Revolutionary Road Read online

  Why not let well enough alone? As an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man, wasn’t it simple logic to expect that he’d be limited to intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sorts of women? But this was the counsel of defeat, and one night, bolstered by four straight gulps of whiskey at a party in Morningside Heights, he followed the counsel of victory. “I guess I didn’t get your name,” he said to the exceptionally first-rate girl whose shining hair and splendid legs had drawn him halfway across a roomful of strangers. “Are you Pamela?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s Pamela over there. I’m April. April Johnson.”

  Within five minutes he found he could make April Johnson laugh, that he could not only hold the steady attention of her wide gray eyes but could make their pupils dart up and down and around in little arcs while he talked to her, as if the very shape and texture of his face were matters of absorbing interest.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a longshoreman.”

  “No, I mean really.”

  “I mean really too.” And he would have showed her his palms to prove it if he hadn’t been afraid she could tell the difference between calluses and blisters. For the past week, under the guidance of a roughhewn college friend, he had been self-consciously “shaping up” on the docks each morning and swaying under the weight of fruit crates. “Starting Monday, though, I’ve got a better job. Night cashier in a cafeteria.”

  “Well but I don’t mean things like that. I mean what are you really interested in?”

  “Honey—” (and he was still young enough so that the audacity of saying “Honey” on such short acquaintance made him blush) “—Honey, if I had the answer to that one I bet I’d bore us both to death in half an hour.”

  Five minutes later, dancing, he found that the small of April Johnson’s back rode as neatly in his hand as if it had been made for that purpose; and a week after that, almost to the day, she was lying miraculously nude beside him in the first blue light of day on Bethune Street, drawing her delicate forefinger down his face from brow to chin and whispering: “It’s true, Frank. I mean it. You’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”

  “Because it’s just not worth it,” he was saying now, allowing the blue-lit needle of the speedometer to tremble up through sixty for the final mile of highway. They were almost home. They would have a few drinks and maybe she would cry a little—it would do her good—and then they would laugh about it and shut themselves in the bedroom and take off their clothes, and in the moonlight her plump little breasts would nod and sway and point at him, and there wasn’t any reason why it couldn’t be like the old days.

  “I mean it’s bad enough having to live among all these damn little suburban types—and I’m including the Campbells in that, let’s be honest—it’s bad enough having to live among these people, without letting ourselves get hurt by every little half-assed—what’d you say?” He glanced briefly away from the road and was startled to see, by the light of the dashboard, that she was covering her face with both hands.

  “I said yes. All right, Frank. Could you just please stop talking now, before you drive me crazy?”

  He slowed down quickly and brought the car to a sandy halt on the shoulder of the road, cutting the engine and the lights. Then he slid across the seat and tried to take her in his arms.

  “No, Frank, please don’t do that. Just leave me alone, okay?”

  “Baby, it’s only that I want to—”

  “Leave me alone. Leave me alone!”

  He drew himself back to the wheel and put the lights on, but his hands refused to undertake the job of starting the car. Instead he sat there for a minute, listening to the beating of blood in his eardrums.

  “It strikes me,” he said at last, “that there’s a considerable amount of bullshit going on here. I mean you seem to be doing a pretty good imitation of Madame Bovary here, and there’s one or two points I’d like to clear up. Number one, it’s not my fault the play was lousy. Number two, it’s sure as hell not my fault you didn’t turn out to be an actress, and the sooner you get over that little piece of soap opera the better off we’re all going to be. Number three, I don’t happen to fit the role of dumb, insensitive suburban husband; you’ve been trying to hang that one on me ever since we moved out here, and I’m damned if I’ll wear it. Number four—”

  She was out of the car and running away in the headlights, quick and graceful, a little too wide in the hips. For a second, as he clambered out and started after her, he thought she meant to kill herself—she was capable of damn near anything at times like this—but she stopped in the dark roadside weeds thirty yards ahead, beside a luminous sign that read NO PASSING. He came up behind her and stood uncertainly, breathing hard, keeping his distance. She wasn’t crying; she was only standing there, with her back to him.

  “What the hell,” he said. “What the hell’s this all about? Come on back to the car.”

  “No. I will in a minute. Just let me stand here a minute, all right?”

  His arms flapped and fell; then, as the sound and the lights of an approaching car came up behind them, he put one hand in his pocket and assumed a conversational slouch for the sake of appearances. The car overtook them, lighting up the sign and the tense shape of her back; then its taillights sped away and the drone of its tires flattened out to a buzz in the distance, and finally to silence. On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song. Straight ahead, two or three hundred yards away, the earth rose high above the moonlit telephone wires to form the mound of Revolutionary Hill, along whose summit winked the friendly picture windows of the Revolutionary Hill Estates. The Campbells lived in one of those houses; the Campbells might well be in one of the cars whose lights were coming up behind them right now.

  “April?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Look,” he said. “Couldn’t we sit in the car and talk about it? Instead of running all over Route Twelve?”

  “Haven’t I made it clear,” she said, “that I don’t particularly want to talk about it?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Jesus, April, I’m trying as hard as I can to be nice about this thing, but I—”

  “How kind of you,” she said. “How terribly, terribly kind of you.”

  “Wait a minute—” he pulled the hand from his pocket and stood straight, but then he put it back because other cars were coming. “Listen a minute.” He tried to swallow but his throat was very dry. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here,” he said, “and frankly I don’t think you do either. But I do know one thing. I know damn well I don’t deserve this.”

  “You’re always so wonderfully definite, aren’t you,” she said, “on the subject of what you do and don’t deserve.” She swept past him and walked back to the car.

  “Now, wait a minute!” He was stumbling after her in the weeds. Other cars were rushing past now, both ways, but he’d stopped caring. “Wait a minute, God damn it!”

  She leaned the backs of her thighs against the fender and folded her arms in an elaborate display of resignation while he jabbed and shook a forefinger in her face.

  “You listen to me. This is one time you’re not going to get away with twisting everything I say. This just happens to be one damn time I know I’m not in the wrong. You know what you are when you’re like this?”

  “Oh God, if only you’d stayed home tonight.”

  “You know what you are when you’re like this? You’re sick. I really mean that.”

  “And do you know what you are?” Her eyes raked him up and down. “You’re disgusting.”

  Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other’s weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other’s strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back ove
r the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.

  “Oh, you’ve never fooled me, Frank, never once. All your precious moral maxims and your ‘love’ and your mealy-mouthed little—do you think I’ve forgotten the time you hit me in the face because I said I wouldn’t forgive you? Oh, I’ve always known I had to be your conscience and your guts—and your punching bag. Just because you’ve got me safely in a trap you think you—”

  “You in a trap! You in a trap! Jesus, don’t make me laugh!”

  “Yes, me.” She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. “Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, self-deluded—Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch”—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—“by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!”

  He swung out one trembling fist for a backhanded blow to her head and she cowered against the fender in an ugly crumple of fear; then instead of hitting her he danced away in a travesty of boxer’s footwork and brought the fist down on the roof of the car with all his strength. He hit the car four times that way: Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!—while she stood and watched. When he was finished, the shrill, liquid chant of the peepers was the only sound for miles.

  “God damn you,” he said quietly. “God damn you, April.”

  “All right. Could we please go home now?”

  With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people. He started the engine and drove carefully away, down to the turn at the base of Revolutionary Hill and on up the winding blacktop grade of Revolutionary Road.

  This was the way they had first come, two years ago, as cordially nodding passengers in the station wagon of Mrs. Helen Givings, the real-estate broker. She had been polite but guarded over the phone—so many city people were apt to come out and waste her time demanding impossible bargains—but from the moment they’d stepped off the train, as she would later tell her husband, she had recognized them as the kind of couple one did take a little trouble with, even in the low-price bracket. “They’re sweet,” she told her husband. “The girl is absolutely ravishing, and I think the boy must do something very brilliant in town—he’s very nice, rather reserved—and really, it is so refreshing to deal with people of that sort.” Mrs. Givings had understood at once that they wanted something out of the ordinary—a small remodeled barn or carriage house, or an old guest cottage—something with a little charm—and she did hate having to tell them that those things simply weren’t available any more. But she implored them not to lose heart; she did know of one little place they might like.

  “Now of course it isn’t a very desirable road down at this end,” she explained, her glance switching birdlike between the road and their pleased, attentive faces as she made the turn off Route Twelve. “As you see, it’s mostly these little cinder-blocky, pickup-trucky places—plumbers, carpenters, little local people of that sort. And then eventually”—she aimed the stiff pistol of her index finger straight through the windshield in fair warning, causing a number of metal bracelets to jingle and click against the steering wheel—“eventually it leads on up and around to a perfectly dreadful new development called Revolutionary Hill Estates—great hulking split levels, all in the most nauseous pastels and dreadfully expensive too, I can’t think why. No, but the place I want to show you has absolutely no connection with that. One of our nice little local builders put it up right after the war, you see, before all the really awful building began. It’s really rather a sweet little house and a sweet little setting. Simple, clean lines, good lawns, marvelous for children. It’s right around this next curve, and you see the road is nicer along in here, isn’t it? Now you’ll see it—there. See the little white one? Sweet, isn’t it? The perky way it sits there on its little slope?”

  “Oh yes,” April said as the house emerged through the spindly trunks of second-growth oak and slowly turned toward them, small and wooden, riding high on its naked concrete foundation, its outsized central window staring like a big black mirror. “Yes, I think it’s sort of—nice, don’t you, darling? Of course it does have the picture window; I guess there’s no escaping that.”

  “I guess not,” Frank said. “Still, I don’t suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities.”

  “Oh, that’s marvelous,” Mrs. Givings cried, and her laughter enclosed them in a warm shelter of flattery as they rolled up the driveway and climbed out to have a look. She hovered near them, reassuring and protective, while they walked the naked floors of the house in whispering speculation. The place did have possibilities. Their sofa could go here and their big table there; their solid wall of books would take the curse off the picture window; a sparse, skillful arrangement of furniture would counteract the prim suburban look of this too-symmetrical living room. On the other hand, the very symmetry of the place was undeniably appealing—the fact that all its corners made right angles, that each of its floorboards lay straight and true, that its doors hung in perfect balance and closed without scraping in efficient clicks. Enjoying the light heft and feel of these doorknobs, they could fancy themselves at home here. Inspecting the flawless bathroom, they could sense the pleasure of steaming in its ample tub; they could see their children running barefoot down this hallway free of mildew and splinters and cockroaches and grit. It did have possibilities. The gathering disorder of their lives might still be sorted out and made to fit these rooms, among these trees; and what if it did take time? Who could be frightened in as wide and bright, as clean and quiet a house as this?

  Now, as the house swam up close in the darkness with its cheerful blaze of kitchen and carport lights, they tensed their shoulders and set their jaws in attitudes of brute endurance. April went first, swaying blindly through the kitchen, pausing to steady herself against the great refrigerator, and Frank came blinking behind her. Then she touched a wall switch, and the living room exploded into clarity. In the first shock of light it seemed to be floating, all its contents adrift, and even after it held still it had a tentative look. The sofa was here and the big table there, but they might just as well have been reversed; there was the wall of books, obediently competing for dominance with the picture window, but it might as well have been a lending library. The other pieces of furniture had indeed removed the suggestion of primness, but they had failed to replace it with any other quality. Chairs, coffee table, floor lamp and desk, they stood like items arbitrarily grouped for auction. Only one corner of the room showed signs of pleasant human congress—carpet worn, cushions dented, ash trays full—and this was the alcove they had established with reluctance less than six months ago: the province of the television set (“Why not? Don’t we really owe it to the kids? Besides, it’s silly to go on being snobbish about television…”).

  Mrs. Lundquist, the baby sitter, had fallen asleep on the sofa and lay hidden beneath its back. Now she rose abruptly into view as she sat up squinting and trying to smile, her false teeth clacking and her hands fumbling at the pins of her loosened white hair.

  “Mommy?” came a high wide-awake voice from the children’s room down the hall. It was Jennifer, the six-year-old. “Mommy? Was it a good play?”

  Frank took two wrong turns in driving Mrs. Lundquist home (Mrs. Lundquist, lurching against door and dashboard, tried to cover her fear by smiling fixedly in the darkness; she thought he was drunk), and all the way back, alone, he rode with one hand pressed to his mouth. He was doing his best to reconstruct the quarrel in his mind, but it was hopeless. He couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive. His throat was still raw from shouting and his hand still throbbed from hitting the car—he remembered that part well enough—but his only other memory was of the high-shouldered way she had stood in the curtain call, with that false, vulnerable smile, and this made him weak with remorse. Of all the nights to have a fight! He
had to hold the wheel tight in both hands because the road lights were blurring and swimming in his eyes.

  The house was dark, and the sight of it as he drove up, a long milky shape in the greater darkness of trees and sky, made him think of death. He padded quickly through the kitchen and living room and went down the hall on careful tiptoe, past the children’s room and into the bedroom, where he softly shut the door behind him.

  “April, listen,” he whispered. Stripping off his coat, he went to the dim bed and sat slumped on its edge in a classic pose of contrition. “Please listen. I won’t touch you. I just want to say I’m—there isn’t anything to say except I’m sorry.”

  This was going to be a bad one; it was going to be the kind that went on for days. But at least they were here, alone and quiet in their own room, instead of shouting on the highway; at least the thing had passed into its second phase now, the long quiet aftermath that always before, however implausibly, had led to reconciliation. She wouldn’t run away from him now, nor was there any chance of his boiling into a rage again; they were both too tired. Early in his marriage these numb periods had seemed even worse than the humiliating noise that set them off: each time he would think, There can’t be any dignified way out of it this time. But there always had been a way, dignified or not, discovered through the simple process of apologizing first and then waiting, trying not to think about it too much. By now the feel of this attitude was as familiar as an unbecoming, comfortable old coat. He could wear it with a certain voluptuous ease, for it allowed him a total suspension of will and pride.

  “I don’t know what happened back there,” he said, “but whatever it was, believe me, I—April?” Then his reaching hand discovered that the bed was empty. The long shape he’d been talking to was a wad of thrown-back covers and a pillow; she had torn the bed apart.

  “April?”

  He ran frightened to the empty bathroom and down the hall.

  “Please go away,” her voice said. She was rolled up in a blanket on the living-room sofa, where Mrs. Lundquist had lain.