A Quiet Revelation at Terminal 4

Louise had just come from Paris. As a young woman, in college and after, she had imagined many times being dazzled by the City of Lights.
She hadn’t imagined then, of course, that her first visit to the French capital would be an escapade with her extramarital lover- or that there would be an undercurrent of despair even under the most dazzling of lights.

     Her alibi was for longer than Sylvan’s, so she had decided to make a quick stop in London, to explore on her own a bit and gather her wits before she went home to confront her husband, Leonard. Then a flight cancellation left her stuck at Heathrow, stuck in London when her husband believed her to be at a conference in Reno.
     For her and Sylvan, the idea had been to gather their strength together and to solidify a plan for confronting their respective spouses with the news that they wished for a split. As far as they knew, it would come as a considerable blow to both of them. Leonard had been pressing and pressing for Louise’s pregnancy.
     She was thirty-four, after all; he reasoned that their window of opportunity was slowly closing and that the experience would only bring them closer. He hadn’t an inkling that Louise didn’t wish to be closer to him. She was all too adept at concealing her discontent with his simple-mindedness, his absorption in his uninspired interior design work.
     But there was also a tacit purpose to the surreptitious holiday- to test whether they were truly good together. They had only been together for hours at a time before. What they found was deeply unsettling. Louise was still making sense of it as she sat listlessly at a bland café in terminal 4 and as she mindlessly perused the W H Smith bookstore.
     To distract herself from the confounding narrative that was then playing out between her and Sylvan, she read the synopses on the back flaps of the paperbacks on the wall. Life seemed so lurid, with so much needless treachery and shame. She shuddered as she placed each one back on the shelf. Was there nothing of life that was both captivating- worth talking or writing about- and sustainably pleasant?
     It became clear that there was no flight for her that night, so she checked in to the Hilton Heathrow and sipped wine at the bar there, lingering despite her emotional fatigue because she feared if she was alone in her room she would be struck by a terrifying sadness. A taught, wiry Italian man gave her a flirtatious smile as he walked back. It was far from subtle, and under different circumstances Louise would have been flattered or perhaps even gotten a rise out of it. But then all Louise could think about was the impossibility of sustaining affection. Then and there she decided her next holiday would be alone. And then, perhaps, when a stud smiled at her suggestively, she would follow him without being invested.