Illegal Liaisons (24 page)

A few hours later he was busying himself around Tomaszek, who was throwing up half the night. Meanwhile, Andrea sent passionate messages. Jonathan cleaned the floor and the soiled sheets, fretting that his lover was worried about not getting a reply.

“Damn it, why did I give him those tomatoes for supper?” Megi held Tomaszek in her arms. Everything stank, yet, out of the blue, a thought crossed Jonathan’s mind: Andrea had entered his life because he’d opened himself to the love of a woman. Where had Megi been at the time? Andrea had entered smoothly and deeply; if she were now to leave him, his blood would flow.

When he later analyzed this period (in no great detail, rather a general summation in order to understand what really had happened) he had the impression he was playing with pictures in a memory game. He is
standing in front of Andrea’s apartment, demanding she see him. He leads her to the church in the opposite direction to the one they usually take; she lies beneath him and asks for a baby; he returns home and strokes his wife’s hair on the sofa; Andrea reproaches him saying he has less and less time for her; he reproaches her for having used him to provoke Simon’s jealousy and to finally make her husband declare that he wants a child by her.

Then his lover stops finding even the smallest gap in her daily schedule into which to squeeze their secret trysts; she starts flirting with other men in front of his eyes again. Jonathan is furious. Andrea writes, “I’m nothing but your toy!” He stops sending her messages.

And later Andrea goes away without saying a word. Jonathan learns from Stefan that his lover has been in Sweden for a week.

“Didn’t you know? What’s happening with you two?”

Jonathan waves it away – there are no words for this infernal circle.

“Surely it’s obvious what you don’t want to do,” says Stefan in the end.

Jonathan looks at him hopefully.

“You don’t want to leave Megi.”

“I don’t?” He looks as if someone has just called him a piece of celery.

“Because what would you do without her?”

“Which one?” Jonathan is lost.

Jonathan throws himself into a whirl of activity: he prepares for the end of term at his writing course, drives the children to their friends’ houses, rushes to school meetings, visits the gym. At times he feels cleansed of desire: he no longer wants to fuck Andrea, is free of those dreams. He strolls down the streets of Brussels, the wind sweeps over him, the balmy temperature soothes his inner seething – perhaps it will transform the lava into petrified peace, a beneficial numbness that won’t upset his daily life.

When, with its recurrences, love destroys the peace he’s had such difficulty in attaining, Jonathan uses his willpower to recall how Andrea courted Simon, how she wormed herself into his favor, how she had seen in him – what, in fact? With every couple, however guarded they may be, something pokes out from beneath their tight uniform, an unruly shirt, a partially ripped lining. Jonathan and Megi also showed the world how
much held them together. How much? Perhaps too much, given how Stefan had summarized it.

There are a number of things that have an adverse effect on the decision to break up, thinks Jonathan: geographical distance, time span, and perhaps something else. He’s plagued by them all, even those without a name. He’s doing everything he can so as not to give in to temptation – he runs (flees), closes himself in at home or in his writing, meets people (cycling expeditions arranged by a circle of fathers he’d found on the internet), goes for a beer with Stefan.

In the end, he can’t bear it and writes to her again.

Andrea doesn’t answer. Jonathan waits until morning then texts her in desperation: “Will always love you and will always be stiff for you.” It is his sincerest declaration and she knows it. Several hours later she sends a smiling face. Nothing else.

Jonathan groans internally as his thoughts circle: how indifferent she must have grown if she’s waited so long to reply! Or perhaps she was busy? Jonathan scans the television and online news – there weren’t any important events that night – so what was she doing? Suspicion grips his throat. Something had happened, something that rendered his declaration unimportant.

He’s almost sure of what she was doing that night. Even so, he waits for at least one denial from her.

But no, she remains silent.

He pretended to be on form. “She’s too vanilla” – he turned over in his head his mother’s saying about a certain friend who had gone to the States, become a housecleaner, and then married the man whose house she was cleaning. She had a degree in physics, like Jonathan’s mother, but didn’t have enough luck to work in her field in the West. She became a perfect lady who lunched. “Why do you keep in touch with her?” Jonathan would ask his mother when Daisy (formerly Danuta) came to England for a few days. To his mind, Daisy resembled the cow on a Swiss chocolate wrapper; the description “vanilla” suited her dress sense and lack of sharp opinions. She came to his mind because he felt as though reality were attacking him like a piece of blunt glass. He wanted to be vanilla now. Not to know and not to feel.

They don’t go far, just to Normandy. Megi doesn’t want to go to Poland this time. Packed to the roof (“we’d pack any car up to the roof”), they say goodbye to Reyers Street. They fix their eyes on the apartment with sunken windows, pass the roundabout where there’s always a pink bicycle with a pannier of planted flowers. Once someone had stolen the flowers, but the following day new ones had already been planted; nature abhors a vacuum.

When Megi goes with the children to the bathroom at a service station, Jonathan checks his cell: no messages, Andrea is silent. As he gets further and further away from Brussels, so she, no doubt, is returning to Simon. Meanwhile, Megi appears through the sliding doors, Tomaszek wielding a balloon with the service station’s logo, Antosia scratching at the price of her new hairbands. Some southerners stare at his wife.

Jonathan takes her by the hand. Now is the time to mend everything – they’re on leave, she is here and so is he. Making sure that the children in the back are engrossed in their film, he places his hand on Megi’s knee. He is bubbling with desire. But as soon as his palm touches his wife’s skin, the tingling in his balls subsides. What does he feel? Barely tenderness. “That’s always something,” he would have thought, had he not remembered their trips together interrupted by intercourse on the lay-bys.

“We’re so good! Why aren’t we sinful?” Images explode in his memory: Andrea leans over him, teases his lower belly with her hair. Jonathan unwittingly squeezes Megi’s knee, she looks at him with devotion. Jonathan pulls his hand back with an apologetic smile, as if he’d jostled an old woman in the bus; the smell of old powder on old skin, or maybe talc, almost pervades him. “From talc we come, to talc shall we return.” He used to cover his tiny daughter’s bottom with the white powder. “Who’s going to help Antosia when she’s old?” groans Jonathan’s soul, which is no doubt destined for damnation.

“Look!” Megi’s voice tears him away from his pondering.

An Audi with an elderly driver stands in the lane next to theirs, the interior full of hanging puppets; the dolls swing as the car moves on. Shivers run down Jonathan’s back. This is a strange journey; thoughts teem, scramble over each other, circulate around real beings, bring into existence those unborn. Because if he were to fulfil Andrea’s wish and
give her a child, where would they be now? What car would he be sitting in, whose knee would he be stroking, from what would he be running?

“That’s too much,” snorts Jonathan soundlessly and switches lanes, but his thoughts continue along their old track: so, he has a strong desire, but not for his wife! Jonathan grows angry. He’s giving so much of himself to his family, looking after them. And what about his needs? Resentment wells within him: he’s sacrificed so much.

“Am I Jesus?” He shrugs so that Megi looks quizzically at him.

He shakes his head without turning his eyes on her. Before Tomaszek was conceived, Jonathan had felt as if he was living with a ghost. Work had sucked Megi in, just as maternity had done before. And although she sometimes prepared supper and had her mother come around so that they could go to the cinema, Megi had been so absent he’d stopped believing in her corporeality. It was not until he once discovered she wasn’t wearing any panties beneath her skirt that something had vibrated between them. How long had she been walking around naked underneath, waiting for him to notice?

She’d opened up in Brussels again. She wanted him, so when he was less in touch with Andrea, Megi stepped into her place. Jonathan – lashed by a bad conscience, that far-reaching Christian scourge – wanted to offer her that place with his whole heart. He gave it and took it back because even now, as he repeated to himself that he’d sacrificed Andrea for the good of his family, he was scared. Because what if he suffocated the love in him, destroyed part of his life, part of himself – and his wife turned into a ghost again? What would Jonathan be left with?

The cliff bit into the water coupled with sky, the horizon was rough with clouds. The cow in the far distance shrank to the size of a pin and the vastness pressed Jonathan’s dilemmas into thin slivers. Maybe he’d even be able to cut them and throw them into hot water like the dumplings his grandmother – his father’s mother who disapproved of “bought” dumplings – used to make?

Megi strolled next to him, wind billowing her jacket. She stopped next to a rose bush.

“Hawthorn,” said Jonathan automatically. “A hedge like the one that grew around the castle where, pricked by a spindle, slept …”

“Look.” Megi squatted.

A flower was growing next to the bush, a bee buzzing among its open petals, stamping the stamen with its little legs.

“I’ve always wondered what that princess felt like after a hundred years.”

Megi embraced him unexpectedly, kissed him; he felt her tongue between his teeth.

They made love a few more times during their stay, but only that once, on the cliff, belonged to Megi. On the other occasions, Jonathan slipped into her body but his thoughts were so much with Andrea that it amazed him he came at all.

Despite the cold of Normandy, Megi didn’t wear underwear. When he cycled off somewhere leaving her with the children, she sent him messages he’d have liked to receive from Andrea. It was such a paradox. When, a few years ago, he’d dreamt of a little tenderness from Megi, she’d been silent. And now she was in love with him once more.

Megi gazes at the ocean. She had been happy a couple of years earlier – she’d loved two men. She’d blossomed so much she’d even wondered whether to tell Jonathan about her lover. But no! Others would have explained everything to him in no time – he wasn’t able to satisfy his woman so he wasn’t a man. And as for her, what a slut!

Only in a culture where machos are tolerated are men cuckolds, she thought. A crude culture, where there’s no place for wise women, no respect for them. And then it turns out that the macho men only shit their pants from fear of their moms
.

Her mother had once said that the one feeling not worth cultivating was guilt
.

Megi didn’t regret either the relationship with her lover or her decision to leave him. Her body had enthusiastically taken in another man, even searched for him. From then on she’d thought about herself, about her pussy, and the fact that he’d given it a name. Her lover hadn’t laughed at the word, took it the way it sounded. And for her the familiar word had begun to bring to mind something different, something bitter and juicy
.

T
HE DOG HUNG ITS HEAD
over the small opening and barked from time to time. “Woof!” wrote Jonathan, and the hound in his imagination moved away from the hole, lowered itself on its front paws as if it were a puppy, and jumped away only to sniff at the ground again.

“What do you want?” muttered Jonathan with hostility as he got up from his laptop to stretch his arms.

Objectively, he could send his protagonist wherever he wanted. Subjectively, he could do fuck all. The dog kept watch over the hole, wagged its tail, curled its lips in a silly half-smile not in keeping with the dignity of the leader of a mongrel pack.

“Why the hell must you go down into that gutter?” Jonathan clicked his cigarette lighter and blew the smoke out on to the terrace.

He stood at the railings and gazed at the city. Brussels was built according to a medieval principle; façades faced streets set slightly at an angle to form triangles of green garden spaces at the back of the apartments. It reminded Jonathan of London, the area where his mother lived. When he got home from school, he used to take his bike and cycle around the area, root around the local haunts, find his way through the gardens and, in the evening, return to a house like so many others, in front of which stood a dustbin instead of a garden. It had smelled of washing indoors; his clothes hung on a wooden drying rack. He’d once caught his finger in it and his nail had fallen off.

Brussels was cozier. Some of the gardens, shaped like triangles of Brie, were like neglected forests where lilac boiled over; others, carpeted with lawns, were an oasis for local cats. They came here to bask in the heat; their howling reached as far as the apartment lofts. The cats bawled in early spring when the urge to rut hit them, and throughout the year when they chased each other away, fighting for their territory. They had the skill of squirrels in climbing trees and could drive their rivals to the very tip of the birch that rose above the gardens.

The other inhabitants of the gardens were birds. They overran the highest branches and the stone recesses lined with wild vines, which, in autumn, flamed a vivid red. The green parrots from the park rarely came
here, frightened perhaps of the true rulers of the territory – pigeons beneath whom branches cracked now and again because they were so huge.

It was they who guided Jonathan to the mysterious door that became the breakthrough in the stories of
The Pavlov Dogs
. The walled-over entrance between one garden and another bothered Jonathan until one day he confided in Megi.