Revolutionary Road (13 page)

"Hell, that's all right. Is that all you meant by bad news?"

"You're sure you don't mind?"

  He didn't mind at all. In fact, he realized as he washed up and changed his shirt, he was looking forward with eagerness to telling the Campbells of the plan. A thing like this never really seemed real until you'd told somebody about it.

  "Listen, though, April," he said, stuffing in his shirttail. "When we're breaking it to Mrs. Givings, there isn't any reason why we have to tell her what we're going to
do
in Europe, is there? I mean I think she thinks I'm enough of a creep as it is."

  "Of course not." She looked surprised at the very idea of telling Mrs. Givings anything at all beyond the simple fact of their wish to sell the house. "What possible business is it of hers? There's no need to tell the Campbells either, for that matter."

  "Oh no," he said quickly, "we have to tell them—" and he almost said, "They're our
friends
" before he caught himself. "I mean,
you
know; of course we don't have to. But why not?"

SHEPPARD SEARS CAMPBELL 
loved to shine his shoes. It was a love he had learned in the army (he was a veteran of three campaigns with a famous airborne division) and even now, though civilian cordovans were far less rewarding than the heavy jump boots of the old days, the acrid smell and crouching vigor of the job held rich associations of
esprit de
corps.
He sang a kind of old time, big-band swing while he did it, alternating the husky lyrics with a squint-eyed, loose-lipped sound—Buddappa banh! Banh! Banh!"—to simulate the brass section, and now and then he would pause to take a swig from the can of beer that stood on the floor beside him. Then he would stretch his back, scratch the yellowed armpits of his T-shirt and permit himself a long and satisfying belch.

  "What time the Wheelers coming, doll?" he asked his wife, who was studying herself, sensibly, in the mirror of her flounced dressing table.

  "Eight-thirty, sweetie."

  "Jesus," he said. "If I want to get a shower, I better haul ass." Squinting, he flexed the toes in his right shoe to test its gleam before he crouched again, snapped his rag, and went to work on the left one.

  The stolid peasant's look that glazed his face as he worked was only an occasional expression with Shep Campbell nowadays—he saved it for his shoe-shining mood or his tire-changing mood—but it held the vestige of a force that had once laid claim to the whole of his heart. For years, boy and man, he had yearned above all to be insensitive and ill-bred, to hold his own among the sullen boys and men whose real or imagined jeers had haunted his childhood, to deny by an effort of will what for a long time had been the most shameful facts of his life: that he'd been raised in a succession of brownstone and penthouse apartments in the vicinity of Sutton Place, schooled by private tutors and allowed to play with other children only under the smiling eye of his English nanny or his French ma'm'selle, and that his wealthily divorced mother had insisted, until he was eleven years old, on dressing him every Sunday in "adorable" tartan kilts that came from Bergdorf Goodman.

  "She woulda made a God damn
lollypop
outa me!" he sometimes ranted even now, to the few friends with whom he could bring himself to talk about his mother, but in calmer, wiser moments he had long since found the compassion to forgive her. Nobody's parents were perfect; and besides, whatever her intentions might have been, he knew she'd never really had a chance. From earliest adolescence, from the time his child's physique began to coarsen into the slope-shouldered build of a wrestler, if not before, he had been lost forever to her fluttering grasp. Anything in the world that could even faintly be connected with what his mother called "cultivated" or "nice" was anathema to Shep Campbell in those formative years, and everything she called "vulgar" was his heart's desire. At his small and expensive prep school he found it easy to become the illdressed, hell-raising lout of the student body, feared and admired and vaguely pitied on the assumption that he was one of the charity boys; after being expelled in his senior year he moved straight, to his mother's horror, into the swarm of a Manhattan high school, and into minor scrapes with the police, until the arrival of his eighteenth birthday sent him whooping and hollering into the paratroops, resolved to acquit himself not only with conspicuous bravery but with that other attribute so highly prized by soldiers, the quality of being a tough son of a bitch.

  He made the grade on both counts, and the war seemed only to deepen the urgency of his quest. Afterwards it seemed entirely logical for him to shrug off all his mother's tearful arguments for Princeton or Williams and go slouching away instead to a third-rate institute of technology in the Middle West ("On the G.I. Bill," he had always explained, as if any possibility of private means would have made him effete). There, dozing through his classes in a leather jacket or lurching at night in the spit-and-sawdust company of other campus toughs, growling his beerbloated disdain for the very idea of liberal arts, he learned the unquestionably masculine, unquestionably middle-class trade of mechanical engineering. It was there too that he found his wife, a small, soft, worshipful clerk in the bursar's office, and fathered the first of his sons; and it wasn't until several years later that the great reaction set in.

  What happened then—he was later to call it "the time I sort of went crazy"—was that he woke up to find himself employed in a hydraulic machinery plant a hundred miles from Phoenix, Arizona, and living in one of four hundred close-set, identical houses in the desert, a sun-baked box of a house with four framed mountain scenes from the dimestore on its walls and five brown engineering manuals in the whole naked width of its bookshelves, a box that rang every night to the boom of television or the shrill noise of neighbors dropping in for Canasta.

  Sheppard Sears Campbell had to admit he felt forlorn among these young men with blunt, prematurely settled faces, and these girls who shrieked in paralyzing laughter over bathroom jokes ("Harry, Harry, tell the one about the man got caught in the ladies' john!") or folded their lips in respectful silence while their husbands argued automobiles ("Now, you take the Chevy; far as I'm concerned you can have any Chevy ever built, bar none") and he rapidly began to see himself as an impostor and a fool. All at once it seemed that the high adventure of pretending to be something he was not had led him into a way of life he didn't want and couldn't stand, that in defying his mother he had turned his back on his birthright.

  Bright visions came to haunt him of a world that could and should have been his, a world of intellect and sensibility that now lay forever mixed in his mind with "the East." In the East, he then believed, a man went to college not for vocational training but in disciplined search for wisdom and beauty, and nobody over the age of twelve believed that those words were for sissies. In the East, wearing rumpled tweeds and flannels, he could have strolled for hours among ancient elms and clock towers, talking with his friends, and his friends would have been the cream of their generation.

The girls of the East were marvelously slim and graceful; they moved with the authority of places like Bennington and Holyoke; they spoke intelligently in low, subtle voices, and they never giggled. On sharp winter evenings you could meet them for cocktails at the Biltmore and take them to the theater, and afterwards, warmed with brandy, they would come with you for a drive to a snowbound New England inn, where they'd slip happily into bed with you under an eiderdown quilt. In the East, when college was over, you could put off going seriously to work until you'd spent a few years in a book-lined bachelor flat, with intervals of European travel, and when you found your true vocation at last it was through a process of informed and unhurried selection; just as when you married at last it was to solemnize the last and best of your many long, sophisticated affairs.

  Brooding on these fantasies, it wasn't long before Shep Campbell gained a reputation as a snob at the hydraulics plant. He antagonized Milly, too, and frightened her, for he had become a moody listener to classical music and a sulking reader of literary quarterlies. He seldom talked to her, and when he did it was never in his old unique blend of New York street boy and Indiana farmer, a mixture she had always found "real cute," but in a new rhythm of brisk impatience that sounded alarmingly like an English accent. And then one Sunday night, after he'd been drinking all day and snapping at the children, she found herself cowering in tears with the baby at her breast while her husband called her an ignorant cunt and broke three bones of his fist against the wall.

  A week later, still pale and shaken, she had helped him load clothes and blankets and kitchenware into the car and they'd set off on their dusty Eastward pilgrimage; and the six months in New York that followed, while he tried to decide whether to go on being an engineer—that period had been, Shep knew, the hardest time of Milly's life. The first rude surprise was that his mother's money was gone (there had never really been very much of it in the first place, and now there was barely enough to keep her decently in a residence hotel, a querulous, genteel old lady with a cat), and there were hundreds of other rude surprises in the overwhelming fact of New York itself, which turned out to be big and dirty and loud and cruel. Dribbling their savings away on cheap food and furnished rooms, never knowing where Shep was or what kind of a mood he'd be in when he came home, never knowing what to say when he talked disjointedly of graduate courses in music and philosophy, or when he wanted to lounge for hours in the dry fountain of Washington Square with a four-day growth of beard, she had more than once gone as far as to look up "psychiatrists" in the Classified New York Telephone Directory. But at last he had settled for the job with Allied Precision in Stamford, they had moved out to a rented house and then to the Revolutionary Hill Estates, and Milly's life had taken on a normal texture once again.

  For Shep, too, the past few years had been a time of comparative peace. Or so it seemed, at any rate, in the glowing dusk of this fine spring evening. He was pleasantly full of roast lamb and beer, he was looking forward to a session of good talk with the Wheelers, and things could have been an awful lot worse. True enough, the job in Stamford and the Revolutionary Hill Estates and the Laurel Players were not exactly what he'd pictured in his Arizona visions of the East, but what the hell. If nothing else, the mellowing of these past few years had enabled him to look back without regret.

  Because who could deny that his tough-guy phase, neurotic or not, had done him a lot of good? Hadn't it helped him on the way to a Silver Star and a field commission at twenty-one? Those things were real, they were a damned sight more than most men his age could claim (Field commission! The very forming of the words in his mind could still make warm tendrils of pride spread out in his throat and chest) and no psychiatrist would ever be able to take them away. Nor was he plagued any longer by the sense of having culturally missed out and fallen behind his generation. He could certainly feel himself to be the equal of a man like Frank Wheeler, for example, and Frank was a product of all the things that once had made him writhe in envy—the Eastern university, the liberal arts, the years of casual knocking around in Greenwich Village. What was so terrible, then, in having gone to State Tech?

  Besides, if he hadn't gone to State Tech he would never have met Milly, and he didn't need any damn psychiatrist to tell him he would really be sick, really be in trouble, if he ever caught himself regretting that again. Maybe their backgrounds were different; maybe he'd married her for reasons that were hard to remember and maybe it wasn't the most romantic marriage in the world, but Milly was the girl for him. Two things about her had become a constant source of his sentimental amazement: that she had stuck right by him through all the panic in Arizona and New York—he vowed he would never forget it—and that she had taken so well to his new way of life.

  The things she had learned! For a girl whose father was a semiliterate housepainter and whose brothers and sisters all said things like "It don't matter none," it couldn't have been easy. The more he thought about it, the more remarkable it was that she could dress very nearly as well as April Wheeler and talk very nearly as well on any subject you wanted to name; that she could live in an ugly, efficient suburban house like this and know why and how it had to be apologized for in terms of the job and the kids ("Otherwise of course we'd live in the city, or else further out, in the real country . . ."). And she had managed to give every room of it the spare, stripped-down, intellectual look that April Wheeler called "interesting." Well, almost every room. Feeling fond and tolerant as he rolled his shoe rag into a waxy cylinder, Shep Campbell had to admit that this particular room, this bedroom, was not a very sophisticated place. Its narrow walls, papered in a big floral design of pink and lavender, held careful bracket shelves that in turn held rows of little winking frail things made of glass; its windows served less as windows than as settings for puffed effusions of dimity curtains, and the matching dimity skirts of its bed and dressing table fell in overabundant pleats and billows to the carpet. It was a room that might have been dreamed by a little girl alone with her dolls and obsessed with the notion of making things nice for them among broken orange crates and scraps of cloth in a secret shady corner of the back yard, a little girl who would sweep the bald earth until it was as smooth as breadcrust and sweep it again if it started to crumble, a scurrying, whispering, damp-fingered little girl whose cheeks would quiver with each primping of gauze and tugging of soiled ribbon into place ("There . . . There . . .") and whose quick, frightened eyes, as she worked, would look very much like the eyes that now searched this mirror for signs of encroaching middle age.

"Sweetie?" she said.

"Mm?"

  She turned around slowly on the quilted bench, tense with a troubling thought. "Well—I don't know, you'll just laugh, but listen. Do you think the Wheelers are getting sort of—stuck up, or something?"

  "Oh, now, don't be silly," he told her, allowing his voice to grow heavy and rich with common sense. "What makes you want to think a thing like that?"

  "I don't know. I can just tell. I mean I know she was upset about the play and everything, but it wasn't
our
fault, was it? And then when we were over there the last time, everything seemed so sort of—I don't know. Remember when I tried to describe the way your mother looked at me that time? Well, April was looking at me that exact same way that night. And now this whole business of forgetting our invitation—I don't know. It's funny, that's all."

  He snapped the lid on his can of shoe polish and put it away with the rolled-up rag and the brushes. "Honey," he said, "you're just imagining all that. You're going to spoil the whole evening for yourself."