Illegal Liaisons (6 page)

“Never yet what?” Jonathan tore his eyes away from Andrea’s group. “Never written anything? And do you want to?”

The girl snorted again but a moment later grew serious.

“Write? Come off it! But you know what I really want to do?” she asked, pronouncing “want to” as “wanna.”

He nodded, confused.

“I want to open a retro clothes shop.”

He was opening a bottle of wine in the kitchen when Andrea came up to him. She was wearing high heels and a slippery dress, beneath which her breasts were so clearly outlined that he was covered with goosebumps.

“Can I help?” she asked, sitting down on the stool at the worktop.

He took the rest of the glasses from the sideboard and thought that had they been alone he would have parted her thighs and slipped his hands up to her pubic hair.

“Will you pour me a glass?”

He shuffled from foot to foot; the physical reaction taking place in his trousers made it difficult to move. Andrea tilted her head. After all those text messages it suddenly seemed strange to him that she should be sitting here, so close yet so distant.

“We’d best think of a subject.” She pulled back her long hair. Everything about her was polished and neat; only her hair lived its own, lush life. “Politics perhaps?”

“And not tourism? It’s riveting.” With his head, he indicated those gathered around the table.

She laughed and he gazed at her, trying to work out the mysterious link that raised her face, whose features were far from classical, to that
of a beauty. Perhaps it was the smile, of which he could not see enough? Or perhaps the intelligence in her eyes, highlighted by tiny wrinkles?

“Andrea …” He cleared his throat and assumed a completely different tone of voice. “Andrea. Where does the name come from?”

“I come from a family of Czech immigrants but was born and brought up in Sweden. When I ask for milk in a Czech shop they look at me as if I were quoting fragments from the old Czech Bible. Do you speak archaic Polish, too? When I first heard you I thought you were English, like Simon.”

“No, I was a teenager when I left Poland. I even remember martial law.”

“Tanks in the streets? My mother told me. I always thought she was still living Prague Spring …”

“Doesn’t she like Sweden?”

Andrea shook her head.

“It’s like in Kundera,” murmured Jonathan. “There’s no life after the fever of Prague Spring.”

“The unbearable lightness … That’s where her recurrent bouts of depression came from.”

“And your father?”

Only then did they notice Simon’s presence.

“Everything OK?” He put his arm around Andrea’s waist and looked her intently in the eyes. His gray hair appeared ash blond in the evening light. He didn’t look like a typical Englishman; slim, tall, he resembled a Scandinavian with the smile of a boy.

“We’ve somehow not had the chance …” he turned to Jonathan. “What do you do? Your wife mentioned you’re a wonderful father.”

“Jonathan lectures on a course in creative writing,” Andrea threw in.

“You’re a writer?”

“I’ve published three books.”

“What about?”

“Fairy tales.”

Simon glanced at him with amusement; Jonathan’s fingers squeezed the neck of the bottle.

“I’ve got children, too.” He heard the man’s voice again. “They’re already grown up, and studying in Durham.”

When the guests had left, promising to return the invitation, Megi turned to Jonathan: “Simon’s girl, Czech or Swedish, you know who I mean? She says she doesn’t want to have children. She’s so set on her career.”

“She’s still young,” he mumbled, leaning over the dish-washer.

“She’s over thirty! I already had Antosia and Tomaszek by that age.”

“Simon’s much older than her.”

“He’s incredible …”

“You find him attractive?” Jonathan dropped a dishwasher tablet into the hollow of the lid and turned on the machine. “You always liked older men.”

“And she, Andrea,” Megi said, ignoring his last comment, “must have been one of those girls who didn’t wear vests under their blouses and were never cold. I remember those olive-skinned types, resilient to the temperature. I envied them. My nose was always blue.”

She removed the tablecloth and shook it out over the sink.

“Did you notice how obsessively Martyna talked about her ‘close friends’?” she said, throwing the tablecloth into the washing machine. “In my opinion, you can have a few close friends, but dozens – that’s misunderstanding the meaning of the word.”

Jonathan smiled to himself. He liked these moments after a party, their spiteful comments, a safety valve for the sense of disappointment they invariably felt on realizing that “grown-up” parties, as opposed to those of students, had nothing much to do with enjoyment.

“Well, because how can you confide in twenty people?” continued Megi, struggling with the lid of the washing machine. “ ‘Listen, I got a chill yesterday, and my boss is a prick.’ I can tell you this but …”

She broke off.

“Where are you?”

“Here!” he shouted from the stairs.

“You off already?”

“Why?” He leaned over the banister.

“Oh, nothing.” And a moment later she added, “Check that the children haven’t kicked their duvets off. Good night.”

Jonathan stopped at the half-landing and rested his forehead on the window. Megi scraped the chairs across the floor. He should have stayed with her, talked, but something forced him out of the kitchen.

The window frames moaned in a gust of wind. Jonathan stared at the storm, fascinated by its intensity. He had always wanted to touch the elements, the truth, vibrations. Traveling had once given him all that, then the first years with Megi, and finally, surprisingly, the children. They could be the sweetest things yet at the same time drive him crazy. When he wanted to strangle them, they stroked his jaw, clenched in fury, with their tiny hands.

Another strong gust thundered against the window pane. The thought,
Andrea is an element
, came to his mind at once.

He woke up at the sad hour just before dawn and lay there listening to his wife’s breathing. She was snoring gently, as she always did when sleeping on her back, one hand on her navel, the other behind her head. The night was bright; the clouds swirled in tiers, masses of cotton wool clambering over each other. He recalled how once, not that long ago, they lay together like this and Megi, stretching out her arm, had pointed to a gap in the clouds and said, “If I were a bird, I’d pierce that hole …”

It had excited him at the time; it was something new. When they had met, she didn’t belong to the so-called easy girls. He knew from friends that she hadn’t had many boys before he came along; it took a long while for her to decide to go to bed with anyone. He’d asked her about it once, used as he was to easygoing girlfriends in England, France, Sweden and Spain. She’d explained something in a roundabout way about her sense of self having been childish for a long time and having instinctively protected it from criticism or attempts to dominate it; that she preferred to mean a great deal to a few than nothing to many.

She had, in his opinion, been a little stiff in bed as a twenty-something, and motherhood had turned her into an almost prudish lover. She only changed when going back to work after having Antosia. He’d sensed she really was aroused by sex. He’d even asked her what had happened. She’d replied that she felt her otherness, her boundaries and was finally ready to transgress them.

Jonathan buried himself in the sheets but his head, instead of humming with sleep, was getting lighter. He sighed and reached for the notebook next to their bed. He might as well make use of the time to plan a schedule for his writing course. He was to present it at the beginning
of August, a month before sessions started. Cecile Lefebure had given him a free hand in the choice of subject.

“The semantics of love’, he scribbled. A moment later, he crossed out the quotation marks and put the notebook aside. He slipped out from beneath the duvet, crept into the hallway and wrote, this time on his cell, “Will you meet me, beautiful?”

A week later he drove Megi to the airport. The road led past the barracklike buildings of NATO with its flags fluttering in front. Before they reached the underground parking garage, the road climbed up and they could see the tails of parked airplanes.

“Have you got your passport?” asked Jonathan, switching off the engine.

“Yes,” replied Megi, unfastening her seat belt.

“Wallet?”

“Purse.”

“Cell phone?”

“And a pair of warm panties.” She laughed. “That’s what my granny used to ask before any trip. She even managed to accost you once, do you remember? And you still married me.”

A moment later she added impatiently: “So I’ve got my underwear then. My thongs …”

Jonathan still didn’t say anything. It was dark in the car; he couldn’t quite see her face. A sense of otherness hung in the air for a while, stirring the tip of his cock. He moved closer to her when suddenly the lights of an approaching car lit up the interior of the Toyota and he saw the familiar eyes of his wife in front of him.

“You’re going to be late,” he muttered and climbed out.

When he returned to the parking garage alone, a message beeped on his cell. His mouth instantly grew dry with emotion but it was only a text from Megi: “Plane full of priests. Think they’ll bring me bad luck?” “It’s nuns who bring bad luck,” he wrote. “Men’s eternal fear of women,” the reply came back, with a smiling face attached.

Waiting for the babysitter, Jonathan tried to take notes for his writing course but couldn’t concentrate. Sentences gave way under the pressure
of thinking, the children made a racket and Megi had already phoned three times asking about some trivialities, quite as though she were keeping an eye on him at a distance.

Jonathan pulled out his phone and once again read Andrea’s message – she was waiting for him on Saint-Boniface Square. He needed to leave in ten minutes but the babysitter had still not arrived. He brushed his teeth for the second time, went back downstairs, and started reading.

Anaïs Nin was to be an important figure in his course so he was going through her
Diaries
again.
As a child I was really worried when I found out we have only one life
, he read.
I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying my experiences
.

“Will you play Yu-gi-o with me?” Tomaszek rested his elbow on Jonathan’s knee. The four-year-old body radiated a puppy-like expression, knew nothing of conventional distance and, with its gestures, showed how strongly tied it was to the bodies of its parents.

Jonathan ruffled his blond hair.

“There’s something I’ve got to do. Ask Antosia.”

“Tosia!” yelled Tomaszek. “Will you play with me?”

Jonathan hunched in on himself. He shouldn’t be going to see her, giving his children the slip in order to meet a woman he didn’t know. He had such a wonderful family, a great wife – that ought to be enough. He raised the book to his eyes and they fell on the text:… 
compensate for this by multiplying my experiences
.

“You’ve got three lives left,” Antosia haughtily informed her brother over the cards.

Tomaszek groaned and thumped his elbows on the table. Jonathan looked at his son with compassion. Antosia was a ruthless player, didn’t allow anyone any handicaps. He returned to his reading:… 
When I was happy, in a state of euphoria, as always at the beginning of love, I felt I had received the gift of survival …

“There, I didn’t die!” Tomaszek howled nearby.

 … 
in the fullness of many elements
.… Jonathan read to the end before closing the book, resigned.

He remembered the details of his first
tête-à-tête
with Andrea: the photograph of a bagel and cappuccino behind the window of the café,
on a level with the image of froth, a fly buzzing, trapped behind the glass; an old man having difficulty opening his trunk, a beggar with a dog.

Jonathan was on his way to his rendezvous and the treadmill of the pavement was fleeing from beneath his feet. The reverse gear of common sense grated in his head but his legs gathered speed. Within, born from self-hatred, a new life was sprouting.

At last, the church. Despite the darkness, he caught sight of her at once.

She tasted of cool fruit.

W
AKING ON THE CUSP
of night and day usually swept away any useful thoughts and left shreds of panic – the heating was malfunctioning, his son might be cold on his school trip, his daughter might fall for some dickhead in the future. The flutter of such thoughts blackened the hours between four and six in the morning when Jonathan would fall into a delicious snooze, interrupted three-quarters of an hour later by the sound of the alarm clock.

That summer, his waking up reminded him of Christmas when he was still a child – the gnawing anticipation, dreams swirling in the imagination of uninhibited reality. He was so excited that even though he tried to close his eyes, he couldn’t. He got up and silently, so as not to wake the household, crept downstairs where his present awaited – a text from Andrea.

He’d grown dependent on seeing the little envelopes flashing on his cell, waited for them day and night; his mouth grew dry when he saw them and his hands shook. In the evenings, he waited for his wife to go to bed, then sat on the sofa and sent messages from the darkened room. In the mornings, he found it hard to wake up and swayed on his bed, his sleepy eyes roaming over the photograph on the wall, which he’d taken on his visit to Gotland with Petra. A house as crooked as the Tower of Pisa – he’d recorded it at the last moment. When they’d returned a year later, the house was no longer there.

At night, Andrea wrote: “You have the code to enter my dreams.…”

“Can I enter them as I stand?” he wrote back.

“And are you standing …?

“In my boxer shorts.”

“To attention?”

“Straight as a rod. For you.”

He curled up on the edge of his bed, in the morning. The glass over the Gotland photograph reflected a red tile from the apartment roof opposite. The loft window always opened at the same time, someone would lean out, start to bustle around, and soon the shape of another head would appear. Jonathan knew what was coming: as he climbed into his car with the children to take them to school, the neighbors, the couple opposite, would stride off to work in their suits.