The Post-Birthday World

  “They’re understated. You game?”

  “Lady, I’m game if it means using lolly sticks for a splint.”

  She poured him a goblet of his favorite sauvignon blanc—£30 a bottle, and the last in the rack. He toasted, “Here’s mud in your eye—or something a bit more untoward,” and knocked back the pill.

  They sipped, and waited. Put in mind of the story, Irina told him about getting hold of a batch of magic mushrooms back in high school through a dubious source. She and her friend Terri had sat at Terri’s kitchen table on an evening when her parents were out. They poured hot water over the shriveled brown twists, and after a few minutes downed a cup each of the bitter, lukewarm tea. Then they sat, just like this, looking at the yellow walls, staring down the paint and waiting for the color to change, for the letters of the crocheted BLESS THIS HAPPY HOME to dance, for the refrigerator to hum show tunes. Too late to turn back from a slight anecdote whose resolution she now realized boded analogously ill, Irina said, well, nothing happened. But, she added, in the expectant interim between chugging that foul brew and resigning themselves that Irina had bought nothing more mind-altering than dried shiitakes from Chinatown, lo, the color of the walls had vibrated without help, the yellow paint pulsing exuberantly in the mellow lantern light. The cliché crochet was already dancing, and the refrigerator hum, that deep thrumming reassurance that all was well, constituted a show tune of a kind. The mushrooms were duff, but Terri’s kitchen was a revelation, and each visit to that room thereafter had filled Irina with narcotic joy.

  Meantime, it was like that, with Ramsey’s face: a revelation, with or without the middle-aged magic mushrooms. She kissed him. She said, “It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work.”

  “I know,” he said, and they finished the wine. “But I think it’s working.”

  They slipped down to the snooker hall. Ramsey switched on the light over the table; this evening the baize invited them to picnic again. The scarlet, canary, and beryl-green balls naturally psychedelic, the triangle gleamed with the secret of Terri’s kitchen: that the visual world courses with psilocybin of its own accord. Promoting bygone tournaments in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Bingen am Rhein, Ramsey’s glassed snooker posters framed the fact that he had led a fine life. It was new, and unwelcome, to begin to think of his achievements as finite and finished, but better to marvel at a job well done than to fall once more into the trap of obsessing, like his fans, over the only tournament that he’d never won. As Ramsey slowly unbuttoned her shirt, Irina grappled with the thought: This is it? These last five paltry years, this is it? Funny how you’re always waiting for your life to begin, like staring down those walls in Terri’s kitchen and waiting for them to seem beautiful when they already were. You can spend an awfully long time anticipating the arrival of what you’ve had all along, like finger-drumming for a delivery from FedEx while the package sits patiently unopened outside the door.

  They undressed each other in a leisurely fashion. Ramsey’s finely muscled abdomen flickered like a school of small fish, and his penis was what she’d once thought of as its normal size. “You know, we used to go for months,” she said, running a finger over her old friend, “and I’d never see it any smaller. I imagined that you walked down the street with this—baseball bat.”

  “I did,” he said. “Them weeks we was apart, in hotels on the road—I done terrible things to you in my head.”

  “… Do you feel all right?”

  “I feel better,” he said, moving against her, “than all right.”

  Not wanting to tax him, Irina began to roll on top, but Ramsey was having none of that. “No, pet. I’m fucking you like a man tonight, make no mistake.”

  Irina was glad. She enjoyed his towering overhead; she liked the view. It had been long enough for that protective amnesia to move in, since you don’t miss what you can’t remember; when he first pierced through to that aching spot at the top, her eyes widened in surprise.

  “Irina?” Ramsey so rarely used her name—as if it belonged to her old life with Lawrence, or perhaps to Lawrence himself. “I’m sorry about—” Shh, she hushed, but he pressed on. “I’m sorry about the rows. I’m so in love with you, but I ain’t always known—”

  Ahh.

  “—how to go about it.”

  “By and large,” she whispered, “especially large—you’ve gone about it very well indeed.” If the thought came to her that sex with Ramsey should always have been like this, the thought rebounded that it had been.

  “You’re dead decent, pet. But I been a proper toe-rag, I have. I just hope that—whenever—you find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  It would not do to say so outright, but they both knew that this was the last time. Then again, presumably for everyone there came a point that you did everything for the last time. Tie your shoes. Look at your watch.

  RAMSEY MAY HAVE BEEN a baby about head colds or constipation, but he accepted real suffering with manful stoicism—as if for years he had been getting all the whining out of his system in preparation for facing true disaster without complaint. The radiation treatments, five days a week for two solid months, gave him a painful rash on his perineum, induced bouts of diarrhea, and so debilitated him that on return from the hospital he would take to bed. Nausea being more or less constant, the meals she served him there—whose delicate seasoning did not come naturally—often went untouched. He would have been dropping weight, were it not for the androgen-blockage treatment, which made him puffy. Testosterone, apparently, fed the cancer, but it had its uses, didn’t it; under the influence of drugs intended to choke the hormone’s supply, Ramsey no longer slipped a hand up her thigh. His physique softened. The tiny fishes of abdominal muscles swam away. The subtle mounds of his chest filled to small breasts. The sharp, defined lines of his body began to blur, much as the keen cookie-cutter features of a gingerbread man loll and spread when you slide the cold dough into the oven.

  One perverse advantage to the long hours Ramsey languished in a half-sleep upstairs, Irina could now arrange to see Lawrence if she liked without detection. It was a freedom she’d gladly have abdicated, but the urge to speak with him was strong. The very fact that after all they’d been through the two were still miraculously on speaking terms seemed to promise recovery beyond the worst of traumas, if not to dangle the possibility of eternal life.

  They met in late August in a Starbucks on the Strand near his office. Ramsey had just finished one of his last radiation treatments, and would not be cognizant for hours. She and Lawrence had e-mailed each other over the months, but it had been nearly a year since they’d met at the Pierre Hotel. She registered a little shock; she’d forgotten what he looked like.

  Lawrence’s shock may have been the greater, and he made no effort to disguise it. “Irina Galina!” he cried nostalgically. “You look fucking awful.”

  Irina glanced at her hands, their dirty nails jagged, the skin newly striated with fine parallel lines. “Ramsey looks worse.”

  “Are you eating anything?”

  Apathetically, Irina had noticed the last time she bathed that her breastbone was prominent, and the skin over her stomach had slackened; she was old enough now that it was starting to crenellate. “I pick at the dinners I make for Ramsey that he’s too sick to eat, but you can understand why I might not have the appetite for polishing them off.”

  “You’re so gaunt! You can’t take care of him if you don’t take care of yourself.”

  Homilies. “I assure you that I’m not the one you should be feeling sorry for.”

  “What’s his attitude like? Because if you really resolve to buck it, mind-set can make a huge—”

  “His oncologist says to the contrary. You can apparently be as dismal and fatalistic as you want, and negativity has no effect whatsoever on the outcome.”

  Lawrence frowned. He was a great believer in the power of will, his own being prodigious. “I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t take one doctor’s—”

&nbs
p; “Just because you don’t like the idea,” she cut him off, “doesn’t make it a lie. And if you think about it, expecting someone who’s in agony to get out the pom-poms and cheerlead for the team is a little unreasonable. That said, he keeps his chin up. When it’s not sunken flat on his chest. He sleeps a lot.”

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  She shrugged. “We can’t get a straight answer. And it doesn’t matter what they tell us; all that matters is what happens. He’ll probably do chemo over the winter.”

  “Hair loss … more nausea … all that?”

  “All that.”

  “I guess he’s not playing much snooker.”

  “Funnily enough, when his energy rises, he does. He says it relaxes him. And for the first time since he was a kid, he can play for fun—for the sheer pleasure of watching the balls go in, for that cracking, glassy resonance when they meet. And with nothing riding on his game anymore, he doesn’t beat himself up when he’s off form.”

  Ramsey’s condition was such a vortex that she had to be mindful about discussing only her own concerns. “But you must tell me—how’s the marriage?” In an e-mail, she had made up for the faux pas of not asking the woman’s name in New York.

  “It’s different. From you and me. More … tempestuous, if you know what I mean.”

  She smiled. “I’m afraid I do know what you mean. Do you prefer that? Or would you rather have back that peaceable, ongoing thing we had? Quiet. Warm. The clockwork day. The passion turned to simmer and unspoken. It wasn’t so terrible, you know. Anything but.”

  “Apples and oranges.”

  “True, but there are points in life that you have to decide whether to eat an apple or an orange.”

  Lawrence squirmed. “I guess I’m not into looking backwards.”

  “I am. I go back to certain junctures and what-might-have-been my heart out.”

  “Waste of time.”

  “Probably,” she agreed cheerfully.

  “You know, even if … the worst happens. At least you’ll be well provided for.”

  The financial situation Irina had nimbly edited from her correspondence. “Not exactly,” she admitted. “Ramsey’s broke.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “All those restaurant bills he picked up when the four of us went out? Just multiply that devil-may-care by several thousand times.”

  “How are you managing?”

  “Not very well. I used up most of my savings on private medical care. And for the last six months, I’ve had to put illustration on ice.”

  Lawrence couldn’t bear to hear of misfortunes that he could not ameliorate in a practical fashion—he was a doer—and his eyes lit before she could stop him. “Well, let me help you! I could spare ten grand no problem, probably even twenty! It wouldn’t even need to be a loan. You could have it.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “No, I couldn’t. That’s incredibly sweet, but Ramsey wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would I. Don’t worry. I’ve other resources.”

  When they parted, Irina said, “Maybe I shouldn’t, but sometimes I miss you. Your steadfastness, your solidity. That’s not too traitorous, is it?”

  “Nah,” said Lawrence. He added a bit too lightly, “Hey, sometimes I miss you, too! Rhubarb-cream pie, and piles of chilies.”

  “You miss my cooking?”

  “Better than being glad to get away from it. And I didn’t mean that’s all I miss. But yeah—I do miss your cooking. If you don’t mind. You’re one of these women who takes care of people. I didn’t realize it until recently, but all women aren’t like that.”

  Irina idled down the Strand, bemused. All those years she’d thought Lawrence was taking care of her.

  AS FOR THE other resources, Irina put off making the call, but another mortgage payment was around the corner. She punched in the digits so slowly—7 … 1 … —that the system cut her off, and she had to start again.

  “Mama?” Her voice was piping. “It’s Irina…. Listen, I know we’ve had our differences, but Ramsey is very sick… . Yes, I thought she would have told you. But what she doesn’t know is that we’re having some— money troubles…. Mama, please don’t I-told-you-so, this isn’t the time! … Yes, we do still have the house, and I guess, on my own account, I could give it up, but Ramsey—he’s so ill—and he loves this place—I can’t do that to him right now. So I was wondering—do you still have the car? … I’m sorry to have to ask, but I’d like you to sell it.”

  BY FEBRUARY, ALL ANYONE else could talk about was an impending war with Iraq, but Irina was contending with another invasion, and with weapons of mass destruction that had thus far proved far more manifest than Saddam Hussein’s. When Ramsey was confined to bed after chemo treatments, it had become an art, and a discipline, to continue to discern beneath the bloat the fierce lines and narrow contours of the face she had fallen in love with. He no longer grew the stubble that had abraded her chin back in the days and betrayed her waywardness to Lawrence; turned the brownish-yellow of ancient parchment, the skin even on his arms and legs was now baby-smooth and hairless. Yet from the slight white wisps remaining on his scalp, she could infer a full, raging head of hair, as with an elegant line drawing she could imply mass with a few pencil strokes. As the months had worn on, the project had grown paleontological—with only partial impressions in a great bland slab from which to reconstruct a rising pterodactyl. When he was too weak to get up she had learned to manipulate his bedpan without embarrassment, reminding herself that we’re all leaky vessels of blood and shit and piss, if we manage to disguise that fact for as long as possible behind a locked bathroom door.

  Perhaps the hardest loss to accept was minor, or seemingly: the crème brûlée aroma that once wafted so enticingly from the base of his neck, that round, wholesome cloud of baking custard. As if the ramekin had been left in the oven on high, now the custard had curdled; the sugar had burnt. The drugs leeched off his skin with an acrid reek, and although when she kissed him the flavor was still sweet, it was sickeningly so.

  Befogged by pain meds, he never seemed to forget who she was, but he could grow hazy on other details. One day last week he had flailed out of bed, convinced that he’d only half an hour to make it to Wembley to play the Masters or he’d be disqualified. (For the delusional, he was astute; that week the Masters was indeed under way in North London, leading Irina to conclude that the snooker circuit was hardwired deep in Ramsey’s brain.) So this one afternoon stood out. His gray-blue eyes no longer flecked with white caps, but calmed to clear, penetrable pools. He was weak but lucid, and the minutes at a go when she could truly talk to mission control had grown dear.

  “Love?” he said, taking her hand as she sat on the edge of the bed. His metacarpus was papery, and poppled with premature liver spots. “There’s something I need to tell you before I ain’t able to tell you nothing.”

  She loved the way he talked: tell you nuffink. “Okay, but don’t strain yourself.”

  Defying her caution, he struggled to sit up, and she helped him arrange the pillows. “I owe you an apology, pet.”

  “If it’s about the rows—”

  “It ain’t about the rows. I been powerful selfish. Back when I first took you to Omen on my birthday”—burfday—“I ought to have paid the bill and drove you home.”

  “And not kissed me over your snooker table? But that’s one of the most wonderful memories of my life!”

  “I know I been jealous of Anorak Man,” he plowed on. “But it ain’t ’cause you been a slag. You been a good wife. I reckon in my gut I always knew you never shagged the bloke once we was married. But I still been so jealous I could taste it like metal in the mouth, like I were sucking on a 50p.”

  “But I left Lawrence for you. Why has that never been enough?”

  “’Cause you shouldn’t have done,” he said. “’Cause I know you made a mistake. You’d have been better off with Anorak Man and no two ways about it.”

  “Oh, rubbish! The pain med
s have gone to your head.”

  “Don’t contradict me, woman. I ain’t been able to say this before, ’cause it fucks me up like. But there’s one upside to this checking-out palaver—”

  She tried to protest, but he raised his hand. His strength was not likely to last, and she should probably let him talk.

  “I can say the truth.” The troof. “I’m a waster, pet. About all I could ever offer you was my dick, which you seemed to fancy for reasons I could never rightly understand, and now it’s about as sexy as a mealy banger on cold mash. What’s worse, I burnt through all the dosh, and I’ll be leaving you nothing but bills and a house in hock. I can’t even leave you a World Championship trophy, ’cause you was right: I disgraced you at the Crucible. It were all my fault—what you said around 9/11, and you was bang on. But the trouble weren’t just the drink, pet. It weren’t just the Remy. It were that I love you too much, too much to stick. So much that I done a terrible thing, pet.

  “Taking you off of Anorak Man was the biggest sin I ever done in my whole sodding life. I could see you was good together. And he was dead sound. Helped you with your work and such like, where I don’t know no children’s book editors from pork pie. He’d have took care of you, pet, and he’s clever, cleverer than me by a pole. He makes them political jokes I never get. Not even bad to look at, if you like that sort of thing. Always treat me proper as well, complimenting my game, keeping up with all them stats like my centuries and that. To thank him, I nick his bird—the bird what he loves more than the world, even if he ain’t always brilliant at showing it. But I got to have you for myself, ’cause I’m a selfish git. If there be any St. Whose-it sitting up at them pearly gates, that’ll be the first thing out of the geezer’s mouth: Why’d you take Irina? Why’d you take Irina from Anorak Man, you tosspot? How could you ruin that beautiful bird’s life?”

  The soliloquy having exhausted him, he sagged down the pillows. She patted the sweat from his brow with a washcloth, and fed him a sip of water.

  “Now, don’t you think that determination is up to me?”