At least now she had some support from him; she appreciated his looking after the house while she studied for exams, thanked him for serving her salads when she got home from work, depressed, pensive. He was pleased his wife didn’t catch on to what the salads really were – part of his plan as a prodigal husband, a practical version of Stefan’s flowers of apology. If he could, he would have carried her in his arms, but he couldn’t touch her. Not only did he not find her attractive, he found her repulsive – so fair, so sexlessly good – different from Andrea.
He writhed with unfulfilled sex. He had under his nose a woman whom Stefan envied him, at whose sight Przemek slobbered, and he couldn’t force himself to take her; instead of which he coveted his neighbor’s wife, an egoist who yelled that the child was only hers, because of whom he woke up at night with a burning desire or the fear that she’d infected him with HIV. She must, after all, have had as many men as she desired.
As if this wasn’t enough, she pushed him away from her life, had decided she wasn’t going to be with him. And kept him in a state of uncertainty as to who the father was! Here he stopped his accusations for a moment – it wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t asked if he was the father but had immediately forged ahead with innocence and love. She wouldn’t have told him anyway; at most she would have said that it was her child. It was herself she loved above all, and her freedom, and Simon closed his eyes to this. That was why she was with him. Jonathan was troublesome because he was possessively in love.
He later lay in his bath, gazing at his own body, that looked as though it were immersed in formaldehyde. His thoughts lost mo-mentum, got stuck. Maybe he’d done the wrong thing? After all, things were fine between them now. She’d said herself that everything was finally falling into place. He was accepting of her and an experienced father, she felt safe with him, she’d seen and grown to love the human being in him. She said that, subconsciously, this was probably what had drawn her to him – his inner youth and easygoing nature with, on the other hand, warmth, and the fact that he gave so much of himself to others. He didn’t place power on a pedestal, didn’t pursue high positions, didn’t boast of a trophy wife. With him she would not feel as though she were “somebody’s” she had grown out of that, so she said…
Jonathan abruptly sat up; water splashed on to the floor. He was killing love! Why had he listened to that idiot Stefan? He didn’t understand any of it! He hadn’t ever committed himself like that, not even Monika could drive him crazy with love, only to the altar; Stefan saw his marriage as a matter of honor, not a love-match. If he happened to think too much about a girl, he applied the hair of the dog. He went on about love because some chicks wouldn’t allow themselves to be screwed otherwise, but he himself admitted that he needed women in the plural. He classified them according to color, shape, taste, and smell. He was married to himself, his own “other half.”
Jonathan shuddered. He and Andrea were different. Their love was an exception. In any case, he had more space in his heart – and that’s what he should have held on to.
But Andrea had decided that she didn’t want to break up his family. He remembered how once, when she realized how crazy he was, not only with desire, but with love for her, she’d asked, looking at him with some disbelief, “But you’ve got everything: children, a fine wife, a profession you’re passionate about. What do you need me for?” He hadn’t answered. She had cuddled up to him, fawned, and then fled. What was he to do? He ran after her.
He slipped deeper into the bath, water filled his ears. Indeed, what did he need her for – in order to have something of his own apart from what he already had – a family, a tidy life? Was it the same with Andrea’s child, this seed conceived by her “I want,” by Jonathan not being ready and Simon’s acquiescence, and which now dwelled in the waters of her belly. Was it her liberation, a living expression of her will?
Jonathan’s head emerged from the water and he took a gasp of air. Thanks to her he had regained his attraction to risk. That was why he was now waiting for the results of the HIV tests.
He picked up Antosia’s orange sponge. If he hadn’t wanted to risk anything, he wouldn’t have started up with her – Andrea, who didn’t allow anyone, including him, to tame her. He wasn’t longing for warm slippers. He saturated the sponge with water and squeezed as hard as he could. “Was Megi warm slippers?” he asked himself. Or maybe some force was driving her into them?
And then he stopped thinking about it all – at least, that’s what he ordered himself to do. When the thought of Andrea appeared, he threw himself into a whirl of simple, daily activities. It was a good thing he didn’t have to edit the little collection; the short stories written by his disciples lay on Cecile’s desk and Jonathan hoped she wouldn’t have too many comments. He couldn’t use his head now; it was all fogged up, sentences fell apart.
He had lost sight of The Pavlov Dogs entirely. When he dipped into what he’d written, he didn’t recognize his own sentences. Somebody else had put the story together, somebody whom the dogs liked, whom they approached, nudged with their noses, at whose sight they wagged their tails. Nobody liked Jonathan – neither his wife, whom he didn’t desire, nor his lover whom he ought to drop, nor his children for whom he had no patience of late. Even the dogs had left him.
He drove the children to and from school, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, loaded and hung the washing, lugged the shopping, took the children swimming, dragged himself to the gym, and jogged by force of will. The hours dovetailed, duties ground along. “I haven’t got the strength for them,” he thought. He didn’t understand what he was reading, he set his social life aside because it required too much effort, he didn’t let his wife drag him to the cinema because he no longer liked her. It was because of her that he’d had to relinquish himself. Now neither desire nor friendship held them together.
He trained so intensively at this time that he was finally laid low. Megi said it was the result of jogging in foul weather, Stefan that it was waiting for the results of the HIV test. At moments like these, Stefan always fell into depths of remorse in the form of psychosomatic symptoms, which again cemented his relationship with Monika who had to look after him. Had he allowed himself to think about her, Jonathan himself would no doubt have admitted that it was because he was cut off from Andrea. But he wouldn’t allow such a thought. He had a strong will; he was, after all, a writer. Only his body was now weak.
He let himself fall – the pain gnawed at him and he gnawed at the pain. He wrapped himself entirely in a martyr’s way of thinking; every morning began with it, and the evening ended with it. He thought about the pain and not about Andrea; about his nerve roots and not about her child; about his lumbago and not the freedom she wanted officially to regain.
He curled up in bed, barely registering the sounds in the apartment. Megi took a few days off but got up early anyway, as if she were going to work, while he lay there pretending to be asleep, short of sleep, aching, sweating. He listened to the swoosh of water in the bathroom, to the children’s pattering, to their scrambling, hushed in vain by Megi’s whispers. The door slammed and he opened his eyes. And again forbade himself to think about Andrea.
After a few days he started to get up, walk around the room. On seeing his own face in the mirror above the sink he thought he looked like an old druid. He hadn’t shaved because he wasn’t sufficiently steady on his feet to risk using a razor.