The Beach House

Chapter Three
The door to Jessica’s bedroom, plastered with signs warning anyone over the age of thirteen to keep out, is open just a crack, and Daff fights her irritation as she glances over and sees Jessica’s unmade bed, three cereal bowls on the bedside table, and crumpled clothes all over the floor.
Last week, Daff announced that if Jess refused to pick up her dirty clothes and bring them to the laundry room, Daff would no longer wash them. She didn’t. For five days. And then she couldn’t bear walking past the closed door knowing that more and more clothes were piling up, and eventually she had given in with an exasperated sigh and gathered up the clothes, sorting them out into darks and whites as she fought her anger and frustration, and wondered what had happened to the sweet little girl who adored her mother and listened to everything she was told.
Daff had had a difficult adolescence herself, and had joked that it would be payback with Jessica, but she didn’t actually believe that, didn’t believe that her sweet, adorable little girl, who thought her mother was God, would ever become the truculent teenager that Daff had been.
Nowadays it seems that Daff can do no right, Jessica audibly snorting or grunting at her when Daff asks her how her day was, or pounding up the stairs, her grand finale a door slamming shut followed by muffled screams that can be heard from her pillow.
It wasn’t always like this. When they’d been a family, when Jessica’s father was around, Daff doesn’t remember any conflict with Jessica. Jess would certainly never have dared speak to Daff the way she does now, would have been far too frightened of what her father would say when he walked in the front door and Daff told him what had happened.
It has been just over a year since Jessica’s father left. A couple of months before that, Daff had come to realize that the colleague at work Richard had become such good friends with was more than a friend. But when she’d told him what she knew, Richard had denied that anything physical had happened; he’d admitted to having feelings but said that she—Nancy, the other woman— had a husband, a family, that although he thought she was attractive, that didn’t mean anything, and nothing would ever happen.
Daff had believed for a while because she had wanted to believe. Because the prospect of life on her own had been terrifying; surely the devil she knew was better than venturing out on her own.
She had found out about Richard and his colleague in the worst way possible. She had been running errands near Richard’s office one day at lunchtime and had phoned him, wanting to surprise him. “I can’t leave,” he had said. “We have a huge deal coming up and I’m swamped. I’m sorry, darling, but maybe tonight we can go out for dinner.”
So she hadn’t bothered going to his office, but she had been in the neighborhood and had walked past a restaurant, glancing in the window to check her newly blown-out hair, looking beyond her reflection to see her husband sitting in the corner with a woman, reaching out and stroking the woman’s cheek, with a smile on his face that she had seen before. The smile he used to have when they first met, when he would reach out and stroke her cheek in an identical gesture, one that told her he loved her, would always take care of her.
Daff had frozen. She hadn’t known whether to run in and scream at him, or her, demand to know what was going on, or whether to run away. She had, in the end, walked away. Very quickly. It wasn’t until she reached the corner that she started hyperventilating. Not crying, Daff has never been the type to cry in public, but she was shaking like a leaf, and drove home as if in a coma, unable to believe what she had seen.
During the next few weeks Daff read everything she could about affairs, first about emotional affairs, the reasons why the friendships people form at work can be so dangerous, and then about emotional affairs tipping into real affairs. She knew then that if it hadn’t already happened, it was only a matter of time.
You can heal, her latest book said. With therapy, counseling, honesty, you both can heal and can reach a place where you find happiness again. The trust takes longer, but it is possible to seal the cracks and, on occasion, to build a relationship that is even stronger than prior to the affair.
If that’s the road down which you choose to go.
Richard, it was true, hadn’t planned on having an affair. He had never thought of himself as the type to be unfaithful, he took his wedding vows seriously and, up until he met Nancy, had thought he was entirely happy.
There are those who say that affairs don’t happen without reason, that there is always something wrong in the relationship for either spouse to start looking elsewhere, and there are others who say you are bound to be attracted to other people while you are married, but that you have a choice, and you weigh what you have to lose against what you may gain, and make your choice accordingly.
For Richard it was neither of those things. He married Daff because he loved her, he has never felt there was anything wrong with their relationship, and when it came to Nancy, when the unspoken attraction between them became so strong it was almost overwhelming, he felt there really was no other choice.
Daff has always been his friend, his lover, the first person he calls when anything goes wrong. Or right. Of course the passion had dulled somewhat, but they had been married for sixteen years, so that was almost to be expected, and it certainly didn’t mean he was looking elsewhere.
Nancy was unlike anyone he had ever met. Where Daff was naturally beautiful, at least in his eyes, Nancy was the most glamorous woman he had ever seen. Where Daff loved the simple life—being at home surrounded by friends, gardening, kicking her feet up on the porch with a cold beer at the end of the day, Nancy was sipping cocktails at trendy bars, high heels swinging off her feet, sophisticated, sexy, and seriously out of his league, or so he had thought.
Daff had dark blond hair, streaked now with gray, that curled gently on her shoulders. It had been highlighted when they first met, but after Jess was born she hadn’t bothered, nor did she use makeup much these days, spending most of the time in jeans and sweats, running around town, getting on with the business of life.
Nancy, on the other hand, was immaculate. Not a hair out of place, never seen without perfect lipstick, she was beautiful, intimidating, and admired by everyone at the office from afar. When they were teamed together to work on a design project for a new restaurant in town, Richard was terrified, and immediately taken aback by Nancy’s sweetness.
And more, by her interest in him. It became clear, very early on, that Nancy thought Richard was wonderful, hung on his every word, and Richard, after he got over his disbelief, was so flattered that a friendship became inevitable.
E-mail helped. At first the e-mails to one another were about their mutual project, but they quickly became more and more personal, fostering an intimacy that grew up so fast and so seamlessly that within weeks it felt as if she was his best friend, as if he couldn’t possibly live without her.
And still, he wouldn’t admit to it being anymore than friendship. They would have lunch together every day, in the beginning always inviting colleagues to join, as chaperones, he realized later.
But they were both married, he would tell himself during those moments when he allowed himself to think it might be more. It would be insane to think that it was anything more than friendship. Insane to think that either of them would allow themselves to have an affair.
“I would never have an affair,” he announced one lunchtime after they had eaten and were sitting on a bench in the park, talking for what felt like hours.
“I . . .” Nancy stopped. She looked at him, looked at the ground and took a deep breath. “I think that this could be dangerous, ” she said eventually. Haltingly. She looked back up at him and he wanted to drown in her eyes. “I think that it is very difficult for men and women to just be friends, and I needed to say it out loud so we . . . so we don’t cross the line, so we’re mindful.”
Richard grinned. “I agree,” he said, and he did.
Another week went by. Then a confession. “I’m sorry,” Nancy said, over an after-work drink in a bar, “but I’ve never met anyone like you. I feel like you’re my best friend in the world, which is ridiculous because we’ve only really got to know one another these last few weeks, but I can’t imagine a life that you’re not a part of.”
“I know.” Richard felt sixteen again. Omnipotent, ready to handle anything. “I feel the same way.”
“I’m so confused,” Nancy said.
“I know.” Richard’s voice echoed her sadness as he said again, “I feel the same way.”
They became one another’s obsession. Nancy, unhappy in her marriage, thought about nothing other than Richard, and Richard, happy enough in his, thought about nothing other than Nancy. The affair—truly an emotional affair at first—was really only ever just a matter of time.
And lust is a dangerous thing, particularly when your life is settled, when you have forgotten quite how heady, how all-consuming it can be. For lust is not just thrilling, it is addictive, and once you have a taste for it, it is very difficult to walk away.
The first kiss came in a Starbucks. After a lunch on a cold and rainy day, they had curled up on a sofa in Starbucks, and Nancy had covered their laps with her coat, had reached out underneath the coat and taken his hand, stroking his fingers, amazed at her boldness, amazed she had the nerve to make the first move.
Nancy never dreamed she would have an affair, and although she loves her husband, he is fifteen years older, and she feels increasingly that she has grown old before her time. Her sophisticated clothes, her glamorous makeup, are all part of the uniform that’s required to fit in her husband’s wealthy, older world.
Richard made her feel young again. He made her feel carefree. They were the same age, and she had forgotten what it was like to feel forty. Had forgotten what it was like to laugh.
Richard had leaned his head back on the sofa and closed his eyes. He had forgotten his body could tingle like that, had forgotten what it felt like to have every nerve on fire.
“What are you thinking?” he said eventually, opening his eyes and looking at her.
“I’m thinking that you should kiss me,” she said, fighting the impulse to run her fingers through his thick blond hair, wanting to place her lips softly on his eyelids, trace the muscles in his back with her hands.
“Kiss you?” he said, as if in a daze.
“Yes,” she whispered.
And he did.
They didn’t leap into an affair. Not immediately. They met in clandestine hole-in-the-wall places, spending hours walking around parks, making out on benches for hours like teenagers. And that was exactly how they both felt: like teenagers. Falling in love for the first time.
Richard was so torn. He’d leave Nancy and go home to a woman and child he loved, a life he loved, and he couldn’t understand why he wasn’t happy, why it couldn’t be enough. For when he was with Nancy he felt consumed with guilt, and when he was at home, all he could think about was Nancy.
Richard broke up with Nancy, determined to focus on his marriage, make it work, but he was so miserable, found life so unbearable without her, he went into her office after two weeks and told her he couldn’t live without her, and the affair resumed.
Five days later he broke up with her again. He choked up as he explained that he had fallen in love with her, but he couldn’t let the affair go on, he couldn’t do this. He was sorry, but it was over, he had to end it.
But he couldn’t stay away.
The first time they had sex, Richard couldn’t perform. The second time they had sex he had got hold of some Viagra, and it was spectacular.
But it was only three weeks before Daff found out. He knew she was in the area, had thought it would be okay, but there were a lot of things that he thought would be okay—lust had, in general, clouded his reasoning so much that he spent much of his day in a fog.
It was a normal Thursday morning for Daff, a morning spent running errands, making phone calls, until she ran out to do some shopping and made that fateful call to Richard’s offIce, then saw him in the restaurant with a woman.
“What did you do for lunch?” she asked him when he got home.
“Grabbed a sandwich at my desk,” he lied smoothly as he was flicking through his mail. “How about you?”
“I saw you,” she whispered, hoping he wouldn’t lie, hoping there would be a reasonable explanation.
“Saw me where?” His face was impassive, innocent.
“I saw you in a restaurant with a woman.”
“Oh, that!” He laughed. “That was just Nancy. I joined her for a coffee. She wanted to talk about a project.”
“That wasn’t a project,” Daff said. “I saw how you touched her.”
“God, Daff, don’t be so ridiculous. We chatted a bit about other stuff. She was upset about a row with her husband. What’s the big deal?”
"What’s the big deal? What’s the big deal? ” Daff was trying to keep her voice calm. “The big deal is you don’t stroke someone’s face like that to comfort them. You don’t look at someone the way I saw you look at . . . her . . . not unless there’s something going on.”
“You’re insane,” Richard said calmly. “Look, what will make you believe me? I swear, you’re the only woman I love. Jesus—” he switched tack, now raising his voice—“how can you even think that? What kind of woman are you?”
“I’m your wife,” Daff said slowly. “And I know you’re having an affair.”
There was a long silence, and then, like a balloon deflating, Richard’s energy disappeared and he admitted it.
He admitted that he had been friends with Nancy up until very recently, that he had realized she was attracted to him, and that the lunch when Daff saw them was the lunch when he was saying the friendship finally had to end because it had become too dangerous.
“I don’t believe you,” Daff said, feeling sick to her stomach, unable to believe what she was hearing.
“I swear to you.” Richard took her in his arms. “I know she’s attracted to me, but that doesn’t mean I’m attracted to her, and even if I was I wouldn’t do anything about it. I love you. Really, I do.”
Daff didn’t completely believe him, but she had no proof. She allowed herself to be hugged, accepted his apology, his insistence that he loved her, would never do anything to hurt her or Jessica, and then, a few days later, she set about finding proof.
It wasn’t hard to collect the evidence, and Daff gave herself two months to be sure. At the end of two months, two months during which time Richard had been attentive, loving, home on time and wanting to make love almost nightly, Daff confronted him.
She did it quietly. Not wanting to make a scene, she booked a table at a quiet Italian restaurant in town, a place known for romantic dinners, for proposals and celebrations, not for nights such as this.
“What’s this?” Richard looked intrigued and happily apprehensive as she slid a small white cardboard box over to him. Daff hadn’t said anything, and Richard’s heart started to beat a little bit faster.
The evidence came tumbling out. His cell phone records, receipts from hotels on days when he was supposed to be at work, itemized credit card bills showing flowers bought, gifts paid for, none of them received by Daff.
And finally two notes that Daff found shoved to the back of his underwear drawer, almost snorting with derision as she unfolded them—his underwear drawer? Couldn’t he have been more f*cking imaginative, she had said when she phoned a friend to let her know.
One was sexy, the other soulful. This was no mere friendship, and as Richard unfolded the notes and realized what they were, there was nothing he could say.
When he found his words, later that night, Daff was stunned at what she heard.
“I didn’t know it was possible,” he wept as he sat on the edge of their bed, “to be in love with two women at the same time.” He looked pleadingly up at Daff, like a child seeking reassurance from his mother.
“I love you,” he cried. “I don’t know how this happened. I didn’t plan this, Daff. I didn’t want this, and I never wanted to hurt you.”
“You lied to me,” Daff said, unable to believe the pain she was in, unable to believe that she wanted to both hit and comfort him at the same time.
“I never meant to.” Richard put his head in his hands and groaned. “It was a huge mistake. I’m so sorry.”
“You must be unhappy with me.” Daff started to cry herself. “What did I do? What was it about me? About us?”
“Nothing. Oh God, nothing. You’re amazing, there’s nothing wrong with you. That’s what I can’t understand. How can I fall for her when I’m so happy with you, when I love you so much?”
“So which one of us do you want?” Daff asked, her voice suspiciously calm and reasonable, in part not to wake Jess, whose room was only down the hall.
“I don’t know,” he wept, and something inside shifted for Daff, a little hardening of the piece of her heart that she had always thought would be reserved for Richard.
Richard moved out. Jessica wasn’t aware of what was happening at first, only that Daddy needed to be closer to work, but then she was with him on weekends, and she would lie in bed at night, her heart pounding, knowing that her parents had separated, and believing herself to be somehow the cause.
If I am extra nice, she thought, then Daddy will come home and we will all live together again. If I do everything I’m told, I will not be punished like this.
She would pray to God as she cried quietly into her pillow, attempting to strike a deal with him, attempting anything in a bid to bring her family back together again.
Richard moved out, and Nancy didn’t. What had seemed so tempting, so appealing when Richard was safely ensconced in his marriage, suddenly became terrifying when he made himself so available.
“You can come and live with me,” he would say to Nancy over lunch, attempting a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “Or get an apartment nearby. Either way, just think, we can finally be together.”
Was it love or desperation? Nancy didn’t know, but what she did know was that her own feelings were beginning to change. That suddenly, after weeks of planning a life together, she wasn’t sure they had a future, couldn’t see herself destroying her marriage to start again with Richard.
As the rose-tinted glasses fell from her eyes, she started to see him in a different light. The jokes he made that in truth she had never found funny but had tried to ignore, seemed puerile and rather silly. His habit of gobbling up the bread basket in restaurants as soon as he sat down began to be deeply irritating instead of endearing. And mostly his desperation, his sheer need was the most difficult of all.
Her own husband, who had been cast as the devil during this, her first affair, now seemed to be exactly what she wanted. He was safety and security, he was friendship and trust. He was everything she knew she loved and wanted, and Richard, suddenly, was not.
“I can’t do this,” Nancy said gently, a few weeks after Richard had moved out. “I can’t leave my husband.”
“What are you saying?” Richard’s eyes widened in shock. He had blown his life apart for this woman and now she didn’t want him?
Was she f*cking kidding him?
Nancy didn’t have answers. She just knew, categorically, that she couldn’t do this. She had started tiptoeing around her husband, terrified that Richard’s wife would contact him, let him know about the affair, find a way to ruin her marriage in revenge.
A surge of anger swept through Richard, and he stormed out, slamming the door of his car in a fury.
“I miss you,” he said to Daff that Friday when he came to the house to collect Jessica. “I miss us.”
He expected Daff’s eyes to soften, expected to see a chink in her armor, but there was none.
“You should have thought of that before you embarked on an affair,” Daff hissed quietly, careful not to let Jessica hear.
And despite the books she had read, despite knowing that an affair didn’t have to end the marriage, suddenly, for Daff it was over. Not because of the affair, but because of the choice he had made. The affair she could have forgiven, in time. She understood that marriages weren’t perfect, and that temptation exists, and that sometimes men—poor creatures—cannot help being driven by their libidos.
But she couldn’t forgive him for leaving his wife and child for the object of his affair, especially when she knew that it wouldn’t last. And she had known it wouldn’t last, for she had seen Nancy, had found out about her, had parked outside her big colonial house and watched her pull up in her Range Rover, her husband arriving in his big 7 series BMW shortly afterward. She had known this was not someone who would leave this life for Richard.
They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but Daff didn’t want revenge, she was far too sad for that. She felt sadness for their marriage, for what she thought she had, and what she so quickly realized was merely an illusion, sad for Jessica who thought she couldn’t be heard crying at night, although Daff heard every whimper.
And she felt sad for Richard.
Daff had always thought of Richard as so powerful, so capable, so strong, but in one fell swoop she had lost all respect for him, and those times when he would turn up on her doorstep in tears—which seemed so like crocodile tears that it was all she could do not to slap him around the face to snap him out of it— she saw him as pathetic.
She saw him as a lost little boy, one who knew he had screwed up his life, torn it apart, and would try everything to get it back together again.
At times he would turn up with anger: if Daff had been more this, if she had wanted more of that, if she hadn’t done this, said that . . .
Daff would just stare at him in disbelief, calling Jessica and walking away, leaving him with his false accusations on the doorstep.
He would phone later, always phoned later to apologize, to cry down the phone and tell her he couldn’t live without her, but Daff, who had always castigated herself for being so black and white about everything in her life, knew that her feelings would never change.
The divorce was finalized three months ago. It could have got nasty, but Daff chose not to go down that road. They went to mediation and wrote their own agreement, Richard paying child support and a small amount of alimony. Not enough for Daff to survive on, something she had been frightened of since the beginning, when she had sat down and made a list of her options, but Richard, always the stronger of the two, refused to pay more, and at the time Daff didn’t have the strength to fight and, naively, didn’t realize quite how much she would need in order to live.
She’d known as soon as Richard left that she would need to get a job. Real estate was the most tempting and seemed the obvious choice for her. The market wasn’t great, but Daff had always had a way with people, was liked by everyone; also the upside was so great, and the rewards so much larger than for any of the salaried jobs she was contemplating.
Within a few months of separating, she had her license, and her first sale was a small cape in a neighborhood close to her own.
She feels, in many ways, that she has the perfect job. She doesn’t earn as much as she would like, but her hours are her own and she is able to be there for Jessica. She just wishes Jessica didn’t so clearly want her to go away.
Jessica blames her mother for the marriage breaking up. She knows nothing of the affair—Richard and Daff agreed never to let her know—but Richard has made it quite clear to Jess that he would never have left his family, that living in a small apartment on the other side of town is not his choice, and so Jessica blames Daff, and her anger is so great, she can barely bring herself to look at her.