Illegal Liaisons (11 page)

Now he was behaving as though he were retarded. And, to his surprise, he sometimes found a masochistic pleasure in it. Up and down he went on a swing, throwing his legs out then drawing them back beneath the seat, his hands loosening their grip on the rope, a pulsating ball tightening then opening in his stomach. The movement robbed him of reason. Just as in childhood he had raced his friends, so now he felt he was swinging harder and harder, up and down.

While he kept checking whether the woman he loved had tossed him at least a few crumbs of reciprocated feelings, Megi was taking down the Christmas decorations with the children. They were having great fun as always. Ever since Jonathan had told them that in Sweden people sang a valedictory song to the tree, each year Antosia, Tomaszek, and Megi had tried to compose a song worthy of their Christmas tree. Jonathan went downstairs just when they’d given up, as usual, and began to howl
Wlazl kotek na plotek i mruga
(The cat has climbed the fence and sits winking), a popular Polish children’s song. They giggled and the dry needles fell, shaken by their intertwined arms as they circled the tree.

“… sits winking!” yelled Tomaszek and tumbled over.

Megi halted to pick him up, herself weak with laughter.

“Sing, you dope!” Antosia, for whom rituals were very important, was cross.

“Mommy, she called me a dope.” Tomaszek pointed an accusing finger.

“Antosia!” Megi’s expression was far from stern.

At that moment she caught sight of Jonathan.

“Come and help us,” she groaned, heaving up her laughing son.

“Do-pey, do-pey,” chanted Antosia to her brother.

“Don’t say that,” said Jonathan spontaneously.

He walked up and pulled Tomaszek to his feet. As he took him by the hand he was horrified at how small and fragile it was. He covered it with his own and grasped Antosia’s hand, soft as a puppy’s paw. Megi grabbed the children on the other side and together they formed a circle around the Christmas tree.

Jonathan wanted to weep so he pressed his face against a branch, hissed “Auuu!”; they laughed.

Jonathan stirred the pot, roughly shaking logs of carrots. The thick mass floated to the surface. He’d learned how to make Polish
krupnik
, thick barley soup, from his mother. Chicken in beer sauce, a speciality of Nick’s, his mother’s English husband, was roasting in the oven. For dessert, in keeping with French custom, there would be cheese.

Jonathan had taken refuge in cooking when Andrea’s silence had become unbearable. He’d already gone through the stage of hoping that she would write to him, of worrying that something had happened to her, of being frightened that he’d offended her, furious that she treated him this way and, finally, of feverishly trying to arrange “accidental” meetings. Now he was going through a stage of blunt despair.

The children were on their Christmas holiday and his writing course was to resume after the break. Megi had been working exceptionally long hours recently, while Antosia had caught a cold that she quickly passed on to her brother. Jonathan stayed at home with the feverish children, tied down because their nanny had gone to Poland.

He dished out medicine, cooked, pressed food into the noneaters, read to them and, during their brief naps interrupted by blocked noses, checked whether a text message had arrived from Andrea. So long as the children were poorly, he concealed his frustration and forged it into patience, but when they picked up, he was drained.

When one day Tomaszek, still grumpy and afflicted with a head cold, approached and started to tug at Jonathan’s T-shirt, demanding that he play with him, Jonathan, who was just taking the dishes out of the dishwasher, couldn’t stand the weight of the little person clutching at his feet any longer. He took a cup from the dishwater and flung it against the floor as hard as he could.

Tomaszek froze, looking at the swing of his father’s hand, at the plume of sharp pieces. A long while passed before he overcame his fear and started to cry.

Antosia ran downstairs and stood at the door, staring owl-like at her brother and father. Jonathan was still standing over the shell of the broken teacup, his face white, his hands clenched; Tomaszek was shaking
with sobs which were becoming less and less like those of a child and more and more like those of an animal.

Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to hug him, afraid that if he took him in his arms the child would fall apart like the teacup. Antosia ran up to her brother and put her arms around him; he clung to her tightly.

“Daddy?” whispered the girl.

Jonathan hid his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry, sorry …”

He felt as if he’d had an accident. If he yelled, “I’m going through a difficult period!” they wouldn’t have understood anyway. He really was going through a difficult period – one of lying in wait for a call from Simon’s woman, the bitch in the red dress, the reason his children were having a bad time with him.

When Saturday arrived, Megi took over the domestic helm and Jonathan pretended that he’d caught a cold from the children. He ached all over; he wanted to cry, didn’t eat, forgot to drink. When he slept, he slept like a log. Blessed sleep, terrible awakening when persistent images invaded him again – the magic of secret meetings, the best sex of his life, soaring, starry lightheartedness. And the thought that all this had fallen apart. He no longer had Andrea. She was having a good time somewhere else with someone new, someone better placed than him.

Then had come the phase of blunt stupor, which led him to the kitchen. Since he couldn’t escape from home he decided to discover its creative aspect – cooking. He anointed the chicken with herbs and in his heart cast a spell over all those who could send him text messages not to do so – except for Andrea. The worst moments were when, with a pounding heart, he opened the envelope only to come across a stupid joke from Stefan.

The approaching spring loosened the beaks of birds; they began to sing but the sound only irritated Jonathan. Others waking up to life, he felt, was unfair when he himself was unwell (he felt left out). He had had no idea that the wound of rejection could go so deep; he couldn’t cheapen his experience by thinking of it as Stefan described it – a couple of fruitful fucks with a good piece of ass such as Andrea. And what, it’s ended? Everything comes to an end.

Why couldn’t his thoughts stop there, give his mind and pride a break? Unfortunately, they didn’t. A behaviorist at heart, he demonstrated an unexpected determination to drill and bore away at the shaft of suppositions until he felt himself falling in head-first.

Why had she ditched him, and without a word? Was he lousy and if so, where – in bed, in life, in conversation? Images from their meetings appeared before his eyes; obscured the car window as he drove. He shook his head like the dog he was beginning to resemble – shaggy, bristled, with hungry eyes.

He discovered a strange dependence on things he hadn’t had the chance to notice before. Such as the fact that routine was a savior. However crumpled he may have been on leaving the house to take the children to school, he returned in a better condition – fleeting conversations calmed him and the gaze of women for whom he was one of few men they saw at this hour, eased his pain.

In spite of this he felt ill. He was undergoing an enforced detox, with no anesthetic or therapist to help. Stefan, although he tried, couldn’t put himself in his position because for him women were like stunning clothes – he kept trying new ones. Jonathan wouldn’t have been able to talk about this to his father or mother. If anyone were to understand him it would have been Megi.

Jonathan exchanged a few greetings and goodbyes in the school parking lot and got into his car. He watched the women disperse to their cars and realized that he drifted among them like a helpless teenager. Pain was tearing at him, respecting no boundaries.

But he had children now! The thought appeared so suddenly that he even pulled himself up straight. For a moment he couldn’t understand what this realization was supposed to mean; finally, it dawned on him. He turned the key in the ignition and drove out of the parking garage too fast.

He raced ahead, angry at the red lights, overtook old men in their cars, grumbled about “snails”; he raced, red in the face, with seething insides and the feverish thought, “She’s got to tell me, I’m an adult, a father, damn it!”

It wasn’t yet ten when he came to a halt. He glanced at Andrea’s window and saw that the bedroom curtain was still half-drawn – a sign that she was in the bathroom. He instinctively hunched in on himself
when he saw Simon leave. The latter looked well-off in his trench coat, carrying a briefcase. Jonathan shook the trouser legs of his jeans as though to give them an elegant crease. For a while, he observed Simon in his rear mirror, and when Simon disappeared round the corner, Jonathan climbed out of the car.

He was just about to press the intercom when an elderly woman in a headscarf à la Queen Elizabeth emerged and held open the door. He thanked her, a little taken aback. His legs carried him to the second floor where all he had to do was press the bell.

“So, how are you?” asked Andrea, standing in the doorway, barefoot and wrapped in nothing but a towel.

He was going to lay it all out for her, throw it in her face, but all he managed to do was cross the threshold. And when she placed her hand – her peasant’s hand, so different from the rest of her subtle self – on his arm, he caught her by the waist, carried her into the room, and threw her on the sofa. She unzipped his fly and helped him lower his trousers – just halfway down his thighs because his cock was already digging into her velvet pussy surrounded by neatly groomed hair, was slipping in and halfway out, until she shouted; he thrust into her a few times and ejected a charge of fear and joy, rejection, and blessedness.

They didn’t manage to talk afterward because Andrea was afraid Simon would return; what they had done had been terribly careless, without a contraceptive at that. Luckily she’d taken the pill and was having her period. The sofa was sticky with sperm and blood when he drowned in Andrea once more, licked her clitoris until she groaned his name.

When later he was going home, waves of bliss mixed with the taste of menstrual blood flooded him, his head aching with jealousy that Simon always had her like that. Tiredness and arousal merged and didn’t allow him to enjoy fully what he’d just done. It had been one of those strange elations – bereft of lightness, effervescence, ecstasy. A difficult, lame elation. Yet elation.

T
HE SCULPTURE ADORNING
the lofty arch in Cinquantenaire Park glistened in the sun; Jonathan raised his eyes to catch the rays falling on the horses’ manes and the figure of the woman driving them.

Jogging had become routine for him in Brussels. He couldn’t resist the sweetness of the climate, the soothing warmth, and didn’t mind the rain and drizzle. Running ordered his stormy emotions, calmed his thoughts, and offered a relatively flat path along which glided the joy of his recent lovemaking. His body, oiled by the rapture he had just experienced, moved harmoniously; he ran and his energy, instead of being depleted, increased.

His passionate intercourse with Megi that morning had surprised him. And yet, over the past few months it had become more and more frequent. Jonathan was getting used to the thought of duality giving him strength. His strength didn’t wane from making love to his wife in the morning with the prospect of doing so to his lover in the afternoon. Quite the opposite: the anticipation of complementing the morning act wound him up to such a degree that the horses on the arch seemed like the first step in a flight to heaven.

W
HAT WAS SUPPOSED
to have been the brutal end of Jonathan’s relationship with Andrea had become its true beginning. It was then that things really started to boil; and the two of them were always on the boil, on a high flame, sparks flying. They tempered the seething roar in view of what people might think.

From the time he’d intruded on her and demanded an explanation, they met whenever they could. They discovered bestial rutting and slow lovemaking, rubbing bodies to the rhythm of music, and arousal to make the ears burn, skin tingle, and groans erupt. Jonathan tried to catch the essence of love but whether he sunk into the words of a song or the smell of his lover, he couldn’t get a hold on it. He became entangled in trivialities, alarmed by the obvious; he rejected popular ways of thinking, what other people might think, and flew – whether up or down, he didn’t know.

He no longer woke up at four in the morning, the hour of anxiety, but earlier, a couple of hours after falling asleep. He was bursting with ideas. Experience had taught him not to try to remember them – what remained in the mornings was a murky puddle of guesses – so he’d get up, sit on the edge of the bathtub and jot down strange thoughts about luminous tails. Other thoughts he tapped into his cell phone, quietly in order not to wake Megi. When the screen lit up with the night’s reply, his blood pounded, his throat grew dry – this was how his body answered Andrea’s signal.

He isolated himself from Megi. He surfed the internet whenever possible, read newspapers, or pretended to prepare material for his creative writing seminars. Once he had struck up with Andrea again, his wife’s body became that of a stranger; he was astounded she even existed. Only the children survived the ravages of his emotions. He rediscovered them, observed their changing moods, euphoric expressions, tiny manipulations, outbursts of contagious happiness – and in them recognized himself as he was with Andrea. “Andrea’s Jonathan” also
flared up and sulked, wanted and took or received “a slap on the hand.” Paradoxically, he understood his children much better now.

Love, that spring, tasted differently to different people. Jean-Pierre wrote about his former girlfriends, concentrating on sensual experiences. Jonathan felt he’d been given a Swedish quilt sown from scraps of material – colorful, warm, and useless.