The Post-Birthday World

  Her heart fell. Now she understood what she’d been afraid of. That he would lie. That, having lied, he would stick to his story, and she could never ask him again. She realized too late that she’d only have had a chance at getting a straight answer, an unsafe answer, by raising the matter breathlessly in the heat of passion (such as it was, facing the wall), and not during the prosaic lights-on of the night’s last few pages.

  Sensing her one and only opportunity slipping rapidly out of reach, she pressed, “You don’t ever have sexual fantasies?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’ve never had a sexual fantasy, of course not.”

  “Then what are they about?”

  He looked annoyed. “Sex, obviously!” If all this stuff was so obvious, it was a wonder that so many books and movies and sociological studies were squandered on its examination.

  “But you never have fantasies while we’re fucking? Only by yourself.”

  “I don’t do anything by myself, I have you.”

  The lies were stacking. She did not believe that he practiced perfect abstinence in a private regard any more than she believed that the only thing that turned him on was straight-up, by-the-book intercourse.

  “Why,” he added, “do you do anything by yourself?”

  “Why would I?” she said, with a flash of defiance. “As you said, I have you.”

  Stalemate.

  “You don’t even—” she tried again. “For example, fellatio. Which we used to do, but sort of quit. The idea of that—doesn’t appeal to you, in your head?”

  “Oh, that’s a typical adolescent thing. All boys are into it. It’s a phase.” Lawrence often took refuge in the general, in the hopes that you wouldn’t see the tree for the forest.

  “Do you wish we still did that?”

  “Not really. It makes me feel self-conscious. Serviced. And it seems a little degrading. To you. I don’t like that.”

  How very upstanding.

  “But I’m getting the impression that you do have fantasies,” he said. “When we’re fucking. Since you assume I do.”

  “Maybe.” She had instinctively withdrawn up on her pillows. While the conversation was technically about “intimacies,” the distance between their bodies was greater than usual, and they were not touching. “Once in a while.”

  “So what are they about?”

  Enter the final answer to why she’d been leery of opening the pornographic Pandora’s Box: that he would turn the tables. But, what—he would admit only to conjuring the kind of seemly relations written up in “marital guides” from the 1950s, and she would admit to fantasizing about eating pussy? She would regale him with an X-rated catalogue of sickness through the ages, thinking about a man jerking off all over her face or forcing himself into her mouth and making her drink come? Get real.

  “Well—obviously,” she said, “about fucking.”

  “Why would you fantasize about something you’re actually doing?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not called fantasizing in that case.”

  “So why did you ask me that?”

  “I was just curious,” she said morosely. “People are different.”

  “I may have my eccentricities when it comes to how I’d sort out the Irish Question, but in this area I think I’m pretty conventional.”

  Surely it was more conventional in this area to be privately consumed with forcing your woman to eat come than it was to exclusively get off on the idea of standard coitus. Irina folded on her side, and Lawrence went back to reading. After a few minutes he turned out the light, and nestled behind her, running a tentative hand over her shoulder. “It sounded as if you were in the mood.”

  “Mmm,” she hummed. If in some regards he was a total stranger, he was determined to remain one. Sexual fantasy was by its nature undignified, and—tragically—it was more important to Lawrence to be respected than to be known.

  While Irina could never prove outright that his claim to what went on in his head during sex was cover, like many a poker bluffer he had a tell, which in this case was a certain belligerent barometer needle whose pressure reading sat stolidly at zero. Lawrence the person could go through the motions of cozying up to his lover, but his penis felt a million miles away and didn’t like being lied for. No matter how insistently he rubbed against her buttocks, it refused to cooperate with its deceiving master.

  “I must be tired,” he said at last.

  “That’s okay. Maybe tomorrow,” she whispered, and turned to kiss his forehead. She could tell he was unnerved. Throughout their years together, he’d never failed to summon an erection on demand, one reason that she was fairly confident that he did have fantasies, and bloody good ones if they did the trick every time. The lone exception was the very first night they slept together. The following morning, wearing only sagging briefs with crenellated elastic, Lawrence had shuffled out to her kitchen where she was preparing coffee, and looked dejectedly at his feet. “But I like you so much!” he said plaintively. Lifting his chin, she’d smiled and said, “I think that’s the problem.” Although sexual dysfunction wasn’t usually subject to nostalgia, she cherished the memory. From Mr. Confidence, impotence had been a compliment.

  Snugging his arm reassuringly between her breasts, Irina couldn’t sleep right away. Why couldn’t he be honest about what got him off? And why did she lie to him in return?

  The self-evident answer was shame, but of a particular shade. Maybe what made “I think about you jerking off in my face” shameful wasn’t its outrageousness but its comedy. Out in the open, it sounded silly. Tacky, and not even inventive enough to make it into the Hustler letters column.

  More crucially still, perhaps the impulse to lie about what drove you privately wild (and Lawrence was not alone; previous lovers had shared what they “liked,” but almost never what they honestly thought about) derived from a prudent desire to preserve the inexplicably mystical power of these sordid vignettes. You relied on those little stories, however risible they sounded when uttered aloud, as keys to the kingdom, and the idea of eroding those keys by exposing them to the acid of ridicule threatened banishment from your own pleasure palace. Reflected in another set of eyes as laughable, ugly, clichéd, or dirty not in an arousing way but dirty as in defiling, they might cease to turn the lock. Even preserved safely in her head, Irina’s own fantasies had still systematically worn out, and lately she’d had a beastly time coming up with something new. (Whatever did one think about at eighty-five, having run through every orifice and excretion that the body affords? Even depravity is finite.) Little wonder, then, that Lawrence played his erotic cards close to his chest, or that at the very thought of disclosing those cards his penis had recoiled in horror. Still, she felt cheated. She would have found his fantasies exciting. If nothing else, she needed to borrow one.

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, IRINA insisted on attending a lecture Lawrence was giving at Churchill House. He was clearly pleased.

  Before the small crowd, Lawrence looked striking in the suit he rarely wore, and having a partner considered an expert on world affairs was gratifying. He was so articulate and serious. In her humble seat near the back, she was proud of him with a determination.

  Nevertheless, Lawrence was not a natural performer. The podium struck him midchest, and made him look short. He read verbatim from a prepared text, absent the biting asides that typified his conversation. The sentences were long and subordinated, and it was hard to follow the thread. Though he was a rash rhetorician at the dining table, here his points were qualified or hedged. She wished that he were able to integrate his irreverent, caustic character into his public persona—that he realized ideas were entertainment. It didn’t help that his subject matter was the deadly Northern Ireland. More than once after a hypnotic sequence of buzz-phrases like cross-border bodies with executive powers, confidence-building measures, and straight-faced allusion to something called the Decommissioning Commission, which sounded straight out of Monty Python, she caught herself: for the la
st five minutes she’d been trying to envision the next drawing for The Miss Ability Act, and hadn’t heard a word he’d said. She knew that the IRA had murdered nearly two thousand people, and that the prospect of such a “scumbag” strategy paying political dividends made Lawrence livid. Why didn’t that passion translate into his speech? In some intangible way, the failure was of a piece with the fact that Lawrence adored Irina herself with all his being, yet couldn’t quite translate that passion into bed.

  After the lecture the applause was polite, the questions few. Only when one gentleman inquired after the possibility that a peace settlement would lead to the wholesale release of terrorist prisoners did the real Lawrence peek through. “Those dirt-birds?” Lawrence sneered. “Not a chance! Even Tony Blair will let them rot in hell.” Irina smiled. This was the Lawrence she loved, and that one answer infused her subsequent kiss on his cheek and whisper “You were great!” with genuine feeling.

  A reception followed. Mostly Lawrence’s colleagues at Blue Sky, the attendees also included a few journalists and representatives from the Foreign Office and Irish Embassy. Irina had milled at similar gatherings before, and always felt a little in over her head. She may have been a newspaper reader, but these people were conversant with fine political details to a degree that made anything a children’s book illustrator might contribute seem obvious and dumb. She might have been happy to volunteer that Tony Blair’s cheesy “Cool Britannia” advertising campaign seemed unbecoming to the British; in a discussion about his Byzantine proposals for a “public-private partnership” in the London tube system, she was lost. When she got into a chat with some Foreign Office toff about Zimbabwe’s program to confiscate white farmland, she blanked on the name of the country’s president in the middle of a sentence, which was enough for the dignitary, after filling in “Robert Mugabe,” to excuse himself for a stuffed fig.

  Everyone asked dutifully what Irina did for a living. She could see them struggling to come up with something to say about children’s books, and in this august environment the titles she’d published—Bubble Boy Goes Camping, The World of Buh—sounded preposterous. Inquiring after a woman’s career was an obligation these days, but after going through the painful exercise four or five times she came to wish that they’d skip it.

  As a fallback, to rescue one think-tanker from flailing (“Do you use paints, or chalk?”), she managed to insert the fact that her mother hailed from the Soviet Union, at which point his face lit with gratitude. While Irina’s answers were disappointing—no, her mother was not a politically motivated defector, but a displaced person from World War II; no, she was not even Jewish—his questions became confident and more relaxed. Mention of Russia also facilitated a segue into sharing deep concerns about securing the former Soviets’ nuclear arsenal and chemical weapons, which was apparently these people’s idea of a good time.

  For pity’s sake, they were supposed to be socializing! So why did no one in the room (well, the Irish Embassy folks excepted) dare to drink more than one glass of white wine? How about a few amusing anecdotes, a little playful, meaningless banter to lighten things up? Why did they feel obliged to be so weighty and grave, as if the fate of mankind would be imperiled if instead of anguishing over violations of the no-fly zones over Iraq they speculated on whether Niles and Daphne were ever going to get together on Frasier? After about an hour of this intellectually high-protein diet, the conversational equivalent of a sixteen-ounce porterhouse, her only remaining appetite was for sweets.

  By happenstance, she discovered a magic bullet in her back pocket. Much as mention of Northern Ireland to Ramsey had triggered instantaneous narcolepsy, mention of snooker to these lofties brought their self-important discourse to a thudding halt.

  “Is that so?” said a natty dignitary, after Irina said that she and Lawrence had gone to the Grand Prix last week. “Don’t follow the sport myself. Will you excuse me?”

  As the gathering grew smaller, one merciful moment of levity ensued when someone raised the subject of Diana. In unison, the group rolled eyes, and a wag christened the crash in that Paris tunnel “the death that wouldn’t Di.” It was an enormous relief to laugh.

  Unfortunately, the reception’s population was now sufficiently reduced that it would soon become impossible to avoid talking to Bethany. Thus far Irina had managed to position herself on the opposite side of the room from Lawrence’s supple colleague, while cutting eyes covertly in the woman’s direction. As usual, the pert little vixen was decked out in a perilously short skirt and tarty heels. She had a provocative habit of propping an elbow on a jutted hip, thus supporting her wine glass. The hand with the glass lolling so languidly that she might have dropped it, she leaned over the rim to take kittenish sips. It was much too chilly in late October to be wearing a sheer black sleeveless top that revealed a lacy bra underneath, but from the looks of those arms, Bethany spent hours in the gym every week, and must have needed to get her boredom’s worth. The rippling shoulders and veined forearms reminded Irina unpleasantly of her mother, who had bequeathed to her a gut aversion to exercise fanatics of any description.

  Alas, Bethany crossed the room first, and so got credit for being the friendly one before Irina had quite resigned herself to the inevitable. “Irina, zdravstvuy!” Bethany kissed Irina on both cheeks and continued in Russian, “I save the best for last!”

  One of Irina’s eyes began to twitch. Making her own bilingualism seem small beer in comparison, this to all appearances air-headed pixie spoke four or five languages. Bethany had explained her habit of talking to Irina in Russian as giving her welcome “practice,” which was nonsense. Bethany was fluent, and she was showing off. Further, her appropriation of Russian felt impertinent. Once long enough from Brighton Beach, Irina had begun to regard Russian not as the language of 200 million Slavs, but as Lawrence’s and her secret code, and now look: Bethany had cracked it.

  Switching to English would seem standoffish. “Privyet, kak dela?” Irina said neutrally, reconciled to the fact that the rest of their chitchat would be in Russian.

  “Wasn’t Lawrence erudite?” Bethany effused. “Two years ago he would have mistaken Paisley for a pattern on drapes. Now, with Northern Ireland, he’s knowledgeable about every twist and turn. And doesn’t he look dashing! I rarely see him in a tie. I tell him, you should dress up more. He hides himself under a bushel, your husband.”

  At the word moozh, Irina flinched. But she wasn’t about to tell Bethany that she and Lawrence weren’t married. And somehow whenever Irina was at a loss for words, she blurted her most private reflections because she couldn’t locate the public ones in time. Owing to this exasperating reflex, she was prone to share her inmost thoughts with total strangers, awkward misfits, and people she disliked.

  “Da,” said Irina. “But I wish he’d employ his sense of humor more in speeches. And talk a little more off the cuff instead of reading from a script. It’s so dry.”

  “Oh, I think the political puzzle is anything but dry,” Bethany differed. “And Lawrence’s design of an agreement prospectively acceptable to both sides is very astute.”

  “Of course, I didn’t mean that it wasn’t a wonderful speech.”

  “Konyeshno,” Bethany purred with a smile. “You know, with your background, you must be so excited about Lawrence going to Russia!”

  “Russia? … Y-yes, of course I’m excited,” Irina stammered.

  “Lawrence is thrilled,” Bethany added, eyeing Irina closely. “Are you coming, too?”

  “I … don’t know, we … haven’t decided. What’s the trip for again?”

  “You know, this fact-finding mission about Chechnya. The funding came through from Carnegie over the summer. Lawrence has been working on his Russian in the office. I’ve tried to help over lunch at Pret a Manger, but as you know, he’s hopeless! He’s so intelligent, but in foreign language—”

  “He’s a moron,” Irina finished fondly in English, slipping an arm around Lawrence as he approached. She
always packed him a sandwich so that he could nosh at his computer after his workout at the gym. Since when did Lawrence eat out for lunch?

  AS THEY WALKED HOME from Blue Sky, Lawrence said heartily, “Listen, thanks for coming. I know Northern Ireland isn’t your favorite subject.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” said Irina. “Though at the reception—well, I don’t know these people. I don’t know much about politics. I hope I don’t embarrass you.”

  “Of course not! Being with an artist makes me seem more interesting, whether or not you can blather about decommissioning. And you’re smart. If that’s not enough for any of those stuffed shirts, fuck them.”

  “I liked your speech.”

  “Bethany said you thought it was humorless.”

  “I didn’t mean—!”

  “No, that’s okay. It was pretty humorless,” said Lawrence jauntily. Engaging with such a robust ego was relaxing—like dining with tumblers that won’t break if upset, and plates you can drop on the floor.

  “I realize Northern Ireland isn’t the stuff of stand-up comedy,” she said. “But you might make the odd wisecrack. You’re funny. You should use it. That’s all I meant. I didn’t mean to criticize.”

  “I don’t mind if you criticize me,” said Lawrence. “You’re right. I should loosen up a little. Was there anything else?”

  So she mentioned shortening his sentences, going lighter on the jargon, and trying to keep from scowling all the time. Unoffended, he seemed to take mental notes.

  “By the way,” he said, “I overheard some of your conversation, about PPP, and Iraq? I thought you held your own pretty well.”

  “Thanks. But I run dry on those subjects in two minutes flat. They have no idea what to ask about illustration. What else can I talk about with these people?”

  “Standard fallback? Just tell them that I’ve got a really, really big dick.”