by Ayn Rand
"No, he didn't."
His words were blurring a little, as if weighted with drops of the liquor he had swallowed: "Don't tell me that you helped us to get that Gift Certificate as a favor to me and that you gained nothing.... I know why you did it."
"You knew it at the time."
"Sure. That's why I like you, Lillian."
His eyes kept coming back to the low cut of her gown. It was not the smooth skin that attracted his glance, not the exposed rise of her breasts, but the fraud of the safety pin beyond the edge.
"I'd like to see him beaten," he said. "I'd like to hear him scream with pain, just once."
"You won.'t, Jimmy."
"Why does he think he's better than the rest of us--he and that sister of mine?"
She chuckled.
He rose as if she had slapped him. He went to the bar and poured himself another drink, not offering to refill her glass.
She was speaking into space, staring past him. "He did notice my existence--even though I can't lay railroad tracks for him and erect bridges to the glory of his Metal. I can't build his mills--but I can destroy them. I can't produce his Metal--but I can take it away from him. I can't bring men down to their knees in admiration--but I can bring them down to their knees."
"Shut up!" he screamed in terror, as if she were coming too close to that fogbound alley which had to remain unseen.
She glanced up at his face. "You're such a coward, Jim."
"Why don't you get drunk?" he snapped, sticking his unfinished drink at her mouth, as if he wanted to strike her.
Her fingers half-closed limply about the glass, and she drank, spilling the liquor down her chin, her breast and her gown.
"Oh hell, Lillian, you're a mess!" he said and, not troubling to reach for his handkerchief, he stretched out his hand to wipe the liquor with the flat of his palm. His fingers slipped under the gown's neckline, closing over her breast, his breath catching in a sudden gulp, like a hiccough. His eyelids were drawing closed, but he caught a glimpse of her face leaning back unresistingly, her mouth swollen with revulsion. When he reached for her mouth, her arms embraced him obediently and her mouth responded, but the response was just a pressure, not a kiss.
He raised his head to glance at her face. Her teeth were bared in a smile, but she was staring past him, as if mocking some invisible presence, her smile lifeless, yet loud with malice, like the grin of a flesh-less skull.
He jerked her closer, to stifle the sight and his own shudder. His hands were going through the automatic motions of intimacy--and she complied, but in a manner that made him feel as if the beats of her arteries under his touch were snickering giggles. They were both performing an expected routine, a routine invented by someone and imposed upon them, performing it in mockery, in hatred, in defiling parody on its inventors.
He felt a sightless, heedless fury, part-horror, part-pleasure-the horror of committing an act he would never dare confess to anyone--the pleasure of committing it in blasphemous defiance of those to whom he would not dare confess it. He was himself!--the only conscious part of his rage seemed to be screaming to him--he was, at last, himself!
They did not speak. They knew each other's motive. Only two words were pronounced between them. "Mrs. Rearden," he said.
They did not look at each other when he pushed her into his bedroom and onto his bed, falling against her body, as against a soft, stuffed object. Their faces had a look of secrecy, the look of partners in guilt, the furtive, smutty look of children defiling someone's clean fence by chalking sneaky scratches intended as symbols of obscenity.
Afterward, it did not disappoint him that what he had possessed was an inanimate body without resistance or response. It was not a woman that he had wanted to possess. It was not an act in celebration of life that he had wanted to perform--but an act in celebration of the triumph of impotence.
Cherryl unlocked the door and slipped in quietly, almost surreptitiously, as if hoping not to be seen or to see the place which was her home. The sense of Dagny's presence--of Dagny's world--had supported her on her way back, but when she entered her own apartment the walls seemed to swallow her again into the suffocation of a trap.
The apartment was silent; a wedge of light cut across the anteroom from a door left half-open. She dragged herself mechanically in the direction of her room. Then she stopped.
The open band of light was the door of Jim's study, and on the illuminated strip of its carpet she saw a woman's hat with a feather stirring faintly in a draft.
She took a step forward. The room was empty, she saw two glasses, one on a table, the other on the floor, and a woman's purse lying on the seat of an armchair. She stood, in unreacting stupor, until she heard the muffled drawl of two voices behind the door of Jim's bedroom; she could not distinguish the words, only the quality of the sounds: Jim's voice had a tone of irritation, the woman.'s--of contempt.
Then she found herself in her own room, fumbling frantically to lock her door. She had been flung here by the blind panic of escape, as if it were she who had to hide, she who had to run from the ugliness of being seen in the act of seeing them--a panic made of revulsion, of pity, of embarrassment, of that mental chastity which recoils from confronting a man with the unanswerable proof of his evil.
She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.
It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil's sake.
She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way to act.
She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if neither could believe the other's reality.
"When did you come back?" he snapped. "How long have you been home?"
"I don't know ..."
He was looking at her face. "What's the matter with you?"
"Jim, I--" She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom. "Jim, I know."
"What do you know?"
"You were there ... with a woman."
His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.
"Sure!" he screamed. "So what? What are you going to do about it?"
She stared at him blankly.
"Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did, because that's what I felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?" He snapped his fingers. "That for your opinion! I don't give a hoot in hell about your opinion! Take it and like it!" It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. "Do you think you're going to make me hide? I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody? I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!--nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!--but if you expect m
e to mean it--to mean it, you damn little fool!--you'd better grow up in a hurry!"
It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night--but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, "Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was--"
"No!" she cried. "Jim! I don't have to know it!"
"It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!"
She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror--because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, "I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?"
He burst out laughing. "You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want it big and pure! I wouldn't think of divorcing you--and don't go imagining that I'll let you divorce me! You think it's as important as that? Listen, you fool, there isn't a husband who doesn't sleep with other women and there isn't a wife who doesn't know it, but they don't talk about it! I'll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those bitches, and keep your mouth shut!"
He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. "Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn't have married me."
"No. I wouldn't have."
"Why did you marry me?"
He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. "Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little gutter-snipe, who'd never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you'd love me! I thought you'd know that you had to love .me!"
"As you are?"
"Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!"
"You loved me ... because I was worthless?"
"Well, what did you think you were?"
"You loved me for being rotten?"
"What else did you have to offer? But you didn't have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security--what security is there in being loved for one's virtues? The competition's wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I--I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity--and that's safe, you'd have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self--everybody's self is a gutter--but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!"
"You wanted me to ... accept your love ... as alms' "
"Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!"
"I ... tried ... to deserve it."
"Of what use would you be to me, if you had?"
"You didn't want me to?"
"Oh, you goddamn fool!"
"You didn't want me to improve? You didn't want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?"
"Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?"
"You wanted it to be alms ... for both of us and from both? You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?"
"Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper! Yes!"
"You chose me because I was worthless?"
"Yes!"
"You're lying, Jim."
His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.
"Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling--didn't you?"
"Yes!" he cried.
Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal--and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact--she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.
"What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.
She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half-trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: "You ... you're a killer ... for the sake of killing ..."
It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.
She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.
He stood motionless--and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.
She moved first. She sprang to her feet--and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment--he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.
She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.
After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections. She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.
She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?--she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she passed. But she would work, she thought, and the harder she worked, the more malevolence she would draw from the people around her, and she would not know when truth would be expected of her and when a lie, but the stricter her honesty, the greater the fraud she would be asked to suffer at their hands. She had seen it before and had borne it, in the home of her family, in the shops of the slums, but she had thought that these were vicious exceptions, chance evils, to escape and forget. Now she knew that they were not exceptions, that theirs was the code accepted by the world, that it was a creed of living, known by all, but kept unnamed, leering at her from people's eyes in that sly, guilty look she had never been able to understand--and at the root of the creed, hidden by silence, lying in wait for her in the cellars of the city and in the cellars of their souls, there was a thing with which one could not live.
Why are you doing it to me?--she cried soundlessly to the darkness around her. Because you're good--some enormous laughter seemed to be answering from the roof tops and from the sewers. Then I won't want to be good any longer--But you will--I don't have to--You will--I can't bear it--You will.
She shuddered and walked faster--but ahead of her, in the foggy distance, she saw the calendar above the roofs of the city--it was long past midnight and the calendar said: August 6, but it seemed to her suddenly that she saw September 2 written above the city in letters of Mood--and she thought: If she worked, if she struggled, if she rose, she would take a harder beating with each step of her climb, until, at the end, whatever she reached, be it a copper company or an unmortgaged cottage,
she would see it seized by Jim on some September 2 and she would see it vanish to pay for the parties where Jim made his deals with his friends.
Then I won.'t!--she screamed and whirled around and went running back along the street--but it seemed to her that in the black sky, grinning at her from the steam of the laundry, there weaved an enormous figure that would hold no shape, but its grin remained the same on its changing faces, and its face was Jim's and her childhood preacher's and the woman social worker's from the personnel department of the five-and-ten-and the grin seemed to say to her: People like you will always stay honest, people like you will always struggle to rise, people like you will always work, so we're safe and you have no choice.
She ran. When she looked around her once more, she was walking down a quiet street, past the glass doorways where lights were burning in the carpeted lobbies of luxurious buildings. She noticed that she was limping, and saw that the heel of her pump was loose; she had broken it somewhere in her blank span of running.
From the sudden space of a broad intersection, she looked at the great skyscrapers in the distance. They were vanishing quietly into a veil of fog, with the faint breath of a glow behind them, with a few lights like a smile of farewell. Once, they had been a promise, and from the midst of the stagnant sloth around her she had looked to them for proof that another kind of men existed. Now she knew that they were tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them, they were the frozen shape of the silent cry that the reward of achievement was martyrdom.
Somewhere in one of those vanishing towers, she thought, there was Dagny--but Dagny was a lonely victim, fighting a losing battle, to be destroyed and to sink into fog like the others.
There is no place to go, she thought and stumbled on--I can't stand still, nor move much longer--I can neither work nor rest--I can neither surrender nor fight--but this... this is what they want of me, this is where they want me--neither living nor dead, neither thinking nor insane, but just a chunk of pulp that screams with fear, to be shaped by them as they please, they who have no shape of their own.