The Post-Birthday World

“Krasny!” Lawrence exclaimed when she set down his pie and ale.

“That’s ‘red,’ you doorak,” she said fondly. She always found Lawrence’s incompetent Russian adorable. Maybe because he was otherwise so sharp, and an Achilles’ heel was humanizing. Besides, his tin ear for Russian was a useful leveller. Without it, a PhD might have made her feel stupid, but he always humbly deferred to her mastery of the tongue. “‘Beautiful’ is krasivy. Red Square, krasnaya ploshchad, da?”

“Konyeshno, krasivy!” He knew she was charmed by his mistakes, and this one was so primitive that he probably made it on purpose. “As in, krasivy pirog”—she gave his memory of the word for “pie” an appreciative nod—“or, moya krasivaya zhena.”

He mightn’t have legally married her, but whenever Lawrence used the word wife—which sounded more cherishing in Russian—Irina basked in the pleasure of being claimed. She understood his superstition about the institution. Sometimes when you tried too hard to nail something down you crushed it. Still, there were scenes in ER when a man would exclaim over a stretcher, “That’s my wife!” and Irina’s eyes would film. The word went to the centre. “That’s my partner!” would never have made her cry.

Tucked into her armchair, Irina forked a first bite of pie with a sensation that all was right with the world—or her world, the only one that mattered at the moment. The creamy filling was balanced perfectly between tart and sweet, and struck a satisfying textural counterpoint with the crisp lattice crust. Late Review had just run its opening credits. Germaine Greer was on tonight, an articulate woman who had once been a knockout but who had aged honestly and was still classically handsome. She was that rare animal, a feminist with a sense of humour, who stuck to her guns but was not a pain in the ass. Moreover, this fifty-something writer radiated a compensatory beauty of wisdom and personal warmth. Germaine gave Irina hope for her own future and broadly bolstered her pride in her gender. The waft from the open windows was the ideal temperature, and for the time being Irina was able to put out of mind when last she reflected on that precise fulcrum of the neither too hot nor too cold. She was not a faithless hussy. Lawrence was home, and they were happy.

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn’t sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something—when not a lie—the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

She didn’t intend to be dire, or to detract from her pleasure in Lawrence’s return, Germaine Greer’s astute commentary on Boogie Nights, and the splendid rhubarb-cream. In fact, Irina reasoned that, for so much of the world to be roiling with war and animosity, there must be an international deficit of compelling men, BBC2 reception, and pie. Still, there was a weed in this garden, or none of her self-congratulation would have made itself felt. She had only been alerted to her own happiness by a narrow brush against an alternative future in which it was annihilated.

Whatever it was, that crossroads last night was one of the most interesting junctures she had arrived at in a long time, and the only person with whom she really wanted to talk about it was Lawrence, the one person with whom she couldn’t. The singular prohibition didn’t seem fair. On the other hand, it probably was. A don’t-make-waves constitution was one of the things that she and Lawrence, perhaps tragically, had in common. Irina didn’t like confessions, either—that is, other people’s—and Irina, too, wanted everything to be fine. For her to be able to introduce with the gravity the subject deserved, “I almost kissed Ramsey last night; I didn’t, but I wanted to, badly, and I think we should talk about why I might have wanted to,” without all hell breaking loose would have required a kind of work during the last nine years that they both had shirked. She hadn’t made the bed for that honesty, so she couldn’t lie in it. Or she had to lie in it, in the other sense of the word. That they could not hunker down right now and turn off the TV and come to grips with what exactly had happened last night was a grievous loss. At once, there seemed some sneaky connection between the fact that they couldn’t talk about it and the fact that it had happened at all.

“That looks worth seeing,” said Lawrence. “Though you might not be keen on the subject matter.”

“Why, do you think I’m a prude?”

“No, but porn isn’t up your alley.”

“Boogie Nights doesn’t look like pornography. It isn’t mention versus use.”

A logical fallacy, mention versus use entailed doing the very thing that you were pretending to eschew—for example, asserting, “I could say that’s none of your business,” when what you’re really saying is, “That’s none of your business!” As it applied to a panoply of ostensibly above-board and purely academic British “documentaries” on whoring and blue movies, mention versus use provided respectable cover for the standard sensationalist come-on of T&A—using tut-tut to disguise tee-hee.

“It’s opening next week. Let’s go … So!” she said gaily, switching off the TV. “Tell me about the conference.”

Lawrence shrugged. “A junket, basically. Except for the fact that I got to see Sarajevo, a total waste of time—”

“Yes, you say that about every conference. But what did you talk about?”

He looked agreeably surprised. “A lot of this ‘nation-building’ stuff has to do with the police. Whether you include the assholes, or ex-assholes—if there’s such a thing—and take the risk of giving them power and guns, or shut them out and take the risk of their still having power and guns and making trouble on the side. And, you know, whether you can impose democracy from without, or if it only sticks if it’s organic, so that no matter what kind of constitution you ram down their throats, as soon as your back is turned everybody reverts to type. In Bosnia, of course, there’s this big question of now NATO is in, how to get us out. Once you build up institutions all founded on the power of an international force, it’s sort of like setting a table and then seeing if you can rip the tablecloth out from underneath without breaking any dishes.”

Irina often drifted off when Lawrence talked about international relations—one of the things that Lawrence might say “all couples did,” since it was tempting to succumb to the hazardous impression that, whatever your partner was nattering about, you knew it already. This time she’d paid attention, and had been rewarded. Oh, she didn’t much care about Bosnia, a morass she had never understood. But he was so good at cutting to the chase; in his work, Lawrence’s very speciality was the main thing.

“That’s a nice image,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said shyly. She should compliment him more often. Nothing meant more to him than her smallest kind word, and it cost her nothing.

“Was Bethany there?”

He put a look on his face as if he had to search the crowd in his mind, though he’d said on the phone that attendance was scant. “Mmm—yeah.”

“What was she wearing?”

“How’m I supposed to remember that?”

“Because my guess is, not very much.”

“I suppose she was tarted up, as you would say, as usual.”

“Someday I’m going to get you to admit that you find her attractive.”

“Nah,” he dismissed. “Never happen. A little trashy. Not my taste.” Another fellow at the institute, Bethany Anders was a nicely put together little floozy with a brain. Tiny and almost always kitted out from head to toe in black, she wore leather microskirts and boots, patterned stockings, and voluptuous cowl collars; she’d a penchant for sleeveless blouses that displayed her shapely shoulders even in the dead of winter. Lawrence was right that her face looked a bit cheap; she wore stacks of makeup, and had big, pouty lips. Yet while this variety of feline prowled the alleyways of most big cities, they were not a dime a dozen in the think-tank biz, whose few female denizens inclined towards frump and paisley shirtwaisters. So in the halls of Churchill House, Bethany stood out. Rather than act cool and distant, whenever Bethany crossed paths with Irina she was overfriendly—more grating than acting chilly by a yard.

It was thanks to Bethany, whose name Irina routinely pronounced in goading italics, that Lawrence was taking over a portfolio at the institute that nobody else wanted. Formerly a bastion of Cold War strategizing, after the fall of the Iron Curtain Blue Sky was overloaded with experts in Russian affairs. (With the fall of the Soviet Union, Irina, too, had experienced a sudden drop in status. Abruptly among the diaspora of one more harmless, economically flailing dung heap, she missed feeling dangerous.) Wanting to distinguish himself, Lawrence had been hitting the books on Indonesia, the Basque Country, Nepal, Colombia, the Western Sahara, the Kurdish region of Turkey, and Algeria. Having written extensively on Northern Ireland (whose pasty politicians must have clamoured to be interviewed by a fox in stilettos), Bethany was teaching him the ropes, since to everyone else at Churchill House during an era of grand Clintonian optimism her pet subject was dreary, morally obvious, and tired beyond belief. If Lawrence wanted to research dumpy old terrorism, he was welcome to it.

Irina had misgivings about Lawrence taking on yesterday’s news, and some portion of her resistance concerned Bethany’s tutelage. But at least “Dr. Slag,” as Irina had dubbed her (or, in American, Dr. Slut), stimulated an elective jealousy that bordered on entertainment. The steadfast Lawrence Trainer was no more likely to stray than to walk out the door in polka-dot pyjamas, and Irina was safe as houses.

“I think she fancies you,” Irina teased.

“Bullshit. She’d flirt with a doorstop.”

Lawrence was intellectually brassy but sexually humble—hence his chronic poor posture. Irina could never get it through his head that she wanted him to be attractive to other women, that she found the prospect exciting. If he, too, felt a little stirring once in a while, that was only red-blooded, for surely she was not the only one who—

“Let’s go to bed,” she proposed, and picked up the pie dishes.

Lawrence grabbed the glasses, a last sip of wine left in hers as an emblem of renewed forbearance. “But I haven’t seen your new work!”

“Oh, that’s right—and I’ve been looking forward to showing you.” For Irina, the greatest satisfaction of finishing a drawing was to unveil it to Lawrence, and once they dropped off the dishes she led him into her studio.

“You remember the project, right?” she said. “Seeing Red? A little boy lives in a world in which everything is blue. And then he meets a traveller from another land in which everything and everyone is red, and it freaks him out. Naturally by the end they’re both thrilled to bits, and have learned to make purple. It’s another predictable story line, but an illustrator’s paradise. This afternoon, I got to red.”

“God, these blue ones are unbelievable. Reminds me of Picasso.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said bashfully. “Though it was challenging to get all those different shades in coloured pencil. There’s a vogue right now in using the same materials that kids do, felt-tip markers, crayon—as if they could’ve drawn this, too.”

“I don’t think so.” Lawrence cheerfully admitted to having no artistic talent, and his wonder was genuine.

“Voilà.” She turned to the last drawing. “Red.”

“Wow!”

Something had happened that afternoon. Perhaps owing to the pent-up feeling that issued from drawing for weeks in blue, the arrival of the crimson traveller had released something. Surrounded by indigo with a fine halo of luminous pink, the tall, spare figure was shocking. Almost scary.

“You’re so great,” said Lawrence with feeling. “I wish you could work with writers who were on a par.”

“Well, I’ve been saddled with worse text. I’d even like the idea, if I thought it really had to do with colour. I used to pine as a kid to see a different one—a really new colour, and not another rehash of the primaries. Unfortunately, I get a creepy feeling that this story was bankrolled because of its multicultural undertones.”

“Like, let’s all fuck each other and make purple babies?”

“Something like that.”

“This last one.” Lawrence studied the fruit of an unusually feverish afternoon; she’d felt possessed. “It’s got a completely different feeling than the blues. Even a different line quality, and the style is more …” Lawrence was no art critic. “Bonkers. Is that a problem? That it doesn’t fit in?”

“Maybe. But I ought to redraw the first ones, rather than throw this one out.”

“You’re a pro, know that?” He ruffled her hair. “I could never do what you do.”

“Well, I’d be hopeless at nation building, so we’re even.”

Her mother would be pleased: their set sequence of retirement was choreographed with the precision of dance. Yet the last step of their waltz toward slumber Irina was considering shaking up a bit. Add a little cha-cha.

Chewing on the matter, she tidied the bedroom. She’d been so exhausted when she came home last night that she’d flung her clothes on the chair. They lay in a crumple, and Irina felt a tinge of aversion for them. With a sniff she found that the navy skirt reeked of Gauloise smoke, and tossed it in the laundry basket. As for the shirt, that little rip at the neckline wasn’t mendable, and she dropped it in the rubbish. She was relieved to get the garments out of her sight, much as her shower that morning had been elongated by an eagerness to wash something more than grime down the drain.

They both undressed. Granted, glimpsing each other’s nude bodies no longer inspired raw lust, but a reciprocal ease with nakedness had a voluptuousness of its own. Which is why it felt especially queer when Lawrence climbed into bed and Irina’s heart raced. Why did the proposal she was working herself up to seem so radical?

“Read?” Lawrence suggested.

“N-no,” she said beside him. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” He reached towards the lamp.

“Don’t—don’t turn out the light yet.”

“Okay.” He wore the same perturbed expression that had met her earlier insistence that he “kiss her properly.”

“I was thinking—you’ve been gone—I was just thinking, I don’t know, about doing it a bit differently.”

“Doing—?”

She already felt foolish, and wished she’d never said anything. “You know—sex.”

“What’s wrong with the way we usually do it?”

“Nothing! Not a thing. I love it.”

“So why change anything? Doesn’t it feel good?”

“It feels great! Oh, never mind. Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

“Well—what did you want to do?”

“I was only wondering if maybe, say, we could try it—facing each other for once.” The whole point was to be able to look him in the eye, but now she was so embarrassed that she was looking anywhere but, and they weren’t even fucking yet.

“What, you mean like, missionary?” he asked incredulously.

“If you want to call it that. I guess.” Irina’s commonly throaty voice had gone squeaky.

“But you said, ages ago, that missionary was lousy for women, that it didn’t work, and you thought that was one reason a lot of women went off fucking altogether. There’s no friction, you said, in the right place. Remember?”

“It doesn’t, ah—no, it doesn’t work without a little help.”

“It’s easier for me to give you—a little help—from, you know, behind.”

“True. Oh, let’s just—it’s fine. Let’s just—the way we’ve been doing it is fine.”

“But is there something bothering you? About the way we do it?”

Obviously there was something bothering her, like the fact that she had not seen his face while they made love for at least eight years, but she couldn’t bring herself to say so aloud. She could see that she was upsetting him, the last thing she’d intended. She wanted to make him feel welcome and warm and loved, and not suddenly anxious that all this time she’d been dissatisfied with their sex life but had been keeping her mouth shut. This was all wrong-headed and backfiring like crazy.

“Not a thing,” she said softly, kissing his forehead and turning on her right side to snuggle her back against his chest. “I’ve missed you, and you feel wonderful.”

“… Is it all right if I turn out the light?”

A slight collapsing sensation, in her chest. “Sure. That’s fine. Turn out the light.”

In the soundest of relationships, it is not always possible to organize epiphanies in concert. Lawrence could hardly be blamed if he failed to experience a burning desire to assault Bethany Anders the exact same evening on which Irina had fixated on Ramsey Acton’s finely articulated mouth, that they might both turn tail in simultaneous panic and rush headlong into each other’s arms. This was probably not the best of nights to upset the sexual apple-cart, and any fine-tuning of their proven method could wait for another time. Besides, this felt good. It did. Looking at the wall. In the dark.

One thing The Usual had to recommend it was that, with her face unobserved, her mind could more readily roam its most disgraceful corridors. She was not opposed, in the privacy of her head, to smut. Yet when Lawrence reached around to graze his fingers lightly between her legs, her mind remained static, and refused to generate any nasty little pictures. She couldn’t get anywhere. Indeed, she visualized herself in a small, enclosed room, standing still. There was a door. There was a door that she could open if she were willing to. But it was not a good idea. Proceeding through this one doorway was forbidden. Slammed in her own face, the door recalled the expression gaining such favour in the States that it was becoming a pestilence: Don’t go there. As time went on and Irina stood helplessly in the same desolate place—it was all dull clinical white, the walls, the linoleum, like some austere coital waiting room where no receptionist ever called her name—she began to realize that only by passing through that forbidden portal would she be able to come.

Lawrence’s dedicated ministrations had grown so protracted that Irina was abashed. She felt fairly sure that he didn’t mind giving her a helping hand, but it was taking too long, and she hated the idea of the procedure becoming tedious, in which case he might even lose his erection. Irina’s fretting that her excitement was becoming a chore for him didn’t heighten it any. This wasn’t working. It was so weird. She’d never had any real trouble with Lawrence, but then she had never told herself, either, that she couldn’t think about something she wanted to think about. The problem was that door, that closed door, and since she refused to defy her own prohibition and push through it, Irina could contrive no means of bringing this dutiful stimulation to a graceful conclusion besides fakery.

She didn’t overdo it. She didn’t light into a reprise of the diner scene in When Harry Met Sally. In fact, with a soft, shuddering groan, she tried to imply that this was one of the quieter ones—and wasn’t it. She worried that she had underplayed the performance to such a degree that it had gone right past him, until Lawrence moved a few times and pulsed; he must have been taken in, because he always waited.

To have got away with the sham was discouraging. After all these years he should know the difference. Now sexual fraud joined the list of other little white lies, like claiming to have forgotten about Ramsey’s birthday, or pretending that it had been early in the evening when the bill arrived at Omen. And she had ruined a perfect record. Never again could she say to herself that she had come when having sex with Lawrence every single time. Now she knew how a pinball player felt on an unprecedented winning streak, when abruptly the ball drops, clunk, into the machine.

The deception was minor. If she had effectively passed a counterfeit note in bed, the denomination was low—at most, a fiver. Doubtless some women faked climaxes for years with their partners; one bogus orgasm over nine years of the real thing could hardly matter. So why did she feel so sorrowful? She should be jubilant. Lawrence was home. Moreover, she had been tested last night, and her fidelity had not proved wanting. But drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina couldn’t be entirely sure if she had passed the test, or failed it.