The Post-Birthday World (53 page)

At the large round table at the front, Irina and Lawrence were seated together, but Ramsey and Jude’s place cards were on the far opposite side. Irina had no idea how Lawrence did it; normal people would start the conversational ball rolling with something anodyne like, “I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of

mayonnaise
!” Yet in no time he had involved most of the table in a heated discussion of the new Bush administration. Ramsey wasn’t fussed about politics, period, so it didn’t strike her as peculiar that his bearing was stony. But she did find it noteworthy that Jude Hartford,
Guardian
subscriber and Old Labour zealot, said nothing.

For hotel fare, the roast beef was impressively rare, and delicious. So it was a shame that Ramsey must have been feeling unwell; he wasn’t touching his dinner.

While the opposite couple’s refusal to engage with the rest of the table made them seem standoffish, Ramsey had an excuse. He was a snooker player at a literary gathering, a fish out of water, and naturally a little shy. Jude was in her element, and should have been acting as interlocutor. What a difficult woman! Poor Ramsey. Irina hoped he knew what he was doing, patching things up with Jude.

After the waiters cleared the table and the foundation director introduced each entrant with slides, Jude began whispering in Ramsey’s ear. Oh, for pity’s sake! The woman sits out the entire dinner not saying word one, and finally starts talking at the very point it’s time to shut up. Presumably Ramsey hadn’t any choice but to respond, though he’d surely be abashed about conversing during the director’s speech. If this were a snooker match, a referee would have ejected Jude from the hall.

Once the slides from

Ivan and the Terribles
flashed on screen, Irina grew irate. She’d been looking forward to this occasion for months, and Jude’s carry-on was distracting. As the red-framed Etch A Sketch compositions were projected, Irina and Lawrence looked at each other and shook their heads. It was astounding that Jude would choose this of all junctures to pick a fight. Ramsey must have been mortified! He whispered in return, probably imploring her to please take up her grievance another time— although any admonishments along these lines were unavailing. More astonishing still, when Jude’s illustrator’s drawings for
The Love Diet
followed, she didn’t even look at the screen, much less bother to listen to an admiring précis of her own book.

The director requested the envelope. Lawrence clasped Irina’s hand, squeezing with the tight, moist grip of a child’s at the dentist. So compelling was the anxiety in his face—that carved, haunted, beautiful face—that Irina spent what they both prayed would be her moment of triumph looking not up at the podium but in Lawrence’s eyes.

So convinced had she been of prevailing in this contest that her ears played tricks on her, and at first she could have sworn that she heard her own name distorted with a crackle of static through the PA. But the identity of the victor was written unmistakably across Lawrence’s face, which suddenly drained of blood and collapsed in a heap like a wet towel.

It was the oddest thing. Though she had been foolish to get her hopes up, and thereby set herself up for a fall, Irina felt fine. Her smile at Lawrence was beatific. Like Jesus taking on the sins of the world, Lawrence seemed to have assumed the full weight of her disappointment. Her most immediate concern was for his own consolation, and she kissed his hand quickly before letting go, that they might both applaud the winner. Winner? Whatever the papers might say tomorrow, Irina McGovern had won this evening. For as she rose from her chair to join the standing ovation, she could not imagine any prize greater than the one she had won thirteen years earlier on West 104th Street.

Jude had struggled to her feet, and was clapping, feebly, along with everyone else. Surely she understood that you weren’t supposed to applaud yourself? She looked confused, and at length did stop patting her hands together like limp flippers, but only to plop to her chair. Mouthing

Congratulations!
and
Go on!,
Irina met her old friend’s eyes, and was surprised to find them swollen and red. It was queer, feeling sorry for the only person at this table who had just pocketed $50,000 and the proceeds from selling perhaps one hundred thousand extra copies of her last book.

Prodded by the director, Jude finally reported for duty as if skulking to the principal’s office. Her acceptance speech bordered on incompetent. While she did remember to thank Ramsey, to whom she wasn’t even married anymore, and with a shit-eating profuseness at that, she forgot to commend her illustrator or to thank the judges. She had a dazed, unfocused quality, as if surprised to find herself at an award ceremony when she had thought she was headed for the launderette. Usually so flamboyant and excitable, she mumbled sheepishly to the podium, as if she wished that this event were already over and that everyone would go away. If this was to pass for one of the best days of Jude’s life, Irina would hate to see the lousy ones.

When the formal folderol was dispatched, Lawrence gave Irina a hug. “I’m really sorry,” he mumbled in her ear. “Your book was miles better, and it should have won.”

On drawing apart, Irina, unlike the victor, was dry-eyed and cheerful. “Thank you. I know you think so, and that’s medal enough for me.”

He studied her, disconcerted. “You really don’t seem that upset.”
“I’m not. It was still exciting to be nominated, and I love you.” What a rare business: once in a blue moon to get your priorities straight.
“Oh, you poor dear!” cried Tatyana, squeezing Irina so tightly that she couldn’t breathe. “You must feel simply wretched!”
“I sure judges already regret their choice,” said Raisa regally. “That speech your friend give—
ochen plokho.
You win, you do better.”
One of the judges approached her in the throng. The earnest middleaged woman’s tender, concerned manner recalled Mrs. Bennington, her tenth-grade art teacher. “The foundation doesn’t award silver medals,” she said with a hand on Irina’s arm. “But you should know, dear, that you were the runner-up. The voting was very close.”
“I appreciate that. But I’m afraid maybe I should have taken my partner’s advice.” Irina glanced up at him with a smile. “Lawrence thought strongly that I should have kept the ending simpler. Just stick-by-oldfriends, without the extra twist. I was awfully bloody-minded about it. But I’m inexperienced as an author; I’m really just an illustrator.”
“No, no!” said the judge. “I thought your ending was wonderfully enigmatic, and very true. Our problem was with the illustrations, I’m afraid.”
“Oh! The Etch A Sketch thing . . . ? ”
“The concept was delightful. And your technical execution was accomplished. But we weren’t happy with the computer-generated images. They were a little clinical—like the difference between an LP and a CD. If you had reproduced drawings on a real Etch A Sketch, dear, it’s possible that you’d have won.”
“It’s all my fault,” said Lawrence morosely when the woman was gone. “I was the one who pushed you to try the computer.”
“Don’t be silly. It should have, but using a real Etch A Sketch never occurred to me. Hilarious, really. I was a genius at Etch A Sketch when I was eight years old.”
They stood in the queue to congratulate Jude, who still looked less as if she’d just won a prestigious award than as if she’d just drawn the Old Maid in a game of cards. Upstairs in their room, they had Consolation Sex, which, if Irina was still facing the wall, wasn’t half bad, and she even managed to persuade Lawrence to keep the light on. For one of the evening’s losers, she was absurdly content, and fell vertiginously to sleep as if plunging from a tall building to the pavement.

While Lawrence shifted their bags the next day to the cheaper Upper West Side hotel provided by his upcoming conference on “global civil society,” Irina met Tatyana at a Broadway Starbucks.

“You look pretty jovial,” said Tatyana after another sympathetic bearhug. “Considering that you lost.”

“Well, as they say, winning isn’t everything!” Irina said brightly.
While Tatyana fetched their coffees, Irina suffered from a funny pining to talk to Lawrence, though they’d only parted an hour before. This yearning for his company in the middle of the day used to be a constant plague when he went off for work, and she missed it. These last few years, being separated had grown too easy. Her flush of gratitude last night had revived the sharper feelings of an earlier era, when the sound of his key in their front-door lock made her heart leap.
“Got a little gossip,” she said when Tatyana returned. “Which you might share with Mama, to warn her off. That tall, thin chap she took such a shine to last night? He’s getting married.”
“Ooh, she’ll be very put out!” Tatyana laughed. “She’s a dreadful flirt of course, with any man. But I haven’t seen her that entranced for ages. On the train home, I heard all about how
elegant
he was, how
graceful,
how she loved his accent. If you want to know the truth—maybe he did British accents back in the day—I think something about that guy reminded her of Papa. And she couldn’t stop going on about—what was it—
snookers
. . . ?”
“Snooker. But you tell her he’s taken,” said Irina flatly. Honestly, the prospect of Raisa courting Ramsey Acton—much less the other way around—made her want to hurl.
After Tatyana brought her sister up to speed with news of the family, she rounded on last night’s ceremony. “You must be
so
disappointed. Coming all the way to New York, only to have to applaud for someone else. And she’s a friend of yours, right? Or was? I wonder if that doesn’t make it worse.”
Irina shrugged. “Jude can have it. That award sure didn’t seem to make her very happy. And Lawrence was so devastated when it wasn’t me that—I almost felt as if I’d won. Even at the reception, he couldn’t stop singing my praises to other people. I tried to remind him that it was déclassé to brag about your own partner, but he was so proud that he wouldn’t listen. It hit me over the head last night—that I already had exactly what I’ve always wanted: a smart, funny, loyal, handsome man.”
When they were parting, Tatyana cocked her head. “I still don’t get it. You just missed out on this huge prize. But you’re
glowing
!” She seemed annoyed.

Irina’s revelatory gratitude for what she had in the first place was sadly short-lived. For if she ordinarily took for granted the architecture of her personal life, even more so did she take for granted the literal architecture of the city from which she hailed. Granted, history lends itself to the conclusion that pause is rare, that any respite is as merciful as it’s bound to be brief, that the very nature of existence is unstable and it is therefore best to be prepared for just about any catastrophe lurking right around the corner on any arbitrary morning. Thus the only real surprise should be those single sunny awakenings on which there is no surprise. Yet in defiance of all we know in theory, it remains common psychic practice to assume that world affairs will keep bumbling along the way they’ve been doing, much as from day to day Galileo himself would have persistently perceived the spinning globe on which we hurtle as standing still.

Thus what Irina would later rehearse about that Tuesday morning with weak room-service coffee in the Hotel Esplanade was its regularness. The

before
by its nature never feels like before. Irina was out of bed for forty-five minutes while September 11, 2001, was still just another date on the calendar, and had no way of knowing how precious they were.

Accordingly, she would squander them on feeling peeved that Lawrence had insisted on getting up so early, when she’d have liked to sleep in. The unexpected exhilaration of Sunday night had subsided, and it was beginning to sink in that she’d lost the Lewis Carroll. There would be no headlong rush to buy her book at Barnes & Noble, no embossed medallions feverishly applied to remaining stock, no “Lewis Carroll winner” in succeeding flap-copy bios. It was unlikely that she’d have a chance at such an imprimatur again, and abruptly there seemed little to look forward to. No wonder Ramsey had been so frustrated with his status as perpetual also-ran. Americans in particular made such a stark distinction between winning and losing, no matter how close you got—didn’t that judge say that she missed by a hair?—that runner-up and nobody blurred to the same thing.

Lawrence’s despair on her account had peaked, and was no longer quite so moving. At their dinner at Fiorello’s last night, she had enjoyed his reprise on Jude’s crummy book (which, having skimmed it, he now decried as a Bible for anorexics), along with a riff on what a pill the woman was, how appalling was her acceptance speech (his imitation was hilarious), and how insane Ramsey must be to ask for a second dose. But this morning Lawrence was once more buried in his laptop; his mind had clearly moved on to the presentation he’d to give tomorrow about Chechnya. Uneager to see her mother that night, she worried that Raisa would only take the news of Ramsey’s engagement as a challenge; her head swam with the nightmare of her mother rocking up with loads of luggage in Borough, insisting they get that lovely snooker player round for dinner. Her own brush with Ramsey at the Pierre vibrated in Irina’s head like a plucked guitar string. Despite her epiphany about having in Lawrence everything she’d always wanted, it pained her that her parallel-universe fancy man, The Chap She Almost Kissed, was getting remarried. The Esplanade was dumpier than the Pierre, with none of the shoe-shine sponges and aromatherapy face-wash frippery that Irina would never use but compulsively slipped into her carry-on, and it made her feel like a chump to pay five dollars for a small bottled water.

“Huh,” Lawrence grunted over the screen, as she gazed out at West End Avenue feeling sorry for herself. “AOL says a plane ran into the World Trade Center.”

“Well, that sounds careless,” said Irina irritably. “I know those pilots in private planes sometimes get off course, but Jesus, the Trade Center is bigger than a breadbox. You’d think maybe he’d turn wheel before busting into it. The sky is clear as crystal, too!”