Word: jeane
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...Jean was devastated by her departure, he is disappointed at her return. "You, who always know the right thing to do, but here you come back, the ink still fresh." His feelings, such as he has, often take second place to his status. Now he considers how he will look to the friends whose esteem he has courted. "If at least you had died," he tells her, "I would have been offered condolences and known how to reply. But no, you come back." His eloquence revs into fury: "My wife's a monster, and everyone will think me a fool...
...moment Jean tires of spouting aphorisms and spitting venom; he offers her a glass of water. As an oenophile might hold a sip of claret in his mouth, testing its taste, Jean lets his mind race through the most demeaning possibilities, entertaining worst-case scenarios. He tries flattery, complimenting Gabrielle as he might a statue: "Your neck has such a lovely blush when you're nervous. Your skin reflects your every thought. I can trace your life in each blue vein. They're highly visible, even the blood pulsing through them. ... The blood in your temples appealed...
...time she has been quiet, with a dull gaze that harbors reproach, for him or herself or both. At one point she touches her dark shirt to brush off something we can't quite see - is it her chagrin, her defeat, the evidence of her lover's passion? Then, Jean plays the gentleman and makes a fatal mistake. He says, "I forgive you." And she explodes in a derisive giggle. Even more than the insult, he senses the threat. "Then this letter is not the worst of it?" he asks, and she replies, like a death sentence: "The worst...
...should stir uneasy reflections in most adults. The feelings of being caged, compromised, desperate for the freedom of anything-but-this - or, for that matter, of being betrayed, and then having to play the reasonable party to someone whose love has withered or never existed - are not limited to Jean and his wife...
...code of romantic drama, the two characters in Gabrielle may seem divided with almost Manichean simplicity: he is the brain, she the heart and other organs. But for all Jean's powers of analysis, he's a fool for thinking he understands his wife. And though he's the chatty one, she has an arsenal of ways to hurt him: describing her lover's body, for instance, in intimate terms she may never have used with him, and invidiously comparing Jean to her lover. ("The thought of your sperm inside me is unbearable," she says. "But not his," Jean proposes...