One day, when he got back after dropping the children off at school, he found Megi at home.
“Don’t you feel well?” he asked when he saw her pottering around in her dressing-gown, making coffee.
“Do I look ill?” She smiled flirtatiously; her hair was slightly damp after her morning shower.
Jonathan put his bag on the floor and studied her.
“So what makes you stay at home?” he asked.
“I wanted to surprise you.” She nervously tightened the cord of her dressing-gown.
He walked up to her, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the head. Megi sighed and returned to brewing coffee.
He sliced the bread, she laid out the butter. As they prepared breakfast, they exchanged comments and joked. Jonathan told her that Cecile had offered him the course next year with extended hours; Megi summed up Przemek’s strategic maneuvers in two fields – to get close to the politicians who looked as though they might win the next elections, and to get a girl.
“Both long-term strategies?” Jonathan bit into his sandwich.
Megi pulled a plate from the cupboard and handed it to him.
“His problem with women is that they instinctively sense what’s most important to him,” she replied, sitting down on the high stool. “Meaning power.”
“In my opinion, his problem with women is that he’s hideous.”
“And yet he does have girlfriends.” Megi’s dressing-gown slipped open a little; a long thigh showed beneath the towelling.
“A good subject for a nature program.”
“Some find him attractive,” she muttered.
“Get real. Would you like to have it off with him?”
She laughed; her leg slipped out completely from beneath the white towelling; Jonathan’s eyes rested on the smooth skin. He wondered whether she had any panties on.
“You don’t understand what makes some men attractive, that’s the whole problem.”
“It would be a problem if I did understand.”
“Don’t you fantasize about doing it with guys?” she asked.
Jonathan shook his head, staring at the band of skin above her thighs. He moved closer.
“And with two women?” she questioned.
“Mmm!”
“A propos, I met Andrea recently. We bumped into each other in Exki.”
The sandwich shot out of Jonathan’s hand. He bent over, apologising under his breath. “We,” in a sentence where his wife put herself in the same category as his lover, upset his balance, and not only mentally. But he was struck by something else in what she’d told him.
“When did you meet her?” He picked the bread up from the floor and threw it into the bin; his face pulsated.
“I can’t remember.” Megi shrugged. “Last week? Two weeks ago?”
“Two?”
“What’s the difference?”
He spun on his axis and swiftly began to clear the kitchen surface.
“Aren’t we eating any more?” Megi was surprised.
“I’ve got to go and write, the Pavlov Dogs are being dogmatic.”
He made toward the hall; Megi pattered behind him, her dressing-gown hanging off her slender shoulders.
“Are you going out? You just said you were going to write.”
“I’ll be back in a minute. The printer’s run out of ink, I’m going to get some more.” He pecked her on the cheek and ran downstairs.
Andrea didn’t want to let him in but he sat out in the hall and stayed there until she poked her head through the door. Seeing him hunched there, she told him they had to stop seeing each other.
“I know what happened,” he said, getting to his feet.
She stepped back and shook her head.
“I know, I really do know,” he whispered, slowly coming close to her.
Again she shook her head but he stretched his hand out to her and gently immersed his fingers in her hair.
“Andrea…”
He took her by the head, then by the hands. He cuddled her as they stepped over the threshold, crossed the living room; he laid her on the bed. She didn’t look at him, said nothing, her lips and fists clenched. He stroked them until they began to yield. He licked and kissed her fingers, one after another, carefully, tenderly. He held her in his arms, rocked her until she no longer curled in on herself.
Then he started to stroke the whole of her – from her smooth hair, down her shoulders, breasts, belly, hips, thighs, and knees. He slipped off her socks, caressed every toe, licked the spaces between them, kissed her toenails. When she groaned, he rolled up her skirt, lowered the rim of her panties and entered her, without undressing – only his cock and her pussy. Andrea arched and started to cry but he scooped her beneath him and came without a single thought, his face wet with happiness and fear.
9
Jonathan stood behind the glass and watched the group of children practising aikido. Little hands parried blows; this child and that tumbled under sudden swings. Tomaszek brandished his limbs enthusiastically; Antosia carefully copied the instructor’s moves. Her precision, his spontaneity, Jonathan’s and Megi’s genes merged.
He glanced aside checking that nobody had caught him in his rapture. But other parents were gazing at their children with similar bliss. Jonathan smiled to himself – they were shameless! There was a time when he hadn’t been able to understand it, but now, along with other parents, he allowed himself to be carried on the wave of indescribable happiness that moments such as these brought.
Megi kept saying that the instant she first saw Antosia, and then Tomaszek, when the tiny babies lay on her belly in the delivery room, was the very essence of life for her. She said that never before or since had she experienced anything so strong.
He believed her; he’d been there with her, seen her reaction. He’d experienced it differently. What he most remembered of the births was his own helplessness, the fact that he couldn’t help his woman, had nothing to do, nothing concrete, nothing he was good at. When he took the three-kilogram bundle into his arms, he wept with fear – the newborn was so fragile.
Later, he changed the diapers with Megi, got up in the night, fed the babies, and taught them how to walk, but in truth it had taken him longer to be ready for fatherhood than it had taken her for motherhood. Now, he watched Antosia and Tomaszek through the glass and thought that moments such as these were the sun of life, fragments from a limited series, treasures.
“It’s a shame adults don’t enjoy themselves,” he thought, observing the children. “Adults plan and execute.”
Andrea appeared in front of his eyes. From the moment he saw how humane she was and realized that, in spite herself, she was trying to break it off with him because she did not want to take him away from his family, he loved her even more. She was a beautiful woman and a wonderful human being. The thought of her brought on an erection and tears welled in his eyes. When he’d taken her – that time after finding out that she and Megi had bumped into each other – she’d written to him saying he ought to leave her. “How can I leave you,” he wrote back. “You’re in me deeper than ever. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? I want to fuck you and kneel before you. I can’t believe that you, you, are with me.”
He looked at the children again. Such strong emotions had sprung up within him lately. How he’d matured as a father, as the man of a beloved woman. Once he’d thought that fresh experiences washed away the color of previous ones; now he knew they deepened them.
Megi runs doubled over beneath her umbrella as hail pounds the fabric and the rain spits even beneath it; but when she stops outside the shop the sun is already shining to the accompaniment of birdsong. A mannequin stands in the display window in front of which she and Andrea had parted a few days ago. Today it is dressed in a silk vest. Not only Jonathan but she, too, associates silk – especially imitation silk – with old age.