Love, that spring, tasted differently to different people. Jean-Pierre wrote about his former girlfriends, concentrating on sensual experiences. Jonathan felt he’d been given a Swedish quilt sown from scraps of material – colorful, warm, and useless.
“And what happened with Fabienne later?” he asked, pointing to the name of the first girl on the list of the author’s juvenile fascinations.
“I don’t know.” Jean-Pierre shrugged.
“Then make it up,” said Jonathan.
Ariane described her infatuation with a certain sailor. There were numerous expressions denoting aesthetic admiration for her white and his black skin; yet just as the beginning of the story foreshadowed a long piece of work so the end shrunk hastily. When Jonathan drew Ariane’s attention to this, she nodded in acknowledgement: she had so many stories she feared she wouldn’t have time to tell them all.
“Choose one,” Jonathan advised but Ariane wasn’t convinced.
“One? Why one? Why this one in particular?”
Kitty wrote about love for a child. Tenderness seeped from every word until all those present smiled at the successive diminutives. Looking at her, it crossed Jonathan’s mind that women submerged themselves in motherhood, became the yolk kneaded into a cake mixture. For homework, Jonathan advised Kitty to write a similar text about herself.
“But how?” she asked.
“The same as here.” He tapped his finger on her piece about love. “With the same tenderness.”
A skeptical smile appeared on Kitty’s face but Jonathan didn’t budge.
“Try, at least give it a try. In a few years your leaven will be ready.”
“Leaven?” Her eyes opened wide.
“The beginnings of a new love. People really need it. Parents.” He smiled.
Nora’s story was an enormous tapestry, an epic framework, ready to be filled with characters. Jonathan had few comments; he waited to see whether Nora would populate her story with small, precise individuals or focus on one, clear character.
The problem was Geert. His story began in a childhood spent in the Congo, gave a vivid picture of the landscape with all its smells, gusts of wind, rustling grass… and there it floundered. Geert couldn’t write any more. Jonathan examined the barely sketched emotions and tapped the French text with his pen.
“Have you tried writing it in Dutch?” he asked.
Geert shook his head.
“French is closer to me. I went to school in Liège when we got back from the Congo, then studied in Paris.”
Jonathan read through the conclusion again.
“Maybe you could do it in English?”
Geert nodded but looked surprised.
“It’s not my language, I’ve got no feel for it.”
“That’s precisely why.” Jonathan handed back the paper.
He was tempted to prescribe the same for himself – a cunning way to see his own emotions simplified – but after some thought decided he would be like a barefoot cobbler. Deep down, he didn’t want to detach himself from what had besotted him, he wanted his head to remain knotted with emotions, his head between Andrea’s thighs.
He thought the next seminar should be on theory. They’d written as much as they could and now they needed inspiring reading, a breather, the fresh air of letters not their own. He glanced at his watch. It didn’t grow dark in May until late, but now the light in the park was fading, fortunately. He said goodbye to his group and on his way home turned down a dark alley. There, beneath a familiar tree, waited Andrea; he practically broke into a run, regardless of how undignified he appeared. Before catching sight of the slender figure concealed by the shadow falling from the branches, he shook with impatience. Presently he would reach out for her, his complementary reading matter, his air.
One day at the beginning of June, Jonathan woke up at dawn. The summer rays of morning drilled into his sleepy eyes and, out of nowhere, a conversation with Andrea flashed through his mind. She had stood leaning against the wall with her trousers halfway down her calves while he kneeled in front of her, digging first his eyes and then his tongue into her pubic triangle. Andrea started to groan; it was obvious that her reaction was so strong it even embarrassed her.
“See how I react at the very sight of your head there.” She tensed. “Instinctively, like Pavlov…”
Jonathan hadn’t been sure whether her English was unclear under the circumstances, or whether Andrea had left the dogs out because she hadn’t heard of them. And although, at the time, he’d pushed the thoughts away, in the early morning light they floated up from the bottom of his mind with a considerable “pop!” Yes, it was between Andrea’s thighs that “The Pavlov Dogs” had been conceived, the characters of the book that was to bring Jonathan popular success.
The Pavlov Dogs quickly started to live their own lives, complicating Jonathan’s paternal and amorous existence. He couldn’t let go of the storyline sprouting in his head; he sensed that if he didn’t catch the gift offered to him by fate, it would disintegrate. So he scrupulously divided his day into segments for individual chores: caring for the children and taking them to school in the morning, shopping, paying bills, and replying to emails from school – a speciality of that establishment (Jonathan was regularly urged to join the flamenco club); preparing material for his writing course, articles, gym. And meeting Andrea.
After some thought, he designated the hours before lunch for his writing, which was why the pattern imposed by Andrea – that it was she who decided when they should meet – soon became a hassle. He swung between dozens of interspaced activities and she arbitrarily told him to present himself just as he was going to school or sitting down to write.
“I work as well,” he whispered into her ear after making love. “Let me know a bit earlier if you can.”
“I will,” she murmured, brushing aside the mention of his work with a smile.
Then she again specified the time and place of their meeting at the last moment and Jonathan performed miracles to get everything done. He drove to her, irritated, his male pride hurt; he returned panting and happy, worked up by the thought of the steering wheel sticky with the combination of her juices and the gasoline that had dripped on to his fingers when he’d filled the car at the last moment, worried that the tank would run out before he got to school.
He was tempted to say “no” to Andrea once, but never dared. She didn’t like to hear how Jonathan combined his commitments as a parent and working writer, how much planning this juggling required. She didn’t have children – he justified her – so didn’t bear them in mind; and when he forced her to do so she must have thought the kids could cope by themselves, requiring help only on the rare occasion of something like the washing machine or dishwasher breaking down.
He tried to go back to the old-fashioned custom of it being he, the man, who proposed the meetings, but Andrea’s stubbornness was like a rubber wall. He had to admit to himself that it undermined his self-confidence more than the lambasting of Uncle Tadeusz, the hot-tempered defender of “real men.” “Couldn’t we meet an hour later?” texted Jonathan. “Sorry, but I’m working,” replied Andrea invariably. When he couldn’t accommodate himself to her schedule, she retracted her proposition and he broke out in cold sweat – in the end, she’d find herself someone who would have no problems fitting in with her.