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The diamond doesn’t just glint; it shines with the intensity of a floodlight and makes her wish she could put the blindfold back on. The deceptively innocent looking item sits in a tiny box which somehow seems to have the power to create a vortex that makes the rest of the world disappear because nothing seems to exist other than the ring and the small black coffin that it is ensconced in. She knows the meaning of the object and, by extension, George’s intentions but it seems impossible to believe that this is actually happening. She hears his voice ask her the most ridiculous of questions and even though she knew it was going to happen, she is blown away. As he continues to prattle on about love she manages to regroup and responds in the only way she knows how, calling him on his impropriety, grounding herself in the familiar world of etiquette and decorum. She feels more comfortable here; she is an expert in creating illusions of perfection and serenity, using them to weave covers that deftly hide ugliness, failings and sordid secrets. She raises her protest and a million tiny alarm bells sound in her head as he dismisses the proximity to Rex’s death as a mere inconvenience, he makes it sound trivial as though it couldn’t possibly be an obstacle, and continues to talk about building a life together.
His mother and her friend appear and she feels the mask of shocked politeness cement itself to her face, preventing her for saying anything that she is actually thinking or feeling. She wants to know how he could believe that this is what she wants but maybe that’s why the onlookers are here to force her to acquiesce to his proposal in order to prevent these strangers witnessing a distasteful scene. She dismisses her fears regarding his nefarious motives because she has to admit that she has given him a reasonable amount of encouragement. She has been spending time with him, she has introduced him to her children, she’s taken a trip away with him and she has slept with him. She wonders if quoting the fact that it has only been seven weeks since her husband’s death was as much for her benefit as it was for his, in seven short weeks she has tripled the number of people that she has had sex with, turning herself from a puritanical widow who had only ever slept with her husband to a morally bereft whore. She is sure that her recent carnal activities qualify her to be described with a harsher term but it’s not a word that she can bring herself to use, ever, not just about herself, she can’t even bring herself to label Edie Britt with that particular moniker.
The cruel and bitter irony of it all is that the motivations behind her recent sexual escapades have been completely misinterpreted by those involved. Lynette is convinced that what happened between them was driven by revenge and spite when this couldn’t be further from the truth, she doesn’t know if something can technically termed love making if it was a little one-sided but there doesn’t seem to be any other way to describe it and she knows that if she had have been given the chance, she would have made love to Lynette in return. The moment may have spawned a fissure in their relationship that she doesn’t know how to seal but that only makes it seem more precious, a suspended instant where they were able to ignore all the impediments that life places in their way and finally be true to themselves. It haunts her night and day, reminding her of what she let slip through her fingers but she tries to keep the memory pure, to encase it in a protective bubble so that she can enjoy it in isolation from the pain and loss that surround it. George, who actually was the victim of her spite, sees something beautiful in her selfish and misguided act. She is strong and capable and has no idea why she was terrified when he talked about leaving her, she doesn’t need him, his entire purpose was to deflect her feelings for Lynette but that doesn’t matter anymore, she opened herself up to Lynette, in every sense of the word, and earned herself rejection and scorn. He was meant to make her feel better, to help her believe that someone wanted her and to fill the great void inside of her but it didn’t work. With every stroke and touch she imagined the two that had come before him. Rex watching her from beyond the grave as she fell from grace and finally committed an act that he wouldn’t be able to forgive - she felt his presence in the room and wanted to scream at him, wanted to tell him that this was all that was left of the girl who used to drink milk from the carton and that he should have been careful what he wished for. Lynette felt more like a ghost than Rex, a shadowy spectre, she lingered in the sense memory of contact that had brought unadulterated pleasure, as though she had been imprinted into Bree’s flesh and nothing else would ever compare. George’s aggressive and overenthusiastic technique certainly failed to capture even a fraction of the magic that Lynette had produced. She was grateful that he was innocent and naïve enough to mistake her weeping for true tears of joy but later, as she sat in the chair and watched him sleep, she wanted to peel her skin from her body, to remove any evidence that she had ever let him touch her and she knew that a relationship with him wasn’t sustainable and she was sure he must know it too, yet here he was asking her to be his wife.
She tries to find the words that would allow her to decline his offer without breaking his heart but her efforts stall as she looks beyond his expectant face to that of his mother and her friend. There is probably nothing untoward about their behaviour but all she sees is two woman standing a little too close, trying, but failing, to hide themselves behind a pillar and she has a sudden flash of insight. She is convinced that if she doesn’t do something to change things, at some point Lynette’s anger will fade and that what she is witnessing an enactment of their future together. All they will have will be fears and crippling secrets and having to keep their relationship hidden will erode everything that is special about it until they become careless, touching in public or not bothering to re-button clothes, because there will no longer be anything worth protecting. She weighs her options and takes the path of least resistance, agreeing to his proposal in the most uneffusive manner but he doesn’t seem concerned. In fact he doesn’t really seem to feel that she is an important part of this moment and is busy sharing his jubilation with the people in the room for whom this is happy news while she gulps down wine in an attempt to burn his hug from her memory.
At least she has enough sense to attempt to express her reservations about her decision to Dr Goldfine and she knows that all the concerns that he raises in return are reasonable and logical but, even though she wants him to convince her that she can’t marry George, they are also easily dismissible given that he doesn’t know all the facts. It is probably pointless to have a therapist from whom you withhold important details and she wonders if maybe she needs to have therapy about her therapy but the problem is that there are things that she cannot divulge, like her involvement in a conspiracy to cover up a crime and once you are in a position where you have to withhold information, it is easy to convince yourself that there are many things that he doesn’t need to know. Lynette is, naturally, one of the things that she feels it is best for her therapist not to learn about but she doesn’t know if this is because she is ashamed of her feelings and worried about his judgement on the issue or if it is simply something that is too important to bring to light in the sterile environment of his office. Sometimes she is tempted to try and accidentally run into him out side of the office to see if she is prepared to talk about Lynette there but deep down she knows that she is frightened of adding another voice to the chorus of doubt that tells her she is deluding herself about Lynette and that she is nothing but a sinful adulteress.
She wishes that there was somewhere that she was permitted to be herself, where she didn’t have to carefully monitor everything she said and did, where she could break down the walls that she has had to build around aspects of her life but she can’t risk destabilising her highly compartmentalised existence. Of course being herself would require knowing who she is and she doesn’t know who that is anymore, hasn’t for a very long time. She did feel naked without her wedding ring; she has spent so long being defined by her relationships that she fears that if she not Rex’s wife, or at least his widow, then she is nothing. She remains Andrew and Danielle’s mother but her children are getting old and they will grow and leave her. Being Mrs George Williams may not be the title that her heart desires but, unlike anything that she may ever have with Lynette, it is position that she can admit to publicly.
She finds herself desperately trying to justify her decision to accept George’s proposal and her reasoning sounds weak even to her own ears but she is not lying when she says that, at this point, she would chose comfort and similar interests in favour of true love. She does want to married to someone who appreciates the things that she does and shares her view on the world but she knows that it’s not that simple, George covers those criteria but he comes with strings attached, he will never be content to be in a marriage where he only has access to her thoughts and feelings, he wants more. The problem is that for all their compatibly, she can’t make herself want him back, Rex and Lynette have placed their fingerprints on her soul, without trying they changed her and claimed her and it seems that her body doesn’t want to accept anybody else. George can try to woo and seduce her all he likes but she won’t be able to enjoy any of his affections, there is nothing that he can do, he never even had a chance.
By the time she arrives to collect George for the movies she has resolved the issue in her head - she can live with marrying him, she can settle for a life of comfortable companionship and mutual interests and will do her best to ignore the repulsion she feels every time he touches her. In a way, it’s not all that different to when she let Rex engage in his perverted little sex games. She’s known true love and that doesn’t make for a perfect marriage, it didn’t keep Rex faithful and didn’t stop her falling in love with someone else and it doesn’t change the fact that Lynette is a married woman. She can don the persona of a woman in love with George just as easily as she can don the carefully co-ordinated pastel outfits that signify the end of her mourning period. Her conviction doesn’t last though; it dies during the ambush of a party that George and his suddenly omnipresent mother have organised. The affair is excoriating, a world full of people who flaunt false sincerity like a badge of honour, to be honest the kind of people that she used to socialise with but this group has been fed an image of her directly from George’s smitten mind and their excitement and their belief that George has finally found someone to love him are like sirens warning her that she is using a flesh and blood human being with real feelings and even though she thought she had reached the saturation point with regard to guilt, it seems there is always room for more. The guilt isn’t enough to dissuade her however and she would have continued to smile her way through the inane small talk if the subject of children had not come up. She doesn’t want to have children with George and not just because she believes, thanks to Andrew’s recent behaviour, that she really shouldn’t be propagating her genes. The mockery of a union that she would be prepared to enter into with George is not something that should be solidified with a child, it will never be a family and it alarms her that George can not see that. She already has a family, it’s not a mistake she wants to make twice and even if she were willing to make that mistake again, it wouldn’t be with George, it would involve adopting a quartet of hell raisers but that is just an idle fantasy that can never come to pass.
Even though he agrees to slow things down, she feels George’s eyes boring into her as she drives away and gets the distinct impression that he is not going to be capable of living up to his side of the bargain but has no idea what to do about it. She does pause a moment to question whether she should be driving given the amount of champagne that she consumed at George’s little soiree but then decides that death or jail may actually be preferable to anything else life has to offer her at the moment. When she gets home she considers calling Lynette but in the end decides that the only solace that she is going to find tonight can be poured into a wine glass. As the liquid infuses her blood and dulls her brain, she realises that maybe she has found a whole new relationship by which she will be defined but she is too numb to care.