The Fountainhead (108 page)

Now he walked slowly, through the streets full of rain that would not come. He looked up and saw empty space where the towers of familiar buildings had been; it did not look like fog or clouds, but like a solid spread of gray sky that had worked a gigantic, soundless destruction. That sight of buildings vanishing through the sky had always made him uneasy. He walked on, looking down.

It was the shoes that he noticed first. He knew that he must have seen the woman’s face, that the instinct of self-preservation had jerked his glance away from it and let his conscious perception begin with the shoes. They were flat, brown oxfords, offensively competent, too well shined on the muddy pavement, contemptuous of rain and of beauty. His eyes went to the brown skirt, to the tailored jacket, costly and cold like a uniform, to the hand with a hole in the finger of an expensive glove, to the lapel that bore a preposterous ornament—a bow-legged Mexican with red-enameled pants—stuck there in a clumsy attempt at pertness; to the thin lips, to the glasses, to the eyes.

“Katie,” he said.

She stood by the window of a bookstore; her glance hesitated halfway between recognition and a book title she had been examining; then, with recognition evident in the beginning of a smile, the glance went back to the book title, to finish and make an efficient note of it. Then her eyes returned to Keating. Her smile was pleasant; not as an effort over bitterness, and not as welcome; just pleasant.

“Why, Peter Keating,” she said. “Hello, Peter.”

“Katie ...” He could not extend his hand or move closer to her.

“Yes, imagine running into you like this, why, New York is just like any small town, though I suppose without the better features.” There was no strain in her voice.

“What are you doing here? I thought ... I heard ...” He knew she had a good job in Washington and had moved there two years ago.

“Just a business trip. Have to dash right back tomorrow. Can’t say that I mind it, either. New York seems so dead, so
slow.”

“Well, I’m glad you like your job ... if you mean ... isn’t that what you mean?”

“Like my job? What a silly thing to say. Washington is the only grown-up place in the country. I don’t see how people can live anywhere else. What have you been doing, Peter? I saw your name in the paper the other day, it was something important.”

“I ... I’m working.... You haven’t changed much, Katie, not really, have you?—I mean, your face—you look like you used to—in a way ...”

“It’s the only face I’ve got. Why do people always have to talk about changes if they haven’t seen each other for a year or two? I ran into Grace Parker yesterday and she had to go into an inventory of my appearance. I could just hear every word before she said it—‘You look so nice—not a day older, really, Catherine.’ People are provincial.”

“But ... you do look nice.... It’s ... nice to see you ...”

“I’m glad to see you, too. How is the building industry?”

“I don’t know.... What you read about must have been Cortlandt ... I’m doing Cortlandt Homes, a housing ...”

“Yes, of course. That was it. I think it’s very good for you, Peter. To do a job, not just for private profit and a fat fee, but with a social purpose. I think architects should stop money grubbing and give a little time to government work and broader objectives.”

“Why, most of them would grab it if they could get it, it’s one of the hardest rackets to break into, it’s a closed ...”

“Yes, yes, I know. It’s simply impossible to make the laymen understand our methods of working, and that’s why all we hear are all those stupid, boring complaints. You mustn’t read the Wynand papers, Peter.”

“I never read the Wynand papers. What on earth has it got to do with ... Oh, I ... I don’t know what we’re talking about, Katie.”

He thought that she owed him nothing, or every kind of anger and scorn she could command; and yet there was a human obligation she still had toward him: she owed him an evidence of strain in this meeting. There was none.

“We really should have a great deal to talk about, Peter.” The words would have lifted him, had they not been pronounced so easily. “But we can’t stand here all day.” She glanced at her wrist watch. “I’ve got an hour or so, suppose you take me somewhere for a cup of tea, you could use some hot tea, you look frozen.”

That was her first comment on his appearance; that, and a glance without reaction. He thought, even Roark had been shocked, had acknowledged the change.

“Yes, Katie. That will be wonderful. I ...” He wished she had not been the one to suggest it; it was the right thing for them to do; he wished she had not been able to think of the right thing; not so quickly. “Let’s find a nice, quiet place....”

“We’ll go to Thorpe’s. There’s one around the corner. They have the nicest watercress sandwiches.”

It was she who took his arm to cross the street, and dropped it again on the other side. The gesture had been automatic. She had not noticed it.

There was a counter of pastry and candy inside the door of Thorpe’s. A large bowl of sugar-coated almonds, green and white, glared at Keating. The place smelled of orange icing. The lights were dim, a stuffy orange haze; the odor made the light seem sticky. The tables were too small, set close together.

He sat, looking down at a paper lace doily on a black glass table top. But when he lifted his eyes to Catherine, he knew that no caution was necessary: she did not react to his scrutiny; her expression remained the same, whether he studied her face or that of the woman at the next table; she seemed to have no consciousness of her own person.

It was her mouth that had changed most, he thought; the lips were drawn in, with only a pale edge of flesh left around the imperious line of their opening; a mouth to issue orders, he thought, but not big orders or cruel orders; just mean little ones—about plumbing and disinfectants. He saw the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes—a skin like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

She was telling him about her work in Washington, and he listened bleakly. He did not hear the words, only the tone of her voice, dry and crackling.

A waitress in a starched orchid uniform came to take their orders. Catherine snapped:

“The tea sandwiches special. Please.”

Keating said:

“A cup of coffee.” He saw Catherine’s eyes on him, and in a sudden panic of embarrassment, feeling he must not confess that he couldn’t swallow a bite of food now, feeling that the confession would anger her, he added: “A ham and swiss on rye, I guess.”

“Peter, what ghastly food habits! Wait a minute, waitress. You don’t want that, Peter. It’s very bad for you. You should have a fresh salad. And coffee is bad at this time of the day. Americans drink too much coffee.”

“All right,” said Keating.

“Tea and a combination salad, waitress.... And—oh, waitress!—no bread with the salad—you’re gaining weight, Peter—some diet crackers. Please.”

Keating waited until the orchid uniform had moved away, and then he said, hopefully:

“I have changed, haven’t I, Katie? I do look pretty awful?” Even a disparaging comment would be a personal link.

“What? Oh, I guess so. It isn’t healthy. But Americans know nothing whatever about the proper nutritional balance. Of course, men do make too much fuss over mere appearance. They’re much vainer than women. It’s really women who’re taking charge of all productive work now, and women will build a better world.”

“How does one build a better world, Katie?”

“Well, if you consider the determining factor, which is, of course, economic ...”

“No, I ... I didn’t ask it that way.... Katie, I’ve been very unhappy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. One hears so many people say that nowadays. That’s because it’s a transition period and people feel rootless. But you’ve always had a bright disposition, Peter.”

“Do you ... do you remember what I was like?”

“Goodness, Peter, you talk as if it had been sixty-five years ago.”

“But so many things happened. I ...” He took the plunge; he had to take it; the crudest way seemed the easiest. “I was married. And divorced.”

“Yes, I read about that. I was glad when you were divorced.” She leaned forward. “If your wife was the kind of woman who could marry Gail Wynand, you were lucky to get rid of her.”

The tone of chronic impatience that ran words together had not altered to pronounce this. He had to believe it: this was all the subject meant to her.

“Katie, you’re very tactful and kind ... but drop the act,” he said, knowing in dread that it was not an act. “Drop it.... Tell me what you thought of me then.... Say everything.... I don’t mind.... I want to hear it.... Don’t you understand? I’ll feel better if I hear it.”

“Surely, Peter, you don’t want me to start some sort of recriminations ? I’d say it was conceited of you, if it weren’t so childish.”

“What did you feel—that day—when I didn’t come—and then you heard I was married?” He did not know what instinct drove him, through numbness, to be brutal as the only means left to him. “Katie, you suffered then?”

“Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterward. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, and he had to call a doctor to give me a sedative, and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without any reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles. Why should I have expected to be exempt?—as Uncle Ellsworth said.” He thought that he had not known there was something worse than a living memory of pain: a dead one. “And of course we knew it was for the best. I can’t imagine myself married to you.”

“You can’t imagine it, Katie?”

“That is, nor to anyone else. It wouldn’t have worked, Peter. I’m temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It’s too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It’s only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me.” He winced. “You see how stupid those things sound. It’s natural for you to be a little contrite—a normal reflex—but we must look at it objectively, we’re grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can’t really help what we do, we’re conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there.”

“Katie! You’re not talking some fallen girl out of her problem. You’re speaking about yourself.”

“Is there any essential difference? Everybody’s problems are the same, just like everybody’s emotions.”

He saw her nibbling a thin strip of bread with a smear of green, and noticed that his order had been served. He moved his fork about in his salad bowl, and he made himself bite into a gray piece of diet cracker. Then he discovered how strange it was when one lost the knack of eating automatically and had to do it by full conscious effort; the cracker seemed inexhaustible; he could not finish the process of chewing ; he moved his jaws without reducing the amount of gritty pulp in his mouth.

“Katie ... for six years ... I thought of how I’d ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won’t ask it. It seems ... it seems beside the point. I know it’s horrible to say that, but that’s how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life—but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that’s not my worst guilt.... Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven—that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain—and wasted pain.... Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things—they’re not even desires—they’re things people do to escape from desires—because it’s such a big responsibility, really to want something.”

“Peter, what you’re saying is very ugly and selfish.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve always had to tell you the truth. About everything. Even if you didn’t ask. I had to.”

“Yes. You did. It was a commendable trait. You were a charming boy, Peter.”

It was the bowl of sugar-coated almonds on the counter that hurt him, he thought in dull anger. The almonds were green and white; they had no business being green and white at this time of the year; the colors of St. Patrick’s Day—then there was always candy like that in all the store windows—and St. Patrick’s Day meant spring—no, better than spring, that moment of wonderful anticipation just before spring is to begin.

“Katie, I won’t say that I’m still in love with you. I don’t know whether I am or not. I’ve never asked myself. It wouldn’t matter now. I’m not saying this because I hope for anything or think of trying or ... I know only that I loved you, Katie, I loved you, whatever I made of it, even if this is how I’ve got to say it for the last time, I loved you, Katie.”

She looked at him—and she seemed pleased. Not stirred, not happy, not pitying; but pleased in a casual way. He thought: If she were completely the spinster, the frustrated social worker, as people think of those women, the kind who would scorn sex in the haughty conceit of her own virtue, that would still be recognition, if only in hostility. But this—this amused tolerance seemed to admit that romance was only human, one had to take it, like everybody else, it was a popular weakness of no great consequence—she was gratified as she would have been gratified by the same words from any other man—it was like that red-enamel Mexican on her lapel, a contemptuous concession to people’s demand of vanity.