IT WAS AT IRINA’S urging that she and Lawrence watched the 2001 championship final between Ramsey and Ronnie O’Sullivan, for her partner’s romance with snooker seemed permanently to have waned. Granted, they’d not seen Ramsey for three and a half years, and he probably qualified as no more than someone they used to know. As they watched the first evening session, she wondered if Ramsey had found another woman yet, and couldn’t shake the hope, both absurd and unkind, that he hadn’t. Ramsey had become a funny mental dependency, as if another life were running alongside this one, perhaps no better or worse but certainly different, and she liked to reach out and touch it from time to time, like dipping her hand into the river from a canoe.
Ramsey was, as ever, impeccably turned out—closely shaven, not a hair out of place, his gear pressed, his pert dickie-bow in perfect parallel with the floor. The loutish-featured O’Sullivan may have been touted as a Reformed Character, but even in biddably traditional attire couldn’t help but look in comparison like a slob. Ramsey’s motions at the table were sure, smooth, and steady, and while they both played fast, Ramsey seemed brisk, O’Sullivan impatient. Ramsey sank superb pots, but never at the sacrifice of position, whereas Ronnie couldn’t resist spectacular shots designed to impress that netted him a single point. Though O’Sullivan was never overtly rude, the older player’s exquisite deportment—Ramsey always tapped the rail appreciatively whenever his opponent racked up a fine clearance—seemed to drive the younger man to a contrasting churlishness. In his chair, the Rocket slouched, allowing his expression to wash with boredom or annoyance. He spent one of Ramsey’s more stylish clearances with a towel draped over his face—presumably to retain concentration, but more likely to keep from having to watch. Though Clive Everton observed that Ramsey’s ranking had progressively deteriorated over the last three years, Irina had a gut sense that their old friend had finally arrived at his day in the sun.
“I think he’s going to win,” Irina predicted at the end of the first night, with Ramsey up ten frames to six. For Irina, the commercial success of Ivan and the Terribles had issued in a sumptuous era of well-wishing and optimism on others’ accounts.
“No way,” said Lawrence, whose brief newscast celebrity around the Good Friday Agreement had effected no such transformation. “The poor bastard’s cursed. And how old is the guy now? Has to be past fifty. It’s over.”
The bookies agreed with Lawrence, and before the final had put the odds of Ramsey’s victory at eight to one. Yet Ramsey held his lead the next afternoon, and went into the fourth session fourteen frames to ten.
She cajoled Lawrence into watching the last session together the following night. O’Sullivan wasn’t being a baby for once, and as Everton said “dug down deep”; before the interval, he narrowed Ramsey’s advantage to fifteen-thirteen. Not conventionally engaged by sport of any description, Irina was now so excited that she couldn’t sit still, bouncing up from her armchair to pace the carpet with leonine restiveness. Once the score notched to sixteen-fifteen, and then drew even at sixteen apiece, she became so agitated that the game was almost too painful to watch.
“What’s with you?” asked Lawrence from his sofa. “It’s only a snooker match.”
“Time was you’d never have said only a snooker match, milyi. Besides, this is electrifying as personal drama. Ramsey must have been playing this game for over thirty years. It’s his life’s dream to win this tournament. Now he’s within two frames… One frame! It’s seventeen-sixteen! Can you believe this?”
Irina was literally jumping up and down, and the television audience was doing the same. Ramsey’s boosters may have reduced in number over the years, but every snooker fan knew the story of Ramsey the Runner-Up. Like Lawrence, most accepted the myth that he could never win this title, that he was cursed. The prospect of Swish breaking the spell, like Sleeping Beauty discovering the alarm clock, produced a groundswell of exhilaration even among the members of the audience wearing “Rother-ham for the Rocket!” T-shirts.
Along with the crowd, Irina groaned and covered her face with her hands when Ramsey missed an easy red, and let O’Sullivan in. This was exactly the kind of sudden, inexplicable lapse under pressure that had lost him six finals before. As O’Sullivan cleaned up to level the match again, Lawrence chided, “I’m telling you, Ramsey can’t do it. Something in him must not want to. His whole identity is wrapped around being this not-quite. If he ever took the championship, he’d wake up the next morning having no idea who he was. Just you watch. He’ll botch it.”
“Wanna bet?” said Irina. “A thousand dollars.”
“Get out.”
“One large.” That ample advance on Ivan and the Terribles, with another six-figure contract in the pipeline, was teaching her the heady joys of profligacy.
“Okay!” said Lawrence. “But you’ll be sorry.”
Irina was already not sorry. Even if Ramsey did bollix the deciding frame, marshaling such fierce belief in their old friend felt splendid, and seemed to improve his karmic odds.
“Now, that is unfortunate!” intoned Clive Everton. O’Sullivan was feeling the pressure himself, and his heavy-handed break-off had left a red available to the corner pocket. He sulked back to his chair, where it was best he got comfortable, for Ramsey not only potted that red, but proceeded to pick its little friends off the pack as if denuding a cluster of grapes on a summer afternoon.
For the spectator, there are two kinds of sportsmen: those you trust, and those you don’t. It is likely the divide correlates with whether the sportsman trusts himself, but in any event watching a player in whom you have imperfect faith fosters anxiety. Watching the kind who has it, whatever it is, and knows he has it, is relaxing. Indeed, certain characters so consistently engender an unswerving confidence in their audience that all the tension leaves the game, and they attain a reputation as dull. Given his history, Irina would have classified Ramsey Acton, in this situation, as the kind of player who made you nervous.
Yet with $1,000 riding on his performance, as the break built to forty, forty-one, forty-eight, Irina resumed a comfortable loll in her armchair. As he approached the magic number at which O’Sullivan would need snookers, her apprehension should have been building unbearably; yet at sixty-four, sixty-five, and seventy-two Irina felt only more languidly at her ease. At seventy-three, Ramsey needed one more color to have victory assured, and he potted it. Just like that. Just as she knew he would. It was the easiest grand she’d ever trousered.
The crowd clapped wildly. Irina smiled serenely at Lawrence. The referee hushed the audience. Its result may have been conclusive, but the frame wasn’t over.
“I say,” said Clive Everton. “Ramsey Acton may have a chance at a 147!”
Snooker’s Holy Grail, unusual at the practice table and supremely rare under tournament conditions, a 147, or maximum, is the highest score it is possible to rack up on a single break. Indeed, Ramsey had played off the black for the entire visit so far, and meanwhile the remaining reds were spread like a whore’s legs. Thus Ramsey Acton purled around the table with the luxuriousness of having already won, and once he exceeded 100 the audience went bananas. O’Sullivan’s fans had forsaken their idol wholesale; the largely working-class crowd had abandoned the sport’s hushed, courtly conceit and reverted to type. The referee seemed to have resigned himself that hounding this rough-and-tumble rabble into silence would be like trying to shove a pit bull into a dress. Oh, a 147 was just icing on the cake; it wasn’t necessary. But then, neither was snooker.
When the last black went in to complete the maximum, the crowd erupted, and the cheers and catcalls lasted two or three minutes. The news had been dominated for months by awful public barbecues to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, whole herds crisping on hillsides while stalwart Yorkshire farmers wept like babies and rural suicides mounted; how rarely these days did anything lovely air on television.
“I wonder if it isn’t a little bit of a letdown,” Irina mused. “Getting just what you’ve always wanted.”
“Losing would be more of a letdown,” said Lawrence. “Ask me. I just lost a thousand bucks.”
“Donate it to the charity of your choice. There must be some fund for retired snooker players down on their luck…. Look at him! It’s so touching. He’s not blubbing, and he’s doing a good job of holding them back—but I swear he has tears in his eyes.”
Academically, she recognized how important it would be for Ramsey to have a woman with whom to share the crowning achievement of his career. But when in the hubbub following the trophy presentation no lithe, glowing little number threw her arms around that lean race-horse neck, Irina was privately pleased.
THE ATTAINMENT OF ANY life’s dream was doubtless seeded with an insidious emptiness, a now-what? sensation sufficiently unpleasant as to induce a retarded nostalgia for the days when you were still tantalized by what you thought you wanted. Yet Ramsey surely preferred contending with the fact that the silver urn he clutched that night at the Crucible was just a cold, useless hunk of metal to the alternative whereby the useless hunk of metal belonged to someone else. In kind, even if in the moment the accolade might feel no more rewarding than the “moon ring” at the bottom of Cap’n Crunch, Irina herself had always yearned to win a prize. The longing felt childish. It was childish. In fact, it was the very grade-school nature of the yen—like Spacer’s pining to win a blue ribbon in his sack race—that made it so tenacious.
So when the call came in from her editor at Transworld an afternoon in latter May informing her that Ivan and the Terribles had been short-listed for the Lewis Carroll Medal, Irina acted like a ten-year-old. She twirled around her studio. She cried, “Oh, rah, rah, rah!” and did not care if the neighbors could hear. But none of this gallivanting was doing it for her; the experience still wasn’t quite happening. The news would only arrive in a profound sense once she delivered it to Lawrence.
The telephone seemed wasteful. She grabbed her jacket, and flew out the door. On the way to Blue Sky, her stride grew so long and light that for short distances she broke into a run. In the lobby of Churchill its connotations cold anHouse, she begged the receptionist not to forewarn her “husband” of her presence—everyone here thought they were married—because she wanted to surprise him.
She surprised him. The door to his office was closed, but no de facto wife should have to knock.
Something wasn’t quite right. Surely those two ought to have been sitting on either side of his desk, or contemplating his computer screen. Even if they were conferring together on the couch, shouldn’t there be papers? Although it wasn’t that the duo was too cozy; by the time she got the heavy door open, they were sitting bizarrely far apart.
“What are you doing here?” asked Lawrence in a strangled voice.
“Funny,” said Irina lightly. “I was about to ask the same thing about Bethany.”
“Oh, just consulting about work stuff,” said Bethany brightly, standing and smoothing her tiny skirt. “It would bore you. Ta, Yasha!” With a blazing smile at Irina, the little tart swished out the door.
Irina had arrived with wonderful news. In willing that its delivery would be wonderful, she struck out the last sixty seconds in her head with a dark line of Magic Marker, like one of those redacted manuscripts of declassified documents issued to satisfy Freedom of Information requests. She even deleted the fact that Bethany had a special name for Lawrence—a Russian diminutive for a middle name with which Bethany had no reason to be acquainted. Bethany and Lawrence were colleagues. These people were surely in and out of each other’s offices all the time.
Given the cheerful nature of her errand, she even managed to put out of mind her running grudge over the fact that the illustration from Seeing Red that she’d framed in glass for Lawrence’s Christmas present two and a half years ago was still propped against the wall—though she had lugged it here herself. Blue Sky was fussy about not putting holes in the plaster, and Lawrence had never gotten round to asking the housekeeping staff to run a wire from the cornice.
So she told him. He hugged her, and proposed a fabulously expensive dinner to celebrate that very night. He declared his utter confidence that she would win. Only in his arms did the honor come home.
ALTHOUGH WHILE DRESSING FOR the reception in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue Irina was understandably nervous, the scale of her anxiety seemed disproportionate. Try as she might to protect herself from getting her hopes up, she knew in her gut that Ivan and the Terribles would clinch this prize. So the source of her fretfulness while she wrestled with her unruly hair had little to do with girding for defeat.
By unhappy coincidence, Jude Hartford was also short-listed for the Lewis Carroll. Ever since Irina had spotted her name in the Telegraph article about the award she’d been trying to fashion an attitude with which to confront the woman. Curiously, Irina couldn’t cite a single romantic breakup over which she still harbored strong feelings of any kind—be they good-riddance or good wishes. By contrast, the rare friendship that had blown up in her face left a jagged edge that for years later she could still run her tongue over like a broken tooth. Friendships aren’t supposed to take on the apocalyptic structure of romance; like old soldiers, they might fade away, but never die. Breakups like the one Irina went through with Jude, replete with the harsh words and total renunciations of a lovers’ quarrel, defied the natural order. Mortal clashes between friends have about them a savage gratuitousness; romantic partings, in retrospect, a soothing quality of the inevitable. Thus Irina’s umbrage even after five years still felt raw.
“Hey, that is one hot dress,” said Lawrence.
Irina bit her lip. “You don’t think it’s too short?”
“Hell, no. You’ve got a whole two inches before the hem hits crotch.”
“It’s more low-cut than I realized in the store. Maybe I should wear that little black jacket.”
“Don’t. You look sexy.”
Irina was surprised; he’d usually say cute. “I thought it makes you uneasy when I look sexy.”
“That’s a load of horseshit. Where’d you get that idea?”
“You don’t like it when I dress up.”
“I don’t like it when I have to dress up.”
“Speaking of which…” She gave the familiar dark Dockers and threadbare button-down with no tie a disparaging once-over. He was such a handsome man if he just stood up straight and made an effort! “I hate to break it to you, but I think most of the men will be wearing tuxes.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to feel sorry for them, then. Are you edgy about seeing Jude?”
“A little,” she admitted. “I haven’t a clue what to say to her.”
“Tell her to go fuck herself. Tell her that you’re more talented than she is, and smarter than she is, and that you’re incredibly relieved not to have to listen to her tired liberal bromides at dinner anymore. Tell her that you’re going to win tonight, and that The Love Diet is the most pathetic piece of PC crap you’ve ever seen. Just because she can’t keep her hands off the Twinkies doesn’t mean that every pork-wad kid in the country should lu-u-v themselves, and that it’s okay to be overweight.”
“Actually, the book is practically Atkins for eight-year-olds. But thanks for your diplomatic advice.” Lawrence had a way of siding with Irina in such extremity that he drove her to her own adversary’s defense.
Indeed, Lawrence hadn’t read the competition carefully. Jude’s storybook was about a chunky little girl who grows so smitten by a boy at school that she cannot eat. Never a worthy object for her affections, the little boy is unremittingly chilly and difficult. Yet meantime the protagonist slims down so in her lovelorn state that every other boy in her class is stuck on her—happy ending.
TRAILING APPREHENSIVELY BEHIND LAWRENCE, Irina entered the events room to mark Jude’s presence at the far end by the drinks table—in a form-fitting evening dress, looking amazingly svelte. But it wasn’t sighting Jude that hit her midsection like a right hook.
The sensation recalled Irina’s real-life version of Jude’s little storybook. In junior high school before her braces came off, she would often walk into the cafeteria and spot the handsome student-council president, on whom she’d had a torturous crush for three years straight. She’d sit nearby but never at the same table, straining to overhear his conversation while feeling so self-conscious of her own that she could barely ask her girlfriend what she thought of the tuna-melt. In those days, it was rational to be anxious—of drawing attention to herself; of not drawing attention to herself. Yet at forty-six, she could not put her finger on why this unexpected apparition in the Pierre Hotel would likewise stab her stomach to the point of nausea. In any event, that tall, tuxedoed gentleman at Jude Hartford’s side was none other than Ramsey Acton.
As she and Lawrence advanced, neither of their old friends seemed to notice them, so intently were they engaged with each other in hushed, urgent-sounding tones. Ramsey’s hand on Jude’s arm confirmed that they’d gotten back together. Irina felt a curious little sag.
Jude looked up with a distracted, harried expression. “Oh, hi there!” Her delivery was aerated as ever, but her eyes were vacant. They did the whole cheek-kissing thing; pecking Ramsey, Irina lingered to inhale.
“Just like old times!” Irina said with nervous gaiety. “Our old foursome is back.”
“Yes, it’s quite a coincidence,” said Jude aimlessly.
“Well, maybe it isn’t,” said Irina, straining to be generous. “Maybe it’s just talent—both being talented… You know, cream rising to the top.” She hated herself for acting as if all that acrimony had never happened. But the twist of Jude’s face implied that she truly couldn’t recall the ugliness of their last encounter, being much more absorbed by some misery in the present.
“Call me prejudiced,” said Lawrence, “but I think Ivan and the Terribles is fantastic.” He gripped Irina’s waist.
In turn, Ramsey slid an arm around Jude’s shoulder, which he massaged with his left hand as if kneading a dry, resistant mass of pasta dough. Jude had never seemed very sensual—she was too tense, too highly strung—and didn’t appear to be enjoying the attentions. He had beautiful hands. Irina thought, What a waste.
“So, you two”—she nodded at the couple—“are giving it another go?”
Jude managed an anemic smile. “Authors are prone to sequels.”
“Not a promising analogy, pet,” Ramsey chided. “Your average sequel is never near as good as the original.”
“To be honest,” Jude said with that faintly hysterical laugh, rearranging her stance in such a way as to shuck Ramsey’s arm, “having a hard time topping your own success is generally only a problem when you had a success to begin with!”
Irina was not sure what they had walked in on, and tried to turn to a neutral subject. “I’ve missed our birthday dinners,” she told Ramsey.
“I have as well,” he said with feeling. “And didn’t you miss a corker last summer.”
“I pulled out all the stops for Ramsey’s fiftieth,” said Jude. “Hired a room in the Savoy. Invited the whole snooker crowd, and not a few of the haut monde. To be quite honest, it was terribly dear! But everyone— everyone else—said it was the occasion of the year.”
“I don’t fancy a lot of fuss,” Ramsey muttered.
“Yes, sweetie,” said Jude with a pressed-lip smile. “Several thousand quid later, I got that message loud and clear.”
“Hey, Ramsey!” said Lawrence, clapping the snooker player’s shoulder. “Congratulations on winning the championship!”
“Cheers, mate,” said Ramsey lightly.
“Lawrence and I watched the final on the BBC,” said Irina, omitting the fact that Lawrence had lobbied for CSI instead. “It was wonderful. And finishing with a 147!”
“Don’t happen every day,” he conceded. “Shame our friend Jude here had to wash her hair.”
“I had previous commitments!” said Jude with exasperation.
“You didn’t go?” asked Irina in astonishment.
“I’d have been there if I could have been. Though to be honest, snooker’s never been my cup of tea.”
“Oh, I’ve only gotten more interested!” said Irina passionately.
“It’s a bit different when you’ve not much choice.”
Now a bona fide fan, Irina was mystified how Jude could hook up with a snooker pro and be so wearied by the sport. If she were with Ramsey Acton, she’d go to every match! But Irina had resolved to be gracious. “By the way, Jude—congratulations yourself!”
“Sorry?” Jude seemed to have forgotten why she was here.
“For being short-listed for the Lewis Carroll, of course.”
“Oh, that!” Jude said absently. “Well, mine can’t possibly win.”
“Why not?”
“Just a presentiment.” Jude looked worn out. Round patches of rouge stood out like tiddlywinks; underneath her cheeks were surely drawn. “Yours, though. It has a proper chance. The illustrations are very clever.”
Clever was a mile from good, its connotations cold and empty, and the conflict from five years ago came back in a rush.
“I see you’ve moved on to computer graphics,” Jude added.
“That’s right,” said Irina coolly. “The book’s sold surprisingly well.”
“Yes,” said Jude with returning coolness. “It would.”
“I think we all need a drink,” said Irina.
As they filtered toward the wine, she fell into step with Ramsey, and drew him aside. “After all you told me at Omen,” she said quietly, “I’m surprised you’re back with Jude.”
“At my age, I’m too knackered to make a new mistake. It’s easier to make the same one.”
“But are things all right between you two?” Just as in Bournemouth four years before, they fell into a ready collusion. “She seems—jumpy.”
“You mean, she’s acting like a right cow. This spot of good fortune—well, success don’t always have an improving effect on people.”
“You should know. You must feel so satisfied. Finally winning that title.”
“Remember what else I told you that night?” He knocked back his wine in a gulp. “I’m never satisfied. Get one thing you want, and it clears the way to seeing what else you’re missing.”
She met his eyes. “And what would that be?”
He looked back, but didn’t answer. “You know, something tells me you’re going to win this medal tonight.”
He really shouldn’t have said such a thing to Jude’s competition. “I bet you’ve told the same thing to every girl on the short-list, you cad!”
He didn’t smile. “I ain’t no womanizer. You should know better.”
Their locked gazes had grown uncomfortable, but if she broke eye contact now she’d seem a coward. “Have you read Ivan?”
“I read it.”
“Did you understand it?”
“I understood it.” As if to demonstrate as much, he didn’t deliver his next sentence as a non sequitur. “Irina, me and Jude’s planning to get remarried.”
Irina glanced at her toes before looking up again. “I guess that’s very good news.” She shouldn’t have appended the I guess, but she couldn’t help it.
“Leastways, maybe I’ll get the house in Spain back,” he said, but the effort at leavening failed. “And you’re married anyway, more or less. What else is a bloke to do? I reckon you’re greedy, pet. Like to have your cake, and make eyes at it as well.”
It was the closest either had come to acknowledging that temptation on his forty-seventh birthday, and the moment was so ungainly that Irina was grateful for the intrusion behind her. “Irina Galina!” Only one person in the world pronounced that double-barrel without irony, and Irina turned to hug her mother with much fanfare.
“Pozdravlyayu tebya!” Though Raisa congratulated her daughter, her plunging crimson gown indicated a little confusion as to which member of the family was the star of the hour. “A eto shtoza krasavets?”
“The handsome man is Ramsey Acton, an old friend of mine. You remember, Lawrence and I mentioned him a while ago. The snooker player.”
Irina was pulled away to meet the judges and press, and left her mother pulling the whole Passionate Russian Number on Ramsey, her hands gesticulating so broadly that she might easily have upended a passing platter of shrimp toast. Putting on a great show of fascination with snooker, Raisa laid on the Slavic accent with a trowel. As a ghastly alternative future flashed before her eyes, Irina was suddenly grateful that Ramsey was engaged.
Thereafter, Irina found herself adjacent to an aristocratic man whose aura of being at sea stirred her compassion. She asked what had brought him here.
“I happened to be in New York for a board meeting, and Jude Hartford asked me to attend,” he said in a plummy British accent. “But the lady’s barely said two words to me. And that snooker chap she’s with—bloody rude!”
“Ramsey, rude?” said Irina incredulously. “You must have misunderstood.”
“I fear I understood all too well, madam. Good-night, my dear. And good luck.”
A nice man, but his story didn’t add up; Ramsey was the most polite, considerate man on earth. To wit, he caught Irina’s ear again. “I met your sister,” he said. “Bird rabbited on—”
“Now, how can a bird rabbit?”
“You’re a pedant, you are,” he said affectionately. “Bird banged on—that better?” (One grew inured to glottal stops in London, but back in the States his that be-ah? was charming.) “About how she was ‘only a housewife and mum,’ different to her sister who’s all famous and such. Never heard a bird so humble on the one hand, and so hacked off as well. Oi, and out of nowhere your woman starts waffling about how you was never cut out to be a mum yourself. How all you care about is your work, and larking about foreign countries, and if you was to have a sprog you’d leave it hanging upside down with marbles in its nose while you had to go and paint another daisy. Quite a sodding earful, that.”
“What did you say?”
“What do you figure? That you was warm, and decent, and smart, and I reckoned you’d make a blinding mum. That got her to shut it.”
Irina laughed, and said without thinking, “I adore you!” as they were all called into dinner.
AT THE LARGE ROUND table at the front, Irina and Lawrence were seated together, but Ramsey and Jude’s place cards were on the far opposite side. Irina had no idea how Lawrence did it; normal people would start the conversational ball rolling with something anodyne like, “I hate it when they prepare this sort of starter with that dollop of mayonnaise!” Yet in no time he had involved most of the table in a heated discussion of the new Bush administration. Ramsey wasn’t fussed about politics, period, so it didn’t strike her as peculiar that his bearing was stony. But she did find it noteworthy that Jude Hartford, Guardian subscriber and Old Labour zealot, said nothing.
For hotel fare, the roast beef was impressively rare, and delicious. So it was a shame that Ramsey must have been feeling unwell; he wasn’t touching his dinner.
While the opposite couple’s refusal to engage with the rest of the table made them seem standoffish, Ramsey had an excuse. He was a snooker player at a literary gathering, a fish out of water, and naturally a little shy. Jude was in her element, and should have been acting as interlocutor. What a difficult woman! Poor Ramsey. Irina hoped he knew what he was doing, patching things up with Jude.
After the waiters cleared the table and the foundation director introduced each entrant with slides, Jude began whispering in Ramsey’s ear. Oh, for pity’s sake! The woman sits out the entire dinner not saying word one, and finally starts talking at the very point it’s time to shut up. Presumably Ramsey hadn’t any choice but to respond, though he’d surely be abashed about conversing during the director’s speech. If this were a snooker match, a referee would have ejected Jude from the hall.
Once the slides from Ivan and the Terribles flashed on screen, Irina grew irate. She’d been looking forward to this occasion for months, and Jude’s carry-on was distracting. As the red-framed Etch A Sketch compositions were projected, Irina and Lawrence looked at each other and shook their heads. It was astounding that Jude would choose this of all junctures to pick a fight. Ramsey must have been mortified! He whispered in return, probably imploring her to please take up her grievance another time—rina met her old although any admonishments along these lines were unavailing. More astonishing still, when Jude’s illustrator’s drawings for The Love Diet followed, she didn’t even look at the screen, much less bother to listen to an admiring précis of her own book.
The director requested the envelope. Lawrence clasped Irina’s hand, squeezing with the tight, moist grip of a child’s at the dentist. So compelling was the anxiety in his face—that carved, haunted, beautiful face—that Irina spent what they both prayed would be her moment of triumph looking not up at the podium but in Lawrence’s eyes.
So convinced had she been of prevailing in this contest that her ears played tricks on her, and at first she could have sworn that she heard her own name distorted with a crackle of static through the PA. But the identity of the victor was written unmistakably across Lawrence’s face, which suddenly drained of blood and collapsed in a heap like a wet towel.
It was the oddest thing. Though she had been foolish to get her hopes up, and thereby set herself up for a fall, Irina felt fine. Her smile at Lawrence was beatific. Like Jesus taking on the sins of the world, Lawrence seemed to have assumed the full weight of her disappointment. Her most immediate concern was for his own consolation, and she kissed his hand quickly before letting go, that they might both applaud the winner. Winner? Whatever the papers might say tomorrow, Irina McGovern had won this evening. For as she rose from her chair to join the standing ovation, she could not imagine any prize greater than the one she had won thirteen years earlier on West 104th Street.
Jude had struggled to her feet, and was clapping, feebly, along with everyone else. Surely she understood that you weren’t supposed to applaud yourself? She looked confused, and at length did stop patting her hands together like limp flippers, but only to plop to her chair. Mouthing Congratulations! and Go on!, Irina met her old friend’s eyes, and was surprised to find them swollen and red. It was queer, feeling sorry for the only person at this table who had just pocketed $50,000 and the proceeds from selling perhaps one hundred thousand extra copies of her last book.
Prodded by the director, Jude finally reported for duty as if skulking to the principal’s office. Her acceptance speech bordered on incompetent. While she did remember to thank Ramsey, to whom she wasn’t even married anymore, and with a shit-eating profuseness at that, she forgot to commend her illustrator or to thank the judges. She had a dazed, unfocused quality, as if surprised to find herself at an award ceremony when she had thought she was headed for the launderette. Usually so flamboyant and excitable, she mumbled sheepishly to the podium, as if she wished that this event were already over and that everyone would go away. If this was to pass for one of the best days of Jude’s life, Irina would hate to see the lousy ones.
When the formal folderol was dispatched, Lawrence gave Irina a hug. “I’m really sorry,” he mumbled in her ear. “Your book was miles better, and it should have won.”
On drawing apart, Irina, unlike the victor, was dry-eyed and cheerful. “Thank you. I know you think so, and that’s medal enough for me.”
He studied her, disconcerted. “You really don’t seem that upset.”
“I’m not. It was still exciting to be nominated, and I love you.” What a rare business: once in a blue moon to get your priorities straight.
“Oh, you poor dear!” cried Tatyana, squeezing Irina so tightly that she couldn’t breathe. “You must feel simply wretched!”
“I sure judges already regret their choice,” said Raisa regally. “That speech your friend give—ochen plokho. You win, you do better.”
One of the judges approached her in the throng. The earnest middle-aged woman’s tender, concerned manner recalled Mrs. Bennington, her tenth-grade art teacher. “The foundation doesn’t award silver medals,” she said with a hand on Irina’s arm. “But you should know, dear, that you were the runner-up. The voting was very close.”
“I appreciate that. But I’m afraid maybe I should have taken my partner’s advice.” Irina glanced up at him with a smile. “Lawrence thought strongly that I should have kept the ending simpler. Just stick-by-old-friends, without the extra twist. I was awfully bloody-minded about it. But I’m inexperienced as an author; I’m really just an illustrator.”
“No, no!” said the judge. “I thought your ending was wonderfully enigmatic, and very true. Our problem was with the illustrations, I’m afraid.”
“Oh! The Etch A Sketch thing…?”
“The concept was delightful. And your technical execution was accomplished. But we weren’t happy with the computer-generated images. They were a little clinical—like the difference between an LP and a CD. If you had reproduced drawings on a real Etch A Sketch, dear, it’s possible that you’d have won.”
“It’s all my fault,” said Lawrence morosely when the woman was gone. “I was the one who pushed you to try the computer.”
“Don’t be silly. It should have, but using a real Etch A Sketch never occurred to me. Hilarious, really. I was a genius at Etch A Sketch when I was eight years old.”
They stood in the queue to congratulate Jude, who still looked less as if she’d just won a prestigious award than as if she’d just drawn the Old Maid in a game of cards. Upstairs in their room, they had Consolation Sex, which, if Irina was still facing the wall, wasn’t half bad, and she even managed to persuade Lawrence to keep the light on. For one of the evening’s losers, she was absurdly content, and fell vertiginously to sleep as if plunging from a tall building to the pavement.
WHILE LAWRENCE SHIFTED THEIR bags the next day to the cheaper Upper West Side hotel provided by his upcoming conference on “global civil society,” Irina met Tatyana at a Broadway Starbucks.
“You look pretty jovial,” said Tatyana after another sympathetic bear-hug. “Considering that you lost.”
“Well, as they say, winning isn’t everything!” Irina said brightly.
While Tatyana fetched their coffees, Irina suffered from a funny pining to talk to Lawrence, though they’d only parted an hour before. This yearning for his company in the middle of the day used to be a constant plague when he went off for work, and she missed it. These last few years, being separated had grown too easy. Her flush of gratitude last night had revived the sharper feelings of an earlier era, when the sound of his key in their front-door lock made her heart leap.
“Got a little gossip,” she said when Tatyana returned. “Which you might share with Mama, to warn her off. That tall, thin chap she took such a shine to last night? He’s getting married.”
“Ooh, she’ll be very put out!” Tatyana laughed. “She’s a dreadful flirt of course, with any man. But I haven’t seen her that entranced for ages. On the train home, I heard all about how elegant he was, how graceful, how she loved his accent. If you want to know the truth—maybe he did British accents back in the day—I think something about that guy reminded her of Papa. And she couldn’t stop going on about—what was it—snookers … ?”
“Snooker. But you tell her he’s taken,” said Irina flatly. Honestly, the prospect of Raisa courting Ramsey Acton—much less the other way around—made her want to hurl.
After Tatyana brought her sister up to speed with news of the family, she rounded on last night’s ceremony. “You must be so disappointed. Coming all the way to New York, only to have to applaud for someone else. And she’s a friend of yours, right? Or was? I wonder if that doesn’t make it worse.”
Irina shrugged. “Jude can have it. That award sure didn’t seem to make her very happy. And Lawrence was so devastated when it wasn’t me that—I almost felt as if I’d won. Even at the reception, he couldn’t stop singing my praises to other people. I tried to remind him that it was déclassé to brag about your own partner, but he was so proud that he wouldn’t listen. It hit me over the head last night—that I already had exactly what I’ve always wanted: a smart, funny, loyal, handsome man.”
When they were parting, Tatyana cocked her head. “I still don’t get it. You just missed out on this huge prize. But you’re glowing!” She seemed annoyed.
IRINA’S REVELATORY GRATITUDE FOR what she had in the first place was sadly short-lived. For if she ordinarily took for granted the architecture of her personal life, even more so did she take for granted the literal architecture of the city from which she hailed. Granted, history lends itself to the conclusion that pause is rare, that any respite is as merciful as it’s bound to be brief, that the very nature of existence is unstable and it is therefore best to be prepared for just about any catastrophe lurking right around the corner on any arbitrary morning. Thus the only real surprise should be those single sunny awakenings on which there is no surprise. Yet in defiance of all we know in theory, it remains common psychic practice to assume that world affairs will keep bumbling along the way they’ve been doing, much as from day to day Galileo himself would have persistently perceived the spinning globe on which we hurtle as standing still.
Thus what Irina would later rehearse about that Tuesday morning with weak room-service coffee in the Hotel Esplanade was its regularness. The before by its nature never feels like before. Irina was out of bed for forty-five minutes while September 11, 2001, was still just another date on the calendar, and had no way of knowing how precious they were.
Accordingly, she would squander them on feeling peeved that Lawrence had insisted on getting up so early, when she’d have liked to sleep in. The unexpected exhilaration of Sunday night had subsided, and it was beginning to sink in that she’d lost the Lewis Carroll. There would be no headlong rush to buy her book at Barnes & Noble, no embossed medallions feverishly applied to remaining stock, no “Lewis Carroll winner” in succeeding flap-copy bios. It was unlikely that she’d have a chance at such an imprimatur again, and abruptly there seemed little to look forward to. No wonder Ramsey had been so frustrated with his status as perpetual also-ran. Americans in particular made such a stark distinction between winning and losing, no matter how close you got—didn’t that judge say that she missed by a hair?—that runner-up and nobody blurred to the same thing.
Lawrence’s despair on her account had peaked, and was no longer quite so moving. At their dinner at Fiorello’s last night, she had enjoyed his reprise on Jude’s crummy book (which, having skimmed it, he now decried as a Bible for anorexics), along with a riff on what a pill the woman was, how appalling was her acceptance speech (his imitation was hilarious), and how insane Ramsey must be to ask for a second dose. But this morning Lawrence was once more buried in his laptop; his mind had clearly moved on to the presentation he’d to give tomorrow about Chechnya. Uneager to see her mother that night, she worried that Raisa would only take the news of Ramsey’s engagement as a challenge; her head swam with the nightmare of her mother rocking up with loads of luggage in Borough, insisting they get that lovely snooker player round for dinner. Her own brush with Ramsey at the Pierre vibrated in Irina’s head like a plucked guitar string. Despite her epiphany about having in Lawrence everything she’d always wanted, it pained her that her parallel-universe fancy man, The Chap She Almost Kissed, was getting remarried. The Esplanade was dumpier than the Pierre, with none of the shoe-shine sponges and aromatherapy face-wash frippery that Irina would never use but compulsively slipped into her carry-on, and it made her feel like a chump to pay five dollars for a small bottled water.
“Huh,” Lawrence grunted over the screen, as she gazed out at West End Avenue feeling sorry for herself. “AOL says a plane ran into the World Trade Center.”
“Well, that sounds careless,” said Irina irritably. “I know those pilots in private planes sometimes get off course, but Jesus, the Trade Center is bigger than a breadbox. You’d think maybe he’d turn wheel before busting into it. The sky is clear as crystal, too!”
Over Irina’s objections—she hated the yammer of television in the morning; it made her feel dirty—Mr. Newshound had to see it for himself. He mumbled something about finding a local station, but the building was smoking on CNN.
“Oh my God, that hole is huge!” said Irina in consternation, shoving her coffee aside and walking closer to the screen. “Lawrence, that could take years to fix. What a pain in the arse! It’s the kind of repair that will have Wall Street covered in that depressing scaffolding over sidewalks forever—”
“Looks too big to be a private plane. I wonder if it was a commercial…? That’s hard to believe. What pilot could be such a moron?”
“That fire looks terrible. If people were already at work—!”
“Shsh! I want to hear this.”
But at the very moment that Lawrence shushed her, the commentator stopped talking. The camera veered to the other tower, and though this same footage would replay all day, and all week, and sporadically through as many years to come as years remained with video technology, there was a first time, and it was different.
“Lawrence, what’s happening?” Irina shrieked. “Two freak accidents in the same morning, the coincidence is impossible!”
“It’s not a coincidence,” said Lawrence levelly. “It’s terrorism.”
The most proximate “terrorists” to London were those IRA goons who ran about hugger-mugger in balaclavas, and frankly looked ridiculous. Though she had never said so outright, since the sentiment might sound hurtful, hitherto Lawrence’s professional specialty had always about it an almost comical little-boy quality.
“But who would do such a thing?” she screeched. “This is insane! What’s the point?”
The CNN commentators and “experts” hastily contacted down the line would soon cast a wide net regarding the identity of the culprits, from white supremacists to Saddam Hussein. But Lawrence didn’t hesitate. “It’s Osama bin Laden.”
“Oh, who’s that?” She was furious.
“He was linked to the first Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, and the embassy bombings in East Africa. You haven’t been paying attention.”
Under ordinary circumstances, Irina might have taken offense. But she did not. He was right. She hadn’t been paying attention.
She didn’t even mind when he told her to shut up. She shut up. He turned up the volume. Two other planes were reported hijacked. One of them plowed into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. For the first time in history, every single airplane in the United States was ordered to ground. Irina and Lawrence remained standing. All of her interjections were obvious: This is awful. It was already apparent that for some time to come whatever you said would sound dumb. But the events of that morning had already grown so eclipsing, and in comparison the two of them and what they said and thought so small, that it was almost as if they didn’t exist at all. Thus Irina had no opportunity to rue the fact that she had ever wasted a moment’s anguish on some trinket called the Lewis Carroll Medal, because as bodies began to drop from upper floors, the award, her entire career in illustration, her frustrations with her sexually competitive mother, and her seditious attraction to Ramsey Acton withered so rapidly that these once monumental matters never even had the chance to seem puny. They simply vanished.
Much as it’s worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more planes might be out there, if the White House or the Empire State Building might be next, if the very government were about to topple or the island of Manhattan to upend into the sea. Now that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did.
As the tower shrank from the sky like a dusty, stepped-on accordion, for the first time in her life Irina knew the true meaning of horror. In a few thick seconds, a skyscraper that had prowed the tip of Manhattan since her adolescence and that she had never much cared for was no more. It hadn’t seemed to fall down so much as evaporate. In fact, the empty shifting billows defied the rules of physics, whereby energy is neither created nor destroyed. The erection of that 107-story tower had required a great deal of energy, and all that energy had been destroyed.
Identical twins often enjoy the same bond of long-married couples, and one half of the pair will languish when the other dies. Within the hour, perhaps the second tower followed suit out of sorrow—sitting with an eerie grace beside its sister as if giving up. Just as when the news came in that Diana had died in a Paris tunnel and Irina rued having so callously fired adjectives like vapid and saccharine at the poor woman while she was still alive, Irina wished with frantic superstition to take back every casually unkind slur she had ever uttered about the World Trade Center—her dismissals of the gaudy lobbies, her comparisons of its unimaginative commercial dimensions to a giant two-for-one offer on boxes of Colgate. It was as if someone had been listening and she hadn’t meant, no, no, she hadn’t meant that she would just as soon it went away. Maybe it was less important to like something than to be used to it.
Lawrence put an arm around her shoulder while Irina cried. They were tears of another order than she had shed before—over her ineptitude at ballet as a child, jeers of “donkey face” in junior high, the falling-out with Jude, her loneliness while Lawrence was away. In retrospect, it was perplexing that she had ever wept on these measly occasions of distress, when all along full-scale tragedy—the malignant, sickening history of the human race—had been unfolding just beyond her doorstep. On CNN, one commentator after another was already saying that nothing would ever be the same again. But it would be. Too many things had already happened after which nothing should have been the same again. This was not the first time people had done something hideous, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Today of all days it should have been possible to weep the whole day through, but it wasn’t. The fact that she had sobbed for entire evenings at a go over the loss of one boyfriend yet now found it too demanding to whimper over the loss of multitudes for more than two or three minutes was just one of those ugly facts about herself that Irina would have to live with.
After blowing her nose, she rang her mother. No answer. “The whole world’s coming to an end,” Irina despaired over the receiver, “and what do you want to bet that Mama is exercising.”
It seemed lunatic to keep watching events on television that were occurring eight miles south. “I have to see it with my own eyes, Lawrence. To make it real.”
“None of the trains are running. And they must have blocked off downtown. You’re not going to get anywhere near it.”
“Please?” She took his hand. “Walk with me?”
So they made a pilgrimage, a hadj—threading down into Riverside Park, where on the walkway by the Hudson the curvature of the island obscured what lay smoldering at its tip. Only when they trudged to the end of the pier at 72nd Street was it possible to see the white cloud rising, a bland puff at this distance, but real enough. Irina associated disaster with clamor, yet no sound emitted from the park but unearthly quiet, oblivious birds, the odd shuffle of feet as they were joined gradually by other New Yorkers, making the same numb trek. Few people spoke, and then only in murmurs. Everyone was polite, orderly, even down the West Side bikeway, commonly the scene of mean-spirited competition between cyclists, in-line skaters, and prams. In defiance of urban convention, strangers met one another’s eyes. For the first time in her memory this felt like a unified city, a single place, and while much reference was made to its communities, the experience of feeling a part of one was rare.
“I think I owe you an apology,” said Irina softly in the West 50s. Aside from the occasional race of emergency vehicles, the West Side Highway to their left, ordinarily bumper-to-bumper in midtown, was deserted, Mad Max. “Your work—I may not have thought it was very important.”
“That’s all right,” said Lawrence, who had never let go of her hand. “Sometimes I forget it’s important myself.”
They were not stopped until West Houston Street, where a police cordon was drawn. A large, respectful crowd had gathered in silence. The air stung with an acrid smell of burnt rubber and nickel, and the bikeway railings were collecting a fine, baptismal ash. Hands to their sides, everyone faced the funeral pyre rising in the distance, paying homage for perhaps five minutes, then turning quiet heel. Irina and Lawrence bore witness for their five minutes, and ceded their places to others.
On the way back uptown, they walked inland. Even when the subways began working again around five p.m., neither made a bid to get on. You did not make pilgrimages by turnstile. In Times Square, with no traffic, they trudged up the middle of Seventh Avenue. The digital ticker overhead streamed, U.S. ATTACKED … HIJACKED JETS DESTROY TWIN TOWERS AND HIT PENTAGON… Bits of flotsam caught by the wind swirled over the empty roadway like the aftermath of a frenzied New Year’s Eve, after the ball has dropped, and the whole city is hungover. A few restaurants had opened, although any establishments that looked Middle Eastern had their shutters drawn tight.
“I hate to sound petty,” said Irina at Columbus Circle. “But if it had to happen—I’m glad we’re in New York. If we were back in Britain, I’d feel left out.”
“Well, I guess that is a little petty,” he admitted. “But what’s not petty now?”
“I’ll tell you what’s not petty,” she said, stopping to turn him toward her. They were impeding the entrance to Central Park, but surrounding pedestrians were deferential, and gave them berth. Irina put her hands on either side of his face, and kissed him. Her cheeks tracked once more with purely private tears, but they were without shame.