Revolutionary Road

  Sometimes, gently, she would charge him with overdramatizing the whole thing. It was a thing women did every day in perfect safety; the girl at school had done it twice at least. Oh, doing it after the third month would be a different story, she granted him that—“I mean it certainly would be legitimate to worry, if that were the case. This way, though, being able to time it so closely and everything, it’s the safest thing in the world.”

  But at her every mention of how safe it was he would puff out his cheeks and blow, frowning and shaking his head, as if he’d been asked to agree that an ethical justification could be found for genocide. No. He wouldn’t buy it.

  Soon there began to be a slight embarrassed hesitation in her voice and a distinct averting of her eyes whenever she spoke of the abortion as “doing this thing,” even in the context of a heartfelt statement on how absolutely essential it was that the thing be done, as if the presence of his loving, troubled face had put the matter beyond the limits of conversational decency. Soon too—and this was the most encouraging sign of all—he began to be aware at odd moments that she was covertly watching him through a mist of romantic admiration.

  These moments were not always quite spontaneous; as often as not they followed a subtle effort of vanity on his part, a form of masculine flirtation that was as skillful as any girl’s. Walking toward or away from her across a restaurant floor, for example, he remembered always to do it in the old “terrifically sexy” way, and when they walked together he fell into another old habit of holding his head unnaturally erect and carrying his inside shoulder an inch or two higher than the other, to give himself more loftiness from where she clung at his arm. When he lit a cigarette in the dark he was careful to arrange his features in a virile frown before striking and cupping the flame (he knew, from having practiced this at the mirror of a blacked-out bathroom years ago, that it made a swift, intensely dramatic portrait), and he paid scrupulous attention to endless details: keeping his voice low and resonant, keeping his hair brushed and his bitten fingernails out of sight; being always the first one athletically up and out of bed in the morning, so that she might never see his face lying swollen and helpless in sleep.

  Sometimes after a particularly conscious display of this kind, as when he found he had made all his molars ache by holding them clamped too long for an effect of grim-jawed determination by candlelight, he would feel a certain distaste with himself for having to resort to such methods—and, very obscurely, with her as well, for being so easily swayed by them. What kind of kid stuff was this? But these attacks of conscience were quickly allayed: all was fair in love and war; and besides, wasn’t she all too capable of playing the same game? Hadn’t she pulled out everything in her own bag of tricks last month, to seduce him into the Europe plan? All right, then. Maybe it was sort of ludicrous; maybe it wasn’t the healthiest way for grown people to behave, but that was a question they could take up later. There was too much at stake to worry about such things now.

  And so he freed himself to concentrate on the refinements of his role. He was particularly careful never to mention his day at the office or confess to being tired after the train, he assumed a quiet, almost Continental air of mastery in dealing with waiters and gas station attendants, he salted his after-theater critiques with obscure literary references—all to demonstrate that a man condemned to a life at Knox could still be interesting (“You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met”); he enthusiastically romped with the children, disdainfully mowed the lawn in record time and once spent the whole of a midnight’s drive in an impersonation of Eddie Cantor singing “That’s the Kind of a Baby for Me” because it made her laugh—all to demonstrate that a man confronted with this bleakest and most unnatural of conjugal problems, a wife unwilling to bear his child, could still be nice (“I love you when you’re nice”).

  His campaign might have been quickly and easily won if he could have arranged for all the hours of the four weeks to be lived at the same pitch of intensity; the trouble was that ordinary life still had to go on.

  It was still necessary for him to kill most of each day at the office, where Jack Ordway kept congratulating him on the niftiness of his flying the coop, and for her to spend it imprisoned in the reality of their home.

  It was also necessary to deal with Mrs. Givings, who lately had found one excuse after another for calling up and dropping in. Her ostensible purpose was business, which in itself was very trying—there were many details to discuss about putting the house on the market, to which the Wheelers had to listen poker-faced—but her talk kept coming back to John and to “the lovely time we all had that day.” Almost before they knew it, they had agreed to a tentative program of future Sunday afternoons “whenever it’s convenient, whatever Sundays you’re not too busy, between now and the time you leave.”

  It was necessary to deal with the Campbells, too. One whole Saturday was consumed that way, a picnic and outing at the beach undertaken at the Campbells’ insistence—a day of hot dogs and children’s tears, of sand and sweat and dazzling confusion—and it left them on the brink of hysteria that night. It was that night, in fact, that the courtship, or the sales campaign, or whatever it was, passed abruptly into its second, nonromantic phase.

  “God, what a day,” April said as soon as she’d shut the children’s door, and then she began to move stiffly around the living room in a way that always meant trouble. He had learned early in the courtship, or the campaign, that this room was the worst possible place for getting his points across. All the objects revealed in the merciless stare of its hundred-watt light bulbs seemed to support her argument; and more than once, on hot nights like this, their cumulative effect had threatened to topple the whole intricate structure of his advantage: the furniture that had never settled down and never would, the shelves on shelves of unread or half-read or read-and-forgotten books that had always been supposed to make such a difference and never had; the loathsome, gloating maw of the television set; the forlorn, grubby little heap of toys that might have been steeped in ammonia, so quick was their power to attack the eyes and throat with an acrid pain of guilt and self-reproach (“But I don’t think we were ever meant to be parents. We’re not even adequate as parents…”).

  Tonight her forehead, cheekbones and nose were sorely pink with sunburn, and the fact that she’d worn sunglasses all day gave her eyes a white, astonished look. Her hair hung in disorderly strings—she kept having to push out her lower lip to blow it away from her eyes—and her body looked uncomfortable too. She was wearing a damp blouse and a pair of wrinkled blue shorts that were just beginning to be tight across the abdomen. She hated to wear shorts anyway because they called attention to how heavy and soft and vein-shot her thighs had grown in the past few years, though Frank had often told her not to he silly about it (“They’re lovely; I like them even better this way; they’re a woman’s legs now”), and now she seemed almost to be parading them in a kind of spite. All right, look at them, she seemed to be saying. Are they “womanly” enough for you? Is this what you want?

  He couldn’t, at any rate, take his eyes off them as they ponderously lifted and settled in her walk around the room. He made himself a powerful drink and stood sipping it near the kitchen door, bracing himself.

  After a while she sat heavily on the sofa and began a lethargic picking-over of old magazines. Then she dropped them and lay back, setting her sneakered feet on the coffee table, and said, “You really are a much more moral person than I am, Frank. I suppose that’s why I admire you.” But she didn’t look or sound admiring.

  He tried to dismiss it with a careful shrug as he took a seat across from her. “I don’t know about that. I don’t see what any of this has to do with being ‘moral.’ I mean—you know, not in any sense of conventional morality.”

  She seemed to think this over for a long time as she lay back allowing one knee to sway from side to side, rocking it on the swivel of her ankle. Then: “Is there any other kind?” she asked. “Don’t ?
??moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?”

  He could have hit her in the face. Of all the insinuating, treacherous little—Christ! And in any other month of his married life he would have been on his feet and shouting: “Christ, when are you going to get over this damn Noël Coward, nineteen-twenties way of denigrating every halfway decent human value with some cute, brittle, snobbish little thing to say? Listen!” he would have raged at her. “Listen! Maybe that’s the way your parents lived; maybe that’s the kind of chic, titillating crap you were raised on, but it’s about time you figured out it doesn’t have a God damned thing to do with the real world.” It was his knowledge of the calendar that stopped his mouth. There were twelve days to go. He couldn’t afford to take any chances now, and so instead of shouting those things he held his jaws shut and stared at his glass, which he gripped until it nearly spilled with trembling. Without even trying, he had given his most memorable facial performance to date. When the spasm was over he said, very quietly:

  “Baby, I know you’re tired. We shouldn’t be talking about it now. I know you know better than that. Let’s skip it.”

  “Skip what? You know I know better than what?”

  “You know. This business about ‘moral’ and ‘conventional.’”

  “But I don’t know the difference.” She had come earnestly forward on the sofa, had drawn her sneakers back under it and was leaning toward him with both tense forearms on her knees. Her face was so innocently confused that he couldn’t look at it. “Don’t you see, Frank? I really don’t know the difference. Other people seem to; you do; I just don’t, that’s all, and I don’t think I ever really have.”

  “Look,” he said. “First place, ‘moral’ was your word, not mine. I don’t think I’ve ever held any brief for this thing on moral grounds, conventional or otherwise. I’ve simply said that under these particular circumstances, it seems pretty obvious that the only mature thing to do is go ahead and have the—”

  “But there we are again,” she said. “You see? I don’t know what ‘mature’ means, either, and you could talk all night and I still wouldn’t know. It’s all just words to me, Frank. I watch you talking and I think: Isn’t that amazing? He really does think that way; these words really do mean something to him. Sometimes it seems I’ve been watching people talk and thinking that all my life”—her voice was becoming unsteady—“and maybe it means there’s something awful the matter with me, but it’s true. Oh no, stay there. Please don’t come and kiss me or anything, or we’ll just end up in a big steaming heap and we won’t get anything settled. Please stay sitting there, and let’s just sort of try to talk. Okay?”

  “Okay.” And he stayed sitting there. But trying to talk was something else again; all they could do was look at each other, heavy and weak and bright-eyed in the heat.

  “All I know,” she said at last, “is what I feel, and I know what I feel I’ve got to do.”

  He got up and turned off all the lights, murmuring “Cool the place off a little,” but the darkness didn’t help. This was deadlock. If everything he said was “just words,” what was the point of talking? How could any possibility of speech prevail against the weight of a stubbornness as deep as this?

  But before long his voice had started to work again; almost independent of his will, it had fallen back and begun to employ his final tactic, the dangerous last-ditch maneuver he had hoped to hold in reserve against the possibility of defeat. It was reckless—there were still twelve days to go—but once he had started he couldn’t stop.

  “Look,” he was saying, “this may sound as if I think there is something ‘awful’ the matter with you; the fact is I don’t. I do think, though, that there’s one or two aspects to this thing we haven’t really touched on yet, and I think we ought to. For instance, I wonder if your real motives here are quite as simple as you think. I mean isn’t it possible there are forces at work here that you’re not entirely aware of? That you’re not recognizing?”

  She didn’t answer, and in the darkness he could only guess at whether she was listening or not. He took a deep breath. “I mean things that have nothing to do with Europe,” he said, “or with me. I mean things within yourself, things that have their origin in your own childhood—your own upbringing and so on. Emotional things.”

  There was a long silence before she said, in a pointedly neutral tone: “You mean I’m emotionally disturbed.”

  “I didn’t say that!” But in the next hour, as his voice went on and on, he managed to say it several times in several different ways. Wasn’t it likely, after all, that a girl who’d known nothing but parental rejection from the time of her birth might develop an abiding reluctance to bear children?

  “I mean it’s always been a wonder to me that you could survive a childhood like that,” he said at one point, “let alone come out of it without any damage to your—you know, your ego and everything.” She herself, he reminded her, had suggested the presence of something “neurotic” in her wish to abort the first pregnancy, on Bethune Street—and all right, all right, of course the circumstances were different this time. But wasn’t it just possible that something of the same confusion might still exist in her attitude? Oh, he wasn’t saying this was the whole story—“I’m not qualified to say that”—but he did feel it was a line of reasoning that ought to be very carefully explored.

  “But I’ve had two children,” she said. “Doesn’t that count in my favor?”

  He let these words reverberate in the darkness for a while. “The very fact that you put it that way is kind of significant,” he said quietly, “don’t you think? As if having children were a kind of punishment? As if having two of them could ‘count in your favor’ as a credit against any obligation to have another? And the way you said it, too—all defensive, all ready to fight. Jesus, April, if you want to talk that way I can come right back at you with another statistic: you’ve had three pregnancies and you’ve wanted to abort two of them. What kind of a record is that? Oh, look.” He made his voice very gentle, as if he were talking to Jennifer. “Look, baby. All I’m trying to suggest is that you don’t seem to be entirely rational about this thing. I just wish you’d think about it a little, that’s all.”

  “All right,” her voice said bleakly. “All right, suppose all this is true. Suppose I’m acting out a compulsive behavior pattern, or whatever they call it. So what? I still can’t help what I feel, can I? I mean what’re we supposed to do about it? How am I supposed to get over it? Am I just supposed to Face Up to my Problems and start being a different person tomorrow morning, or what?”

  “Oh, baby,” he said. “It’s so simple. I mean assuming you are in some kind of emotional difficulty, assuming there is a problem of this sort, don’t you see there is something we can do about it? Something very logical and sensible that we ought to do about it?” He was weary of the sound of his own voice; he felt he had been talking for years. He licked his lips, which tasted as foreign as the flesh of a dentist’s finger in his mouth (“Open wide, now!”), and then he said it. “We ought to have you see a psychoanalyst.”

  He couldn’t see her, but he could guess that her mouth was flattening out and drawing a little to one side, her tough look. “And is Bart Pollock’s job going to pay for that too?” she asked.

  He issued a sigh. “You see what you’re doing, when you say a thing like that? You’re fighting with me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes you are. And what’s worse, you’re fighting with yourself. This is exactly the kind of thing we’ve both been doing for years, and it’s about time we grew up enough to cut it out. I don’t know if Pollock’s job is going to pay for it; frankly, I couldn’t care less whose job pays for what. We’re two supposedly adult human beings, and if one or the other of us needs this kind of help we ought to be able to talk it over in an adult way. The question of how it’s going to be ‘paid for’ is the very least important part of it. If it’s needed, it’ll be paid for. I promise you
.”

  “How nice,” It was only by a dim shifting of shadows and a rustling of upholstery that he could tell she was standing up. “Could we sort of stop talking about it now? I’m dead tired.”

  As he listened to her receding footsteps down the hall, and then to the sounds of her brief preparations for bed, and then to the silence, he finished his drink with a foretaste of defeat. He felt that he had played his last chance, and had almost certainly lost.

  But the next day brought fresh reserves of strength to his position from an unexpected source: it was the Sunday of John Givings’s second visit.

  “Hi!” he called, getting out of the car, and from the moment he ambled pigeon-toed across the driveway with his parents twitching and apologizing around him, it was clear that this would be a different and more difficult afternoon than the last. There would be no strolling companionship today, no fond remembrance of radio shows; he was in a highly agitated state. The sight and the sound of him was so unnerving, at first, that it was some time before Frank began to see how this visit might have a certain beneficial, cautionary effect. Here, after all, was a full-fledged mental case for April to observe and contemplate. Could she still say, after this, that she didn’t care if she was crazy too?

  “How soon you people taking off?” he demanded, interrupting his mother in the midst of a rapturous sentence about the magnificence of the day. They were sitting out on the back lawn, where April was serving iced tea—or rather, everyone but John was sitting. He was up and walking around, occasionally pausing to stare with narrowed eyes at some point far away in the woods or past the house and down across the road; he looked as if he were turning over grave and secret issues in his mind. “September, did you say? I don’t remember.”

  “It isn’t really definite yet,” Frank said.

  “You’ll be around another month or so, though, anyway; right? Because the thing is, I need to ask somebody for a—” He broke off and glanced around the lawn with a puzzled look. “Hey, by the way, where do you people keep your kids? Old Helen keeps telling me about your kids, and I never see ’em. They go to birthday parties every Sunday, or what?”