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?”
Jonathan hunched in on himself. He shouldn’t be going to see her, giving his children the slip in order to meet a woman he didn’t know. He had such a wonderful family, a great wife – that ought to be enough. He raised the book to his eyes and they fell on the text:… compensate for this by multiplying my experiences.
“You’ve got three lives left,” Antosia haughtily informed her brother over the cards.
Tomaszek groaned and thumped his elbows on the table. Jonathan looked at his son with compassion. Antosia was a ruthless player, didn’t allow anyone any handicaps. He returned to his reading:… When I was happy, in a state of euphoria, as always at the beginning of love, I felt I had received the gift of survival…
“There, I didn’t die!” Tomaszek howled nearby.
…in the fullness of many elements…. Jonathan read to the end before closing the book, resigned.
He remembered the details of his first tête-à-tête with Andrea: the photograph of a bagel and cappuccino behind the window of the café, on a level with the image of froth, a fly buzzing, trapped behind the glass; an old man having difficulty opening his trunk, a beggar with a dog.
Jonathan was on his way to his rendezvous and the treadmill of the pavement was fleeing from beneath his feet. The reverse gear of common sense grated in his head but his legs gathered speed. Within, born from self-hatred, a new life was sprouting.
At last, the church. Despite the darkness, he caught sight of her at once.
She tasted of cool fruit.
8
WAKING ON THE CUSP of night and day usually swept away any useful thoughts and left shreds of panic – the heating was malfunctioning, his son might be cold on his school trip, his daughter might fall for some dickhead in the future. The flutter of such thoughts blackened the hours between four and six in the morning when Jonathan would fall into a delicious snooze, interrupted three-quarters of an hour later by the sound of the alarm clock.
That summer, his waking up reminded him of Christmas when he was still a child – the gnawing anticipation, dreams swirling in the imagination of uninhibited reality. He was so excited that even though he tried to close his eyes, he couldn’t. He got up and silently, so as not to wake the household, crept downstairs where his present awaited – a text from Andrea.
He’d grown dependent on seeing the little envelopes flashing on his cell, waited for them day and night; his mouth grew dry when he saw them and his hands shook. In the evenings, he waited for his wife to go to bed, then sat on the sofa and sent messages from the darkened room. In the mornings, he found it hard to wake up and swayed on his bed, his sleepy eyes roaming over the photograph on the wall, which he’d taken on his visit to Gotland with Petra. A house as crooked as the Tower of Pisa – he’d recorded it at the last moment. When they’d returned a year later, the house was no longer there.
At night, Andrea wrote: “You have the code to enter my dreams….”
“Can I enter them as I stand?” he wrote back.
“And are you standing …?
“In my boxer shorts.”
“To attention?”
“Straight as a rod. For you.”
He curled up on the edge of his bed, in the morning. The glass over the Gotland photograph reflected a red tile from the apartment roof opposite. The loft window always opened at the same time, someone would lean out, start to bustle around, and soon the shape of another head would appear. Jonathan knew what was coming: as he climbed into his car with the children to take them to school, the neighbors, the couple opposite, would stride off to work in their suits.
It was practically all women at the first session of his creative writing class.
The older ones sat in a group by the door, the younger at the head of the long table by the window. The two men – one a balding thirtysomething, the other gray-haired – sat a fair distance from each other.
Cecile introduced Jonathan: the author of three books, a journalist with a degree in literature, a Pole who’d gone to school in England, studied in France and had been living in Brussels for the past few months. Jonathan nodded, his eyes on Cecile’s long neck, adorned with a red necklace.
“…will in a moment introduce his schedule for the course in creative writing,” she concluded.
Jonathan opened his laptop and rose to his feet.
“Good morning,” he began. “I’m very pleased to be able to put forward a program that, at this stage of my life, I believe to be the most interesting. I hope it will also inspire you.”
He looked around at the faces turned toward him. Attentive eyes and encouraging smiles; one of the young women kept nervously pushing back her hair as it fell over her forehead, the balding man mechanically drew circles on a sheet of paper.
“Before I introduce the subject of the course, I’d like to say a few words about myself.”
He leaned over his laptop and the photograph of a gap-toothed little boy appeared on the white screen behind him. The older women laughed, the younger ones exchanged glances. The men looked at Jonathan questioningly.
“Thank you for the excellent introduction.” He turned to Cecile. “After so many kind words all I can add is that… the lad behind me is also me.”
The women smiled, the older man adjusted his glasses. Jonathan pointed behind and said: “I had fewer teeth…”
They laughed; the thirtysomething put down his pen.
“…and fewer nasty experiences. Drugs, of course.” He waited for them to relax completely, then grew serious. “But I hold on to this photograph and, what’s more, look at it sometimes. Why? Because so much is happening around us. We rush to work in the morning, to collect the children in the afternoon, do the shopping on Saturday, organize family outings on Sunday. Or we feed the cats and stress about foreign language exams. From time to time we meet people we really like. Too rarely. Just as we all too rarely calmly breathe the air that reminds us of past holidays, too rarely do we simply sit and gaze aimlessly…”