“Oh, it was worse than that,” she went on. “I guess plenty of kids aren’t Anna Pavlova. But I had buck teeth.”
Ramsey angled his head. “Looks like a fine set of chops to me.”
“I don’t think my mother would have sprung for them, but luckily my father paid for braces. Really, my front teeth weren’t just a little crooked. They hung out of my mouth and rested on my lower lip.” Irina demonstrated, and Ramsey laughed.
“Well, you helped explain something,” he said. “You’re not—aware of yourself. You are beautiful, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so. But you don’t know it.”
Abashed, Irina reached for her sake cup only to discover that it was empty; she pretended to take a slug. “My mother’s much more beautiful than I am.”
“Even allowing that were ever true,” he said, signalling for another round of sake flagons, “you must mean she was.”
“No, is. At sixty-three. In comparison to my mother, I’m a schlub. She still works out on a bar, for hours. All on three sticks of celery and a leaf of lettuce. Sorry—half a leaf.”
“She sounds a right pain in the arse.”
“She is—a right pain in the arse.”
Their sashimi platters arrived, and the chef was such an artist—the spicy tuna was bound with edible gold leaf—that eating his creation seemed like vandalism.
“Me,” said Ramsey, surveying his platter with the same respectful look-don’t-touch expression with which he’d met Irina by his car, “I watch buff birds strut the pavement, first thing goes through my head ain’t, ‘Blimey, love a bit o’ that, ’ey!’ but, ‘Bloody hell, she must spend all day in the gym.’ I don’t see beauty; all I see is vanity.”
“Great excuse for skipping sit-ups: oh, I wouldn’t want to look ‘vain.’ ”
“No chance of that, pet.”
Irina frowned. “You know, something changed when that tin came off my teeth. Too much changed. It was sort of horrifying.”
“How’s that?”
“Everyone treated me like a completely different person. Not just boys, but girls. You’ve probably been good-looking all your life, so you have no idea.”
“Am I?”
“Don’t be coy. It’s like me pretending to be ashamed of having been skinny.” Worried that she was encouraging something that she shouldn’t, she added, “I only mean, you have regular features.”
“Grand,” he said dryly. “I’m overcome.”
“I’m convinced that decent-looking people—”
“I fancy good-looking better.”
“—All right, then, good-looking people. They haven’t a clue that how they’re treated—how much it has to do with their appearance. I even bet that attractive people have a higher opinion of humanity. Since everybody’s always nice to them, they think everybody’s nice. But everybody’s not nice. And they’re superficial beyond belief. It’s depressing, when you’ve been on the other side. You get treated like gum on somebody’s shoe, or worse, like nothing. As if you’re not just unsightly, 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