My Husband

by Maud Ventura

But it comes back to my love of beginnings. I’ve always preferred the first chapters of a book, the first fifteen minutes of a film, the first act of a play. I like starting points. When everyone is in their rightful place in a world that makes sense.

And what more beautiful gift is there than a hiding place?

More generally, the idea that my husband existed before meeting me is surreal, even revolting.

Armed with this quantitative and qualitative data, I could thus evaluate whether our relationship is normal or cold.

“You forgot your ring last night when we came home, it was downstairs next to the keys!” my husband crows, handing me my solitaire diamond ring (a fitting name: I have never felt so alone as I have since I’ve married him).

His naiveté is unbearable. My husband is so certain of my love that even my ring placed on the entryway table does not come across as a threat to him. What world is he living in?

Sometimes, I picture myself alone on the earth with him. I invent a fatal epidemic, a nuclear war that leaves us the only survivors, or a desert island where we wash up after a plane crash. When I think of my greatest happiness, it’s always just the two of us: we are alone and we are together. I can’t help it—my paradise is being in a couple, a duo, a pair.

I do my best, but most of the time I’m too busy being in love to be a good mother.

I take advantage of being alone to write a few lines in my notebook. Of course I record how he withdrew his hand from mine just now on the sofa, how he took his phone from his pocket when I was right next to him. Once more, writing calms me down.

And above all: no crushes in elementary school, no boyfriend as a teenager, no great love story before marriage. I wouldn’t waste a minute being in love.

It’s also for these physiological reasons that my husband’s absence can be so painful: my body is in withdrawal.

It’s a demand, uttered in the imperative: Sweep me off my feet, please. Make me fall in love with you, please. Sweep me off my feet now. Make me fall in love with you, now.

The way we met was so wonderful that sometimes I feel like it’s the real story, and our relationship merely an endless footnote.

How can we know where we’re going if we don’t know where we’re coming from?

Married just a few hours, my love for my husband was already painful, and I was learning, like Phaedra, that this pain might be hereditary.

And I went to the hairdresser this week, too—why doesn’t Lucie say anything to me? Why should it always be me debasing myself with my considerate comments?