world.
The hallucinations were an affliction. She was trying to watch television with her partner, to have a convivial slice of pie and a quiet nightcap—though Irina’s vodka seemed to have evaporated, and she couldn’t remember drinking it—and here were these people in her home who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, and who induced her to keep squeezing and kneading against one another the muscles of her inner thighs.
“You might not be keen on the subject matter,” said Lawrence. “But that still looks worth seeing.”
Irina tore her eyes from her shameless guests. “What’s worth seeing?”
“Boogie Nights!”
Gamely, she ventured, “Well, I wasn’t big on Flashdance, but I didn’t mind Saturday Night Fever.”
Lawrence looked incredulous. “How could you have listened to a fifteen-minute discussion of that movie and still think it bears any relation to Saturday Night Fever?”
Irina cringed. “Oh. What’s it about, then?”
“The porn industry!”
“I was a little distracted.”
“A little?”
“I told you I was tired.”
“Being short of sleep might take the edge off, but it doesn’t send most people’s IQ plummeting to below fifty.”
“Just because my mind wandered doesn’t make me an idiot. I don’t like it when you do that. You do it all the time, too. You’re always telling me I’m stupid.”
“On the contrary. I’m constantly trying to get you to have faith in your own opinions and to be more forceful about them in public. I’m constantly telling you that you are smart, and very perceptive about the world, even if you don’t have a PhD in international relations. Sound familiar?”
Irina hung her head. It did sound familiar. Lawrence could be tempted to use the M-word on Irina, but he used it indiscriminately on everyone sooner or later, so there was no purpose to taking it personally. And he had, he was right, many times urged her to be more outspoken about her views around his colleagues’ dinner tables.
“Yes, you’re usually very supportive,” she conceded.
“Why do you keep trying to pick a fight?” From Lawrence, this was brave.
“I don’t know,” she said, and with genuine puzzlement. She truly did not understand why, when she had such a powerful motivation not to rock the boat, she would keep being so provocative, or, on an evening when she was desperate not to attract close examination, she would behave in an erratic, irritable fashion sure to bring maximum scrutiny to bear. Did she want him to know? Maybe she was forcing him to play a parlour game, like Botticelli: I’m a famous person, and my name begins with big scarlet A.
Are you dead?
(As of tonight? To my marrow.)
Are you female?
(All too female, it turns out.)
Where were you last night, at five in the fucking morning?
(Only yes-or-nos. That question is cheating.)
You’re one to talk about cheating!
Or maybe Lawrence was supposed to play hangman on the back of his conference programme, and, since he would never in a million years guess that she’d have chosen F-A-I-T-H-L-E-S-S H-U-S-S-Y, proceed to noose himself, letter by letter?
They finished watching Late Review. As if having given up on her ability to absorb the most primitive factual aspects of the novel and West End play the panel went on to assess, Lawrence didn’t solicit her opinion for the rest of the show. He turned off the television, and as the tube went black Irina thought, Come back! Commonly vexed by its incessant prattle, tonight she could have watched TV for hours. Instead of getting ready for bed, Lawrence plunged back to the sofa; horribly, that clap of his palms on his knees meant he wanted to talk. Irina tried to fill the yawning silence with encouraging little smiles, though just what she was encouraging remained obscure. Apropos of nothing she said, “I’m glad you’re home,” an assertion that, while it unquestionably did constitute Lie #3, she did not throw out as duplicitous cover. Rather, she wanted it to be so, and half-hoped that if she said she was glad he was home emphatically aloud she could make it be so.
“And?” he said at last. “What else is new?”
Irina looked at him blankly. Did he suspect something? “Not much that I haven’t told you on the phone. Work,” she said starkly. “I got some work done.”
“Can I see it?”
“Eventually … When I’m finished.” She didn’t want to show the new work to Lawrence. She wanted to show it to Ramsey.
Giving up, Lawrence rose with his face averted, and she could tell he was hurt.
They chained the door, closed and locked the windows, drew the drapes, took their vitamins, flossed, and brushed their teeth. A rote regime repeated every night, on this one it took on a murderous monotony. Though having missed a night’s sleep and so exhausted she was dizzy, Irina dreaded going to bed.
Methodically, they removed their clothes, and hung them on hangers. Irina couldn’t remember the last time that she and Lawrence had torn off each other’s garments and thrown them to the floor, in a frenzy to contact bare skin. You didn’t have to do that, when you shared a bed for years, and it would be wildly unreasonable of her to sulk over the matter. Everyone understood: that’s what you did at “the beginning,” and she and Lawrence were in the middle. Or she had thought for ages that they were in the middle, though you couldn’t read your own life like a book, measuring the remaining chapters with a rifle of your thumb. Nothing prevented turning an ordinary page on an ordinary evening and suddenly finding that you weren’t in the middle but at the end.
Irina cornered the rumpled white blouse onto the hanger with more care than the rag deserved; the little tear along the collar was longer now. The navy skirt was stretched; at least she’d had the presence to glance in the mirror when she came home, and yank the button round to centre it at the back. For the first time in a day she had combed her hair, which had flown into such disarray that she’d looked electrocuted.
But she hadn’t had the presence to take a shower. She’d returned to the flat with so little time to spare. Even then, it had been hell to tear herself from the Jaguar. Climbing the depressingly steep learning curve that apparently attends the sordid departure, she’d refused to kiss Ramsey good-bye in front of this building; a neighbour might see. What little time that remained to prepare for Lawrence’s arrival she’d squandered on vodka, and on standing in the living room in a state of paralysis, hands held out from her sides as if afraid to touch a body that had suddenly developed a vicious will of its own. But now she risked having left an incriminating odour on her skin, if only from a peculiar excess of her own perspiration.
The real telltale reek arose from these thoughts in her head. They were rancid.
She was naked now, but Lawrence didn’t give her a glance. That was normal, too. You got used to each other, and the nude body lost its surprise. Still, it saddened her that her experience was of not being seen at all, much as the cool boys in seventh grade had looked straight through her before she got braces. On the other hand, maybe she did the same thing to Lawrence, whited him out with an oh, that. In the privacy of his obliviousness, she took the time to look for once, to really look at and see her partner’s bare body.
He was fit. From a military regime of spending his lunch hour at a sports club near the office, his shoulders rounded with muscle, and his thighs were solid. His penis even at rest was a better-than-respectable size. Granted, gentle love handles swelled at his waist, but she couldn’t ride him about a mere couple of pounds comprised entirely of her own pie. Besides, she gladly pardoned his minor flaws—flat feet, a thinning at the temples—for they had