The Post-Birthday World

“You might not be keen on the subject matter,” said Lawrence. “But that still looks worth seeing.”

Irina tore her eyes from her shameless guests. “What’s worth seeing?”

“Boogie Nights!”

Gamely, she ventured, “Well, I wasn’t big on Flashdance, but I didn’t mind Saturday Night Fever.”

Lawrence looked incredulous. “How could you have listened to a fifteen-minute discussion of that movie and still think it bears any relation to Saturday Night Fever?”

Irina cringed. “Oh. What’s it about, then?”

“The porn industry!”

“I was a little distracted.”

“A little?”

“I told you I was tired.”

“Being short of sleep might take the edge off, but it doesn’t send most people’s IQ plummeting to below fifty.”

“Just because my mind wandered doesn’t make me an idiot. I don’t like it when you do that. You do it all the time, too. You’re always telling me I’m stupid.”

“On the contrary. I’m constantly trying to get you to have faith in your own opinions and to be more forceful about them in public. I’m constantly telling you that you are smart, and very perceptive about the world, even if you don’t have a PhD in international relations. Sound familiar?”

Irina hung her head. It did sound familiar. Lawrence could be tempted to use the M-word on Irina, but he used it indiscriminately on everyone sooner or later, so there was no purpose to taking it personally. And he had, he was right, many times urged her to be more outspoken about her views around his colleagues’ dinner tables.

“Yes, you’re usually very supportive,” she conceded.

“Why do you keep trying to pick a fight?” From Lawrence, this was brave.

“I don’t know,” she said, and with genuine puzzlement. She truly did not understand why, when she had such a powerful motivation not to rock the boat, she would keep being so provocative, or, on an evening when she was desperate not to attract close examination, she would behave in an erratic, irritable fashion sure to bring maximum scrutiny to bear. Did she want him to know? Maybe she was forcing him to play a parlour game, like Botticelli: I’m a famous person, and my name begins with big scarlet A.

Are you dead?

(As of tonight? To my marrow.)

Are you female?

(All too female, it turns out.)

Where were you last night, at five in the fucking morning?

(Only yes-or-nos. That question is cheating.)

You’re one to talk about cheating!

Or maybe Lawrence was supposed to play hangman on the back of his conference programme, and, since he would never in a million years guess that she’d have chosen F-A-I-T-H-L-E-S-S H-U-S-S-Y, proceed to noose himself, letter by letter?

They finished watching Late Review. As if having given up on her ability to absorb the most primitive factual aspects of the novel and West End play the panel went on to assess, Lawrence didn’t solicit her opinion for the rest of the show. He turned off the television, and as the tube went black Irina thought, Come back! Commonly vexed by its incessant prattle, tonight she could have watched TV for hours. Instead of getting ready for bed, Lawrence plunged back to the sofa; horribly, that clap of his palms on his knees meant he wanted to talk. Irina tried to fill the yawning silence with encouraging little smiles, though just what she was encouraging remained obscure. Apropos of nothing she said, “I’m glad you’re home,” an assertion that, while it unquestionably did constitute Lie #3, she did not throw out as duplicitous cover. Rather, she wanted it to be so, and half-hoped that if she said she was glad he was home emphatically aloud she could make it be so.

“And?” he said at last. “What else is new?”

Irina looked at him blankly. Did he suspect something? “Not much that I haven’t told you on the phone. Work,” she said starkly. “I got some work done.”

“Can I see it?”

“Eventually … When I’m finished.” She didn’t want to show the new work to Lawrence. She wanted to show it to Ramsey.

Giving up, Lawrence rose with his face averted, and she could tell he was hurt.

They chained the door, closed and locked the windows, drew the drapes, took their vitamins, flossed, and brushed their teeth. A rote regime repeated every night, on this one it took on a murderous monotony. Though having missed a night’s sleep and so exhausted she was dizzy, Irina dreaded going to bed.

Methodically, they removed their clothes, and hung them on hangers. Irina couldn’t remember the last time that she and Lawrence had torn off each other’s garments and thrown them to the floor, in a frenzy to contact bare skin. You didn’t have to do that, when you shared a bed for years, and it would be wildly unreasonable of her to sulk over the matter. Everyone understood: that’s what you did at “the beginning,” and she and Lawrence were in the middle. Or she had thought for ages that they were in the middle, though you couldn’t read your own life like a book, measuring the remaining chapters with a rifle of your thumb. Nothing prevented turning an ordinary page on an ordinary evening and suddenly finding that you weren’t in the middle but at the end.

Irina cornered the rumpled white blouse onto the hanger with more care than the rag deserved; the little tear along the collar was longer now. The navy skirt was stretched; at least she’d had the presence to glance in the mirror when she came home, and yank the button round to centre it at the back. For the first time in a day she had combed her hair, which had flown into such disarray that she’d looked electrocuted.

But she hadn’t had the presence to take a shower. She’d returned to the flat with so little time to spare. Even then, it had been hell to tear herself from the Jaguar. Climbing the depressingly steep learning curve that apparently attends the sordid departure, she’d refused to kiss Ramsey good-bye in front of this building; a neighbour might see. What little time that remained to prepare for Lawrence’s arrival she’d squandered on vodka, and on standing in the living room in a state of paralysis, hands held out from her sides as if afraid to touch a body that had suddenly developed a vicious will of its own. But now she risked having left an incriminating odour on her skin, if only from a peculiar excess of her own perspiration.

The real telltale reek arose from these thoughts in her head. They were rancid.

She was naked now, but Lawrence didn’t give her a glance. That was normal, too. You got used to each other, and the nude body lost its surprise. Still, it saddened her that her experience was of not being seen at all, much as the cool boys in seventh grade had looked straight through her before she got braces. On the other hand, maybe she did the same thing to Lawrence, whited him out with an oh, that. In the privacy of his obliviousness, she took the time to look for once, to really look at and see her partner’s bare body.

He was fit. From a military regime of spending his lunch hour at a sports club near the office, his shoulders rounded with muscle, and his thighs were solid. His penis even at rest was a better-than-respectable size. Granted, gentle love handles swelled at his waist, but she couldn’t ride him about a mere couple of pounds comprised entirely of her own pie. Besides, she gladly pardoned his minor flaws—flat feet, a thinning at the temples—for they had entered into a contract of sorts, which she could have recited like the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive me my defects, as I have also forgiven your deficits. After all, her breasts were beginning to droop; she now awoke with little bags under her eyes; the hieroglyph of a lone varicose vein on her left calf warned cryptically of untold decrepitude to come, and she could soon have need to cash in on his own forgiveness in buckets. It was a shame that he held himself in a defensive hunch, since if Lawrence simply stood up straight he’d cut a fine figure of a man for forty-three. Most women Irina’s age were obliged to overlook far more than slight swells or flat arches, and nightly bedded butterball guts, hairy shoulders, double chins, and bald pates. She was lucky. She was very, very lucky.

So why didn’t she feel lucky?

“Read?” she proposed.

After ten days, he should have said no. After ten days, he should have slipped a hand around the small of her back, and clapped his mouth on her neck. “Sure,” he said, kicking the duvet to his feet. “For a few minutes.”

Irina had no idea how Lawrence could dive straight from a steady drone of “nation building” to The End of Welfare. In his place, she’d be desperate for an antidote, a sumptuous reread of Anna Karenina, or a cheap thriller. But then, since Lawrence’s professional bread-and-butter was so dry that it was more like plain charred toast, she had no real understanding of wanting to spend your life blathering about “nation building” in the first place. She obviously wasn’t a serious person. Still, she wished he’d leaven his life a bit. Back in the day he hadn’t been averse to James Ellroy, Carl Hiaasen, or P. J. O’Rourke. Ever since becoming a fellow at Blue Sky, he was consumed with making every moment count. But towards what?

Irina settled on the adjacent pillow with Memoirs of a Geisha. She could take her time with it, since there was no chance that Lawrence would want to read the novel next. It was about submission, and weakness, and servitude. It wasn’t about overcoming disadvantage, the way Mr. Think Tank defeated his vulgar Las Vegas upbringing (as Lawrence would say, he was “a phoenix rising from the trashes”). It was about living with disadvantage and even capitalizing on it. The book was too much, she realized, about women.

They didn’t touch. Settling in, Lawrence rested his right leg against her left; Irina rearranged her leg to restore the distance. She turned a few pages, but the couple from the living room was back again, groping across the type. Preemptively, Lawrence switched off the lamp, right at the point that Irina had finally managed to digest an entire sentence. He might have asked.

There was a formula. Lawrence had assured her that all couples do it the same way pretty much every time, even if you make a stab at creativity at “the beginning.” She had no idea how he’d come to this conclusion. This was a man who, left to his own social devices, would talk about safe externals like the election of New Labour for hours on end, so it was awfully difficult to picture Lawrence inquiring of colleagues over drinks, “Do you always use the same position when fucking your wife?” Nevertheless, he was probably right. You sorted out what worked, and it was too much bother to keep concocting some new twist on what frankly admitted of limited variations. Also, once you did get into a—she saw no necessity for calling it a “rut”—a set and roundly successful sequence, if then you suddenly started rooting around down there with your mouth, say, when for years that hadn’t been part of the programme—well, it seemed weird, didn’t it? Like, what is this, why are you doing that. Not only weird, but alarming. And the last thing that Irina wanted to be on this of all nights was alarming.

Besides, she didn’t object to doing it the same way every time; sameness wasn’t the problem. (Before last night, there hadn’t been a problem, had there, or at least not one that seemed pressing. Whatever her modest dissatisfactions, their redress could always be deferred to the following night—be deferred indefinitely, come to that. Anyway, why not count her blessings? Hadn’t she come—how many women could say this?—hadn’t she come every single time that she and Lawrence had made love?) The problem—that is, if it was a problem—was same-what.

As always, Irina turned on her right side. As always, Lawrence did likewise, and fit himself behind her, slinging his left arm around her waist and nestling his knees in her crooked legs. Together they formed two Zs, a comic-book symbol of sleep. And on the evenings they had given each other the signal—a leonine yawn, a mutter about having had a damned long day—sleep was just what they would do, too. But Lawrence had been gone ten days, and ran his hand tentatively over her rump. “Are you feeling okay?” he whispered. “You said something about bad fish.”

Unless she was about to tell all, and at such a bewildering juncture that she was still not sure what there was to tell, she could not seem cold to his advances. That would be a giveaway, wouldn’t it, that something was wrong. She had to act normal.

“I’m fine,” she said (Lie #4, and this one was a whopper). Truly wishing that she could give him the reassurance he deserved, she clasped his left hand as it wandered uncertainly across her hip—it seemed lost—and pulled his arm between her breasts.

Lawrence’s arm felt like a two-by-four. His proximity may not always have stirred a rapacious lust, but the snug of his chest against her back had always provided a deep animal comfort and sense of safety. Now it made her feel trapped. When his pelvis worked gently against her tailbone (against that very abrasion from the snooker table), his erection had the pesky quality of a poking finger.