“He’s only five years older than I am!”
“When he starts to fall apart, what will you have left? A drunk in your bed, and debt collectors at your door!”
“I told you. Ramsey has plenty of money!”
“For now. I have seen the way he throws it around. Just like your father! They have holes in their pockets, and for a few days it is one big party! And then you wake up one morning and they need to borrow a dollar to buy the newspaper.”
“You know, this refusal of yours to grasp how highly he’s regarded in Britain is sheer obstinacy! Ramsey Acton is a world-renowned snooker player!”
“Snookers player!” Raisa practically spit. “And that voice of his. The way he talks. So low-class. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“I love the way he talks. It has flavor!”
“My English may not be very good, but even I can tell that he talks from the gutter!” Raisa had begun to wave her hands, as if conducting her beloved Tchaikovsky. “I ought not have to tell you things like this, at your age. Marriage is practical. It is not romance only. In this way, I made a terrible mistake myself, and I cannot bear to see you repeat it! Lawrence was not rich, but he made a regular wage—”
“Leaving aside that Ramsey is rich, why does everything for you have to do with money?”
“I am not talking about money alone! Marriage is an alliance. I do not mean that it is like forming a corporation. I am not as cynical as you think. It is more like an alliance between countries—meaning that it should be to your mutual advantage! You pool your resources—”
“See? More money!”
“Not more money. The most important resources you pool are the strengths of your characters. But if you insist on seeing what I tell you as all to do with a cold, businesslike perspective on marriage, then very well: character is a commodity. Lawrence was steadfast. He had principle, determination, and discipline! Lawrence would have taken care of you for the rest of your life. Lawrence was responsible, and that man you’ve run off with is a scoundrel!” Ergo, Irina had just traded gold futures for pork bellies.
“You don’t know him at all!” Irina was trying ferociously not to cry.
“Irina, I do know what I’m talking about! Your father was beguiling. He was handsome. He was funny, with the many different voices. At the beginning, he treated me to the high life. But Charles was a weak man, an indulgent man, who never planned for the future. All he cared about was having a good time, today.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, Ramsey and I do have a wonderful time together, today, not that you’d understand what that means—”
“Oh, I have seen your wonderful time. In the parlor drunk on the floor in front of the children, there is your wonderful time—”
“And yes, I do find him attractive, more attractive than any man I’ve ever met. But he’s also very generous, and very kind—”
“Kind? This is what I hear last night? This was kindness?”
Irina bowed her head. “All right. The relationship is—volatile. But that’s because there’s so much fire in it—”
“He berated you! I may not have understood all the words—he uses so many ugly-sounding ones that I do not even wish to learn—but I recognized that tone of voice. I tell you, I never allowed your father to speak to me like that. You know he and I had our differences, but there was a line he knew he could never cross.”
“He crossed plenty of lines, including having affairs with every script girl and moon-eyed extra he could get his hands on as soon as he escaped this house. But that’s not Ramsey’s fault! Papa has nothing to do with Ramsey!”
“You change the subject because you are uncomfortable with it, yes? You want to remind me about those floozies, because you don’t want to talk about last night!” Raisa towered behind her daughter, who had turned her back. “He is abusive! Have you no pride? What I hear from across the hall, it sounded like every other house on this street. One more husband, drunk and shouting, with no class, no self-respect, and most of all no respect for his wife.”
“Look,” said Irina, turning back around. She had often dreamt of standing up to her mother, and it was about time at forty-three, but in fantasy she was never shaking. “What are you saying? That I should get a divorce? Because you know him better after he’s crossed your threshold once than I do after knowing him for seven years?”
“If you had an ounce of sense in your head, you would run back to Lawrence and beg his forgiveness. Tell him that you had one of those middle-aged—what do Americans call them, some kind of attack. That you know you have been foolish, but you would please like to come back!”
Irina looked at her mother in dull disconnect. If anyone had pride in buckets, it was Raisa, which meant that she would never rescind her judgment, no matter how many years of monogamous, temperate devotion she might ultimately witness from Rumsee Achtun. Though she and her mother had battled over a host of trivia—last year it was over the fact that Irina had dabbed her mouth with her linen napkin during the borscht course, when she thought that’s what the damned thing was for—previous confrontations were tiffs. This was not a tiff. This was a rift. In English, the words sounded alike, but the consequences could not be more contrasting.
Irina threw up her hands. “I’m sorry you don’t like him.”
She turned heel, as her mother cried at her back, “I cannot watch a tragedy unfold before my eyes and keep silent!” Apparently she didn’t share her daughter’s view that there was nothing more to say.
NOW THAT THE SHOW trial was finally over in the kitchen, Tatyana rushed past Irina in the hallway, whispering, “The kulebiaka!” Oh, dear. That’s what that smell was.
Back in the parlor, the company’s guilty expressions confirmed that the off-camera dressing-down had successfully secured the audience that Raisa required. Only Ramsey seemed oblivious, as captivated by “World Snooker Championship 1999” as the kids were bored by it. But her mother’s aggressive, accusatory tone would have translated, Russian or no, and the frequency with which “Lawrence” had punctuated his mother-in-law’s harangue and “Ramsey” cropped up in his wife’s defensive retorts would have left the subject matter anything but opaque.
As Irina stooped to put an arm around his shoulders, Ramsey kept his gaze trained on the TV. “Oi, this gizmo’s right sophisticated, pet. Backspin, side-spin… And the sound effects are the business! They even got the interruption of the odd mobile.”
On the television, she recognized the animated figure clearing the table as a Looney Tunes incarnation of her own husband. Clad in his pearl waistcoat, Cyber Ramsey was severe and unsmiling, in contrast to the zany, hyperactive character hunched rabidly over the controls. The animators had emphasized the long lines in her husband’s face and grayed his hair; alas, the younger gaming set perceived him as a wizened old coot.
Worst of all for Ramsey’s ulterior purposes, the likeness simply wasn’t good. Thus Raisa strode haughtily back into the room and glanced contemptuously at the screen. Her son-in-law had given the children a toy for Christmas only to hog it himself, and all she saw sidling around a big green table was an anonymous cartoon.
“Oi,” said Ramsey, “one of the brilliant things about a visit home for Christmas is opportunity for a nice mother-daughter chat.”
At chat, the crack of a ball rang from the game, as a recording of Dennis Taylor marveled, “Now, that’s a long deep screw from Ramsey Acton!” But Raisa gave no indication of having discerned his name in the commentary, and shot Ramsey an icy smile. “I see Irina only one time each year now she live in England. And so many changes this year, da? We have much to talk about.”
He pulled Irina with him to a stand and slipped an arm around her waist. “Glad to hear it. Good you got that over with. ’Cause”—he downed a shot with his free hand—“we got other places to be, do you know what I mean? Irina, pet, could you nip up and pack our bags? I booked us into the Plaza, and check-in’s before six p.m. or we could lose the room.”
>
Meeting Ramsey’s eyes, Irina read clearly, It’s her or me. The choice was hardly difficult at the age of forty-three, and she leapt upstairs to throw their luggage together, in a state of curious jubilation. The seditious notion that there were other places to stay in New York besides this dark, oppressive duplex in Brighton Beach had never entered her head.
When she lugged the bags downstairs, Tatyana met her at the bottom. “Irina,” she whispered. “Don’t go! At least stay for Christmas dinner. There are zakuski in the dining room, including that magnificent caviar that Ramsey bought—it will go marvelously with the blini. I was able to scrape the burnt bits off the kulebiaka, and we have a whole roast suckling pig for the main event!”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t,” said Irina. “You must have heard some of that—or all of it. I can’t ask Ramsey to stay where he’s not welcome.”
“At least try to patch things up a little, or who knows how long the stand-off could last! You know how stubborn Mama is.”
“She’s not the only one who’s stubborn. And I didn’t start it. I’m sorry, Tatyana, I know you’ve gone to an awful lot of trouble to make a beautiful meal. I hope this hasn’t ruined it. Try to give the kids a nice Christmas.”
“I just want you to know that I don’t agree,” said Tatyana, placing a hand on her sister’s arm. “I think he’s wonderful. Dashing, exuberant, funny. I’m infatuated with his accent. He sounds just like Michael Caine! And he obviously adores you. You’re very lucky. You two have something incredibly special, and I hope you’ll be happy together. I’m sorry, but he just seems to push her buttons about Papa.”
When Irina returned to the parlor, Ramsey and Raisa were faced off, Ramsey in his leather jacket, Raisa in her slender red-wool dress whose pads extended her shoulders to the breadth of her adversary’s. Tall, wiry, and flinty in bearing, these two were catastrophically alike. If nothing else, they were both prima donnas.
“Ready, pet?” Ramsey asked, slipping his hands under Irina’s arms and raising her high off the floor, then sliding her body down his in slow motion back to the carpet; the lift and controlled set-down were almost pointedly balletic. Her laughter was loose. Relinquishing any desire to please was so relaxing that she wondered why she didn’t give up on the futile project more often.
“I so sorry you have to leave,” Raisa told Ramsey.
“Well, I don’t get much time off this season, and—not to seem ungrateful for your hospitality, Mum—I ain’t spending the whole holiday worrying about whether my chair’s in them special dents in the carpet. Ta!”
Taking a ready Gauloise from behind his ear, Ramsey turned with his fag dangling unlit from his lips while Irina said softly, “Bye, Mama,” kissing her hastily on the cheek. As he reached for his bag, Ramsey exclaimed, “Blimey, almost forgot!” in the tone of having done no such thing. Raisa was not the only one in this house with a sense of theater. He rooted through his jacket pocket, and tossed Raisa a set of keys. “Happy Christmas! It’s in that multilevel round the corner. I bought you a car.”
As he tucked a parking-lot ticket into the breast pocket of her dress, Raisa’s face would have looked no less stricken had Ramsey socked her in the gob. As they left the house, Irina’s mind reeled with several certainties: that whatever model awaited her mother in that garage, it was aggressively, pugnaciously classy; that it was aggressively, pugnaciously costly; that—Raisa having not dropped word-one about wanting a car—aside from brute expenditure, the gesture was designed to signify absolutely nothing; that her mother would never, ever thank Ramsey for such an extravagant present; and that she would never give it back.
ONCE THEY DISEMBARKED FROM the taxi on 59th Street, there proceeded the most delightful Christmas of Irina’s life. After Ramsey threw clothes onto the furniture of their opulent room because he could, and went around jacking up the thermostat and jerking chairs goofily out of their depressions in the carpet, they knocked back with a bottle of champagne to watch It’s a Wonderful Life naked under the spread. Thereafter, they dressed to the nines, and headed to the Oak Bar for a little more champagne and oysters on the half shell. Rather than opt for the hotel’s conventional Christmas dinner, they celebrated release from heavy fare like pirozhki and salmon in charred pastry by preferring plump Gulf shrimp with fresh horseradish and crunchy patty pans. Irina regaled Ramsey with a bitterly comic translation of the scene with her mother in the kitchen, and segued to a long reflection about her father. As one of those rare Christmas presents that you actually adore, for the entire evening Ramsey never once mentioned snooker.
Back upstairs by one a.m., Ramsey drew out his Discman and asked her to dance.
“Oh, I can’t,” said Irina. “Really, I’m awkward and I have no sense of time and I’d probably break a lamp. Ask Mama.”
“I reckon I’ll not ask your mum another bloody thing in my life. Get your bum over here.”
“Ramsey, no! I’ve had too much to drink, and I’d just embarrass myself.”
Undeterred, Ramsey put on John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and drafted her into a jig. Though at first she couldn’t stop laughing, at length she allowed the exercise to glide from farce to festival. All her life she had spurned school sock-hops, and fled to the kitchen when party hosts cleared a space by the stereo. Through the 80s, when the very granite of Manhattan trembled from gyrating clubs, Irina had preferred quiet dates at bistros. At weddings, she was wont to pinion a nearby guest with earnest conversation like pinning his hand to the table with a steak knife, in desperation to avoid being hauled to the floor. She couldn’t dance, she hated to dance, she did not know how.
Yet in their Plaza hotel room, no one was watching but Ramsey, who, last night aside, really was kind, and would never hold her tentative first efforts up to ridicule. He himself was uninhibited, careering with a wacky devil-may-care that granted his partner permission to try any ludicrous move in return. He twirled his forefingers in the droll circles of a Motown chorus, jagged a raised knee with a hip that looked dislocated, unfurled her from his clasp only to roll her back again like a curled piece of paper, and most of all, never let her go. Adopting an eclecticism that would have appalled the likes of Raisa and Tatyana, they mixed up jitterbug shimmies, disco turns, tango thrusts, rock-and-roll boogie, and even, in a nod to the nightmare they had jettisoned that afternoon, the odd arabesque. As their DJ, Ramsey followed with Duke Ellington and Sonny Rollins, moved on to Glenn Miller, threw in a dash of R&B with Captain Beefheart, and rounded up with a salacious Sly and the Family Stone at a volume that made Irina grateful the walls of the Plaza were bank-vault thick. Something about the common rhythm they had already discovered in bed translated to the floor beside it, and by the time Ramsey had slipped into the Discman his last selection, a garnish of modernity in Ice-T, Irina was beginning to wonder if as a rule of thumb you shouldn’t so much look to marry your perfect fuck as your perfect dance partner—although there was no harm in marrying both.
15
THIS YEAR, IT WAS Irina who reminded Lawrence of Ramsey’s birthday, and Lawrence who dragged his feet. He was awfully busy. Due to some old coincidence, did they have to get together with Ramsey Acton every 6th of July until the end of time?
“Are you saying you want to drop him?” she asked incredulously.
“Nothing as active as that,” Lawrence said. “Just not pick him up again.”
“Not picking him up again is the way you drop people.”
“But he can be a little tedious, can’t he? The only thing he knows how to talk about is snooker.”
“You used to love talking about snooker!”
Lawrence shrugged. “Maybe I’ve said all I’ve got to say.” He pretended to go back to reading. Irina stood before his couch until he glanced wearily up from the page. “Why do you look horrified?”
“We’ve known him for years. Is that the way it’s going to be with me? Suddenly that’s it, do svidanya, because you’ve said all you’ve got to say?” Irina had an anguished appre
hension that this was indeed what happened to some couples, and that the experience of simply running out of script could come upon you with no warning.
“I’m discussing Ramsey’s birthday, and suddenly you’re shrieking about my leaving you or something. Dial it back.”
“We have a friendship. He has every reason to believe that we care about him. And Ramsey is a nice man.”
“Oh, who’s not nice.”
“You’re not, at the moment.”
“Jesus, last year I had to put a gun to your head to even call the guy!”
True, last year she had met Ramsey in Lawrence’s stead, to maintain his romance with a snooker celeb, but the evening had turned into one long Speak for yourself, John. After a few months of tug-of-war Lawrence had lost ownership of Ramsey Acton, decisively so in Bournemouth. Be it Ramsey or Russia, Lawrence required superior if not sole possession or he wasn’t interested. Thus his veto of another birthday dinner translated: If I can’t have Ramsey, then you can’t, either. But she would not completely relinquish the man, who had become like those two or three sneaked cigarettes a week—rationed in cautious quantities, perfectly harmless.
“That’s right,” said Irina, “and you said that if I didn’t ring him he’d be hurt.”
“Finally over your own dead body you make a date, then tell me later you two caroused all night and got stoned off your heads.”
She’d hoped he’d forgotten. “That’s not what I said.”