The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

parted ways. Ramsey Acton was a nice man. Maybe he did find her fetching; she could hardly hold that against him. But Irina had described her relationship as sound, satisfying, and permanent. And Ramsey was Lawrence’s friend.

      If anyone was kissing anyone tonight, she would have to kiss him.

      Even putting the momentous matter of Lawrence aside, the prospect was fraught. Ramsey might never have thought of her in that way at all. At the very least, she risked the mortification that Estelle must have felt when she tore off her shirt and the teenage Ramsey Acton fled in dismay to his bicycle.

      Still, it could have been a small decision. Drunken, addled revellers often do things late at night for which they apologize in the morning with a reductive titter. But the minimizing of such moments was a matter for other people. For Irina knew with perfect certainty that she now stood at the most consequential crossroads of her life.

      “I almost forgot,” she said with a shaky smile. “Happy birthday.”

      

chapter two

      At the rattle of the key in the lock, Irina felt her pulse in her teeth.

      “Irina Galina!” It wasn’t precisely a sobriquet. In a nod to the rhymey assonance of the Russian language, Irina’s mother had chosen Galina for her middle name, and Lawrence loved the boisterous, comical cadence of the double-barrel. Yet tonight his pet handle rang from the hallway with a grating singsong, as if she were an adorable Muppet on Sesame Street and not a grown woman.

      Dropping his luggage, Lawrence poked his head into the living room. In a stroke, her heart fell. She thought, I have never before looked into that face and felt absolutely nothing.

      The first time Irina ever laid eyes on Lawrence—having found her posting for Russian tutoring on a Columbia message board, he’d made an appointment for his first lesson—she opened the door of her West 104th Street apartment with an imperceptible double-take. She wouldn’t pretend to love at first sight, but she did register a familiarity, as if they had met before. Though his trim physique was buried in flannel and drooping denim, the face was arresting: sharply cut, cheeks hollowed from overwork, forehead curdled, deep-set eyes as big, brown, and imploring as a bloodhound’s.

      Even then, Lawrence liked to think of himself as a self-sustaining unit, like a geodesic dome whose moisture infinitely recirculates and waters its own crops. Irina did soon grow to appreciate that Lawrence was an enterprising young man who had bootstrapped himself from the moneyed equivalent of trailer-park trash to the Ivy League. But what tore at her sympathy that first afternoon was the immediate apprehension that he was starved—that emotionally he was like one of those wild boys raised by chimps, who’d been subsisting in the forest on roots and berries. That first impression had never left her, of pleading and raw need, of an undercurrent of desperation of which Lawrence himself was unaware. Even the cockiness with which he had leaned, smirking, against the door frame had proven simply heartbreaking in the end, since his improbable incompetence at Russian justified no swagger. Over the proceeding years her sympathy had only deepened.

      Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence’s face was familiar, it was killingly so—as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She’d been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises—or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence’s face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead. Strong, unapologetic nose: nothing. Boyishly tousled hair: nothing. Pleading brown eyes—

      She couldn’t look in his eyes.

      “Hey, what’s up?” said Lawrence, kissing her perfunctorily with dry lips. “Don’t tell me you’re just sitting here, not even reading.”

      Just sitting here was exactly what she’d been doing. Her own mind having converted overnight into a home entertainment centre, she’d felt no need to reach for a book. In fact, the prospect of reading anything as demanding as a cereal box was risible.

      “Just thinking,” she said weakly. “And waiting for you to come home.”

      “Well, it’s coming up on eleven, right?” he said, returning to the hall to cart his bags to the bedroom. “Almost time for Late Review!”

      Lawrence’s voice died quickly and left dead air, as if the very acoustics of their home had gone flat. Irina struggled to right her posture, but kept sagging into the cushions of her chair. She heard bustling from the bedroom. Naturally the instant he arrived he had to unpack. Always this tyrannical obsession with order.

      When he shambled back to the living room, Irina couldn’t think of anything to say, and she wasn’t accustomed to having to “think of ” something to say to Lawrence.

      “Okay,” she croaked. As if contaminated by Ramsey’s syncopated syntax, Irina’s timing was off, and her response to Lawrence’s proposal was minutes late.

      “Okay, what?”

      “Okay, let’s watch Late Review.”

      There was too much space around their words. Irina visualized this ragged discourse as a mismatch of type-sizes and prints, like a kidnapper’s ransom note snipped jaggedly from different headlines. That she and Lawrence had ever carried a competent conversation now seemed incredible. She wondered what they used to talk about.

      “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