while back. Something about a trip to Russia?”
“Oh.” He intently sudsed a water glass that only needed rinsing. “I thought I told you.”
A piece of cartilage took similar concentration to cut out. “You know you didn’t.”
“Well—guess I was putting it off.”
“I guess you were. How long are you going for?”
“About a month.”
“A month!” Irina’s knife paused. “When is this?”
“Couple weeks from now.”
“When were you going to tell me, packing for the plane?” “Tonight, actually, if you hadn’t brought it up.”
“That’s easy to say now.”
“I wasn’t going to just disappear.”
Ripping the skin off another thigh, Irina pondered once again how difficult she found it to simply say to Lawrence what she was thinking as she was thinking it. She pushed herself to ask boldly, “Have you not considered my coming along?”
“Nah,” he dismissed, sloshing rinse water onto the floor. “You’d be bored.”
“It’s my country. Why would that bore me?”
“It can’t be
your country
if you’ve never been there. And you’ve said yourself that you try to put as many miles as possible between you and your ‘heritage.’ ”
“I try to put as many miles as possible between me and my
mother,
” said Irina, chopping chilies. “And I’ve never bought her sentimentality about a place she left when she was ten. That doesn’t mean Russia doesn’t interest me.”
“Forget it. Your coming along would cost a fortune. Hotels in Moscow are larcenous for foreigners—and don’t imagine that you’d be considered anything but.”
“I earn my own money; I could pay for it. Besides,” she added shyly, carving out a pocket of chicken fat, “maybe I could get paid something for being your translator.”
“The Carnegie grant covers the cost of a translator, who’d be more experienced. And we’re trying to arrange a side trip to Chechnya. You’d never get security clearance.”
“I wouldn’t have to come to Chechnya. I could stay behind in Moscow.”
“Irina, you’re not thinking! You have work to do. This should be a great opportunity to bear down while I’m gone.”
“I’m ahead of schedule for Puffin already, and I could bring my drawing kit along.”
“You’re not going to be productive holed up in some hotel!” said Lawrence, mashing peanut butter on a cracker. “And if you were, then there’d
be no point in your being in Russia to begin with.”
So far this conversation was reminiscent of the Peter, Paul and Mary
ballad “Cruel War,” in which a girl appeals repeatedly to her soldier lover
to allow her to come with him into battle. She makes a variety of arguments, offering, for example, to tie back her hair and don a uniform to
pass as his comrade. The refrain,
Won’t you let me go with you?
is regularly
followed by the mournful,
No, my love, no
—albeit mournfulness was noticeably absent from Lawrence’s own discouragements. As Irina recalled,
the girl’s beseechings are all in vain, save the last—and she scrambled
for the successful verse.
Lawrence, oh Lawrence!
(okay, the soldier’s name in
the song was Johnny, but the substitute had a ring)
I fear you are unkind!
Finally, soft and sibilant:
/ I love you far better than all of mankind / I love you far better than words can
e’er express / Won’t you let me go with you?
Yes, my
love, yes.
“But I love you,” Irina blurted, realizing as she did so that sappy folk
songs weren’t an optimal source of inspiration when cajoling a wiseass
like Lawrence Trainer. “I can’t make you take me with you, and I’ll understand if you don’t. But I’ll miss you. I don’t want us to be apart for a
month.”
Alas,
Yes, my love, yes
was not forthcoming.
“I don’t, either,” he said. “Still, we both gotta do what we gotta do,
right? And nobody travels on business with wives or girlfriends anymore.
This’ll be a boy thing.”
“If it’s a
boy thing,
does that mean that
Bethany
isn’t coming?” “Bethany’s not somebody’s wife. She’s a research fellow.” Irina grabbed yet another fistful of chilies. “You mean she is
coming.”
“I don’t know—maybe.”
“You do too know! And maybe means yes!”
“What’s it matter? She speaks perfect Russian—”
“So do I!”
“But you are
not
a fellow at Blue Sky, you are
not
up on the separatist
war in Chechnya, and you are
not
covered by a grant from Carnegie!” “You forgot to mention that I’m also not a slag.” The pile of chopped chilies was now mountainous even by Irina’s immoderate standards, and glistened with evil intent.
“Look, we’ll be doing interviews all day, and you’d feel like a third wheel.”
“You just want to have your own special thing!” Irina exploded. Briefly, the image beckoned of sweeping all the preparations for dinner dramatically onto the floor—but they were not that kind of couple. “You
know
I could come as long as we paid my way, and you’ve said that I’m pretty good at holding up my end of things with your think-tank cronies. But you won’t let me because you want to have Russia all to yourself, so that it’s yours and not mine!”
Propped against the counter, Lawrence blinked. It was not their habit to put subtext on the table, any more than it was Lawrence’s habit to concede that there was one. “If,” he said after a pause, “I would like to have my
own special thing,
what is wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” she said defeatedly, surveying the makings of kung pao chicken with no appetite. “Except that the alternative would be to do something together, and have Russia as something we have in common, instead of a place you’ve colonized for yourself because you got there first.”
“Irina,” he said with unusual earnestness. “It’s important that we both maintain our independence.”
“I don’t think that’s our problem,
maintaining independence.
”
“I wasn’t aware we had a problem.”
“No,” she said sorrowfully. “You wouldn’t be.”
If the purpose of spicy cuisine was to play a line between pleasure and pain, it was apparently possible to tip full-tilt over to pain, period. The chicken turned out hot beyond precedent, and neither managed more than a few bites.