"The Erotic Potential of my Wife" is the first of David Foenkinos's works to be translated into English.  It is the story of Hector, who develops a compulsive obsession with watching his wife wash the windows.  This goes so far as to set up a hidden camera in their apartment, so as better to observe her window washing when he is not home.  This camera captures images of her apparently cheating on him.  This excerpt traces his reaction.

...making a woman believe that you do not know she is cheating on you facilitates peace in the Household.  After the afternoon he had spent, Hector was not against a taking pit-stop in falsehood.  He could not look at her quite like before; to be honest, it was far worse than that, since he had a constant vision of the lover.  When he looked at his wife, he saw a woman whom a boor with the face of a Czech apparatchik had fitted into.  As there was a good film on TV that night, it was OK.  They would be on the couch.  Couches are pleasant, they are like newly-adopted children, and they would share a beautiful moment of gentle Americanization.  Brigitte found Hector’s attitude strange.  She tried to know what was wrong with him and inevitably, in the great tradition of sudden panics, he strung together several “nothing, nothings” that rang, it must be said, quite hollow.  Desperate, he quickly glanced towards the window and considered its deceiving cleanliness; he would still have many days, maybe even weeks, to wait beneath the sweat of another man.  He lied, saying that he had a headache (it was the third time he was using the same excuse that evening) and, once again, Brigitte dissolved two aspirins in a glass of water.  It was his sixth that evening, and as luck would have it, he started to feel the beginning of a headache.

            Friday nights systematically flow into Saturday mornings (no capacity here to surprise us).  And one week ago, the preceding Saturday, Brigitte had been cheating on Hector in the atrocious conditions we know.  As thought by chance, that morning, hardly awake, she asked about her husband’s schedule for the day (her adultery was being tuned like a Swiss watch).  Did he honestly have the look of someone who has a schedule?  Hector never had anything planned, and especially not the days when his wife was seeking to gain information in view of copulating while he had his back turned towards his schedule.

            “I don’t have anything planned… and you?”

            You need to have balls to be able to answer like this.  But Madam did not waver, nothing, not a drop of sweat (although he, in such a situation, would already have been raising his left arm to keep coronary thrombosis at bay).  Women are fascinating.  In truth and in lies, women are fascinating.  So Brigitte had to do some grocery shopping and then, in late afternoon, from five until seven, she would see her brother.  Gérard was an easy scapegoat, what could she possibly be doing with him on a Saturday afternoon?  No, it was not possible, nobody saw their brother on that day of the week.  Brothers are mostly seen on Tuesday lunchtime.  So Hector’s heart skipped any number of beats (thereby outpacing even that old saying).  He rushed straight into that excess of dignity that every cuckold knows too well.  He wanted to do nothing, and wait nicely for the next window washing; but when he listened to his wife deploy her liar’s timetable under his very nose, he decided to flush her out.  Men are as small as their resolutions: he hadn’t lasted half a day.  Brigitte had hardly left their lovely apartment (they had been happy once) when Hector picked up the phone to call the alibi brother.  The associate confirmed her story, of course.  How had he believed for one moment that he would drop her?  Families always hide adulterers in the cellar, they are the Jews of love.  Apparently, her alibi was plausible, they had to buy a gift for their parents’ wedding anniversary.  The bastards, they were also in on it.  The while family must have really been laughing behind his back, his ears were burning like hellfire.  He should have been wary, what an idiot!  Thank goodness he had been overcome with a passion for watching his wife wash windows; without this opportunity he would never have known anything about the family plot that was being woven around him.  He would have to very careful now, and, why not, place more cameras.

            Hector had just called Gérard, and he had been obliged to find some pretext for this telephone call.  Gérard was not the kind of man you call just like that, something concrete was required.  In a state of panic, Hector couldn’t come up with anything better than suggesting a bike ride in the late afternoon. By sweet-talking him, perhaps he would crack.  As we know, he confirmed his sister’s alibi with surprising aplomb, in spite of the cycling temptation.  On the other hand, he had not thought through the collateral damage of such an angle.  Gérard, with incredible good humor, suggested they go on this bike ride right away.  It’s true, why postpone until tomorrow what we can do now?  This Gérard was a real moron (now that the marriage was going down the drain, Hector was no longer going to rhapsodize about his brother-in-law’s bikes, and about that North African race of his that any doped-up European cyclist could have won), but since he was a moron whose muscle mass was inversely proportional to his neuronal mass, he should not be provoked, as they say.  Hector had to put on some shorts, and they gave him the appearance of a right-wing candidate in some municipal election.  He looked in the mirror and found himself thinner, he didn’t even have to look closely to see his bones through his skin.