Atlas Shrugged (61 page)

He closed the door of his bedroom like a fugitive winning a moment’s reprieve. He moved cautiously, undressing for bed: he wanted no sound to betray his presence to his family, he wanted no contact with them, not even in their own minds.

He had put on his pajamas and stopped to light a cigarette, when the door of his bedroom opened. The only person who could properly enter his room without knocking had never volunteered to enter it, so he stared blankly for a moment before he was able to believe that it was Lillian who came in.

She wore an Empire garment of pale chartreuse, its pleated skirt streaming gracefully from its high waistline; one could not tell at first glance whether it was an evening gown or a negligee; it was a negligee. She paused in the doorway, the lines of her body flowing into an attractive silhouette against the light.

“I know I shouldn’t introduce myself to a stranger,” she said softly, “but I’ll have to: my name is Mrs. Rearden.” He could not tell whether it was sarcasm or a plea.

She entered and threw the door closed with a casual, imperious gesture, the gesture of an owner.

“What is it, Lillian?” he asked quietly.

“My dear, you mustn’t confess so much so bluntly”—she moved in a leisurely manner across the room, past his bed, and sat down in an armchair—“and so unflatteringly. It’s an admission that I need to show special cause for taking your time. Should I make an appointment through your secretary?”

He stood in the middle of the room, holding the cigarette at his lips, looking at her, volunteering no answer.

She laughed. “My reason is so unusual that I know it will never occur to you: loneliness, darling. Do you mind throwing a few crumbs of your expensive attention to a beggar? Do you mind if I stay here without any formal reason at all?”

“No,” he said quietly, “not if you wish to.”

“I have nothing weighty to discuss—no million-dollar orders, no transcontinental deals, no rails, no bridges. Not even the political situation. I just want to chatter like a woman about perfectly unimportant things.”

“Go ahead.”

“Henry, there’s no better way to stop me, is there?” She had an air of helpless, appealing sincerity. “What can I say after that? Suppose I wanted to tell you about the new novel which Balph Eubank is writing—he is dedicating it to me—would that interest you?”

“If it’s the truth that you want—not in the least.”

She laughed. “And if it’s not the truth that I want?”

“Then I wouldn’t know what to say,” he answered—and felt a rush of blood to his brain, tight as a slap, realizing suddenly the double infamy of a lie uttered in protestation of honesty; he had said it sincerely, but it implied a boast to which he had no right any longer. “Why would you want it, if it’s not the truth?” he asked. “What for?”

“Now you see,
that’s
the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn’t understand it—would you?—if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy—to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn’t like the one that exists.”

“No,” he said slowly, “I wouldn’t understand it.”

“It’s really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and
that
is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.”

He looked at her blankly. It sounded like some sort of monstrous corruption that precluded the possibility of wondering whether anyone could mean it; he wondered only what was the point of uttering it.

“What’s love, darling, if it’s not self-sacrifice?” she went on lightly, in the tone of a drawing-room discussion. “What’s self-sacrifice, unless one sacrifices that which is one’s most precious and most important? But I don’t expect you to understand it. Not a stainless-steel Puritan like you. That’s the immense selfishness of the Puritan. You’d let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you’d have to be ashamed.”

He said slowly, his voice oddly strained and solemn, “I have never claimed to be immaculate.”

She laughed. “And what is it you’re being right now? You’re giving me an honest answer, aren’t you?” She shrugged her naked shoulders. “Oh, darling, don’t take me seriously! I’m just talking.”

He ground his cigarette into an ashtray; he did not answer.

“Darling,” she said, “I actually came here only because I kept thinking that I had a husband and I wanted to find out what he looked like.”

She studied him as he stood across the room, the tall, straight, taut lines of his body emphasized by the single color of the dark blue pajamas.

“You’re very attractive,” she said. “You look so much better—these last few months. Younger. Should I say happier? You look less tense. Oh, I know you’re rushed more than ever and you act like a commander in an air raid, but that’s only the surface. You’re less tense—inside.”

He looked at her, astonished. It was true; he had not known it, had not admitted it to himself. He wondered at her power of observation. She had seen little of him in these last few months. He had not entered her bedroom since his return from Colorado. He had thought that she would welcome their isolation from each other. Now he wondered what motive could have made her so sensitive to a change in him—unless it was a feeling much greater than he had ever suspected her of experiencing.

“I was not aware of it,” he said.

“It’s quite becoming, dear—and astonishing, since you’ve been having such a terribly difficult time.”

He wondered whether this was intended as a question. She paused, as if waiting for an answer, but she did not press it and went on gaily:

“I know you’re having all sorts of trouble at the mills—and then the political situation is getting to be ominous, isn’t it? If they pass those laws they’re talking about, it will hit you pretty hard, won’t it?”

“Yes. It will. But that is a subject which is of no interest to
you,
Lillian, is it?”

“Oh, but it is!” She raised her head and looked straight at him; her eyes had the blank, veiled look he had seen before, a look of deliberate mystery and of confidence in his inability to solve it. “It is of great interest to me ... though not because of any possible financial losses,” she added softly.

He wondered, for the first time, whether her spite, her sarcasm, the cowardly manner of delivering insults under the protection of a smile, were not the opposite of what he had always taken them to be—not a method of torture, but a twisted form of despair, not a desire to make him suffer, but a confession of her own pain, a defense for the pride of an unloved wife, a secret plea—so that the subtle, the hinted, the evasive in her manner, the thing begging to be understood, was not the open malice, but the hidden love. He thought of it, aghast. It made his guilt greater than he had ever contemplated.

“If we’re talking politics, Henry, I had an amusing thought. The side you represent—what is that slogan you all use so much, the motto you’re supposed to stand for? ‘The sanctity of contract’—is that it?”

She saw his swift glance, the intentness of his eyes, the first response of something she had struck, and she laughed aloud.

“Go on,” he said; his voice was low; it had the sound of a threat.

“Darling, what for?—since you understood me quite well.”

“What was it you intended to say?” His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.

“Do you really wish to bring me to the humiliation of complaining? It’s so trite and such a common complaint—although I did think I had a husband who prides himself on being different from lesser men. Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness the aim of your life? And that you can’t really say in all honesty whether I’m happy or unhappy, because you haven’t even inquired whether I exist?”

He felt them as a physical pain—all the things that came tearing at him impossibly together. Her words were a plea, he thought—and he felt the dark, hot flow of guilt. He felt pity—the cold ugliness of pity without affection. He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won’t admit, a feeling I can’t know or understand or try to guess? -if she loves me, why doesn’t the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don’t switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards—
you’re
guilty—no matter what she does, it’s nothing compared to your guilt—she’s right—it makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know it’s she who’s right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it’s she who’s right!

“What would make you happy, Lillian?” he asked. His voice was toneless.

She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.

“Oh, dear!” she said, as in bored amusement. “That’s the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause.”

She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.

“What would make me happy, Henry? That is what
you
ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don’t know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won’t be the first man to default on that promise. It’s the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you’d never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life.”

She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her.

“I know that claims of this kind are impractical,” she said. “I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor.”

He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn’t I want to know the reason?”

“I have been very busy.”

She shrugged. “A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband’s existence. I didn’t know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn’t include blast furnaces.”

She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.

It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which he tore her arms off his body and threw her aside.

He stood, paralyzed, shocked by the brutality of his own reaction. She was staring at him, her face naked in bewilderment, with no mystery, no pretense or protection; whatever calculations she had made, this was a thing she had not expected.

“I’m sorry, Lillian ...” he said, his voice low, a voice of sincerity and of suffering.

She did not answer.

“I’m sorry ... It’s just that I’m very tired,” he added, his voice lifeless; he was broken by the triple lie, one part of which was a disloyalty he could not bear to face; it was not the disloyalty to Lillian.

She gave a brief chuckle. “Well, if that’s the effect your work has on you, I may come to approve of it. Do forgive me, I was merely trying to do my duty. I thought that you were a sensualist who’d never rise above the instincts of an animal in the gutter. I’m not one of those bitches who belong in it.” She was snapping the words dryly, absently, without thinking. Her mind was on a question mark, racing over every possible answer.

It was her last sentence that made him face her suddenly, face her simply, directly, not as one on the defensive any longer. “Lillian, what purpose do you live for?” he asked.

“What a crude question! No enlightened person would ever ask it.”

“Well, what is it that enlightened people do with their lives?”

“Perhaps they do not attempt to do anything.
That
is their enlightenment.”

“What do they do with their time?”

“They certainly don’t spend it on manufacturing plumbing pipes.”

“Tell me, why do you keep making those cracks? I know that you feel contempt for the plumbing pipes. You’ve made that clear long ago. Your contempt means nothing to me. Why keep repeating it?”

He wondered why this hit her; he did not know in what manner, but he knew that it did. He wondered why he felt with absolute certainty that
that
had been the right thing to say.

She asked, her voice dry, “What’s the purpose of the sudden questionnaire?”

He answered simply, “I’d like to know whether there’s anything that you really want. If there is, I’d like to give it to you, if I can.”

“You’d like to
buy
it? That’s all you know—
paying
for things. You get off easily, don’t you? No, it’s not as simple as that. What I want is non-material.”

“What is it?”

“You.”

“How do you mean that, Lillian? You don’t mean it in the gutter sense.”

“No, not in the gutter sense.”

“How, then?”

She was at the door, she turned, she raised her head to look at him and smiled coldly.

“You wouldn’t understand it,” she said and walked out.