Revolutionary Road (32 page)
"Mm. Yes . . ."
After that they confined their weekly visits to the inner waiting room of John's ward. He didn't seem to mind. He would ask about the Wheelers from time to time, but of course they told him nothing. By Christmas they had slipped into the habit of allowing two or three weeks to elapse between visits; then they tapered off to once a month.
Little things make a difference. One sleeting January day, at the shopping center, her eye was caught and held by a small, brown, mixed-breed spaniel puppy in the pet-shop window. Feeling absurd—she had never done anything quite so silly and impulsive in her life—she went in and bought him on the spot and took him home.
And what a pleasure he was! Oh, he was troublesome too—paper-training and housebreaking and worms and so on; it takes a lot of plain, hard work to make a good pet— but he was worth it.
"
Roll
over!" she would say, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in her slipper socks. "
Roll
over, boy!" Then she would knead his fuzzy little ribs and belly with her fingers while he squirmed on his spine, his four paws waving in the air and his black lips drawn back from his teeth in giggling ecstasy.
"
Oh,
you're such a good little dog!
Oh,
you're such a good little wet-nosed sweetie-pie—aren't you? Aren't you? Yes you
are
! Oh, yes you
are
!" It was the puppy, more than anything or anyone else, that made her winter endurable.
Business began to pick up with the coming of spring, which never failed to give her a sense of life beginning all over again; but one ordeal remained to be survived: the selling of the Wheelers' house. Her dread of the inevitable meeting with Frank in the lawyer's office, at the closing, was so intense that she hardly slept at all the night before. It turned out, though, to be much less awkward than she'd feared. He was cordial and dignified—"Good to see you, Mrs. Givings"—they talked only of business matters, and he left as soon as the papers were signed. Afterwards, it was as if she'd closed a door forever on the whole experience.
The next two months kept her exhaustingly, deliriously busy: more of the sweet old houses coming on the market, more of the more presentable new ones being built, more and more of the right sort of people coming out from the city—people who wanted and deserved something really nice, and who didn't care about haggling for bargains. It soon developed into the best real estate spring of her career, and she took a craftsman's pride in it. The days were long and often very difficult, but that only made the shrunken evenings more exquisitely restful.
Between playing with the puppy and chatting with Howard, she found any number of simple, constructive little tasks to do around the house.
"Isn't this cozy?" she asked one fine May evening as she crouched on spread newspapers to varnish a chair. Howard, bored with the W
orld-Telegram,
was sitting with folded hands and looking out the window; the puppy was curled up asleep on his little rug nearby, sated with happiness. "It's wonderful just to let yourself unwind after a hard day," she said. "Would you like some more coffee, dear? Or some more cake?"
"No, thanks. I may have a glass of milk later on."
Turning the chair carefully on its spattered papers and seating herself on the floor to reach its underside, she went on talking as her brush trailed back and forth.
". . . I simply can't tell you how pleased I am about the little Revolutionary Road place, Howard. Remember how dreary it looked all winter? All cold and dark and—well, spooky. Creepy-crawly. And now whenever I drive past it gives me such a lift to see it all perked up and spanking clean again, with lights in the windows. Oh, and they're delightful young people, the Braces. She's very sweet and fun to talk to; he's rather reserved. I think he must do something very brilliant in town. He said to me, 'Mrs. Givings, I can't thank you enough. This is just the kind of home we've always wanted.' Wasn't that a sweet thing to say? And do you know, I was just thinking. I've loved that little house for years, and these are the first really suitable people I've ever found for it. Really nice, congenial people, I mean."
Her husband stirred and shifted the placement of his orthopedic shoes. "Well," he said, "except for the Wheelers, you mean."
"Well, but I mean r
eally
congenial people," she said. "
Our
kind of people. Oh, I was very fond of the Wheelers, but they always were a bit—a bit whimsical, for my taste. A bit neurotic. I may not have stressed it, but they were often very trying people to deal with, in many ways. Actually, the main reason the little house has been so hard to
sell
is that they let it depreciate so dreadfully. Warped window frames, wet cellar, crayon marks on the walls, filthy smudges around all the doorknobs and fixtures—really careless, destructive things. And that awful stone path going halfway down the front lawn and ending in a mud puddle—can you imagine anyone defacing a property like that? It's going to cost Mr. Brace a small fortune to get it cleared away and replanted. No, but it was more than that. The kind of thing I mean goes deeper than that."
She paused to press the excess varnish from her brush against the side of the can, frowning, working her lips in an effort to find words for the kind of thing she meant.
"It's just that they
were
a rather strange young couple. Irresponsible. The guarded way they'd look at you; the way they'd talk to you; unwholesome, sort of. Oh, and another thing. Do you know what I came across in the cellar? All dead and dried out? I came across an enormous box of sedum plantings that I must have spent an entire day collecting for them last spring. I remember very carefully selecting the best shoots and very tenderly packing them in just the right kind of soil—
that's
the kind of thing I mean, you see. Wouldn't you think that when someone goes to a certain amount of trouble to give you a perfectly good plant, a living, growing thing, wouldn't you think the very least you'd do would be to—"
But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.
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