Chicken Skin – Chapter IV

Antoine, as for him, didn’t really know where he was in his sentimental life. At first, he had been seduced by Christine’s freshness and youth.

That wasn’t his first adulterous affair, and Christine, for him, at the very beginning, wasn’t more than a new affair among good fortunes he didn’t even have to look for.

Day after day, Christine yet became more important to him. She had spent a full-time internship month in his company and he had got used to her presence and to their intimate tête-à-têtes.

He appreciated her constant good mood, her gentleness. Her shyness finally seduced him. He liked to see her cheeks blush when she just left his arms and had to pass his study door and face his secretary’s kindly clear-headed look.

At the very beginning, Christine’s reserves and modesties entertained him. Now they touched him.

Ever since she came only one day each week, he indubitably missed her.

Sometimes, he caught himself about to get into her study, thinking he would find her, or about to request from his secretary to ask Christine to come into his study, while, almost at the same time, he realized she wasn’t there.

The contentious nature of the relations he maintained with his wife had become significantly worse ever since Christine arrived in Antoine’s company. It was just like if she confusedly felt something was changing in her husband’s life. He himself didn’t see it that way though. He had the feeling he was sustaining his momentum. In his life, nothing was changing. His meeting with Christine was just one more meeting amongst others.

However his wife was becoming more agressive, more tyrannical each day. He had to explain his briefest absence, the shortest of his delays. When, exasperated, he ended up asking her if she was jealous, she laughed in his face without adding anything very coherent. Let’s see now what she could be, or rather, who she could be jealous of?

The conversation try was then finishing and the reproaches, the remarks and the assaults started again. Antoine was ending up wondering why he got back home every evening.

But he had got into the groove.

Antoine met Judith, his wife, around ten years before. After four years of cohabitation, they got married to the great pleasure of both families, and finally they’ve had a son they named Arthur.

In ten years, after cloudless beginnings, their relationship, in spite of ups and downs common to all couples, so they say, had put down its roots. Antoine got used to have somebody at home, as Judith didn’t work. She saw to her interior, by the way, very well. No stain, no ruck could resist her long. The cleanliness of her house was beyond reproach, its tidiness was perfect. The most complete order reigned in each and every of its rooms. Besides, Judith was a peerless cook.

Let’s just say that, if Antoine was sure to find with other women satisfactions that Judith didn’t give him anymore, he was not sure to find amongst them so accomplished a housekeeper.

Since she gave birth to their son, Judith had refused too frequent sexual relations. At the beginning of that rejection that was new to him,  she would find all kinds of excuses to avoid to get close to him. Those were situations that she obviously wished to avoid. Then, as time went by, as the pressures that Antoine would apply were becoming more frequent, his demands growing more insistant, she ended up refusing categorically any sexual relation. Antoine couldn’t understand the why of that new current state of affairs.

As he was continuously re-entering the fray, Judith was perpetually on her toes. She was straightaway agressive, preventing that way Antoine’s claims, prayers or angers because they had ended up exceeding her while she didn’t want to give in to them anymore.

What was the most difficult to understand for him was that jealousy that was new in Judith’s behavior, were those questions she asked about his absences, her angers at the shortest of his latenesses. How dared she be jealous when she refused him what the other women he met gave him with pleasure?

Antoine, of course, didn’t publish his liaisons. He never told his wife about his affairs, even if sometimes, he had thought he would do it, imagining for a moment that it would take her back on the track of a right marital life. He confined himself to telling her from time to time, irritated by a new refusal or an ultimate agression, that he wouldn’t need to kneel down to have his wicked way with women and to bring them where she now herself refused to come.

He was concealing to his wife a whole aspect of his life. He thought that Judith, as suddenly as she began to refuse him, would one day come back to him.

Deep down, on thinking about it, this jealousy that she seemed to feel then would probably do the work.