by Ayn Rand
He had expected a torrent that would lift him and smash him against some unknown rocks. He had not found even a brook joining his peaceful river. It was more as if the river went on and someone came to swim quietly in his wake; no, not even to swim--that was a cutting, forceful action--but just to float behind him with the current. Had he been offered the power to determine Dominique's attitude after their marriage, he would have asked that she behave exactly as she did.
Only their nights left him miserably unsatisfied. She submitted whenever he wanted her. But it was always as on their first night: an indifferent body in his arms, without revulsion, without answer. As far as he was concerned, she was still a virgin: he had never made her experience anything. Each time, burning with humiliation, he decided never to touch her again. But his desire returned, aroused by the constant presence of her beauty. He surrendered to it, when he could resist no longer; not often.
It was his mother who stated the thing he had not admitted to himself about his marriage. "I can't stand it," his mother said, six months after the wedding. "If she'd just get angry at me once, call me names, throw things at me, it would be all right. But I can't stand this." "What, Mother?" he asked, feeling a cold hint of panic. "It's no use, Peter," she answered. His mother, whose arguments, opinions, reproaches he had never been able to stop, would not say another word about his marriage. She took a small apartment of her own and moved out of his house. She came to visit him often and she was always polite to Dominique, with a strange, beaten air of resignation. He told himself that he should be glad to be free of his mother; but he was not glad.
Yet he could not grasp what Dominique had done to inspire that mounting dread within him. He could find no word or gesture for which to reproach her. But for twenty months it had been like tonight: he could not bear to remain alone with her--yet he did not want to escape her and she did not want to avoid him.
"Nobody's coming tonight?" he asked tonelessly, turning away from the fire.
"No," she said, and smiled, the smile serving as connection to her next words: "Shall I leave you alone, Peter?"
"No!" It was almost a cry. I must not sound so desperate, he thought, while he was saying aloud: "Of course not. I'm glad to have an evening with my wife all to myself."
He felt a dim instinct telling him that he must solve this problem, must learn to make their moments together endurable, that he dare not run from it, for his own sake more than hers.
"What would you like to do tonight, Dominique?"
"Anything you wish."
"Want to go to a movie?"
"Do you?"
"Oh, I don't know. It kills time."
"All right. Let's kill time."
"No. Why should we? That sounds awful."
"Does it?"
"Why should we run from our own home? Let's stay here."
"Yes, Peter."
He waited. But the silence, he thought, is a flight too, a worse kind of flight.
"Want to play a hand of Russian Bank?" he asked.
"Do you like Russian Bank?"
"Oh, it kills ti--" He stopped. She smiled.
"Dominique," he said, looking at her, "you're so beautiful. You're always so ... so utterly beautiful. I always want to tell you how I feel about it."
"I'd like to hear how you feel about it, Peter."
"I love to look at you. I always think of what Gordon Prescott said. He said that you are God's perfect exercise in structural mathematics. And Vincent Knowlton said you're a spring morning. And Ellsworth--Ellsworth said you're a reproach to every other female shape on earth."
"And Ralston Holcombe?" she asked.
"Oh, never mind!" he snapped, and turned back to the fire.
I know why I can't stand the silence, he thought. It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed ... the thing more inconceivable than one's death--never to have been born.... He felt a sudden, desperate desire which he could identify--a desire to be real to her.
"Dominique, do you know what I've been thinking?" he asked eagerly.
"No. What have you been thinking?"
"I've thought of it for some time--all by myself--I haven't mentioned it to anyone. And nobody suggested it. It's my own idea."
"Why, that's fine. What is it?"
"I think I'd like to move to the country and build a house of our own. Would you like that?"
"I'd like it very much. Just as much as you would. You want to design a home for yourself?"
"Hell, no. Bennett will dash one off for me. He does all our country homes. He's a whiz at it."
"Will you like commuting?"
"No, I think that will be quite an awful nuisance. But you know, everybody that's anybody commutes nowadays. I always feel like a damn proletarian when I have to admit that I live in the city."
"Will you like to see trees and a garden and the earth around you?"
"Oh, that's a lot of nonsense. When will I have the time? A tree's a tree. When you've seen a newsreel of the woods in spring, you've seen it all."
"Will you like to do some gardening? People say it's very nice, working the soil yourself."
"Good God, no! What kind of grounds do you think we'd have? We can afford a gardener, and a good one--so the place will be something for the neighbors to admire."
"Will you like to take up some sport?"
"Yes, I'll like that."
"Which one?"
"I think I'll do better with my golf. You know, belonging to a country club right where you're one of the leading citizens in the community is different from occasional week ends. And the people you meet are different. Much higher class. And the contacts you make ..." He caught himself, and added angrily: "Also, I'll take up horseback riding."
"I like horseback riding. Do you?"
"I've never had much time for it. Well, it does shake your insides unmercifully. But who the hell is Gordon Prescott to think he's the only he-man on earth and plaster his photo in riding clothes right in his reception room?"
"I suppose you will want to find some privacy?"
"Well, I don't believe in that desert-island stuff. I think the house should stand in sight of a major highway, so people would point it out, you know, the Keating estate. Who the hell is Claude Stengel to have a country home while I live in a rented flat? He started out about the same time I did, and look where he is and where I am, why, he's lucky if two and a half men ever heard of him, so why should he park himself in Westchester and ..."
And he stopped. She sat looking at him, her face serene.
"Oh God damn it!" he cried. "If you don't want to move to the country, why don't you just say so?"
"I want very much to do anything you want, Peter. To follow any idea you get all by yourself."
He remained silent for a long time.
"What do we do tomorrow night?" he asked, before he could stop himself.
She rose, walked to a desk and picked up her calendar.
"We have the Palmers for dinner tomorrow night," she said.
"Oh, Christ!" he moaned. "They're such awful bores! Why do we have to have them?"
She stood holding the calendar forward between the tips of her fingers, as if she were a photograph with the focus on the calendar and her own figure blurred in its background.
"We have to have the Palmers," she said, "so that we can get the commission for their new store building. We have to get that commission so that we can entertain the Eddingtons for dinner on Saturday. The Eddingtons have no commissions to give, but they're in the Social Register. The Palmers bore you and the Eddingtons snub you. But you have to flatter people whom you despise in order to impress other people who despise you."
"Why do you have to say things like that?"
"Would you like to look at this calendar, Peter?"
"Well, that's what everybody does. That's what everybody lives for."
"Yes, Peter. Almost everybody."
"If you don't appro
ve, why don't you say so?"
"Have I said anything about not approving?"
He thought back carefully. "No," he admitted. "No, you haven't.... But it's the way you put things."
"Would you rather I put it in a more involved way--as I did about Vincent Knowlton?"
"I'd rather ..." Then he cried: "I'd rather you'd express an opinion, God damn it, just once!"
She asked, in the same level monotone: "Whose opinion, Peter? Gordon Prescott's? Ralston Holcombe's? Ellsworth Toohey's?"
He turned to her, leaning on the arm of his chair, half rising, suddenly tense. The thing between them was beginning to take shape. He had a first hint of words that would name it.
"Dominique," he said, softly, reasonably, "that's it. Now I know. I know what's been the matter all the time."
"Has anything been the matter?"
"Wait. This is terribly important. Dominique, you've never said, not once, what you thought. Not about anything. You've never expressed a desire. Not of any kind."
"What's wrong about that?"
"But it's ... it's like death. You're not real. You're only a body. Look, Dominique, you don't know it, I'll try to explain. You understand what death is? When a body can't move any more, when it has no ... no will, no meaning. You understand? Nothing. The absolute nothing. Well, your body moves--but that's all. The other, the thing inside you, your--oh, don't misunderstand me, I'm not talking religion, but there's no other word for it, so I'll say: your soul--your soul doesn't exist. No will, no meaning. There's no real you any more."
"What's the real me?" she asked. For the first time, she looked attentive; not compassionate; but, at least, attentive.
"What's the real anyone?" he said, encouraged. "It's not just the body. It's ... it's the soul."
"What is the soul?"
"It's--you. The thing inside you."
"The thing that thinks and values and makes decisions?"
"Yes! Yes, that's it. And the thing that feels. You've--you've given it up."
"So there are two things that one can't give up: one's thoughts and one's desires?"
"Yes! Oh, you do understand! So you see, you're like a corpse to everybody around you. A kind of walking death. That's worse than any active crime. It's ..."
"Negation?"
"Yes. Just blank negation. You're not here. You've never been here. If you'd tell me that the curtains in this room are ghastly and if you'd rip them off and put up some you like--something of you would be real, here, in this room. But you never have. You've never told the cook what dessert you liked for dinner. You're not here, Dominique. You're not alive. Where's your I?"
"Where's yours, Peter?" she asked quietly.
He sat still, his eyes wide. She knew that his thoughts, in this moment, were clear and immediate like visual perception, that the act of thinking was an act of seeing a procession of years behind him.
"It's not true," he said at last, his voice hollow. "It's not true."
"What is not true?"
"What you said."
"I've said nothing. I asked you a question."
His eyes were begging her to speak, to deny. She rose, stood before him, and the taut erectness of her body was a sign of life, the life he had missed and begged for, a positive quality of purpose, but the quality of a judge.
"You're beginning to see, aren't you, Peter? Shall I make it clearer? You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn't want me to show it. You wanted an act to help your act--a beautiful, complicated act, all twists, trimmings and words. All words. You didn't like what I said about Vincent Knowlton. You liked it when I said the same thing under cover of virtuous sentiments. You didn't want me to believe. You only wanted me to convince you that I believed. My real soul, Peter? It's real only when it's independent--you've discovered that, haven't you? It's real only when it chooses curtains and desserts--you're right about that--curtains, desserts and religions, Peter, and the shapes of buildings. But you've never wanted that. You wanted a mirror. People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose. I gave you what you wanted. I became what you are, what your friends are, what most of humanity is so busy being--only without the trimmings. I didn't go around spouting book reviews to hide my emptiness of judgment--I said I had no judgment. I didn't borrow designs to hide my creative impotence--I created nothing. I didn't say that equality is a noble conception and unity the chief goal of mankind--I just agreed with everybody. You call it death, Peter? That kind of death--I've imposed it on you and on everyone around us. But you-you haven't done that. People are comfortable with you, they like you, they enjoy your presence. You've spared them the blank death. Because you've imposed it--on yourself."
He said nothing. She walked away from him, and sat down again, waiting.
He got up. He made a few steps toward her. He said: "Dominique ..."
Then he was on his knees before her, clutching her, his head buried against her legs.
"Dominique, it's not true--that I never loved you. I love you, I always have, it was not ... just to show the others--that was not all--I loved you. There were two people--you and another person, a man, who always made me feel the same thing--not fear exactly, but like a wall, a steep wall to climb--like a command to rise--I don't know where--but a feeling going up--I've always hated that man--but you, I wanted you--always--that's why I married you--when I knew you despised me--so you should have forgiven me that marriage--you shouldn't have taken your revenge like this--not like this, Dominique--Dominique, I can't fight back, I----"
"Who is the man you hated, Peter?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Who is he?"
"Nobody. I ..."
"Name him."
"Howard Roark."
She said nothing for a long time. Then she put her hand on his hair. The gesture had the form of gentleness.
"I never wanted to take a revenge on you, Peter," she said softly.
"Then--why?"
"I married you for my own reasons. I acted as the world demands one should act. Only I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves--not to know that. I've never lied to myself. So I had to do what you all do--only consistently and completely. I've probably destroyed you. If I could care, I'd say I'm sorry. That was not my purpose."
"Dominique, I love you. But I'm afraid. Because you've changed something in me, ever since our wedding, since I said yes to you--even if I were to lose you now, I couldn't go back to what I was before--you took something I had ..."
"No. I took something you never had. I grant you that's worse."
"What?"
"It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it."
"Dominique, I ... I don't want to talk."
She looked down at his face resting against her knees, and he saw pity in her eyes, and for one moment he knew what a dreadful thing true pity is, but he kept no knowledge of it, because he slammed his mind shut before the words in which he was about to preserve it.
She bent down and kissed his forehead. It was the first kiss she had ever given him.
"I don't want you to suffer, Peter," she said gently. "This, now, is real--it's I--it's my own words--I don't want you to suffer--I can't feel anything else--but I feel that much."
He pressed his lips to her hand.
When he raised his head, she looked at him as if, for a moment, he was her husband. She said: "Peter, if you could hold on to it--to what you are now----"
"I love you," he said.
They sat silently together for a long time. He felt no strain
in the silence.
The telephone rang.
It was not the sound that destroyed the moment; it was the eagerness with which Keating jumped up and ran to answer it. She heard his voice through the open door, a voice indecent in its relief:
"Hello? ... Oh, hello, Ellsworth! ... No, not a thing.... Free as a lark.... Sure, come over, come right over! ... Okey-doke!"
"It's Ellsworth," he said, returning to the living room. His voice was gay and it had a touch of insolence. "He wants to drop in."
She said nothing.
He busied himself emptying ash trays that contained a single match or one butt, gathering newspapers, adding a log to the fire that did not need it, lighting more lamps. He whistled a tune from a screen operetta.
He ran to open the door when he heard the bell.
"How nice," said Toohey, coming in. "A fire and just the two of you. Hello, Dominique. Hope I'm not intruding."
"Hello, Ellsworth," she said.
"You're never intruding," said Keating. "I can't tell you how glad I am to see you." He pushed a chair to the fire. "Sit down here, Ellsworth. What'll you have? You know, when I heard your voice on the phone ... well, I wanted to jump and yelp like a pup."
"Don't wag your tail, though," said Toohey. "No, no drinks, thanks. How have you been, Dominique?"
"Just as I was a year ago," she said.
"But not as you were two years ago?"
"No."
"What did we do two years ago this time?" Keating asked idly.
"You weren't married," said Toohey. "Prehistorical period. Let me see--what happened then? I think the Stoddard Temple was just being completed."
"Oh that," said Keating.
Toohey asked: "Hear anything about your friend Roark ... Peter?"
"No. I don't think he's worked for a year or more. He's finished, this time."
"Yes, I think so.... What have you been doing, Peter?"
"Nothing much.... Oh, I've just read The Gallant Gallstone."
"Liked it?"
"Yes! You know, I think it's a very important book. Because it's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background and ... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours--you were just lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you--you were unlucky, that's all." He was saying it defiantly, with a violence inappropriate to a literary discussion. He was not looking at Toohey nor at Dominique, but speaking to the room and to what that room had witnessed.