My Husband

Friday being the day of Venus, the goddess of love, Ariane surfs articles about making one’s relationship last. All the sites and women’s magazines tell her that maintaining an air of mystery is crucial to prolonging the romance in a marriage, but this is practically impossible for a mother of two children. Ariane always has to be accessible to her children, parents, and in-laws. Thankfully, the internet is not her only source of romantic advice. She often notes down lessons on love in her green notebook, which inspire her, like yesterday when she used the green book for courage to meet Maxime. 

Ariane reflects that she is eternally interested in love, with love being her only hobby. The problem is she loves too intensely, such as she did even with Adrian and Antoine, her boyfriends before her husband. Maybe that is why she is destined to be sad, because her love is so great it cannot be returned. Her mother saw her cry at her wedding and softly told Ariane that love and sadness go together. This makes Ariane think she has inherited her intensity from her mother, like Phèdre did from her mother Pasiphae.

During the afternoon, Ariane dyes her hair blonde. She is not sure if her husband knows that her natural hair color is brown, but she does know most of his girlfriends have had pale hair, which shows his preference for blondes. 

Waiting for the hair product to work, Ariane takes out the secret key from her jewel box and goes through the mail. The reason for this surreptitious ritual is that she is not supposed to have a key to the mailbox. She gave the key to her husband three years ago and never asked for it back. When her husband seemed to be in a rush to collect the mail in the mornings, Ariane suspected he was having an affair. She copied the key from her in-laws—who had an identical set—and since then keeps a secret eye on the mail. Ariane has found no evidence of her husband cheating.

The jewel box also contains the fake solitaire ring she wore before she met her husband. Ariane bought herself one because she wanted to feel married. When she wore the ring out, she felt more confident, as if she had found her place in the world as a visibly married woman. Three months later, she met her husband. The reason her current ring resembles the fake one is that she has always wanted a cathedral diamond.

After examining the mailbox, Ariane goes through her husband’s bag and his worn clothes. She finds crumpled-up receipts from grocery stores in his pockets, listing all the cheeses and groceries her husband has bought. She finds his purchases reassuring, because a man who plans to leave his wife does not buy 10 days’ worth of cheese. She also peruses his email account and the contents of his phone, loaded onto his computer. Ariane always dreads reading her husband’s mail and messages, fearing what the next one may reveal. However, the truth is there have been no suspicious mail over the years; even his conversations with unknown women have turned out to be mundane ones with colleagues or wives of friends.

Ariane wonders if she should feel guilty about spying on her husband. However, the spying is a sign of her love for him. She wishes her husband was more interested in her life. For weeks, she has left around for her husband to find a crudely worded love letter (composed by her) that appears to be from another man. Her husband has not even noticed the letter. Nor does he ever ask Ariane prying questions. If he did, she would confess her adultery to him, but he never rises to the occasion.

The last item on Ariane’s list is listening to recordings of the private conversations between her and her husband. She records the conversations on her phone so she can analyze them for clues. Today, she notes an anomaly: Her husband told her in one conversation that he would be having dinner with a coworker, and on another, coworkers. She wonders which is true, and why her husband is lying. Ariane thinks recording the conversations is reasonable. She wishes she could have recorded the conversation at Louise and Nicolas’s house so she could understand why her husband compared her to a clementine.

Once, Ariane transcribed a recording and translated it into English. She gave the conversation for her class to study and translate, encouraging them to comment on the relationship between the husband and wife in the passage. When a student remarked that it was obvious the husband did not love the wife, Ariane’s heart sank. She has never used her recordings in class since then. What she does instead is change the name of the male character in passages to that of her husband, like she did on Monday.

Ariane’s husband has told her he plans to go to the pool after his dinner. He loves to swim, the exercise giving him mental clarity. Ariane now pictures her husband pausing between strokes, struck with the clear realization that he needs to leave her. Agitated, she leaves the children in front of the television to watch a movie. At 10:00 PM, as he had promised, her husband returns home. From her bedroom, Ariane can hear him approach the children, and then everyone coming upstairs to bed. 

Ariane pretends to sleep when her husband enters the bedroom, her back to him. This is a gift to her husband, since Ariane is wearing no make-up. Her husband has indicated that he likes Ariane to be well-dressed and groomed. Ariane is also acting on the advice she wrote in her green notebook earlier that day, which is to play hard to get.

The nervous itch starts up again, debilitating Ariane. She tries to distract herself by thinking of her marriage. The bigger picture suggests her marriage is happy. Even the scale of a year suggests this, as there is never a month that goes by without lovemaking, a deep, private conversation, and a gift from her husband. 

Things appear fine even on a weekly level, but the trouble starts if Ariane pays attention to every day. During some days, there are slights from her husband that she cannot understand, such as his removing his hand from hers on Wednesday. In these moments, Ariane can see her husband does not really love her. Taken together, these many moments “set [her] marriage to a sad soundtrack” (184).