Chicken Skin – Chapter V

Christine had got upon the wrong side of the bed that morning. She had felt assailed by an unexplainable bad mood since she woke up.

That day was the day of her first real date with Antoine though.

She didn’t understand what was happening to her: everything annoyed her. Things resisted her: it had a knack for exasperating her and it wrested little cries of irritation and exceeded sighs from her.

The objects fall from her hands, just as if an unusual heaviness had stoke them. It seemed that all the things that had to break one day had decided that that day was the day: the handle of the door of the closet of the bathroom got stuck to her hand, the bathtub siphon, obviously blocked, refused to let the soapy water of her shower pass, and the zipper of her dress kept obstinately jammed. Every new incident Christine got more exasperated and it didn’t really settle anything.

When she finally could reach the kitchen to have her breakfast, she thought she had got the string of calamities over with. It was an absolute illusion: she broke a glass, let the spoon fall on the ground and closed that new set by spraying the floor with milk when her unique intention had been to pour some of it in her coffee.

Finally, in spite of the obstacle race she had had to run at the very beginning, Christine was ready to face her day. On the other hand, she surprisingly lacked of spirit and had been unable to shake a muted and odd bad mood she had felt since she got up that morning.

She wondered, not without some anxiety, what would be her state of mind when she arrived at her rendez-vous with Antoine. They were to meet at 7.30 p.m. in a Parisian restaurant he gave her the name and address , and that was located in the Opera Garnier area.

Christine din’t know yet what she was going to do of her day. Benjamin was taking an oral in the afternoon and was going to spend the mornin reviewing. She didn’t plan to go to and spend the day working at Antoine’s company.  By the by, she preferred not to see him before the evening  because she wanted to put in kind of a break  between the usual setting of their meetings and the new place where they would meet that was the symbol , in her view, of the so much desired turning point their relation seemed then to go toward.

After having thought to take a walk in the department stores of the Boulevard Haussmann, she decided to spend the day reading and lazing at her home. She was to have lunch quietly and spend a quiet afternoon, then, just as quietly, she would head to Paris.

She felt like enjoying the sweetness of the waiting time that arrives ahead of a first love date. Just one cloud was still spoiling the horizon of her pleasure: a current state of exasperation that she didn’t succeed yet to take control of, and she wished would soon be dispersed.

She had lunch while watching television. Everything was as usual: there was nothing new under the sun, the same scandals, the same dramas were coming onto the screen. The same debates, the same subterfuges, the same noisy silences and the same collective hysterias were spread. Some times, a faint feeling of being misled assailed Christine.

When she switched the television off, after she had had lunch, her bad mood had vanished. Did she owe that to the comfort that food gives, or to the feeling she had while listening to the testimony of a terrorism victim that she obviously  was not the most unhappy or unlucky person in the world? She didn’t really know but she could note that the feeling of discomfort and the state of exasperation that hadn’t let her alone since the beginning of the day had purely and solely died out.

She spent the afternoon reading, laid down on the couch of her tiny lounge.