THE NIGGLING SENSATION OF something being wrong or changed that had plagued Irina since Lawrence’s return from Russia gradually subsided. If he was hard on her for getting plastered at Christmas and denting her mother’s samovar, Lawrence had a powerful sense of decorum, and his dressing-down in such circumstances was only to be expected—as well as his insistence that they personally lug the thing into a local metalsmith and pay for the repair. Should indeed something have altered, the mind is merciful in such matters, and often cannot recall what it does not have. That period of subtle perturbation had been peculiar, like repeatedly detecting a flicker in the periphery of her vision, yet when she turned to stare directly where she thought something had moved, the vista stood stock-still. Thereafter, the very memory of sensing something amiss, too, blessedly evanesced, and her version of events became that everything was fine, everything had always been fine, and she had never thought otherwise.
One was perpetually subjected to tales of “obsessive love” in cinema: the kind of romance in which you lose yourself in the other, flooding over your own boundaries to mingle indistinguishably with the oncoming waves from an opposite shore. Irina had no idea how such people ever got anything done—earned their keep, paid the bills, and shopped for dinner; in fact, you never saw them doing anything of the kind in movies. Too, the “consuming passion” was always portrayed as mutually destructive, as proceeding inexorably toward private Armageddon.
In any event, Irina and Lawrence had embraced an alternative romantic model, one that mightn’t have made for riveting movies, but did make for a fruitful life. Lives. Separate, fruitful lives. Having no interest in “losing himself” in her or at all, Lawrence regarded the project in which they were engaged—and it was a project—as one of helping each other to become the finest discrete individuals as they could manage.
Lawrence called her to her responsible, competent, professional self. Last June, she had delivered the portfolio for The Miss Ability Act well before deadline; each panel was exactingly wrought. While not knocked-on-butt agog, her editor had been firmly pleased and admiring. Known as reliable and meticulous, Irina remained in the good graces of one more company, and they were glad to offer her another contract for a small book already under way with another author—thanks to Lawrence’s productive nagging to always keep her eye on the next project.
Because Irina hadn’t the background to be of use to Lawrence in his research on the Tamil Tigers, she helped him in return by cheerfully assuming the everyday burden of shopping and cooking. In fact, when he took her aside the January after they returned from Brighton Beach— confiding that he’d just as soon pick up lunch around Blue Sky, and spare her sending him off to work with a sandwich—she’d felt strangely hurt. The prepared meats section of the supermarket had occasioned a queer pang ever since.
To Lawrence’s credit, the boost of his professional profile since the Good Friday Agreement last year spurred him to bolster Irina’s prominence in equal measure. He did not want a humble, subservient helpmeet who merely made sure that they never ran out of milk. The amount of time he dedicated to getting her up to speed in computer graphics was stupendous. As a belated Christmas present that she actually wanted, he bought her a new Apple, better for graphics than a PC, and all the necessary software.
Meantime, Irina had been powwowing on another matter with Betsy for months. (She and Betsy had grown close—in contrast to Melanie, a lively but high-strung actress whose vivacity could turn acrid on a dime, and around whom Irina had always to remember to be a bit careful. Melanie’s bitter quip about what a homebody she’d become under Lawrence’s thumb sent a chill through the friendship for keeps.) Irina was, after all, a children’s book illustrator. In Betsy’s view, the one sure formula for “going forward” as a couple was to have a child. Now, there were no guarantees, at forty-four. But Irina wouldn’t be manipulated once more by Lawrence’s shrugging relationship to all the things in life that actually mattered. With his passive acquiescence, she tossed her pills into the medicine cabinet like throwing dice, then tried to put the matter from her mind. She would get on with her work, take supplements of folic acid, and see what happened.
IT WAS LAWRENCE’S IDEA that after mastering the new software she consider authoring her own book. He decried the weak material she was forced to illustrate; if she couldn’t do better, she wouldn’t do worse. Fortified by his faith in her, Irina took the plunge.
In girlhood, one of her favorite toys was her Etch A Sketch. As Irina recalled, when you were painstaking enough, and your sister didn’t come along and shake your picture upside-down out of sheer meanness, it was possible to improve on crude outlines, and pattern or even blacken whole solids. A trip to Woolworth’s confirmed that the classic toy was still in production, so the allusion wouldn’t be lost on modern-day children.
It took many hours and calls to cybergeeks referred by friends, but eventually Irina got her software to approximate the line quality of an Etch A Sketch with staggering exactitude. Having perfected the technique at the keyboard, Irina set about drafting a story line to go with it:
A little boy named Ivan has a best friend called Spencer. The two boys do everything together—build tree houses, go skateboarding, try to best each other in sack races. At school, they are so famously inseparable that their teachers insist on seating them rows apart, to prevent the two from whispering during lessons. But Ivan’s mother always knows to pour two glasses of milk after school, and slice two apples (which the upscale parents who bought these books would prefer to cookies), since Spencer was sure to come over every afternoon to play. Spencer is brainy, and often helps Ivan with his homework. After the work is done, they learn to make popcorn all by themselves—though on their first try, they forget the pot lid, and kernels fly all over the kitchen. Later the tale of the popcorn sailing through the room and landing in their hair, floating little white boats in the dishwater, becomes a story they love to retell on camping trips in the tent when it’s raining.
But one day when Spencer is home sick, and Ivan is sorrowfully on his lonesome at school, Ivan meets another boy at recess. The new boy, Aaron, is tall, witty, and clever, as well as gifted at kickball. He seems to like Ivan especially much. Soon Ivan is having such a good time with his new friend that he forgets all about missing Spencer, and asks if Aaron would like to come over to his house after school.
Ivan’s mother is surprised to see a different boy turn up with her son, but there is no telling about childhood friendships, so she serves them milk and fruit with no questions asked. Aaron and Ivan go outside to skateboard, and it turns out that Aaron knows all kinds of tricks that Ivan has never learned before. The truth is, Ivan is having even more fun with Aaron than he ever did with Spencer, quite.
Suddenly Ivan looks up to find Spencer staring forlornly through the open gate of the backyard, where Aaron is teaching Ivan to do flips. Spencer must have started to feel better, and his mother had let him come over to play. Ivan will never forget the look on Spencer’s face before the boy turns and runs away.
That night, Ivan feels terrible. He can’t eat his dinner. He can’t sleep, and tosses and turns until daylight. He keeps seeing the desolate expression on Spencer’s face, and remembering all the games they played together, all the homework that Ivan would never have been able to get right if it weren’t for Spencer’s help. And then he remembers the afternoon of the lidless popcorn, and bursts into tears.
The next day at recess, Ivan pulls Aaron aside. Ivan confesses that he really likes Aaron, and thinks he’s the greatest skateboarder he’s ever seen. But Ivan already has a best friend. His old best friend may not be as good at skateboarding, and maybe they get a little bored with each other some afternoons, but that’s the way it is when you know somebody really well. Ivan says that Aaron will have to find someone else to play with, because he doesn’t want to feel as bad as he did last night ever again.
But that is not the end of the story. A few weeks later Aaron does find another boy to play with, and in an afternoon they become best friends—the very best. In fact, they, too, are inseparable. And the name of Aaron’s new best friend is Spencer.
That night, Ivan feels terrible.
WHEN SHE SHOWED THE story to Lawrence, he was appreciative, but he had a problem with the ending. “Why don’t you just stop there?” he asked, pointing to where Ivan tells Aaron to find another playmate. “Lop off the rest, and you’ve got a solid, simple, unified story about loyalty whose point any kid could get.”
“But I don’t want it to be too simple,” she objected.
“It’s a children’s book!”
“The biggest mistake children’s book authors make is writing down to their audience. Kids are short. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid.”
“But that ending fucks everything up!”
“Fucked-up sounds realistic to me.”
“Look, up to that penultimate point, you’re saying basically, stick by old ties—and we’ll leave aside for a sec the fact that you can have more than one friend.”
“You can only have one best friend, as any schoolchild knows. A huge proportion of the drama in childhood is all about who fills that slot, and who gets booted out.”
“But as is, the moral of this story is that the protagonist was a sap, and should have run off with the new kid when he had the chance. Like, screw old ties, it’s a Darwinian world out there, every man for himself.”
“That’s one way of reading it,” she said coolly. “The other slant you could put on it is that Ivan feels terrible in both instances, and your author never tells you in which he feels worse. In fact, the suggestion is—since the wording is identical—that between betraying and being betrayed, the anguish may be a toss-up.”
“There is no way that any kid is going to get that,” Lawrence insisted.
“There is no way that any kid is not going to get that,” Irina countered.
Lawrence took umbrage that she resisted his editorial advice, but Irina stuck to her guns on the ending, and then got down to the illustrations. Drawing with a mouse admittedly inserted a sense of remove, but the computer was no less engaging than paint or pencils, in its way. She especially enjoyed drawing wonky fluffs of popcorn, the judder of the line imparting a sense of explosion. Though she did miss color, the black-and-white format enabled her to concentrate on the expressiveness of the figures—the slim, attenuated grace of Aaron, the wide-eyed, despondent close-up of Spencer’s stricken face when he believes that in a single day he’s been replaced. Because to accurately reflect the nature of an Etch A Sketch drawing the line could never lift, depicting isolated elements like eyes and shirt buttons was technically challenging. Once she was satisfied with a picture, she surrounded the illustration with the red frame of the toy, adding two white knobs on the bottom.
The work was well under way when Lawrence came home one night in March looking alarmingly pale. He admitted that he’d felt “a little weird” all day, but had soldiered through to nightfall at Blue Sky. She knew something was terribly wrong when he couldn’t make a dent in their popcorn. Not long thereafter, he slipped off and closed the loo door, though the sound of violent retching escaped its cracks. The next day, a Saturday, Lawrence propped himself in front of his computer to work on a paper about the guerrilla war in Nepal. At regular intervals, he would scuttle to the loo, quietly brush his teeth, and return to the keyboard.
Lawrence made an exasperating patient. For a solid fortnight, he dragged himself out of bed at seven a.m., dressed for work, and stared down a cup of coffee that clearly turned his stomach. Then it would be left to Irina to take the coffee away, fix a cup of weak tea and piece of un-buttered toast, and put him back to bed. Though he was dropping an alarming amount of weight, he perpetually urged her to return to her project, and apologized for the distraction of his “stupid little virus.” Yet when toward the end of his convalescence she too came down with a touch of something—just a mild sore throat and runny nose—Lawrence, still shaky and off-color, fetched pillows, hankies, and hot lemon drinks, even braving the ghastly Elephant & Castle for novels and lozenges. For Pete’s sake, he was the only man she’d ever met on whom she would have urged more self-pity.
THE FACT THAT SHE finished her project on Ramsey’s birthday—his forty-ninth, she calculated—wasn’t altogether coincidental. Oh, she hadn’t proposed to Lawrence that they try to resume their old tradition; goodness, they hadn’t seen Ramsey since Bournemouth nearly two years before, and there comes a point where you put off getting in touch out of sheer embarrassment that for far too long you have put off getting in touch. Besides, last year Ramsey himself had let them off the hook. But because the sixth of July remained a powerful marker in her mind, it made a fitting private deadline, of whose significance Lawrence was agreeably unaware when she unveiled the illustrations that night.
“It’s fucking brilliant!” Lawrence announced when he had finished leafing through her printouts. Alas, he could not resist adding, “I still think that ending is off. But you’re only going to listen to an editor, who will tell you the same thing.”
Despite his reservations, Lawrence dedicated himself to seeing Ivan and the Terribles celebrated in the world of commerce with a determination that put her supportive trips to Tesco in the shade. He declared that it was high time she replaced her mousy, small-time agent with heavy-hitting representation, and did exhaustive Internet research on which in-fluential British agents had lucrative sales in the US. He “helped” her design—i.e., put together himself—a professional-looking submission package, including a CD of both the Ivan illustrations and digital photos of previous work, a polished CV, and confident cover letter. Her studio grew stacked with identical manila envelopes, all neatly addressed with printed labels and pasted with proper postage. She may have been a tad uneasy with his taking over so completely; at once, his efforts on her account moved her more than she could say.
Meanwhile, six months had elapsed since Irina had ceased to stop by the clinic in Bermondsey to pick up new packets of pills, and yet her periods proceeded to make her feel heavy and churlish in perfect cycle with the moon. Thus that autumn she prevailed upon Lawrence to see his GP, and got a checkup herself. Irina’s blood-work confirmed that for a woman her age her hormone levels were splendid. But when his GP rang, her partner grunted through the call with a gruffness that even for Lawrence seemed impolite.
“Well, that’s it, then,” he said when he hung up. “Low sperm count.” He sank onto the sofa. He didn’t turn on the television, though it was time for the news.
Irina sat beside him, and tucked a lock behind his ear. “It’s really hopeless?”
“Seems like!” he said. “You know, I’ve read that male potency in the West may be plummeting because of widespread use of oral contraception. You girls pop all these pills and then pee them away, and the estrogen gets into the water supply.”
Irina smiled. “Are you saying that it’s my fault?”
“Well, it’s nobody’s fault, is it?” he said ferociously.
“This really bothers you, doesn’t it? Even though, on the kid business, I sensed you were on the fence.”
Lawrence stood up. “Well, it’s probably better this way, isn’t it? You’re forty-four. Pregnancy would be hard on you, and at your age the chances of birth defects soar. Maybe if we’d gotten on this a long time ago… But Jesus, by the time the kid entered college, we’d be drawing social security. Besides, with me at Blue Sky weekdays, you’d do most of the work, and that wouldn’t be fair. Your career would suffer.”
Though she sympathized with his sense of having been unmanned, Irina was struggling with her own disappointment, and sour-grapes wasn’t helping. “No, I know you. Between weekends and evenings, you’d find a way to pull your weight and then some. Look at the way you nurse me when I don’t feel well, or how you’re helping me with Ivan. You’re chronically responsible. You’d be up at four a.m., crooning and rocking and feeding the baby breast-expressed bottles from the refrigerator so I could get some sleep.”
Lawrence shoved his hands in his pockets and looked to the floor. “Yeah, probably.” Glancing up, he seemed to remember her. “Did you have your heart set on this?”
“Oh, we’d left it so late, I couldn’t afford to count on it. I’ve just had this feeling that something more needs to happen. We just keep going on and on and…” She shrugged.
“Lots of other things can happen,” he said, though the promise sounded ominous. “Still, I’m sorry.”
“You know,” she said tentatively, “we might think about alternatives.”
“Adoption?”
“That’s more of a crapshoot than I’m ready for. I meant—maybe in vitro.”
“If my jizz is firing blanks, it’s not going to hit a bull’s-eye in a petri dish, either.”
“No, obviously it would have to be someone else’s.” She avoided the word sperm.
“A bank?” Lawrence wouldn’t use the word himself. “That’s still half crapshoot. Who’s to say the donor’s not a serial killer?”
“I was more thinking that maybe we could ask—someone we know.”
“Like who?”
Irina looked away. “No one comes to mind, off the top of my head…”
Lawrence thrust his face into her line of vision. “Someone we know, and you wouldn’t need in vitro, would you?”
“Lawrence! I wouldn’t do that.”
“However some other guy’s spunk gets up there, are you seriously proposing that I constantly bump into someone we know and he knows and I know that he’s the real father of my kid? Use your head! How would you feel if you had to raise a son or daughter that was, I don’t know, mine and Betsy’s?”
She smiled. “Could do worse.”
“Forget it. Forget the whole fucked-up thing. If it’s not clean, I’m not interested.” If it’s not mine, I’m not interested—a running theme.
Irina did forget it. Lawrence had violent convictions about what a man did and did not do. Of course, borrowing a cup of sugar from next door would never have worked, emotionally at least. But for once Irina despaired of her partner’s rigidity, his strict notions of manliness, which now constrained her life as well. Because physically? Maybe a woman knows these things. Maybe a woman can tell. She had a gut instinct that the first donor prospect who popped into her head would have been a perfect match. It would have worked. In vitro or otherwise, it would have worked—the very first try.
SO THEY SOUGHT THE standard compensation for a childless career woman, and lo, in short order three prestigious agents were eager to take Irina on. The basis on which she selected the winning representative surprised her; it was out of character.
Irina had been frugal her whole life. Her mother was obsessed with money, and as a girl she’d colored her crayons to nubs. Granted that Lawrence now made a decent wage, but she had never believed that his money was her money quite, and she felt self-conscious that with her stingy illustration advances she couldn’t completely cover her half of the rent. Shopping in thrift stores, buying their furniture at Oxfam, was one way of contributing to the family coffers.
Yet there was a meanness to this outlook, a reluctance to spend the currency of life itself. Unrelenting penny-pinching precluded bursts of you-only-live-once abandon, as well as the fuck-it thrill particular to costly purchases that are foolhardy. It sobered Irina to realize the degree to which she allowed parsimony to control her decisions, on both the large scale and the small. When she had offered to pay her own way to Russia, had she really been serious, or did she make the gesture only knowing full well that Lawrence didn’t want her along? For that matter, they were a hop, skip, and a jump from the Continent, yet she never urged Lawrence to take holidays in Rome or Venice, because it was too expensive. When was the last time she’d bought herself a new dress? Not a new old dress, a new new dress? She couldn’t remember. They now had this Ford Capri, but she still did most of the shopping on foot, to save on petrol. At Tesco, she’d always get the yellow-tag snow peas, despite having a yen for French green beans—which were too expensive. If bargain-hunting afforded a scheming little pleasure, were there not also pleasures in extravagance—in obliviously blowing £200 on a single night out?
The first agent was nice. The second agent seemed in uncanny accord with her artistic sensibility. The third agent promised that Ivan would sell for pots of money.
Bingo.
Pitching simultaneously to Britain and the States, Irina’s new agent put the book up for auction, and between the two markets Irina’s Etch A Sketch project brought in $125,000. Irina took Lawrence out to dinner at Club Gascon, and though they didn’t quite manage to squander £200 on five courses with matching wines, they came damned close.
Thus they were in festive form for Christmas in Brighton Beach again. This time there were no fights about the heating or napkins or soap dishes, much less any drunken displays of abandon that knocked over the samovar, and when familial gatherings proceed with unerring smoothness and conviviality, they can also seem profoundly pointless. On the plane home, Irina fantasized about what kind of climactic quarrel she could pick with her mother that might issue in a merciful era of not-speaking. Some concocted impasse would save so much bother, including those newsy international phone calls placed with dutiful regularity every month. Still, the visit had its gratifying side. Tatyana had fallen all over herself hugging and squeezing and declaring for no reason at all that she “simply adored her big sister,” of whom she was “incredibly proud,” which meant that inside she was seethingly jealous.
Ivan and the Terribles was published in September of 2000 to great fanfare on both sides of the Atlantic. Its publicity budget was generous, and if the reviews were less so, large adverts in the New York and London Times more than made up for critical nitpicking. The print run was enormous, the cover price widely discounted, and Irina’s survey of Waterstone’s and WHSmith confirmed that stacks had made it into the chains. Decry “selling out” as you may, there was a variety of selling out—of copies—whose stigma Irina would gladly assume. No one was going to tell her that those piles of red-framed glossy hardbacks on Waterstone’s front tables weren’t beautiful.