My Husband

by Maud Ventura

Monday has always been my favorite day of the week. Sometimes it wears a deep royal blue—navy blue, midnight blue, Egyptian blue, sapphire blue. But more often Monday takes on a practical blue, economical and inspirational: the color of Bic pens, my students’ workbooks, and simple clothing that goes with everything. Monday is also the day of labels, resolutions, storage boxes. The day of smart choices and reasonable decisions. People have told me that loving Mondays is a brainiac thing—that only nerds are happy when the weekend is over. That might be true. 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.

When my husband is absent, the house resounds less, like a piano whose soft pedal is engaged: the sound comes out muted, domestic life loses variation and intensity. It’s as though someone’s placed an enormous lid over our roof.

Tuesday is a quarrelsome day. The explanation is simple: its color is black and its Latin etymology reveals that it’s the day of Mars, the god of war. The storming of the Bastille took place on a Tuesday. September 11, too. Tuesday is always a dangerous day—which is all the more worrying because we have a dinner tonight that I have no desire to attend, and everyone knows that social gatherings are rarely peaceful.

The fear of a lull has always terrorized me. As a teenager, the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir was my model (except for their non-monogamy—open relationships are not my style). I would picture them in cafés, talking for hours and chain-smoking. I would fantasize about a marriage cemented by verbal and intellectual ping-pong, a union in which words played a leading role.

Giving him a child brought us closer. Especially at the beginning, when the three of us were living in isolation. It was a commitment for life (I would always be the mother of his children) and a precious complicity (the two of us shared the difficult nights when our son’s ear infection kept us awake till dawn). This little boy was one more thing we had in common, an inexhaustible topic of conversation, the proof and the concretization of his love for me. But it wasn’t enough to inspire as much love for my son as it should have.

I read somewhere that there are three kinds of women: the woman in love, the mistress, and the mother.

Couples who don’t love each other anymore don’t care about not catching everything. They think of their exchanges as a text with many holes, and are unbothered by it; they say it’s no big deal, they’ll fill in the gaps later. I think the need to be exhaustive is proof of love: not wanting to lose a single word.