The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver

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Irina regarded her relationship with Lawrence as a miracle. He was a devoted, funny, and intelligent man, and he loved her. She didn’t care if feminists would have maintained that she didn’t need a man; she did need a man, more than anything on earth. When Lawrence was out of town, the flat seemed to generate an echo. She would not, any longer understand why she was here, in both the general sense of alive, and the specific sense of on a Georgian square just south of London Bridge. Many were the solitary evenings that she might have worked late in her studio, but the opportunity would be wasted. She would walk from room to room. Pour a glass of wine and leave it standing. Drizzle the stainless-steel drain board with corrosive to remove the lime scale. (So mineral was London’s tap water—reputed to have cycled through more human bodies than any liquid on the planet, and leaving a white, crusty ghost behind every evaporated drop—that it might have stood sheerly upright on the counter like the Cliffs of Dover without a glass.) But suddenly the energy required to wipe the glop away would elude her. She would go to bed, and wake to a reek in the kitchen from the chemicals left to seethe.

      Shameful or not, having a man who loved her and whom she loved in return was the most important thing in Irina’s life. It wasn’t that she didn’t have strong and abiding subordinate affections, for Irina was far more sociable than Lawrence, and had put much effort into building a whole new set of comrades when they moved to London in 1990. Yet there were hungers that friends could never satisfy, and when you made the slightest bid to get them to feed this particular appetite they ran a mile. Moreover, it wasn’t that she cared nothing for her “art,” even if two histrionically self-involved parents in film and dance impelled her to couch the word in sour quotation marks. The illustrations, when they were working, were a joy. But the joy was greater when Lawrence eased up behind her while she was drawing, and purled peevishly in her ear that it would be nice to eat.

      Monogamy had been effortless. Over nine years, Irina had been attracted to one of Lawrence’s colleagues from the Blue Sky Institute for exactly half an hour—at the end of which the man rose for another round of drinks, and she noticed that his backside was pear-shaped. That was that, like a scratchiness in your throat when you don’t end up coming down with a cold.

      The period of solitary confinement while Lawrence was in Sarajevo had passed less painfully than most, but it is in the nature of the absence of pain that one fails to take note of it. Though she commonly prepared time-consuming meals for Lawrence without complaint, it was still festive to get out of fixing complete dinners with vegetables and grains. Alone, Irina had taken to skipping the whole nonsense altogether and working through the dinner hour. At around ten p.m., famished and pleasantly tired, she’d been downing a large, gooey slice of Tesco chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose very purchase was out of character; now on the eighth day of Lawrence’s Bosnian departure, she was on her third box. Later she played the sappy music that Lawrence detested—Shawn Colvin, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, all those girl singers recently in vogue who deployed excessive vibrato in the exaltation of gloom, or to declare brassily that they had no need for men and you knew they were lying. Unsmitten by Lawrence’s disapproving glare—his mother was an alcoholic—she’d been pouring herself a tiny nightcap before bed. Lawrence would never have countenanced cognac more than once a month. But he might have appreciated that the fumes of brandy swirled into heady reflections on how lucky she was to have found him, how eagerly she looked forward to his coming home.

      In all, then, the week had been self-possessed. She’d allowed herself the little indulgences of the unwatched, including the gradual, contemplative incineration of a secret packet of cigarettes. But she’d made headway on her drawings, and a woman of Irina’s slight dimensions could afford a little cake. In two days, it was back to trout and broccoli, and she’d be sure to air the living room of its incriminating nicotine taint.

      Thus when Irina woke that Saturday she was startled to discover that her smug self-possession had cracked like an egg. It was ridiculously late, after eleven, and she would normally arise by eight. Groggily she reconstructed that after that disquieting phone call with Ramsey, she had not, as she ought to have, cradled the receiver and flossed. There was, she recalled, a second brandy. In the kitchen, the chocolate-cappuccino cake was decimated. That’s right, she’d stood fretfully at the counter, slicing smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left. And oh dear, she had cranked up the volume of Little Earthquakes so high that a downstairs neighbour had arrived at the door in a bathrobe to complain. There would be hell to pay if Lawrence got wind of that, since he had only last month banged on the door below to get them to “put a lid on the salsa,” and he “didn’t mean the kind you dump on tacos, either.”

      Befuddled, Irina put on the large stove-top espresso pot. Armed with a second cup, in the studio she could do no more with the half-finished drawing than stare. It was not possible to work. Clearly her finite reserve tank in Lawrence’s absence would last exactly eight days but not ten. Suddenly a whole lonely day and night and day again threatened only a debauched wooze of back-to-back fags, entire bottles of brandy, and endless fingerfuls of crass commercial icing whose main ingredient was lard.

      Leaving for Borough Market, where she always shopped on Saturdays, she slammed the door resolutely behind her. Irina was going wobbly, and Irina had to be contained.

      At the bustling covered market near London Bridge, the crowd was as ever abrasive with American accents. While it was irrational to bristle at the company of compatriots, one of the traits that Americans seem to share is a common dislike of running into one another in foreign countries. Perhaps it was having that mirror held up, reflecting an image so often loud, aggressive, and overweight. Irina didn’t have a big problem with being American herself (everyone has to come from somewhere, and you don’t get to choose), although, a second-generation Russian on her mother’s side, she had always presumed her nationality to have an opt-out clause. Maybe she winced a bit at the familiar skirl piping from Monmouth Coffees (“La-a-a-rry, they’re out of decaf Guatema-a-la!”) because she enjoyed the feeling of Britain being somewhere else, a sensation increasingly difficult to preserve in a town colonized by Pizza Hut and Starbucks. When she overheard another Yank inquire about the location of South-wark Street, with a hard R, it was hard not to feel tarred with ignorance by association.

      On the other hand, out from under Lawrence’s influence, Irina sometimes indulged in what she privately termed mental kindness. The exercise had nothing to do with how she acted; as a woman who had grown up treated rather badly by classmates, she had developed a chronic horror of treating anyone badly herself. It didn’t have to do with what she said. It had to do with what went on in her head. There were merits to being nice in your mind—to hearing a fellow American mispronounce Southwark and deliberately choosing to think, Why don’t Brits cut us a little slack? Americans would never expect a Londoner to know that Houston was pronounced Hyooston in Texas, but Howston in Manhattan. Surely that beat grumbling sotto voce, “You stupid twat.” Of course, you could empathize or denounce your heart out within the privacy of your thoughts, and neither improve anyone’s day nor injure their feelings. Still, Irina was convinced that what went on in her mind mattered, and silently cast strangers in the gentlest possible light as a discipline. If nothing else, internal generosity made her feel better.

      Mental kindness was not a concept she had shared with Lawrence, who was more apt to indulge in the likes of mental laceration. He was awfully hard on people, especially anyone he considered of inferior intelligence. His favourite word was moron. That harshness could be contagious; Irina had to guard against it. However, she should really exercise mental kindness first and foremost on Lawrence himself.

      For one thing, Lawrence liked to keep his life simple, restricted to a few close friends and mostly to Irina, period—who had extravagantly benefited from admission to his tiny pantheon of the beloved. Scornfulness was a form of population control. Since you couldn’t invite the whole gamut of your acquaintances from your vegetable seller to your plumber for tea, you needed a filter. It just so happened that Lawrence’s filter was made of very fine mesh indeed.

      For another thing, Lawrence was a genuine example of what was once standard-issue in the States but had latterly become an endangered American type: the self-made man. Lawrence clung fiercely to his condescension because

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