The Erotic Potential of my Wife

by David Foenkinos

  Marcel lent him his handkerchief. He promised to take him to Deauville to eat mussels. Everything would get better. This idea of mussels could have finished him off but, in a surprising way, Hector regained some composure. The memory of the wash produced a hint of a smile (a gap in his mouth). The paradoxical malaise of the collector is that he finds the biggest source of rejoicing in his vice. Transformed into a mental collection, the moment of the washing of windows has become his possibility of not living a soft life (during a session of psychoanalysis, he would be told that he is seeking to kill his father). When Brigitte cleaned the windows, it was her refrain, it was the song that lovers sing under the rain. The absurdity of his life had the charm of clichés. Thus, he was not unhappy; all he needed was to think about his secret. To feel good, he had found the solution: not to seek to get better! He was like that, full stop. He liked the window washing of his wife like others like to go to prostitutes while walking the dog. He was going to start a subterranean life for the umpteenth time. Of course, there was a non-negligible part of risk. To film the woman of your life behind her back: we had seen better for the peace of the household.

  Marcel loved to buy newspapers when he took the train: simple newspapers where current affairs, summer fashions and celebrities were discussed. Under his elbow, there was a weekly whose cover was on the strange affair of the disappearances.1 Two young women had been abducted in the same Paris neighbourhood. We learned everything about their lives, but there were no elements about the abductor. Hector, still bowled over by his resolution, thought that he would never know the abduction of his personality. They were finally arriving in a city that looked a bit like Saint-Etienne. And Laurence won her match 23 to 21. She was gentle when she won.

  ______________

  1 If we mention this affair of the disappearances, it is because it will have its importance in our story. Here, nothing is ever superfluous; we do not support the unnecessary.

  5

  Brigitte did not notice anything, the camera had been so discreet it was worthy of a wildlife documentary. Hector, upon his return, acted as though nothing was going on, which was incredibly easy since to act as though nothing was going on was the attitude towards which he had the highest disposition. Saturday evening they made love, endeavouring to tire themselves out as much as possible so that Sunday, a day that is sometimes hard to kill, would unfold in the torpor of physical recuperation. Well, they would have done better in abstaining, as a serious (and peculiar for people who consider Sunday as a difficult day to kill) event occurred: it was Mireille, calling in a quavering voice, a soup problem, thought Hector, and in actual fact it was far more serious, since this telephone call announced his father’s death.

  ‘Oh my God …’ sighed Hector. And three minutes later, he could hardly feel anything. Except, maybe, some gurgles in his stomach, signs that he was hungry.

  Death has its faults, it encumbers the lives of those who are alive and kicking by leaving those who do not die in their arms. A mother, for example. We should always die in groups; it would be like a package holiday. Hector did not really know why all these cynical thoughts were going through his mind, it was perhaps the effect of death, it hardened him in one fell swoop. Hector did not cry, but Brigitte, adorably discerning, understood that something peculiar had just taken place. She approached her man who suddenly had a child’s face, and placed a gentle hand on his cheek.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  Hector thought at that moment – was it an echo of his cynical trip? – that he could obtain anything from that woman. When you lose your father, how many window washes can you win?

  Ernest was the older brother, so he was charged with taking in their mother. Hector spent the night with them. There was also Justine who had returned to the marital home, after having attempted to lead a single life. They had played out their crisis, and then, lo and behold, everything was forgotten. Hector thought straight away about his story of changing luck. In his mind, Justine’s return announced the pending end of his pseudo-happiness. No doubt about it: a karmic threat was hanging over the two brothers: they could not be happy at the same time. (At least the Karamazovs were all three united in the sinister.) Between brothers, you have to help each other. Yeah right, he was not even able to endure a trivial year of misery. He had to re-Justinify himself. To relax, he went out to buy some instant soup and prepared it for his mother. It would lift her spirits, her daily soup. Ultimately, that was far from the case. After the two brothers motivated Mireille to eat a little, at least enough to survive until the funeral, she acquiesced and found herself face to face with a painful revelation: instant soup was good. All these years, she had bought, washed, peeled twelve million vegetables to, at the moment her husband died, realise that our modern society provides delicious ready-made soups. She entered a depression that would only end with her last breath. Hector blamed himself for the blow, and added this new guilt to the sum of guilt-feelings that he had to bear for the rest of his life.

  The few days preceding the funeral, Hector had turned around in circles a lot, an attitude that was beginning to characterise him. He was subsiding in his age, and was considering, for the first time, that he did not have children. When he died, who would come to wander around his tomb? Who would come to throw some flowers? No one; without offspring, tombs remain tombs, and never know the cosiness of petals. It seemed to Hector that he had always sought a good reason to have a child, and he had just found it here, in the evidence of his future solitude. He was becoming narrow-minded, obsessed with his vital benefits; we did not really like him in those moments. After reading an article dedicated to the best positions in view of procreating (the hard-working aspect of Hector, a taste for efficient things) he caught Brigitte like an animal in heat. She thought that he needed to reassure himself of his father’s death by copulating non-stop. On that point, she was not entirely wrong. But falling pregnant was not part of her plans. So, when she understood her husband’s desires for expansion, she admitted not being ready. She suggested a dog, just to get used to it gently.

  It was raining that day, it was such a cliché! Death was always a cliché. You do not innovate or show off on the day of your death. Anyway, you are always lying down the same. The women were dressed in black; and the stiletto heels reminded the deceased of the tick-tock of the grandfather clock that he would never hear again. The mother’s tears ran slowly. Her past life, and the short life that was left for her to live, could be read on her face. A small plaque was left in front of the tomb:

  He had so loved his moustache.

  Hector stopped on that word, moustache. His father was in that word, the death of his father was in that word. He suddenly felt the moustache as a weight that was lifting, the hairs were rising towards the sky. He had always lived in anxiety and need, always squashed in the smallness of a living room with a large grandfather clock. The death of his father, he was thinking about that expression: and all his worries were disappearing, all the collections, all the needs to always protect himself; nothing can be expected any longer from a dead father. We become responsible for our shell. He raised his eyes to the sky, always the moustache, and, ahead of the sky, a large window ingrained itself. A large window that Brigitte washed immediately.

  6

  Like a woman you only undress partially, Hector had waited several days before watching the tape. He had put it away in a calm corner of the living room, and now that he was entering a phase in the afternoon where he was incognito, he could envisage harvesting the third part of his collection. Sitting comfortably, the telephone off the hook, Hector was going to savour this delicious moment. He immediately felt something strange: how to say it, it was the first time that he was looking at Brigitte when she thought she was alone. The change was not vulgar for a non-connoisseur of Brigitte but every deviance in behaviour, as minimal as it was, jumped out at Hector. He found that she stood less upright. It was a question of millimetres, a light futile nothing, but on video all the mo
difications of the loved woman could be seen. To be honest, watching her was boring. She was not a big hit. At best, she could have been accorded a part in a Sunday night Italian TV film. Hector pulled himself together. Waiting for the ominous moment, he subconsciously criticised everything that was not that moment. Brigitte had to be washing windows, or could not be anything.

  Hector pressed on pause, and contemplated every millimetre of the Brigittian calf. He had just had an idea, an improvisation in happiness: he should add music to the images! He thought of Barry White, of Mozart, of course, of the Beatles, of the music of the film Car Wash, and finally, he opted for a very famous German song whose lyrics were pretty much like this: ‘nanenaay, ich-nanenaay, nanenaay, ich-nanenaay’ (phonetic translation). When you film your wife washing a window, you do not skimp over the details. Everything had to be perfect. Sensual pleasure was a physical science of which everyone possesses his own Einstein. For him, this German music was exciting. Brigitte was wonderful; for the third time, he was watching her in the purity of her feminine deployment. He stopped the tape on several occasions. His eyes, wide open like a mouth before a sneeze, gleaned every particle of the film. Hector was becoming completely dependent on Brigitte’s washes, to the point that he was almost feeling a non-pleasure at the satisfaction (difficult sometimes to make love to a woman who is so loved). He was of course still able of grasping the carpe diem of a clean window, but like every Judeo-Christian who lives in Paris, he was caught up by a Left Bank guilt-feeling. Satisfied pleasure always had the venomous colour of the collaborationist eras. He felt dirty, his father had just died and he was getting aroused basely. His whole life had been but a masquerade, he was mediocre and shame was walking all over him. Shame was limping all over him.

  It was then.

  Yes, it was then that the recording stopped since Brigitte stepped off the stepladder and went out of the frame. The next image was Brigitte’s return, but this time, she was accompanied by a man. Yes, a man! Hector almost choked, even though no pretzel agonised the horizon of his larynx. There was no time to pause the tape; and it is often thus that the big dramas of our lives begin. The man and the woman (yes, Brigitte had become ‘the woman’, the sudden impression of knowing her less) talk a few seconds, and their mouths are close, far too close, dirty mouths. Because of ‘nanenaay, ich-nanenaay, nanenaay, ich-nanenaay’, it is not possible to hear clearly what they are saying to each other. An almost ‘new wave’ atmosphere can be discerned in this atmosphere of corporal betrayal. But, assuredly not much of a cinephile, the man transforms into a beast, drops his trousers, and spreads Brigitte’s thighs; the act is executed, there is a record in this, in less than twelve seconds.

  Stop (Hector stops the tape).

  In a first instance, you do not reason, you think of throwing yourself out of the window, you think of the other man’s body, you think of the moment when he is writhing over Brigitte. The bastard did not even leave her time to clean the windows; odds are, he’s a pervert. And to say that he was with a friend watching a ping-pong match; he had always hated this shitty sport, a sport invented to make men cuckolds. Brigitte’s flesh soiled one Saturday afternoon, it reeked of the poverty of suburban trivial events, for all he knows, she had a familial connection with that masculine thing, something consanguineous that would make of this disgusting affair an affair humiliating humanity. He needed to breathe, to take matters in his own hands again, and taking matters in his own hands was to look for this maniac to wring his neck. Only, he did not know anything about violence; he had sometimes fought over objects, but never had the fatal point of physical aggression been crossed. A cold sweat took over him at the memory of the stranger’s hairy back, a back as large as a shark’s jaw; she was cheating on him with a Saturday neanderthal. The cowardice of his possible reaction to the situation racked his brain. There probably were other solutions. He thought of hiring a hit man, something proper and professional, a bullet in the neck, and then, he would not show off as much with his ad vitam limp thing, his hideous thing that had explored Brigitte’s mythical interior. But frankly, where could he find a good hit man on a Friday in the middle of the afternoon? He was worried that they would lumber him with an intern who would forget to burn the silent partner’s name before pulling the trigger, maybe not even oiled.

  Hector had not read Aragon, and ultimately it is not essential to read Aragon to know that sensual pleasure is a dictatorship. The tyranny par excellence that we only overthrow by overthrowing ourselves. So, the idea of finding a hit man, the idea to doing the guy in, are joyously ridiculous once the idea of happiness has been brushed against one single and severe moment. To leave Brigitte would irremediably mean they would not see each other anymore; and not to see each other would irremediably mean that he would no longer assist window washing. His intelligence, stimulated by the redoubtable shock he had just experienced, was leading him towards evident real truths. And from this evidence flowed one unique truth: the impossibility of speaking about what happened with Brigitte. The collection ‘washing the windows’ had to be preserved at all costs; not to put anything in jeopardy, even to pass for a coward. To be a coward, yes. But for pleasure. We could see vice in this, though every sensuality is the vice of another: sado-masochists must find missionary position of amateurs truly vicious. Hector was trapped by his sexual pleasure. He therefore did not have a choice, and Brigitte would come home that evening, he would look at her right in her eyes, and he would give her his biggest smile, the one tested on their wedding day.

  We liked it, that smile.

  A Kind of Decadence

  1

  It is no more stupid to stay with a woman who is cheating on you just to see her wash the windows, than to go around the globe just to see for one instant the beauty of the earlobe of this beloved woman, than to commit suicide like Romeo and Juliet (this Juliet must surely have been a champion of window washing), than to go pick edelweiss for his Belle du Seigneur, than to go to Geneva just for a day to look for the Ritz that does not exist, than to need to live in sensual bubbles, than to love you with that way of looking like a Stalinist moustache, all that is the same, so Hector had no reason to feel guilty for his small sensual drift. Everyone has the misfortune of loving. Moreover, making a woman believe that you do not know she is cheating on you facilitates peace in the household. After the afternoon he had spent, Hector was not against a pit-stop in falsehood. He could not look at her quite like before; to be honest, it was even far worse than that, since he had a constant vision of the lover. When he looked at his wife, he saw a woman whom a boor with the face of a Czech apparatchik had fitted into. As there was a good film on TV that night, it was ok. They would be on the couch, couches are pleasant, they are like newly-adopted children, and they would share a beautiful moment of gentle Americanisation. Brigitte found Hector’s attitude strange. She tried to know what was wrong with him, and inevitably, in the great tradition of sudden panics, he chained several ‘nothing, nothings’ that rang, it must be said, quite hollow. Desperate, he quickly glanced towards the window, and considered its deceiving cleanliness; he would still have many days, maybe even weeks, to wait beneath the sweat of another man. He lied, saying that he had a headache (it was the third time he was using the same excuse that evening) and, once again, Brigitte dissolved two aspirins in a glass of water. It was his sixth that evening, and as luck would have it, he started to feel the beginning of a headache.

  Friday nights systematically flow into Saturday mornings (no capacity here to surprise us). And one week ago, the preceding Saturday, Brigitte had been cheating on Hector in the atrocious conditions that we know. As though by chance, that morning, hardly awake, she asked about her husband’s schedule for the day (her adultery was being tuned like a Swiss watch). Did he honestly have the look of someone who has a schedule? Hector never had anything planned, and especially not the days when his wife was seeking to gain information in view of copulating while he had his back turned towards his schedule.


  ‘I don’t have anything planned … and you?’

  You needed to have balls, to be able to answer like this. But madam did not waver, nothing, not a drop of sweat (although he, in such a situation, would already have been raising his left arm to keep coronary thrombosis at bay). Women are fascinating. In truth and lies, women are fascinating. So Brigitte had to do some grocery shopping, and then, in late afternoon, from five until seven, she would see her brother. Gérard was an easy scapegoat, what could she possibly be doing with him on a Saturday afternoon? No, it was not possible, nobody saw their brother on that day. Brothers are mostly seen on Tuesday lunchtime. So Hector’s heart skipped many beats (by the by, he was already beating a saying). He was entering head-on the jolt of dignity that every cuckold knows well. He wanted to do nothing, and wait nicely for the next window washing; but when he listened to his wife deploy her timetable of lies under his nose, he then wanted to flush her out. Men are as small as their resolutions: he had not lasted half a day. Brigitte had hardly left their so lovely apartment (they had been happy once) than Hector picked up the phone to call the alibi brother. The associate confirmed, of course. How had he believed one moment that he would drop her? Families always hide adulterers in caves, they are the Jews of love. Apparently, her alibi was plausible, they had to buy a gift for their parents’ wedding anniversary. The bastards, they were also in on it. The whole family must have really been laughing behind his back, his ears were burning like hell fire. He should have been wary, what an idiot! Thank goodness that he had been hit with the passion for his wife washing the windows; without this opportunity, he would never have known anything about the family plot that was being woven around him. He would presently have to be very careful, and, why not, place more cameras.