Revolutionary Road (5 page)

  "Oh, yeah," he said. "House leak." She told him a good many other things about the plants, while he nodded and watched her and wished she would go away, listening to the whir and whine of the lawnmower. "Well," he said when her voice stopped. "That's swell, thanks a lot. Can I—offer you a cup of coffee?"

  "Oh, no, thanks ever so much—" She skittered four or five feet away, retreating, as if he had offered her a soiled handkerchief to blow her nose in. Then, from the safety of her new position, she displayed all her long teeth in an elaborate smile. "Do tell April we loved the play last night—or wait, I'll tell her myself." She craned and squinted into the sun, judging the distance her voice would have to travel, and then she let it loose:

  "
April! April!
I just wanted to
tell
you we
loved
the
play
!" Her strained, shouting face could have been the picture of a woman in agony.

  After a second the sound of the lawnmower stopped and April's distant voice said, "What's that?"

"I say, we LOVED, the PLAY!"

  And at last, on hearing April's faint "Oh—thanks, Helen," she was able to slacken her features. She turned back to Frank, who was still clumsily holding the box. "You really do have a very gifted wife. I can't tell you how much Howard and I enjoyed it."

  "Good," he said. "Actually, I think the general consensus is that it wasn't too great. I mean I think most people seemed to feel that way."

  "Oh, no, it was charming. I did think your nice friend up on the Hill was rather unfortunately cast—Mr. Crandall?— but otherwise—"

  "Campbell, yes. Actually, I don't think he was any worse than some of the others; and of course he did have a difficult part." He always felt it necessary to defend the Campbells to Mrs. Givings, whose view seemed to be that anyone who lived in the Revolutionary Hill Estates deserved at best a tactful condescension.

  "I suppose that's true. I was surprised not to see
Mrs.
Crandall in the group—or Campbell, is it? Still, I don't expect she'd have the time, with all those children."

  "She worked backstage." He was trying to shift the box so that the sand would stop trickling, or trickle somewhere else. "She was quite active in the whole thing, as a matter of fact."

  "Oh, good. I'm sure she would be; such a friendly, willing little soul. All right, then—" She began sidling toward her car. "I won't keep you." This was the moment for her saying "Oh, one other thing, while I think of it." She nearly always did that, and the other thing would turn out to be the thing she had really come for in the first place. Now she hesitated, visibly wondering whether to say it or not; then her face showed her decision not to, under the circumstances. Whatever it was would have to wait. "Fine, then. I simply love the stone path you've started down the front lawn."

  "Oh," he said. "Thanks. I haven't hardly started it yet."

  "Oh, I know," she assured him. "It
is
hard work." Then she trilled a gracious little two-note song of goodbye and twitched into her station wagon, which rolled slowly away.

  "Mommy, look what Daddy's got," Jennifer was calling. "Mrs. Givings brought it."

  And Michael, the four-year-old, said, "It's flowers. Is it flowers, or what?"

  They were hurrying toward him over the cropped grass, while April slowly and heavily brought up the rear, pulling the lawnmower behind her, blowing damp strands of hair away from her eyes with a stuck-out lower lip. Everything about her seemed determined to prove, with a new, flatfooted emphasis, that a sensible middle-class housewife was all she had ever wanted to be and that all she had ever wanted of love was a husband who would get out and cut the grass once in a while, instead of sleeping all day.

  "It's leaking, Daddy," Jennifer said.

  "I know it's leaking. Quiet a minute. Listen," he said to his wife, without quite looking at her. "Would you mind telling me what I'm supposed to do with this stuff?"

  "How should I know? What is it?"

  "I don't know what the hell it is. It's European house leak or something."

  "European what?"

  "Oh no, wait a second. It's
like
house leak, only it's pink instead of yellow. Yellow instead of pink. I thought you'd probably know all about it."

  "Whatever made you think that?" She came up close to squint at the plants, fingering one of their fleshy stems. "What's it for? Didn't she say?"

  His mind was a blank. "Wait a second. It's called beecham. Or wait—seecham. I'm pretty sure it's seecham." He licked his lips and changed his grip on the box. "It's marvelous in acid soil. Does that ring a bell?"

  The children were switching their hopeful eyes from one parent to the other, and Jennifer was beginning to look worried.

  April ran her fingers into her hip pockets. "Marvelous for what? You mean you didn't even ask her?"

  The plants were quivering in his arms. "Look, could you kind of take it easy? I haven't had any coffee yet, and I—"

  "Oh, this is swell. What am I supposed to do with this stuff? What am I supposed to
tell
the woman the next time I see her?"

  "Tell her any God damn thing you like," he said. "Maybe you could tell her to mind her own God damn business for a change."

  "Don't
shout,
Daddy." Jennifer was bouncing up and down in her grass-stained sneakers, flapping her hands and starting to cry.

  "I'm
not
shouting," he told her, with all the indignation of the falsely accused. She held still then and put her thumb in her mouth, which seemed to make her eyes go out of focus, while Michael clutched at the fly of his pants and took two backward steps, solemn with embarrassment.

  April sighed and raked back a lock of hair. "All right," she said. "Take it down to the cellar, then. The least we can do is get it out of sight. Then you'd better get dressed. It's time for lunch."

  He carried the box down the cellar stairs, dropped it on the floor with a rustling thud and kicked it into a corner, sending a sharp pain through the tendon of his big toe.

  He spent the afternoon in an old pair of army pants and a torn shirt, working on his stone path. The idea was to lay a long, curving walk from the front door to the road, to divert visitors from coming in through the kitchen. It had seemed simple enough last weekend, when he'd started it, but now as the ground sloped off more sharply he found that flat stones wouldn't work. He had to make steps, of stones nearly as thick as they were wide, stones that had to be dislodged from the steep woods behind the house and carried on tottering legs around to the front lawn. And he had to dig a pit for each step, in ground so rocky that it took ten minutes to get a foot below the surface. It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress, and it looked as if it would take all summer.

  Even so, once the first puffing and dizziness was over, he began to like the muscular pull and the sweat of it, and the smell of the earth. At least it was a man's work. At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe on its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man's love, a man's wife and children. Lowering his eyes with the solemnity of this thought, he could take pleasure in the sight of his own flexed thigh, lean and straining under the old O.D., and of the heavily veined forearm that lay across it and the dirty hand that hung there—not to be compared with his father's hand, maybe, but a serviceable, good-enough hand all the same—so that his temples ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man. Following it down to the edge of the lawn, he squatted over it again, grunted, wrestled it up to his thighs and from there to his waist, cradling it in the tender flesh of his forearms; then he moved out, glassy-eyed and staggering on the soft grass, out around the white blur of the house and into the sun of the front lawn and all the way over to the path, where he dropped it and nearly fell in a heap on top of it.

  "We're helping you, aren't we, Daddy?" Jennifer said. Both children had come to sit near him on the grass. The sun made perfect circles of yellow on their two blond heads and gave their T-shirts a dazzling whiteness.

  "You sure are," he said.

  "Yes, because you like to have us keep you company, don't you?"

  "I sure do, baby. Don't get too close now, you'll kick dirt in the hole." And he fell to work with the long-handled shovel to deepen the hollow he had dug, enjoying the rhythmic rasp and grip of the blade against a loosening edge of buried rock.

  "Daddy?" Michael inquired. "Why does the shovel make sparks?"

  "Because it's hitting rock. When you hit rock with steel, you get a spark."

  "Why don't you take the rock out?"

  "That's what I'm trying to do. Don't get so close now, you might get hurt."

  The piece of rock came free at last; he lifted it out and knelt to claw at the sliding tan pebbles of the pit until the depth and the shape of it looked right. Then he heaved and rolled the boulder into place and packed it tight, and another step was completed. A light swarm of gnats had come to hover around his head, tickling and barely visible as they hung and flicked past his eyes.

  "Daddy?" Jennifer said. "How come Mommy slept on the sofa?"

  "I don't know. Just happened to feel like it, I guess. You wait here, now, while I go and get another stone."

  And the more he thought about it, as he plodded back up through the trees behind the house, the more he realized that this was the best answer he could have given, from the standpoint of simple honesty as well as tact. She just happened to feel like it. Wasn't that, after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?

  "I love you when you're nice," she'd told him once, before they were married, and it had made him furious.

  "Don't
say
that. Christ's sake, you don't 'love' people when they're 'nice.' Don't you see that's the same as saying 'What's in it for me?' Look." (They were standing on Sixth Avenue in the middle of the night, and he was holding her at arm's length, his hands placed firmly on either side of the warm rib cage inside her polo coat.) "Look. You either love me or you don't, and you're going to have to make up your mind."

  Oh, she'd made up her mind, all right. It had been easy to decide in favor of love on Bethune Street, in favor of walking proud and naked on the grass rug of an apartment that caught the morning sun among its makeshift chairs, its French travel posters and its bookcase made of packingcrate slats—an apartment where half the fun of having an affair was that it was just like being married, and where later, after a trip to City Hall and back, after a ceremonial collecting of the other two keys from the other two men, half the fun of being married was that it was just like having an affair. She'd decided in favor of that, all right. And why not? Wasn't it the first love of any kind she'd ever known? Even on the level of practical advantage it must have held an undeniable appeal: it freed her from the gritty round of disappointment she would otherwise have faced as an only mildly talented, mildly enthusiastic graduate of dramatic school; it let her languish attractively through a part-time office job ("just until my husband finds the kind of work he really wants to do") while saving her best energies for animated discussions of books and pictures and the shortcomings of other people's personalities, for trying new ways of fixing her hair and new kinds of inexpensive clothes ("Do you really like the sandals, or are they too Villagey?") and for hours of unhurried dalliance deep in their double bed. But even in those days she'd held herself poised for immediate flight; she had always been ready to take off the minute she happened to feel like it ("Don't
talk
to me that way, Frank, or I'm
leaving.
I
mean
it") or the minute anything went wrong.

  And one big thing went wrong right away. According to their plan, which called for an eventual family of four, her first pregnancy came seven years too soon. That was the trouble, and if he'd known her better then he might have guessed how she would take it and what she would happen to feel like doing about it. At the time, though, coming home from the doctor's office in a steaming crosstown bus, he was wholly in the dark. She refused to look at him as they rode; she carried her head high in a state of shock or disbelief or anger or blame—it could have been any or all or none of these things, for all he knew. Pressed close and sweating beside her with his jaw set numbly in a brave smile, trying to think of things to say, he knew only that everything was out of kilter. Whatever you felt on hearing the news of conception, even if it was chagrin instead of joy, wasn't it supposed to be something the two of you shared? Your wife wasn't supposed to turn away from you, was she? You weren't supposed to have to work and wheedle to win her back, with little jokes and hand-holdings, as if you were afraid she might evaporate at the very moment of this first authentic involvement of your lives—that couldn't be right. Then what the hell was the matter?

  It wasn't until a week later that he came home to find her stalking the apartment with folded arms, her eyes remote and her face fixed in the special look that meant she had made up her mind about something and would stand for no nonsense.

  "Frank, listen. Try not to start talking until I finish, and just listen." And in an oddly stifled voice, as if she'd rehearsed her speech several times without allowing for the fact that she'd have to breathe while delivering it, she told him of a girl in dramatic school who knew, from first-hand experience, an absolutely infallible way to induce a miscarriage. It was simplicity itself: you waited until just the right time, the end of the third month; then you took a sterilized rubber syringe and a little bit of sterilized water, and you very carefully . . .