Revolutionary Road Read Online Free PDF

back to the car.
      "Now, wait a minute!" He was stumbling after her in the weeds. Other cars were rushing past now, both ways, but he'd stopped caring. "W ait a minute, God damn it!"
      She leaned the backs of her thighs against the fender and folded her arms in an elaborate display of resignation while he jabbed and shook a forefinger in her face.
      "You listen to me. This is one time you're not going to get away with twisting everything I say. This just happens to be one damn time I know I'm not in the wrong. You know what you are when you're like this?"
      "Oh God, if only you'd stayed home tonight."
      "You know what you are when you're like this? You're sick. I really mean that."
      "And do you know what you are?" Her eyes raked him up and down. "You're disgusting."
      Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.
      "Oh, you've never fooled me, Frank, never once. All your precious moral maxims and your 'love' and your mealy-mouthed little—do you think I've forgotten the time you hit me in the face because I said I wouldn't forgive you? Oh, I've always known I had to be your conscience and your guts— and your punching bag. Just because you've got me safely in a trap you think you—"
    " You in a trap! You in a trap! Jesus, don't make me laugh!"
      "Yes, me." She made a claw of her hand and clutched at her collarbone. "Me. Me. Me. Oh, you poor, selfdeluded— Look at you! Look at you, and tell me how by any stretch "—she tossed her head, and the grin of her teeth glistened white in the moonlight—"by any stretch of the imagination you can call yourself a man!"
      He swung out one trembling fist for a backhanded blow to her head and she cowered against the fender in an ugly crumple of fear; then instead of hitting her he danced away in a travesty of boxer's footwork and brought the fist down on the roof of the car with all his strength. He hit the car four times that way: Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! —while she stood and watched. When he was finished, the shrill, liquid chant of the peepers was the only sound for miles.
      "God damn you," he said quietly. "God damn you, April."
      "All right. Could we please go home now?"
      With parched, hard-breathing mouths, with wobbling heads and shaking limbs, they settled themselves in the car like very old and tired people. He started the engine and drove carefully away, down to the turn at the base of Revolutionary Hill and on up the winding blacktop grade of Revolutionary Road.
      This was the way they had first come, two years ago, as cordially nodding passengers in the station wagon of Mrs. Helen Givings, the real-estate broker. She had been polite but guarded over the phone—so many city people were apt to come out and waste her time demanding impossible bargains—but from the moment they'd stepped off the train, as she would later tell her husband, she had recognized them as the kind of couple one did take a little trouble with, even in the low-price bracket. "They're sweet, " she told her husband. "The girl is ab solutely ravishing, and I think the boy must do something very brilliant in town—he's very nice, rather reserved—and really, it is so refreshing to deal with people of that sort." Mrs. Givings had understood at once that they wanted something out of the ordinary—a small remodeled barn or carriage house, or an old guest cottage—something with a little charm—and she did hate having to tell them that those things simply weren't available any more. But she implored them not to lose heart; she did know of one little place