“You think so?” Przemek’s eyebrows shot up. “I saw them walking down the street once suspiciously close to each other.”
Stefan was more annoyed than he’d been a few minutes ago in the toilet.
“And Martyna told me that she once saw them leaving somewhere together, a church I think it was,” added Rafal.
“Jonathan in a church?” Stefan wiped his brow with a napkin decorated with golden letters: Happy New Year. “He’s an old atheist, even a chick like Andrea couldn’t get him to go to one!”
Rafal laughed but Przemek froze with a strange expression on his face. Stefan followed his gaze – two feet away from them stood Megi. Her bobbed haircut was ideally suited to her Roaring Twenties costume but the golden cap, which until then had added a decadent charm, now looked like the tilted hat of a clown.
For a moment, nobody said anything. Only when a strange smile appeared on Rafal’s face – something like an attempt to sympathize beneath which lay uncensored joy – did Megi turn and leave.
“Bloody hell,” said Stefan.
“What’s happened?” asked Martyna, joining them by the table.
Rafal leaned over to his wife’s ear. Stefan made his way toward the dancers. He tapped Jonathan’s shoulder and whispered something to him. As Jonathan went to where Megi had disappeared, Stefan walked Andrea to the terrace. He pulled some Gauloises from his frock coat and passed them to her, but she refused with a wave of her hand. He must have said something amusing because she burst into laughter, a little exaggerated.
“Her last fellow said she had a drink problem.” Rafal lowered his voice as he poured himself more punch.
“Man problems, more like,” muttered Martyna.
“Let it be. The girl’s just got drunk, that’s all.” Monika waved it aside.
“She’s one thing.” Przemek adjusted the Turkish fez slipping down to his ear. “But that husband of Megi’s! With a wife like that…”
Jonathan stood outside the toilet waiting for Megi to emerge. He stood close enough to hear her open the door but far enough not to have to explain why he was keeping an eye out for his wife.
When Stefan had warned him that Megi had heard something and wanted to go, he’d left Andrea and run after his wife, only to see her disappear behind the bathroom door. He knocked. “Engaged,” came the answer.
She’d already been there for a good while as he stood outside, paralysed with regret and sadness. He wanted to hug her, explain everything. And kill those gossips. He glowered at the circle of Megi’s colleagues – they were talking about them. A wave of anger surged over him and just as it had swelled so, unexpectedly, it began to subside – how could they help it, the poor bores? They had nothing better to do.
He had to explain everything to Megi. He had to tell her he didn’t want any other woman except for her (which he didn’t, other than Andrea). He simply had to say he’d got drunk.
Megi stands in front of the sink and looks at the mirror cracked with age.
“Bloody hell!” She slaps the sink.
Her golden cap slips down to her eyes but all she can see is Andrea’s dress; beneath her eyelids crumples the red mist of fury.
She wants to run out to them, catch the woman by that long mop of hers. That’s what she wants to do, but she holds on to the sink, holds on with all her strength. Finally, she leans over it as if to vomit.
“Easy, easy.” A voice in her speaks but soon grows silent as if it, too, was scared of Megi. Everybody ought to be scared of her, everybody! That whore, those gossips, Jonathan!
“Easy, easy,” whispers Megi, as if she were steadying a horse. The beast in her still bridles, but a tiny bit less.
“Easy…” She hears her voice and slowly, very slowly, sits down on the closed toilet seat.
“When did it start?” She forces herself to think; the chronology is to help get a hold of what is seething within. “Is it because he’s sitting at home with the kids and is bored?”
Images leap in front of her eyes. Megi on maternity leave, day and night at home; Jonathan at work or in the gym. Megi at the time: hips still narrow but a belly that after the birth resembles an elongated bread-bin suspended over her hips. Jonathan: accepts her body during the pregnancy and birth, but once she’s a mother suddenly no longer wants her.
Another image: her aunt, staying with them for a few days and poking her nose into everything, points at the hook in the hall.
“Don’t you think that’s a good place for you to hang Jonathan’s clothes?”
“What clothes?” Megi doesn’t understand.
“For work. So they’re there waiting for him in the morning. Shirt ironed, tie, trousers, socks…”
“Pants.”
“Underwear, certainly,” says her aunt without a smile.
Next scene: Megi in a suit, already at work, slim again. The crop rotation of work–family suits her, independence carries her away. Men look at her, pick her up, a married woman, a rose without thorns, who can be had without responsibilities. They want her, many of them – except Jonathan.
Someone knocks at the bathroom door.
“Engaged,” Megi answers back.
She places her hands on her skirt and sits on the loo like an old woman in a doctor’s waiting room. And thinks about how the other guy had picked her up – or, in fact, she’d picked him up. Not long afterward Jonathan, too, had come back to her. When she got pregnant they decided Jonathan would stay at home with the child. But Jonathan couldn’t bear it and chickened out of paternity leave.
Megi raises her hands. Something is tickling her and her face is still stiff and a little wet; she hadn’t noticed the tears.
Jonathan… When they do make love it’s so good…
Megi adjusts herself on the convex toilet lid. They’ve both changed; she, too, is no longer the twentysomething who is slightly rigid in bed, “likes” various positions in order to make herself more attractive to the boy. Now sex really does arouse her. So why is he now …? Why are they passing each other by again?
Or maybe it’s not her body but something in her character that’s started to repulse him? Maybe she overlooked his feelings, didn’t notice on time that he didn’t share her joy at being a parent? Maybe deep inside he remained still that other boy, in defiance of all those who – including her – had demanded he be enthusiastic about being a father. Had that been the beginning of their otherness, the tearing apart of the entity that had been put together during the first years of their relationship? Beginning… Does such a thing exist?
The music falls silent or seems to. A quiet voice whispers within, “But what, in fact, has happened? He got drunk, the woman led him on. And people gossip.” Megi has heard a lot about Andrea in the Commission canteen – that she has guys on the side, that she doesn’t want children, that she’s a career woman, that she acts as if the older man isn’t enough. That she’s a whore.
Megi bends back her head. The apartments in Brussels, with their high ceilings edged with stucco, pride themselves in being old. She would also like to be like that some day.