Revolutionary Road (24 page)

  "I hope so," she whispered. "I hope so; very much."

  Then he had slept, and now he was awake.

  He got up and went padding through the silent house. The kitchen was alight with all the colors of the sunrise—it was a beautiful morning—and the calendar had lost its power. There it hung, through the courtesy of A. J. Stolper and Sons, a document useful only in the paying of bills and the making of dental appointments. Days and weeks could pass now without anyone's caring; a month might vanish before anyone thought to tear away the page for the month before.

  Franklin H. Wheeler poured himself a glass of ice-cold orange juice, the color of the sun, and sipped it slowly at the kitchen table, afraid it would sicken him to take it all at once. He had won but he didn't feel like a winner. He had successfully righted the course of his life but he felt himself more than ever a victim of the world's indifference. It didn't seem fair.

  Only very gradually, there at the table, was he able to sort out and identify what it was that had haunted him on waking, that had threatened to make him gag on his orange juice and now prevented his enjoyment of the brilliant grass and trees and sky beyond the window.

  It was that he was going to have another child, and he wasn't at all sure that he wanted one.

  "Knowing what you've got, comma," said the living human voice in the playback of the Dictaphone, "knowing what you need, comma, knowing what you can do without, dash. That's inventory control.

  "Paragraph . . ."

  It was suddenly past the middle of August, and two weeks had elapsed since his last talk with Pollock, or possibly three; time, now that he'd overcome the need to measure and apportion it, had again begun to slip away from him. "You mean to say it's Friday already?" he was apt to demand on what he'd thought was Tuesday or Wednesday, and it wasn't until lunchtime today, when he passed a store window featuring a display of autumn leaves and the words back to school, that he realized the summer was over. Very soon now it would be time for topcoats, and then it would be Christmas.

  "The main thing I have to do now," he had recently explained to April, "is to finish this Speaking-of series. I mean I can't very well expect to talk money with him until I've done that, can I?"

  "No; I suppose not. You know best."

  "Well, I can't. I mean we can't expect any miraculous changes overnight in a thing like this; it's the kind of a thing that can't be rushed."

  "Do I seem to be rushing you? Really, Frank; how many ways can I say it? It's entirely up to you."

  "I know," he said. "I know, of course I know that. Anyway, I do want to get the damn series done as soon as possible. I'll probably stay in late a couple of nights this week to work on it."

  And he'd taken to staying in late nearly every night since then. He rather enjoyed having dinner alone in town and taking walks through the city at evening before catching the late train. It gave him a pleasant sense of independence, of freedom from the commuter's round; and besides, it seemed a suitable practice for the new, mature, nonsentimental kind of marriage that was evidently going to be their way from now on.

  The only trouble was that this second Speaking-of piece had turned out to be much harder than the first. He had finished it twice now, and each time had discovered gaping errors of logic or emphasis that seemed to demand a total revision.

  The office clock read five-forty-five as he listened to the playback of his third and final revision, and the silence beyond his cubicle proved that even the last and most drearily conscientious people on the Fifteenth Floor had gone home; soon the platoons of scrubwomen would arrive with mops and buckets. When the recording had droned to its conclusion he felt nicely exhilarated. It wasn't very good, but it would do. Now he could take off uptown and have a couple of drinks before dinner.

  He was in the act of leaning over to shut off the machine when the click, click, click of a woman's heels came delicately up the aisle outside. He knew at once that it was Maureen Grube, that she had purposely stayed late in order to be alone with him, and that he was going to take her out tonight. It seemed important not to look openly into the aisle as she passed; instead he remained hunched over the Dictaphone, peeking at the doorway from cover. It was Maureen, all right; the quick glimpse he caught of her was more than enough to confirm that. It was enough to show him that an inch of petticoat was switching nicely through a vent in the hem of her skirt with every step and that her face, as subtly averted as his own, had not quite dared to glance in at him.

  Her footsteps receded, and as he waited confidently for their return he reset the machine to the "start" position and leaned back in his chair to listen. That way he could be staring frankly into the aisle, yet quite legitimately occupied with business, when she came by again.

  "Copy for Veritype," the Dictaphone said. "Title: Speaking of Inventory Control, parenthesis, revision three. Paragraph. Knowing what you've got, comma, knowing what you need, comma, knowing what you can do without, dash. That's—"

  "Oh." She had stopped directly in his line of vision, and her careful expression of surprise was somewhat vitiated by the deep, permanent-looking blush that had suffused her face and neck. "Hello, Frank. Working late?"

  He shut off the machine and got slowly to his feet, moving toward her with the loose, almost sleepy gait of a man who knows exactly what he's doing.

  "Hi," he said.

EVERY FRIDAY
and Saturday night, "For Your Dancing Pleasure," the Steve Kovick Quartet played at Vito's Log Cabin, on Route Twelve, and on those two nights (as Steve himself liked to say, winking over the rim of his rye-andginger) the joint really jumped.

  Piano, bass, tenor sax and drums, they prided themselves on versatility. They could play anything, in any style you wanted to name, and to judge from the delight that swam in their eyes they had no idea of what inferior musicians they were. In the three supporting members of the Quartet this lack of discernment could be excused on the grounds of inexperience or amateurism or both, but it was harder to condone in their leader, who played the drums. A thick, blunt, blue-jawed man, getting on for forty now, he had been a professional for twenty years without ever quite learning his craft. Artistically awakened and nourished by the early recordings and movies of Gene Krupa, he had spent the only happy hours of his youth in a trance of heroworshiping imitation—first intently slapping telephone books and overturned dishpans, later using a real set of drums in the sweat and liniment smells of the high-school gym—until one June night in his senior year when the rest of the band stopped playing, the hundreds of couples stood still, and Steve Kovick felt the weight of all their rapture on his wagging, chewing head while he beat it out for three solid minutes. But the splendid crash of cymbals with which he ended that performance marked the pinnacle and ruin of his talent. He would never drum that well again, he would never again kindle that much admiration, nor would he ever again lose his frantic grip on the conviction that he was great and getting better all the time. Even now, at a rundown beer-and-pizza joint like Vito's Log Cabin, there was a negligent grandeur in the way he took the stand, the way he frowned over the arrangement of sticks and brushes and hi-hat cymbals and then peered out, beetle-browed, to ask if the spotlight could be adjusted a fraction of an inch before he settled down; and there was elaborate condescension in the way he whisked and thumped through preliminary fox trots or handled the gourds for Latin-American interludes; anyone could tell he was only marking time, waiting for the moment when he could tell the boys to cut loose on one of the old-time Benny Goodman jump numbers.

  Only then, once or twice an hour, did he give himself wholly to his work. Socking the bass drum as if to box the ears of every customer in the house, doing his damnedest on snare and tom-tom, he would take off in a triumph of misplaced virtuosity that went relentlessly on and on until it drenched his hair with sweat and left him weak and happy as a child.

  The patrons of the Log Cabin on dance nights were mostly high-school seniors (it was the corniest band in the world but the only live music for miles around; besides, there wasn't any cover and they'd serve you without proof of age and the big parking lot was nice and dark) and a smattering of local storekeepers and contractors who sat in a state of constant laughter with their arms around their wives, remarking on how young it made them feel to watch these kids enjoying themselves. There was an occasional tough element, too, boys in black leather jackets and boots who slouched in the urine-smelling corner near the men's room with their thumbs in their jeans, watching the girls with menacingly narrow eyes and taking repeated trips to the toilet to comb and recomb their hair; and there were the regulars, lonely and middle-aged and apparently homeless, the single or inadequately married people who came to the Log Cabin every night, music or not, to drink and sentimentalize under the fly-blown, joke-hung mirror of its rustic bar.

  Not infrequently, over the past two years, the dance night crowd had included a party of four intensely humorous young adults who belonged to no discernible group at all: the Campbells and the Wheelers. Frank had discovered the place soon after moving to the country—had discovered it in search of drunkenness one night after a quarrel with his wife, and been quick to bring her back for dancing as soon as things were happier.

  "You people ever been to the Log Cabin?" he had asked the Campbells early in their acquaintance, and April had said, "Oh
no,
darling; they'd hate it. It's terrible." The Campbells had looked from one to the other of their faces with uncertain smiles, ready to hate it or love it or espouse whatever other opinion of it might please the Wheelers most.

  "No, I don't think they'd hate it," Frank had insisted. "I bet they'd like it. It takes a special kind of taste, is all. I mean the thing about the Log Cabin, you see," he explained to them at last, "is that it's so awful it's kind of nice."

  At first, through the spring and summer of 1953, the four of them had come here only once in a while, as a kind of comic relief from more ambitious forms of entertainment; but by the following summer they had fallen into it like a cheap, bad habit, and it was their awareness of this particular degeneration, as much as any other, that had made the idea of the Laurel Players uncommonly attractive last winter. When
The Petrified Forest
went into rehearsal their attendance at the Log Cabin dwindled sharply (there were other, quieter places to stop for drinks on the way home from the school), and in the long uneasy time since the failure of the play they had not come here at all—almost as if to do so would have constituted an admission of moral defeat.

  But "What the hell," Frank had said this evening, after every conversational attempt in the Campbells' living room had petered out and died, "why don't we all break down and go to the Log Cabin?"

  And here they were, a quiet foursome ordering round after round of drinks, getting up and coupling off to dance, coming back and sitting silent under the blast of the jump numbers. But for all its awkwardness the evening was oddly free of tension, or so at least it seemed to Frank. April was as aloof and enigmatic, as far away from the party as she'd ever been in the worst of the old days, but the difference was that now he refused to worry about it. In the old days he might have talked and laughed himself sick trying to win an affectionate smile from her, or trying by sheer vivacity to make up for her rudeness to the Campbells (because that was what it did amount to, sitting there like some longnecked, heavy-lidded queen among commoners—plain damn rudeness); instead he was content to relax in his chair, one hand lightly tapping the table to Steve Kovick's beat, and perform the minimal pleasantries while thinking his own thoughts.

  Was his wife unhappy? That was unfortunate, but it was, after all, her problem. He had a few problems too. This crisp way of thinking, unencumbered by guilt or confusion, was as new and as comfortable as his lightweight autumn suit (a wool gabardine in a pleasingly dark shade of tan, a younger and more tasteful, junior-executive version of the suit Bart Pollock wore). The resumption of the business with Maureen had helped him toward a renewal of selfesteem, so that the face he saw in passing mirrors these days gave him back a level, unembarrassed glance. It was hardly a hero's face but neither was it a self-pitying boy's or a wretchedly anxious husband's; it was the steady, controlled face of a man with a few things on his mind, and he rather liked it. The business with Maureen would have to be brought to a graceful conclusion soon—it had served its purpose—but in the meantime he felt he was entitled to savor it. That, in fact, was what he was doing now, allowing the erotic thump of Steve Kovick's tom-tom to remind him of her hips, gazing wryly off into the swirl of dancers as he gave in to voluptuous memories.

  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 threeday 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.