by Tobias Wolff
By now I’d picked up enough swank to guess that Ayn Rand was as bad as she was popular, and she was very popular. In a smirky spirit I pulled a copy of The Fountainhead off a book rack in the train station as I was leaving for Christmas break, read a few pages for laughs, forgot to laugh, and got so caught up I decided to buy it. There was still a man ahead of me at the cash register when the conductor began his last call. The clerk was old and slow, damn his eyes. I stood there in a sweat, knowing I should give up and leave but unable to surrender the novel. In the end I made the train at a dead run, suitcases nearly wrenching my arms out of their sockets. But I had it—the fat book swinging in my raincoat pocket, banging against my thigh.
I was bound for Baltimore to spend the holidays with my mother’s father and his wife. The poky local was packed with boys from school, and on any other trip I would have been horsing around with the rest of them, but this time I found a nearly empty car and settled in with the novel. At the next stop down the line we took on a bunch of girls from Miss Cobb’s Academy. I watched them milling around on the platform, waiting to board, and saw a girl I’d met at their Halloween dance. Her name was Lorraine—Rain, she called herself. By the third slow-dance we’d been pushing up close together, so close that one of the monitors wandering the floor tapped me on the shoulder with her pointer, which meant we had to retreat to opposite sides of the room and couldn’t dance with each other again. Later I saw her making out with my classmate Jack Broome, which didn’t stop me from writing her an ironically jocular letter a few days later. She never wrote back. Whenever I thought of that letter, as I often did, every phrase glowed with stupidity, made even more garish by the dead silence of its reception.
Rain came into my car, another girl at her elbow. Cigarette smoke curled from her nostrils. They stopped in the doorway and looked the car over. Her friend said something and Rain laughed, then she saw me and stopped. She was thrown. So was I. I had to force myself not to look away. A few weeks ago I’d been nudging a boner against her and she’d been sort of nudging back, the two of us holding this thing between us like an apple in some birthday game. Then she’d betrayed me and snubbed me. Now what?
I could see her decide to brazen it out. She said something to the other girl and came down the aisle, steadying herself on the seatbacks, long camel overcoat swaying to the rhythmic sideways lurch of the train. She was a redhead with beautifully arched eyebrows and pouty lips, her pale forehead faintly stippled with acne scars. When she talked to you she leaned back and narrowed her eyes as if sizing you up. She stopped beside me and asked where I was going, and when I said Baltimore she wondered if I knew some friend of hers who lived there.
I repeated the name thoughtfully, then said no, I didn’t think I knew her.
Well, you should, Rain said. She’s stupendous great fun. I’ll tell her to look out for you.
Terrific.
She dropped her cigarette and ground it out, her leg flashing forward from the pleats of her skirt. She had on black stockings. Then she glanced back at her friend. Well, she said—Oh, don’t tell me! She plucked the novel off my lap. Do not tell me you’re reading this book!
It seemed useless to deny it.
She flipped through the pages, then stopped and began to read. Oh, God, she said, and went on reading long enough for her friend to look impatient. I waited, smiling idiotically. Dominique is my spirit guide, Rain said. You know what I mean?
Well, sure, I said. Absolutely.
Roark too, she said, but in a different way. I have a completely different thing with Roark. I’m not even going to try to describe that.
I know what you mean, I said, then added, Probably like what I have with Dominique.
Her friend called out and jerked her head toward the next car. Rain held the book out, then pulled it back. Can I borrow it? I don’t have a thing to read.
No. Afraid not.
Please? Then, in a low voice: Pretty please?
No. Sorry.
She looked at me in that measuring way of hers. Maybe she was wondering whether I would take the book by force if I had to. She came up with the right answer. Okay, she said, and handed it over.
Rain hadn’t bothered to close the book. I glanced over the pages she’d been reading and found this exchange between Dominique and Roark: I want to be owned, not by a lover, but by an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You’ve heard it. What do you wish to say now?
Take off your clothes.
I read without stopping until we pulled into New York, where I took an empty bench in the station and went back to the book as my schoolmates played the fool around me. One boy had gotten plastered on the train and was puking into an ashtray, and a couple others were pretending to be drunk. What sheep!
It was dark when I boarded the train to Baltimore. Now and then I stopped reading to study my reflection in the window. His face was like a law of nature—a thing one could not question, alter, or implore. It had high cheekbones over gaunt, hollow cheeks; gray eyes, cold and steady; a contemptuous mouth, shut tight, the mouth of an executioner or a saint.
My cheeks weren’t hollow and my eyes weren’t gray, but my mouth surely tightened with contempt over the next weeks as I read and re-read The Fountainhead and considered how shabbily this world treats a man who is strong and great, simply because he’s strong and great. A man like the architect Howard Roark, who refuses to change even one angle of a design to advance his career and who, when his finest work—a housing project—is secretly modified during construction, goes there and personally dynamites the whole thing to smithereens rather than let people live in such mongrelized spaces. His genius is not for sale. He is a free man among parasites who hate him and punish him with poverty and neglect. And he has sex with Dominique.
Dominique seems like a regular glacier as she rolls over the men in her path. With her air of cold serenity and her exquisitely vicious mouth, she treats Roark like dirt, talking tough to him, even smacking his face with a branch, but underneath she’s dying for him and he knows it and one night he goes to her room and gives Dominique exactly what she wants, with her fighting him all the way, because part of what she wants is to be broken by Roark. Taken.
This was new and interesting to me—the idea that a woman’s indifference, even her scorn, might be an invitation to go a few rounds. I felt like a sucker. It seemed that all my routine gallantries and attentions had marked me as a weakling, a slave.
I was discovering the force of my will. To read The Fountainhead was to feel this caged power, straining like a dammed-up river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running. I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—nothing between me and greatness itself—but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability.
That was where the contempt came in. I had stayed with my grandfather and his wife on other vacations, and found them kindly but dull. Grandjohn was a retired air force colonel whose specialty had been photo analysis. While studying pictures of German trains during the war, he’d spotted a certain marking that led to an important bombing run. My mother told me that story. Grandjohn didn’t tell stories. After the war he’d worked in an office at the Pentagon before getting put out to pasture. At first I’d attributed his blandness to a professional habit of secrecy, and made it romantic—monotony as cover.
This time, though, I watched Grandjohn and his wife with a cold eye. How could he have spent so many years in the air force without learning to fly? Thirty years around Mustangs and Tomcats and Saber Jets, and he seemed happy to pilot a desk to his retirement party.
Patty was his second wife, a friend of my grandmother’s who’d married him after Grandmargie died. Patty was boring too. She read him the day’s news while he peered
at the crossword puzzle through his half-moon glasses. They say they’re going to widen the road where that car went off with all those kids. She had covered the floors of their house in thick white carpets that deadened the air and made whatever you said in that woolen silence sound like the sudden caw of a crow on a damp day.
I began to feel their kindness as a form of aggression. Patty was pitilessly solicitous. I couldn’t touch a book without getting grilled about the sufficiency of light and the comfort of the chair. Was I warm enough? Did I need a pillow for my back? How about one of the five thousand Cokes they’d stored up in anticipation of my visit? Grandjohn kept telling me how lucky I was to have my mother’s eyes, and how proud of me she would have been. Sometimes I had to go into the bathroom and scream silently, rocking from side to side like a gorilla, my head thrown back, my teeth bared.
This, I decided, this sadistic dullness, this excruciating compulsion to please, was how you ended up after a lifetime of getting A’s in obedience school. Roark had worked in a quarry, hewing granite blocks with a chisel, rather than take a job doing tame architecture. He refused to think as others would have him think. Had Grandjohn ever done anything else? Had Patty ever thought at all? Christ! How could they last another hour like this without cutting each other’s throats?
I fled the house every chance I got, riding a bus the ten miles into Baltimore from Wilton Oaks, their housing development. It rained steadily through Christmas into the new year. I walked the glistening streets in a fury of derision, wet and cold, sneering at everyone except the drunkards and bums who’d at least had the guts not to buy into the sham. Despising any sign of uniformity, I saw uniforms everywhere—not only on soldiers and policemen, but on high school girls and housewives out shopping. The businessmen struck me as especially pathetic in their hats and suits and London Fogs, each with some laughable flag of individuality hanging from his neck.
The Fountainhead made me alert to the smallest surrenders of will. Passing a shoe store, I saw a young salesman in the act of bending over a customer’s foot. I stopped by the window and stared at him, hoping he’d sense my rage and disgust. You—is this your dream? To grovel before strangers, to stuff their corns and bunions into Hush Puppies? And for what—a roof overhead and three squares a day? Coward! Fool! Men were born to soar, and you have chosen to kneel!
But he never looked my way. Instead he continued to chat up his customer, a grizzled old guy in overalls, all the while cradling the man’s stockinged foot in one hand, examining it as if it were an object of interest and value. The salesman laughed at something the geezer said, then lowered the foot gently to the sizing stool. He rose and walked toward the back of the store. The old guy, smiling to himself, fingers laced across his stomach, stared past me into the street.
I returned to school three or four days before we were actually due back. Only a few boys were around, luckless scholars retaking tests they’d flunked, red-eyed swimmers tuning up for the season; otherwise the place was deserted. My reason for cutting the break short wasn’t just to get away from Grandjohn and Patty. Our entries for the Ayn Rand competition were due the third week of January, and I wanted to get a jump on my story before classes started. But I wrote nothing. I took long walks through the snowy woods and fields, watching myself do it, admiring my solitude as if from a great height. Like Howard Roark, I kept a cigarette clamped in my executioner’s lips—once I got a safe distance from the campus—and between these bouts of passionate striding I pigged out with the jocks at the training table and lay on my bed reading The Fountainhead for the third time.
I wasn’t writing, but that didn’t trouble me—I knew I could deliver my story when the time came. What I was doing was tanking up on self-certainty, transfusing Roark’s arrogant, steely spirit into my own. And as I read the book I could feel it happen, my sense of originality and power swelling as my mouth resumed its tightness of contempt.
For once I had a complete picture of the world: over here a few disdainful Roarks and a few icy Dominiques, meltable only by Roarks; over there a bunch of terrified nobodies running from their own possibilities. Now and then I caught glimpses of other ideas in the novel, political, philosophical ideas, but I didn’t think them through. It was the personal meaning that had me in thrall—the promise of mastery achieved by doing exactly as I pleased.
When classes started I still hadn’t begun my story; and the longer I went without writing, the more convinced I became of its inevitable superiority. By now I was reading The Fountainhead for the fourth time, my confidence at a boil as I fell behind in my assignments and picked up demerits for missing chapel and chores. Bill had to prod me to keep my side of the room halfway neat, and one afternoon he confiscated the novel and wouldn’t give it back until I’d picked up the mess around my bed. Man, you’re really hot on this stuff, aren’t you?
She’s good, I said. She’s damned good.
She’s okay.
Okay? Come on. I distinctly remember you saying how interesting she is.
I said she had some interesting ideas. Have you read her other book—Atlas Shrugged?
Not yet. I will.
It’s all right, I guess. Same kind of thing. More speeches. Longer speeches. It kind of got on my nerves, actually—all that Übermensch stuff.
The German word shut me up. Our history master used it often—too often, really, and with excessive pleasure in his accent—to describe the Nazis’ ideology. Because of this association, when Bill flashed the word I became instantly conscious of his Jewishness, and all the more so because he kept it to himself. I could have argued that a man with a mind of his own and a pair of balls to back it up didn’t have to be a Nazi, but of course Bill hadn’t actually said that. And something else made me hold my tongue. He knew that I’d caught on to his Jewishness, but he wasn’t aware of mine, such as it was. I didn’t want to say something that would touch so tender a nerve, a tenderness I assumed in him because I suffered from it myself, covertly bristling when I read or heard anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. In fact that part of my blood felt most truly my own at just those moments when it seemed liable to condescension or ridicule. I figured Bill had kindred feelings, and I didn’t want to provoke them by pushing a view that he identified with German murderers. Our balance was fragile enough anyway, with so many complications of ambition and envy and pretense.
The crowning irony was that Bill himself should appear so much the poster Aryan—so blond, so fair, so handsome. More than handsome: over the past months he had become beautiful. How had that happened? What had changed? Here, too, my secret knowledge of him cast a shadow, because what made him beautiful was a quality of melancholy that softened his gaze and the set of his mouth, and that I attributed to his Jewishness. It seemed to me that the other Jewish boys in school were subject to a similar poignance of expression—intermittently, of course, and some more than others, but all of them to a degree. It was one of the marks of their apartness.
As the submission deadline approached I entered a fever of elation, as if Ayn Rand had already chosen my story. I literally had chills, my brow was hot and clammy. I began to hear the voices of my characters and see their faces. It was all coming together: a great story, a masterpiece!
The day before it was due, without yet having committed a word of it to paper, I rose to read a passage of L’Etranger in my French class and my head kept floating up until it reached a zone of absolute silence and the faces turned toward me looked as featureless as plates of dough. Then my knees went watery and I reached out to steady myself but fell anyway, bringing my desk down with me. I was all tangled up in it. I tried to sit up and fell back again and lay there, waiting.
They kept me in the infirmary for almost two weeks. My fever was not, it turned out, the fizz of genius. It was influenza, complicated by walking pneumonia. Later, once he knew he wasn’t going to lose me, the school doctor said that people had been dying of this particular bug and that I was lucky not to have died myself.
Then one morning the nurse brought in a box of chocolates with a tender farewell note from Patty and a copy of Advise and Consent Grandjohn had inscribed To the budding writer. The Colonel left these off for you, the nurse said. Didn’t want to wake you up. Nice fella, the Colonel. Fine figure of a man.
I watched her set up my breakfast, a brisk, gum-chewing blonde with strong red hands. Her shoulder brushed mine as she cranked the bed upright, humming to herself, and I became aware of her as a woman. I knew my grandfather still made love to Patty. I’d heard their headboard banging the wall as I lay reading, and it embarrassed me, mostly for Patty’s sake. She seemed too old for this—I thought of her as a victim in the transaction. But Grandjohn was still, as the nurse said, a fine figure of a man, tall and strong and jut-jawed, and I could sense his pleasure in the company of women. The nurse obviously had responded with pleasure of her own. I couldn’t help thinking of their hours alone here among all these empty beds, the Nurse and the Colonel, and this thought—framed in that impersonal, tritely pornographic way—made me raw with suspicious envy. She must have caught it in my face because she gave me an amused, sidelong glance and flicked my shoulder with the napkin before dropping it in my lap.