The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver

dastardly little scrap was capable of inducing not only bliss but blinding pain—total-turnoff, back-to-Go-do-not-collect-$200 pain—and how could anyone negotiate such a perilous node with any confidence if he didn’t have one? She had sometimes thanked her lucky stars that she was not a man, faced with this bafflingly twitchy organ whose important bit measured not a quarter of an inch across, when chances were that the woman herself couldn’t tell you how it worked. It would have been unreasonable, therefore, to take issue with the disappointment of a tad off this way or that, and given that the whole project was fundamentally impossible, Lawrence was surprisingly good at it.

      Tonight, however, Irina couldn’t catch the wave. Too much of her attention was focused on trying not to cry. And the truth was that she was fighting her own pleasure. For once, the off-ness, it didn’t have to do with his middle finger being just a smidgen too far down. It was wrong; it felt wrong, even wrong as in morally wrong. But if she didn’t come, Lawrence would know she hadn’t come, and more to the point he would know that, while he was in Sarajevo, something had happened.

      It was even more wrong, what she did, to get where she had to go; it was fiendish.

      Irina had indulged her share of fantasies. She had imagined “a” man doing this or that, or even, though she had never admitted as much to anyone else, “a” woman; there were only two sexes, after all, and to keep yourself amused you had to use all the combinations at your disposal. Yet these throwaway figures were always faceless, like mannequins with the heads lopped off. She had never before conjured one man, a real man, a man you could ring on the phone, with an address, a preference for hot over cold sake, a long face, and a black silk jacket. A tall, willowy man, with thin lips and grave eyes and a mouth of such infinite depth, with such an inexhaustible array of recesses, that kissing him was like touring the catacombs of Notre Dame. Last night it had felt less as if she’d slipped her tongue into his mouth than as if her entire body had crawled into the maw. It was a whole world, his mouth, a whole unsuspected world, and kissing him occasioned the same sense of discovery as sliding a clear drop of plain tap water under a microscope and divining whole schools of fantastic fibrillose creatures, or pointing a telescope at a patch of sky pitch-dark to the naked eye and lo, it is spattered with stars.

      She had only kissed him. So why was the modesty of her transgression such negligible solace? The skirt had twisted, but she’d kept it on. The blouse had ripped that little bit further, but she’d never let him lift it. Let him? He hadn’t tried. He had, to do Ramsey justice, tried only to stop. Which she should have also, she should have tried to stop, but she didn’t try, did she, or hard enough, because she hadn’t stopped, had she, and when you try hard enough you succeed, don’t you? You succeed. It was true that she hadn’t pulled his T-shirt from the waist of his trousers and smoothed up the flat of his bare stomach to the mounds of his chest. But she’d wanted to, and now there was no stopping her mind, her wretched, unprincipled mind, from making up for lost time. She hadn’t unclasped his thick leather belt, with its heavy pewter buckle. She hadn’t unfastened the button at his waist, or edged the zip, tooth by tooth, to its nadir. He had said, “We can’t do this,” in defiance of the fact that they clearly could because they were. Sometimes, more accurately, “We shouldn’t do this,” a point on which their agreement remained shamefully theoretical. Later, plaintively, a helpless railing at the gods for smiting the poor man with what he most perfectly could not resist and most certainly ought to: “But I like Lawrence!” Nevertheless, if firmly belted, buckled, buttoned, and zipped away, the captive baton that had rounded neatly against the socket of her hipbone had given every indication that, if the spirit was reluctant, something else was very, very willing.

      Still, she hadn’t fucked him, had she? She hadn’t fucked him, because that would be wrong. But she’d wanted to. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him more than she had ever wanted to fuck any man in her life. She wanted to fuck him, and not “make love” to him either, she wanted to fuck him. It was all that she could do to keep from shouting as much out loud, and Irina gnashed a bit of pillowcase between her teeth. She was dying to fuck him. She could see it. She could almost feel it now. She could feel it. It was not only one of the things she wanted, it was the only thing she wanted, to fuck him. That was the only thing in the whole bloody world she wanted and she would always want it, too, not just once, but over and over, to fuck him. And she knew that she’d do anything, give up everything, humiliate herself to fuck him and if he ever refused her she could see herself begging, on her knees, begging him, please—

      “Wow,” said Lawrence.

      Irina was covered in sweat, and it took a minute for her breathing to steady, and for the nuclear mushroom behind her eyes to recede. A considerate man, Lawrence was usually into ladies-first, but her enthusiasm had spurred him; he, too, had finished, whenever that was, and she hadn’t noticed.

      “I guess you really missed me,” he said, giving her a final squeeze.

      “Mmm,” she said.

      Sleep remained at bay, even as Lawrence began lightly to snore. Irina was disconsolate. Lawrence didn’t know, and he never had to know. Not about last night, and not about tonight, either. But she still held herself accountable, and not only for her perfidy on Victoria Park Road, but for the more considerable infidelity a few minutes ago in her head. That was the whole theory behind mental kindness, wasn’t it? That on any Judgment Day worth its salt, you wouldn’t merely be confronted with whom you insulted or what you stole, but with the whole unspooled videotape of your tawdry little mind from birth to lights-out. Before tonight, Irina had never pictured fucking another man—not a real man, a man they knew. Now not only had she kissed another man while her partner was trustingly out of town, but tonight she fucked him. Forget clinging to cheap literalism. She had cuckolded Lawrence in his own bed.

      Nothing could ever be the same again. How pathetic, that at Omen she had worried about “vandalizing” a deluxe sashimi platter with extra yellowtail, while remaining coolly oblivious to smashing up nine years’ worth of mutual devotion in a single reckless night. With one kiss, she had sent the greatest achievement of her life crashing to the floor in a million pieces, like the countless vases and crystal pitchers that she had clumsily upset as a girl. At forty-two, she was still clumsy, but worse, brutally so, purposely so. Yet maybe there was justice after all. As Lawrence slumbered faithfully beside her, she looked at the soft shadow of his face on the pillow, and felt stone-cold. While bull-in-a-china-shopping through this weekend, she had broken not only their covenant, but her own heart.

      A grown woman should be able to stop herself. Adulthood was about thinking things through. Now she hadn’t looked before she leapt, and everything was ruined. She had kissed her life good-bye. Even as she whipped herself for being an awful, empty, selfish shrew undeserving of the abiding love of an intelligent, loyal man like Lawrence, she was afflicted again by visions, of the black belt, the silk jacket.

      For forty-two years, Irina had lived with the consequences of everything she had ever done. She’d taken her punishment for spitefully hiding her sister’s ballet slippers the night before a recital. When Columbia had accidentally added an extra zero to her cheque for tutoring undergraduates and she spent the money, she’d paid back every dime when they caught the error, taking out a loan on her credit card at 20 percent. She had faced down the disagreeable results of every confidence betrayed, every hurtful remark blurted, every poorly drafted illustration irrevocably published for the world to see. Surely it was asking little enough, this once, to turn back the clock—not years or anything, nor months nor even weeks, but barely a day. Once again they would lean in tandem over the snooker table, inches apart, as Ramsey demonstrated how to brace the cue. Drifting uneasily to sleep, Irina looked temptation square in the face, smiled bravely, and withdrew.

      

chapter two

      To Irina’s mind, it was the most underrated of symphonies: the jingle of the ring, the hard rasp, the clop of the bolt withdrawing,