Illegal Liaisons

by Grazyna Plebanek

  Jonathan nodded.

  “And did he tell her it was Simon?”

  “No, not that.”

  Froth spurted from Stefan’s can as he opened it.

  “Then you’ve got more luck than brains.” He shook the froth from his hand; the smell of beer filled the sauna. “And I’m in deep shit. I’m not sure Monika hasn’t caught on I fucked Martyna because she’s not talking to me. “Where’s my shirt?” I ask and she says nothing. I bring her flowers, still nothing. What an atmosphere! I tell her that the children are suffering because of it but it’s like banging my head against a brick wall.”

  “Has she done it before?”

  “She used to soften with flowers.”

  “So what are you going to do this time?”

  “I thought you’d tell me.” Reproach flitted in Stefan’s eyes. “I’ve run out of ideas. But getting back to you, what’s the situation? She’s pregnant, he’s getting his revenge, Megi’s blocked because of it …”

  “Blocked but we don’t know whether that’s why,” retorted Jonathan through clenched teeth. He had a superstitious approach to words; he didn’t like the idea that when uttered they created facts. “That’s your theory.”

  “And Przemek’s.”

  Stefan raised his arms; a couple of drops squirted from his can onto the wooden planks, and the smell of beer grew stronger.

  “And now they’ll kick us out of here if you go on stinking the place out with that,” muttered Jonathan.

  “But what did you tell Megi when she mentioned the blocking?”

  “That it’s a conspiracy theory. And that since she’s passed the exam and has the necessary experience, she’ll get another job before we know it.”

  Stefan nodded in approval.

  “She won’t buy that, she’s too intelligent, but you showed you were trying. And Andrea? Do you see each other?”

  Jonathan nodded.

  “And fuck?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Meaning you do. So nothing’s changed.”

  “Only that Andrea wants to leave Simon.”

  Stefan choked; beer spurted on to the bench again. Jonathan raised his eyes without a word.

  “And you haven’t told me? But she’s not gone running to Megi yet, has she? Shit, it’s like that Ilona of mine.”

  “Quite the opposite!” Jonathan riposted. “Yours wanted to live happily ever after with you. Andrea is different.”

  “In what way? So why’s she leaving Simon?”

  “Says she can’t go on like this. But that it doesn’t oblige me in any way because she doesn’t want to break up my family.”

  “And what, she’s going to be alone, with the baby?”

  “That’s exactly what’s doing my head in! Andrea alone … And all those guys, understand?”

  It took Stefan a while to grasp what Jonathan meant.

  “You must be mad,” he said in the end. “You’re scared she’ll make the most of her freedom? A pregnant woman, then a single mother with a small child, is going to make the most of the single life? Give me a break!”

  “So what am I supposed to be scared of?” Jonathan was at a loss.

  “Just that when she cracks up from being alone she’ll go to Megi and create a stink!”

  “That’s not Andrea.” Jonathan shook his head. “She’s got a job, good money, she’ll hire a nanny. What does she need somebody like me for?”

  “And you, what do you need her for?”

  Jonathan started squeezing his can; the sound rang out in the quiet sauna like an explosion.

  “She keeps running away from me,” he said barely audibly. “I can’t leave her because she runs away and … keeps wanting me.”

  Stefan looked at him strangely, then asked, “And aren’t you afraid she’s going to land you with the baby?”

  “All I’m afraid of,” said Jonathan after a long while, “is what I’m going to tell my children. That’s all I’m afraid of in this whole business of, as you call it, ‘landing me with the baby.’ ”

  Stefan gasped in anger, spread his hand out in front of him, and folded his fingers one by one.

  “Alimony, looking for a nanny, choosing a school …”

  Jonathan began to wriggle around on the bench.

  “More generally,” he interrupted Stefan’s counting, “I’m scared of asking her whether it’s mine.”

  “Want to know what I think? Don’t!”

  “But what if it is mine? Surely I’ve a right to know. On the other hand, what about my kids? What about Megi?”

  Stefan reached for another can of beer, pretending not to see his friend’s contorted face.

  “Don’t think in terms of ‘what if,’ ” he said earnestly. “Do what I do in such cases: check you haven’t got HIV and don’t phone her any more. Then she won’t leave Simon and it’ll all blow over.”

  Megi walks briskly past the Hotel Renaissance façade. Jonathan wanted her to buy Tomaszek a pair of trainers for his gym classes on her way back from work because the boy had grown out of his old pair. They couldn’t go together because the children had swimming lessons that afternoon.

  “Can’t you do it tomorrow?” She was sitting in front of a pile of papers, finding it hard to turn her mind to domestic matters.

  “If he’s grown out of them, he’s grown out of them.” Jonathan cut her short.

  Megi enters the black district; ahead of her, Chaussée d’Ixelles tempts with its lights. A pair of shoes gleam in a display she passes: red, with a huge bow at the toes, patent leather. What if she had a pair like that? And a hairpiece to go with them like the one hanging in the hair salon nearby – black, curly hair, not Afro but thick waves. Megi turns the corner. She’s struck by the ad in the pharmacy window for an anticellulite cream: someone is handing a woman a brand new body, a shape on a hanger, smooth and shiny. Megi shudders. But every wrinkle is a notch made by time, a mark denoting “I’ve been there.” What was there to be ashamed of?

  Returning with a package in her hand, she watches men in coats and suits sneak along the walls. Of course, the time for “international relations” is coming to an end; the little hotels and brothels were under siege between five and seven when office workers squeezed in pleasure between work and family dinner. Wasn’t it Przemek who’d told her that?

  That day he’d proposed they go to lunch and she’d insisted they meet at the Exki; the speed and transitory nature of the place precluded intimacy.

  “I’ve been offered a job back in Poland on excellent conditions,” he began ceremoniously. “I can’t tell you exactly what it involves but if I were to take it I’d have a whole team under me, and also,” he smiled, a strand of rocket lodged between his teeth, “lots of power.”

  “Congratulations,” she replied.

  “As I mentioned before, I’d like to offer you a position in my future team. A lot of responsibilities, decent money, and no small influence over matters. What do you say?”

  Megi picked up a plastic spoon. She had to weigh her words. Przemek was, above all, a player and only after that an admirer.

  “When would you be starting?”

  He smiled with approval. She hadn’t asked when she would be starting because that would have meant she’d agreed; but neither had she said no.

  “Early next year.”

  Getting into the metro, Megi decides not to tell Jonathan for the time being; she’ll sleep on it first. When she reaches the apartment, she sees that the windows are dark – Jonathan and the children aren’t here yet. He must have treated them to a hot chocolate after their swimming. Megi climbs the stairs and stands in the silence of her own home. Just like six years ago when, after having seen her lover, she returned late on the pretext of having so much work. She’d stood on the threshold then just as she did now – the threshold of happiness and scruples, sexual fulfilment and moral trembling. Or perhaps simply fulfilment and trembling?

  And yet she’d broken up with the other man. She extend
s her fingers and folds them one by one, silently repeating, “One: decision to leave him; two: sticking with the decision; three: getting stuck because of panic that am killing love; four: physical low, body’s mourning; five: first, tiny signs of picking up.”

  Megi walks up to the huge window and gazes out at Brussels’s roofs from the dark shell of her apartment. She had coped, picked herself up. Nobody had told her how to do so, she’d got there herself. Now she is stronger, there is more of her. More of her and more about her.

  6

  JONATHAN SENT ANDREA fewer messages but didn’t stop completely. He’d worked out this strategy when he’d decided to put Stefan’s advice into practice – and although he had a strong feeling that he’d been given a prescription for a different disease, he couldn’t afford to turn up his nose. He needed a remedy immediately.

  He reassured Andrea, hinted that at this stage of pregnancy she ought to look after herself, that he was and always would be there, but that they ought to limit seeing each other. He himself started to obsessively invest in family life. First of all, he had a blood test done.

  Sitting in the waiting room, he browsed the leaflets about HIV. Dry sentences began to erase Andrea’s kisses from his memory, changed the meaning of tender gestures, of his tongue’s exploits in the depth of her groin. Now he scrutinized those moments with the possibility of being infected, delved into the details without his former excitement, rewound the scenes of their intertwined bodies from a medical point of view. He left millilitres of blood lighter, a venomous feeling of guilt heavier – if he’d caught the virus, he was endangering not only himself as a father but also the innocent Megi!

  He decided to avoid physical intimacy with his wife while waiting for the results. But he deceived himself because, although more and more sexually frustrated, he knew that his desire was not directed at Megi. He still wanted only Andrea, even though he put himself off her in his thoughts as much as possible. He even suspected that she wouldn’t notice his remoteness and if she did she would, as was her wont, allow him to distance himself more. But whether the pregnancy had changed her or whether he was not sufficiently tactful, it was enough to make her start sniffing around. So he met her in order to reassure her – in a church once more, because Simon wasn’t going away so often during the last trimester of her pregnancy.

  They stood, hidden behind a pillar, facing the altar, her back against his belly, his arms wrapped below her neck. He studied the stained-glass windows and thought that somebody had to break the infernal circle before it sucked in innocent people, children. He wanted to tell her this but couldn’t, so his eyes merely flitted between his lover – the pregnant atheist, a Czech woman brought up in Sweden – and the motionless Virgin Mary to whom his Polish grandmother had prayed. He even tried to remember the words she’d taught him but got stuck at the beginning of the Hail Mary.

  He held Andrea in his arms, filled to the brim with love, and then got into his car and drove away. Fewer and fewer messages came, and he was increasingly convinced that he was in a deadlock; even if Andrea were to leave Simon, he wouldn’t leave the children and Megi. As it was, he’d already cut the branch they were sitting on (if Stefan and Przemek’s theory about Simon blocking Megi was correct). Was he, on top of it all, to leave her knowing how much the professional setback had cost her?

  At least now she had some support from him; she appreciated his looking after the house while she studied for exams, thanked him for serving her salads when she got home from work, depressed, pensive. He was pleased his wife didn’t catch on to what the salads really were – part of his plan as a prodigal husband, a practical version of Stefan’s flowers of apology. If he could, he would have carried her in his arms, but he couldn’t touch her. Not only did he not find her attractive, he found her repulsive – so fair, so sexlessly good – different from Andrea.

  He writhed with unfulfilled sex. He had under his nose a woman whom Stefan envied him, at whose sight Przemek slobbered, and he couldn’t force himself to take her; instead of which he coveted his neighbor’s wife, an egoist who yelled that the child was only hers, because of whom he woke up at night with a burning desire or the fear that she’d infected him with HIV. She must, after all, have had as many men as she desired.

  As if this wasn’t enough, she pushed him away from her life, had decided she wasn’t going to be with him. And kept him in a state of uncertainty as to who the father was! Here he stopped his accusations for a moment – it wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t asked if he was the father but had immediately forged ahead with innocence and love. She wouldn’t have told him anyway; at most she would have said that it was her child. It was herself she loved above all, and her freedom, and Simon closed his eyes to this. That was why she was with him. Jonathan was troublesome because he was possessively in love.

  He later lay in his bath, gazing at his own body, that looked as though it were immersed in formaldehyde. His thoughts lost mo-mentum, got stuck. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing? After all, things were fine between them now. She’d said herself that everything was finally falling into place. He was accepting of her and an experienced father, she felt safe with him, she’d seen and grown to love the human being in him. She said that, subconsciously, this was probably what had drawn her to him – his inner youth and easygoing nature with, on the other hand, warmth, and the fact that he gave so much of himself to others. He didn’t place power on a pedestal, didn’t pursue high positions, didn’t boast of a trophy wife. With him she would not feel as though she were “somebody’s” she had grown out of that, so she said …

  Jonathan abruptly sat up; water splashed on to the floor. He was killing love! Why had he listened to that idiot Stefan? He didn’t understand any of it! He hadn’t ever committed himself like that, not even Monika could drive him crazy with love, only to the altar; Stefan saw his marriage as a matter of honor, not a love-match. If he happened to think too much about a girl, he applied the hair of the dog. He went on about love because some chicks wouldn’t allow themselves to be screwed otherwise, but he himself admitted that he needed women in the plural. He classified them according to color, shape, taste, and smell. He was married to himself, his own “other half.”

  Jonathan shuddered. He and Andrea were different. Their love was an exception. In any case, he had more space in his heart – and that’s what he should have held on to.

  But Andrea had decided that she didn’t want to break up his family. He remembered how once, when she realized how crazy he was, not only with desire, but with love for her, she’d asked, looking at him with some disbelief, “But you’ve got everything: children, a fine wife, a profession you’re passionate about. What do you need me for?” He hadn’t answered. She had cuddled up to him, fawned, and then fled. What was he to do? He ran after her.

  He slipped deeper into the bath, water filled his ears. Indeed, what did he need her for – in order to have something of his own apart from what he already had – a family, a tidy life? Was it the same with Andrea’s child, this seed conceived by her “I want,” by Jonathan not being ready and Simon’s acquiescence, and which now dwelled in the waters of her belly. Was it her liberation, a living expression of her will?

  Jonathan’s head emerged from the water and he took a gasp of air. Thanks to her he had regained his attraction to risk. That was why he was now waiting for the results of the HIV tests.

  He picked up Antosia’s orange sponge. If he hadn’t wanted to risk anything, he wouldn’t have started up with her – Andrea, who didn’t allow anyone, including him, to tame her. He wasn’t longing for warm slippers. He saturated the sponge with water and squeezed as hard as he could. “Was Megi warm slippers?” he asked himself. Or maybe some force was driving her into them?

  And then he stopped thinking about it all – at least, that’s what he ordered himself to do. When the thought of Andrea appeared, he threw himself into a whirl of simple, daily activities. It was a good thing he didn’t have to edit the little collec
tion; the short stories written by his disciples lay on Cecile’s desk and Jonathan hoped she wouldn’t have too many comments. He couldn’t use his head now; it was all fogged up, sentences fell apart.

  He had lost sight of The Pavlov Dogs entirely. When he dipped into what he’d written, he didn’t recognize his own sentences. Somebody else had put the story together, somebody whom the dogs liked, whom they approached, nudged with their noses, at whose sight they wagged their tails. Nobody liked Jonathan – neither his wife, whom he didn’t desire, nor his lover whom he ought to drop, nor his children for whom he had no patience of late. Even the dogs had left him.

  He drove the children to and from school, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, loaded and hung the washing, lugged the shopping, took the children swimming, dragged himself to the gym, and jogged by force of will. The hours dovetailed, duties ground along. “I haven’t got the strength for them,” he thought. He didn’t understand what he was reading, he set his social life aside because it required too much effort, he didn’t let his wife drag him to the cinema because he no longer liked her. It was because of her that he’d had to relinquish himself. Now neither desire nor friendship held them together.

  He trained so intensively at this time that he was finally laid low. Megi said it was the result of jogging in foul weather, Stefan that it was waiting for the results of the HIV test. At moments like these, Stefan always fell into depths of remorse in the form of psychosomatic symptoms, which again cemented his relationship with Monika who had to look after him. Had he allowed himself to think about her, Jonathan himself would no doubt have admitted that it was because he was cut off from Andrea. But he wouldn’t allow such a thought. He had a strong will; he was, after all, a writer. Only his body was now weak.

  He let himself fall – the pain gnawed at him and he gnawed at the pain. He wrapped himself entirely in a martyr’s way of thinking; every morning began with it, and the evening ended with it. He thought about the pain and not about Andrea; about his nerve roots and not about her child; about his lumbago and not the freedom she wanted officially to regain.