The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online

highlight of my erotic life. I still have dreams about Denise, and that bench on the Common.”
Irina felt the squirm of an emotion that she was reluctant to name. In the early days with Lawrence, they, too, had whiled away hours on the battered brown couch in her apartment on West 104th Street, giving each other mouth-to-mouth. But those memories had grown too precious. At some indeterminate point in perhaps the second year they lived together she noticed that they no longer kissed—really kiss-kissed, the way Ramsey meant, even if they still pecked good-bye. It probably wasn’t fair to blame it all on Lawrence, but Irina couldn’t resist the impression that he had stopped kissing her. They had a robust sex life, and it seemed insensible to focus on the deficits of sensory window-dressing. Yet lately when she watched actors smooching in movies, Irina felt a confusing admixture of alienation—what obscure anthropological custom is this, the pressing of lips?—and jealousy.
“Kissing,” she ventured wistfully. “It’s more emotional than sex, isn’t it? Especially these days, maybe it means more.”
“I’d not want to do down shagging, but snogging might be more fun.”
In the subsequent conversational lull, Irina bore down on her sashimi platter, now pleasantly vandalized. The creamy slabs of fish lolled indolently from her chopsticks, their fleshy texture indefinably obscene. The taste was clear and unmuddied, a relief after nine days of chocolate-cappuccino cake, whose clinging coffee icing left a residual sludge.
“So how long you been married?” asked Ramsey formally.
“Well, technically,” she admitted, nibbling a giant clam, “we’re not.”
Ramsey clapped his chopsticks to his platter. “But the bloke calls you his wife !”
“I know. He says he’s forty-three, and too old to have a ‘girlfriend.’ ”
“So he marries you, don’t he? Seems sloppy.”
“Lawrence hates pomp. Anyway, these days your only real security is good intentions. You can’t get married in the same way you used to, not since the advent of ready divorce. So it doesn’t matter. I know how he feels.”
“Oi, he adores you,” said Ramsey. “It’s one of the things I like about visiting you two. You and Lawrence, you’re like—Gibraltar.”
“What about you? Going to try again?”
“Figure I about packed it in.”
“Everyone says that after a divorce, and it’s always nonsense.”
“Fair enough. But it’s crap of you to try and rob me of such a comforting fancy.”
Her loyalty to Lawrence firmly reestablished, Irina could afford to be nosy. “May I take that to mean that you aren’t seeing anyone?”
“Not so’s you’d notice.”
There was no reason to be pleased. “But aren’t snooker players constantly hit on by groupies? Like Estelle, who drag you to their rooms and tear off their shirts?”
“It ain’t as bad as football; snooker is massively a blokes’ sport. But it ain’t so different from school. I got”—he paused decorously—“options.”
“Did Jude leave you feeling burnt?”
“Jude left me knackered. Nil were never enough. We buy a house in Spain; it should have been in Tuscany. I mean, good on her, she’s a bird what has high expectations of life, and that’s brilliant. Honest to fuck, it’s bloody brilliant. Still, when you’re bollixing them expectations—when all you got to do is walk into a room to make your wife want to top herself from disappointment—well, it wears you out, like. Can’t say as I’ve totally recovered.
“Jude got ideas of things,” he speculated. “When real life didn’t come across she kept trying to yank reality round to the idea ’stead of the other way round. Know what I’m saying? Snooker trains you out of that. After every shot, it’s a whole new frame. You live with the balls the way they lay, and not the way they was a minute ago when you had the whole break planned out. She’d an idea of what it would be like to write children’s books,