The Post-Birthday World

For Betsy, another American, everything was always simple. In fact, her cool, compass-and-ruler approach to circles that others found difficult to square had a curious brutality. When Jude and Irina had fallen out, she’d advised with a savage little shrug, “As far as I could tell, you’ve never liked her much anyway. Write it off.”

Irina wasn’t proud of the way she “dealt” with this quandary, meaning that she didn’t deal with it at all. Every day in the countdown to July 6, she promised herself in the morning to ring Ramsey in the afternoon, and in the afternoon to ring him in the evening. Yet propriety pertained even to night owls, and once it passed eleven p.m., she’d check her watch with a shake of the head and resolve to ring first thing the next day. But he probably slept late, she’d consider on rising, and the cycle would begin again. The sixth was a Saturday, and the Friday before she faced the fact that a single day’s notice so obviously risked his being busy that to ring at the last minute might seem ruder than forgetting the occasion altogether. Well, now she wouldn’t have to face down Ramsey Acton all by herself. A flood of relief was followed by a trickle of sorrow.

The phone rang Friday at nearly midnight. At this hour, she was so sure that it was Lawrence that she answered, “Zdravstvuy, milyi!”

Silence. No returning, “Zdravstvuy, lyubov moya!” It wasn’t Lawrence.

“… Sorry,” said an airy, indistinct British accent after that embarrassed beat. “I was trying to reach Irina McGovern.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is Irina. It’s just, I thought it was Lawrence.”

“… You lot rabbit in—was that Russian?”

“Well, Lawrence’s Russian is atrocious, but he knows just enough—he’d never manage in Moscow, but we use it at home, you know, as our private language … Endearments,” she continued into the void. “Or little jokes.”

“… That’s dead sweet.” He had still not identified himself. It was now too awkward to ask who this was.

“Of course, Lawrence and I met because I was his Russian tutor in New York,” Irina winged it, stalling. “He was doing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia on nonproliferation. In those days, that meant you needed to have some Russian under your belt. These days, it’s more like Korean … But Lawrence has no gift for languages whatsoever. He was the worst student I ever had.” Blah-blah-blah. Who was this? Though she had a theory.

A soft chuckle. “That’s dead sweet as well … I dunno why.”

“So,” Irina charged on, determined to identify the caller. “How are you?”

“… That’d depend, wouldn’t it? On whether you was free tomorrow night.”

“Why wouldn’t I be free?” she hazarded. “It’s your birthday.”

Another chuckle. “You wasn’t sure it was me, was you? ’Til just then.”

“Well, why should I be? I don’t think—this is strange—but I don’t think, after all these years, that I’ve ever spoken to you on the phone.”

“… No,” he said with wonderment. “I reckon that’s so.”

“I always made our social arrangements through Jude, didn’t I? Or after you two split, through Lawrence.”

Nothing. The rhythm to Ramsey’s phone speech was syncopated, so that when Irina began to soldier on, they were both talking at once. They both stopped. Then she said, “What did you say?” at the same time he said, “Sorry?” Honestly, if a mere phone call was this excruciating, how would they ever manage dinner?

“I’m not used to your voice on the phone,” she said. “It sounds as if you’re ringing from the North Pole. And using one of those kiddy contraptions, made of Dixie cups and kite string. You’re sometimes awfully quiet.”

“… Your voice is wonderful,” he said. “So low. Especially when you talk Russian. Why don’t you say something.” Summat. “In Russian. Whatever you fancy. It don’t matter what it means.”

Obviously she could rattle off any old sentence; she’d grown up bilingual. But the quality of the request unnerved her, recalling those porn lines that charged a pound per minute—what Lawrence called wank-phone.

“Kogda mi vami razgovarivayem, mne kazhetsya shto ya golaya,” she said, binding her breasts with her free arm. Fortunately, nobody learned Russian anymore.

“What’d that mean?”

“You said it didn’t matter.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I asked you what you had in mind for tomorrow night.”

“Mm. I sense you’re having a laugh.”

But what about tomorrow night? Should she invite him over, since he liked her cooking? The prospect of being in the flat alone with Ramsey Acton made her hysterical.

“Would you like it,” she proposed miserably, “if I made you dinner?”

He said, “That’s bleeding decent of you, pet.” The curious little endearment, which she’d only encountered once before when collaborating with an author from way up in Newcastle, was somehow warmer for being odd. “But I fancy taking you out.”

Irina was so relieved that she flopped into her armchair. In doing so, she pulled the cord, and the phone clattered to the floor.

“What’s that racket?”

“I dropped the phone.”

He laughed, more fully this time, round, and the sound, for the first time in this halting call, relaxed her. “Does that mean yes or no?”

“It means I’m clumsy.”

“I never seen you clumsy.”

“Then you’ve never seen me much.”

“I never seen you enough.”

This time the silence was Irina’s.

“Been a whole year,” he continued.

“I’m afraid Lawrence wouldn’t be able to join us.” Ramsey knew that, but she’d felt the need to insist Lawrence’s name into the conversation.

“Rather put it off, so Lawrence could come as well?”

He’d given her an out; she should jump at it. “That doesn’t seem very ceremonial.”

“I was hoping you might see it that way. I’ll call by at eight.”

For the most part, other people took couples as they found them: you were, or, at a certain point, you weren’t. At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker’s tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly in love, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. Of course, people did have opinions, about whether you were suited, or probably fought; almost always your friends—that is, friends of the couple—liked one of you more. But these opinions were cheap. They cost nothing to hold, and nothing to change.

Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden. Irina had a few companions who’d little time for Lawrence, and found him paternalistic or gruff; they regarded Lawrence as a friendship tax, the cost of doing business. But one way or the other, she didn’t care.

Love having come to her neither easily nor early, Irina accepted the fact that any minor contribution she might make to human affairs would have nothing to do with unprecedented achievement in courtship. No one would ever recount the peaceable, convivial union of a children’s book illustrator and a think-tank research fellow as one that launched ships or divided nations. No modern-day Shakespeare would squander his eloquence on the ordinary happiness—if there is such a thing—that percolated within a modest flat in Borough through the 1990s.

Nevertheless, Irina regarded her relationship with Lawrence as a miracle. He was a devoted, funny, and intelligent man, and he loved her. She didn’t care if feminists would have maintained that she didn’t need a man; she did need a man, more than anything on earth. When Lawrence was out of town, the flat seemed to generate an echo. She would not, any longer understand why she was here, in both the general sense of alive, and the specific sense of on a Georgian square just south of London Bridge. Many were the solitary evenings that she might have worked late in her studio, but the opportunity would be wasted. She would walk from room to room. Pour a glass of wine and leave it standing. Drizzle the stainless-steel drain board with corrosive to remove the lime scale. (So mineral was London’s tap water—reputed to have cycled through more human bodies than any liquid on the planet, and leaving a white, crusty ghost behind every evaporated drop—that it might have stood sheerly upright on the counter like the Cliffs of Dover without a glass.) But suddenly the energy required to wipe the glop away would elude her. She would go to bed, and wake to a reek in the kitchen from the chemicals left to seethe.

Shameful or not, having a man who loved her and whom she loved in return was the most important thing in Irina’s life. It wasn’t that she didn’t have strong and abiding subordinate affections, for Irina was far more sociable than Lawrence, and had put much effort into building a whole new set of comrades when they moved to London in 1990. Yet there were hungers that friends could never satisfy, and when you made the slightest bid to get them to feed this particular appetite they ran a mile. Moreover, it wasn’t that she cared nothing for her “art,” even if two histrionically self-involved parents in film and dance impelled her to couch the word in sour quotation marks. The illustrations, when they were working, were a joy. But the joy was greater when Lawrence eased up behind her while she was drawing, and purled peevishly in her ear that it would be nice to eat.