Illegal Liaisons (14 page)

Megi pulled out some CDs and switched one on.

“Don’t drown us out!” shouted Antosia.

Megi, resigned, pressed “stop” and inclined the seat.

“Racket or no racket, we’re off on vacation.” She stretched out her hand to stroke Jonathan’s hair.

He shuddered, torn from his own thoughts.

“And you’re still stressed with the city,” sighed Megi and gazed through the windscreen. “Hardly surprising. We’ve had a difficult year. The move, a new job for me, and for you the children at a new school. You’re brave to have taken such good care of them.”

Jonathan nodded and slipped into a slower lane.

“I really appreciate it,” continued Megi. “You’ve proved your masculinity.”

“Masculinity?”

Instead of German valleys outside the car, he momentarily saw Andrea’s shoulders revealed in her red dress.

“Any guy can take his children for walks at the weekends but not many can spend the afternoon with them, help with their homework, read to them, put them to bed.”

“You think so?” mumbled Jonathan.

Andrea was now leaning her butt on the table edge. In nothing but stilettos; he’d already removed her Dress …

“… that the story’s becoming clear.” Megi’s words reached him.

“Sorry, what did you say?” He leaned toward her, his alarmed eyes assessing the road. He shouldn’t let himself get so distracted.

“It’s great that your story’s becoming clear! It’s extraordinary how we live together, sleep in the same bed, yet you’ve got a life of your own like that.”

The wheels scraped warningly along the white strip marking the road from the wayside.

“Shall I take over?” asked Megi. “Pull into a gas station. There ought to be one in five kilometers.”

“No, there’s no need. I thought the jerk behind was going to pass us.”

Megi fell silent; after a while she settled her head on Jonathan’s jacket, which she’d squeezed in between her shoulder and the window. Without her daily make-up and with strands of hair falling on her cheeks, she looked like yet another child in his car. Suddenly he thought that moments like these were necessary in order to be happy with one’s lot, brief moments of separation beneath which lurks valuable intimacy. He wanted to say it out loud – he knew Megi would understand – but she was already asleep.

Again he saw Andrea. She lay beneath him on the crumpled bedspread. (She’d succumbed in the end, allowing him to make love to her where she slept with Simon, but refused to remove the spread so their smells wouldn’t mix.) A huge wave of tenderness swelled up in Jonathan, flooded his nose and mouth; from his throat emerged a sound that was neither a cough nor sob. He glanced at the rear-view mirror: the children were avidly following the animated adventures of cows and bulls. He wiped his eyes with the outside of his hand and shielded his right cheek with it so that his wife, should she awake, wouldn’t see it was wet.

By the sea, where Megi spent most of the time with the children so that Jonathan could have a break from daily responsibilities, he felt a little like a country dog that, let off its chain, doesn’t dare venture far from its kennel. He ran along the coast trying to shake his head free of unwanted thoughts,
but whether he jogged against the sun or left it behind him, Brussels – and the woman with whom he’d fallen in love – was always in front of his eyes.

He was tormented by the thought that his lover was not chasing after him as he was after her. Admittedly, she was tender when they met, admired – in text messages – his sense of humor, intelligence, the charm of an outsider, contagious sexual enthusiasm, and sophistication. And yet Jonathan sensed an imbalance in their commitment.

When it had dawned on him, he began to probe in an effort to extract as much as he could from her: he inundated her with compliments, provoked confessions, screwed her until she was breathless. He even dug his heels in a couple of times to keep her “on hold” and make her miss him – he didn’t reply to a message, sometimes two, and waited. But when he let it go and stopped contacting her, Andrea also remained silent. She didn’t ask, didn’t sweet-talk him but accepted his decision. Then he was the one who couldn’t stand it any longer and ran to her. He had once asked her why she did this, why she let him go. She hadn’t answered. The worst thing about all this was the calm certainty that he was at her mercy. She kept dancing in front of him, the bitch in a red dress.

Only once did she come after him – after she’d omitted to invite him and Megi to the party in which mutual friends had been included. She’d apologized, written about some misunderstanding or oversight. But he’d lost his temper and remained unmoved in his silence for two weeks. “No, sixteen days,” he corrected himself and accelerated his trot along the Baltic shore.

He returned to the rented room and took a shower. The children’s scattered toys, his wife’s drying swimsuit, the pattering feet of his mother-in-law who’d installed herself in the room next door, all jarred on his nerves. He liked Megi’s mother a great deal but instinctively avoided her now – he was, after all, hurting her daughter.

He went out again, crossed the dirt roads and, clenching his teeth, assured himself what a good thing it was he’d broken up with Andrea. Good, very good. His long strides marked the rhythm: “Good, good, good.”

He returned for lunch. He leapt up the stairs and neared the door. The children were making such a racket that it was obvious no adult was keeping an eye on them. He was about to peer in when he heard familiar
voices coming from his mother-in-law’s room. He glued his eye to a gap in the door. Megi’s mother was sitting on the divan, her daughter had just emerged from the bathroom in a bathing suit he’d never seen before.

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Megi’s mother. “Who’d have thought you’d had two children. Look how slim you are!”

“But doesn’t this stick out, this here …?”

“Nothing sticks out. It lies on you perfectly, take a look for yourself!” She picked up the rectangular mirror from the sill and handed it to her daughter. “And don’t be so silly. Enjoy what you’ve got. You’re at a wonderful age.” His mother-in-law sat down on the divan again, her thick hair fleetingly falling over her face. “The truth is that when I was young I was also blind to the way I looked, and only realized once I was over thirty. But I was happiest with myself in my forties, and later.”

“Jonathan doesn’t want me,” said Megi suddenly.

Her mother didn’t say anything.

“I don’t even know when it started,” Megi’s voice faltered, as if she were in a hurry. “He doesn’t fancy me, doesn’t say I’m attractive. He doesn’t say anything. He’s there but he isn’t there.”

“Isn’t?”

“Even physically.”

Jonathan heard the divan squeak as Megi sat down next to her mother. For a moment they didn’t say anything, his mother-in-law held her daughter close.

“I didn’t think I could tell anyone,” said Megi finally. “Jonathan is my friend after all, that is, my husband, man, but above all …”

“Fortunately he’s one of those men you can usually depend on.”

“That’s true. Although he didn’t stay home with Tomaszek, remember, when my maternity leave was over.”

“But he’s with them now. Being a parent is one thing, being yourself another. It’s knocked into men’s heads that, above all, they’re to be themselves, the rest will be done for them by women anyway. That needs to be worked on if it’s to change. It’s already happening in your generation. You’re friends, partners.”

“Do you think so?”

His mother-in-law nodded and patted Megi on her bare shoulder.

“Don’t worry, some things can be changed, fortunately. And those that can’t …” She waved it off and got up to put the mirror back on the sill. “There, look at him!” She indicated the window. “For pity’s sake, has nobody told him he looks like a tree trunk in those briefs.”

Megi sits in a fishing boat moored on the sand. She knows by heart the phases of the red sphere plunging over the horizon, the speed of the process, and the expression of reverence on the faces of those around her. Holidaymakers wade in the water, their hands behind their backs, which makes them look like conscientious penguins. Megi turns her eyes away from the disc of the slipping sun and gazes at the horizon where the sky meets the water in a gray embrace
.

“Where are the children?” Anxiety needles her. “Ah, with mom!”

Mom … A couple of years ago Megi overheard some relatives grumbling in the kitchen about her mother. “Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” they griped, thinking she couldn’t hear them. Megi stopped in front of the door but didn’t hear the end; someone was approaching in the hall and she had to pretend she was rearranging the plates she was carrying from the table
.

“Doesn’t fall far …” It was true. She’d learned her maternal skills from her mother and grandmother. She, like them, looked after the house and nosed the little ones like a lioness – even if she did so through Jonathan at times. He was her eyes, her husband – well trusted
.

The last spark of the setting sun disappears into the sea. The people disperse; the sky turns the purple color of end-credits
.

“Where’s Jonathan?” Another stab. “Running? No, he runs in the morning. At the café with the children? No, Mom’s there … So where is he?”

Darkness and coolness draw over the sea; the beach around her grows deserted. Megi doesn’t follow the others; she remains sitting in the blackened boat
.

Jonathan followed the edge of the sea, going against the crowd, which, having seen the performance of the setting sun, made its way to the exit.

Cold crept up on him, chilling his fingertips and raising the hair on his arms, but didn’t force him to retire with the others. He strolled and thought about his cell phone. He would willingly throw it away. Now, with a broad swing like when skimming pebbles over water.

To his surprise, he recalled the way Megi skipped stones – and almost laughed out loud. It was a sight for the entire family; even the children
proved better at the skill which, for some reason, she couldn’t master. Megi would pick up a stone and take a swing but the stone wouldn’t glide; in a strange flight resembling the trajectory of a sickle, it returned to the starting point, sometimes hitting Megi herself.

He’d taught her so many times how to skim pebbles, but she couldn’t get the knack.

He kicked a piece of wood from which all life had been washed away by the salty water. He could teach her so many things! Be it only to make love like Andrea – unrestrained, indecently, sometimes even unaesthetically. To leave him breathless with desire.

He picked up a pebble and took a mighty swing. It was not a question of skill; Jonathan didn’t believe in anything like objective sexual competence. What was most important in making love was intelligence, Imagination, and “chemistry,” not necessarily in that order. There was also lack of inhibition, but this was a double-edged sword. He’d once had a girlfriend who admitted blatantly that animal copulation aroused her, and he was aroused by the fact that she’d told him. Yet when he was granting her request he’d felt a shadow of repulsion, which had appeared from he knew not where, and which had spoiled his enjoyment.

Jonathan hurled another pebble and when he heard the splash, far away in the dark water, he reached into his pocket and checked his cell again. The phone shimmered in his hand like a dead fish. He took a swing.

Megi stands in the fishing boat and thinks about perverts. What if one is lurking in the forest by the path leading to the beach? A childhood terror brought up to date in the form of a goblin – a stocky monster with wide-set legs and narrow horizons?

Megi scrambles out of the boat and makes toward the dark funnel of the exit. There are two or three people on the beach; if something were to happen, they wouldn’t hear her scream. She reaches the wooden walkway. Ahead of her is the dark forest and dunes, behind her a single, tall figure. “Shall I let him pass? Shall I run on ahead?”

Jonathan made his way to the beach exit, which was barely visible against the dunes. Wading through the loose sand along the beaten track where the beach met the sea seemed too tiring. He glanced, yet again, at his
phone which he hadn’t in the end thrown into the water but hidden in his pocket with a groan of disappointment.

He walked ahead, moving away from the sea, following somebody’s slight silhouette. He thought he would bury the phone. The struggle with himself to resist the temptation of getting in touch with Andrea who, put off by his silence, had given no sign of life, was finishing him off. In the end, he made a wager with himself: if he managed to write a message to Andrea before the slim silhouette ahead of him disappeared in the dark gorge of the beach exit, he would send it.

He pulled the phone out and began typing. He cancelled and wrote anew. He groaned and wiped his eyes, which watered from staring at the blue screen. He began again.

Megi looks back, takes out her phone just in case, quickly searches for her husband’s number, and positions her finger on “call”. What had initially seemed a game of her own imagination, a controlled game of hide-and-seek – she and the archetypal pervert – has imperceptibly turned into painful anxiety
.

The man walking behind her brightens the darkness with his phone. Megi quickens her stride. “Have your phone switched on, Jonathan, have your phone …” She shakes beneath her thin jacket and immediately reassures herself. “It must be switched on, he never parts with it.”

With that thought in mind Megi plunges into the darkness
.

“Send.” Jonathan’s finger, damp with sweat, pressed the key on his phone while he raised his head. The message he sent was gliding just where he gazed – into the eyes of his lover, brown irises beneath dark lashes and hair so different from the delicate blonde hair of his wife, which their children had inherited.

So he was at Andrea’s mercy once again.

He forged ahead through the dark forest, the rustling leaves deadening the footsteps of the woman before him. He reached the road lit by street lamps and hesitantly pulled out his phone. His heart thumped to the beat of the disco which was blasting out the nearby bar. He looked at the screen. Andrea had written back!