...of a spouse

She, as soon as he comes in, as soon as she hears - she recognises them right away, she has known them for a long time - that voice, that tone that he has in his moments of emotion, that childish, defenceless, naive, caressing tone, and that limp, muggy voice, it seems to her - I know it, I feel it each time just as she does - that right away everything inside her bristles like fur on a cat's back. At first you don't understand very well what it is you feel when you're near him in those moments: a certain embarrassment... a revulsion... that coaxing, damp, limp intonation creeps into you, tries to get at you in your most secret, best guarded spots, it's a lack of decency, a criminal lack of respect, an attempt at rape... One has the feeling of being the tool of his pleasure, his plaything... He doesn't give a hoot what others might feel... in fact, he doesn't see the people about him, he doesn't look at them... you might die of sorrow, pine away beside him, without his seeing it... people are nothing but puppets, dolls, subject to the whims of the spoilt, stupid, frivolous child that he is... he fancies that it suffices for him to shout "I quit," that in the twinkle of an eye he can change roles, play something else, wipe out, as with a sponge, with that muggy voice of his, what he has engraved in her, and in me, the indelible marks left by his scratches, his bites, his bursts of hatred that burn and disfigure, vitriol. With a hardly perceptible movement (but which he perceives right away: it's as though a cold breath, a cold pale irradiation, emanated from her, from the somewhat too neutral tone in which she answers, when he asks where they're going... "I don't know, wherever you want."... from her silence... from the gesture with which she lifts her coat as she gets into the car ahead of him...), she brushes him aside, keeps him at a distance, she sets a gap between them that he tries to bridge, she spreads out an icy desert that he seeks to cross at all costs, he grows restless, over-active, tense, the dance begins. The roles - without either he or she being able to change them - have been cast between them for the evening.

[Martereau, Sarraute, N.]