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For Ramsey, playing was work. Summers, he worked at playing. To celebrate his forty-eighth birthday that July, he took Irina on a trip to India to visit the Ooty Club, where he gave a dazzling exhibition of trick shots on the world’s first snooker table. On their return, there was always something that beat laboring over a drawing in her stuffy garret—wine-soaked lunches, afternoon cinema, a spontaneous excursion to Dover. By the time the snooker season resumed in October, Irina had made pitiful progress on
The Miss Ability Act.
Mindful of her springtime vow to knuckle down, she gave Bournemouth a miss, albeit with regret; if the Ooty Club was “the cradle of the game,” Bournemouth was the cradle of their marriage. Yet the dislocated sensation that afflicted her on the road grew only more manifest in their large, empty home. She would pare her nails, sharpen pencils, fix tea. It’s not so simple a matter for an artist—however she avoided the word—to “knuckle down.” She’d make a mark on the paper and it was wrong and the paper was spoiled and she would have to start again. Grown accustomed to companionship morning to night, Irina had lost the knack of solitude.
If only for distraction from the harrying task of tracking down her peripatetic talent, which seemed to have wandered off like a naughty child, Irina filled the gaps in the furnishings left by Jude’s plunder. Habitually, Irina headed down to the Oxfam shop in Streatham. Although while Ramsey was in Bournemouth she found several lovely pieces for a song, his Platinum MasterCard in her wallet undermined her satisfaction. Indeed, Irina wasn’t cut out for wealth, and with money infinitely on offer found the world curiously cheapened. Negotiating an expensive city on a budget took ingenuity and cunning. Times past, snagging yellowtagged supermarket snow peas in excellent condition for half-price had made her feel victorious. Now that their average weekly restaurant bill that summer must have been £1,000, how could she feel clever for saving 60p?
Ramsey rang every evening on his mobile from the Royal Bath bar, and she could hear the carousing in the background, the crooning and ballyhoo and clinking of glassware. When she’d been along for the ride, the swanning from hotel to hotel had seemed tiring and depersonalized; from a distance the tour inevitably appeared glamorous again. In the vacuum of the stay-at-home wife, she grew paranoid. Snooker players were dogged by packs of adoring fans, not all of whom were boys.
Ramsey’s take on the Monica Lewinsky scandal across the pond was at least reassuring; the hoo-ha was rapidly advancing toward the impeachment of President Clinton. Unlike most Europeans, Ramsey didn’t deride the American public for being unsophisticated about the perks of power. Nor did Ramsey trot out the hackneyed assertion of the day that must have disquieted American women coast-to-coast:
All men lie about sex, right?
Rather, Ramsey said that if you’ll lie about sex, then you’ll lie about anything, because if a man will lie to his wife, he’ll lie to anybody. Too, Ramsey said that a man who would put such an august career on the line for the sake of a little “messing about” with a groupie was a gobshite.
Still, after hours of aimless snacking, fags lit and extinguished and lit again five minutes later, and dull, uncomprehending confrontation with blank sheets of paper, who could blame her for fleeing such a dismal life for the adoring companionship of a lovely man at the UK Championship in Preston in November?
Right before Christmas, she pulled three all-nighters straight to meet her extended deadline for
The Miss Ability Act,
more than once breaking down in tears. Irina conceded to herself on the way to deliver the portfolio to Puffin that perhaps the last ones were a little “hasty,” but at least she got them in on time. Nevertheless, fatigue, insecurity, and a soiling sensation of having done a slapdash job on her homework was not the best preparation for Christmas in Brighton Beach, and for finally introducing her mother to not only Ramsey Acton himself, but to the fact of the man’s existence.
After Lawrence’s chiding, Irina had headed off her mother’s calls to Borough by ringing Brighton Beach frequently herself. She did hint that she had a “surprise” when announcing that “
we
are coming for Christmas,” but demurred from identifying the constituents of the pronoun. Since there was no telling how her melodramatic mother would react to her having left dependable Lawrence Trainer for an impetuous snooker player, Irina decided to simply show up with Ramsey Acton at the door. It was a plan indicative either of a newly matured boldness, or of a regressively childish desperation to put off the unpleasant for as long as humanly possible.
En route to Heathrow in the Jaguar on December 23, Ramsey nipped and surged in and out of traffic with the usual nervy precision, and being whizzed about zip-zip-zip was thrilling. Yet by Hammersmith, she laid an apprehensive hand on his arm. “Now, you know that my mother is difficult,” she said.
“You made that more than clear.”
“And you know it isn’t easy for me to visit her, at the best of times. And this isn’t the best of times. That is, she won’t be expecting you. She’s obsessed with order, and people like that don’t like being snuck up on. They like to know what’s coming.”
“So why didn’t you tell her on the blower?”
“As I told you, there’s a raw power in a person standing physically in front of you that brooks no argument—and that may shut her up. But I want you to make me a promise.”
“Shoot,” said Ramsey.
“Promise me that under no circumstances will you pick a fight. You can berate me up one side and down the other when we come back. But even if I get drunk and dance naked on a table, you will not,
will not
take it up with me in Brighton Beach.”
“Why do you assume we’ll have a row?” he asked, sounding wounded. Their every set-to had lodged indelibly in the part of Irina’s brain that stored other major traumas, like car accidents and the deaths of close friends. Ramsey never seemed to recall having spoken a single harsh word.
“I’m not assuming anything,” she said. “I’m asking you for a promise. Ironclad, pinky-swear. You haven’t made it yet.”
“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “No rows. I promise.”
Irina squeezed his arm and thanked him, but his assent had sounded ominously offhand. Like the inexpensive toys she used to get for Christmas from distant relatives, a promise cheaply given was prone to break the first time you played with it.
At duty-free, Irina could no more stop Ramsey from springing for a bottle of Hennessy XO than she’d been able to discourage his purchase of first-class tickets. Indeed, turning a blind eye to the buckets of money that Ramsey threw at any problem or pleasure was becoming the norm. At first Irina had grabbed the odd lunch bill; lately she hadn’t bothered. She didn’t harbor any presumptuous notions about his funds being hers as well now that they were married. Still, Ramsey was rich, he enjoyed spending money on her, and it was amazing how readily a woman who once spooned out the Cajun seasoning at the bottom of the popcorn bowl to use again could adapt to plane tickets that cost—well, she’d rather not even think about it. And merely because those complimentary toiletry kits were, according to Ramsey, “the business.” Never mind that for the price of a miniature spritzer of noisome cologne, foam earplugs, and two tablespoons of mouthwash you could probably put a down-payment on a small house.
On the plane, the service was solicitous, and they did get rather tipsy. Between queries about how he’d fared in the UK Championship, the flight attendant was forever asking if Ramsey wanted another box of chocolates or an extra blanket.
Extra blankets came in useful. Irina had always spurned that “milehigh club” nonsense, for she couldn’t see the appeal of sexual intercourse atop the plastic toilet of a cramped airline loo that’s wah-ing from a circulation fan and reeking of nauseous disinfectant. Yet somewhere over Iceland as they reclined under a mound of tartan synthetic it did seem wasteful to ignore the fact that Ramsey had a hard-on that could have doubled as a police baton for bashing anti-globalist protesters over the head. Once Ramsey loosened his belt, in their dark tent her hand traced the outlines of the most beautiful dick she had ever encountered. It was impossible to say why. Irina may never have been one of those women who find male genitals a little repulsive, but she had never, either, made great aesthetic distinctions between them. But this particular dick was unspeakably exquisite—smooth, simple, and straight, with testicles that snugged close to his groin with skin that was taut and talcum-dry. When Ramsey forced himself to the practice table in Preston last month, she had only to conjure the image of his erection that morning to emit a groan of such helplessness and urgency that the waitress in the hotel café asked if there was something wrong with the coffee. Frankly, she’d become a slave to that dick, and it sometimes alarmed her what extravagant sacrifices she might make or humiliations she might endure just to be allowed to touch it one more time.
They got Ramsey’s shirt wet. Once he slipped under her skirt to return the favor, he chuckled in her ear, “Oi, I could wash my hands down there!” When he reached her cervix she managed to keep from crying out, but her eyes bulged and the rasp of her inhalation was probably audible. None of their little activities seemed to take very long and they were careful to keep covered, but chances were that the flight attendants knew exactly what was going on. Old Irina would have been mortified. Old Irina had never had a very good time on airplanes, either.
As the front door opened, Raisa’s outfit obligingly announced the fact that her personality as well was contrived and over-deliberate: a flaming red blouse over a snug black skirt, with a scarf, belt, and heels color-coordinated in the same precise shade of blinding sun-yellow. It was flashy, it was Sunday-magazine-supplement sharp, and it was too much.
Ordinarily Raisa imbued her every sentence with an artificial enthusiasm, like a mortician pumping embalming fluid into a corpse. Yet she was so nonplussed to find a tall, narrow stranger beside her daughter that she failed to marshal her hallmark theatricality. She kissed her daughter with perfunctory distraction, then asked flatly in a normal-person tone of voice that Irina almost never heard,
“Mama, I’d like you to meet my husband, Ramsey Acton.”
“Eto kto takoi?”
“Tvoi
muzh
? Bozhe moi, Irina, ty vyskochila zamuzh!”
She shot a skeptical glance at Ramsey’s hose-clip, which he’d forbidden Irina to replace.
“You heard me.”
“Tak!”
Raisa exclaimed.
“
Eto
tvoi suprees!”
“Ramsey, this is my mother, Raisa McGovern.” Obscurely, Raisa had refused to relinquish her ex-husband’s surname, to keep him and to get back at him at the same time.
“Pleasure,” said Ramsey, kissing his mother-in-law with Continental elegance on both cheeks. He was just the kind of man Raisa would admire—graceful, kitted out in soft dark fabrics with expensive tailoring, albeit with that little dash of dangerousness in the leather jacket. Yet her clumsy, wallflower elder daughter had no business marrying such a striking older man. Raisa would be far more comfortable with a son-inlaw in slovenly plaid flannel, whose comeliness was at best an acquired taste, preferably two inches shorter than Raisa’s own stately height of five-ten, and with chronically poor posture. In sum, Raisa was far more comfortable with
Lawrence.
Having recovered a measure of her excruciating vivacity, Raisa ushered the two inside.
“Akh, izveneete!”
“Kak grubo s moei storony! Pozhaluysta, prokhodite, prokhodite! Dobro pozhalovat!”
“Mama, Ramsey would feel a great deal more welcome if you’d speak
po-angliyski.
You’d never know it, my dear, but my mother has lived in this country for over forty years, and does speak English of a kind.”
“Rumsee? Rumsee Achtun, da?”
It was all an act, including that Slavically trilled R on Ramsey’s first name. When she deigned to switch to scrupulously crummy English, that was an act, too. “I no can get over it! When you two marry?
Ee gdye Lawrence, Irina? Shto sloochilos s Lawrensom?
” As if Ramsey couldn’t translate the word
Lawrence.
“Lawrence and I have amicably parted ways. And please don’t take exception to not being invited to the wedding. No one was. It was a registry-office job, just the two of us.”
“This very sudden,
da
?”
“Yes, Mama,” Irina lied; their first anniversary was last week. “Very sudden.”
Raisa led Ramsey upstairs to deposit their luggage in Irina’s old room, then gave him a tour of the house, which she’d bought for a pittance with the spartan proceeds of her divorce when her marriage finally went up in flames during Irina’s senior year of high school. (The dowdy hovel’s now being worth a small fortune was a fact about which Raisa was both smug and secretive.) She’d made a beeline for the increasingly Russian enclave, where she could live among
her people
and feel superior to the Jews at the same time. Presently, she’d be wanting to show off her studio to Ramsey, in order to impress upon her guest that she was not just anybody but an accomplished ballerina and famously strict dance instructor (Raisa boasted that her students were afraid of her) who still worked out at the bar indefatigably every day. Raisa was not going gentle into that good night, and Irina supposed, despite herself, that her mother’s ferocity at sixty-four was impressive.
Exhausted at three a.m. London-time, after too much wine on the plane and too little sleep while meeting the deadline for
The Miss Ability Act,
Irina sank—insofar as it was possible to
sink
into such uncomfortable furniture—into one of the parlor’s red velveteen chairs. Deserting a nice man for a raffish snooker player was sufficiently scandalous behavior to cast her in the liberating role of black sheep. So why had she still felt bound by the convention of coming home for Christmas? Ramsey was the only man who had ever made her feel beautiful. Her mother always made her feel dowdy, unfit, and mousy by comparison. On the boardwalk, men still stared at Raisa’s calves. While Irina was proud of her mother, in a way, there wasn’t much point in presenting her husband with this statuesque paragon of muscle—with a slimmer waist, higher cheekbones, and more lustrous bound black hair—only to show herself up.
When the other two returned, Ramsey ran his hands over her shoulders and kissed the hollow behind her earlobe. Her mother’s eyes sharpened. Raisa didn’t approve of “groping” in public. No matter how obvious
it appeared to Irina that behind that stern glance of reproach lay jealousy,
Raisa herself would never recognize her sense of decorum as the bitter
fruit of sexual neglect. In fact, because the unself-aware—which includes
basically everybody—are impervious to uncharitable perceptions of their
underlying motives, all these insights you have into people and what
makes them tick are surprisingly useless. Censure registered, Raisa excused herself coolly to the kitchen.
As the matching red velveteen chair was insensibly positioned so that
one of the shelves supporting Raisa’s hideous porcelain figurines jutted
into your neck if you leaned back, Ramsey pulled it four inches forward
before taking a seat. As the legs sank into fresh royal-blue carpet, Irina’s
eyes widened in alarm. When soon thereafter Ramsey popped upstairs to
the loo, she shot up and restored his chair to its previous position. Ramsey returned, having retrieved the Hennessy XO. He looked at
the chair.
“You don’t know the drill,” Irina whispered. “She’ll go bananas if you
make new depressions in the carpet!”
“I don’t fancy learning
the drill,
” said Ramsey, full-voice. He yanked
the chair back out a good foot—that would make a second set of criminal
indentations in the pile—and slid back into the seat with his long legs
extended, as if hoping that someone would trip over them. He reached for
his Gauloises. Irina made frantically slashing motions. With an eye-roll,
he put them back.
Raisa entered with a tray, the presentation of which, with its glasses
resting in filigreed silver holders, was the whole point, since nobody
wanted any tea. As for the plate of Pepperidge Farm cookies, it was meant
to cameo the fact that Raisa wouldn’t have one. Setting the tray on the
coffee table, she looked steadily at the legs of Ramsey’s chair. Held any
longer, her gaze would have set the carpet fibers on fire.
“So,
R-rumsee,
” Raisa began after she’d poured a round. “What you do
for living?”
“I’m a snooker player.”
“Snookers,”
Raisa turned around in her mouth. “This—game?” “It’s a game,” said Ramsey tolerantly.
“Card game? Like bridge?”
“The closest thing to snooker in the US is pool,” Irina intervened. “You know, when you hit balls with a stick into pockets on a green table?” She rued the fact that her description made all forms of billiards sound inane, but there was no limit to the English words that her mother would pretend not to know. Why Raisa imagined that to live in a country for decades and still have little command of the language seemed charming was anyone’s guess. Honestly, every day she must have walked around this house practicing dropping her articles, expunging every form of the verb “to be,” and converting each hard
Th
to
Z
and
W
to
V
:
“Zis—game? Vat you do for living?”
For a smart woman to maintain this degree of justoff-the-boat authenticity after forty-some years of Jehovah’s Witness missionaries,
Reader’s Digest
sweepstake mailings, PBS miniseries, and screaming ads for Crazy Eddie’s would be hard work.
“You play this—
snookers,
” Raisa directed to Ramsey, “for money?”
“Da,”
said Ramsey. “I play
snookers
for money.”
“But you only make this money when you win?”
“Spot on, Mum. I only get paid when I win.”
“Ramsey wins a lot, Mama.”
“So you no know until you play your—
snookers
”—Raisa never took her eyes off Ramsey—“if you have fat pocket or you have nothing.”
(Nozzing.)
“That’s a fair cop,” said Ramsey neutrally; he seemed to be enjoying this.
“Mama, you don’t get it! In the UK, Ramsey’s famous. The pool analogy, it’s not helpful. Snooker is a big deal in Britain. The players are superstars. They’re on TV all the time. Ramsey can’t walk down the street without five people asking for his autograph . . .” She was speaking into a void.
“You ever think,
Rumsee,
you get real job?”
“When hell freezes, I reckon.” Playing his part to the hilt, Ramsey knocked back his cold tea, then reached for the cognac beside his chair. He peeled off the lead strip, popped the ornate cork, and poured a triple. “Can’t see nipping off to an office or such. See, Irina and me fancy a bit of a lie-in mornings. As a rule, I’ll have got so dishmopped the night before”—Ramsey took a demonstrative slug—“it takes most of the day to get my head right.”
Raisa rose stiffly to remove the tea things.
“That’s it, we’re going to bed,” Irina announced, massaging her temples.
“Oi, the party’s just getting started!” cried Ramsey, laying on the South London with a trowel;
started
came out
stah-id.
“For you maybe,” said Irina. “This isn’t my idea of a party.”