The Post-Birthday World

“We’ve got another twenty minutes,” he said, splaying on the couch opposite. “So how’s tricks? Anything new?”

“Oh,” she said, “nothing much since we last spoke.” Behold, her first lie. Irina had a queasy feeling that it wouldn’t be her last.

“Didn’t you have dinner with Ramsey? Don’t tell me you chickened out.”

“Oh, right,” she said thickly. She was no good at this. She was already botching it. Of course she’d have to give an accounting of last night. But the mere sounding of Ramsey’s name gave her palpitations. “Yes, we did that.”

“So how was it? You were worried that you’d have nothing to say to each other.”

“We managed,” she said. “I guess.”

Lawrence was beginning to look irked. “Well, what did you talk about?”

“Oh, you know—Jude. Snooker.”

“Is he entering the Grand Prix this year? Because I thought I might go.”

“I have no idea.”

“I wondered if his ranking’s slipped enough to have to play the qualifiers.”

“Beats me.”

“Well, you can’t have talked that much about snooker.”

“No,” she said. “Not so much.” It was as if she had to hoist every word from her mouth with a forklift.

“Did you at least get any good gossip?”

Irina tilted her head. “Since when did you care about ‘gossip’? That is, about what’s going on in someone’s heart, and not in their head?”

“I meant like, is it true that Ronnie O’Sullivan has checked himself into rehab. What’s your problem?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. She had not, overnight, turned into an ogre, and she gazed at her partner mournfully. It was obscene, though, that he couldn’t tell the difference the moment he walked in the door, if a flicker of nervousness ran through her that maybe he had. Since Lawrence avoided the main thing like the plague, the fact that he hadn’t remarked on her lacklustre response to his home-coming was if anything a red flag. It was hardly subtle: so far this conversation was reminiscent of a prison visit. They seemed separated by a thick pane of glass, and spoke haltingly as if through receivers. After all, Irina had broken a law of a kind, and had just begun her first day of what could prove a very long sentence. She added pitifully, “I made you a pie.”

“I had a snack on the plane … Sure, why not. A small piece.”

“Would you like a beer with that?”

“I’ve already had a Heineken … What the hell, let’s celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“The fact that I’m back.” He looked wounded. “Or didn’t you notice?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Yes, of course. That’s what the pie is for. To welcome you home.”

In the kitchen, she leaned her palms against the counter, dropped her head, and breathed. It was a relief to escape Lawrence’s company, however briefly; yet from the fact of the relief itself there was no escape, and it cored her.

Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon …) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.

She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stol-ichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”

Lawrence was too polite to object that she’d served him a slice much bigger than he’d asked for, and exclaimed, “Krasny!”

“That’s ‘red,’ you doorak,” she said, in the best imitation of affectionate teasing she could muster. “‘Beautiful’ is krasivy. Red Square, krasnaya ploshchad, da?”

Ordinarily Lawrence’s tin ear for Russian made her laugh, but there was an edge on her voice that made Lawrence look over.

“Izvini, pozhaluysta,” he apologized correctly. “Konyeshno, krasivy. As in, krasivy pirog”—she was amazed that he knew the word for “pie”—“or, moya krasivaya zhena.”

For pity’s sake. Even in Russian, he called her his “wife.” The term had never before struck her as cheeky, but it did now.

And it was typical, wasn’t it, that he could only call her beautiful in Russian. In English, she was cute, a safe, minimizing adjective that could as easily apply to a hamster as to a “wife.” It wasn’t fair to be irritated by a perfectly lovely compliment, but the resort to speaking in tongues when coming anywhere near emotional subject matter was painfully reminiscent of her father. A dialogue coach for mostly B-movies, her father was a master of accents; his work ran along the lines of coaching the man who did the voice of Boris Badenov in Bullwinkle on how to thicken his consonants with Soviet wickedness. He could switch readily from Chinese “flied lice” to Irish brogue, and she supposed it was all very amusing. Except that he had never told her he loved her, or was proud of something she’d accomplished, unless rolling his Rs like Sean Connery or lapsing into a Swedish lilt—I lahf me leetle dahter, jaaaaaa! She’d adored all the voices he’d employed reading her stories when she was little, but as she grew older the charm wore off. Why, he was born in Ohio, but even his Midwestern delivery sounded like one more accent.

Besides, Lawrence may have used Russian as a device to arms-length sentiments that might sound embarrassing in English, but it was also their private argot, and right now it was too much. It was too intimate. It hurt. “Thank you,” she said firmly in English, and brought the Russki speak to a close.

Lawrence tried, with one more line, to keep it going. “Tih u-sta-la?” His minor-key delivery was wrenchingly tender, and Irina bowed her head. She hadn’t touched her pie.

“Yes, I’m a little tired. I didn’t sleep well.” She hoped this didn’t count as her second lie. Arguably “not sleeping at all” fell under the subhead of “not sleeping well.”

“Something on your mind?” He had noticed. He was fishing.

“Oh, maybe it was the sushi. Only takes one piece of dicey tuna. My appetite’s off. I’m not sure I can eat this.”

“You do look pale.”

“Yes,” she said. “I feel pale.” Not wanting to appear too conscious of the time, Irina surreptitiously glanced at the watch on Lawrence’s wrist. Damn. Still five more minutes before Late Review.

“So, how was the conference?” It was disgraceful, how little she cared.

He shrugged. “A junket, basically. Except for the fact that I got to see Sarajevo, a total waste of time. Too many UN wonks, and NGO losers. You know, you need a police force. Well, duh. At least my budget didn’t have to cover it.”

“God forbid you should come back having learned something you didn’t know already, or having met someone you actually liked.” The sentence escaped her mouth before she could stop it. She tried to gentle the barb with a smile, but from the expression on Lawrence’s face she might have slapped it. “Milyi!” she scrambled; “dear” sounded warmer in Russian. “I’m just razzing you. Don’t look so serious.”

She had to stop this, the compulsive criticism. What ever happened to mental kindness? For that matter, what ever happened to plain kindness? Lawrence had been out of town for ten days, and everything she’d said since his arrival had been either flat-out mean or insultingly fatigued. Another man—whoever that might be—would have taken issue with the dig. But Lawrence didn’t like trouble, and reached for the remote.

Irina considered the word. The fact that Lawrence so frequently reached for the remote seemed apt.

More criticism.

When BBC2 came on, Irina was so grateful for the distraction that she could have kissed the tube. Ordinarily, in front of the TV Irina sewed on buttons, snapped beans, but now she focused on the screen with what she hoped was a look of rapt fascination.

She was rapt, and she was fascinated all right, but not by Late Review. Because Irina was seeing things. Really, it was like being possessed, or schizophrenic. Figures grappled in the shadows. Behind the TV, a man and woman grasped each other so tightly that it was impossible to tell which arms and legs were whose. Their mouths were open and fastened. When she glanced to the left, the same man flattened his lover against the wall, raising the woman’s arms overhead and pinioning her wrists to the plaster as he buried his face in her neck. If Irina cut her eyes a few degrees to the right, there they were again, disrupting the drapes, as the taller figure pressed the woman so fiercely against the window frame with his pelvis that her tailbone must have hurt. (It still hurt, but only a little. The soreness on Irina’s tailbone was from the side of the snooker table. The abrasion might have been worse had they not sunk in tandem to the floor.)

These figures that had invaded her living room, Irina hadn’t invited them, nor bid them to make such exhibitions of themselves against her walls. (And on her carpet. She glanced down, and there was the same immoderate couple. He was on top. Slight enough that the woman could still breathe, the man was still heavy enough to pin her. She couldn’t get away if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.) In their defence, the visitors were only kissing, but if a qualifier like only applied to kissing like that, one might as well say that Jeffrey Dahmer had only murdered and cannibalized people or that Hitler had only tried to rule the world.

The hallucinations were an affliction. She was trying to watch television with her partner, to have a convivial slice of pie and a quiet nightcap—though Irina’s vodka seemed to have evaporated, and she couldn’t remember drinking it—and here were these people in her home who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, and who induced her to keep squeezing and kneading against one another the muscles of her inner thighs.