Free The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver

back.” He looked wounded. “Or didn’t you notice?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “Yes, of course. That’s what the pie is for. To welcome you home.”
In the kitchen, she leaned her palms against the counter, dropped her head, and breathed. It was a relief to escape Lawrence’s company, however briefly; yet from the fact of the relief itself there was no escape, and it cored her.
Leadenly, Irina removed the pie from the fridge. Chilling for under two hours, it wasn’t completely set. With any luck the egg in the filling had cooked thoroughly enough that the pie’s having been left out on the counter for a full day wasn’t deadly. Well, she herself wouldn’t manage more than a bite. (She’d not been able to eat a thing since that last spoonful of green-tea ice cream. Though there had been another cognac around noon . . . ) The slice she cut for herself was so slight that it fell over. For Lawrence, she hacked off a far larger piece—Lawrence was always watching his weight—than she knew he wanted. The wedge sat fat and stupid on the plate; the filling drooled. Ramsey didn’t need admiration of his snooker game, and Lawrence didn’t need pie.
She pulled an ale from the fridge, and pondered the freezer. Normally, she’d join him with a glass of wine, but the frozen Stolichnaya beckoned. Since she’d brushed her teeth, Lawrence needn’t know that she’d already knocked back two hefty belts of neat vodka to gird herself for his return. Spirits on an empty stomach wasn’t like her, but apparently acting out of character could slide from temporary liberation to permanent estrangement from your former self in the wink of an eye. She withdrew the frosted bottle, took a furtive slug, and poured herself a better-than-genteel measure. After all. They were “celebrating.”
Lawrence was too polite to object that she’d served him a slice much bigger than he’d asked for, and exclaimed, “Krasny!”
“That’s ‘red,’ you doorak, ” she said, in the best imitation of affectionate teasing she could muster. “ ‘Beautiful’ is krasivy. Red Square, krasnaya ploshchad, da? ”
Ordinarily Lawrence’s tin ear for Russian made her laugh, but there was an edge on her voice that made Lawrence look over.
“Izvini, pozhaluysta,” he apologized correctly. “ Konyeshno, krasivy. As in, krasivy pirog ”—she was amazed that he knew the word for “pie”—“or, moya krasivaya zhena. ”
For pity’s sake. Even in Russian, he called her his “wife.” The term had never before struck her as cheeky, but it did now.
And it was typical, wasn’t it, that he could only call her beautiful in Russian. In English, she was cute, a safe, minimizing adjective that could as easily apply to a hamster as to a “wife.” It wasn’t fair to be irritated by a perfectly lovely compliment, but the resort to speaking in tongues when coming anywhere near emotional subject matter was painfully reminiscent of her father. A dialogue coach for mostly B-movies, her father was a master of accents; his work ran along the lines of coaching the man who did the voice of Boris Badenov in Bullwinkle on how to thicken his consonants with Soviet wickedness. He could switch readily from Chinese “flied lice” to Irish brogue, and she supposed it was all very amusing. Except that he had never told her he loved her, or was proud of something she’d accomplished, unless rolling his Rs like Sean Connery or lapsing into a Swedish lilt— I lahf me leetle dahter, jaaaaaa! She’d adored all the voices he’d employed reading her stories when she was little, but as she grew older the charm wore off. Why, he was born in Ohio, but even his Midwestern delivery sounded like one more accent.
Besides, Lawrence may have used Russian as a device to arms-length sentiments that might sound embarrassing in English, but it was also their private argot, and right now it was too much. It was too intimate. It hurt. “Thank you,” she said firmly in