Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  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.

  book two

  1

  Brussels, 2007

  THE 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 complement
ing 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.

  2

  Brussels, spring 2006, a year earlier

  WHAT 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.

  “And what happened with Fabienne later?” he asked, pointing to the name of the first girl on the list of the author’s juvenile fascinations.

  “I don’t know.” Jean-Pierre shrugged.

  “Then make it up,” said Jonathan.

  Ariane described her infatuation with a certain sailor. There were numerous expressions denoting aesthetic admiration for her white and his black skin; yet just as the beginning of the story foreshadowed a long piece of work so the end shrunk hastily. When Jonathan drew Ariane’s attention to this, she nodded in acknowledgement: she had so many stories she feared she wouldn’t have time to tell them all.

  “Choose one,” Jonathan advised but Ariane wasn’t convinced.

  “One? Why one? Why this one in particular?”

  Kitty wrote about love for a child. Tenderness seeped from every word until all those present smiled at the successive diminutives. Looking at her, it crossed Jonathan’s mind that women submerged themselves in motherhood, became the yolk kneaded into a cake mixture. For homework, Jonathan advised Kitty to write a similar text about herself.

  “But how?” she asked.

  “The same as here.” He tapped his finger on her piece about love. “With the same tenderness.”

  A skeptical smile appeared on Kitty’s face but Jonathan didn’t budge.

  “Try, at least give it a try. In a few years your leaven will be ready.”

  “Leaven?” Her eyes opened wide.

  “The beginnings of a new love. People really need it. Parents.” He smiled.

  Nora’s story was an enormous tapestry, an epic framework, ready to be filled with characters. Jonathan had few comments; he waited to see whether Nora would populate her story with small, precise individuals or focus on one, clear character.

  The problem was Geert. His story began in a childhood spent in the Congo, gave a vivid picture of the landscape with all its smells, gusts of wind, rustling grass … and there it floundered. Geert couldn’t write any more. Jonathan examined the barely sketched emotions and tapped the French text with his pen.

  “Have you tried writing it in Dutch?” he asked.

  Geert shook his head.

  “French is closer to me. I went to school in Liège when we got back from the Congo, then studied in Paris.”

  Jonathan read through the conclusion again.

  “Maybe you could do it in English?”

  Geert nodded but looked surprised.

  “It’s not my language, I’ve got no feel for it.”

  “That’s precisely why.” Jonathan handed back the paper.

  He was tempted to prescribe the same for himself – a cunning way to see his own emotions simplified – but after some thought decided he would be like a barefoot cobbler. Deep down, he didn’t want to detach himself from what had besotted him, he wanted his head to remain knotted with emotions, his head between Andrea’s thighs.

  He thought the next seminar should be on theory. They’d written as much as they could and now they needed inspiring reading, a breather, the fresh air of letters not their own. He glanced at his watch. It didn’t grow dark in May until late, but now the light in the park was fading, fortunately. He said goodbye to his group and on his way home turned down a dark alley. There, beneath a familiar tree, waited Andrea; he practically broke into a run, regardless of how undignified he appeared. Before catching sight of the slender figure concealed by the shadow falling from the branches, he shook with impatience. Presently he would reach out for her, his complementary reading matter, his air.

  One day at the beginning of June, Jonathan woke up at dawn. The summer rays of morning drilled into his sleepy eyes and, out of nowhere, a conversation with Andrea flashed through his mind. She had stood leaning against the wall with her trousers halfway down her calves while he kneeled in front of her, digging first his eyes and then his tongue into her pubic triangle. Andrea started to groan; it was obvious that her reaction was so strong it even embarrassed her.

  “See how I react at the very sight of your head there.” She tensed. “Instinctively, like Pavlov …”

  Jonathan hadn’t been sure whether her English was unclear under the circumstances, or whether Andrea had left the dogs out because she hadn’t heard of them. And although, at the time, he’d pushed the thoughts away, in the early morning light they floated up from the bottom of his mind with a considerable “pop!” Yes, it was between Andrea’s thighs that “The Pavlov Dogs” had been conceived, the characters of the book that was to bring Jonathan popular success.

  The Pavlov Dogs quickly started to live their own lives, complicating Jonathan’s paternal and amorous existence. He couldn’t let go of the storyline sprouting in his head; he sensed that if he didn’t catch the gift offered to him by fate, it would disintegrate. So he scrupulously divided his day into segments for individual chores: caring for the children and taking them to school in the morning, shopping, paying bills, and replying to emails from school – a speciality of that establishment (Jonathan was regularly urged to join the flamenco club); preparing material for his writing course, articles, gym. And meeting Andrea.

  After some thought, he designated the hours before lunch for his writing, which was why the pattern imposed by Andrea – that it was she who decided when they should meet – soon became a hassle. He swung between dozens of interspaced activities and she arbitrarily told him to present himself just as he was going to school or sitting down to write.

  “I work as well,” he whispered into her ear after making love. “Let me know a bit earlier if you can.”
/>   “I will,” she murmured, brushing aside the mention of his work with a smile.

  Then she again specified the time and place of their meeting at the last moment and Jonathan performed miracles to get everything done. He drove to her, irritated, his male pride hurt; he returned panting and happy, worked up by the thought of the steering wheel sticky with the combination of her juices and the gasoline that had dripped on to his fingers when he’d filled the car at the last moment, worried that the tank would run out before he got to school.

  He was tempted to say “no” to Andrea once, but never dared. She didn’t like to hear how Jonathan combined his commitments as a parent and working writer, how much planning this juggling required. She didn’t have children – he justified her – so didn’t bear them in mind; and when he forced her to do so she must have thought the kids could cope by themselves, requiring help only on the rare occasion of something like the washing machine or dishwasher breaking down.

  He tried to go back to the old-fashioned custom of it being he, the man, who proposed the meetings, but Andrea’s stubbornness was like a rubber wall. He had to admit to himself that it undermined his self-confidence more than the lambasting of Uncle Tadeusz, the hot-tempered defender of “real men.” “Couldn’t we meet an hour later?” texted Jonathan. “Sorry, but I’m working,” replied Andrea invariably. When he couldn’t accommodate himself to her schedule, she retracted her proposition and he broke out in cold sweat – in the end, she’d find herself someone who would have no problems fitting in with her.

  He flinched but went, risking arriving late at school, bungling the preparation for his course, not noting down the ideas that came into his head. He never regretted it afterward – both long intercourse and quickies guaranteed him a dose of pure happiness for a day, a day and a half, and the fact that Andrea felt the same prolonged the ecstasy that they celebrated with text messages. Clearly it was to be – the time had come for him to grab several important things at once.