“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.
He flinched but went, risking arriving late at school, bungling the preparation for his course, not noting down the ideas that came into his head. He never regretted it afterward – both long intercourse and quickies guaranteed him a dose of pure happiness for a day, a day and a half, and the fact that Andrea felt the same prolonged the ecstasy that they celebrated with text messages. Clearly it was to be – the time had come for him to grab several important things at once.
Andrea had her own theory about sex, and although Jonathan considered it a little girlish, he listened with pleasure as he did to everything she said. She claimed that one could foretell sexual compatibility by first kisses. If there was something in the first touch of lips that broke through otherness, what followed ought to be positive. But if there was a shadow of distaste, unease, a feeling that this was not it, it should end there.
“Does that mean that all the lips you’ve touched worked out well?” he asked naively.
She hid her laughter beneath her hair.
“I understand, you had to learn somehow,” he muttered.
He was angry at himself for being jealous of her past. This was something new, undesirable. Up until then his partners’ past relationships had not mattered to him; he had recognized that the past was their own
business, and together with Stefan ridiculed men who felt threatened by a woman’s sexual experience. Just as they did the myth of deflowering virgins – they associated it with bad-quality sex.
So where did this unexpected jab of jealousy come from? Did it confirm his commitment or desire to own “his woman”? Was he a man in love or an embarrassing idiot?
Andrea interrupted these soundless ruminations, snuggling up to him and recounting the story of their first kiss once again. The accidental brush of their lips had given her the premonition of what could happen to them in bed; in the crowded café a world of experiences unknown to her – at least with such intensity – had opened up. The coincidence had been a unique gift to them both, something which, in another configuration, they couldn’t achieve. That was why she’d written to him first.
Before he left, she showered him with caresses and tender words and, although she was better with the first, he was also sensitive to the latter; at this point in his infatuation he was moved by his lover’s charm. He walked around dazed with admiration, lust, and an incessant desire to be close. This last feeling was so strong that the very thought of parting – which was becoming unavoidable due to approaching holidays – transfixed him with pain.
At the same time he felt that, despite passionate lovemaking, he was not as close to her as he would like to be, that he was still unsure of her feelings. He was disorientated by the fact that their liaison was different from anything he’d known – too intense for a passing affair, too secretive for a future relationship.
He didn’t intend to tell anyone about Andrea; he merely mentioned something casually to Stefan because he had to give vent. Despite good intentions, Stefan didn’t show he understood the gravity of what had happened in Jonathan’s life and put his condition down to the atmosphere of the city where bureaucrats landed up without their wives and, in clubs, found women willing to spend the weekend, the night or even shorter periods, with them.
“A colleague of mine in the department has three girls here,” he informed Jonathan as they watched a school game in which Franek, Stefan’s son, was playing.
“Do they know about each other?” asked Jonathan, sitting down on a bench damp from the morning mist. Franek, a round-faced ten-year-old,
marched toward his teammates with a solemn expression, unsure of his capabilities but determined not to make a fool of himself in front of his father.
“Think what you’re saying,” said Stefan, his eyes following the boy. “Anyway, you know him, he was at the New Year party. The guy’s got a wife and children in Spain, like every decent Catholic. And three girls here.”
Jonathan leaned back on the bench and scrutinized the assembled parents: mostly fathers although a few mothers were there, too, surrounded by flasks and bags of clothes for the players to change into.
“Where did he get them, the chicks?” asked Jonathan, sensing that what was important was slipping away from the conversation.
“As if there weren’t enough opportunities!” Stefan peered at him from beneath the baseball cap he wore for the occasion in the belief that it suited the father of a ten-year-old footballer. “We’re spoiled for choice here, every color under the sun, young interns and older goods whose husbands stayed at home. And if the worst comes to the worst, there’s always a club like the Madou to pick up a quickie. Everybody knows that you’re only there for one thing. A quick glance, chat up, details fixed, and it’s yours.”
“What’s mine?”
“Whatever you want. What you’ve got.”
T
HE
P
AVLOV
D
OGS
slipped unnoticed from Jonathan’s story into his family life. After Antosia sneaked a look at the notes spread out by the computer, he had to explain what he was writing about. From that moment the children started to think of adventures for the dogs, tried out names, and Tomaszek even tried drawing one. The creature looked like an elongated pregnant cow but Jonathan told the boy that the animal was beautiful and could be the leader of his mongrel pack. And, much to his own surprise, that is how he started to imagine his protagonist.
The dog, which he intended to have been left an orphan by its owner, imperceptibly became an aggressive, bristling creature. Hungry, its head
injured by a brick that some drunks had hurled at it, it had learned the first essential thing about survival: to avoid dog catchers.
Megi attempted to join in and invent adventures for the dogs but her imagination lacked the panache of both Jonathan and the children. On hearing that Tomaszek had suggested one of the bitches should be in heat, she strongly protested. She controlled herself only when Antosia came up with the idea that the dog should wear underwear on her “difficult days” – like her classmate’s bitch.
“Flowery ones, you know Mommy, the wild flower pattern? And they’ve got to be long, halfway down the thighs, the dog’s thighs that is, you get it?”
“Yes, I do,” muttered Megi, gathering peelings into a newspaper. “Longer ones, à la bloomers.”
“That would be, like, good,” agreed her daughter, who had caught on to Aunt Barbara’s expression and didn’t want to stop using it despite countless admonitions and threats.
The following morning, Jonathan drove from school with his hands gripping the steering wheel so hard they grew damp. Andrea wanted to meet him that day so he had shaved carefully and, in the evening, caught up with what he’d planned to do in the morning – in a word, he’d done everything so that he could see her once he’d taken the children to their lessons. Yet, she’d given no sign of life since that morning!
Outside the school, he texted her asking if their plans still stood. He waited half an hour in the car, and texted again, this time asking if everything was all right.