Chicken Skin – Chapter XV

Antoine had finally recovered a certain balance. Several months had gone. He had structured himself and had succeeded in facing his various duties.

He worked a little less because he was efficiently helped by the employee he had chosen.

Antoine had kept the word given to Judith during the intense crisis upon which he had thought he had irremediably lost her. Though he intended, as his wife demanded that he be always more present by her side, forcing him to sacrifice some of his professional commitments, that she accept to get back to a normal life as a couple. Judith persisted with her refusal. It wasn’t in question anymore to have whatever physical contact with her husband. She said such contacts made her suffer because they had become unbearable. Actually the only explanation to that refusal was that she purely and simply rejected Antoine himself. In one word, she didn’t love him anymore. He couldn’t understand what was the cause of that rejection, and that added to the mortification of his self-esteem.

Judith had had consequently to ease off on her grasp little by little. She finally preferred not to spend too much time with Antoine who, as for him, was going on claiming that she fulfill what he finally had called, in desperation, her marital duties. It had been of no use though, and she had preferred to let Antoine be freer in the organisation of his time, better than to have to sustain more often his repeated assaults. She reproached him less for his latenesses, excused more easily his absences.

Judith had also finally, out of patience and arguments, feeling that she else would have to accept to go back to the marriage bed, renounced to one of the two evenings Antoine had had to promise to save for her and their son. The professional duties he had to fulfill, just as he had told her one day, had the advantage of making him forget his sad condition of rejected husband, and for her, the advantage of letting her some respite by distancing Antoine who was constantly complaining about the frustration she imposed on him.

In fact, he gave those evenings to Christine who, as for her, was always ready to see him without objecting, and even with a certain pleasure. That distracted him from the frustrating everyday life of his couple.

In the end, he could meet Christine at their apartment at least twice a week.

Christine then lived in a pleasantly adorned, roomy and light two-bedroom apartment.

Antoine and she had no real life as a couple. She sometimes regretted it, but faithful to her own habits, she waited patiently. She thought that Antoine would finally leave his wife to come and live with her. He was obviously in love with her, and he also talked about having a child together when she would have finished her studies and when he would have acquired, at the same time, a sufficient financial solidity.

Christine wasn’t taking into account that Antoine attached importance to his marriage. For him, this union made sense, even if it wasn’t perfectly fitting in with the idea he had made of it. By getting married, he had taken a life-long commitment, once and for all. He wasn’t imagining a single second that he would be able to live without his wife and his son. At bottom, he had that taste that many men have for a certain type of sadomasochist relationships. Antoine and Judith’s marriage was then no more than a pure ratio of power, that had been established for several years yet by then. There was not much left of their bygone complicity. Strangely, Antoine had finally got used to their new style of relation, and was even enjoying it in a way.

Judith was his wife, and that meant something for him. In fact, he wasn’t really analyzing the situation, he was simply taking it as it came.

Antoine, whatever Christine imagine, was very far from thinking to leave Judith. He was actually counting on finally obtaining from her that she start again a worthy of the name sexual life.

He was in love with Christine, of course. He often spent with her nice moments, going up sometimes to the point of a senses elation that he had experimented only at the very beginning of his relationship with Judith, before she even became his wife. Maybe marriage had that cooling down effect over the whole womankind. Finally, best live exactly the way he was living, with a woman who was evolving just like any other would have, and a charming mistress whom he was infallibly protecting from being tempted to set in the comfort of a situation that would have made her equally unbearable in the long run.

So was Antoine’s state of mind.

That wasn’t perturbing at all the illusions that Christine was maintaining .

Her logic was very different from Antoine’s one. She was banking on the love she had for him, on the feelings they were sharing. She thought that he would compare, and that, at that game, Judith would certainly lose. What man could have bear for long a bitter and despotic spouse, a wife, as beautiful as she might be, changed into an inflexible cold fish, when he could have at his exclusive disposal the given heart and body of a soul that was entirely his?

Christine was waiting that he make his mind, and making the most of every moment she spent with him. She didn’t say anything , didn’t ask either. As certainly, as surely as he had made of her his mistress, as he was then sharing with her a part of his life, he would also make of her his wife.

In fact, little by little, a deep misunderstanding was setting in between Christine and Antoine. That was even more serious maybe, even more poisoning for the future of their relation because it was taking root in the silence, in the darkness of the field of the unsaid.