Гражина Плебанек - Illegal Liaisons

“I’ve got children, too.” He heard the man’s voice again. “They’re already grown up, and studying in Durham.”

When the guests had left, promising to return the invitation, Megi turned to Jonathan: “Simon’s girl, Czech or Swedish, you know who I mean? She says she doesn’t want to have children. She’s so set on her career.”

“She’s still young,” he mumbled, leaning over the dish-washer.

“She’s over thirty! I already had Antosia and Tomaszek by that age.”

“Simon’s much older than her.”

“He’s incredible…”

“You find him attractive?” Jonathan dropped a dishwasher tablet into the hollow of the lid and turned on the machine. “You always liked older men.”

“And she, Andrea,” Megi said, ignoring his last comment, “must have been one of those girls who didn’t wear vests under their blouses and were never cold. I remember those olive-skinned types, resilient to the temperature. I envied them. My nose was always blue.”

She removed the tablecloth and shook it out over the sink.

“Did you notice how obsessively Martyna talked about her ‘close friends’?” she said, throwing the tablecloth into the washing machine. “In my opinion, you can have a few close friends, but dozens – that’s misunderstanding the meaning of the word.”

Jonathan smiled to himself. He liked these moments after a party, their spiteful comments, a safety valve for the sense of disappointment they invariably felt on realizing that “grown-up” parties, as opposed to those of students, had nothing much to do with enjoyment.

“Well, because how can you confide in twenty people?” continued Megi, struggling with the lid of the washing machine. “‘Listen, I got a chill yesterday, and my boss is a prick.’ I can tell you this but…”

She broke off.

“Where are you?”

“Here!” he shouted from the stairs.

“You off already?”

“Why?” He leaned over the banister.

“Oh, nothing.” And a moment later she added, “Check that the children haven’t kicked their duvets off. Good night.”

Jonathan stopped at the half-landing and rested his forehead on the window. Megi scraped the chairs across the floor. He should have stayed with her, talked, but something forced him out of the kitchen.

The window frames moaned in a gust of wind. Jonathan stared at the storm, fascinated by its intensity. He had always wanted to touch the elements, the truth, vibrations. Traveling had once given him all that, then the first years with Megi, and finally, surprisingly, the children. They could be the sweetest things yet at the same time drive him crazy. When he wanted to strangle them, they stroked his jaw, clenched in fury, with their tiny hands.

Another strong gust thundered against the window pane. The thought, Andrea is an element , came to his mind at once.

He woke up at the sad hour just before dawn and lay there listening to his wife’s breathing. She was snoring gently, as she always did when sleeping on her back, one hand on her navel, the other behind her head. The night was bright; the clouds swirled in tiers, masses of cotton wool clambering over each other. He recalled how once, not that long ago, they lay together like this and Megi, stretching out her arm, had pointed to a gap in the clouds and said, “If I were a bird, I’d pierce that hole…”

It had excited him at the time; it was something new. When they had met, she didn’t belong to the so-called easy girls. He knew from friends that she hadn’t had many boys before he came along; it took a long while for her to decide to go to bed with anyone. He’d asked her about it once, used as he was to easygoing girlfriends in England, France, Sweden and Spain. She’d explained something in a roundabout way about her sense of self having been childish for a long time and having instinctively protected it from criticism or attempts to dominate it; that she preferred to mean a great deal to a few than nothing to many.

She had, in his opinion, been a little stiff in bed as a twenty-something, and motherhood had turned her into an almost prudish lover. She only changed when going back to work after having Antosia. He’d sensed she really was aroused by sex. He’d even asked her what had happened. She’d replied that she felt her otherness, her boundaries and was finally ready to transgress them.

Jonathan buried himself in the sheets but his head, instead of humming with sleep, was getting lighter. He sighed and reached for the notebook next to their bed. He might as well make use of the time to plan a schedule for his writing course. He was to present it at the beginning of August, a month before sessions started. Cecile Lefebure had given him a free hand in the choice of subject.

“The semantics of love’, he scribbled. A moment later, he crossed out the quotation marks and put the notebook aside. He slipped out from beneath the duvet, crept into the hallway and wrote, this time on his cell, “Will you meet me, beautiful?”

A week later he drove Megi to the airport. The road led past the barracklike buildings of NATO with its flags fluttering in front. Before they reached the underground parking garage, the road climbed up and they could see the tails of parked airplanes.

“Have you got your passport?” asked Jonathan, switching off the engine.

“Yes,” replied Megi, unfastening her seat belt.

“Wallet?”

“Purse.”

“Cell phone?”

“And a pair of warm panties.” She laughed. “That’s what my granny used to ask before any trip. She even managed to accost you once, do you remember? And you still married me.”

A moment later she added impatiently: “So I’ve got my underwear then. My thongs…”

Jonathan still didn’t say anything. It was dark in the car; he couldn’t quite see her face. A sense of otherness hung in the air for a while, stirring the tip of his cock. He moved closer to her when suddenly the lights of an approaching car lit up the interior of the Toyota and he saw the familiar eyes of his wife in front of him.

“You’re going to be late,” he muttered and climbed out.

When he returned to the parking garage alone, a message beeped on his cell. His mouth instantly grew dry with emotion but it was only a text from Megi: “Plane full of priests. Think they’ll bring me bad luck?” “It’s nuns who bring bad luck,” he wrote. “Men’s eternal fear of women,” the reply came back, with a smiling face attached.

Waiting for the babysitter, Jonathan tried to take notes for his writing course but couldn’t concentrate. Sentences gave way under the pressure of thinking, the children made a racket and Megi had already phoned three times asking about some trivialities, quite as though she were keeping an eye on him at a distance.

Jonathan pulled out his phone and once again read Andrea’s message – she was waiting for him on Saint-Boniface Square. He needed to leave in ten minutes but the babysitter had still not arrived. He brushed his teeth for the second time, went back downstairs, and started reading.

Anaïs Nin was to be an important figure in his course so he was going through her Diaries again. As a child I was really worried when I found out we have only one life , he read. I wanted to compensate for this by multiplying my experiences .

“Will you play Yu-gi-o with me?” Tomaszek rested his elbow on Jonathan’s knee. The four-year-old body radiated a puppy-like expression, knew nothing of conventional distance and, with its gestures, showed how strongly tied it was to the bodies of its parents.

Jonathan ruffled his blond hair.

“There’s something I’ve got to do. Ask Antosia.”

“Tosia!” yelled Tomaszek. “Will you play with me?”