My Husband

Lucie meets Ariane at the tennis club for their customary Saturday morning game. Although Ariane likes the physical aspect of the game, she does not enjoy competition, so she lets Lucie win. 

Afterwards, they get a coffee. Lucie describes the troubled love life of her sister, Marion. Ariane feels an affinity for Marion, who is a charismatic, beautiful 40-year-old literature professor. Marion writes books on courtly love, gets invited to seminars, and has been married twice. After being deserted at the altar recently, Marion has embarked on a relationship with her second husband. Lucie claims this is bound to end in catastrophe. Lucie thinks Marion chases love to distract herself from real life, such as the cancer with which she has been dealing for the last 10 years. Ariane realizes that Lucie is “precise, opinionated, and prudish” (196).

When Ariane is not thinking about her husband—which she admittedly does 65% of her time—she likes to think of the three words that describe a person she knows, such as Lucie. The words have to capture the essence of a person. Ariane chooses the descriptors with careful thought: The words for her husband are charismatic, introverted, and contradictory. Her husband is introverted despite his sociable nature, because he comes to his decisions in solitude; he is contradictory because he wants the very things he disdains. For instance, he looks down upon Nicolas’s duplex apartment in the city and his finance job, but is also jealous of them. 

Once, Ariane had asked her husband for the three words to describe her. He had used four: “[B]eautiful, very cold, in love, observant” (200). Ariane had protested that “in love” wasn’t a descriptor, but her husband had meant she was in love with the idea of love. This quality was a part of Ariane’s personality. The summation made Ariane very uncomfortable.

The best thing about children’s birthday parties is that they need to be organized only once every year. For Ariane, a child’s birthday party is a terrible experience, filled with chaos. On her daughter’s 8th birthday party, everyone coos over her husband’s involvement: He is the one who has baked the strawberry cake and decorated the house. 

Ariane feels the other mothers judge her for not being a baker. She also feels left out when she sees that her husband has given their daughter wrapped-up colorful pencils. He has never made such an effort for Ariane, though he does plan vacations and dinners for her and him. When she learns her daughter wants to be a vet, she is taken by surprise. She realizes that she knows nothing about her own family. 

The day gets worse when Ariane spots her husband talking to Lucie, staring intensely into her eyes. Ariane, who thinks she has had too much to drink, decides to get back at her husband. She finds Lucie’s husband Pierre and takes him to the upstairs bathroom. Ariane kisses Pierre, who is surprised at first, but then begins to respond. She and Pierre make desperate love against the window, Ariane regretting her indiscretion immediately after. She should have waited till the end of the day and written her grievances in her notebook. In any case, the day for affairs is Thursday, not Saturday. 

When she goes downstairs, her husband gives her a sharp look, as if he knows what she has done. Ariane is wracked by anxiety, calculating the height of the second-floor bathroom window to determine whether her husband could have seen her from the garden.

After the party, Ariane and husband relax in the drawing room. Her husband does not ask her about Pierre at all, though Ariane continues to feel he saw her in the bathroom. Her husband seems to be in a happy mood and puts on classical music, which is a sign Ariane cannot decode. She knows that when he puts on French music he is in a great mood, and pop music means he is going to be insufferable. Ariane is excited to learn what the choice of classical music means when her daughter comes downstairs, saying her stomach is hurting. 

Her daughter sits in her lap, and Ariane feels simultaneously annoyed and guilty for being annoyed. She gathers herself and carries her daughter to her room, giving her stomach medicine. Ariane lies down with the child and sings to her till the little girl dozes off. Ariane makes to leave the room, but her daughter calls out for her again. Ariane squeezes her daughter’s wrist and tells her to go to bed, “the gentle Mom mask … gone” (213). By the time she goes downstairs, her husband has turned off the music.

Ariane’s husband leans out of their bedroom window to unhook the shutters. Behind him, Ariane fantasizes about giving him a push so he falls to his death. She is sure no one would see her. At her husband’s funeral, Ariane would make a beautiful grieving widow, the black clothes complimenting her blond hair. She dismisses the fantasy and begins to cry. 

In bed, her husband finally asks the reason for her tears. Ariane cannot tell him the truth that it is his indifference that is hurting her, so she says she is overwhelmed by work and family pressures. Ariane asks her husband to distract her by recounting their day from his perspective. As he narrates the day, Ariane soaks in every detail. Her husband’s version of events seems more concrete to her than her own. 

After his story, they make love. This surprises Ariane, because her husband usually never touches her if she has been crying. Both times they have made love this week has been after Ariane’s infidelity; she suspects her husband senses her actions and is laying claim to her. Though he turns his back to her to sleep after they have had sex, Ariane can tell her husband is awake. She is seized by her itch. An hour later, her husband turns to her, kisses her, and asks if she is having trouble sleeping.

The narrative shifts back to where it began at the beginning of the novel: The Sunday morning when Ariane’s husband tells her that they need to have a talk. Ariane keeps a cold, beautiful façade in response to the words, but she is tormented on the inside. She is certain he plans to leave her and that she will die of what the Japanese call takotsubo, or broken-heart syndrome. The children sense her despair and ask her if she is alright. Ariane wants to tell them that she is not fine, that their father is going to abandon her, that soon he will sit down with the children and tell them that the separation is not their fault. She visualizes the chain of events without trouble because she has lived them in her head many times before.

Anyone would think from her reaction that her husband leaving her is Ariane’s biggest fear. However, her biggest fear is that when he leaves her, whether now or decades later, he will say that he spent a large chunk of his life with the woman who was not the one. Perhaps Ariane should be happy that her husband is leaving her sooner rather than later. He is course-correcting, rather than stay trapped in a loveless relationship. 

Ariane feels relief that he is being decisive, the relief mitigating her pain. She reflects that she “lived several love stories” (230) before meeting her husband, behaving intensely in each. The only exception was with Adrien, her boyfriend before her husband. Adrien is the only man who loved her more than she loved him. Ariane did not feel sad at all with Adrien, but she felt little passion either. When she was torn between Adrien and her husband, she decided to go with the one she pursued. Now she wonders if she made the wrong choice. 

Ariane dresses in white, the color of Sunday. She agonizes about her husband’s timing: Why leave her on a Sunday on this particular week in June? She wonders if he has found out about Maxime or Pierre, but then it strikes her that what he has discovered is far worse: Her husband has found one of her notebooks, the one which lists his offences and her corresponding punishments of him.

Ariane’s penalties run from not cuddling with her husband to moving his things, such as wallets and keys, so he thinks he forgot them. The habit of hiding his things began with a good intention: Ariane initially hid them so she had an excuse to bring them around to her husband’s office and thus meet him. However, since then, it has continued as a punishment. Ariane started keeping the punishment notebook two years ago, “with the aim of reestablishing equilibrium between [her] husband’s behavior and [her] own” (235). By punishing him, Ariane ensures that justice is served, and also that her resentment against her husband gets an outlet. 

This week the offences and punishments have been particularly intense. For example, it was Ariane who hid her husband’s folder to confuse him. However, there are many crimes for which he has not been punished, such as his insistence that he and Ariane sleep in a shuttered room. Ariane has toyed with the idea of mildly poisoning her husband’s food with a laxative or a small dose of contaminant as vengeance for depriving her of a good night’s sleep for so many years.

The realization that her husband has found the incriminating notebook makes Ariane feel ill. She needs to get out of the house. Ariane tells her husband she has run out of her birth control pills and drives away. She drives around to calm herself, listening to the Supertramp CD, which she had stowed in the glove apartment a while ago as the soundtrack to play when her marriage ends. She cries as the song plays, simultaneously translating the lyrics to French. After the song ends, Ariane dries her tears and visits a pharmacy.

Dreading the “talk” with her husband in the evening, Ariane goes through the rest of the day in a haze. She makes mistakes, such as biting her tongue hard while eating chocolate and taking the wrong exit on a roundabout on her way to her in-laws’ house. Some mistakes are on purpose, such as burning herself while she cooks to see if she can still feel physical pain. 

Ariane’s husband puts the children to bed, lingering in their room for longer than usual. She wonders if he is preparing them for the change that is about to hit their family. Ariane feels out of breath as she waits for him in bed.

After a protracted shower, Ariane’s husband sits next to her on the bed and grabs her hands. He seems to be at a loss for words, searching for the right thing to say. He finally finds his chain of thought and tells Ariane that he has been thinking about something important for a while. Since they’re both turning 40 this year, decisions have to be taken now or never. He asks Ariane if she would like to have a third child. Ariane is so struck with relief at her husband’s words that she says yes without thinking, kissing him in joy. This is what he wanted to talk to her about, not leaving her. 

As they go to bed, Ariane promises to herself not to hide her husband’s things anymore. However, as he goes off to sleep, the obsessive itch spreads across her body once again.

This section is narrated from the first-person perspective of Ariane’s husband. He tells the reader that his game has been particularly good this week, as is obvious through Ariane’s notebook. He pushed Ariane’s buttons deliberately, knowing how worked up she would get over his actions. He especially appreciates how he told her he loved her in the middle of the night, only to deny it later. He stared at the pretty waitress at the restaurant to make Ariane jealous, and overlooked Ariane deliberately at Nicolas and Louise’s house to upset her. However, comparing her to a clementine was not meant to be offensive—he actually loves the sour little fruits.

Ariane’s husband knows all about her notebook. He also knows that he must keep the power dynamics in their relationship skewed to his advantage. The trick to maintaining the upper hand is that he changes his treatment of her from week to week, being cold and neglectful on some days and loving on others. Since he tormented her in so many ways from Monday to Saturday, he will be on his best behavior the next few days. He likes to keep Ariane guessing. Recently, he learnt about a male contraceptive that is easy to conceal: This gave him the idea of suggesting a third child to Ariane. To get her to agree to the child, he made sure she would be in a vulnerable emotional state.

Now they will try for a baby, but he will use the contraceptive secretly. They will not be able to conceive. Ariane will begin to think she is sterile or menopausal, fearing her husband will leave her for a younger woman. Then, when she is least expecting it, he will get Ariane pregnant. Although motherhood is not something Ariane enjoys, she does love their children, and will love the new baby too. 

Ariane’s husband does not resent her for her lack of motherliness; he likes the fact that despite the children, he continues to be her favorite. Ariane has amplified her attempt to remain seductive for him after the babies, never giving up the wife role for that of the mother. Her husband appreciates that. As for the children, he makes up for Ariane’s lack of interest: “[M]y softness compensates for her coldness” (253).

Ariane’s husband loves her. He is not angry at her infidelities, as he knows the other men do not matter. He always makes love to her after her dalliances to mark his territory. He has always found her ethereally beautiful and complex, and cannot imagine a life apart from her. Still, he feigns indifference to her tears because he knows she is looking not for a shoulder to cry on, but a soulmate who torments her. It is because of his feigned coldness that their marriage still has passion after 13 years. 

Of course, Ariane’s husband does not need to keep a notebook to play her. He does as he pleases without a code because he is in a comfortable position: He knows Ariane will do anything for him. No other woman will love him as much as his wife does, whose name, he reveals to the reader, is Ariane.