I started reading Revolutionary Road again because I needed a break from Moby Dick. But I could not stop reading and this time marked a few more quotes from Yates's masterpiece.
For background, the protagonists are Frank and April Wheeler, aptly described in the Wikipedia entry for the book as "self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors."
In this read I noted how Frank would never admit to being comfortable and practical. He still thinks he is too tuned in to really be what he might appear to be—a boring suburban husband and father with a dull job in some building downtown. So, for a while, Frank manages to suppress his fear of April's plan for them to leave the suburbs and start life over in Paris.
At first, Frank and April feel elated. They spend evenings rhapsodizing over drinks instead of fighting. The change in their behavior registers on some level with their young children.
There was one consolation: they could go to sleep without any fear of being waked in an hour by the abrupt, thumping, hard-breathing, door-slamming sounds of a fight: all that, apparently, was a thing of the past. They could lie drowsing now under the sound of kindly voices in the living room, a sound whose intricately rhythmic rise and fall would slowly turn into the shape of their dreams. And if they came awake later to turn over and reach with their toes for new cool places in the sheets, they knew the sound would still be there—one voice very deep and the other soft and pretty, talking and talking, as substantial and soothing as a blue range of mountains seen from far away.
Soon, though, Frank's doubts begin to ripple across the boozy evening conversations.
Once he interrupted her to say, "Listen, why do we keep talking about Paris? Don't they have government agencies pretty much all over Europe? Why not Rome? Or Venice, or some place like Greece, even? I mean let’s keep an open mind; Paris isn’t the only place."
"Of course it isn't." She was impatiently brushing a fleck of ash off her lap. "But it does seem the most logical place to start, doesn't it? With the advantage of your knowing the language and everything?"
If he'd looked at the window at that moment he would have seen the picture of a frightened liar. The language! Had he ever really led her to believe he could speak French? "Well," he said, chuckling and walking away from her, "I wouldn't be too sure about that. I've probably forgotten most of what little I knew, and I mean I never did know the language in the sense of—you know, being able to speak it fluently or anything; just barely enough to get by."
"That's all we'll need. You'll pick it up again in no time. We both will. And besides, at least you've been there. You know how the city's laid out and what the various neighborhoods are like; that's important."
And he silently assured himself that this, after all, was substantially true. He knew where most of the picture-postcard landmarks were, on the strength of his several three-day passes in the city long ago; he also knew how to go from any of those places to where the American PX and Red Cross Club had once been established, and how to go from those points to the Place Pigalle, and how to choose the better kind of prostitute there and what her room would probably smell like. He knew those things, and he knew too that the best part of Paris, the part where the people really knew how to live, began around St. Germain des Prés and extended southeast (or was it southwest?) as far as the Café Dome. But this latter knowledge was based more on his reading of The Sun Also Rises in high school than in his real-life venturings into the district, which had mostly been lonely and footsore. He had admired the ancient delicacy of the buildings and the way the street lamps made soft explosions of light green in the trees at night, and the way each long, bright café awning would prove to reveal a sea of intelligently walking faces as he passed; but the white wine gave him a headache and the talking faces all seemed, on closer inspection, to belong either to intimidating men with beards or to women whose eyes could sum him up and dismiss him in less than a second. The place had filled him with a sense of wisdom hovering just out of reach, of unspeakable grace prepared and waiting just around the corner, but he'd walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves, and time after time he had ended up drunk and puking over the tailgate of the truck that bore him jolting back into the army. Je suis, he practiced to himself while April went on talking; tu es; nous sommes; vous êtes; ils sont.
One night, while Frank is still in denial, he and April arrive for another evening of drinks and camaraderie with their suburban commiserators Shep and Milly Campbell—and Shep, we learn, covets April. On this night, the Wheelers plan to announce the move to Europe. From Shep's perspective—
April had indeed decided to wear her dark blue dress, and she'd never been lovelier, but there was an odd, distant look in her eyes—the look of a cordial spectator more than a guest, let alone a friend—and it was all you could to get anything more than a "Yes" or an "Oh, really" out of her.
And Frank was the same, only ten times worse. It wasn't just that he wasn't talking (though that alone, for Frank was about as far out of character as you could get) or that he made no effort to conceal the fact that he wasn't listening to anything Milly said; it was that he was acting like a God damned snob. His eyes kept straying around the room, examining each piece of furniture and each picture as if he'd never found himself in quite such an amusingly typical suburban living room as this before—as if, for Christ's sake, he hadn't spent the last two years spilling his ashes and slopping his booze all over every available surface in this room; as if he hadn't burned a hole in the upholstery of this very sofa last summer and passed out drunk and snoring on this very rug.
Then—yeesh—April turns up pregnant, so Frank and April resume fighting.
He made himself a powerful drink and stood sipping it near the kitchen door, bracing himself.
After a while she sat heavily on the sofa and began a lethargic picking-over of old magazines. Then she dropped them and lay back, setting her sneakered feet on the coffee table, and said, "You really are a much more moral person than I am, Frank, I suppose that's why I admire you." But she didn't look or sound admiring.
And later,
She didn't answer, and in the darkness he could only guess at whether she was listening or not. He took a deep breath. "I mean things that have nothing to do with Europe," he said, "or with me. I mean things within yourself, things that have their origin in your own childhood—your own upbringing and so on. Emotional things."
There was a long silence before she said, in a pointedly neutral tone: "You mean I'm emotionally disturbed."
"I didn't say that!" But in the next hour, as his voice went on and on, he managed to say it several times in several different ways.
And when the marriage is lost to April, she finds clarity on how she ended up where she is now—starved of youth's promise and stuck in the suburbs, bored miserable with a man she can no longer stand:
The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you'd met at a party, a boy who'd danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.
The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was ever to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear—until he was saying "I love you" and she was saying "Really, I mean it; you're the most interesting person I've ever met."
What a subtle, treacherous thing it was to let yourself go that way! Because once you'd started it was terribly difficult to stop; soon you were saying "I'm sorry, of course you're right," and "Whatever you think is best," and "You're the most wonderful and valuable thing in the world," and the next thing you knew all honesty, all truth, was as far away and glimmering, as hopelessly unattainable as the world of the golden people. Then you discovered you were working at life the way the Laurel Players worked at The Petrified Forest, or the way Steve Kovick worked at his drums—earnest and sloppy and full of pretension and all wrong; you found you were saying yes when you meant no, and "We've got to be together in this thing" when you meant the very opposite; then you were breathing gasoline as if it were flowers and abandoning yourself to a delirium of love under the weight of a clumsy, grunting, red-faced man you didn't even like—Shep Campbell!—and then you were face to face, in total darkness, with the knowledge that you didn't know who you were.
