Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates

And I didn't even want a baby, he thought to the rhythm of his digging. Isn't that the damnedest thing? I didn't want a baby any more than she did. Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as respoinsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn't been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove hiimself capable of taking it. Proving, proving; and for no other reason thant that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive who loved him when he was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time - this was the hell of it - who might at any time of the day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was a sludicrous and as simple as that.


... but the worst part - the worst part of the whole weekend, if not of his life to date - was the way April was looking at him. He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.

It haunted himi all night while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallow his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford he used for a station car. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the traini, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.


Stumbling down the wooden steps and out into the darkness, grinding the pebbles fiercely under his heels, he felt all the forces of the plausible, the predictable, and the ordinary envelop him like ropes. Nothing was going to happen; and the hell with her. Why wasn't she home where she belonged? Why couldn't she go to Europe or disappear or die? The hell with this aching, suffering, callow, half-assed delusion that he was in "love" with her. The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world. But by the time he'd reached the last row he was jelly-kneed and trembling in a silent praryer: Oh God, please don't let the car be free.


"Have you thought it throught, April? Never undertake to do a thing until you've-"

But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had o teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, somthing true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.