Once, after an exceptionally beautiful session of lovemaking, in his elation, a fairy tale’s “Over the mountains, over the seas, there lived…” ran through his head. He asked whether she ever thought of traveling some more, whether she’d like to move somewhere else. She adamantly denied it: Brussels was populated with sources for her, and her television career was forged among its officials.
“It’s my job,” she said. “I love it. I’m happy here, everything’s all mixed up, Brussels is a huge pot of languages. Here the gender of a man’s cock is feminine, une verge. A vagina is masculine, un vagin. I don’t want to leave.”
He took her from the churches and made love to her on Simon’s sofa, on his floor, between his sheets. He immersed himself in Andrea and thought he could be with her there or anywhere.
This time, after Megi’s abrupt departure from Andrea’s and Simon’s party, he had barely managed to convince his wife of his innocence. He explained that he’d gone – alone – to buy some cigarettes. How was he supposed to have known where Andrea was at the time? “Don’t be childish.” He gazed into Megi’s worried eyes. “Do you take me for an idiot? Why should I risk, destroy everything I’ve built up over the years?” Megi left the room; he raised his hands, which had gripped his thighs and left damp patches on the corduroy – it looked as though he’d wet himself.
They’d promised to be careful. And this excited them all the more; they screwed like mad, hugged in parks, petted in the car. He slipped his T-shirt beneath her butt because juices ran down her thighs when he licked her and made the seats sticky. When he returned, it was as though he were drugged. The following day, he woke up in the morning unable to believe what he’d done.
Bad dreams and strange thoughts tormented him. He couldn’t imagine daily life without her, even a brief parting.
Pride in being able to satisfy both Andrea and Megi had long evaporated. He didn’t want to make love to anyone apart from Andrea; the very thought of wrestling with another woman was as grotesque as inflating a frog.
He kissed Andrea and penetrated deeply or plunged shallowly, until she wriggled her hips impatiently. “Do you really want it?” he asked and rocked her from beneath while she clung to him or threw her arms out.
Although women provoked him with their eyes more and more frequently, he had stopped playing the wise guy who stood up for polygamy. The time of unbridled thoughts about numerous lovers, the time of reading Anaïs Nin, had passed. He was experiencing a wave of monogamy – with Andrea.
When he saw her at his door, alone, without Simon, he couldn’t control himself and in a gesture unbefitting the greetings of a mere host, his lips touched hers. Andrea recoiled. For the first time, he saw her thrown off balance.
“Andrea!” He heard Megi’s voice behind him.
“Simon couldn’t come.”
“I know, he sent me an email. What would you like to drink?”
“I, too, hate being asked, ‘Where’s your husband?’” The voice of his wife, as she walked away with his lover, reached Jonathan. “As if a woman without a partner was a table with a missing leg.”
A moment later, Megi loomed up in front of him again, reminding him to look after the guests’ food and drinks. He uncorked a bottle of wine and circulated with it, a little disorientated that some people were sitting on his sofa, spaced out and irritable with jealousy because Andrea was acting as if he wasn’t there – tilting her head back, running her fingers through her hair and laughing at the jokes of guys showing off in front of her.
“Jonathan, could you fetch some ice from the freezer?” asked Megi.
Stefan turned up the music; some guests started to dance. Rafal stretched out his hand to Andrea in invitation. She knew the impression she made when she danced, they’d talked about it once; even so, Jonathan stood in a group with some other fools and stared at her.
“Jonathan!”
“Yes?”
“The ice! That’s the third time I’ve had to ask you.”
Megi’s face seemed paler, tarnished, like an ancient teaspoon. He tore his back away from the wall. Rafal, in high spirits, tried to spin Andrea but was so overwhelmed he turned a pirouette himself. Jonathan leaned against the edge of the freezer and pressed the ice to his forehead. It excited her when men couldn’t take their eyes off her, salivated about her, especially when Simon wasn’t there. She sensed her power and bandied it around. She was just as they made her out to be; he was the only one not to see it because in the churches, in bed, they were one to one. There, she looked at nobody but him.
“Who’s the chick?” started Jean-Pierre when Jonathan appeared downstairs with the ice.
“Which one?”
“What do you mean ‘which one’?”
Rafal had let go of Andrea’s hand and she was now walking toward them, hips swaying. Jonathan, without much thought, pressed the ice into Jean-Pierre’s hands and blocked her way.
“Andrea,” he said, although she was looking at him as though he were nothing but mist. “Couldn’t we be… together?”
Megi’s hands shake, the thought coming to her is tangled, with frayed endings: how could he… how could he?
She retreats, a floorboard creaks beneath her foot. The man lifts his head from the hips of the girl lying on the pile of coats, his chin glistening like a dribbling baby’s.
“Who is it?” The nervous giggle of the girl patters across Megi’s spine like a little mouse.
“Never mind,” mutters Stefan indistinctly.
Megi takes another step back, this time noiselessly.
“Have you seen Stefan?” she hears behind her.
Monika looks tired but smiles her eternally polite smile. “Ha!” says Megi. What else can she say?
Monika’s lips turn up more in a tic than a smile. A guttural sound comes from the room behind them.
“Stefan’s downstairs.” Megi closes the door and pushes Monika ahead.
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?