you’re unseeable. Ugly people, fat people, even people who just aren’t anything special? They have to work harder to please. They have to do something to prove out, whereas when you’re pretty to look at you don’t have to do anything but sit there and everybody is plumb delighted.”
Irina wasn’t accustomed to talking so much. Early in that speech Lawrence would have interrupted that she had made her point, so enough already. When Ramsey said nothing to shut her up, he induced the little falling sensation of anticipating resistance and meeting none, like unexpectedly stepping off a kerb.
“Having buck teeth in junior high,” she rounded up unsteadily, “must be ideal preparation for getting old. For pretty people, aging is a dumb shock. It’s like, what’s going on? Why doesn’t anyone smile at me at checkout anymore? But it won’t be a shock for me. It’ll be, oh that. That again. Teeth.”
“Rubbish. You’ll still be ravishing at seventy-five.”
“Dream on, buddy,” she said with a smile. “But you—you have that telltale face of a boy all the girls were a-swoon over in high school. Grammar school,” she corrected.
“Hate to disappoint you, sunshine, but I didn’t go to grammar school. Secondary modern. I failed the eleven-plus.”
“That must have been painful.”
“I wasn’t fussed, was I? I aimed to be a snooker player. Jesus God, I bunked off school more than I went.”
“Still, I can see it. You were the kind of kid that the eyesores like me would all have hopeless crushes on from the back row, while you went out with the only girl in class who’d had breasts since she was ten.” The image came readily. Maybe it was the Peter Pan effect of playing games all day, but Ramsey still looked adolescent. Even his hair, turning less grey than white, gilded in candlelight to surfer-blond.
“I may have had my options,” he conceded. “But only in hindsight. In them days, girls scared my bollocks off. I’m thirteen, right? A bird named Estelle, a year or two older, takes me to her room and pulls her shirt off. I stare at her Beatles posters—anywhere but at her chest—mumble something about snooker practice, and scarper to the push-bike. I hadn’t a monkeys’ what I was meant to do.”
“You left her there, standing in her room, with her shirt off? I bet she loved that.”
“Seem to recollect she never spoke to me again.”
“But you figured it out eventually. What to do.”
“Matter of fact, I’m not sure I have done.”
“I could steer you toward a few birds-and-bees how-tos, but I should warn you they’re mostly targeted at ages five to eight.”
“To be honest, the most erotic memories of my life ain’t of shagging at all,” he reflected. “I did have a girlfriend in senior school, you was right about that. And she did have breasts, but they were small. Small and perfect. We was inseparable, and I wager the rest of the school assumed we was bonking our brains out. We wasn’t. Denise was tiny, and dark-haired, like you. Quiet. She spent every night she could get away at Rackers, the local snooker club in Clapham, watching me cane fellas twice my age for a fiver a frame. I’d give her the dosh to hold, and my coat, and she knew the signal for ‘the competition’s getting bolshie, so do a runner sharpish.’ She liked to chalk my cue.”
“Sounds metaphorical.”
“Well, there’s something to be said for getting your cue chalked, full stop, and not in any filthy sense. When I cleared up my last frame, I’d walk her home. She’d carry my case. I’d hold her hand. We always walked through Clapham Common and stopped midway at the same bench. We snogged there, for hours. It sounds innocent; I reckon it was. Them kisses, they were so endless, and each one so different … I wasn’t really busting to do anything else. I didn’t feel cheated. Though best nobody warned me that at sixteen I was experiencing the 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.”
“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’s not as bad as football; snooker is massively a blokes’ sport. But it’s not so different to school. I got”—he paused decorously—“options.”
“Did Jude leave you feeling burnt?”
