Revolutionary Road

  For the last three times, evenings when they couldn’t use her apartment because her roommate was home, she had agreed with surprising alacrity to let him take her to a hotel. Anonymous and safe behind a double-locked door in an air-conditioned tower, they had dined on room-service lamb chops and wine while the sound of midtown traffic floated up from twenty stories below; they had reveled in the depths of a long, wide bed and lathered themselves clean in a steaming palace of a bathroom stocked with acres of towels; and each time, when he’d handed her into a taxi at last and turned alone toward Grand Central, he had wanted to laugh aloud at having so perfectly fulfilled the standard daydream of the married man. No fuss, no complications, everything left behind in a tumbled room under somebody else’s name, and all of it wound up in time to catch the ten-seventeen. It was too good to be true, like the improbable stories that older, more experienced soldiers had once told him of three-day passes with Red Cross girls. It couldn’t go on much longer, of course, and it wouldn’t. In the meantime…

  In the meantime, all during the next slow tune and the one after that, he cordially danced with Milly Campbell. She made a damp, untidy package in his arms and she talked inanely (“Gosh, you know something, Frank? I don’t think I’ve had this much to drink in years and years and years…”), but he was afraid that if he danced with April now she would only say, “This is horrible; please let’s go home,” and he didn’t feel like it. He wouldn’t have minded going home alone, if such a thing were possible (he had a pleasant vision of himself preparing neatly for bed with book and nightcap, bachelor style); otherwise he was happy enough to stay in this jumbled, lively place where the drinks were cheap and the band was loud and he could feel the inner peace that comes from knowing that all your clothes are new and perfectly fitted.

  “Gosh. Gee, Frank, I’m afraid I’m not very—excuse me a second.” Milly lurched pathetically away toward the ladies’ room, which gave him an opportunity to have a dignified drink alone at the bar. When she came out, a long time later, she looked exhausted and gray under the blue lights. “Gosh.” She tried to smile, giving off a faint scent of vomit. “I guess Shep and I’d better sort of go home, Frank. I think I must be sick or something. I guess I’m being an awful party-poop; you must think I’m—”

  “No, don’t be silly. Just hold on a second and I’ll get Shep.” He peered dizzily into the swaying roomful of dancers until he picked out Campbell’s big red neck and April’s small head moving along the far wall; he gave them an urgent beckoning signal, and soon they were all four crunching in the gravel outside, wandering lost in a dark sea of automobiles.

  “Which way…?”

  “This way…Over here…”

  “You okay, honey?”

  “It’s so dark…”

  The slick, chin-high tops of the cars made an undulating surface that stretched away into the darkness in all directions; beneath it stood endless shadowy ranks of fenders and fins, of intricately bulbous bumpers and grills alive with numberless points of reflected neon. Once, when Frank bent over to strike a match for guidance, the flame caused a writhing recoil of human flesh only inches away from his face—he had startled a pair of lovers in one of the cars—and he hurried into the darkness of the next aisle, saying, “Where the hell did we leave the damn cars, then? Does anybody remember?”

  “Here,” Shep called. “Over here in the last row. Oh, but Jesus, look. Mine’s blocked in.” He had backed his big Pontiac against a tree, hours before. Now two other cars stood directly in front of it and there was no room for maneuvering on either side.

  “Lord, what a mess…”

  “Of all the inconsiderate…”

  “Damn that tree…”

  “Well, look, though,” Frank said. “We’ve still got one car free; we could run Milly home and bring Shep back, and maybe by that time the car’ll be—”

  “But it might take hours,” Milly said weakly, “and meantime your sitter’ll be costing you a fortune. Oh dear.”

  “No, hold it,” Shep said. “We can all go home in your car; then I’ll borrow your car and come back and—or no, wait—”

  “Oh, look.” April’s voice cut through the confusion with such sober authority that they all stopped talking. “It’s perfectly simple. You take Milly home, Frank, and go on home yourself—that takes care of both sitters—and Shep and I can wait till the other car’s free. That’s the only logical way.”

  “Fine,” Frank said, moving away with his car keys out and ready. “All agreed, then?”

  The next thing Shep Campbell knew, the taillights of the Wheelers’ car were winking away down Route Twelve and he was walking back toward the Log Cabin (which throbbed now to a slow, sentimental waltz) with April’s slender elbow in his hand. In all his guilty fantasies he could never have plotted a better way of finding himself alone with her, and the funny part was that he hadn’t even had to arrange it: it had happened because it was the only logical—or no, wait a minute. His fuddled mind worked hard to sort it out as they mounted the steps under red and blue lights. Wait a minute—why couldn’t she have taken Milly home, and left Frank behind? Wouldn’t that have been logical too?

  By the time he’d worked it out that far they were back on the brink of the dance floor; she had turned to him gravely with her eyes fixed on his right lapel, and the only thing to do was take her lightly around the waist and go on dancing. He couldn’t ask her if she’d planned it this way without being a fool, and he couldn’t assume she had without being a bigger one. Allowing his fingers to spread out very shyly on the small of her back and his hot cheek to rest against her hair, he moved to the music and was humbly grateful that the thing had happened; never mind how.

  It was like the other time here last summer, but it was much, much better. The other time she’d been drunk, for one thing, and he had known even as he miserably pressed and mauled her that it was strictly a one-way deal: she’d been too far gone to know how much she was giving him, and the proof of it was the way she’d kept arching back her neck to talk and chatter in his face as if they were sitting across a bridge table or some damn thing, instead of locked as tight as lovers from the collarbone down. This time she was sober, she hardly talked at all, and she seemed as sensitive as he was to every tactile subtlety, every tentative seeking and granting and shy withdrawal and seeking again; it was almost more than his bashful heart could stand.

  “Feel like another drink?”

  “All right.”

  But as they stood at the bar, self-consciously sipping and puffing cigarettes among the regulars, he couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt like a boy on his first date, crippled by the secret, ignorant desire of virginity; he was sweating.

  “Tell you what,” he said at last, almost roughly. “I’ll go check the car.” And he promised himself that if she gave the slightest hint, if she smiled and said, “What’s your hurry, Shep?” or anything like that, he would forget everything—his wife, his fear, everything—and go for her all the way.

  There was nothing in her gray eyes to suggest complicity: they were the eyes of a pleasant, tired young suburban matron who’d been kept up past her bedtime, that was all. “Yes, all right,” she said. “Why don’t you?”

  Stumbling down the wooden steps and out into the darkness, grinding the pebbles fiercely under his heels, he felt all the forces of the plausible, the predictable and the ordinary envelop him like ropes. Nothing was going to happen; and the hell with her. Why wasn’t she home where she belonged? Why couldn’t she go to Europe or disappear or die? The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in “love” with her. The hell with “love” anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world. But by the time he’d reached the last row he was jelly-kneed and trembling in a silent prayer: Oh God, please don’t let the car be free.

  And it wasn’t. The other cars still held it fast against the tree. As he whirled back to face the building its lights careened in his
head and he nearly keeled over. He was loaded. That last drink must have really—Wow. His lungs felt very shallow, and he knew that unless something could be done at once to stop the lights from sliding around that way he would be sick. He began running in place, pumping his fists and bringing his knees up high, his shoes making brisk, athletic sounds in the gravel. He did that until he’d counted a hundred, taking deep breaths, and when he was finished the lights held still. He felt chastened and full of blood as he walked back to the Log Cabin, where the Quartet had broken into its own crude version of one of the old-time, big-band numbers—“One O’Clock Jump” or “String of Pearls” or something, the kind of music that always took him back to basic training.

  She had left the bar for one of the dark leatherette booths nearby; she was sitting very straight in its deep seat, partly turned around to watch for him through the smoke, and she greeted him with a shyly welcoming smile.

  “Still blocked in, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Oh, well. Come and sit a minute. I don’t really mind, do you?”

  He could have crawled across the leatherette seat and buried his head in her lap. What he did instead was to slide in as close beside her as he dared and begin to tear up a cardboard match in the ash tray, splitting it at the base with his thumbnail and carefully peeling it down in strips, frowning as intently as a watchmaker over his work.

  She was gazing off into the blur of the dance floor, moving her uptilted head very slightly to the rhythm of the band. “This is the kind of music that’s supposed to make everybody our age very nostalgic,” she said. “Does it you?”

  “I don’t know. Not really, I guess.”

  “It doesn’t me, either. I’d like it to, but it doesn’t. It’s supposed to remind you of all your careless teen-age raptures, and the trouble is I never had any. I never even had a real date until after the war, and by then nobody played this kind of music any more, or if they did I was too busy being blasé to notice it. That whole big-band swing period was a thing I missed out on. Jitterbugging. Trucking on down. Or no, that was earlier, wasn’t it? I think people talked about trucking on down when I was in about the sixth grade, at Rye Country Day. At least I remember writing ‘Artie Shaw’ and ‘Benny Goodman’ all over the sides of my schoolbooks without quite being sure who they were, because some of the older girls used to have those names on their books and it seemed a terribly sophisticated thing to do, like putting dabs of nail polish on your ankles to hold your bobby socks up. God, how I wanted to be seventeen when I was twelve. I used to watch the seventeen-year-olds getting into cars and riding away with boys after school, and I was absolutely certain they had the answers to everything.”

  Shep was watching her face so closely that everything else vanished from his consciousness. It didn’t even matter what she was saying, nor did he care that she was talking to herself as much as to him.

  “And then by the time I turned seventeen I was shut up in this very grim boarding school, and the only times I ever really jitterbugged were with another girl, in the locker room. We’d play Glenn Miller records on this old portable Victrola she had, and we’d practice and practice by the hour. And that’s all this kind of music can ever really remind me of—bouncing around in my horrible gym suit in that sweaty old locker room and being convinced that life had passed me by.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “What is?”

  “That you never had any dates or anything, all that time.”

  “Why?”

  He wanted to say, “Oh God, April, you know why. Because you’re lovely; because everyone must have loved you, always,” but he lacked the courage. Instead he said, “Well, I mean, hell; didn’t you ever have fun on vacations?”

  “Fun on vacations,” she repeated dully. “No. I never did. And now you see you’ve put your finger on it, Shep. I can’t very well blame boarding school for that, can I? No, all I ever did on vacations was read and go to movies by myself and quarrel with whichever aunt or cousin or friend of my mother’s it was who happened to be stuck with me that summer, or that Christmas. It all does tend to sound pretty maladjusted, doesn’t it? So you’re quite right. It wasn’t boarding school’s fault and it wasn’t anyone else’s fault, it was my own Emotional Problem. And there’s a fairly good rule-of-thumb for you, Shep: take somebody who worries about life passing them by, and the chances are about a hundred-and-eight to one that it’s their own Emotional Problem.”

  “I didn’t mean anything like that,” Shep said uncomfortably. He didn’t like the sardonic lines that had appeared at the pulled-down corner of her mouth, or the way her voice had flattened out, or the way she clawed a cigarette out of the pack and stuck it in her lips—these things were too close to the cruel image he had projected of her ten years from now. “I just meant, I never would’ve pictured you being that lonely.”

  “Good,” she said. “Bless you, Shep. I always hoped people wouldn’t picture me being that lonely. That was really the best thing about being in New York after the war, you see. People didn’t.”

  Now that she’d mentioned her life in New York he was yearning to ask a question that had morbidly haunted him as long as he’d known her: had she still been a virgin when she met Frank? If not, it would somehow lessen his envy; if so, if he had to think of Frank Wheeler as her first lover as well as her husband, he felt it would make his envy too great to be borne. This was the closest he had ever come to an opportunity for finding out, but if words existed to make the question possible they had hopelessly eluded him. He would never know.

  “…Oh, it was fun, I suppose, those years,” she was saying. “I always think of that as a happy, stimulating time, and I suppose it was, but even so.” Her voice wasn’t flat any more. “I still felt—I don’t know.”

  “You still felt that life was passing you by?”

  “Sort of. I still had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere, as far ahead of me as the seniors at Rye when I was in sixth grade; people who knew everything instinctively, who made their lives work out the way they wanted without even trying, who never had to make the best of a bad job because it never occurred to them to do anything less than perfectly the first time. Sort of heroic super-people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I’d suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake; and they’d know it too. I’d be like the ugly duckling among the swans.”

  Shep was looking steadily at her profile, hoping the silent force of his love would move her to turn and face him. “I think I know that feeling,” he said.

  “I doubt it.” She didn’t look at him, and the little lines had appeared again around her mouth. “At least I hope you don’t, for your sake. It’s a thing I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It’s the most stupid, ruinous kind of self-deception there is, and it gets you into nothing but trouble.”

  He let all the air out of his lungs and subsided against the back of the seat. She didn’t really want to talk; not to him, anyway. All she wanted was to sound off, to make herself feel better by playing at being wistful and jaded, and she had elected him as her audience. He wasn’t expected to participate in this discussion, and he certainly wasn’t to go getting any ideas; his role was to be big, dumb, steady old Shep until the car was free, or until she’d gotten all the gratification there was to be had from the sound of her own voice. Then he’d drive her home and she’d make a few more worldly-wise pronouncements on the way; she might even lean over and give him a sisterly peck on the cheek before she slithered out of the car and slammed the door and went inside to get into bed with Frank Wheeler. And what the hell else did he expect? When the hell was he ever going to grow up?

  “Shep?” Both of her slim, cool hands had reached out and grasped one of his on the table, and her face, pressing toward him, was transformed into a mischievous smile. “O
h, Shep—let’s do it.”

  He thought he was going to faint. “Do what?”

  “Jitterbug. Come on.”

  Steve Kovick was nearing the climax of his evening. It was almost closing time; most of the people had gone home, the manager was counting his money, and Steve, no less than the hero of every Hollywood movie ever made about jazz, knew that this was the approach of what was supposed to be his finest hour.

  Shep had never really learned to dance, let alone to abandon himself to this kind of dancing, but no power on earth could have stopped him now. Turning, clumsily hopping and shuffling in the enchanted center of that dizzy room, he allowed the noise and the smoke and the lights to revolve and revolve around him because he was wholly certain of her now. As long as he lived he would never see anything more beautiful than the way she reeled away as far as their joined hands would allow and did a quick little bobbing, hip-switching curtsy out there before she came twisting back. Oh, look at her! his heart sang, Look at her! Look at her! He knew that when the music stopped she would fall laughing in his arms, and she did. He knew, leading her tenderly away to the bar, that she would allow his arm to stay close around her while they had another drink, and she did that too. As they talked there in suggestively low voices he no longer cared what he was saying—what did it matter? What did words amount to, anyway?—because he was full of delirious plans. A motel sprang up in his mind’s eye: he saw himself filling out the registry form in the glare of its clapboard office (“Thank you, sir. That’ll be six-fifty, Number Twelve…”) while she sat waiting in the car outside; he pictured the abrupt, shockingly total privacy of the cabin with its maple chair and desk and staring double bed, and here he was briefly troubled: Could you really take a girl like April Wheeler to a motel? But why not? And besides, a motel wasn’t the only possibility. Miles and miles of open country lay waiting in all directions; the night was warm and he had an old army poncho in the car; they could climb to some gentle pasture high out of sight and sound and make their bed among the stars.