He was down the stairs and out on the street and walking; before he'd gone half a block he had broken into an exultant run, and he ran all the way to Fifth Avenue. Once he had to swerve to keep from stepping into a baby carriage, and a woman shouted "Can't you watch where you're going?" but he refused, no less than an eagle or a lion would have refused, to look back. He felt like a man.
Could a man ride home in the rear smoker, primly adjusting his pants at the knees to protect their crease and rattling his evening paper into a narrow panel to give his neighbor elbow room? Could a man sit meekly massaging his headache and allowing himself to be surrounded by the chatter of beaten, amiable husks of men who sat and swayed and played bridge in a stagnant smell of newsprint and tobacco and bad breath and overheated radiators?
Hell, no. The way for a man to ride was erect and out in the open, out in the loud iron passageway where the wind whipped his necktie, standing with his feet set wide apart on the shuddering, clangoring floorplates, taking deep pulls from a pinched cigarette until its burning end was a needle of fire and quivering paper ash and then snapping it straight as a bullet into the roaring speed of the roadbed, while the suburban towns wheeled slowly along the pink and gray dust of seven o'clock. And when he came to his own station, the way for a man to alight was to swing down the iron steps and leap before the train had stopped, to land running and slow down to an easy, athletic stride as he made for his parked automobile.
The curtains were drawn in the picture window. He saw that from the road before he'd reached the driveway; then, when he'd made the turn, he saw April come running from the kitchen door and stand waiting for him in the carport. She was wearing her black cocktail dress, ballet slippers, and a very small apron of crisp white gauze that he'd never seen before. And he'd barely had time to switch off the ignition before she wrenched open the car and took hold of his forearm with both hands, talking. Her hands were thinner and more nervous than Maureen Grube's; she was taller and older and used a completely different kind of perfume, and she spoke more rapidly in a higher-pitched voice.
"Frank, listen. Before you come in I've got to talk to you. It's terribly important."
"What?"
"Oh, so many things. First of all I missed you all day and I'm terribly sorry for everything and I love you. The rest can wait. Now come on inside."
If he'd had a year to devote to it and nothing else to do, he couldn't for the life of him have sorted out and weighed the emotions that filled him in the two or three seconds of his lumbering to the kitchen steps with April fastened to his arm. It was like walking through a sandstorm; it was like walking on the ocean floor; it was like walking on air. And this was the funny part: for all the depth of his bafflement he couldn't help noticing that April's voice, different as it was, possessed a quality that made it oddly similar to Maureen Grube's voice telling of the fabulous people Norma knew, or saying "Visual Aids"—a quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity, a way of seeming to speak less to him than to some romantic abstraction.
"Wait here, my darling," she was saying. "Just for a minute, till I call you," and she left him alone in the kitchen, where the hot brown smell of roasting beef brought tears to his eyes. She handed him an OldFashioned glass full of ice and whiskey and disappeared into the darkened living room from which, now, he could hear an ill-suppressed giggle of children and the scrape of a match.
"All right," she called. "Now."
They were at the table, and he looked into all three of their faces before he saw what it was that bathed them in a flickering yellow light. It was a cake with candles. Then came their slow, shrill singing:
"Hap-py birth-day to you . . ."
Jennifer's voice was the loudest and April's was the only one in tune when they took the high note—"Hap-py
birth
day, dear Dad-dy . . ." but Michael was doing the best he could, and his was the widest smile.
"
FORGIVE YOU FOR
what,
April?" They were standing alone on the living room carpet, and she took a tentative step toward him.
"Oh, for everything," she said. "For everything. The way I was all weekend. The way I've been ever since I got mixed up in that awful play. Oh, I've got so much to tell you, and I've got the most wonderful
plan,
Frank. Listen."
But it wasn't easy to listen to anything over the outraged silence in his head. He felt like a monster. He had wolfed his dinner like a starving man and topped it off with seven cloying forkfuls of chocolate cake; he had repeatedly exclaimed, over the unwrapping of his birthday gifts, the very word he'd used to describe what Maureen Grube had been to him— "Swell . . . Swell . . ."—he had heard his children's bedtime prayers and tiptoed from their room; now he was allowing his wife to ask forgiveness, and at the same time, with a cold eye, he was discovering that she wasn't really very much to look at: she was too old and too tall and too intense.
He wanted to rush outdoors and make some dramatic atonement—smash his fist against a tree or run for miles, leaping stone walls, until he fell exhausted in a morass of mud and brambles. Instead he shut his eyes and reached out and drew her close against him, crushing her cocktail apron in a desperate embrace, letting all his torment dissolve in pressing and stroking the inward curve of her back while he urged his groaning, muttering mouth into her throat. "Oh, my lovely," he said. "Oh, my lovely girl."
"No, wait, listen. Do you know what I did all day? I missed you. And Frank, I've thought of the most wonderful—no, wait. I mean I love you and everything, but listen a minute. I—"
The only way to stop her talking and get her out of sight was to kiss her mouth; then the floor began to tilt at dangerous angles and they might have fallen into the coffee table if they hadn't taken three tottering steps and gone over instead into the voluptuous safety of the sofa.
"Darling?" she whispered, fighting for breath. "I do love you terribly, but don't you think we ought to—oh, no, don't stop. Don't stop."
"Ought to what?"
"Ought to sort of try and get into the bedroom first. But not if it makes you cross. We'll stay here if you like. I love you."
"No, you're right. We will." He forced himself up, dragging her with him. "I better take a shower first, too."
"Oh, no, don't. Please don't take a shower. I won't let you."
"I've got to, April."
"Why?"
"Just because. I've got to." It took all his will to move one heavy, swaying step at a time.
"I think you're terribly mean," she was saying, clinging to his arm. "Terribly, terribly mean. Frank, did you like the presents? Was the tie all right? I went to about fourteen different places and none of them had any decent ties."
"It's a swell tie. It's the nicest tie I've ever had."
Under the stiff pelting of hot water, in which Maureen Grube had become an adhesive second skin that only the most desperate scrubbing would shed, he decided he would have to tell her. He would soberly take hold of both her hands and say "Listen, April. This afternoon I—"
He turned off all the hot water and turned up the cold, a thing he hadn't done in years. The shock of it sent him dancing and gasping but he made himself stay under it until he'd counted to thirty, the way he used to do in the army, and he came out feeling like a million dollars. Tell her? Why, of course he wasn't going to tell her. What the hell would be the point of that?
"Oh, you look so clean," she said, whirling from the closet in her best white nightgown. "You look so clean and peaceful. Come sit beside me and let's talk a minute first, all right? Look what I've got."
She had set a bottle of brandy and two glasses on the night table, but it was a long time before he allowed her to pour it, or to say anything else. When she did pull away from him, once, it was only to remove the constriction of lace from her shoulders and let it fall away from her breasts, whose nipples were hardening and rising even before he covered them with his hands.
For the second time that day he discovered that the act of love could leave him speechless, and he hoped she would be willing to let the talking wait for tomorrow. He knew that whatever she had to say would be said with that odd, theatrical emphasis, and he didn't feel equipped to deal with it just now. All he wanted was to lie here smiling in the dark, confused and guilty and happy, and submit to the gathering weight of sleep.
"Darling?" Her voice sounded very far away. "Darling? You're not going to sleep, are you? Because I do have so much to say and we're letting the brandy go to waste and I haven't even had a chance to tell you about my plan."
After a minute he found it easy to stay awake, if only for the pleasure of sitting with her under the double cloak of a blanket, sipping brandy in the moonlight and hearing the rise and fall of her voice. Play-acting or not, her voice in moods of love had always been a pretty sound. At last, with some reluctance, he began to pay attention to what she was saying.
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 here 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."