Revolutionary Road
“Don’t come any closer. Can’t I even get away from you in the woods?”
He stopped, panting, ten yards below her. At least she was all right; her face was clear. But they couldn’t fight up here—they were well within sight and earshot of houses down on the road.
“April, listen, I didn’t mean that. Honestly; I didn’t mean that about wishing you’d done it.”
“Are you still talking? Isn’t there any way to stop your talking?” She was bracing herself against a tree trunk, looking down at him.
“Please come down. What’re you doing up—”
“Do you want me to scream again, Frank? Because I will, if you say another word. I mean it.”
And if she screamed here on the hillside they would hear her in every house on Revolutionary Road. They would hear her all over the top of the Hill, too, and in the Campbells’ house. There was nothing for him to do but to go back alone, down through the woods to the lawn, and then indoors.
Once he was back in the kitchen he gave all his attention to the grim business of keeping watch on her through the window, standing—or crouching, and finally sitting on a chair—far enough back in the shadows so that she wouldn’t be able to see him.
She didn’t seem to be doing anything up there: she continued to stand leaning against the tree, and as twilight closed in it became difficult to make her out. Once there was a yellow flare as she lit a cigarette, and then he watched the tiny red coal of it move in the slow arcs of her smoking; by the time it went out the woods were in total darkness.
He went on doggedly watching the same place in the trees until the pale shape of her surprised him at much closer range: she was walking home across the lawn. He barely managed to get out of the kitchen before she came in. Then, hiding in the living room, he listened to her pick up the phone and dial a number.
Her voice was normal and calm. “Hello, Milly? Hi…. Oh yes, they left a little while ago. Listen, though, I was wondering if I could ask a favor. The thing is, I’m not feeling very well; I think I may be getting the flu or something, and Frank’s tired out. Would you awfully much mind keeping the kids for the night?…Oh, that’s wonderful, Milly, thanks…. No, don’t bother, they both had their baths last night…. Well, I know they’ll enjoy it too. They always have a wonderful time at your place…. All right, fine, then. I’ll call you in the morning.”
Then she came into the living room and turned on the lights, and the exploding glare caused them both to blink and squint. What he felt, above all, was embarrassment. She looked embarrassed too, until she walked across the room and lay down on the sofa with her face out of sight.
It was at times something like this, in the past, that he’d gone out and wrenched the car into gear and driven for miles, stopping at one blue- and red-lighted bar after another, spilling his money on wet counters, morosely listening to the long, fuddled conversations of waitresses and construction workers, playing clangorous jukebox records and then driving again, speeding, eating up the night until he could sleep.
But he wasn’t up to that tonight. The trouble was that there had never, in the past, been a time exactly like this. He was physically incapable of going out and starting the car, let alone of driving. His knees had turned to jelly and his head rang, and he was meekly grateful for the protective shell of the house around him; it was all he could do to make his way to the bedroom again and shut himself inside it, though this time, for all his despair, he was sensible enough to take the bottle of whiskey along with him.
There followed a night of vivid and horrible dreams, while he sprawled sweating on the bed in his clothes. Sometimes, either waking or dreaming that he was awake, he thought he heard April moving around the house; then once, toward morning, he could have sworn he opened his eyes and found her sitting close beside him on the edge of the bed. Was it a dream, or not?
“Oh, baby,” he whispered through cracked and swollen lips. “Oh, my baby, don’t go away.” He reached for her hand and held it. “Oh, please stay.”
“Sh-sh-sh. It’s all right,” she said, and squeezed his fingers. “It’s all right, Frank. Go to sleep.” The sound of her voice and the cool feel of her hand conveyed such a miracle of peace that he didn’t care if it was a dream; it was enough to let him sink back into a sleep that was mercifully dreamless.
Then came the bright yellow pain of his real awakening, alone; and he’d scarcely had time to decide that he couldn’t possibly go to work today before he remembered that he had to. It was the day of the shakedown conference. Trembling, he forced himself up and into the bathroom, where he put himself tenderly through the ordeals of a shower and a shave.
An illogical, unreasoning hope began to quicken his heart as he dressed. What if it hadn’t been a dream? What if she really had come and sat there on the bed and spoken to him that way? And when he went into the kitchen it seemed that his hope was confirmed. It was astonishing.
The table was carefully set with two places for breakfast. The kitchen was filled with sunlight and with the aromas of coffee and bacon. April was at the stove, wearing a fresh maternity dress, and she looked up at him with a shy smile.
“Good morning,” she said.
He wanted to go down on his knees and put his arms around her thighs; but he held back. Something told him—possibly the very shyness of her smile—that it would be better not to try anything like that; it would be better just to join her in the playing of this game, this strange, elaborate pretense that nothing had happened yesterday. “Good morning,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.
He sat down and unfolded his napkin. It was incredible. No morning after a fight had ever been as easy as this—but still, he thought as he unsteadily sipped at his orange juice, no fight had ever been as bad as that. Could it be that they’d fought themselves out at last? Maybe this was what happened when there was really and truly nothing more to say, either in acrimony or forgiveness. Life did, after all, have to go on.
“It certainly is a—nice morning out, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes; it is. Would you like scrambled eggs, or fried?”
“Oh, it doesn’t really mat—well, yes; scrambled, I guess, if it’s just as easy.”
“Fine. I’ll have scrambled too.”
And soon they were sitting companionably across from each other at the bright table, whispering little courtesies over the passing of buttered toast. At first he was too bashful to eat. It was like the first time he’d ever taken a girl out to dinner, at seventeen, when the idea of actually loading food into his mouth and chewing it, right there in front of her, had seemed an unpardonably coarse thing to do; and what saved him now was the same thing that had saved him then: the surprising discovery that he was uncontrollably hungry.
Between swallows he said: “It’s sort of nice, having breakfast without the kids for a change.”
“Yes.” She wasn’t eating her eggs, and he saw that her fingers were shaking a little as she reached for her coffee cup; otherwise she looked completely self-possessed. “I thought you’d probably want a good breakfast today,” she said. “I mean it’s kind of an important day for you, isn’t it? Isn’t this the day you have your conference with Pollock?”
“That’s right, yes.” She had even remembered that! But he covered his delight with the deprecating, side-of-the-mouth smile he had used for years in telling her about Knox, and said: “Big deal.”
“Well,” she said, “I imagine it is a pretty big deal; for them, anyway. What exactly do you think you’ll be doing? Until they start sending you out on the trips, I mean. You never have told me much about it.”
Was she kidding, or what? “Haven’t I?” he said. “Well, of course I don’t really know much yet myself; that’s the thing. I guess it’ll mostly be just a matter of what Pollock calls ‘blocking out objectives’—sitting around letting him talk, I guess. Acting like we know something about computers. And of course the main reason for this whole thing, at least I think it’s the main reason, is that Knox
may be getting ready to buy up one of these really big computers, bigger than the ‘500.’ Did I tell you about that?”
“No, I don’t believe you did.” And the remarkable thing was that she looked as though she’d like to hear about it.
“Well, you know—one of these monstrous great things like the Univac; the kind of machine they use to forecast the weather and predict elections and all that. And I mean those jobs sell for a couple of million dollars apiece, you see; if Knox went into production on one they’d have to organize a whole new promotion program around it. I think that may be what’s going on.”
He had the odd sensation that his lungs were growing deeper, or that the air was growing richer in oxygen. His shoulders, which had been tight and high, came gradually to rest against the back of the chair. Was this the way other men felt, telling their wives about their work?
“…Basically it’s just a terrifically big, terrifically fast adding machine,” he was saying, in reply to her sober wish to know how a computer really worked. “Only instead of mechanical parts, you see, it’s got thousands of little individual vacuum tubes…” And in a minute he was drawing for her, on a paper napkin, a diagram representing the passage of binary digit pulses through circuitry.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “At least I think I see; yes. It’s really sort of—interesting, isn’t it?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know, it’s—yeah, I guess it is sort of interesting, in a way. Of course I don’t really know much about it, beyond the basic idea of the thing.”
“You always say that. I bet you really know a lot more about it than you think. You certainly do explain it well, anyway.”
“Oh?” He felt his smiling cheeks get warm as he lowered his eyes and put the pencil back inside his crisp gabardine suit. “Well, thanks.” He finished the last of his second cup of coffee and stood up. “Guess I’d better be getting started.”
She stood up too, smoothing her skirt.
“Listen, though, April; this was really nice.” The walls of his throat closed up. He felt he was about to cry, but he managed to hold it back. “I mean it was a swell breakfast,” he said, blinking. “Really; I don’t know when I’ve ever had a—a nicer breakfast.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad; I enjoyed it too.”
And could he just walk out now? Without saying anything? Looking at her as they moved toward the door, he wondered if he ought to say “I can’t tell you how awful I feel about yesterday,” or “I do love you,” or something like that; or would it be better not to risk starting things up again? He hesitated, turning to face her, and felt his mouth go into an awkward shape.
“Then you don’t really—” he began. “You don’t really hate me, or anything?”
Her eyes looked deep and serious; she seemed to be glad he had asked her that question, as if it were one of the few questions in the world she could answer with authority. She shook her head. “No; of course I don’t.” And she held the door open for him. “Have a good day.”
“I will. You too.” And then it was easy to decide what to do next: without touching her he began as slowly as any movie actor, to bend toward her lips.
Her face, as it came up close, betrayed an instant’s surprise or hesitation, but then it softened; she half closed her eyes and made it clear that this, however brief, would be a mutually willing, mutally gentle kiss. Only after the kiss was completed did he touch her with his hand, on the arm. She was, after all, a damned good-looking girl.
“Okay, then,” he said huskily. “So long.”
SEVEN
APRIL JOHNSON WHEELER watched her husband’s face withdraw, she felt the light squeeze of his hand on her arm and heard his words, and smiled at him.
“So long,” she answered.
She followed him outside to stand on the kitchen steps and watch, hugging her arms against the morning chill, while he started up the station car and brought it rumbling out into the sunshine. His flushed profile, thrust out and facing the rear as the car moved past, revealed nothing but the sobriety of a man with a pardonable pride in knowing how to back a car efficiently down a hill. She walked out to a sunny place in front of the carport to see him off, watching the crumpled shape of the old Ford get smaller and smaller. At the end of the driveway, as he backed it out and around into the road, a gleam of sun on the windshield eclipsed his face. She held up her hand and waved anyway, in case he was looking, and when he came into view again as the car straightened out it was clear that he’d seen her. He was bending and grinning up at her, neat and happy in his gabardine suit, his blazing white shirt and dark tie, answering her wave with a small, jaunty wave of his own; then he was gone.
Her smile continued until she was back in the kitchen, clearing away the breakfast dishes into a steaming sinkful of suds; she was still smiling, in fact, when she saw the paper napkin with the diagram of the computer on it, and even then her smile didn’t fade: it simply spread and trembled and locked itself into a stiff grimace while the spasms worked at her aching throat, again and again, and the tears broke and ran down her cheeks as fast as she could wipe them away.
She got some music on the radio, to steady her nerves, and by the time she’d finished washing the dishes she was all right again. Her gums were sore from too many cigarettes during the night, her hands were inclined to shake and she was more aware of her heartbeats than usual; otherwise she felt fine. It was a shock, though, when the radio announcer said “Eight forty-five” it seemed like noon, or early afternoon. She washed her face in cold water and took several deep breaths, trying to slow her heart down; then she lit a cigarette and composed herself at the telephone.
“Hello, Milly?…Hi. Everything all right?…My voice sounds what?…Oh. Well, no, actually, I’m not feeling any better; that’s really why I called…. Are you sure you don’t mind? I mean it may not be for the whole night again; maybe Frank’ll want to come over and get them this evening, depending how things work out; but I guess we’d better leave it open, just in case…. Well, that’s really wonderful of you, Milly, I do appreciate it…. Oh no, I’m sure it’s nothing serious; it’s just—you know, one of those things…. All right, then. Give them a kiss for me, and tell them one or the other of us’ll be stopping by to pick them up, either tonight or tomorrow…. What?…Oh, well—no, not if they’re outdoors playing. Don’t call them in.” The cigarette broke and shredded in her fingers; she let it drop into the ash tray and used both hands to grip the telephone. “Just give them—you know; give them each a kiss for me, and give them my love, and tell them—you know…. All right, Milly. Thanks.”
And she barely managed to get the phone back in its cradle before she was crying again. To control herself she lit another cigarette, but it gagged her and she had to go to the bathroom and stand there for a long time, retching dryly even after she’d lost what little breakfast she’d managed to eat. Afterwards, she washed her face again and brushed her teeth, and then it was time to get busy.
“Have you thought it through, April?” Aunt Claire used to say, holding up one stout, arthritic forefinger. “Never undertake to do a thing until you’ve thought it through; then do the best you can.”
The first thing to do was to straighten up the house, and in particular to straighten up the desk, where the hours and hours of her trying to think it through, last night, had left a mess of remnants. The heaped-up ash tray was there, and the opened bottle of ink surrounded by spilled ashes, and the coffee cup containing a dried brown ring. She had only to sit down at the desk and switch on its lamp to bring back the harsh, desolate flavor of the small hours.
In the wastebasket, lumped and crumpled, lay all the failures of the letter she had tried to write. She picked one of them out and opened it and spread it flat, but at first she couldn’t read it: she could only marvel at how cramped and black and angry the handwriting looked, like row on row of precisely swatted mosquitos. Then part of it, halfway down the page, came into focus:
…your cowardly self-delusio
ns about “love” when you know as well as I do that there’s never been anything between us but contempt and distrust and a terrible sickly dependence on each other’s weakness—that’s why. That’s why I couldn’t stop laughing today when you said that about the Inability to Love, and that’s why I can’t stand to let you touch me, and that’s why I’ll never again believe in anything you think, let alone in anything you say…
She didn’t want to read the rest because she knew it wasn’t worth reading. It was weak with hate, like all the other abortive letters on all the other crumpled papers; all of them would have to be burned.
It wasn’t until five this morning—and could that really have been only four hours ago?—that she’d finally stopped trying to write the letter. She had forced herself up from the desk then, aching with tiredness, and gone in to take a deep, warm bath, lying very still under the still water for a long time, like a patient in therapy. Afterwards, feeling absent-minded and greatly calmed, she had gone into the bedroom to get dressed; and there he was, on his back.
The sight of him, in the early blue light, sprawled out and twisted in his wrinkled Sunday sports clothes, had been as much of a shock as if she’d found a stranger in the bed. When she sat down in the reek of whiskey to get a closer look at his flushed, sleeping face, she began to understand the real cause of her shock: it was much more than the knowledge that she didn’t love him. It was that she didn’t, she couldn’t possibly hate him. How could anyone hate him? He was—well, he was Frank.
Then he’d made a little snoring moan and his lips had begun to work as he groped for her hand. “Oh, baby. Oh, my baby, don’t go away…”
“Sh-sh-sh. It’s all right. It’s all right, Frank. Go to sleep.”
And that was when she’d thought it through.
So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.