Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  5. Impossibility of being in the same place at the same time in public because the chemistry is impossible to miss.

  6. Phase of blindness due to reciprocation, savoring each other, growing admiration.

  7. First cut.

  8. First quarrel and reconciliation.

  9. Deepening of feelings but also moments of hesitation over whether to back out while there’s time.

  10. Blundering on nevertheless.

  11. Deepening, getting to know each other better, adapting to each other, trust.

  12. Jealousy.

  13. Tiredness.

  14. Increasingly serious consideration of whether or not to change one’s life for that person. At the same time, small disappointments.

  15. More and more shortcomings can be seen. Helplessness because feelings put one at somebody’s mercy. Aversion to the person who has such power.

  book three

  Brussels, autumn 2008

  AN EX-MODEL IN JEANS, black sweater, and suede shoes approached the spick-and-span Land Rover parked in front of the toy shop in Waterloo. He let his children in – they had the same features as their father, the same movements and clothes. Packs of toys landed in the trunk. “He’s going to his trophy wife. And, in the evening, to his lover,” thought Jonathan and pulled out a lollipop stick from his pocket, a present from Tomaszek. His eyes fell on another man leaving the shop. “Poor creep,” he pitied the flabby fifty-year-old. To his surprise a herd appeared behind the man, a Girl-Guide-like wife and a file of boys identical to their father.

  Jonathan climbed into his Toyota and drove away; only when nearing home did he realize that he hadn’t bought what he’d set out to buy – presents for his children. He did a U-turn on the Avenue de Fre, glancing at the residences concealed in the parks. “They belong to those who made their fortune in the Congo,” his dentist, a Lebanese who’d comfortably found a clinic for himself near a wealthy clientele, had informed him. His fillings were unreliable so Jonathan had stopped going to him.

  As he passed the windows of the Lebanese clinic, it crossed Jonathan’s mind that it was people who hated it who lived in the heart of Brussels. Hatred, the other side of love. He was the same – like a ball-bearing in a bagatelle, he rolled from side to side. Now that Andrea was pregnant, he loved her, hated her, hated her, loved, loved …

  1

  Brussels, autumn 2007, a year earlier

  HE EAGERLY AWAITED their trysts, like a believer awaiting Holy Communion, equally unsure whether he was worthy. Neatly dressed, he left his gym bag in the car, entered the darkness of the church and sat in a pew. Slowly, his thoughts unfurled.

  Although he tried not to meet his lover always in the same places, he grew to know the people there. He bowed in greeting to the thin man with the hands of a pianist, who spent his time in the church on St Catherine’s Square; nodded to the gray-haired, neatly dressed woman in St Michael’s Cathedral; and the homeless who sat beneath the temple walls, he recognized by their dogs – all the homeless had dogs.

  He soaked in their phantomlike presence, collected fragile events until Andrea appeared. She tore the silence with the tap of her heels, turned the darkness inside out with the scent of news which permeated her to the marrow. Still shaking after an interview, high on television adrenalin, she approached and took him by the hand. She wanted to leave immediately. She disliked the stagnation of churches, the smell of wax, stillness.

  He held her hand, warming her as though wanting to pass on to her something she didn’t understand. He had a fleeting hope that Andrea would ask him about the elderly woman whose eyes were glued to the altar, or the man with the fingers of a pianist. But she was already swiftly whispering about the latest moves of Commission officials. He got up and held her – wanted to lift her above the scum of current affairs, throw her a rope with an anchor so that she could grab the carelessly bypassed, fragile manifestations of life.

  Once, after an exceptionally beautiful session of lovemaking, in his elation, a fairy tale’s “Over the mountains, over the seas, there lived …” ran through his head. He asked whether she ever thought of traveling some more, whether she’d like to move somewhere else. She adamantly denied it: Brussels was populated with sources for her, and her television career was forged among its officials.

  “It’s my job,” she said. “I love it. I’m happy here, everything’s all mixed up, Brussels is a huge pot of languages. Here the gender of a man’s cock is feminine, une verge. A vagina is masculine, un vagin. I don’t want to leave.”

  He took her from the churches and made love to her on Simon’s sofa, on his floor, between his sheets. He immersed himself in Andrea and thought he could be with her there or anywhere.

  This time, after Megi’s abrupt departure from Andrea’s and Simon’s party, he had barely managed to convince his wife of his innocence. He explained that he’d gone – alone – to buy some cigarettes. How was he supposed to have known where Andrea was at the time? “Don’t be childish.” He gazed into Megi’s worried eyes. “Do you take me for an idiot? Why should I risk, destroy everything I’ve built up over the years?” Megi left the room; he raised his hands, which had gripped his thighs and left damp patches on the corduroy – it looked as though he’d wet himself.

  They’d promised to be careful. And this excited them all the more; they screwed like mad, hugged in parks, petted in the car. He slipped his T-shirt beneath her butt because juices ran down her thighs when he licked her and made the seats sticky. When he returned, it was as though he were drugged. The following day, he woke up in the morning unable to believe what he’d done.

  Bad dreams and strange thoughts tormented him. He couldn’t imagine daily life without her, even a brief parting.

  Pride in being able to satisfy both Andrea and Megi had long evaporated. He didn’t want to make love to anyone apart from Andrea; the very thought of wrestling with another woman was as grotesque as inflating a frog.

  He kissed Andrea and penetrated deeply or plunged shallowly, until she wriggled her hips impatiently. “Do you really want it?” he asked and rocked her from beneath while she clung to him or threw her arms out.

  Although women provoked him with their eyes more and more frequently, he had stopped playing the wise guy who stood up for polygamy. The time of unbridled thoughts about numerous lovers, the time of reading Anaïs Nin, had passed. He was experiencing a wave of monogamy – with Andrea.

  When he saw her at his door, alone, without Simon, he couldn’t control himself and in a gesture unbefitting the greetings of a mere host, his lips touched hers. Andrea recoiled. For the first time, he saw her thrown off balance.

  “Andrea!” He heard Megi’s voice behind him.

  “Simon couldn’t come.”

  “I know, he sent me an email. What would you like to drink?”

  “I, too, hate being asked, ‘Where’s your husband?’ ” The voice of his wife, as she walked away with his lover, reached Jonathan. “As if a woman without a partner was a table with a missing leg.”

  A moment later, Megi loomed up in front of him again, reminding him to look after the guests’ food and drinks. He uncorked a bottle of wine and circulated with it, a little disorientated that some people were sitting on his sofa, spaced out and irritable with jealousy because Andrea was acting as if he wasn’t there – tilting her head back, running her fingers through her hair and laughing at the jokes of guys showing off in front of her.

  “Jonathan, could you fetch some ice from the freezer?” asked Megi.

  Stefan turned up the music; some guests started to dance. Rafal stretched out his hand to Andrea in invitation. She knew the impression she made when she danced, they’d talked about it once; even so, Jonathan stood in a group with some other fools and stared at her.

  “Jonathan!”

  “Yes?”

  “The ice! That’s the third time I’ve had to ask you.”

  Megi’s face seemed paler, tarnished, like an ancient teaspoon. He tore his ba
ck away from the wall. Rafal, in high spirits, tried to spin Andrea but was so overwhelmed he turned a pirouette himself. Jonathan leaned against the edge of the freezer and pressed the ice to his forehead. It excited her when men couldn’t take their eyes off her, salivated about her, especially when Simon wasn’t there. She sensed her power and bandied it around. She was just as they made her out to be; he was the only one not to see it because in the churches, in bed, they were one to one. There, she looked at nobody but him.

  “Who’s the chick?” started Jean-Pierre when Jonathan appeared downstairs with the ice.

  “Which one?”

  “What do you mean ‘which one’?”

  Rafal had let go of Andrea’s hand and she was now walking toward them, hips swaying. Jonathan, without much thought, pressed the ice into Jean-Pierre’s hands and blocked her way.

  “Andrea,” he said, although she was looking at him as though he were nothing but mist. “Couldn’t we be … together?”

  Megi’s hands shake, the thought coming to her is tangled, with frayed endings: how could he … how could he?

  She retreats, a floorboard creaks beneath her foot. The man lifts his head from the hips of the girl lying on the pile of coats, his chin glistening like a dribbling baby’s.

  “Who is it?” The nervous giggle of the girl patters across Megi’s spine like a little mouse.

  “Never mind,” mutters Stefan indistinctly.

  Megi takes another step back, this time noiselessly.

  “Have you seen Stefan?” she hears behind her.

  Monika looks tired but smiles her eternally polite smile. “Ha!” says Megi. What else can she say?

  Monika’s lips turn up more in a tic than a smile. A guttural sound comes from the room behind them.

  “Stefan’s downstairs.” Megi closes the door and pushes Monika ahead.

  Later, when the guests depart, she lies in bed next to Jonathan but can’t fall asleep, her throat is tight. She goes downstairs, chooses a record. She needs a woman’s voice. She lights a half-burned-down candle.

  So, Stefan too! Drunk, at a party. What’s worse – that or Jonathan and Andrea’s balcony scene that Monika had told her about? Jonathan had justified himself while she looked in silence as he sat in front of her, downtrodden, yet attractive, with his slender hands digging into the corduroy of his rough trousers. “I’m not an idiot,” he’d repeated. “What does Andrea need Jonathan for?” Megi had thought at the time. And finally she’d believed him.

  Her thoughts of six years earlier – before she’d decided to return to Jonathan, before she’d broken up with the other man – were evidence of panic and her sense of guilt, interspersed with flashes of rebellion: “My body belongs to me.” How she had deliberated at the time, how many thoughts – both her own and those of others – had she mulled over! She’d even bought a book about polygamy. She didn’t like a culture that shaped everyone to the pattern of “good-bad,” “black-white.” She had read and analyzed; it had felt as though she were regaining her sight. She thought she’d finally discerned a scale of tones; instead of judging, she graded. She ran up and down the grades, flew and plummeted.

  A person who is free falls in love, one who is not free betrays. Why had she betrayed Jonathan? Because he didn’t want her? Why didn’t he want her? Had he been struck by the Madonna-Whore curse? Had he seen only a mother in Megi at the time and, for the love of God, didn’t want to see anything else?

  Beginnings, beginnings!

  She remembers when she told her mother that she was tired, that she felt like a wound-up robot. That she was missing the anesthetic, childish infatuation. Jonathan.

  Half a year later, she had told her that she was in love. With another man.

  2

  JONATHAN SLIPS into the lining of Andrea’s vagina. “Jonathan, Jonathan!” the cry reaches him, but he rushes ahead, forward, rubs persistently, until her muscles clench his cock. Andrea weeps but he pushes right inside, into the depths of her belly, somewhere higher than her navel.

  “Oh God!” Megi would have said but this isn’t her, it’s Andrea beneath him. Rumpled like a rag doll, she doesn’t mention God, only laughs wildly.

  “Something like that, something like that,” she pants, the whites of her eyes glistening, her bare teeth clenching and unclenching.

  Jonathan presses his tongue between them. He doesn’t drill hard with it – now, after it all, he has no strength left to push it down her throat. He runs the tip over her lips, caresses her gums, licks the inside of her cheeks. And she carries on laughing and wiping tears away.

  When they get out of bed, Jonathan holds her rump from below. “The perfect shape of an apple,” he says in English and Polish. She replies in Swedish and Czech. Now Jonathan laughs. Andrea tenses; he ruffles her hair, hiding the rest of his smile in it. The same things excite them but “restaurace v cipu” doesn’t make her laugh.

  Suddenly he asks her if she doesn’t want any children. Andrea looks at him, her heart-shaped face framed by dark hair.

  “No,” she answers after reflection. “I don’t like children.”

  Jonathan draws her to the rumpled sofa again, turns her on her back. It’s better like this, now he can lie on her, simulating intercourse, which makes him grow stiff again.

  “But you’ll want them someday?”

  Andrea slides from beneath him, picks her bra up from the armchair.

  “Maybe,” she says slipping her hands through the straps.

  “When?” Jonathan, lying on his back, stretches himself.

  Andrea turns to him and, carefully arranging her breasts in the bra cups, says, “You mean because I’m over thirty? Men have been ramming it into my head that I’m old ever since I was seventeen. The boys in my class pointed to fifteen-year-olds and said, “Look, fresh goods!” ’

  She reaches for her panties; the colors of spring flash in front of his eyes, disciplined by lace trimmings.

  “They did it because they couldn’t have me. It was their way of punishing me.”

  Jonathan draws himself out on the bed, crosses his hands behind his head.

  “May I smoke?”

  Andrea shakes her head. She is just going to leave the room but turns at the last moment, walks up to him, and takes his hand. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, she starts to pull off his wedding ring. The metal resists so Andrea puts Jonathan’s finger into her mouth, moistens it with saliva without looking down to where an erection is slowly swelling.

  “Andrea,” groans Jonathan. “Stop …”

  He is engulfed by flames, the heat of wet dreams spreads through his groin, tickles thighs, licks testicles coarsely, like a cat.

  “God!” cries Jonathan. And spreads his arms, legs, lips.

  They never went back to the question that Jonathan had asked Andrea at his party. “Couldn’t we be together?” still hung in that room, that time, pressed in between the cubes of ice and Jean-Pierre panting behind their backs.

  Jonathan was now writing a good deal. He woke up in the mornings and rearranged paragraphs of The Pavlov Dogs in his memory. There was a lot of material; this time he was not writing a children’s book. A novel for teenagers was growing, perhaps even one for adults. He scribbled notes on loose pieces of paper because he didn’t like notebooks. His world had narrowed to sentences on his laptop, and maybe that’s why he saw the question he’d asked Andrea so clearly. He hadn’t demanded an answer; on the contrary, he was pleased there wasn’t one, tossed as he was between “I want to be with her,” “But what about the children?”, “How can I live without her?”, “But Megi …”

  On his way to fetch Antosia and Tomaszek from school, he played with the chestnuts they’d stuffed into his pockets. The chestnuts had lost their charming smoothness and color had seeped away from them, but wrinkled they looked wise.

  The children were very happy at the school here; they had a lot of friends. Jonathan arranged with their mothers for the kids to visit each other’s houses, but found it ha
rd to switch to concrete facts. “I’ll take them after school; yes, I’ll feed them; no, he’s not allergic to anything,” he yapped. The family machinery was well oiled, self-help books on parenting would have been proud of him.

  Until one day when Tomaszek refused to go home. In a room covered with cushions, the tots had built a castle and ran around barefoot, tearing off their jackets and T-shirts. A few parents were standing at the door hurrying their children along. Jonathan, who had a date with Andrea that afternoon, shifted from foot to foot like the others, sweating in his winter jacket.

  “We’re going, Tomaszek,” he said yet again. One of the parents took up the cry and, as in Chinese whispers, names changed, languages mixed, but the message remained the same.

  The children, however, didn’t listen to anyone. They barricaded themselves in the castle of cushions and ruled fairly and unfairly, pinching and shoving each other, leaping with joy and squealing in pain.

  “Tomaszek!”

  The school clock showed it was too late for him to have a shower before seeing Andrea.

  The circle of parents around the door undulated; they, too, had started to look at the clock. Some of them had pulled out of polite conversations and turned directly to the castle, which was pulsating with life.

  “Marika, come here!” “Bea, put your shoes on!” “Esme, we’re going home!”

  But the children blocked the entrance with another cushion and, giggling, started to collect ammunition: ping-pong balls, badminton shuttlecocks, building blocks, and balls of paper.

  “Sean, please!”

  “Charlie, do you hear?”

  “Maura, I repeat!”

  Jonathan glanced at the clock again, and was overwhelmed by the heat. They would be stuck in the traffic soon, the road – down to one lane – would be packed, he wouldn’t have time to defrost the chicken, Andrea would have to wait …

  “Tomaszek, I’m going!”

  The castle grew silent, then giggles broke out again. Jonathan turned on his heel and started to go downstairs.