Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

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 .

JONATHAN SLIPSinto 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 hard 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!”