Читать книгу The Post-Birthday World - Lionel Shriver - Страница 10

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, open-Sesame. The soft brush of wood against carpet. Engrossed in her reading, she had turned down Shawn Colvin, the better to keep her ear cocked. Curled impatiently in her armchair, she had more than once brightened in a false start as neighbours tromped past the flat and on upstairs. At last there was no mistaking the bold assertion of dominion, of access, of belonging, into their escutcheon. These were the unsung peak moments of domestic life: those Pavlovian leaps of the heart on an ordinary night when your beloved walks in the door.

“Irina Galina!”

Still in the hallway, he missed the flush of her smile, though there would be others. Only Lawrence would be able to redeem a middle name otherwise a mocking misnomer. Galina Ulanova was the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina in the 1940s, and Irina’s squat pliés (before her mother gave up on her altogether) had conspicuously failed to live up to her namesake. She’d always hated that name, until Lawrence converted it first to joke, and then, if only because she now associated it with his voice, to joy.

“Lawrence Lawrensovich!” she cried, completing a responsive ritual that never grew tired. As for the sardonic patronymic, his father’s name was Lawrence also.

“Hey!” He kissed her lightly, and nodded at the stereo. “The usual tear-jerking soundtrack.”

“That’s right. I do nothing while you’re gone but sob.”

“What are you reading?”

“Memoirs of a Geisha.” She teased, “You’d hate it.”

“Oh, probably,” he said airily, returning to the hall. “What don’t I hate?”

“Come back here!”

“I was just going to unpack.”

“Sod unpacking!” While Lawrence maintained a militantly American vocabulary as a point of pride, Irina appropriated British lingo whimsically, and even, after seven years here, as a matter of right. “You’ve been gone for ten days. Come back and kiss me properly!”

Though Lawrence duly dropped his bags again and U-turned to the living room, his expression as she looped her wrists about his neck was perplexed. He tried for a closed-mouth kiss, but Irina was having none of that, and parted his lips with her tongue. So rarely had they locked mouths in these latter years that their tongues kept smashing into each other, as at ten she would bumble into partners during a pas de deux. Unpracticed, he pulled back prematurely, stringing spittle between their lips—not cinematic romance. Lawrence glanced at her askance. “What’s got into you?”

She would rather not say. She was not planning to say, and didn’t. “You call me your ‘wife.’ Well, that’s what husbands do, when they come home. They kiss their wives. Sometimes they even enjoy it.”

“It’s coming up on eleven,” he said, launching back down the hall with his bags. “Thought you might want to watch Late Review!”

He was a hard case.

When Lawrence sprawled on the couch after unpacking, she took a moment to study his face. The feeling it induced was gratitude, if only for her own restraint. Last night had been close, as close a call as ever she had encountered, and a fleeting shadow crossed her mind, of that other life in which she could only look at Lawrence in guilt and shame and frantic desperation to cover her tracks. The contrasting cleanliness would have been even more refreshing had she intended to tell him everything, but she and Lawrence had been leaving something out—it was hard to identify what—for long enough that to gush that she had nearly kissed Ramsey Acton last night and then thought better of it would have been dangerous, however wryly she recounted the moment. To recount it wryly would entail a gross distortion anyway, and unless she related the crisis as the Gethsemane it had been there’d be no point. Fully truthful, she’d make him anxious, and create a wariness of Ramsey forever after. It was Lawrence’s friendship with Ramsey as well as her own with Lawrence of which she had been mindful when she’d wished the snooker player happy birthday and then excused herself hastily, in a panic, to the loo.

Curiously, contemplating Lawrence she felt less the recognition of when they met than the mystery of his eternal unfamiliarity. There was a discomfort in Lawrence that his bluster would disguise, and in truth she was never quite sure what really went on in his head. As striking as the planes in that drastic face, they were like theatre flats that shut you from the pulleys behind the scenes. She even thought tentatively, He looks a trace melancholy.

There was no doubting that Lawrence’s was a beautiful face, or better than beautiful; fascinating. The kind you could dive into like dark water and get lost. She felt privileged to be allowed to study it, and to follow the unexplained clouds as they crossed his countenance and then dispersed with the changeability of island weather. It was peculiar how the more you got to know someone, the more you grew to appreciate how little you knew, how little you had ever known—as if progressive intimacy didn’t involve becoming ever more perceptive, but growing only more perfectly ignorant. To whatever degree she had been assembling a vivid portrait of Lawrence Trainer’s nature, its refinement was all about deconstruction. She would no sooner limn this or that quality than rub it out for being wildly inaccurate or cartoonlike in its simplicity or exaggeration. He was kind; no, sorry, he was savage. He was selflessly devoted to her; to the contrary, he held something back in a way that was decidedly selfish. He was sure of himself; uh-uh, how could she buy into that superficial confidence when it was obvious that he was achingly insecure? At once, Lawrence was kind, he was devoted, and some portion of that assurance drove to his core. Were her mental picture of Lawrence an illustration on her drawing table, it would after over nine years appear a messy smudge of erasures. Maybe by the time she was eighty-five she would approach the limit of having absolutely no idea who Lawrence was, when before she might have listed out “character traits” as if together they amounted to a man. Maybe arriving at this state of being stymied was an achievement. Maybe to live successfully alongside anyone was to come to understand not how much he was like you but how much he was not-you—and hence to allow, as we do so rarely with one another, that the person sprawled across from you on the sofa is actually there.

“What are you looking at?”

“You.”

“Seen me before.”

“Sometimes I forget what you look like.”

“Been gone ten days, not ten years.” Lawrence glanced at his watch. It wasn’t eleven.

“You haven’t asked me how it went last night, with Ramsey.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.” She sensed Lawrence had not forgotten.

“We had a much nicer time than I expected.”

“Talk about snooker? At least I’ve primed you enough that you should have been able to keep your head above water.”

“No, we hardly talked about snooker at all.”

“What a waste! Who else do you know who’s a professional snooker player? You could have at least gotten the dope—the literal dope—on Ronnie O’Sullivan.”

“Ramsey’s not only a snooker player. He’s a person.” Deftly, she chose person over man. “He seems more at ease one-on-one.”

Lawrence shrugged. “Who isn’t?”

“Lots of people.” She could see that Lawrence was jealous. But she wanted to laugh. Lawrence was jealous over Ramsey. Lawrence had title to Ramsey, and her evening with his snooker buddy was meant to have been awkward. Irina had been sent on a mission to maintain Lawrence’s own friendship with Ramsey by proxy, but was supposed to learn her lesson along the way: that she and Ramsey were chalk and cheese, and that she was incapable of engaging in the jubilant snooker banter that only Anorak Man could furnish. Ramsey was meant to have learned his lesson as well: that while Irina might be nice to look at, shapely legs know nothing of Stephen Hendry’s renown for mastery of side pockets, and at the end of the day her partner was much more fun. Alas, these lessons had not proceeded as their architect had planned.

Of course, the evening had been plenty awkward, leaving her unnerved, even shaken, but also intrigued. What was that, what had happened? Whence this improvident urge to fasten her mouth on the wrong man? After Ramsey had given her a lift home—the ride having proceeded in petrified silence—she’d battened herself into the flat, flipping the top bolt, drawing the chain, and leaning with her back against the door, palms pressed flat, as if something were trying to get in. Breathing a bit too heavily still, she had assured herself that the high voltage in that basement snooker hall must already be dissipating to static electricity. Brushing her teeth before bed, she’d envisaged the relief of waking prudently by herself in her as-good-as-marital bed this morning—having done nothing disreputable, nothing that she had to hide from Lawrence or might be tempted to divulge in a confessional rush, after which he would never quite trust her again. Surely once she was straight, sobered up, and well rested, her scandalous impulse while leaning over that fancy match-grade snooker table would shrink to drunken, stoned idiocy, to mere naughtiness, to a delusional infatuation that—there is a God—she’d had the eleventh-hour sense to squelch. In the plain light of day, she would take the strange evening under advisement, as testimony that she should stay away from drugs, that she should drink moderately, that she missed Lawrence and needed to get laid. Over coffee, she had told herself, rinsing her mouth, you’ll shake your head in dry amusement and go ha-ha-ha.

Yet sipping her cappuccino this morning, she’d regarded her near miss with awe and respect. It hadn’t shrunk. To the contrary, what had appeared beforehand as a merely diverting flirtation on Ramsey’s part, one that could prove embarrassing or inconvenient for Irina, had only grown larger as she approached it. Last night had been like groping about in a fog and expecting to bump into a low stone wall, and instead banging her nose smack against an Egyptian pyramid. Whatever she had run up against on Victoria Park Road, by accident, in innocence, and however wisely she had about-faced and soldiered in blind lockstep in the opposite direction, it was big. Briefly, a whole other life had opened up before her, and the fact that she declined to avail herself of it could not eradicate the image.

One other memory had haunted her all day. At the end of that lift home, Ramsey had drawn into the lay-by in front of this building. He should have kept the motor running, to indicate that at three he had no expectation of being asked up “for coffee”. Instead he switched off the engine, and sat for what seemed a terribly long time—though it wasn’t—hands at rest in his lap with a dead quality. They were exquisite hands, with long, sinuous fingers and slender metacarpi, more those of a musician than a sportsman. Yet they lay on his thighs with corpselike inertness, the delicate dusting of blue cue chalk creased in his cuticles, lending them a ghoulish hue. He stared straight through the windscreen, his face, too, at rest, almost empty; he might have been contemplating a list of groceries to pick up on the way home at a twenty-four-hour Tesco. Irina as well made no move to get out of the car.

But that wasn’t the memory that lingered so. After a beat, they had both resumed animation, and Ramsey got out. Irina remained seated, because she could tell he preferred to come round. He was a gentleman. He opened her door with the gravity of a chauffeur ushering the bereaved from a hearse. As ever, that hand hovered at the small of her back as she walked half a pace ahead. Yet as she rooted for her keys and proceeded to the door, she turned to find him still standing in the street—as if to take the next step onto the kerb was to cross a line in the sand. Since he remained ten feet away and gave no indication of coming closer, that took care of any discomfiting question of a farewell peck on the cheek.

The two matching Georgian squares on which Lawrence and Irina lived were registered buildings, and in order to so much as change the outside colour of the window frames from black to white their management company had to ask permission from the National Trust. (They said no.) So pristinely preserved was this estate that production companies like Merchant-Ivory often used it as a backdrop for historical films. Thus while standard aluminium London street lamps glared a rude orange, the lantern to Ramsey’s left was an iron reproduction gaslight from the nineteenth century. The bulb was flame-shaped, its glow antique. Cast in this theatrical light, golden on one side with his other half in shadow, Ramsey himself could have been acting in a period drama; his uncompromising verticality seemed a posture from an earlier age. Tall, gaunt, and darkly clad, his figure evinced a brooding solemnity she associated not with Snooker Scene but Thomas Hardy.

“Good-night,” she said. “Thank you for dinner. I had a lovely time.”

“Yes,” he said. From lack of use and too many cigarettes, his voice was dry. “I did as well. Thank you for joining me. Good-night.” He stood there. “I’d say, ‘Safe home,’ but it looks like you’re going to make it.” A flickered smile.

She should have shot him a returning smile, and let herself inside. She didn’t. She looked at him. Stock-still before the kerb, Ramsey looked back. Unlike the pause in the car, really only a moment, this suspension was a solid fifteen seconds—which once you have already exchanged “good-nights” has the touch and feel of about a year and a half. Something unsaid passed between them, and if Irina had her way it would stay unsaid, too. Forever. She turned to the door with the resolve of capping a jar of something tasty that is not very good for you, like lemon curd, after having sampled a tantalizing half-spoonful—turning the lid tight, slipping the jar onto a high shelf, and closing the cupboard.

Irina blurted unthinkingly to Lawrence, “I have a confession.”

The look of instant wariness on his face announced that Lawrence liked everything to be fine, thank you very much, that Lawrence didn’t care for “confessions,” and that Lawrence might even have wanted, if necessary, to be lied to. He could seem so industrious, but in some respects he was a lazy man.

“When we finished dinner—” she continued in the absence of any encouragement. “Oh, and you’d have hated it—”

“Do we have anything in common?”

She laughed. “I like Memoirs of a Geisha and sushi. You don’t. Anyway, it was still early when the check arrived—” It hadn’t been remotely early. Irina was damned if she understood this compulsion to revise the irrelevant side details that didn’t even matter whenever you were tinkering with the main thing. “So Ramsey asked if I wanted to go get stoned, and, I don’t know. I said sure.”

“You hate getting stoned!”

“I clammed up, as usual. I wouldn’t do it often. I don’t mind it once in a while.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where did you get stoned?”

“Well, not out on the street in Soho. Obviously, we went back to Victoria Park Road. I’ve been there often enough, with Jude.”

“They’re divorced.”

“I happen to know that.”

“So you didn’t go back there with Jude.”

“Oh, never mind! I only had two tokes, and then he played a million practice frames and totally ignored me, and then rode me home. I just thought you’d be amused. In fact, I was sure you’d say I was ‘juvenile.’ ”

“You were juvenile.”

“Thanks. That was obliging.” She had wanted to—to tell him something else of course, but like the deluxe sashimi platter there were no substitutions.

“Nuts, I don’t want to miss the beginning.” Lawrence reached for the remote.

“We’ve five minutes yet. Oh, and I almost forgot!” She sprang from her chair. “I made you a pie! Would you like a slice? Rhubarb-cream. It came out fabulous!”

“I don’t know,” he said, peering at her with the intense examination to which she had subjected Lawrence himself not long before. “I had a snack on the plane …”

“I bet you spent all your free time in the hotel gym. And we’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“That you’re home, silly!”

His head tilted. “What’s with you tonight? You’re so—bubbly. Sure that dope’s worn off?”

“What’s wrong with being glad you’re back?”

“There’s glad and glad. It’s late. You don’t usually have this much energy. Not sure I can keep up.”

“Tih ustal?” she solicited, in their tender minor key.

“Yeah, pretty whacked.” His eyes narrowed. “Have you been drinking?”

“No, not a drop!” she declared, wounded. “Though speaking of drops, would you like a beer with your pie?”

“Whatever you’re on, I guess I’d better have some, too.”

Scrutinized for signs of inebriation and disgusted with herself for having overimbibed the night before, in the kitchen Irina poured herself an abstemious half-glass of white wine. She pulled out the pie, which after chilling for a full day was nice and firm, and made picture-perfect slices that might have joined the duplicitous array of photographs over a Woolworth’s lunch counter. She shouldn’t have any herself; oddly, she’d snacked all afternoon. But countless chunks of cheddar had failed to quell a ravenous appetite, so tonight she cut herself a wide wedge, whose filling blushed a fleshy, labial pink. This she crowned with a scoop of vanilla. Lawrence’s slice she carefully made more modest, with only a dollop of ice cream. No gesture was truly generous that made him feel fat.

“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.