Revolutionary Road

  “When?” He was as bashful as a schoolboy, unable to look her full in the face.

  “The first time you made love to me.”

  The coffee table tipped absurdly and banged straight again, rattling its cups, as he moved from its edge to the edge of the sofa and took her in his arms; and the evening was over.

  It wasn’t until a good many such evenings had passed—until the time, in fact, when he had again begun to think in terms of time passing—that the first faint discordances crept into their talk.

  Once he interrupted her to say, “Listen, why do we keep talking about Paris? Don’t they have government agencies pretty much all over Europe? Why not Rome? Or Venice, or some place like Greece, even? I mean let’s keep an open mind; Paris isn’t the only place.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” She was impatiently brushing a fleck of ash off her lap. “But it does seem the most logical place to start, doesn’t it? With the advantage of your knowing the language and everything?”

  If he’d looked at the window at that moment he would have seen the picture of a frightened liar. The language! Had he ever really led her to believe he could speak French?

  “Well,” he said, chuckling and walking away from her, “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I’ve probably forgotten most of what little I knew, and I mean I never did know the language in the sense of—you know, being able to speak it fluently or anything; just barely enough to get by.”

  “That’s all we’ll need. You’ll pick it up again in no time. We both will. And besides, at least you’ve been there. You know how the city’s laid out and what the various neighborhoods are like; that’s important.”

  And he silently assured himself that this, after all, was substantially true. He knew where most of the picture-postcard landmarks were, on the strength of his several three-day passes in the city long ago; he also knew how to go from any of those places to where the American PX and Red Cross Club had once been established, and how to go from those points to the Place Pigalle, and how to choose the better kind of prostitute there and what her room would probably smell like. He knew those things, and he knew too that the best part of Paris, the part where the people really knew how to live, began around St. Germain des Prés and extended southeast (or was it southwest?) as far as the Café Dome. But this latter knowledge was based more on his reading of The Sun Also Rises in high school than in his real-life venturings into the district, which had mostly been lonely and footsore. He had admired the ancient delicacy of the buildings and the way the street lamps made soft explosions of light green in the trees at night, and the way each long, bright café awning would prove to reveal a sea of intelligently walking faces as he passed; but the white wine gave him a headache and the talking faces all seemed, on closer inspection, to belong either to intimidating men with beards or to women whose eyes could sum him up and dismiss him in less than a second. The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he’d walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves, and time after time he had ended up drunk and puking over the tailgate of the truck that bore him jolting back into the army.

  Je suis, he practiced to himself while April went on talking; tu es; nous sommes; vous êtes; ils sont.

  “…better once we get settled,” she was saying, “don’t you think? You’re not listening.”

  “Sure I am. No, I’m sorry, I guess I wasn’t.” And he sat down on the coffee table, smiling with what he hoped was a disarming candor. “I was just thinking that none of this is going to be easy—taking off to a foreign country with the kids and all. I mean, we’ll be running into a lot of problems we can’t even begin to anticipate from this end.”

  “Well, certainly we will,” she said. “And certainly it’s not going to be easy. Do you know anything worth doing that is?”

  “Of course not. You’re right. I’m just kind of tired tonight, I guess. Would you like a drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  He went to the kitchen and got one for himself, which brightened him; and there were no further difficulties until the next night, or the next, when she made a startling disclosure about how she’d spent her day.

  He had assumed that she too would be lazy and absent-minded in the daytime; he had pictured her taking long baths and devoting whole hours to the bedroom mirror, trying on different dresses and new ways of fixing her hair—perhaps leaving the mirror only to waltz lightly away on the strains of imaginary violins, whirling in a dream through the sunlit house and returning to smile over her shoulder at her own flushed image, and then having to hurry to get the beds made and the rooms in order in time for his homecoming. But it turned out that on this particular day she had driven to New York right after breakfast, had undergone an interview and filled out a lengthy job application with an overseas employment office, had gone from there to make the necessary arrangements for their passports, had obtained three travel brochures and the schedules of half a dozen steamship companies and airlines, had bought two new traveling bags, a French dictionary, a street guide to Paris, a copy of Babar the Elephant for the children and a book called Brighter French (“For Bright People Who Already Know Some”), and had sped home and relieved the baby sitter just in time to get the dinner started and mix a pitcherful of martinis.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “Not really. It was sort of invigorating. Do you realize how long it’s been since I spent a day in town? I was going to pop into the office at lunchtime and surprise you, but there wasn’t time. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. It just sort of throws me, that’s all; the amount of stuff you can get done in one day. Pretty impressive.”

  “You’re annoyed,” she said, “aren’t you. Oh, and I don’t blame you.” She puckered her face into what looked distressingly like the understanding simper of the wife in a television comedy. “It must seem as if I’m sort of taking over, doesn’t it—taking charge of everything.”

  “No,” he protested, “no, listen, don’t be silly; I’m not annoyed. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter, though. It’s like when I mow the lawn, or something. I knew I should’ve left the passports and the travel agent for you to handle, but I was right there in the neighborhood and it seemed silly not to stop in. Oh, but I am sorry.”

  “Look, will you cut it out? I’m going to start getting annoyed in a minute, if you keep on at this. Will you please forget it?”

  “All right.”

  “This probably won’t be much use to us,” he said, fingering through the pages of Brighter French. “I mean, I think it’s a little advanced.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I guess it’s sort of a supercilious little book; I just grabbed it in a hurry. That’s another thing I should’ve left for you to do. You’re always much better at things like that than I am.”

  It was the night after that when she told him, looking remorseful, that she had some bad news. “I mean not really bad, but annoying. First of all Mrs. Givings called up today and issued this very formal invitation to dinner tomorrow night, and naturally I said no; I said we couldn’t get a baby sitter. Then she started trying to pin me down for a night next week and I kept begging off, until I realized we are going to have to see her soon anyway, about putting the house on the market, so I said why didn’t they come here for dinner.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “No, don’t worry, they’re not coming—you know how she is. She kept babbling about not wanting to put us to any trouble—Lord, what a pain that woman can be—and I kept insisting we did want to see her anyway, on business, and this went on for half an hour until I finally worked her around to saying she’d come over alone tomorrow night. So it’ll be after dinner, strictly business, and with any kind of luck we’ll never have to see her again except to sell the house.”

  “Fine.”

  “Ye
s, but here’s the trouble. I’d completely forgotten we were supposed to be going to the Campbells’ tomorrow night. So I called Milly and tried using the same lie about the baby sitter, and she seemed—I don’t know, really upset. You know how Milly is sometimes? It’s like dealing with a child. And the first thing I knew she had me saying yes, we’d come tonight instead. So there goes the weekend—Campbells tonight, Givings tomorrow. I’m awfully sorry, Frank.”

  “Hell, that’s all right. Is that all you meant by bad news?”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

  He didn’t mind at all. In fact, he realized as he washed up and changed his shirt, he was looking forward with eagerness to telling the Campbells of the plan. A thing like this never really seemed real until you’d told somebody about it.

  “Listen, though, April,” he said, stuffing in his shirttail. “When we’re breaking it to Mrs. Givings, there isn’t any reason why we have to tell her what we’re going to do in Europe, is there? I mean I think she thinks I’m enough of a creep as it is.”

  “Of course not.” She looked surprised at the very idea of telling Mrs. Givings anything at all beyond the simple fact of their wish to sell the house. “What possible business is it of hers? There’s no need to tell the Campbells either, for that matter.”

  “Oh no,” he said quickly, “we have to tell them—” and he almost said, “They’re our friends” before he caught himself. “I mean, you know; of course we don’t have to. But why not?”

  TWO

  SHEPPARD SEARS CAMPBELL loved to shine his shoes. It was a love he had learned in the army (he was a veteran of three campaigns with a famous airborne division) and even now, though civilian cordovans were far less rewarding than the heavy jump boots of the old days, the acrid smell and crouching vigor of the job held rich associations of esprit de corps. He sang a kind of old time, big-band swing while he did it, alternating the husky lyrics with a squint-eyed, loose-lipped sound—Buddappa banh! Banh! Banh!”—to simulate the brass section, and now and then he would pause to take a swig from the can of beer that stood on the floor beside him. Then he would stretch his back, scratch the yellowed armpits of his T-shirt and permit himself a long and satisfying belch.

  “What time the Wheelers coming, doll?” he asked his wife, who was studying herself, sensibly, in the mirror of her flounced dressing table.

  “Eight-thirty, sweetie.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “If I want to get a shower, I better haul ass.” Squinting, he flexed the toes in his right shoe to test its gleam before he crouched again, snapped his rag, and went to work on the left one.

  The stolid peasant’s look that glazed his face as he worked was only an occasional expression with Shep Campbell nowadays—he saved it for his shoe-shining mood or his tire-changing mood—but it held the vestige of a force that had once laid claim to the whole of his heart. For years, boy and man, he had yearned above all to be insensitive and ill-bred, to hold his own among the sullen boys and men whose real or imagined jeers had haunted his childhood, to deny by an effort of will what for a long time had been the most shameful facts of his life: that he’d been raised in a succession of brownstone and penthouse apartments in the vicinity of Sutton Place, schooled by private tutors and allowed to play with other children only under the smiling eye of his English nanny or his French ma’m’selle, and that his wealthily divorced mother had insisted, until he was eleven years old, on dressing him every Sunday in “adorable” tartan kilts that came from Bergdorf Goodman.

  “She woulda made a God damn lollypop outa me!” he sometimes ranted even now, to the few friends with whom he could bring himself to talk about his mother, but in calmer, wiser moments he had long since found the compassion to forgive her. Nobody’s parents were perfect; and besides, whatever her intentions might have been, he knew she’d never really had a chance. From earliest adolescence, from the time his child’s physique began to coarsen into the slope-shouldered build of a wrestler, if not before, he had been lost forever to her fluttering grasp. Anything in the world that could even faintly be connected with what his mother called “cultivated” or “nice” was anathema to Shep Campbell in those formative years, and everything she called “vulgar” was his heart’s desire. At his small and expensive prep school he found it easy to become the ill-dressed, hell-raising lout of the student body, feared and admired and vaguely pitied on the assumption that he was one of the charity boys; after being expelled in his senior year he moved straight, to his mother’s horror, into the swarm of a Manhattan high school, and into minor scrapes with the police, until the arrival of his eighteenth birthday sent him whooping and hollering into the paratroops, resolved to acquit himself not only with conspicuous bravery but with that other attribute so highly prized by soldiers, the quality of being a tough son of a bitch.

  He made the grade on both counts, and the war seemed only to deepen the urgency of his quest. Afterwards it seemed entirely logical for him to shrug off all his mother’s tearful arguments for Princeton or Williams and go slouching away instead to a third-rate institute of technology in the Middle West (“On the G.I. Bill,” he had always explained, as if any possibility of private means would have made him effete). There, dozing through his classes in a leather jacket or lurching at night in the spit-and-sawdust company of other campus toughs, growling his beer-bloated disdain for the very idea of liberal arts, he learned the unquestionably masculine, unquestionably middle-class trade of mechanical engineering. It was there too that he found his wife, a small, soft, worshipful clerk in the bursar’s office, and fathered the first of his sons; and it wasn’t until several years later that the great reaction set in.

  What happened then—he was later to call it “the time I sort of went crazy”—was that he woke up to find himself employed in a hydraulic machinery plant a hundred miles from Phoenix, Arizona, and living in one of four hundred close-set, identical houses in the desert, a sun-baked box of a house with four framed mountain scenes from the dimestore on its walls and five brown engineering manuals in the whole naked width of its bookshelves, a box that rang every night to the boom of television or the shrill noise of neighbors dropping in for Canasta.

  Sheppard Sears Campbell had to admit he felt forlorn among these young men with blunt, prematurely settled faces, and these girls who shrieked in paralyzing laughter over bathroom jokes (“Harry, Harry, tell the one about the man got caught in the ladies’ john!”) or folded their lips in respectful silence while their husbands argued automobiles (“Now, you take the Chevy; far as I’m concerned you can have any Chevy ever built, bar none”) and he rapidly began to see himself as an impostor and a fool. All at once it seemed that the high adventure of pretending to be something he was not had led him into a way of life he didn’t want and couldn’t stand, that in defying his mother he had turned his back on his birthright.

  Bright visions came to haunt him of a world that could and should have been his, a world of intellect and sensibility that now lay forever mixed in his mind with “the East.” In the East, he then believed, a man went to college not for vocational training but in disciplined search for wisdom and beauty, and nobody over the age of twelve believed that those words were for sissies. In the East, wearing rumpled tweeds and flannels, he could have strolled for hours among ancient elms and clock towers, talking with his friends, and his friends would have been the cream of their generation. The girls of the East were marvelously slim and graceful; they moved with the authority of places like Bennington and Holyoke; they spoke intelligently in low, subtle voices, and they never giggled. On sharp winter evenings you could meet them for cocktails at the Biltmore and take them to the theater, and afterwards, warmed with brandy, they would come with you for a drive to a snowbound New England inn, where they’d slip happily into bed with you under an eiderdown quilt. In the East, when college was over, you could put off going seriously to work until you’d spent a few years in a book-lined bachelor flat, with intervals of European travel, and when you f
ound your true vocation at last it was through a process of informed and unhurried selection; just as when you married at last it was to solemnize the last and best of your many long, sophisticated affairs.

  Brooding on these fantasies, it wasn’t long before Shep Campbell gained a reputation as a snob at the hydraulics plant. He antagonized Milly, too, and frightened her, for he had become a moody listener to classical music and a sulking reader of literary quarterlies. He seldom talked to her, and when he did it was never in his old unique blend of New York street boy and Indiana farmer, a mixture she had always found “real cute,” but in a new rhythm of brisk impatience that sounded alarmingly like an English accent. And then one Sunday night, after he’d been drinking all day and snapping at the children, she found herself cowering in tears with the baby at her breast while her husband called her an ignorant cunt and broke three bones of his fist against the wall.

  A week later, still pale and shaken, she had helped him load clothes and blankets and kitchenware into the car and they’d set off on their dusty Eastward pilgrimage; and the six months in New York that followed, while he tried to decide whether to go on being an engineer—that period had been, Shep knew, the hardest time of Milly’s life. The first rude surprise was that his mother’s money was gone (there had never really been very much of it in the first place, and now there was barely enough to keep her decently in a residence hotel, a querulous, genteel old lady with a cat), and there were hundreds of other rude surprises in the overwhelming fact of New York itself, which turned out to be big and dirty and loud and cruel. Dribbling their savings away on cheap food and furnished rooms, never knowing where Shep was or what kind of a mood he’d be in when he came home, never knowing what to say when he talked disjointedly of graduate courses in music and philosophy, or when he wanted to lounge for hours in the dry fountain of Washington Square with a four-day growth of beard, she had more than once gone as far as to look up “psychiatrists” in the Classified New York Telephone Directory. But at last he had settled for the job with Allied Precision in Stamford, they had moved out to a rented house and then to the Revolutionary Hill Estates, and Milly’s life had taken on a normal texture once again.