“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 g
ot 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.
8
WAKING 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.
It was practically all women at the first session of his creative writing class.
The older ones sat in a group by the door, the younger at the head of the long table by the window. The two men – one a balding thirtysomething, the other gray-haired – sat a fair distance from each other.
Cecile introduced Jonathan: the author of three books, a journalist with a degree in literature, a Pole who’d gone to school in England, studied in France and had been living in Brussels for the past few months. Jonathan nodded, his eyes on Cecile’s long neck, adorned with a red necklace.
“… will in a moment introduce his schedule for the course in creative writing,” she concluded.
Jonathan opened his laptop and rose to his feet.
“Good morning,” he began. “I’m very pleased to be able to put forward a program that, at this stage of my life, I believe to be the most interesting. I hope it will also inspire you.”
He looked around at the faces turned toward him. Attentive eyes and encouraging smiles; one of the young women kept nervously pushing back her hair as it fell over her forehead, the balding man mechanically drew circles on a sheet of paper.
“Before I introduce the subject of the course, I’d like to say a few words about myself.”
He leaned over his laptop and the photograph of a gap-toothed little boy appeared on the white screen behind him. The older women laughed, the younger ones exchanged glances. The men looked at Jonathan questioningly.
“Thank you for the excellent introduction.” He turned to Cecile. “After so many kind words all I can add is that … the lad behind me is also me.”
The women smiled, the older man adjusted his glasses. Jonathan pointed behind and said: “I had fewer teeth …”
They laughed; the thirtysomething put down his pen.
“… and fewer nasty experiences. Drugs, of course.” He waited for them to relax completely, then grew serious. “But I hold on to this photograph and, what’s more, look at it sometimes. Why? Because so much is happening around us. We rush to work in the morning, to collect the children in the afternoon, do the shopping on Saturday, organize family outings on Sunday. Or we feed the cats and stress about foreign language exams. From time to time we meet people we really like. Too rarely. Just as we all too rarely calmly breathe the air that reminds us of past holidays, too rarely do we simply sit and gaze aimlessly …”
He cast his eyes over the gathering; they were listening to his every word.
“I believe it’s important,” he continued, pointing at the smiling, gap-toothed boy behind him, “not to lose sight of oneself. And in writing, that, I believe, is what’s most important.”
“Two beers on Luxembourg Square?”
“I don’t know what time Megi …” began Jonathan.
“Three beers.” Stefan’s voice sounded decisive. “Come earlier and you’ll make it for happy hour, beer’s half price.”
Luxembourg Square, a cosy square surrounded by low-rise buildings, was crammed with office workers. Black specks in suits moved around between tables and trampled the scrap of lawn which had automatically become the smoking area. Jonathan locked his bike and made his way to O’Farrell’s.
Stefan, who, judging by his spaced-out eyes and gargantuan smile, must have drunk a fair amount, edged closer to his friend.
“You know Rafal, the last party was at his place.”
Jonathan nodded.
“Yes, he came to dinner. When you weren’t there.” Jonathan tried to make it sound like a reproach.
“His wife’s terrible.” The drunken “sss” drew the attention of the other customers.
“What’s that?” Przemek leaned over toward him.
Jonathan remembered how he had tried to make fun of Przemek, saying that, professional or not, he thought the man was slippery. He teased Megi because he knew Przemek was after her, but she was annoyed when Jonathan made fun of her new colleagues. With his perfect English and French, he had no idea – in her opinion – what it was like to be constantly accosted by colleagues “from the West” about where to find a “cheap Polish housecleaner.” “You don’t know what it feels like when they say Poles can be intelligent, too.” She was furious. “It’s covert racism!” Which was why she was all the more impressed when Poles consistently and obstinately climbed
the Commission ladder.
Jonathan sympathized with her patriotism but couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Przemek. “He’s the sort of person who sees life as a transaction,” he argued.
“What’s terrible?” Now Rafal, too, was leaning toward them.
Stefan opened his mouth but Jonathan gave him a warning tap on the shoulder.
“He doesn’t know what to say,” he winked at the others.
“I’m celebrating my birthday next Saturday,” the Indian woman sitting diagonally opposite said. “Will you drop in?”
“Can I bring someone?” sputtered Stefan.
“Of course you can. I’d like to meet your wife.”
“Wife?” Stefan’s finger shot up. “What the hell are wives for?”
Jonathan reached for the peanuts and caught his sleeve on Rafal’s glass. The beer spilled in a frothy puddle.
“Sorry, I’m terribly sorry,” Jonathan pleaded as he got to his feet. “I’ll call the waitress. Stefan, we’re going!”
Jonathan struggled across half the city with a drunkard and a bicycle but, finally, managed to deliver Stefan home. Freed from the weight of his friend’s body, he felt surprisingly unsteady on his feet, as if standing on rickety scaffolding. And what if both of them were going through a stage of accosting younger women? Every man at some point experienced the irrational fear that he might not get it up one day, but did the way they were behaving mean that the serpent of anxiety had slipped from their minds to their bodies?
He mounted his bike and pushed at the pedals. He rode clumsily, uncertain whether it was the effect of the beer or the vision that he was fleeing: he and Stefan, their shoes and false teeth highly polished, cravats around their necks, sitting in a sanatorium and boasting about the number of lovers they’d gone through while they still could …
When Megi left for Luxembourg on business, Jonathan already had a babysitter lined up. It was only so that he could go to the gym to get the strength for a Sunday full of paternal duties, he repeated to himself. He even took his gym gear but, spraying himself with his favorite scent, he no longer deluded himself – his body knew perfectly well what it wanted. He left, waving goodbye to Antosia and Tomaszek, unable to force himself to give them a hug. He was leaving them, going to Andrea. He felt contaminated.
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