Grażyna Plebanek - Illegal Liaisons

Jonathan lowered his head, full of invective, and noticed with amazement that, despite the weakness that came with alcohol, he was swelling in his trousers. He hissed, looked around and discreetly adjusted the tip of his cock upward. He even had to take his cell out of his pocket; there was no room for it. And when he took it out, he wrote without much thought, “Kisses from Brussels, what are you doing?”

The intercom woke him in the morning – the organ-grinder asking for money. Jonathan refused and went to the bathroom. He found it hard to arrange the blocks of the coming day. He was to collect Megi and the children from the station, do the shopping before that, and set the apartment to rights. And see Andrea. He shook his head, spraying drops of water across the bathroom. He glanced at his phone – the envelope was pulsating, within it the hour and place of his tryst with his lover. Jonathan looked at his watch. He had less than an hour. If he managed to sort himself and the neglected apartment out on time, he would just be able to see her before collecting his family.

Fernand Cocq Square, usually buzzing with life, was exceptionally deserted, even though awnings tempted with their shade. As he saw Andrea approaching, Jonathan impulsively regretted his scruples. He’d had the house to himself for a few days; he could have had her there! Instead, he had sat and written.

“Ahoj,” said Andrea in Czech.

Something clutched at him. She looked tired from close up; pallor broke through her olive skin.

“Czesc,” he replied in Polish.

Her eyes turned to him but her face expressed no amusement.

Not knowing why, Jonathan remembered an occasion when they’d lain in bed. “You’re a sexavore,” he’d said, and she’d laughed. He’d asked whether it was true, as rumors had it, that she and Simon were swingers. “My sweet, bourgeois hypocrite.” She had stroked him behind the ear.

“I’ve missed you,” she said now as she sat in the passenger seat.

He touched her hair, tucked a stray lock behind her ear. She shook her head – he’d forgotten she couldn’t stand having her hair behind her ears. He withdrew his hand and rested his back on the seat.

“And I was in Normandy.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to get out. He turned to her and already his lips were embracing hers, he was sucking the softness of her tongue, slipping his hand beneath her skirt, and finally touching her pussy. He groaned – she was not wearing any panties.

Later they sat dazed, sweating. Jonathan’s thoughts drifted above Fernand Cocq Square, Ixelles, Brussels. “The cock and the vagina are both feminine in Dutch – roede and schede,” he recalled. Geert had once explained to him the intricacies of Belgium’s second official language. He’d said that the older generation still knew the gender of specific words, but the younger had to search in dictionaries. “Genders are getting blurred,” Geert had concluded.

Jonathan glanced at Andrea – he knew she would have found it funny. But she was so serious now he didn’t dare mention it.

“I’ve got to go,” he said instead.

She sat as if she hadn’t heard him. Her lips were swollen, her neck covered with dark marks left by kisses.

“I’m going to the station,” he added. “The kids are coming back from holiday.”

He cast his eyes at her hands. She held them strangely, palms upward, like the hard-worked hands of a peasant.

“How was Sweden?” he asked, his voice unexpectedly sharp.

“We mustn’t meet any more,” she said.

A gust of wind ruffled the branches on the trees, the church bells chimed. “Twelve,” rattled in his head.

She got out without saying goodbye. “There must have been a gate here, there must have been a gate here,” pounded in his head. It didn’t make sense to him, nor did anything that day, that year, even what his life had brought. All around him rose vertical walls and he obediently climbed them and slid down, climbed and slid down. When he reached the station, he was a wound stitched together in haste.

Megi holds the receiver close to her lips .

“You know what he comes out with? That I ‘don’t share his passions.’ ”

“What passions?” asks her mother .

“Exactly, what passions? The need to go diving?”

“Let it go, don’t take it to heart. It’s just a man digging around in the mire of his moods.”

Megi’s thoughts return to their meeting at the station. From the moment she got into the car, she’d felt that something wasn’t right. And in the evening, even though they hadn’t seen each other for a week, Jonathan hadn’t reached out for her. He’d settled on the other side of the bed, neat and tidy as a newly pressed pair of trousers, distant in his smoothness and creases. Only toward morning did he huddle up to her back and then penetrate her in this one, embryonic position .

Suddenly, Megi is dangerously close to going through his cell .

“Don’t lower yourself,” she growls to herself. “Nosey parkers get bloody noses.”

If Jonathan had checked her phone six years ago, would she have been able to end the affair in that early stage of besotted madness? Even if she had, Jonathan might have let her down. Not been able bear it. And they wouldn’t be together now .

Megi forbids herself from making assumptions .

Jonathan rested the back of his head against the window of St George’s brasserie. He hoped the glass would cool his thoughts. When Andrea had told him that they mustn’t see each other again, he’d fallen first into a stupor, then seethed, and finally fallen into another daze.

“Beer?” guessed the Lion King.

This time it was Jonathan who’d suggested “escaping to George’s” and now he wrapped himself in his friend’s optimism. Stefan poured out his troubles – his daughter, reacting to Monika’s constant control, was rebelling all the more fiercely and letting off steam with numerous piercings. The girl already had rings in her tongue, nose, and belly button. He preferred not to think where else; what he saw was enough to worry him and alienate him from his daughter.

Stefan reached for his beer, froth settling on his moustache.

“I saw Andrea,” said Jonathan and, seeing his friend wanting to say something, added, “Only to hear ‘we mustn’t see each other again.’ ”

“Because she’s pregnant?”

Beer shot from Jonathan’s nose.

“Monika said they had plans, apparently.” Stefan looked troubled.

A motorbike slipped on to the roundabout, one of those little farters that shatter the eardrums. In his imagination, Jonathan ran after the bike, yanked the driver by the neck, dragged him off, and beat him up – for the “planned pregnancy,” for the hunch about what had happened in Sweden when she hadn’t written back, for being rejected.

“Don’t take it the wrong way.” He heard Stefan’s voice. “But didn’t she use you to force Simon into procreation? I heard him myself once saying that he had grown-up children and that was enough. A young chick made him look good. But then she decided she wanted a baby!”

Jonathan turned his eyes to his friend and, in his thoughts, sorted him out like he had the motorcyclist a moment ago.

“And don’t worry about the pregnancy.” Stefan waved it away. “He probably can’t get it up any more. And even if the miracle of the immaculate conception does take place, then Andrea will have the baby and be hotter than ever. Married women are best. They take their moods out on their husbands. For you, they dress up, pamper themselves, buy underwear.”

“Married women?” interrupted Jonathan. “So it’s not Aneta any more?”