Revolutionary Road

  It was a relief, at any rate, to be sitting down. It made Pollock less tall and allowed Frank to conceal, under the table, the fact that he was picking and tearing at a loose strip of skin along his left thumbnail while Pollock talked. Was Frank married? Children? Where did he live? Well, it certainly was wise to live in the country when you had kids; but how did Frank feel about commuting? It was almost exactly like Oat Fields wishing to know how he felt about school and baseball.

  “You know what impressed me most about that piece of yours?” Pollock asked over his martini, the stemmed glass of which looked very fragile in his hand. “The logic and the clarity of it. You hit each point in the right place and you drove it home. To me it wasn’t like a piece of reading matter at all. It was like a man talking.”

  Frank ducked his head. “Well, as a matter of fact, that’s what it was. I just talked it into the Dictaphone, you see. Actually the whole thing was more or less an accident. Our department isn’t supposed to handle the creative end or the production end of these things, you see; that’s the agency’s job. All we’re supposed to do is control the distribution of their stuff to the field.”

  Pollock nodded, chewing on his gin-soaked olive. “Let me tell you something. I’m having another of these, you with me? Good. Let me tell you something, Frank. I’m not interested in creative ends or production ends or who’s supposed to control the distribution of what. I’m interested in one thing, and one thing only: selling the electronic computer to the American businessman. Frank, a lot of people tend to look down on plain old-fashioned selling today, but I want to tell you something. Back when I was first breaking into the selling field a very wise and wonderful older man told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said to me, ‘Bart, everything is selling.’ He said, ‘Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale.’ He said, ‘You don’t believe me? All right, look at it this way.’ He said, ‘Bart, where the hell do you think you’d be if your father hadn’t sold your mother a bill of goods?’”

  “And I kept sitting there getting drunk and thinking ‘What the hell does this guy want from me?’” he would tell April tonight. “Of course I kept thinking none of it matters a damn, but still; he really had me guessing. And it’s true about these big, bluff, rough-diamond types, you know it? They do have a certain personal magnetism. He does, anyway.”

  “Now of course, good selling today consists of many things, the combining of many forces, and as you know this is particularly true when you’ve got an idea to sell instead of just a product. Take a job like ours, introducing a whole new concept of business control, and hell, it gets so you can’t hardly see the woods for the trees. You got your market research people, you got your advertising and your whaddyacallit, your public relations people; you got to coordinate all these forces into one basic, overall selling effort. I like to think of it as building a bridge.” He squinted and used one forefinger to describe a slow aerial arc between the ash tray and the celery-and-olives dish. “A bridge of understanding, a bridge of communication between the science of electrox—” he hiccupped—“Excuse me. The science of electronics and the practical, everyday world of commercial management. Now, you take a company like Knox.” He looked regretfully into the empty glass of his second, or possibly his third, martini. “Very old, very slow, very conservative—hell, you know this as well as I do: our whole operation’s geared to selling typewriters and file cabinets and clankety-clank old punched-card machines, and half the old farts on the payroll think McKinley’s in the White House. On the other hand—you want to order now, or wait a while? All right, sir, let’s have a look. The ragout’s very tasty here and so’s the smoked salmon and so’s the mushroom omelet and so’s the lemon sole. Fine and dandy, make it two. Couple more of these things too, while you’re at it. Right. Now, you might say this company’s like some real old, tired old man. On the other hand—” He shot his cuffs and leaned massively on the table, eyes bulging. Beads of sweat had begun to appear among the big tan freckles of his head. “On the other hand, here comes this whole revolutionary concept of electronic data processing, and Frank, let’s face it: this is a newborn baby.” He cradled an imaginary infant in both hands, and then he shook them quickly as if to rid his fingers of a glutinous fluid. “I mean it’s still wet! I mean they just now hauled it out and turned it over and slapped its ass and by Jesus its belly button’s still hangin’ out sore as a boil! You follow me? All right; you take this little-biddy newborn baby and you give it to this old, old man, or this old woman, let’s say, these old married folks, and whaddya think’s gunna happen? Why, they’re gunna let it shrivel up and die, that’s what. They’re gunna take it and lay it away in a dresser drawer someplace and give it sour old milk to suck and never change its pants, and are you tryna tell me that baby’ll ever grow up healthy and strong? Why hell that baby’s got no more chance ’n a fiddler’s bitch. Let me give an example.”

  And he gave one example after another, while Frank did his best to follow him. After a while he stopped to blot his head with a handkerchief, looking bewildered. “And that’s the problem,” he said. “That’s pretty much what we’re up against.” Sighting grimly and carefully on the last of his drink, he downed it in a swallow and fell to work on his cooling food, which seemed to sober him. He went on talking as he ate but he was quieter now and more dignified, using words like “obviously” and “furthermore” instead of “fart” and “belly button.” His eyes no longer protruded; he had left off being the backwoods tycoon and was resuming his customary role as balanced, moderate executive. Had Frank considered the tremendous effect of the computer on the business life of the future? It was, Bart Pollock could assure him, food for thought. And he went on and on, modestly confessing his ignorance of technicalities, disparaging his right to speak as a prophet, earnestly losing his way in the labyrinthine structure of his sentences.

  Watching him and trying to listen, Frank found that his own three martinis (or was it four?) had amplified the sounds of the restaurant into a sea of noise that jammed his eardrums, and had caused a dark mist to close in on all four sides of his vision so that only the things coming directly before him could be seen at all, and they with a terrible clarity: his food, the bubbles in his glass of ice water, Bart Pollock’s tirelessly moving mouth. He used the full power of this pinpoint scrutiny to watch Bart Pollock’s table manners, to see if he would leave white curds on the rim of his glass or soak his roll in the gravy boat, and he felt enormously, drunkenly gratified on being able to establish that Bart Pollock did neither of those things. Before long Pollock subsided, with visible relief, into a conversational vein that had less to do with abstractions than with company personalities, and that was when Frank felt it safe to bring up the topic nearest his heart.

  “Bart,” he said. “Do you happen to remember a man here in the Home Office named Otis Fields?”

  Pollock blew a long jet of cigarette smoke and watched it fade. “No, I don’t believe I—” he began, but then he blinked happily to attention. “Oh, Oat Fields. Oh, hell, yes, many years ago. Oat Fields was one of our general sales managers back in—Lord, this goes back a good many—hey, hold on, though. You couldn’t ’ve been around then.”

  And Frank, surprised at the fluency of his own voice, gave a brief account of the last time he’d sat at a luncheon table very much like this one.

  “Earl Wheeler,” Pollock said, leaning back to squint in the effort of memory. “Earl Wheeler. Newark, you said? Wait a second. I do remember a Wheeler and I think he had a name like Earl—no, but that was in Harrisburg, or Wilmington, and anyway, he was a much older man.”

  “Harrisburg, that’s right. That was later, though. Harrisburg was the last place he worked. The Newark job was earlier, back around ’thirty-five or -six. Then he also worked in Philadelphia a while, and Providence—pretty much all over the Eastern Region. That’s why I grew up in about fourteen different places, you see.” And he was startled to hear a note of self
-pity creeping into his voice: “Never did get much of a chance to feel at home anywhere.”

  “Earl Wheeler,” Pollock was saying. “Why hell, of course I remember him. And you see the reason I didn’t connect him with Newark is because that was before my time. But I do recall Earl Wheeler very clearly in Harrisburg; only thing is I had the impression he was more of an elderly man. I’m probably—”

  “You’re right. He was. He already had two full-grown kids by the time I was born, you see—” and he almost caught himself saying, “I was the accident, you see; I was the one they didn’t want.” Hours later, sobering up and trying to remember this part of the talk, he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t said that; he couldn’t even be sure that he hadn’t broken into a wild shout of laughter and said, “You see? You see, Bart? They laid me away in a dresser drawer and gave me sour old milk to suck—” and that he and Bart Pollock hadn’t risen up to punch each other’s arms at the hilarity of this joke and laughed and laughed until they cried and fell into the coffee cups.

  But that didn’t happen. What happened instead was Bart Pollock’s shaking his head in wonderment and saying, “Isn’t that something? And imagine your remembering this restaurant all these years; even remembering old Oat Fields’s name.”

  “Well, it’s not too surprising. It was the only time my father ever took me to New York, for one thing; besides, a hell of a lot depended on that day. He really thought Fields was going to give him a Home Office job, you see. He and my mother had the whole thing planned, the house in Westchester and all the rest of it. I don’t think he ever did get over it.”

  Pollock respectfully lowered his eyes. “Well, of course that’s—that’s the breaks in this business.” And then he hurried on to more cheerful aspects of the story. “No, but this is really interesting, Frank. I had no idea you were the son of a Knox man. Funny Ted didn’t mention it.”

  “I don’t think Ted knows it. It wasn’t a thing I featured when I took the job.”

  And now Bart Pollock was frowning and smiling at the same time. “Hold on here a second. You mean to say your dad sold for us all his life and you never even let on?”

  “Well yes, actually, that’s right. I didn’t. He was retired then, and I just—I don’t know; anyway, I didn’t. It seemed important not to at the time.”

  “I’ll tell you something, Frank. I admire that. You didn’t want anybody giving you a special break here and a special break there; you wanted to make good on your own. Right?”

  Frank shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “No, it wasn’t exactly that. I don’t know. It was pretty complicated.”

  “A thing like that is complicated,” Bart Pollock said with solemnity. “Many people wouldn’t understand a thing like that, Frank, but I’ll tell you something. I admire it. I bet your dad did too. Didn’t he? Or no, wait a minute.” He leaned back, smiling and cannily narrowing his eyes. “Wait a minute. Let me see how good a judge of character I am. I bet I know what happened. This is just a guess, now.” He winked. “An educated guess. I bet you went ahead and let your dad think his name had helped you get the job, just to please him. Am I right?”

  And the disturbing fact of the matter was that he was. On an autumn day of that year, feeling stiff and formal in a new serge suit, Frank had taken his wife to visit his parents; and all the way out to Harrisburg he’d planned to be elaborately, sophisticatedly offhand in the announcing of his double piece of news, the baby and the job. “Oh, and by the way, I’ve got a steadier kind of job now, too,” he had planned to say, “kind of a stupid job, nothing I’m interested in, but the money’s nice.” And then he would let the old man have it.

  But when the moment came, in that overstuffed Harrisburg living room with its smell of weakness and medicine and approaching death, with his father doing his best to be benign, his mother doing her best to be tearfully pleased about the baby and April doing her best to be sweetly and shyly proud—when all the lying tenderness of that moment came it had robbed him of his nerve, and he’d blurted it out—a job in the Home Office!—like a little boy come home with a good report card.

  “Who’d you see there?” Earl Wheeler had demanded, looking ten years younger than he’d looked ten minutes before. “Ted who? Bandy? Don’t believe I know him; course, I’ve forgotten a lot of the names. He knew me, though, I guess, didn’t he?”

  And “Oh yes,” Frank had heard himself saying over a preposterous swelling in his throat. “Oh yes, certainly. He spoke very highly of you, Dad.”

  And it wasn’t until they were on the train again, going back to New York, that he’d regained enough composure to pound his fist on his knee and say, “He beat me! Isn’t that the damnedest thing? The old bastard beat me again.”

  “I knew it,” Bart Pollock was saying now, his eyes twinkling and suffused with heart-warmth. “I’ll tell you something, Frank: I’m seldom wrong in my hunches about people. Care for a little cordial or a little B and B or something with your dessert?”

  “And do you mean to say you sat through the whole lunch,” April might well ask tonight, “and told him your whole life story, and never even got around to telling him you’re leaving the company in the fall? Whatever was the point of that?”

  But Pollock was making it impossible, now, to get a word in edgewise. He was getting down, at last, to business. Who was going to nurse that baby? Who was going to build that bridge?

  “…Your public relations expert? Your electronics engineer? Your management consultant? Well, now, certainly, all of them are going to play important roles in the overall picture; each of them is going to offer very valuable specialized knowledge in their respective fields. But here’s the point. No single one of them has the right background or the right qualifications for the job. Frank, I’ve talked to some of the top advertising and promotion men in the business. I’ve talked to some of the top technical men in the computer field and I’ve talked to some of the top business administration men in the country, and we’ve all of us pretty much come to this conclusion: it’s a completely new kind of job, and we’re going to have to develop a completely new kind of talent to do it.

  “Now, the past six months or so I’ve been going around sounding men out, inside the company and outside too. So far I’ve got my eye on half a dozen young men with various backgrounds, and I hope to line up half a dozen more. You see what I’m doing? I’m recruiting myself a team. Now let me”—he held up a thick hand to ward off any interruptions—“let me be more specific. These little pieces you’re doing for us now are only the beginning. I want you to finish that series the way we mapped it out the other day in Ted’s office; that’s fine; but what I’m driving at now goes way beyond that. As I say, this whole project’s still taking shape, nothing’s definite yet, but this’ll show you the direction of my thinking. I’ve got a hunch you’re the kind of a fella I could send out to groups of people all over the country—civic groups, business seminars, groups of our own field sales people as well as customers and prospects, and all you’d do is stand up in front of those groups and talk. You’d talk computers, chapter and verse; you’d answer questions; you’d put the electronic data processing story over in the kind of language a businessman can understand. Frank, maybe it’s the old-time salesman in me, but I’ve always had one conviction, and that’s this: when you’re trying to sell an idea, I don’t care how complicated or what it may be, you’ll never find a more effective instrument of persuasion than the living human voice.”

  “Well, Bart, before you go any further, there’s something I—” He felt tight in the chest and short of breath. “I mean I couldn’t very well say this in Ted’s office the other day because I haven’t told him about it yet, but the thing is I’m planning to leave the company in the fall. I guess I should’ve made that clear earlier; now I feel sort of—I mean I really am sorry if this conflicts with your—”

  “You mean to say you apologized to him?” April might ask. “As if you had to ask his permission to leave, or something?”
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  “No!” he would insist. “Of course I didn’t apologize to him. Will you give me a chance? I told him, that’s all. Naturally it was a little awkward; it was bound to be awkward after the way he’d been talking; can’t you see that?”

  “Well, now I am sore at Bandy,” Pollock was saying. “Let a man of your caliber go to waste for seven years and then lose you to another outfit.” He shook his head.

  “Oh, it’s not to another outfit—I mean you know; it’s not anything else in the business machine field.”

  “Well, I’m glad of that, anyway. Frank, you’ve been aboveboard with me and I appreciate it; now I’ll be aboveboard with you. I don’t want to pry into things that’re none of my business, but can you tell me this? Can you tell me how definite a commitment you’ve made on this other thing?”

  “Well—pretty definite, I’m afraid, Bart. It’s kind of hard to—well, yes. Quite definite.”

  “Because here’s my point. If it’s a question of money, there’s certainly no reason why we can’t get together on a satisfactory…”

  “No. I mean I appreciate your saying that, but it’s not really a question of money at all. It’s more of a personal thing.”

  And that seemed to settle it. Pollock began to nod slowly and steadily, to show his infinite understanding of personal things.