The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

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.

      This was terrible! What had she done? Had Lawrence ever lain beside her only to experience the limbs of her body as pieces of timber, only to regard the press of her flesh as a “trap” and her own polite knocking at the sexual door as some bothersome nag, nag, nag, she would shrivel up inside to a black, fisted dried currant.

      With practiced dexterity and Irina’s numb cooperation, Lawrence slipped in from behind. It was, they had both agreed, a nice angle. But Lawrence may have had an angle on intercourse in more than one sense. Before the protocol had settled, they’d tried the usual assortment of positions. But it hit her now—how awful, that it had taken last night, of all things, to notice—that amid the several options available nothing had obliged them to choose this posture in particular and stick with it. Moreover, the selection of a front-to-back configuration as the only way they would make love for, prospectively, fifty-some years was Lawrence’s doing, and the choice wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t arbitrary—it wasn’t just how they ended up making love, willy-nilly, the way she had ended up wearing that navy skirt and raggedy white blouse to dinner last night, because that was the outfit she’d been trying on when the buzzer sounded. They’d been doing it for nearly nine years this way and she should never have allowed this position for more than a time or two and now it was too late to object and that was tragic. She had passively capitulated to Lawrence’s weakness, to his real weakness and not the kind of weakness he feared, like atrophied pectorals or abdication in an argument about appeasement of the IRA.

      This was what the coward in Lawrence had opted for: That they never kiss. That they never look at each other. That he see only the blurred profile of her head; that she always stare at the wall. That she never be permitted to meet those imploring brown eyes and watch them get what they begged for. Though in the West 104th Street days they had lit candles on the bed stand, now it was always dark, as if for good measure—as if being faced toward white plaster weren’t impersonal enough. The irony was that Lawrence loved her. But he loved her too much. He loved her so much that it was scary, and he would no more gaze into her eyes while they were fucking than stare into the face of the sun.

      Per custom, after a couple of minutes Lawrence reached quietly for her nether regions, circling and homing in on central command. His earnest manipulations were never quite right of course—never quite, exactly right. But to be fair, there was something inscrutable about that recessive twist of flesh, if only because the clitoris was built on an exasperatingly miniature scale. For a man to get a woman to come with the tip of his finger required the same specialized skill of those astonishing vendors in downtown Las Vegas, who could write your name on a grain of rice.

      Because one millimetre to the left or right equated geographic ally to the distance from Zimbabwe to the North Pole. Little wonder that many a lover from her youth who had imagined himself nearing the gush of Victoria Falls had, through no fault of his own, been paddling instead the chill Arctic