An Unwanted Guest

He sighs and says, sounding regretful, ‘We haven’t been happy, Beverly, for a long time.’

She doesn’t know how to respond to that. Of course they haven’t been happy. Her friends – with big mortgages, demanding jobs, problem teenagers, and ageing parents – aren’t happy, either. It’s impossible at this stage of their lives, with all the demands and stresses they face. He’s simply being childish, she thinks, looking back at him in disbelief. He’s probably having some kind of middle-age crisis, like some spoiled child who wants to be happy all the time, who doesn’t understand that you can’t always be happy. Life doesn’t work that way. Henry can’t be one of those men who realizes one day that he’s miserable and decides to chuck it all and do what he wants. Surely not. She can’t just throw everything aside and do what she wants so that she can be happy. Women don’t get to make fools of themselves like that. Society won’t let them. But men do it all the time. She feels bitterness rising in her heart, not only against him, but against the world. She feels so powerless, more powerless than he is. She has never had the selfishness, or even the time, to ask herself what would make her happy.

She sits looking at him, thinking how close she is to losing everything. But maybe it’s not too late. If he would just say he spoke too hastily, that of course he loves her and wants to make it work, that they’ve had things stacked against them, he knows that, it’s been hard for both of them, and they have to somehow help each other, try harder to be content together – then she’s sure they could love each other again. She’s not ready to give up. Not yet. But she waits, and he doesn’t say it.

Finally she says, ‘What do you mean you haven’t been happy?’ She sounds so controlled, but she wants to smack him as if he were a pouting child. That’s what he is to her right now, a selfish child, and she wishes she could straighten him out the way she used to be able to straighten out the kids before they became wilful, unmanageable teenagers. When he still says nothing she adds, ‘And what makes you think you have a greater right to happiness than anyone else – than me, for instance, or Teddy or Kate?’

Henry looks at his wife with veiled loathing. He hates it when she gets like this, all high and mighty. She’s such a martyr; she has no idea how hard that’s been to live with. How joyless must life be? She’s a miserable woman, constantly complaining. At least, it seems that way to him. Maybe he’s not being fair, he thinks now, rather guiltily. She is so exposed in that skimpy new nightgown that he feels a sudden pity for her. But he is still unable to reach out to comfort her.

He wonders how other people see his wife. What do Ted and Kate think of their mother? He doesn’t really know. They complain that she nags them too much, but she clearly loves them. She’s a good mother, he knows that. He doesn’t know how the kids feel about either one of them. He doesn’t know what teenagers feel at all. He loves his children, but he no longer loves their mother, which is what makes this so hard. He doesn’t want to hurt them, or damage them in any way.

He’s stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. And now he’s found himself here, snowed in with her for the weekend. What will they do with all this time they have together?

‘I don’t think I have a greater right to happiness than you or the kids,’ he answers her stiffly. Surely that’s not it. How typical of her to hear his We haven’t been happy as I haven’t been happy. He doesn’t think he’s more important than the kids are, or than she is. He doesn’t think she’s happy either. The difference between them is that he can see it, and she can’t. Or maybe it’s just that he can admit it. That he might be willing to do something about it.

Perhaps, by the end of the weekend, things will somehow be clearer.

Friday, 11:30 PM

Gwen knows she’s being reckless but she doesn’t care. Something has happened to her, and she’s opening herself up to it. Perhaps it’s the Veuve Clicquot that’s gone to her head. Or maybe it’s the way he smells – like expensive soap and imported suits. And he hasn’t even touched her yet.

David has Bradley bring them more champagne. Bradley freshens up the fire, then discreetly pulls the library door closed behind him.

‘I like that boy,’ David says, and she giggles as he refills their glasses.

In the library, they talk. She loves the sound of his voice, especially now, when he’s talking to her alone. It’s lower, more intimate, but gruffer somehow, and it makes her feel desired. When he speaks low, he moves in close, so that she can hear, and she leans in more towards him, too.

They both know what’s going to happen.

When they reach his room – he’d offered to walk her to hers, but she shook her head – he closes the door behind them with a soft click, and she shivers. She doesn’t move; she waits in the dark.

He reaches behind her neck and unclasps her necklace and removes it and she feels as if he’s undressed her. She breathes in, a little gasp, waiting.

He gently drops the necklace – costume jewellery, but pretty – on the bureau just inside the door. Then he kisses her.

The kiss releases something in her that’s been pent up too long, and she kisses him back, but not frantically – slowly, as if she’s still not sure. And he seems to get that. As if he’s not entirely sure either.

Beverly has a difficult time falling asleep; she always does when she’s away from the kids, and now her world is falling apart. It doesn’t help that she can hear a muffled argument coming from the room next door – Dana and Matthew’s room. Is no one happy?

It annoys her that Henry fell asleep so quickly, as if he didn’t have a care in the world – and now he’s snoring away. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen to them. She resents that she has to do the worrying for both of them. It always falls to her to do all the emotional work.

They’d agreed to stop talking about their marriage before either of them said something they might regret. They agreed to sleep on it and see how they felt in the morning.

Finally, deep into the night, she’s falling asleep at last, when she hears a muffled scream. But sleep has her now, and the scream becomes part of a dream – a nightmare. Someone is trying to suffocate her. In that strange way of dreams, she is screaming loudly even while someone holds a pillow firmly to her face.

Saturday, 1:35 AM

Riley lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling. She wonders when Gwen will come to bed. According to her watch, it’s after one thirty in the morning. She doesn’t think for a minute that Gwen and David have been in the library all this time. She’s gone to his room. She’s gone to bed with him. Maybe she will spend the entire night with him and not come back to their room at all until morning.

It makes her terribly uneasy – the panic is rising inside her like a tide. Not because she’s a prude – far from it. She’s had a lot of lovers. And not because she’s jealous, either. But because she’s certain that there’s some cloud hanging over this David Paley. She just can’t remember what it is. Again she curses the lack of an internet connection.

She fights an irrational urge to get up and knock on David Paley’s door. But she doesn’t even know which room he’s in.

She hates this constant, generalized anxiety she always feels now. She tells herself that nothing can possibly happen to Gwen here, among all these people. Riley knows that Gwen is with him.

Finally, she slips uneasily towards sleep. As she drifts off, she thinks she hears a scream, somewhere far away. She persuades herself it’s not a scream, but a memory; she often hears screams as she’s drifting off to sleep. She’s used to it. They’re a precursor to the nightmares.

Chapter Eight

Saturday, 5:45 AM