The Post-Birthday World (43 page)

“Man,” said Lawrence quietly, flopping onto their bed that night. “How’d you like our friend

Zeetos
? Tell me she doesn’t get shit like that wrong on purpose. In fact, contriving to be underestimated is strategy. I’ve started to theorize that your mother’s English is secretly the match of H. L. Mencken’s. She just wants to entice you into saying stuff you think she can’t understand so you’ll blow your cover.”

“That’s what you do around her with Russian,” said Irina, taking off her blouse.

“You’d think that bag of bones could make a few inroads on her plate when she only ordered one course. What a loon! I swear she sneaks down to stuff her face with those Pepperidge Farm cookies when nobody’s looking. Otherwise she’d be dead.”
“No, a subsistence diet slows your metabolism to a crawl.”
“So is that what you’re doing? Keeping your
metabolism
up? I’ve never seen you eat so much in one day.”
Irina clutched her blouse to her chest. “I hate being browbeaten, even tacitly, and maybe my rebellion went a little far today. But you’d rather starve to impress her. Every time we come back from Brighton Beach you’ve dropped three pounds.”
“Is this more riding me for ‘trying to please’? Because those that’s-anice-dress-Mrs.-Cleavers are a
joke.
A joke for your benefit, so you’re supposed to get it.”
“Of course I know you’re playing a game. But then you’re incredibly mean behind her back, and I wish you’d stop it.”
“Would you
keep your voice down
?” he whispered. “This morning I was taking her part too much. Now I’m too mean to the broad. Which is it?”
“It’s the combination I don’t like. It’s hypocritical.”
“You know, I’m starting to wonder if on the tube I should have made you promise not to pick a fight with
me.
”
“I’m not trying to pick a fight—”
“Then
don’t.
Your mother’s just across the hall, and if we’re up till all hours having a shouting match we make ourselves look bad. Now, brush your teeth.”
Maybe because he was working such long hours, for the last six months the frequency with which they’d been having sex had dropped—nothing precipitous, perhaps by one less night a week, still roughly sating Irina’s erotic appetite. But satisfying a need to come is one of a host of purposes the activity serves, a surprisingly minor one. Especially in the established relationship, its most vital function is reassurance. So once they were in bed and Irina reached around with a beseeching stroke of his hip, only for Lawrence to mumble something about jet lag and doze off, she was more than disappointed. She was nervous.

* * * Since the night before they had neither fought nor fucked, Lawrence and Irina began Christmas Day well rested.

“Dobroye utro milye!”
Raisa cried gaily.
“S Rozhdestvom vas!”

Returned from another overkill run, Lawrence wiped the bottom of his coffee glass and set it on a saucer. In the early days, Irina had been grateful for the way he fell into lockstep with her mother’s lunatic sense of order. But there was nothing like the parental imprimatur to put the kibosh on your attraction to a man, and this morning his scurrying to wash and dry and put away the coffee glass before it was even cold was irritating.

“Irina,” said Raisa with a pretense of lightness. “I mention this before,

da
? When you take shower, you drain soap dish and dry. You leave soap in puddle, it turn to jelly. Lawrence very good about this. Sometimes you forget.”

Irina trudged back upstairs to drain the stupid soap dish, and then convened with Lawrence in their bedroom to wrap presents.

Right before they’d left for New York, Lawrence realized that in Moscow he’d neglected to pick up anything for Raisa. “Oh, dear,” Irina had worried. “And you’ve been to the
motherland.
I’m afraid she’ll be offended.” Tentatively, she suggested that maybe the most diplomatic thing to do was to give her mother the Rostov choker.
It’s funny how you can make an offer in all sincerity, and still be crushed when you’re taken up on it. On the heels of her proposal, Irina hoped frantically that Lawrence would insist she keep his gift, Raisa’s sensitivities be damned. Instead he commended her quick thinking, and promised to find her a replacement in due course.
She didn’t want a replacement. Her very ingratitude on first receiving the present had guaranteed that her about-face before that taxi on Trinity Street would be total, and her attachment to the jewelry was now improvidently fierce. Thus when they spread their presents on the bed beside a pile of refolded wrapping paper from last year, Irina opened the attractive Twinings tea tin she’d found for the necklace and gazed inside possessively. “Do you still want me to give her the choker?”
“I wasn’t the one who wanted to give it to her, you did. But yes, why not?”
“I only thought . . . Well, you said you went shopping yesterday. I thought you might have found something else to give her instead.”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t find much of anything. It was Christmas Eve, and a goat-fuck. If you were expecting me to buy something different, you should have said so.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said forlornly, and wrapped the tin herself.
When she heard Tatyana arrive
en famille,
Irina trotted downstairs to greet them in the foyer. Tatyana dropped her carrier bags and opened her ample arms to enfold her only sibling. “Welcome back! I’m so thrilled to see you! I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks! And look at you, you’re looking
fabulous
!” Tatyana gave Lawrence an equally hearty hug. Thankfully, she had no idea that he thought she was an idiot.
While the sisters unloaded the food in the kitchen, Tatyana extolled, “From what I hear, Lawrence is doing
sensationally
in London! A neighbor of mine brought by a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
last month, and if it wasn’t Lawrence’s byline on the op-ed page, big as life! I was so impressed! And there I was, just piddling around in the kitchen over another Charlotte Russe. It must be awfully stimulating, living with someone who’s so
learned.
”
“Stimulating is one word for it,” said Irina quietly, stashing the blini.
“Well, aren’t you just busting with pride?”
“Lawrence can be . . . a bit of a know-it-all. A bit of a show-off, intellectually.” She spoke under her breath. In the parlor, he was already rattling off the complications of Afghanistan to Dmitri. “This think-tank job may not have been great for his character. He’s become chronically condescending.”
“Chepukha,”
Tatyana dismissed. “He always treats you with respect. And he goes on about politics with such feeling! I find that kind of passion in a man terribly attractive.”
Irina gave up. There was nothing more frustrating than venturing criticism of someone you were supposed to esteem, and getting no uptake whatsoever. She was left twisting in the wind, sounding like a bitch.
So they retreated to territory that should have been safe, although cookery was also a minefield. Both sisters were cooks, but of radically contrasting types. Irina was prone to experiment; Tatyana followed recipes to the letter. Irina pushed flavors to their limit—never adding a clove of garlic but the whole bulb; Tatyana specialized in elaborate concoctions with lashes of cream and butter that were classically artful but lacked counterpoint. Irina found Russian cuisine dumpy; Tatyana enthusiastically reproduced their culinary heritage with tasteless authenticity. Where Irina was all very slam-bam (Tatyana would say careless), throwing dishes together with fistfuls of this and that in the confidence that all would work out in the end—which it
did
—Tatyana leveled exact halfteaspoons of cinnamon with a table knife. As far as Irina was concerned, in the kitchen she dashed off Kandinskys, while her sister dabbed paintby-numbers. Since they’d had terrible rows in the past—Irina would add so much lemon zest to a birch-log icing that it was “ruined”—she settled on the most neutral substance she could think of.
“I don’t understand this fad for salt mills,” said Irina, fetching the shakers for the
zakuski
table. “With pepper, a mill makes a huge difference. But freshly ground salt?”
“Yes, you’re right, the flavor’s identical!” Tatyana agreed ardently. “Though you might get something textural out of the variations in the size of the grains, don’t you think? For example, I do like that shardy, crystalline quality of Maldon.”
“Or how about
gray
salt!” Irina rejoined. “It has this marvelous mineral bite . . . !”
While mutually forceful feelings on these subjects allowed for muchneeded
bonding,
once they brought out the
pirozhki
and Lawrence had moved on to a conclusion to thirty years of brutal sectarian warfare in Ulster, Irina felt girly.
Despite her professed appetite for learned discourse, Tatyana nipped Northern Ireland right in the bud. In no time she was regaling the company with the travails of redecorating their en suite bathroom, despairing that contractors tracked plaster everywhere. When Lawrence quizzed her earnestly about the pattern of wallpaper she’d chosen, then about the tiles, the toilet, and the taps, Tatyana responded in heartfelt detail, blissfully unaware that his encouraging comments were savage: “Little trumpets or little boats—that must be really hard to decide! . . . I can’t imagine the upheaval! How do you manage? . . . Yes, that’s the modernday quandary—those silent flushers are civilized, but they just don’t get the job done!”
Weary of his game with Tatyana, Lawrence tried to teach her two kids the bar trick of propping a coaster half off the table, flipping it up, and catching it in a single motion; they found his flawless repetition of the trick mesmerizing, though neither seemed to have the knack. His patience with adults was thin; with kids it was limitless. It occurred to Irina wistfully that Lawrence would make a good father.
Alas, just when Sasha was getting the hang of it, he knocked a bowl of sour cream onto the carpet. Lawrence streaked to the kitchen and returned with an armload of sponges and spot-removers, feverishly expunging the stain. He admonished the kids, “Maybe we’d better not try the coaster trick around all your grandmother’s beautiful things.”
Thus it was back to adult conversation. Irina asked Dmitri about his construction business and didn’t care, Tatyana asked Irina about her illustrations and didn’t care, Raisa asked the children about their schoolwork and didn’t care, and Lawrence, stuck in the corner with Tatyana, was ultimately reduced to asking more questions about her bathroom absent the spirit of sly send-up that had made the first set marginally entertaining. Everyone complimented the
pirozhki,
while Irina thought they didn’t have nearly enough onion, or enough anything, and tasted mostly like dried-out hamburger.
So this was
peace
—which, according to their resident conflict studies expert, “beat the alternative.” No one got into an argument. No one said anything insulting. No one broke into rowdy song or raised a voice. While they were provided tiny lace-edged napkins with their appetizers, Irina excused herself to wipe her greasy hands on a paper towel just to be on the safe side.
Yet once she returned, her frustration was building in combustible quantities. She was reminded of being gussied up in a pert pink dress and patent-leather pumps after church as a girl, having to hang around the house forever waiting for some hunk of meat to overcook, scolded the while that though she had to keep on the scratchy dress for Sunday lunch, she wasn’t allowed to draw pictures because she might get crayon on her outfit. What was the point of growing up if you didn’t earn yourself escape from Sunday Lunch Syndrome? It may have been the twenty-fifth of December, but Irina was not a practicing Christian, and it should have been
within her gift,
as Lawrence would say, to demote the holiday to just another day of the week if she chose.
Why
would she inexorably volunteer to shuttle dishes back and forth for an extravagant
zakuski
array that she didn’t even want?
Why
was she obliged to converse politely about Tatyana’s PTA work when she was not remotely interested? For years she had whispered dark vows about how when
she
was a grown-up
she
wouldn’t ruin half of every weekend trying to keep stains off her uncomfortable clothes and talking about the boring old
PTA.
Here she had finally clawed her way to adulthood, only to willingly shackle herself once more to other people’s hopelessly crap idea of a good time. Why didn’t she and Lawrence check into a hotel, order champagne and oysters, and fuck like bunnies? She was forty-three years old—
why couldn’t she go color?
Irina sidled over to Dmitri, even if he always seemed a little tonguetied, because of the lot he looked the most companionably glum. Moreover, to ease himself through the occasion, with the excuse of good ethnic form, he had broken out the frosty bottle of vodka that he’d slipped into Tatyana’s cooler. He wasn’t knocking back shots like a Cossack; nevertheless, inroads had been made.
“Would you mind if I had some?”
“
Da, konyeshno,
Irina, let me get you a glass.”
Bang, Lawrence’s black look was Pavlovian. It was
two in the afternoon.
But rather than suddenly demur that she preferred to
mah
to juice after all, she smiled encouragingly as he filled the glass to the brim, and toasted brightly to Lawrence,
“Za tvoye zdorovye!”
Then she drained the whole pour in one cold, glorious gulp like a
real Russian.
If the
pirozhki
were only teasers for the grand
zakuski
course to come, Irina was already full. The day before, being bullied to starve herself had driven her to overeat; being bullied to stuff herself had the corresponding effect of putting her off her dinner. She did help Tatyana lay out the
zakuski
in the dining room—herring and black bread, blini with smoked salmon, pickled beets, “poor man’s caviar” made of eggplant, hard-boiled eggs, cucumber salad, and that enormous
kulebiaka
(which, its decorative pastry delicately browned, did look splendid)—but bustled dishes about as cover for not eating them. In sufficient quantity food grows repulsive, and all Irina could see when she looked at that groaning board was an oppressive array of leftovers. Aversion to the buffet made her second and third vodkas fiendishly effective.
Once the main course was laid out—the whole roasted suckling pig on a bed of kasha, braised red cabbage, grated-potato pudding, and string beans with walnut sauce—Irina merely snitched a bit of crackling from the pork to go with her wine.
In such abundance, a meal is less a feast than a mugging. The company staggered back to the parlor as if bashed on the head. Even Tatyana agreed that they might take a breather before dessert, and open their presents.
The vodka had been primly whisked away before dinner, but the bottle was easily located in the freezer, and now seductively cold. As she returned to the parlor with her bracer, Irina’s face flushed with the high color of Christmas cheer. When the polite one-at-a-time unwrapping began, the extra shot helped to drown her sorrow when she handed off their present to her mother. Raisa put the choker on, and Irina purred about how well it suited her; much was made of Lawrence’s having brought the gift from Moscow. For once Raisa’s effusion evinced a trace of sincerity. But watching the choker leave her own life with finality pierced Irina with a grief all out of proportion to the scale of the loss—a monumental mournfulness that she herself did not quite understand, even as a lump formed in her throat at the very point where the enamelwork once had rested. Grim consolation, presumably she might inherit it when Raisa was dead.
The abundance of the other gifts, however well-meaning, engendered that all-this-trouble-and-money-for-what? deflation of the average American Christmas. Tatyana’s heavy package for Irina contained a set of massive homemade candles that the kids had helped to cast; Irina’s foreign residence was an abstraction to her sister, and it would never have occurred to Tatyana that now she would have to drag ten pounds’ worth of gaudy paraffin back to the UK in zipper-strained luggage. Lawrence got two ties, when he hardly ever wore them; Raisa a synthetic shawl, a lumpy sweater, and some cheap costume jewelry from the children, appurtenances all destined for a bottom drawer. Since one compulsively buys people the last thing they need, Tatyana received mostly food. Nearly
everyone
had given Dmitri aftershave; the boxed bottles that collected at his feet, two of the same brand, were an embarrassment. Likewise Raisa persisted in purchasing her grandchildren toys designed for younger kids— the label on the doll for ten-year-old Nadya specified “For Ages 4–7”—and children never interpret such slips as ignorance, but as calculated insult. Toward the last, Irina shyly handed Lawrence an envelope, from which he pulled a postcard-size drawing. He frowned at first, and she was hurt that he didn’t seem to recognize it, for she’d gone to some effort replicating the illustration in miniature.
“It’s the arrival of the Crimson Traveler,” she explained, “the first version, for
Seeing Red.
I told you, it was an odd man out, and in the end I couldn’t use it and had to draw the panel again. I framed the original for you. It didn’t make any sense to bring all that glass to New York . . . so I made you that little reproduction. You liked the picture so much, remember? You said the style was—
bonkers.
”
“Oh, yeah . . .” he said foggily.
“I thought you might like to hang it in your office.”
“Sure, that’s a great idea!” he said, and kissed her cheek. But his enthusiasm felt pumped, like her mother’s, and she was still not convinced that he remembered the illustration at all. Moreover, her gift may have been a tad perverse. The unruly sensation that had taken hold of her when she scrawled that alarming panel had derived from a place that Lawrence had no vested interest in her choosing to revisit.