The Post-Birthday World. Lionel Shriver
playing her a flecked video of some famous 1985 snooker match on his flat-screen TV in the basement—which could not compete with the sport on his couch. Though she’d only managed a bite of the smoked salmon and beluga, the fish might still linger, and she’d cadged more than one of Ramsey’s Gauloises. Not taking any chances, Irina brushed her teeth. It wasn’t her custom to brush her teeth at seven, but she could always claim to have burped a little stomach acid or something. Discouragingly, even when you didn’t want to get good at this sort of thing, you got good at it anyway.
It wasn’t like Lawrence not to sniff out the wine. He had a nose like a hound. That meant he may have noticed her chin, too, and the hint of smoked fish. In the living room, his concentration on Jon Snow was excessive.
“I’ll have the popcorn in a minute!” she said brightly from the doorway. “And for dinner, how about pasta?” She’d forgotten to take the chicken out to thaw.
“Whatever.” One more report on mad cow disease could not have been that compelling. The British government had been slaughtering those poor animals by the tens of thousands for months.
“I could make the kind with dried chilies and anchovies that you especially like!”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked over and smiled, gratefully. “That would be great. Make it hot. Make it a killer.”
Pasta was far more than she need have offered. He was already accepting crumbs.
The bedclothes were seductive, but, with Lawrence up, the swaddling lost its appeal. The dream eluding capture had been unsettling—something about the Beatles in her bedroom, mocking her undersized breasts. Lawrence would sometimes let her sleep in, but whenever Irina arose and found him away to work she felt dolorous and cheated. So she crawled out of bed. Even if they didn’t chat much in the morning, percolating side by side without having to talk was its own pleasure, and it was nice to begin the day as a team.
After trotting off to buy a Telegraph, she yawned back to the kitchen in painter’s pants and a soft, floppy button-down, entering into the clock-work of their morning routine. Some people found the infinite iterations of home life tedious. For Irina, its rhythms were musical; the shriek of the grinder was the day’s opening fanfare. She welcomed a refrain to which she could almost hum along: the gurgle and choke of the stove-top espresso pot, the roar and strangle of the steamer wand as she whipped the milk to froth. If duplicating the same proportions every morning lent her coffee preparation an inevitable monotony, she wouldn’t opt for too little milk just because making her coffee badly was different. There was nothing tiresome about having established that, because Lawrence liked his toast on the dark side, the ideal setting on the toaster was halfway between 3 and 4. The properties of repetition, she considered, were complex. Up to a point, repetition was a magnifier, and elevated habit to ritual. Taken too far, it could grow erosive, and grind ritual to the mindless and rote. In kind, the pound of surf, depending on the tides, could either deposit sand on the shore, or wear it away.
While Irina was not averse to variety—sometimes the coffee was from Ethiopia, others from Uruguay—overall, variety was overrated. She preferred variation within sameness. If you were voracious for constant change, you ran out of breakfast beverages in short order. She had some appreciation for folks with a greed for sensation, who were determined, as an old boyfriend used to say, “to squeeze the orange” and press fresh experience from every day. But that way lay burnout. There were only so many experiences, really—a depressing discovery in itself—and surely you were better off trying to replicate the pleasing ones as often as possible.
Furthermore, she reflected, steaming the milk with her signature teaspoon of Horlicks (which rounded the edge off the acid), that impression of “infinite” repetition—of having coffee and toast over and over and over, numbingly into the horizon—is an illusion. Boredom with routine is a luxury, and one unfailingly brief. You are awarded a discrete number of mornings, and are well advised to savour every single awakening that isn’t marred by arthritis or Alzheimer’s. You will drink only so many cups of coffee. You will read only so many newspapers, and not one edition more. You glory in silent communion with your soul mate at the dining table a specific, quantifiable number of times—so inclined, you could count them—before, wham, from one calamity or another at least one of you isn’t there anymore. (Not so long ago, Irina had feared a falling-out, one that would shake her faith in “the whole project,” but that anxiety had been latterly eclipsed by the more powerful fear that Lawrence would die. Thus a growing sense of security in one realm begot an accelerating sense of menace in another, one in which “the whole project” was jeopardized in a more absolute regard.) Whenever Irina read those listings in news articles, of how many meals the average person totals over a lifetime, how many years he spends sleeping, how many individual instances he will go to the loo, she was never dazzled by all those digits, but humbled by their paltriness and finitude. According to the actuarial average, this was one of only seventy-eight summers that she was likely to sample, and forty-two were dispatched. It was shocking.
“Been out all last week,” said Lawrence through his toast. “Work’s really piling up. I’m going to have to get a move on.”
“Don’t bolt your food!” she chided. “And if you drink your coffee too fast, you’ll burn your throat. Why not take it easy, read a few pages of The End of Welfare?”
“I concentrate better at the office.”
“Wouldn’t you like another piece of toast? It’s that gorgeous loaf from Borough Market, and it doesn’t last. Eat it while it’s fresh.”
“Nah,” said Lawrence, wiping the crumbs from his mouth. “Gotta go.”
“Did you see this mad cow article?” Irina was shamelessly trying to keep him home a few minutes longer, as she’d once wrapped around her father’s ankle when he had another six-week shoot to coach movie dialogue in California and was trying to get out the door. “Now that the price of mince is down to 49p a pound, beef sales are starting to soar. Have you read about what CJD is like? But never mind risking a long, slow death as your brain turns to sponge if you can save a quid or two on dinner. It doesn’t make any sense! At £1.39, nobody will touch the stuff because it might kill you, but at 49p no problem?”
“Pretty good deal! How about hamburgers tonight?”
“Not on your life. We’re having chicken.”
Irina saw him to the door, and managed to stall his departure with more small-talk until she bid Lawrence a reluctant do svidanya.
She tidied up and took the chicken out to thaw, fighting a customary desolation. Even Lawrence’s standard weekday abandonment fostered a little grief.
Once settled in her studio, she had trouble focusing on the next illustration of Seeing Red. The impulse to make a phone call was insistent. Merely a courtesy call, of course. It was plain good form, was it not, when someone has treated you to a sumptuous spread, to thank him for his generosity? She could make it short.
The number in her address book was still under Jude’s name. Her hand rested on the receiver for several seconds, her heart pounding. A courtesy call. She picked up the phone. She put it back in its cradle. She picked it up again.
“Hallo?”
She put the receiver right back down. He’d sounded sleepy. It was too early. And she’d thanked him already, Saturday night, at the door. How silly, to have roused him for nothing. How much sillier, that she was shaking. At least he’d have no way of knowing who rang, only to rudely hang up. He’d assume it was one of those computer-generated phone solicitations, or a wrong number.
Yet as Irina returned to her drawing table, it came to her with a nauseous lurch that