IN FRONT OF people I knew, I tried not to betray my obsession by words, although to exercise such self-control continually is extremely taxing. At the hairdresser’s one day I saw a talkative woman to whom everyone had been speaking perfectly normally until she announced, her head tilted back over the basin: “I’m being treated for my nerves.” Immediately, the staff stiffened and addressed her with distant reserve, as if this irrepressible confession were proof of her insanity. I feared I would also be considered abnormal if I had said: “I’m having a passionate love affair.” Yet when I was among other women, at the supermarket checkout or at the bank, I wondered whether they too were wrapped up in a man. If they weren’t, how could they go on living this way—that is to say, judging by my previous standards, with nothing else to wait for but the weekend, a meal out, the gym class, or the children’s school results: things for which I now felt aversion or indifference.