Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Author:Richard Yates
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780375708442
Publisher: New York : Vintage Contemporaries, 2000.
Published: 1989-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

FOUR

"FLY THE COOP," Jack Ordway said, stirring his coffee. "Kick over the traces. Take off. Pretty nifty, Franklin."

They were sitting at a ketchup-stained table for two in the dark corner of the Nice place, and Frank was beginning to regret having told Ordway about Europe. A clown, a drunk, a man unable to discuss anything at all except in the elaborately derisive tone he used for talking about himself—wasn't this the desirable kind of confidant to have in a thing like this? But he'd told him, nevertheless, because in the past few weeks it had become more and more difficult to carry his secret alone through the office day. Sitting attentively in staff conferences while Bandy outlined things to be done "in the fall" or "first of the year," accepting Sales Promotion assignments that would theoretically take him months to complete, he would sometimes find his mind sliding readily into gear with the slow machinery of Bandy's projects before it occurred to him to think: No, wait a minute—I won't even be here then. At first these little shocks had been fun, but the fun of them had worn off and soon they had become distinctly troubling. It was getting on for the middle of June. In another two and a half months (eleven weeks!) he would be crossing the ocean, never to be concerned with Sales Promotion again, yet the reality of that fact had still to penetrate the reality of the office. It was a perfectly, inescapably real fact at home, where nobody talked of anything else; it was real on the train each morning and again on the train each night, but for the eight hours of his working day it remained as insubstantial as a half-remembered, rapidly fading dream. Everyone and everything in the office conspired against it. The stolid or tired or mildly sardonic faces of his colleagues, the sight of his in basket and his current work pile, the sound of his phone or of the buzzer that meant he was wanted in Bandy's cubicle—all these seemed constantly to tell him he was destined to stay here forever.

The hell I am! he felt like saying twenty times a day. You just wait and see. But his defiance lacked weight. The bright, dry, torpid lake of this place had contained him too long and too peacefully to be ruffled by any silent threat of escape; it was all too willing to wait and see. This was intolerable; the only way to put an end to it was to speak out and tell somebody; and Jack Ordway was, after all, the best friend he had in the office. Today they had managed to avoid Small and Lathrop and Roscoe for lunch, and had started it off with a couple of weak but adequate martinis; and now the story was out.

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