Our wife narrator and her husband are 40, have been happily married for 15 years. They are the perfect couple, he works in finance, they have two perfect 7 and 9 year old kids, she works as a translator and English teacher. She comes from a more modest background but she’s learned to hide that and smooth it over (from reading “how to” books about bourgeois manners to copying the women in his family and so on). She is beautiful, cold, observing, and privately obsessed – she loves her husband, of a love that never grows old. She lives in terror that he might love her less as time goes on. He, meanwhile, seems oblivious to her neuroses, going through the happy motions of the married couple.
We learn their routine over the course of one week – and we discover the strange way her mind works, with each day being assigned a color and a mood (her favourite day is Monday, yellow and full of promise, etc etc) each with its own set of rules. Monday is control and possibility, Thursday (green) is for transgressions or punishment, Sunday (red) is his favourite day. She notices and overthinks everything – from her quiet fury at his likening her to a clementine in a game at a friends’ dinner party (a clementine! ordinary and cheap and easily accessible, how dare he! but this outrage at his offense she keeps to herself, tucked away and monitored), to him kissing her this morning with his eyes open, to his removing his hand from hers as they sit watching TV, to the night he said “I love you” to her in the night only to not recall doing so the next day. She reads manuals about how to be the perfect wife, how to be aloof, mysterious… and when his transgressions become too much, she cheats on him, having sex with other men with the kind of abandon she does not have with him. And only ever on Thursdays.
Eventually we learn that she keeps a little notebook hidden, in which she records every thing he does that upsets her, with the date and time, and decides on the corresponding punishment (no kiss goodbye upon leaving this morning, or go to bed early before he comes back, or cheating, etc). She also has started recording their conversations so as to better analyse them later. On Tuesdays, she goes through his email and pockets. She gets a copy of their mailbox key cut, and checks the mailbox in the afternoon before he comes home for any sign of infidelity. She hates doing it – her whole life hanging on one potential email after the next.
Saturday is her daughter’s birthday. By this point she’s worked herself into a frensy over the transgressions of the week, and she drinks too much. When she catches him speaking in a way she deems flirtatious, with her friend, she loses it – grabbing her friends’ husband to the upstairs bathroom and having sex with him then and there. She’s also certain that her husband caught her eye as she walked out from the upstairs bedroom – the anguish building, but he makes no allusion to it later.
The next day he tells her in the morning they need to talk. She imagines their life is over, contemplates killing him, knows she will be dumped. He makes it drag all day, and in the evening takes her hands in his and asks her if she’d contemplate having a third child. She is desperate with relief and accepts instantly.
The epilogue is from the point of view of the husband, and we realise that all along he has been playing with her! He found the booklet of punishments and reads them every day, acting accordingly to either ramp up the tension or down. He knows full well when she cheats on him on days she’s very upset – of course, since he’s orchestrated the upset himself – and he always sleeps with her on those days so as to mark his territory. We realise the whole relationship is a battle for control (except she thinks she’s the only one playing), and the closure of the novel cheekily answers (albeit in a twisted way) that initial question: how can you make love and passion last through years of marriage?
