“Gave him a piece of your mind?” Stefan stood next to him.
Jonathan took a drag and without a word blew out a cloud of smoke.
“Don’t worry, it’s just the usual hiccup after ditching a girl. It doesn’t normally happen to me,” Stefan explained, seeing that Jonathan wanted to say something, “but I’ve seen it happen to others.”
He leaned against the railings then after a while added: “Anyway Simon had it coming. He didn’t invite you to that party. He thinks that since you’re a nobody in the Commission … You’ve shown him that’s not the case.”
“What’s not?” asked Jonathan in a drab voice.
“Well, that if you’re not in the Commission it doesn’t mean you’re not important.”
Jonathan stared at the garden stretching out in front of him.
“Stefan,” he said clearly. “I’m fucking his wife.”
“Still!” Stefan tore his hands away from the railings. “Even though she didn’t invite you to their party, ignored you, and after everything else you said?”
Jonathan stamped out the cigarette butt.
“Right, that’s not the point,” Stefan said, more to himself.
When the terrace door closed behind him, Jonathan rested his back against the rough wall. In the light seeping from the apartment, he could see the rain cutting through the air. He turned his face to the sky. How far he’d gone! He loved Andrea even for her faults. He was hurt, yet happy. Is this the essence of love, he thought. Pain?
All at once, he longed for his calm love of Megi.
“What are they talking about?” wonders Megi, looking at Jonathan on the balcony. “Exchanging rude jokes, what else?”
She turns her eyes to Andrea. She’s like a stone chafing in her shoe. Megi tries to shake it out of her mind – in vain. If it was a man who’d so irked Megi, she would confront him. But Andrea is a woman.
She remembers the dream she had that night: she was standing at a party like this one and talking about something unimportant. There were fewer people than here which was why she was surprised nobody had noticed a bear slip in through the door.
It was beautiful! Its coat, almost black, glistened like a pitch-black stream, fur swaying in rhythm with its gait. As it passed Megi, it didn’t slow down but walked between her legs at the same steady pace. She shuddered, clenched her glass tighter and, with an apologetic smile, looked around at the faces of the guests. But they seemed not to notice it, perhaps they had not even noticed the bear’s presence at the party.
She’d woken up, flooded with an irrational feeling of happiness: the bear had chosen her, passed between her legs! She burned with shame, exciting shame.
Megi runs her fingers through her hair and her eyes return to the circle of men swaying around Andrea; she watches Andrea make room for them, invite them to be the center of her interest. With her attention, her eyes, she extracts from those she is talking to whatever they believe is the best in them; she is their mirror; the canvas for their self-portraits. She merely retouches a little and immediately they appear better – are “the real thing!”
Megi shrugs. She doesn’t believe in Native American male friendship. Brought up by women, she knows that nothing can equal their power. Which is why, when women turn against her, Megi feels lost.
7
AS HE WALKED next to Stefan, Jonathan remembered that, according to Megi, the more time he spent with his friend, the more Jonathan became part of Stefan’s dog team and, like a good Husky, took on some of his friend’s personality for a time: the way he spoke, some of his gestures. “It’s easy to guess who you’ve just seen,” she laughed. “Do I also pick up other people’s traits?” Jonathan worried; he didn’t want to be a chameleon. “No, no,” Megi reassured him. “Only Stefan’s.”
Stefan was less susceptible to Jonathan’s influence and Jonathan consoled himself that even though his friend’s personality may have been more dominating, he, Jonathan, had more empathy. Does that mean I’m more feminine? The thought flitted through his mind, but he quickly rid himself of it. “Masculine” and “feminine” were so flexible and kept on changing; he himself was the best example of this. He didn’t bother to put a name to it. He had already been an outsider in life; he might as well be avant-garde.
This time, as he walked down the street with his friend, Jonathan felt, for the first time, that he was observing him. He studied Stefan’s body language, the glances he threw at passing women, his half-smiles, the way he turned to look – at that woman for example, older than them, classy.
Once she’d passed by, Stefan didn’t even interrupt what he was saying, as though separate cells in his brain registered aesthetic and sexual events without disturbing those responsible for the coherent spinning of a story. Yet the woman walking away must have thought Stefan was still eyeing her because when Jonathan glanced back, he saw that she was trying to step lightly in her stilettos over the uneven pavement.
The street traced a gentle arch. Brussels, he thought, a sexy city where people look at each other and this mutual attention warms them as if they were lying in a beach shelter. A city where Megi had one morning dared to say, “Why clitoris? It should be tickloris.”
They passed another girl at whom Stefan cast his approving eye.
“Not bad,” he muttered.
“Young.”
“What do you expect? Thirty-year-olds are desperate. Marriage and babies – that’s what they have in mind. Forty-year-olds are great but they scare me.”
“Twenty-year-olds in bed are like broth from a stock cube.”
“But you can screw them,” sighed Stefan.
Jonathan stopped short. Stefan walked on a while before realizing he was talking to himself. He turned and looked questioningly at Jonathan.
“She wasn’t even twenty,” Jonathan indicated behind him.
“What’s up with you? I haven’t raped her!”
“You’re forty and dribbling over a girl half your age. Are you retarded or something?”
Stefan cast his eyes around as if to seek understanding from the waiters watching for customers at the Italian restaurants.
“What’s …” he began but Jonathan hissed through clenched teeth, “You don’t like Andrea, do you?”
Stefan stared at him goggle-eyed.
“You don’t like her because she’s just like you,” continued Jonathan, speaking as if he were also listening to himself. “She eyes men in that same way and then …”
Stefan stepped up to him, slowly, as if he were an injured bird.
Two waiters stopped talking; their coal-dark eyes glowered beneath the awning.
“Why do you leave them?” Jonathan jabbed Stefan’s chest with his finger.
“Who?”
“Those birds of yours!”
Stefan gazed at him and, tilting his head to one side, said slowly, as though to a toddler, “Because I’ve got a wife.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“No, no! I mean why do you pick them up? Why do it at all? Understand?”
Stefan walked up to him, sheltering them both from the waiters’ sight.
“Sorry, old chap,” he said quietly. “But I don’t understand.”
Autumn smelled of flowers and it wasn’t clear where the scent was coming from since leaves were rustling in the trees, fumes drifting from cars and police horses, leaving odors more suited to a nineteenth-century street.
With the start of a new school year, Jonathan returned to his routine: he drove the children to school, wrote, fetched them and, when Megi came home and began preparing dinner, took his gym bag and left. Andrea already waited for him in the church. They went to her place and made love on Simon’s bed.
He couldn’t settle his thoughts for a long time after his return; they skipped in euphoria and made him want to run, hold witty discussions, learn Spanish. In order to cover his tracks, he tapped the keyboard while allowing images from an hour ago to scud before his eyes: Andrea snuggling on top of him, her
slender thighs wrapped around his hips, his eyes and lips covered by his lover’s dark hair.
In October, Simon left for a whole two weeks. Jonathan wanted to make the most of the time, even though his going to the gym every day might have appeared suspicious. Andrea was the one who showed caution for them both and, as was her wont, was sparing with herself and forced him to wait for her invitation.
He was furious. Why hold on to the rhythm of their first dates? The speed at which they see each other ought to have equalled the strength of the emotions which carried him. He pressed her because she was now the only one he wanted to make love to; her body seemed semifluid and unearthly, their fucking ecstatic.
He stopped enjoying Megi. He waited for his wife to fall asleep at night and only then went to bed. He lay there, still feeling the weight of Andrea’s head on his shoulder, recalling the murmur of their whispering, the tangle of words, the moisture of their tongues, the merging of English and Polish, French and Swedish.
Once, when he’d had enough of waiting for Megi to fall asleep, he silently picked up his phone, which at night he kept beneath the bed and, hiding it behind a bottle of water, started to leave the bedroom. Suddenly, the light of a message flashed on the screen and, magnified by the plastic bottle, fell on Megi’s face.
Only after a while did he dare to look at her. She was asleep … But if she had woken up then, if she’d read what was painted on his face, illuminated by the bluish glow, he would have answered with sheepish simplicity: “I love her. I want to be with her.”
The Pavlov Dogs yapped in Jonathan’s head even as he jogged around Cinquantenaire Park; and – wonders never cease – the point at which he usually grew tired was when he passed one of Brussels’s strange statues, the statue of a dog. The subject was attracted to him like filings to a magnet – Antosia told him how her friend’s bitch had run away during a walk and come back pregnant, then Megi came across a second-hand clothes shop right next to the statue of a dog like the one in Tintin. Their daughter begged them to take in one of her friend’s puppies when they were born; his wife was fascinated by the fact that the bronze dog was peeing.
Jonathan absorbed the information and, although not everything suited his story, something filtered through; be it the nervy peeing here and there of the leader of the mongrel pack or the polygamous personality of the prettiest bitch. Something even made him call one of his chapters “Pushing to get down in the gutter.”
His students appeared after the holidays in practically the same line-up. Cecile said it was rare for people to go back to writing after the holidays, just like when learning a foreign language.
Jonathan entered the building with a certain thrill. The stone statues in little hats seemed to greet him; the man sitting in the glass-fronted kiosk marked “Information” welcomed him as one of his own. A moment later, gray-haired Geert, sun-tanned Ariane, Jean-Pierre in the immortal jacket that served him throughout all the seasons of the year, and British Kitty, now with longer hair, walked in; only the oldest participant, Nora, was missing. Jonathan asked whether they’d written anything during the holidays – they answered with smiles full of embarrassment, and Ariane pulled a thick notebook bound in cream canvas from her bag.
“My daughter gave this to me,” she said. “I’ve been writing in it for some time now.”
“What are you writing?” They leaned toward her; Ariane opened the book. The sentence on the first page looked like embroidery on a kitchen wall-hanging.
“What’s that maxim?” asked Kitty.
“It’s a sentence from The House of Spirits. I love that book!”
They leaned over the entry.
“… ‘if you call things by their name, they materialize …,’ ” Geert translated the beginning.
“… ‘and you can no longer ignore them because …”,” continued Kitty.
“ ‘If,’ ” Ariane corrected her. “ ‘If, however, they remain in the realm of words unuttered …”
“ ‘… with time they may vanish into thin air.’ ” Geert adjusted his glasses.
They fell silent. A tram rumbled past the window.
“That fits in with the former subject we studied.” Jonathan smiled. “To ‘The Semantics of Love.’ ”
“Former?” Ariane pulled herself up. “But that’s why I’m writing in this book!”
“Really?” Jonathan was pleased.
Ariane answered with a smile; Geert nodded.
“But isn’t it a stupid subject?” Jonathan let out.
Jean-Pierre stopped sprawling over two chairs and sat up straight.
“It’s broad,” he said after some thought.
Geert agreed.
“A lot falls into place because of it. I hear more, feel more.”
“Me, too.” Kitty laid her hand over her pretty bust. “After all, you did tell me to write with tenderness.”
“Buy yourself something like this.” Ariane leaned over to her, indicating her notebook. “No, wait, I’ll buy it for you!”
“But going back to that quotation,” said Geert, “I wonder … What if things that have been given a name do become real?”
“I’ve got a practical question,” said Ariane. “Does anyone know where Anaïs Nin hid her diaries?”
“In a bank safe,” replied Jean-Pierre. “Before that idea occurred to her she used to keep her secret one somewhere at home covered with an “overt” one. But later on, when she had piles of them – and some of them almost got lost during her travels – she decided to keep them in a bank safe.”
“And Henry Miller, where did he keep his?” asked Ariane.
Jean-Pierre looked at her derisively.
“Wherever he pleased. What did he have to be scared of?”
Megi leaned over the dark desk; there were a few dents in the wood. The shadow of swelling veins slowly appeared on her hands.
“No,” said Jonathan. “I don’t want old furniture in my home.”
Megi tore her eyes and her fingers away from the texture of the surface. Tomaszek’s squeals as Antosia tickled him came from another part of the shop.
“Why not?”
“I’ve already told you.” He looked around because a thud had reached him from the corner where the children were. “Buying antiques is for the senile. Look around, who comes here to buy anything? Nobody but old fogies.”
“Who, please God, don’t speak Polish.”
“It’s a different matter if the piece of furniture’s been in the family for years. But I don’t intend to bring home something I know nothing about.”
“Don’t you think it’s mysterious?”
“About as mysterious as second-hand underwear.”
The search for desks had already taken them two weekends. Jonathan was annoyed, not so much by the antiques to which Megi persisted in returning as by having to drive around instead of resting. A side effect of moving was the need to throw away old things and buy new ones, just as one of the consequences of having children was constantly having to provide them with something new because they kept growing out of their old things. Jonathan was ground down by the cogs of small necessities.
“Let’s go to IKEA then,” sighed Megi, settling in the front seat of their car.
“And didn’t I say so from the start?” muttered Jonathan, at the last moment pulling out a half-empty carton of juice from beneath him.
The aisle in IKEA led them relentlessly through areas packed with wardrobes, beds, chairs, picture frames, while the children managed to find ways of disappearing in one place and leaping out from another. Megi, in the meantime, filled the yellow and blue bag at an alarming rate with what, in Jonathan’s opinion, were unnecessary objects.
“You said you didn’t want any Swedish artificial egalitarianism at home.” He ruffled his hair as she threw a bathroom rug into the bag.
“Jonathan, those old rags on our floor …” she retorted, assessing the shade of the towels stacked nearby.
He turned so as not to look at this wh
en he heard someone calling him. Kitty stood by a shelf of vegetable graters and next to her were a stout man and a chubby child in a buggy.
“We’re looking for a high chair for Emma.” Kitty indicated the little girl who raised her eyes and studied Jonathan intently.
Unknowingly, he answered the child’s gaze with a smile. Little Antosia had stared like that when she was a baby. “Studying objects,” he and Megi used to call it, admiring how she turned a building brick or spoon in her hands – a miniature scientist.
“And we’re looking for desks for the children.” He waved toward Tomaszek, who was swinging on some curtains. Antosia was not in sight, hiding behind bales of material no doubt.
“Let me introduce you,” he turned to Kitty as Megi approached. “This is my wife. And this is Kitty who comes to my writing course.”
“My wife,” he repeated, introducing her to Kitty’s partner.
Once they’d parted ways, Megi forged ahead without a word.
“Megi,” he called, seeing a desk he thought might be suitable for Antosia. “Wait!”
She turned with a long face.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I began to think you might have forgotten my name.”
He pulled himself up, looking at her helplessly.
“ ‘This is my wife,’ ‘my wife,’ ” she continued, mimicking him. “Have you forgotten what I’m called? I’m Megi!”
She cheered up only once they’d decided on two small desks and were headed to the check-out. On the way, she stopped at the mirror department; he walked up to her and put his arms around her, stroking her hair.
“Well,” he murmured. “That’s out of the way. We coped. As always.”
He looked at her face reflected in the mirror, then took in everything, the two of them, the furniture shop.
“Yes, as always.”
He ran his hand over her cheek, turned, and called the children. He kept calling them even though they’d heard him a long time ago. He called to deafen the thought that had jabbed at him unexpectedly as he gazed into the mirror. Even when you’re old, I’ll love you, he’d thought. Even when you’re old, Andrea.
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