Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  “My child. Mine,” drifted Andrea’s voice. Jonathan abruptly pulled himself up and stole out of the children’s room. He slipped under the duvet and wrapped himself in Megi’s warmth. But sleep didn’t come. He rolled on to his back and stared at the oblique window.

  Stefan appeared in his mind. His women were amazingly like each other. Clinging women – those were the ones he attracted, those were the ones he shunned, starting with Monika, through to his last whim, Martyna, the doyenne of narcissists. Stefan saw his children chiefly on weekends. He talked to Jonathan about his daughter’s piercings but lacked the courage to speak to her. Franek still tried to please his father but it was clear that the twelve-year-old was inevitably beginning to gravitate toward his peers, ceasing to need his father.

  Jonathan’s women were different, independent, self-sufficient. He congratulated himself for not being a menace who mended his own ego by undermining their values. He wasn’t afraid of strong women, nor was he afraid of children. He didn’t run away from being a father – it was his right to be one. Although he sometimes growled with tiredness, these growls expressed love. If he were the father of Andrea’s child, he wouldn’t dodge the responsibility. If he were …

  He started counting in his head: she was to give birth at the end of January so she must have conceived in May, perhaps April. “I told you I wanted one with you,” came Andrea’s voice. Megi sighed in her sleep.

  Jonathan sprung out of bed, ran downstairs and pulled out his diary from his jacket. When exactly had that been, the time they didn’t use a rubber? An article deadline, his mother’s birthday, a school meeting, but no markings for fertile and infertile days. May, May … There was still that night in Sweden when she hadn’t replied to his messages. Had that been because someone was with her?

  He stepped onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and let out a column of smoke. Constellations: Orion, the North Star. Megi didn’t know much about them, could barely find the Great Bear. Andrea didn’t want anything from him, she cut him off from her life. Whose was that little human being growing in her?

  A bat glided above the gardens, its trajectory cut by a light, a falling star or a plane.

  Who else was Andrea screwing?

  Jonathan leans Andrea against the wall and slips his hands under her dress; his fingers run down her naked body, only the swell above her pubic mound brings him round. She quickly turns and sticks out her rump. Her waist is still narrow from the back, her buttocks firm and shapely. Jonathan parts them and takes a while to fit his cock into the hole. Andrea pushes her rump out further but Jonathan prolongs his manipulations. He knows how hot she is – a miracle of the middle trimester, an onslaught of hormones that sweep a woman away, telling her to get as much humping in as she can before confinement and delivery.

  Slowly he inserts himself into Andrea; her pussy is hot and wet, the walls part effortlessly. She absorbs him into herself, sucks him in with her warm opening, would have allowed herself to be screwed to bits. She writhes in orgasm, although she doesn’t usually come from behind. Now she howls quietly; her legs, shaking but obstinate, hold her stiff.

  Jonathan helps her lie on her side. He waits until she’s had enough – she’d come four times that day – but again she arches her back. Just before her wave reaches its climax, he picks up speed, the whirl has caught him, too.

  Later, they lie wet, Jonathan’s hand wandering up toward Andrea’s hips. It comes across her belly and, instinctively, irrationally, retreats. He still can’t ask about the shape that is there between them, doesn’t know the due date or how the pregnancy is going.

  He climbs into his car and moves away from her apartment. Around the corner he hits a traffic jam straight away – dairy workers from Germany and France are blocking the main streets of Brussels, police stand guard at the impassable tunnels. Jonathan presses the pedals one by one: accelerator – he’s driving on postcoital euphoria; brake – he ought to ask Andrea openly who the father of her child is; clutch – he’s afraid of what she’ll say.

  He goes back to the same crossroads, passes her apartment again. The hands of the clock glide mercilessly; he should have been at the school long ago but had been fucking when they closed the thoroughfares. After forty minutes, he manages to get to Reyers. The lower part is closed off, along the upper rolls a vehicle cleaning the road. The cars move bumper to bumper; police watch threateningly from beneath the plastic screens of their helmets. Jonathan, in rhythm with the frog hop of his car, searches his memory for any affirmation that Simon is the child’s father. He can’t remember any.

  “Shit, shit!” He thumps his palm against the steering wheel; the man in the Audi next to him watches him in sympathy.

  The street has already been swept but all the lanes of traffic are stuck; cars glisten as far as the eye can see. The vehicles move off slowly and again come to a standstill at the Montgomery roundabout. Tractors block the lanes around the fountain; a red, plastic cow looks on from a trailer. “Shit, shit!” Jonathan stamps the floor of the Toyota but the string of cars still doesn’t move. He pulls out his phone and calls the mother of one of Tomaszek’s friends. He’s fallen victim to the demands made by French dairymen, has been immobilised near a red cow. Could she keep an eye on his kids?

  He moves forward slowly and finally grinds to a halt in the siege of honking cars. The tractor drivers aren’t there; they’ve gone for a beer. Only their machines are left, blocking the way for Brussels’s rushing inhabitants. If the farmers were here that would be something, at least, but no! It’s shadow-boxing. Sweating, Jonathan opens all his windows. He hadn’t asked Andrea if he was definitely not the father. The red cow looks at him accusingly. He hadn’t asked because he can’t stand heart-to-heart talks; truthful answers scare him. There’s no room for truth in illicit liaisons; truth might destroy the delicate construction.

  Something changes in the configuration of vehicles; the gray nose of his Toyota sniffs out a thinning of the traffic and, at last, breaks out toward Avenue Tervuren. It streaks along the empty lane; cold wind and rain sweep down Jonathan’s collar, veil his glasses with drizzle. Things are fine as they are, with their staggering rate of lovemaking and short moments of happiness. The child is her child and she is his love.

  With bravado, Jonathan turns right into Boulevard du Souverain, passes the crossroads, and in reaction to his unexpectedly restored freedom races down the street – in the process of being repaired ever since they’d moved to Brussels. Then he speeds until he grinds to a halt in another traffic jam. Another unexpected obstacle: a fairground has installed itself on the one and only free lane.

  Parents are milling around awkwardly when Jonathan arrives at the school playground, their eyes searching for their children. Dusk transforms the playground, the cheerfully painted monkey-bars and huts become forts, delighted gnomes giggle in the bushes. His heart in his throat, Jonathan looks around for his kids. He could count on Antosia’s common sense but where had giddy-headed Tomaszek got to?

  A mother he knows emerges from the drizzle and points to the lush hedge. He recognizes his son’s voice among the cacophony of screams drifting from there; Antosia he finds on the swings. In the light of the street lamp, he sees the altered faces of parents, late because of the traffic jam. Soon, just like his, their eyes would anxiously be groping through the dusk, as they worried where their children were.

  Holding their hands, Jonathan drags his kids to the car; they’re with him now – two hands, two children. He has no more hands.

  Megi passes Portofino brasserie and comes to Luxembourg Square. The wheels of taxis rasp along the cobblestones, the old tenements cower in the drizzle. The corridors of the new European Parliament building hang suspended above the ground, stairs meander in glazed cages, a screen projects a circle of stars. “What a clear-cut shape,” thinks Megi. “You don’t have to struggle to find the Great Bear.”

  Przemek had insisted he walk her home; she’d just about managed to wangle her way out of it. She wante
d to be alone after what he’d implied: that she would have got the position of head of unit had it not been for blocking from above.

  “Above?” she’d asked. “But was it official?”

  He’d shaken his head, looking around carefully.

  “Who doesn’t like me and why?” She’d groaned, and a moment later regretted her imprudent words because Przemek had immediately moved closer.

  Megi shudders when she remembers that moment of physical proximity. How come some people have no inhibitions? Even men who look like Shrek try to pick her up, not giving a second thought to why an attractive woman who has a handsome husband should want to go to bed with them.

  Megi pulls back her hair, wet from the drizzle. An unwanted admirer was nothing compared to the fact that she’d passed a difficult exam and not got the job because of someone’s whim. If only she knew who it was, but it was like shadow-boxing. She guessed it was someone much higher up than Przemek, some vengeful éminence grise.

  And later, in the ladies’ toilets, she’d overheard that Andrea had got the post.

  Her umbrella slips down Megi’s back, her hair and shoulders get wet. She cuts across the cobbled square, where the little fountains froth in summer. Only the approach to Schumann roundabout left.

  4

  WHEN ANDREA TOLD HIM she’d got the position of head of unit, he tried to assume a suitable expression. What was worse was that he didn’t know which suited best. On the one hand, the new job would turn the journalist into an office worker, on the other, the post was a Eurocrat’s dream because the money was secure and the head of unit was untouchable. Well, and his wife had sat up many a night in order to pass the exam and get the job, then everything had gone to waste because he, during his free time from writing, was fucking the life partner of the head of cabinet for the Commissioner. At least that was Stefan’s theory.

  “Congratulations, you’re magnificent,” said Jonathan, kissing Andrea on the forehead, which, for some time now, had been a strong rival to her lips.

  He recalled the saying that people love each other as long as they want to kiss each other on the lips. But there were so many shades of love, after all; desire could evolve into friendship, into mutual respect … “Bullshit!” something cried in Jonathan, whose emotions expressed themselves in English, while common sense used Polish. Probably because when, as a boy, he’d said goodbye to one of his parents, the other didn’t spare him arguments, saying that he had to come to terms with the situation. English was the language of school and peers, but also feelings. When he gazed into Petra’s icy irises, he heard her hot, English declarations. Bullshit, he repeated in his thoughts.

  Love was infatuation, desire, and passion, that’s what his body told him, his ever-fertile body, which, having sniffed out the smell of its woman, followed her trail until he’d fucked her. Friendship, respect – those were the values the human being in Jonathan called upon, the human being Andrea had noticed when he’d agreed to be with her, even though she’d got herself pregnant by another man. But the human being in him was not constant. It took on the characteristics of a male, because how else could he explain the doubts that assailed him as to who the father of his lover’s child was, the way he downplayed Simon’s procreative abilities, and his attempts, underlain with anxiety, to ascribe the child to himself?

  The human being in Jonathan kept being burned to a cinder by desire and from his ashes arose the male. He peed to mark out his territory, took his female, then lay on his back in a gesture of surrender – because once more the human being had appeared on stage – whom the male chased away. And so it went round and round.

  “You’re magnificent,” repeated Jonathan.

  Andrea cheered up and, in his heart, he congratulated himself on having perfectly mastered the schoolboy reflex of repeating the last sentence without understanding.

  “I’ve got to go.” He reached for his jacket.

  Ever since the roads had been blocked, he left with time to spare, then sat in front of the school in a car that grew cold.

  “What did you say?” He glanced absentmindedly at Andrea, as he groped in his pockets in search of his cell.

  “That I want to leave Simon.”

  He froze, one arm in the sleeve. Something like this had already happened, this scene, her eyes fixed on him expectantly, with concealed joy. So what was that last sentence?

  “But,” he began, chasing away thoughts about déjà vu, “Simon won’t let you leave.”

  Her face darkened. He continued nevertheless: “And what about his child?”

  “It’s my child.”

  Silence, then: “Andrea!” yells Jonathan, throwing his jacket on the floor. His cell flies from the pocket and slides until it comes to a rest by Simon’s slippers.

  Jonathan grabs Andrea by the elbows and shakes her. Her hair covers her face so that only her belly, that belly, indicates where her front and back are. When finally her face appears between the dark strands, her lips, twisted in fury, scream, “You didn’t want to have a child with me!”

  Jonathan squeezes her arms, feels her muscles tense, feels her bones as though his fingers had long ago punctured her body.

  “Is it mine?” he wants to yell.

  She waits for the question but Jonathan purses his lips and watches Andrea tilt back her head; her eyes are black, angry, her lips tremble. When she finally says something, her voice is sure, distinct: “It’s my child.”

  Jonathan’s fingers slacken. Andrea moves away from him.

  “Mine,” she repeats as if she were informing viewers of the fall of shares on the exchange. “I can afford it, in all respects.”

  A few hours later, lying on the bed he shared with Megi, the children cuddled up to his sides, Jonathan tried in vain to understand what Antosia was reading. The words of the story hummed soothingly, Tomaszek’s eyes were closing and from the whirlpool of Jonathan’s thoughts leapt Andrea’s yelling. Or maybe it was he who’d taken it as yelling because in reality she hadn’t raised her voice again when he left her that afternoon, only drily informed him that if she left Simon, it didn’t obligate him, Jonathan, in any way. She wouldn’t break up his family, wouldn’t take that responsibility on her shoulders. Jonathan didn’t have to be afraid either for himself or, more to the point, for her. Andrea would manage.

  “Daddy, Tomaszek’s fallen asleep. And you’re not listening,” complained Antosia.

  Jonathan raised himself, carefully took his son in his arms and carried him to bed.

  “You read beautifully.” He kissed Antosia on the hair.

  She nodded but there was scepticism on her face. His daughter’s reactions were more and more mature, she didn’t have tantrums like a child, only concealed her feelings like an adult. He hugged her closely so she wouldn’t see his expression. He would have preferred her to remain a child a little longer, be happier a little longer.

  He turned off the light in the children’s room and went back to his bedroom. Megi was working long hours again; she’d phoned not long ago, explaining that she’d be late. He opened the window and exposed his face to the breeze of the evening air. Andrea hadn’t explained anything, had decided for herself that she wouldn’t get in the way of his family. She hadn’t asked for his opinion; she had simply resolved it should be this way.

  He looked at the oblique roofs of the apartments, at the arc of his street, at the tops of the leafless trees. Everything here was mild; the November gusts were melancholic rather than sharp, the houses leaned against each other affably, windows smiled in the façades, each apartment building was different, each a little old, a little new, unpretentious, familiar.

  “Don’t worry.” Andrea’s words came back to him. “I’m not going to break up your family.” Jonathan closed the window; the room turned silent. She’d made the decision herself. But then he, too, had never started to think seriously about leaving Megi and the children. It was his private taboo. And Andrea had understood that his passion for her belonged to the present
– Jonathan felt her here and now – while his feelings for Megi were retained in his memories, in their watching the children together, in their plans and daily routines. And although the fireworks of being with his lover outshone daily routine, the basis of his life endured, the main current flowed persistently, linked the past to the future, waited for the moment until it could overflow and embrace the present again.

  The slamming of a door reached him from below. Megi’s footsteps were slow, like his grandmother’s in the past when she’d walked to his father’s apartment. His grandmother had tended to be tired; shopping pulled on her shoulders. Something clattered downstairs – a hanger had slipped from Megi’s hands.

  Jonathan quickly stripped and slid beneath the duvet. Suddenly a thought occurred to him that he hadn’t taken into account before: if Andrea left Simon and he stayed here, then … his lover would be free. A free Andrea, Andrea openly taking advantage of her freedom!

  He switched off the bedside lamp, curled up on his side, and Megi, seeing him asleep, stepped back from the bedroom door and quietly closed it behind her.

  5

  JONATHAN SAT in the sauna on the scorching planks and breathed the humid air. Stefan had settled himself next to him on the wooden steps. Jonathan passed him a can of beer and opened one himself.

  “How did you know Simon was blocking Megi?” he asked.

  “One knows these things.”

  “Megi only told me today.”

  “And how did she know?”

  “You know so why shouldn’t she? She’s the one concerned.”

  Stefan rolled his eyes; the steam was making his face turn red.

  “If she’s the one concerned, then everyone should know except for her,” he bristled.

  “What’s this, ‘teach yourself Cardinal Richelieu’?”

  “Did Przemek tell her?” Stefan answered with a question.