Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  He looked at the children again. Such strong emotions had sprung up within him lately. How he’d matured as a father, as the man of a beloved woman. Once he’d thought that fresh experiences washed away the color of previous ones; now he knew they deepened them.

  Megi runs doubled over beneath her umbrella as hail pounds the fabric and the rain spits even beneath it; but when she stops outside the shop the sun is already shining to the accompaniment of birdsong. A mannequin stands in the display window in front of which she and Andrea had parted a few days ago. Today it is dressed in a silk vest. Not only Jonathan but she, too, associates silk – especially imitation silk – with old age.

  Megi pushes the door and walks alongside the row of hangers. Something sexy but not kitschy. In no way must Jonathan laugh at her. She wanders around, restless as a bee, until she grabs a bra and pair of panties and dives into a changing room. The black triangles of underwear contrast sharply with her pale skin. Megi joins her hands and unconsciously rubs one against the other.

  “Is the size right?” the saleswoman asks from behind the curtain.

  “Yes, yes.” She rubs her hands harder.

  A memory comes back: they used to rub their hands like that at the summer camps then shove them under each other’s noses saying, “Look! That’s how corpses smell.” Megi smiles; the mirror registers the change. She bends over and pulls her phone out of her bag. She’d told her mother of her suspicions about Jonathan and Andrea – she’s close to her mother – and they both decided that Megi should phone Andrea to sense whether the panic in the latter’s eyes had only been an illusion.

  She dials Andrea’s number, which she obtained from the trainee, and cringes. What’s she going to talk about? The smell of corpses? What’s Swedish for “corpse”? Or Czech? She knows nothing about this partner of Simon’s.

  “Hello? It’s me, Megi.”

  “I’m sorry but is it urgent?” replies Andrea’s official voice. “I’m just recording.”

  Megi hangs up.

  “Is that your size or shall I bring another one?” the shop assistant enquires from behind the curtain.

  Megi doesn’t reply. She stands in front of the mirror; the black lingerie is draped over a hanger, next to it her own clothes. She gazes at the triangle of pubic hair. Should she shave? That’s what they’d done to her when preparing her for the operation. The smell of disinfectant and a bald pussy. She hated them for reducing her, a woman, to a little girl.

  And now she’s cold. She quickly pulls on her clothes and leaves the shop, buying nothing.

  Jonathan’s thoughts returned to the previous evening. They’d watched a couple of episodes of Sex and the City; Megi had borrowed them from Monika, who loved the film.

  At first, Megi had watched the series as she would a spider behind glass.

  “A woman’s sexuality can’t be based on a coarse reversal of roles, especially in the Casanova myth!” she’d fumed. “There’s a rhythm in the way a woman matures. There’s a time for everything – on a monthly, yearly, and ten-year scale. I can see that men might want us to be available nonstop but it can’t be like that! And something like this” – she’d pointed to the screen – “is made to sell things to the ever-ready female, crotchless panties and other shit. There’s no truth, only business.”

  “Celibacy was introduced for similar reasons.” Jonathan smiled. “So as not to pass church property on to children. That’s business, too.”

  He’d thought she’d laugh but she got to her feet and angrily switched off the television. It suddenly hit him that she hadn’t laughed for a long time. He couldn’t make her laugh any more. Was it like that ever since Andrea had arrived on the scene; was it then that the thread of understanding between him and his wife had started to grow weaker?

  Watching her, he was again haunted by beginnings. As if there was such a thing as a beginning! Yes, he’d met Andrea, accidentally kissed her, but they must have been waiting for each other. There must have been a vacuum in him somewhere for the moment to have shaken him so much. Because when had Megi last shown herself to him in a bra and panties? She used to show him her new clothes, ask his advice about whether they suited her or not, to which he used to reply, “Yes, wonderful,” “No, take them back,” “Not bad but a bit too sensible.” They’d acquired the habit in their first years together when Jonathan, asked for his opinion, had pulled the new garb off, had her, and only then expressed his opinion.

  The good old days! They’d enjoyed each other, laughed together. She’d thought Jonathan’s fascination with the female metaphor of taking off the armor of the office day so funny. He’d latched on to the phrase. Megi, home from work, would say, “I’ve got to remove my bra,” and he, returning tired, would throw himself on the sofa and, glancing at her, murmur, “I’ve not even got the strength to remove my bra.” They’d joked that they were moving with the times because taking off a bra was on a par in their home with loosening a tie. And then daily life had teemed with chores to be done immediately so that, one day, when she’d appeared in front of him in her underwear – he couldn’t remember exactly when – he’d merely nodded his approval and returned to the computer. Poor Megi had stood in the doorway for a moment then turned, embarrassed; Jonathan had leapt from his chair, put his arms around her, and given her some good cunnilingus. She’d stimulated him until she squeezed a few drops from his cock, like an icicle melting in the spring sun.

  Now, Jonathan turned to the table and began to tap at the keyboard. The Pavlov Dogs didn’t romanticise beginnings; they lived in constant continuity; their lives were continuous. And when there was no constancy they allowed something else to take its place. Such was the law of nature, a dog’s law.

  10

  SOME TIME AGO, when Latin American literature was in fashion, Jonathan found the verbosity of its prose annoying. He’d been a fan of Nabokov then, of his precision, spiced with an ironic style. Now Love in the Time of Cholera drew him in like music pulsating in his belly. He asked his students what they thought of Márquez and saw that his admiration alone didn’t render Márquez objectively admirable. Ariane said she’d already been through it – just like bell-bottoms. Jean-Pierre sniffed at the lack of refinement in the overly long stories. Geert, a poetry lover, mumbled that so many words between two covers overwhelmed him. Only Kitty admitted that Latin American novels were not a bad vintage.

  “Because what’s so literary about the sentence: ‘He finally understood something that, without knowing it himself, he had felt numerous times before: that one could at one and the same time and with equal pain, love many women simultaneously, without betraying any’?” asked Jean-Pierre.

  “That’s not any good.” Ariane settled herself more comfortably on the chair.

  “In what way?” asked Jonathan.

  “It’s too …”

  “Immoral?” Kitty broke in.

  Ariane shook her head as though something buzzed around her.

  “Too simple! Simple as …”

  Jonathan was about to throw in the missing word but realized he didn’t know the English word for “cep” [blockhead].

  “Didn’t I say so?” Jean-Pierre took possession of another chair and turned it into an elbow-rest.

  “What’s simple about it?” Kitty was surprised.

  “It’s a round sentence that doesn’t clarify anything,” snorted Ariane. “Where is human emotion?”

  “In the rest of the book?” risked Jonathan.

  “What I mean,” Ariane seemed irritated by something, “is it lacks life’s reality.”

  “Literary novels aren’t nonfiction,” muttered Jean-Pierre.

  “Reality is integral to the story,” she explained almost angrily.

  Jonathan thought about it afterward when sitting in church waiting for Andrea. But only for that moment because next they lay on the carpet in her living room, Jonathan with his hands around her waist, Andrea snuggled in the saddle of his hips. As she raised herself he took her apple-shaped ba
ckside in his hands. He adored her sticking it out; he could admire her pussy for hours.

  On his way home, he decided to keep both Andrea and Megi. He wanted them both; the symbiosis was essential to him. Vibrating with love, he thought about the chain of sexual moves – he licks Andrea, Megi sucks him, Andrea Simon, and he, Jonathan, takes Megi from behind.

  In all this, he felt wanted, desired, and loved. When he left home, Megi admired him; when he went to Andrea’s, she huddled up to him. He wallowed in caresses, blossomed in their love, discovering ever better sides to himself. People he knew and people he didn’t know flocked around him now, women accosted him with their eyes, men phoned about professional matters until he was afraid that one day he would wake up and find that it was all too good to be true.

  At such moments, when he was horrified by how far he’d blundered, he tried to weigh out the failure of his “real” relationship – or at least the one that others considered as such – his marriage. And yet the word “failure” didn’t fit because although he had turned his world upside down in his thoughts, undermined its foundations, and vigorously thrown everything away to be with Andrea, in reality he defended that world. He didn’t even think of leaving Megi – his best friend, his family. And under no circumstances his children. No such script existed.

  Jonathan thought that the contrasts provided by the evening were the stuff of writers’ dreams. The three parties he and Megi had attended were like going from one funfair mirror to another, one making you thin, the next making you fat.

  They started with a party held by a couple of Megi’s young colleagues. The hosts were good-looking, served imaginative dishes, made sure their guests had enough to drink; their fair-haired daughter played with a fattish Golden Retriever. After an hour, Jonathan had said practically all that could meet with favorable answers. When the conversation moved to comparing life in Belgium to that in their fatherland – with an emphasis on the superiority of cucumber soup over the local speciality, carbonnade – Megi leaned over and whispered in Jonathan’s ear: “Can’t they see that there’s no conflict between liking what’s here and what’s there?”

  “They’re defending their own yard.” He shrugged.

  “Brave Snail that kept to Polish soil,” she snorted.

  “What snail?”

  “Required reading. The peasants resisting foreign powers in the nineteenth century. You were doing Shelley at the time.”

  Next was a pub – somebody from Megi’s work, who’d been transferred to another EU country, was holding a goodbye do. Jonathan stepped into a world of cigarette smoke and tipsy men with marks left by their wedding rings. Seeing some dancers place their hands on the intimate parts of their partners, Jonathan signalled to Megi that it was time to go.

  “If that was hell and the other was heaven,” he muttered, “what’s in store now?”

  Simon, the host of the third party that evening, had not omitted to invite them this time. Andrea greeted them at the threshold. Jonathan was speechless, she looked so beautiful in her tight dress; which is why he was relieved that, after taking their coats, she mingled with the crowd.

  The apartment seemed entirely different than the one he knew from their secret trysts. He had generally put the meticulous appearance of the place down to Simon; now he was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the bourgeois love of order was no stranger to his hostess either. The food was served in family porcelain, the knives and forks arranged in neat rows, next to which lay ironed fabric napkins.

  “Most ambitious,” muttered Megi, squinting at the cutlery trestles that had no right to be there because everyone was walking around carrying their plates.

  Despite the pomposity, the guests were circulating casually, raising serious issues in the kitchen, making drunken passes on the dance floor, petting each other and smoking on the balcony. The door handle to the bathroom was loose so that women went in pairs – one went in, the other stood on guard. It occurred to Jonathan that they always went to pee together, and that the lock must have broken that day because the previous day, when Simon had returned from London, it had still been working.

  Above the heads of the other guests he caught sight of Andrea dancing with the journalist who’d been unpleasantly surprised when Jonathan had lied that he’d learned English in Poland. Jonathan turned and went out onto the balcony. He helped himself to a cigarette from a stray pack and blew the smoke into the air. A moment later, he heard a creak – in the balcony door stood Andrea.

  He glanced at her over his shoulder then stared at the street full of respectable apartments. Suddenly he felt her fingers on his lips. He backed away but he’d already picked up the smell – the smell of her pussy.

  Anger clenched his jaws, but his cock swelled in his trousers.

  “Kiss it,” she ordered.

  “Megi?” calls Martyna. “Have you been here long? I didn’t see you!”

  “I didn’t see you either.” Megi stifles a yawn. “Where were you hiding?”

  “In the kitchen!”

  “The kitchen, you?”

  Martyna smiles, pleasantly tickled, she likes to stress her dislike of “a woman’s chores’.

  “We were talking about this exhibition that has just opened in London. Did you see it?”

  Megi shakes her head. She has just been to London but what she remembers most is the airport and the fact that she had masses of work. Martyna doesn’t work; she claims to hold an artistic salon that Jonathan calls her “narcissistic salon.” Martyna now starts to pour out a stream of words and Megi automatically stops listening. She recalls a conversation with Przemek, or rather information slipped in between the lines about his designs on a government position in Poland and the hint that he’d like to see her with him. Now Megi shrugs – she can’t imagine leaving Brussels. She feels at home here; here, she has a choice at every corner. Besides, the children really like their school, and Jonathan … where is he exactly?

  Megi stares enquiringly at Martyna’s moving lips.

  “We’ve got to go.” She makes a move to pass her interlocutor.

  “Are you looking for Jonathan? He’s on the balcony, at least that’s where they were a few minutes ago.”

  “They?” Megi freezes.

  Martyna looks at her in a way Megi doesn’t like. She looks like a puffball close up, she thinks.

  “With Andrea,” says Martyna and adds, “I also saw them in the street together.”

  A frame from a Polish film suddenly appears in front of Megi’s eyes – a Polish soldier being killed by a German. That tilt, the way they focused on the tilt of the body as it fell backward, drums the thought in.

  “I once saw them leave a church together.” It’s Martyna’s voice again. “I’m not the only one to have seen them.”

  Megi tilts her head and the world is crooked. She holds her face in her hands and rearranges it, back to its former expression.

  “And now I saw them as …” Martyna raises her arm, there’s something black beneath it.

  Moles, birthmarks, or has she got something stuck? The weasel of a thought runs through Megi’s head.

  “Goodnight,” she says loudly and runs out.

  They’re not on the balcony. Nor in the room with the bottles. Megi tugs at the bathroom door, the handle remains in her hand.

  “Don’t worry.” Simon laughs and takes the door handle from her. “Are you off already?” He, too, looks around but Jonathan isn’t anywhere. He indicates the coat stand but Megi rushes out in nothing but her dress.

  She races alongside the respectable apartments, or rather skips oddly, rubbing her arms; it’s a cold evening. She can’t remember where they parked. Something blinds her and makes her eyelid pulsate. She presses down on it with her fingers, which makes it harder for her to see anything – how’s she going to find them now?

  She sits on a bench in the bus shelter, shivers so much that a black boy stares at her anxiously. Megi opens her handbag – only one tissue, one sheet of paper for al
l this fear.

  “Why doesn’t Jonathan want me?”

  She raises her head just as she did when she kissed the other man. He was taller than her, even a tiny bit taller than Jonathan. One business trip, two nights during which they didn’t leave the bed. At one stage he’d kissed her labia and in his English, weighed down with an Austrian accent, asked, “What do you call it?” “Cipka,” she answered. “Cipka,” he repeated without understanding.

  He didn’t laugh at the word, he savored its sound. And at that moment she reclaimed them – both her pussy and herself – because she liked this Megi who arched her back, sticking her butt out to her lover so that he could slip into her smoothly and rub her inner walls. She loved the rhythm of the moves, the slapping, his hips and her buttocks, her arms resting on the edge of the bed, her head hanging, swaying with the rhythm of fucking. What had she thought about then? Only one thing – his cock with its pulsating head, the ingeniously formed instrument as it slipped in and out, caught at her insides and teased her, rubbed her, aroused her …

  After two nights her pussy was so chafed that, on returning home, she was irrationally relieved that nobody penetrated her (Jonathan was not reaching for her then). Her groin could cool down, and she had time to be with herself.

  A couple of days later, as she was going to meet her lover, Jonathan slipped his hand beneath her skirt by chance and discovered she was not wearing any panties. It excited him, she barely escaped, said she had to fly to work.

  That day she’d had them both.

  After some time, she made a decision – she broke off with the other man. She returned from their last meeting in tears; the car coped with her as a carthorse does with a drunken carter, while she arranged points worthy of a lawyer in her head:

  1. Thunderbolt, that is, infatuation.

  2. Longing to meet, childishness.

  3. Happiness reciprocated.

  4. Lows of uncertainty alternating with flights of euphoria.