Content #
CHAPTER TWO #
◆ Nor was he ever in doubt of what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he’d never yet come close enough to one to touch her hand. There had been two or three of them in the various high schools he’d attended, disdainfully unaware of him in their concern with college boys from out of town; what few he’d seen in the army had most often been seen in flickering miniature, on strains of dance music, through the distant golden windows of an officers’ club, and though he’d seen plenty of them since then, in New York, they had always been climbing in or out of taxicabs, followed by the grimly hovering presences of men who looked as if they’d never been boys at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
◆ All the nerves at the roots of his teeth seemed to have entwined with the nerves at the roots of his scalp in a tingling knot.
CHAPTER FIVE
◆ THE ARCHITECTS OF THE KNOX BUILDING had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter. They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake. It stood in an appropriately humdrum section of lower midtown, and from the very day of its grand opening, early in the century, it must clearly have been destined to settle deep into that smoke-hung clutter of numberless rectilinear shapes out of which, in aerial photographs, the mightier towers of New York emerge and rise.
CHAPTER SEVEN
◆ 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—”
CHAPTER TWO
◆ He gave both the Wheelers double shots in their next drinks, to help things along, and he held Milly’s down to half a shot because if she went on putting it away like this, in the shape she was in, she’d be out cold in another hour.
CHAPTER SIX
◆ But when the moment came, in that overstuffed Harrisburg living room with its smell of weakness and medicine and approaching death, with his father doing his best to be benign, his mother doing her best to be tearfully pleased about the baby and April doing her best to be sweetly and shyly proud—when all the lying tenderness of that moment came it had robbed him of his nerve, and he’d blurted it out—a job in the Home Office!—like a little boy come home with a good report card.
CHAPTER FIVE
◆ Her anxiety was compounded at the Wheelers’ kitchen door. They were home—both cars were there—but the house had a strangely unwelcoming look, as if they weren’t expecting visitors. There was no answer to her very light knock on the glass pane of the door, which gave back a vivid reflection of sky and trees, of her own craning face and the faces of Howard and John behind her. She knocked again, and this time she made a visor of one hand and pressed it to the pane, to see inside. The kitchen was empty (she could see what looked like a glass of iced tea on the table) but just then Frank Wheeler came lunging in from the living room, looking awful—looking as if he were about to scream or to weep or to commit violence. She saw at once that he hadn’t heard her knock and didn’t know she was there: he hadn’t come to answer the door but in desperate escape from the living room, possibly from the house itself. And there wasn’t time for her to step back before he saw her—caught her crouched and peering into his very eyes—which made him start, stop, and arrange his features into a smile that matched her own.
◆ “Okay.” John nodded in apparent satisfaction, looking from one of the Wheelers to the other. “Okay; that’s a good reason.” They both looked relieved, but Mrs. Givings went tight all over because she knew, from long experience, that something perfectly awful was coming next.
◆ “Money’s always a good reason,” John said. He began to move around the carpet, hands in his pockets. “But it’s hardly ever the real reason. What’s the real reason? Wife talk you out of it, or what?” And he turned the full force of his dazzling smile on April, who had moved across the room to stab out her cigarette in an ash tray. Her eyes looked briefly up at him and then down again.“Huh?” he persisted. “Little woman decide she isn’t quite ready to quit playing house? Nah, nah, that’s not it. I can tell. She looks too tough. Tough and female and adequate as hell. Okay, then; it must’ve been you.” And he swung around to Frank. “What happened?”
◆ And at least, Mrs. Givings thought, if nothing else could be salvaged from this horrible day, at least he was allowing Howard to lead him away quietly. All she had to do now was to follow them, to find some way of getting across this floor and out of this house, and then it would all be over.But John wasn’t finished yet. “Hey, I’m glad of one thing, though,” he said, stopping near the door and turning back, beginning to laugh again, and Mrs. Givings thought she would die as he extended a long yellow-stained index finger and pointed it at the slight mound of April’s pregnancy. “You know what I’m glad of? I’m glad I’m not gonna be that kid.”
From #
《Revolutionary Road》 Richard Yates