Revolutionary Road (9 page)

  Why not? Wouldn't it be perfectly easy to walk up and ask her out to lunch? No, it wouldn't; that was the trouble. An unspoken rule of the Fifteenth Floor divided the men from the girls on all but business matters, except at Christmas parties. The girls made separate arrangements for lunch in the same inviolable way that they used a separate lavoratory, and only a fool would openly defy the system. This would need a little planning.

  He was still in the middle of the in basket when a thin smiling face and a round solemn one appeared above the glass wall, looking in from the next cubicle. They were the faces of Vince Lathrop and Ed Small, and this meant it was time to go down for coffee.

"Gentlemen," said Vince Lathrop. "Shall we dance?"

  Half an hour later they were back in the office, having heard at some length about Ed Small's difficulties with grass seed and lawn care in Roslyn, Long Island. The coffee had helped to strengthen Ordway, though it was clear now that what he really needed was a drink, and to prove how much better he felt he was pacing up and down the cubicle and going through his impersonation of Bandy, wobbling his head and repeatedly sucking at a side tooth with little kissing sounds.

  "Well, but I wonder if we're really being effective, that's the thing (kiss). Because if we really want to be effective, then we're going to have to get in there and be more, be more (kiss), be more
effective
. . ."

Frank was trying for the second or third time to read the top paper on his current work pile, which seemed to be a letter from the branch manager in Toledo; but its paragraphs were as opaque as if it had been typed in a foreign language. He closed his eyes and rubbed them and tried again, and this time he made it.

  The branch manager in Toledo, who in the Knox tradition referred to himself as "we," wished to know what action had been taken on his previous correspondence with regard to the many serious errors and misleading statements in SP-1109, a copy of which was attached. This proved to be a thick, coated-stock, four-color

brochure entitled
Pinpoint Your Production Control with
the Knox
"500,"
and the sight of it brought back uneasy memories. It had been produced many months before by a nameless copywriter in an agency that had since lost its Knox account, and had been released to the field in tens of thousands of copies marked "Address all inquiries F. H. Wheeler, Home Office." Frank had known at the time that it was a mess—its densely printed pages defied simple logic, as well as readership, and its illustrations were only sporadically related to its text—but he'd let it go anyway, chiefly because Bandy had confronted him in the aisle one day with a kiss of the side tooth and said, "Haven't we released that brochure yet?" Since then the inquiries addressed to F. H. Wheeler

had come in slow, embarrassing streams from all parts of the United States, and he was dimly aware of something particularly urgent about those that had been coming from Toledo. The next paragraph reminded him:

As you will recall, it was our intention to order 5,000 additional copies of the brochure for distribution at the annual NAPE Convention (Nat'l. Assn. of Production Executives) here June 10 - 13. However, as stated previous correspondence, the brochure is in our opinion so inferior that it does not fulfill its purpose in any way, shape, or manner.

Therefore please advise immediately re our inquiry previous correspondence, namely: what arrangements are being made to have a revised version of the brochure in our office not later than June 8 in the required number of copies?

He looked quickly at the upper left-hand corner and was relieved to find that the letter had not carried a carbon to Bandy. That was a piece of luck; but even so, this had all the earmarks of a Real Goody. Even if there were still time to arrange for a new brochure to be produced (and there probably wasn't), he would have to clear the job through Bandy, and Bandy would want to know why he hadn't been told about it two months earlier. He was in the act of laying the thing on his secondary pile when the beginnings of a bright idea came through his confusion; and suddenly he was out of the cubicle and walking toward the front of the office with his heart in his mouth.

 She was at her desk in the reception area with nothing to do, and when she looked up her eyes were so full of pleased expectancy—of complicity, it almost seemed— that he nearly forgot what it was he had to pretend he'd come for.

 "Maureen," he said, moving up close and taking hold of the back of her chair, "if you're not too busy here I wonder if you'd help me find some stuff in the central file. You see this?" He laid the brochure on her desk as if it were an intimate revelation, and she leaned forward from the hips to examine it, so that her breasts swung close to his pointing hand.

 "Mm?"

 "The thing is, it's got to be revised. That means I've got to dig up all the material that went into it, right from scratch. Now, if you'll look in the inactive file under SP

1109 you'll find copies of all the stuff we sent to the agency; then if you check each of those papers you'll find another code number referring you to other files; that way we can trace the thing back to original sources. Come on, I'll help you get started."

 "All right."

  As he moved up the aisle behind her hips he felt the promise of triumph in his expanding chest, and soon they were alone together in the labyrinth of the central file, enveloped in her perfume as they fingered nervously through a drawer of folders.

 "Eleven-oh-what, did you say?"

 "Eleven-oh-nine. Should be right there somewhere."

   For the first time he allowed himself to scrutinize her face. It was round and wide-nosed and not really very pretty—he could afford to admit that now—and its tooheavy make-up was probably there to hide a bad complexion, just as the little black tails she had drawn at the corners of her eyes were there to make the eyes look larger and farther apart. Her carefully arranged hair was probably her greatest problem—it must have been a shapeless frizzled bush when she was a child, and must still give her trouble in the rain—but her mouth was wonderful: perfect teeth and plump, subtly shaped lips that had the texture of marzipan. He found that if he focused his eyes on her mouth so that the rest of her face was slightly blurred, and then drew back to include the whole length and shape of her in that hazy image, it was possible to believe he was looking at the most desirable woman in the world.

"Here," she said. "Now, you want all the folders relating

to all these other code numbers. Is that it?"

  "That's it. It may take a little time; I hope you weren't planning on an early lunch."

"No. I didn't have any special plans."

  "Good. I'll stop back in a while and see how you're doing. Thanks a lot, Maureen."

"You're very welcome."

 And he went back to his cubicle and sat down. It was a perfect arrangement. He could wait here until the rest of the floor had emptied out for lunch; then he would go back and get her. His only problem now was to think up an excuse for not going out to lunch in the usual way, with the usual crowd—an excuse, if possible, that would cover him for the rest of the afternoon.

  "Eat?" a deep masculine voice inquired, and this time three heads hung above the partition. They were the heads of Lathrop, Small, and the man who had spoken, a gray mountain of a man with heavy eyebrows and a clenched pipe, whose bulk rose high enough above the glass to reveal that he wore a defiantly unbusinesslike checked shirt, hairy wool tie and pepper-and-salt jacket. This was Sid Roscoe, the literary and political sage of the Fifteenth Floor, a selfdescribed "old newspaper guy" who contemptuously edited the employee house organ,

Knox Knews.
"Come on, you characters," he said heartily. "On your feet."

Jack Ordway obeyed him, pausing only to murmur "Ready, Franklin?" But Frank held back, inspecting his watch with the look of a man pressed for time.

 "Guess I won't be able to make it today," he said. "Got some people to see uptown this afternoon; I'll probably stop for a bite up there."

 "Oh, for God's sake, Wheeler," Ordway said, turning on him. There was a disproportionate amount of shock and

disappointment in his face, a look of But you've
got
to come with us; and it took Frank a second to realize what the trouble was. Ordway needed him. With Frank along for moral support, it would be possible to steer the group to what Ordway called the Nice place, the dark German restaurant where a round of weak but adequate martinis came floating to your table almost as a matter of course; without him, under Roscoe's leadership, they would almost certainly go to the Awful place—a bright, mercilessly clean luncheonette called Waffle Heaven where you couldn't even get a glass of beer and where the cloying smells of melting butter and maple syrup were enough to make you retch into your tiny paper napkin. There would then be nothing for Jack Ordway to do but sit and hold himself together until they brought him back to the office and set him free to slip out again for the couple of quick ones he would need to survive the afternoon.

Please,
his comically round eyes implored as they led him away,
please
don't let this happen to me.

  But Frank sat firm, thumbing the edges of his current work file. He waited until they were safely in the elevator, and then he continued to wait. Ten minutes went by, and twenty, and still the office seemed much too crowded; then at last he half rose from his chair and peeked out over the surface of the partition-tops in all directions.

 Maureen's head moved alone above the waterline of the central file. There were a few other heads bunched near the elevators and a few others scattered in far corners, but there was no point in waiting any longer. The office would never be emptier than this. He buttoned his coat and stalked out of the cubicle.

  "That's fine, Maureen," he said, bearing down on her and taking the batch of folders and papers from her hand. "I don't think we'll need any more than that."

  "Well, but it's only about half the stuff, though. I mean didn't you want all of it?"

 "Tell you what: let's not worry about it. How about some lunch?"

"All right. I'd love to."

 He was all action as he hurried back to his desk to drop the papers and dodged into the men's room to wash up, but when he went to stand by the elevators, waiting for her to come out of the ladies' room, he was all worry. The small crowd around the elevators was beginning to include people coming
back
from lunch; if she didn't hurry up they might run into Ordway and the others. What the hell was she doing in there? Standing with her arms around three other girls in a paralysis of laughter at the very idea of going out with Mr. Wheeler?

  Then suddenly she was walking toward him in a light coat, and the elevator door was sliding open and the operator's voice was saying  "Down!"

  He stood a little behind her and held himself in a rigid parade rest as they dropped through space. All the restaurants for blocks around would be loaded with Knox people; he would have to get her out of the neighborhood, and as they moved through the lobby he touched her elbow as hesitantly as if it were her breast. "Listen," he mumbled. "There aren't any decent places to eat around here. You mind taking a short trip?"

  They were out on the sidewalk now, jostled by the crowd, and he stood smiling like an idiot for what seemed a full minute of indecision before the word "taxi" popped into his head; then all at once it made him feel so fine to see one slowing down under the command of his wagging arm, and so splendid to see her smile and bend and climb gracefully into its deep seat, that he didn't give a damn about what he saw from the corner of his eye at that moment: the unmistakable bulk of Sid Roscoe in the crowd, flanked by the familiar shapes of Lathrop and Small and Ordway, coming from the direction of the Awful place. It was impossible to tell whether they'd seen him or not, and he instantly decided that it didn't matter. He slammed the door and allowed himself one more glance through the window of the cab as it pulled away from the curb, and he wanted to laugh aloud at the sight of Jack Ordway's orange loafers flapping along through the forest of legs and feet.

"EVERYTHING'S
 sort of going out of focus," she said. "I mean I feel fine and everything, but I guess we'd better eat something."

  They were in an expensive brick-walled restaurant on West Tenth Street, and Maureen had talked for half an hour in a breathless autobiographical rush, pausing only once to let him telephone Mrs. Jorgensen and arrange for one of the other girls to take the reception desk for the afternoon. ("The thing is," he had explained, "I had to borrow Maureen to help me locate some stuff here in Visual Aids, and it looks like we're going to be tied up here for the rest of the day." There was no department or subdepartment anywhere in the Knox Building called Visual Aids, but he was reasonably sure that Mrs. Jorgensen didn't know it, and that anyone she'd be likely to ask would not be certain either. He h way back from the phone booth.) The rest of his time had been devoted to steady drinking and listening, with mixed emotions.

  These were some of the things he'd learned: that she was twenty-two and came from a town far upstate, where her father owned a hardware store; that she hated her name ("I mean 'Maureen's' all right but 'Grube' sounds so awful with it; I guess that was one reason I was so crazy to get married"); that she'd been married at eighteen and had it annulled six months later—"It was completely ridiculous"—and had spent the following year or two "just moping around home and working at the gas company and feeling depressed" until it struck her that what she'd always really and truly wanted to do was to come to New York "and live."

  All this was pleasing, and so was the way she had shyly slipped into calling him "Frank," and so was the news that she did indeed have an apartment with another girl—a "perfectly adorable" apartment right here in the Village— but after a while he found he had to keep reminding himself to be pleased. The trouble, he guessed, was mainly that she talked too much. It was also that so much of her talk rang false, that so many of its possibilities for charm were blocked and buried under the stylized ceremony of its cuteness. Soon he was able to guess that most if not all of her inanity could be blamed on her roommate, whose name was Norma and for whom she seemed to feel an unqualified admiration. The more she told him about this other girl, or "gal"—that she was older and twice divorced, that she worked for a big magazine and knew "all sorts of fabulous people"—the more annoyingly clear it became that she and Norma enjoyed classic roles of mentor and novice in an all-girl orthodoxy of fun. There were signs of this tutelage in Maureen's too-heavy make-up and too-careful hairdo, as well as in her every studied mannerism and prattling phrase—her overuse of words like "mad" and "fabulous" and "appalling," her wide-eyed recitals of facts concerning apartment maintenance, and her endless supply of anecdotes involving sweet little Italian grocers and sweet little Chinese laundrymen and gruff but lovable cops on the beat, all of whom, in the telling, became the stock supporting actors in a confectionery Hollywood romance of bachelorgirls in Manhattan.

  Under the oppressive weight of this outpouring he had called for round after round of drinks, and now her meek announcement that everything was sort of out of focus filled him with guilt. All Norma's brittle animation had fled from Maureen's face; she looked as honest and as helpless as a child about to be sick on her party dress. He called the waiter and helped her to choose the most wholesome items on the menu with all the care of a conscientious father; and when she had settled down to eat, looking up now and then to assure him that she felt much better, it was his turn to talk.

  He made the most of it. Sentences poured from him, paragraphs composed themselves and took wing, appropriate anecdotes sprang to his service and fell back to make way for the stately passage of epigrams.

  Beginning with a quick, audacious dismantling of the Knox Business Machines Corporation, which made her laugh, he moved out confidently onto broader fields of damnation until he had laid the punctured myth of Free Enterprise at her feet; then, just at the point where any further talk of economics might have threatened to bore her, he swept her away into cloudy realms of philosophy and brought her lightly back to earth with a wise-crack.

  And how did she feel about the death of Dylan Thomas? And didn't she agree that this generation was the least vital and most terrified in modern times? He was at the top of his form. He was making use of material that had caused Milly Campbell to say "Oh that's so true, Frank!" and of older, richer stuff that had once helped to make him the most interesting person April Johnson had ever met. He even touched on his having been a longshoreman. Through it all, though, ran a bright and skillfully woven thread that was just for Maureen: a portrait of himself as decent but disillusioned young family man, sadly and bravely at war with his environment.

  By the time the coffee came he could see that it was all taking effect. Her face had become an automatic register of quick responses to everything he said: he could make it leap into delighted laughter or frown and nod in solemn agreement or soften into romantic contemplation; if he'd wanted to he could very easily have made it weep. When she looked briefly away from him, down at her cup or off misty-eyed into the room, it was only for a kind of emotional catching of breath; once he could have sworn he saw her planning how she would tell Norma about him tonight ("
Oh,
the most fascinating man . . ."), and the way she seemed to melt when he helped her on with her coat, the way she swayed against him as they walked out of the place for a stroll in the sunshine, made it clear that the last shred of doubt could be safely abandoned. He had it made.

  The only problem now was where to go. They were heading vaguely toward the trees of Washington Square; and the trouble with taking a walk in the park, aside from its waste of valuable time, was that this was the hour when the park would be full of women who had once been April's friends and neighbors. Anne Snyder and Susan Cross and God only knew how many others would be there, lifting their softening cheeks to the sun or wiping ice cream from the mouths of their children as they talked of nursery schools and outrageous rents and perfectly marvelous Japanese movies, waiting until it was time to gather up their toys and graham crackers and stroll home to fix their husbands' cocktails, and they'd spot him in a minute ("Well, of
course
it's Frank Wheeler, but who's that
with
him? Isn't that funny?"). But he had scarcely allowed this uneasiness to develop before Maureen came to a stop on the sidewalk.

  "This is my place. Would you like to come up for a drink or something?"

  Then he was following her hips up a dim carpeted stairway, and then a door had clicked shut behind him and he was standing in a room that smelled of vacuum cleaning and breakfast bacon and perfume, a high, silent room where everything lay richly bathed in yellow light from windows whose blinds of split bamboo had turned the sun into fine horizontal stripes of tan and gold. He stood feeling tall and strong as she ducked and curtsied around him in her stockinged feet, straightening ash trays and magazines—"I'm afraid the place is an awful mess; won't you sit down?"—and when she sank one knee into a studio couch to reach across it for the cord that opened one of the blinds, he moved up close behind her and put his hand on her waist. That was all it took. With a moist little whimpering groan she turned and pressed herself into his arms, offering up her mouth. Then they were on the couch and the only problem in the world was the bondage of their clothing. Twisting and gasping together, they worked urgently at knots and buttons and buckles and hooks until the last impediment slipped away; and then in the warmth and rhythm of her flesh he found an overwhelming sense of
this
is what I needed;
this
is what I needed; his self-absorption was so complete that he was only dimly aware of her whispering, "Oh, yes; yes; yes . . ."

  When it was over, though, when they had fallen apart and rejoined each other in a lightly sweating tangle of arms and legs, he knew he had never been more grateful to anyone in his life. The only trouble was that he couldn't think of anything to say.

  He tried to get a look at her face, to give himself a clue, but she had clasped her head against his chest so that all he could see was the black disorder of her hair; she was waiting for him to speak first. He rolled his head a little and found he was looking through a crooked opening of the window blind, which she had managed to raise a few inches before falling into his arms. He studied the weathered brick cornice of a house across the street, whose chimney pots and television aerials made intricate silhouettes against the vibrant blue of the sky. From somewhere high and far away came the faint crawling drone of a plane. He looked the other way, into the room where everything—Picasso prints, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, sling chair, mantelpiece bristling with snapshots—everything swam in the vivid yellow light; and his first consecutive thought was that his flung coat and shirt were lying over there, near the chair, and his shoes and pants and underwear were here, closer at hand. He could be up and dressed and out of this place in thirty seconds.

  "Well," he said at last, "I guess this wasn't exactly what you had in mind when you went to work this morning, was it?"

  The silence continued, so complete that he was aware for the first time of the ticking of an alarm clock in the next room. Then:

  "No," she said. "It certainly wasn't." And she quickly sat up. She groped for the royal blue sweater and snatched it up to cover herself. Then, hesitating, she seemed to decide that modesty could hardly be said to matter any more, and let it drop; but in a flurry of embarrassment she picked it up again, evidently wondering if this wasn't exactly the kind of a time when modesty mattered most, and covered her breasts with it again and crossed her arms over it. Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he himself had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there. Her face and neck were pale but a deep red blush had begun to mottle both her cheeks, as if she'd been slapped, and she looked so vulnerable that for a second or two he was certain he could read her thoughts. What would Norma say? Would Norma be appalled at her for having been so easy to get? No; surely Norma's feeling would be that in a really adult, really sophisticated affair it was hopelessly banal to think in such terms as being "easy" or "hard" to "get." Yes, but still, if it was as adult and sophisticated as all that, why couldn't she decide what to do with her sweater? Why was she having such an awful time thinking of what in the world she could possibly
say
to the man?

Finally she composed herself. She lifted her chin as if to toss back a smooth, heavy lock of hair and willed her face into a drawing-room comedy smile, looking him straight in the eyes for the first time.

  "Do you have a cigarette, Frank?"

  "Sure. Here." And at last, mercifully, the dialogue began to flow.

  "What was the name of that department you invented?"

  "Mm?"

  "You know. The place you told her we'd be. Mrs. Jorgensen."

  "Oh. Visual Aids. I didn't really invent it. There used to be something called that, down on I think the eighth floor. Don't worry, though, she'll never figure it out."

  "It does sound wonderfully real. Visual Aids. Excuse me a sec, Frank." And she skittered across the apartment, crouching awkwardly as if that would make her less naked, into the room where the alarm clock ticked.

  When she came out, wearing a floor-length dressing gown and with her hair almost completely restored to its former shape, she found him fully dressed and politely inspecting the snapshots on the mantelpiece, like a visitor who hasn't yet been asked to sit down. She showed him where the bathroom was, and when he came back she had straightened up the couch and was moving indecisively around the kitchenette.

  "Can I get you a drink or anything?"

  "No thanks, Maureen. Actually, I guess I'd better be cutting out. It's getting kind of late."

  "Gee, that's right, it is. Have you missed your train?"

  "That's all right. I'll get the next one."

  "It's a shame you have to rush off." She seemed determined to be calm and dignified, and she carried it off with elegance until the moment of her opening the door for him, when her eyes strayed to the corner near the couch and discovered that something flimsy and white, a brassiere or a garter belt, had been overlooked in her straighteningup and still lay twisted on the carpet. She started, visibly fighting an impulse to run over and grab it and stuff it behind the cushions—or possibly tear it to shreds—and when she turned back to him her eyes were pitiably wide and bright.

  It couldn't be avoided; he would have to put something into words. But the only honest thing he could say was that he'd never felt more grateful to anyone—to thank her— and he wondered if this mightn't have exactly the wrong effect, almost as if he were offering her money. Another idea occurred to him: he could be sad and tender; he could take her by the shoulders and say "Look, Maureen. There can't be any future in a thing like this." But then she might say "Oh, I know," and hide her face in his coat, and that would leave him nothing to say but "I don't want to think I've taken any kind of unfair advantage here; if I have, well, I'm—" and that was the trouble. He would have to say "I'm sorry," and the last thing he wanted to do—the very last thing in God's world he wanted to do was apologize. Did the swan apologize to Leda? Did an eagle apologize? Did a lion apologize? Hell, no.

  What he did instead was to smile at her—a subtle, worldly, attractive smile—and hold his face in that position until she falteringly smiled back. Then he bent and kissed her lightly on the lips and said, "Listen: you were swell. Take care, now."