The Post-Birthday World Read Free Page A

learned that Lawrence would be at a conference on “nation building” in Bosnia and wouldn’t return until the night of July 7. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the one who’s big buddies with Ramsey.”
    “Oh, I think he likes you.” But Lawrence’s tone imparted moderation, or even reservation, as in “I think he likes you well enough.” “But he’s so odd. I have no idea what we’d talk about.”
     
    “The fact that they’re thinking about dropping the bow-tie rule? Really, Irina, you should call, if only to make an excuse. How many years have we—”
    “Five,” she said morosely. She’d counted.
     
    “If you let it go, he’ll be hurt. Before I left, I did leave a brief message on his cell-phone voice mail to apologize that I’d be in Sarajevo this year. But I let it slip that you were staying behind in London. If you want that badly to get out of it, I could always call him from here, and say that you changed your mind at the last minute and came with. You know, happy returns, but what a drag, we’re both out of town.”
“No, don’t. I hate lying for petty reasons.” Irina was uneasy with the implication that she didn’t have a problem with lying for substantial reasons, but further qualification seemed tortuous. “I’ll ring him.”
She didn’t. What she did do was ring up Betsy Philpot, who had edited Jude’s and Irina’s collaborations at Random House, and so knew Ramsey somewhat. Not having worked together for a couple of years, Betsy and Irina had morphed from colleagues to confidantes. “Tell me that you and Leo are free on the sixth.”
“We’re not free on the sixth,” said Betsy, whose conversation never ran to frills.
“Damn.”
“This matters why?”
“Oh, it’s Ramsey’s birthday, when we’ve had this custom of getting together. Except now Jude’s history, and Lawrence is in Sarajevo. That leaves me.”
“So?”
“I know this sounds vain, and it could be all in my head. But I’ve wondered if Ramsey doesn’t—if he isn’t a little sweet on me.” She’d never said so aloud.
“He doesn’t strike me as a wolf. I’d think he’s nothing you can’t handle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t.”
For Betsy, another American, everything was always simple. In fact, her cool, compass-and-ruler approach to circles that others found difficult to square had a curious brutality. When Jude and Irina had fallen out, she’d advised with a savage little shrug, “As far as I could tell, you’ve never liked her much anyway. Write it off.”
Irina wasn’t proud of the way she “dealt” with this quandary, meaning that she didn’t deal with it at all. Every day in the countdown to July 6, she promised herself in the morning to ring Ramsey in the afternoon, and in the afternoon to ring him in the evening. Yet propriety pertained even to night owls, and once it passed eleven p.m., she’d check her watch with a shake of the head and resolve to ring first thing the next day. But he probably slept late, she’d consider on rising, and the cycle would begin again. The sixth was a Saturday, and the Friday before she faced the fact that a single day’s notice so obviously risked his being busy that to ring at the last minute might seem ruder than forgetting the occasion altogether. Well, now she wouldn’t have to face down Ramsey Acton all by herself. A flood of relief was followed by a trickle of sorrow.
The phone rang Friday at nearly midnight. At this hour, she was so sure that it was Lawrence that she answered, “Zdravstvuy, milyi!”
Silence. No returning, “Zdravstvuy, lyubov moya!” It wasn’t Lawrence.
“. . . Sorry,” said an airy, indistinct British accent after that embarrassed beat. “I were trying to reach Irina McGovern.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is Irina. It’s just, I thought it was Lawrence.”
“. . . You lot rabbit in—were that Russian?”
“Well, Lawrence’s Russian is atrocious, but he knows just enough—