Her plan, the idea born of her sorrow and her missing him all day and her loving him, was an elaborate new program for going to Europe “for good” in the fall. Did he realize how much money they had? With their savings, with the proceeds from the sale of house and car and with what they could save between now and September, they’d have enough to live comfortably for six months. “And it won’t take anything like six months before we’re established and self-supporting again for as long as we like—that’s the best part.”
He cleared his throat. “Look, baby. In the first place, what kind of a job could I possibly—”
“No kind of a job. Oh, I know you could get a job anywhere in the world if you had to, but that’s not the point. The point is you won’t be getting any kind of a job, because I will. Don’t laugh—listen a minute. Have you any idea how much they pay for secretarial work in all these government agencies overseas? NATO and the ECA and those places? And do you realize how low the cost of living is, compared to here?” She had it all figured out; she had read an article in a magazine. Her skills at typing and shorthand would bring them enough to live on and more—enough for a part-time servant to take care of the children while she worked. It was, she insisted, such a marvelously simple plan that she was amazed at having never thought of it before. But she had to keep interrupting herself, with mounting impatience, to tell him not to laugh.
This laughter of his was not quite genuine, nor was the way he kept squeezing her shoulder as if to dismiss the whole thing as an endearing whimsy. He was trying to conceal from her, if not from himself, that the plan had instantly frightened him.
“I’m serious about this, Frank,” she said. “Do you think I’m kidding or something?”
“No, I know. I just have a couple of questions, is all. For one thing, what exactly am I supposed to be doing while you’re out earning all this dough?”
She drew back and tried to examine his face in the dim light, as if she couldn’t believe he had failed to understand. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see that’s the whole idea? You’ll be doing what you should’ve been allowed to do seven years ago. You’ll be finding yourself. You’ll be reading and studying and taking long walks and thinking. You’ll have time. For the first time in your life you’ll have time to find out what it is you want to do, and when you find it you’ll have the time and the freedom to start doing it.”
And that, he knew as he chuckled and shook his head, was what he’d been afraid she would say. He had a quick disquieting vision of her coming home from a day at the office—wearing a Parisian tailored suit, briskly pulling off her gloves—coming home and finding him hunched in an egg-stained bathrobe, on an unmade bed, picking his nose.
“Look,” he began. He let his hand slide off her shoulder and work its way up under her arm to fondle the shape and light weight of her breast. “In the first place, all this is very sweet and very—”
“It’s not ‘sweet’!” She pronounced the word as if it were the quintessence of everything she despised, and she caught at his hand and threw it down as if it were despicable too. “For God’s sake, Frank, I’m not being ‘sweet.’ I’m not making any big altruistic sacrifice—can’t you see that?”
“Okay; okay; it’s not sweet. Don’t get sore. Whatever it is, though, I think you’ll have to agree it isn’t very realistic; that’s all I meant.”
“In order to agree with that,” she said, “I’d have to have a very strange and very low opinion of reality. Because you see I happen to think this is unrealistic. I think it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a house he can’t stand in a place he can’t stand either, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things, living among a bunch of frightened little—my God, Frank, I don’t have to tell you what’s wrong with this environment—I’m practically quoting you. Just last night when the Campbells were here, remember what you said about the whole idea of suburbia being to keep reality at bay? You said everybody wanted to bring up their children in a bath of sentimentality. You said—”
“I know what I said. I didn’t think you were listening, though. You looked sort of bored.”
“I was bored. That’s part of what I’m trying to say. I don’t think I’ve ever been more bored and depressed and fed up in my life than I was last night. All that business about Helen Givings’s son on top of everything else, and the way we all grabbed at it like dogs after meat; I remember looking at you and thinking ‘God, if only he’d stop talking.’ Because everything you said was based on this great premise of ours that we’re somehow very special and superior to the whole thing, and I wanted to say ‘But we’re not! Look at us! We’re just like the people you’re talking about! We are the people you’re talking about!’ I sort of had—I don’t know, contempt for you, because you couldn’t see the terrific fallacy of the thing. And then this morning when you left, when you were backing the car around down at the turn, I saw you look back up at the house as if it was going to bite you. You looked so miserable I started to cry, and then I started feeling lonely as hell and I thought, Well, how did everything get so awful then? If it’s not his fault, whose fault is it? How did we ever get into this strange little dream world of the Donaldsons and the Cramers and the Wingates—oh yes, and the Campbells, too, because anotherthing I figured out today is that both those Campbells are a big, big, big, colossal waste of time. And it suddenly began to dawn on me—honestly, Frank, it was like a revelation or something—I was standing there in the kitchen and it suddenly began to dawn on me that it’s my fault. It’s always been my fault, and I can tell you when it began. I can tell you the exact moment in time when it began. Don’t interrupt me.”
But he knew better than to interrupt her now. She must have spent the morning in an agony of thought, pacing up and down the rooms of a dead-silent, dead-clean house and twisting her fingers at her waist until they ached; she must have spent the afternoon in a frenzy of action at the shopping center, lurching her car imperiously through mazes of NO LEFT TURN signs and angry traffic cops, racing in and out of stores to buy the birthday gifts and the roast of beef and the cake and the cocktail apron. Her whole day had been a heroic build-up for this moment of self-abasement; now it was here, and she was damned if she’d stand for any interference.
“It was way back on Bethune Street,” she said. “It was when I first got pregnant with Jennifer and told you I was going to—you know abort it, abort her. I mean up until that moment you didn’t want a baby any more than I did—why should you have?—but when I went out and bought that rubber syringe I put the whole burden of the thing on you. It was like saying, All right, then, if you want this baby it’s going to be All Your Responsibility. You’re going to have to turn yourself inside out to provide for us. You’ll have to give up any idea of being anything in the world but a father. Oh, Frank, if only you’d given me what I deserved—if only you’d called me a bitch and turned your back on me, you could’ve called my bluff in a minute. I’d probably never have gone through with the thing—I probably wouldn’t have had the courage, for one thing—but you didn’t. You were too good and young and scared; you played right along with it, and that’s how the whole thing started. That’s how we both got committed to this enormous delusion—because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion—this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I’ve been making you subscribe to it all this time. I’ve been making you live by it! My God, I’ve even gone as far as to work up this completely corny, soap-opera picture of myself—and I guess this is what really brought it home to me—this picture of myself as the girl who could have been The Actress if she hadn’t gotten married too young. And I mean you know perfectly well I was never any kind of an actress and never really wanted to be; you know I only went to the Academy to get away from home, and I know it too. I’ve always known it. And he
re for three months I’ve been walking around with this noble, bittersweet expression on my face—I mean how self-deluded can you get? Do you see how neurotic all this is? I wanted to have it both ways. It wasn’t enough that I’d spoiled your life; I wanted to bring the whole monstrous thing full-circle and make it seem that you’d spoiled mine, so I could end up being the victim. Isn’t that awful? But it’s true! It’s true!”
And at each “true!” she thumped a tight little fist on her naked knee. “Now do you see what you have to forgive me for? And why we have to get out of here and over to Europe as fast as we possibly can? It isn’t a case of my being ‘sweet’ or generous or anything else. I’m not doing you any favors. All I’m giving you is what you’ve always been entitled to, and I’m only sorry it has to come so late.”
“All right. Can I talk now?”
“Yes. You do understand, though, don’t you? And could I have a little more of the brandy? Just a splash—that’s fine. Thanks.” When she’d sipped at it she threw back her hair, allowing the blanket to slide from her shoulders, and drew a little away from him in order to sit back against the wall, tucking her legs up beneath her. She looked wholly relaxed and confident, ready to listen, happy in the knowledge that she’d stated her case. The blue-white luminescence of her body was a powerful force; he knew he wouldn’t be able to think straight if he looked at her, so he willed himself to look at the moonlit floor between his feet, and he took longer than necessary over the lighting of a cigarette, stalling for time. He would have to get his bearings. When she came home to the Paris apartment her spike-heeled pumps would click decisively on the tile floor and her hair would be pulled back into a neat bun; her face would be drawn with fatigue so that the little vertical line between her eyes would show, even when she smiled. On the other hand…
“In the first place,” be said at last, “I think you’re being much too hard on yourself. Nothing’s ever that black and white. You didn’t force me to take the job at Knox. Besides, look at it this way. You say you’ve always known you weren’t really an actress, and therefore it’s not too legitimate for you to go around feeling cheated. Well, let’s face it: isn’t it just possible the same thing applies to me? I mean who ever said I was supposed to be a big deal?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said calmly. “I think it might be rather tiresome if you were a big deal. But if you mean who ever said you were exceptional, if you mean who ever said you had a first-rate, original mind—well my God, Frank, the answer is everybody. When I first met you, you were—”
“Oh, hell, I was a little wise guy with a big mouth. I was showing off a lot of erudition I didn’t have. I was—”
“You were not! How can you talk that way? Frank, has it gotten so bad that you’ve lost all your belief in yourself?”
Well, no; he had to admit it hadn’t gotten quite that bad. Besides, he was afraid he could detect a note of honest doubt in her voice—a faint suggestion that it might be possible to persuade her he had been a little wise guy, after all—and this was distressing.
“Okay,” he conceded. “Okay, let’s say I was a promising kid. The point is there were plenty of promising kids at Columbia; that doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“There weren’t plenty like you,” she said, sounding reassured. “I’ll never forget what’s-his-name, you know? The one you always admired so much? The one who’d been the fighter pilot and had all the girls? Bill Croft. I’ll never forget the way he used to talk about you. He said to me once: ‘If I had half that guy’s brains I’d quit worrying.’ And he meant it! Everybody knew there was nothing in the world you couldn’t do or be if you only had a chance to find yourself. Anway, all that’s beside the point. You wouldn’t have to be the least bit exceptional, and this would still be a thing that has to be done. Don’t you see that?”
“Will you let me finish? In the first place…” But instead of allowing his voice to run on he felt a need to be quiet for a minute. He took a deep drink of brandy, letting it burn the roof of his mouth and send out waves of warmth across his shoulders and down his spine as he solemnly stared at the floor.
Had Bill Croft really said that?
“Everything you say might make a certain amount of sense,” he began again, and one of the ways he could tell he was losing the argument was that his voice had taken on a resonance that made it every bit as theatrical as hers. It was the voice of a hero, a voice befitting the kind of person Bill Croft could admire. “Might make a certain amount of sense if I had some definite, measurable talent. If I were an artist, say, or a writer, or a—”
“Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own? Listen: I don’t care if it takes you five years of doing nothing at all; I don’t care if you decide after five years that what you really want is to be a bricklayer or a mechanic or a merchant seaman. Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents—it’s your very essence that’s being stifled here. It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.”
“And what’s that?” For the first time he allowed himself to look at her—not only to look but to put down his glass and take hold of her leg, and she covered and pressed his hand with both of her own.
“Oh, don’t you know?” She brought his hand gently up her hip and around to the flat of her abdomen, where she pressed it close again. “Don’t you know? You’re the most valuable and wonderful thing in the world. You’re a man.”
And of all the capitulations in his life, this was the one that seemed most like a victory. Never before had elation welled more powerfully inside him; never had beauty grown more purely out of truth; never in taking his wife had he triumphed more completely over time and space. The past could dissolve at his will and so could the future; so could the walls of this house and the whole imprisoning wasteland beyond it, towns and trees. He had taken command of the universe because he was a man, and because the marvelous creature who opened and moved for him, tender and strong, was a woman.
At the first bright, hesitant calls of awakening birds, when the massed trees were turning from gray to olive green in a rising mist, she gently touched his lips with her fingertips.
“Darling? We really are going to do it, aren’t we? I mean it hasn’t just been a lot of talk or anything, has it?”
He was on his back, taking pleasure in the slow rise and fall of his own chest, which felt broad and deep and muscled enough to fill the modeling of a medieval breastplate. Was there anything he couldn’t do? Was there any voyage he couldn’t undertake and any prize in life he couldn’t promise her?
“No,” he said.
“Because I mean I’d like to get started on it right away. Tomorrow. Writing letters and whatnot, and seeing about the passports. And I think we ought to tell Niffer and Mike about it right away too, don’t you? They’ll need a little time to get used to it, and besides, I want them to know before anybody else. Don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But I mean I don’t want to tell them unless you’re absolutely sure.”
“I’m absolutely sure.”
“That’s wonderful. Oh darling, look at the time. And it’s practically light outside. You’ll be dead tired.”
“No I won’t. I can sleep on the train. I can sleep at the office. It’s all right.”
“All right. I love you.”
And they fell asleep like children.
PART TWO
ONE
THERE NOW BEGAN A TIME of such joyous derangement, of such exultant carelessness, that Frank Wheeler could never afterwards remember how long it lasted. It could have been a week or two weeks or more before his life began to come back into focus, with its customary concern for the passage of time and its anxious need to measure and apportion it; and by then, looking back, he was unable to tell how long it had been otherwise. The only day that would always stand clear and sharp in his memory was the first one
, the day after his birthday.
He did sleep on the train, riding with his head fallen back on the dusty plush and his Times sliding from his lap; and he stood for a long time over scalding cups of coffee in the echoing tan vault of Grand Central, allowing himself to be late for work. How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their gray-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting midtown office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.
In the meantime, Frank Wheeler’s coffee was delicious, his paper napkin was excellently white and dry, and the grandmotherly woman who served him was so courteous and so clearly pleased with the rhythm of her own efficiency (“Yes, sir, thank you sir; will that be all, sir?”) that he wanted to lean over and press a kiss into her wrinkled cheek. By the time he reached the office he had passed into that euphoria of half-refreshed exhaustion in which all sounds are muffled, all sights are blurred and every task is easy.
First things first: and the first thing he had to do, when the elevator door slid open at the Fifteenth Floor, was to walk up and deal like a man with Maureen Grube. She was alone at her reception desk, in a dark suit that she’d probably worn because it was the most severe, least provocative thing in her wardrobe, and when she saw him coming she looked badly flustered. But his smile was so expert—not the least bit furtive or the least bit vain, a perfectly open, friendly smile—that he could see the assurance come back into her face before he got to the desk. Had she been afraid he would think her a tramp? That he’d spend the day whispering and chuckling about her with the other men? If so, the smile told her she could relax. Had she been afraid, on the other hand, that he would try to make a big romantic thing out of it? That he’d embarrass the life out of her with messy little importunings in corners (“I’ve got to see you…”)? The smile told her she could stop worrying about that, too; and these two possibilities, for the moment, were the only ones that seemed likely enough to bother with.