The Fountainhead (52 page)

Austen Heller, who had been her friend, spoke to her about it. He was angrier than she had ever seen him; his face lost all the charm of his usual sarcastic poise.

“What in hell do you think you’re doing, Dominique?” he snapped. “This is the greatest exhibition of journalistic hooliganism I’ve ever seen swilled out in public print. Why don’t you leave that sort of thing to Ellsworth Toohey?”

“Ellsworth is good, isn’t he?” she said.

“At least, he’s had the decency to keep his unsanitary trap shut about Roark—though, of course, that too is an indecency. But what’s happened to you? Do you realize who and what you’re talking about? It was all right when you amused yourself by praising some horrible abortion of Grandpaw Holcombe’s or panning the pants off your own father and that pretty butcher’s-calendar boy that he’s got himself for a partner. It didn’t matter one way or another. But to bring that same intellectual manner to the appraisal of someone like Roark.... You know, I really thought you had integrity and judgment—if ever given a chance to exercise them. In fact, I thought you were behaving like a tramp only to emphasize the mediocrity of the saps whose works you had to write about. I didn’t think that you were just an irresponsible bitch.”

“You were wrong,” she said.

Roger Enright entered her office, one morning, and said, without greeting: “Get your hat. You’re coming to see it with me.”

“Good morning, Roger,” she said. “To see what?”

“The Enright House. As much of it as we’ve got put up.”

“Why, certainly, Roger,” she smiled, rising, “I’d love to see the Enright House.”

On their way, she asked: “What’s the matter, Roger? Trying to bribe me?”

He sat stiffly on the vast, gray cushions of his limousine, not looking at her. He answered: “I can understand stupid malice. I can understand ignorant malice. I can’t understand deliberate rottenness. You are free, of course, to write anything you wish—afterward. But it won’t be stupidity and it won’t be ignorance.”

“You overestimate me, Roger,” she shrugged, and said nothing else for the rest of the ride.

They walked together past the wooden fence, into the jungle of naked steel and planks that was to be the Enright House. Her high heels stepped lightly over lime-spattered boards and she walked, leaning back, in careless, insolent elegance. She stopped and looked at the sky held in a frame of steel, the sky that seemed more distant than usual, thrust back by the sweeping length of beams. She looked at the steel cages of future projections, at the insolent angles, at the incredible complexity of this shape coming to life as a simple, logical whole, a naked skeleton with planes of air to form the walls, a naked skeleton on a cold winter day, with a sense of birth and promise, like a bare tree with a first touch of green.

“Oh, Roger!”

He looked at her and saw the kind of face one should expect to see in church at Easter.

“I didn’t underestimate either one,” he said dryly. “Neither you nor the building.”

“Good morning,” said a low, hard voice beside them.

She was not shocked to see Roark. She had not heard him approaching, but it would have been unnatural to think of this building without him. She felt that he simply was there, that he had been there from the moment she crossed the outside fence, that this structure was he, in a manner more personal than his body. He stood before them, his hands thrust into the pockets of a loose coat, his hair hatless in the cold.

“Miss Francon—Mr. Roark,” said Enright.

“We have met once,” she said, “at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers.”

“Of course, Miss Francon,” said Roark.

“I wanted Miss Francon to see it,” said Enright.

“Shall I show you around?” Roark asked him.

“Yes, do, please,” she answered first.

The three of them walked together through the structure, and the workers stared curiously at Dominique. Roark explained the layout of future rooms, the system of elevators, the heating plant, the arrangement of windows—as he would have explained it to a contractor’s assistant. She asked questions and he answered. “How many cubic feet of space, Mr. Roark?” “How many tons of steel?” “Be careful of these pipes, Miss Francon. Step this way.” Enright walked along, his eyes on the ground, looking at nothing. But then he asked: “How’s it going, Howard?” and Roark smiled, answering: “Two days ahead of schedule,” and they stood talking about the job, like brothers, forgetting her for a moment, the clanging roar of machines around them drowning out their words.

She thought, standing there in the heart of the building, that if she had nothing of him, nothing but his body, here it was, offered to her, the rest of him, to be seen and touched, open to all; the girders and the conduits and the sweeping reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else’s in the world; his, as his face, as his soul; here was the shape he had made and the thing within him which had caused him to make it, the end and the cause together, the motive power eloquent in every line of steel, a man’s self, hers for this moment, hers by grace of her seeing it and understanding.

“Are you tired, Miss Francon?” asked Roark, looking at her face.

“No,” she said, “no, not at all. I have been thinking—what kind of plumbing fixtures are you going to use here, Mr. Roark?”

A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: “I have visited the Enright construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building.”

Roark came to stand beside her, close to her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked down at the paper, smiling.

“You have Roger completely bewildered by this,” he said.

“Has he read it?”

“I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some names I’d never heard before. Then he said, Wait a moment, and he read it again, he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it one way ... but on the other hand ...”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. You know, Dominique, I’m very grateful, but when are you going to stop handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won’t like that.”

“Someone else?”

“You knew that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright House. You wanted me to get it. But don’t you think someone else might understand your way of doing things?”

“Oh yes. But the effect—for you—will be worse than if they didn’t. They’ll like you the less for it. However, I don’t know who’ll even bother to understand. Unless it’s ... Roark, what do you think of Ellsworth Toohey?”

“Good God, why should anyone think of Ellsworth Toohey?”

She liked the rare occasions when she met Roark at some gathering where Heller or Enright had brought him. She liked the polite, impersonal “Miss Francon” pronounced by his voice. She enjoyed the nervous concern of the hostess and her efforts not to let them come together. She knew that the people around them expected some explosion, some shocking sign of hostility which never came. She did not seek Roark out and she did not avoid him. They spoke to each other if they happened to be included in the same group, as they would have spoken to anyone else. It required no effort; it was real and right; it made everything right, even this gathering. She found a deep sense of fitness in the fact that here, among people, they should be strangers; strangers and enemies. She thought, these people can think of many things he and I are to each other—except what we are. It made the moments she remembered greater, the moments not touched by the sight of others, by the words of others, not even by their knowledge. She thought, it has no existence here, except in me and in him. She felt a sense of possession, such as she could feel nowhere else. She could never own him as she owned him in a room among strangers when she seldom looked in his direction.

If she glanced at him across the room and saw him in conversation with blank, indifferent faces, she turned away, unconcerned; if the faces were hostile, she watched for a second, pleased; she was angry when she saw a smile, a sign of warmth or approval on a face turned to him. It was not jealousy; she did not care whether the face was a man’s or a woman’s; she resented the approval as an impertinence.

She was tortured by peculiar things: by the street where he lived, by the doorstep of his house, by the cars that turned the corner of his block. She resented the cars in particular; she wished she could make them drive on to the next street. She looked at the garbage pail by the stoop next door, and she wondered whether it had stood there when he passed by, on his way to his office this morning, whether he had looked at that crumpled cigarette package on top. Once, in the lobby of his house, she saw a man stepping out of the elevator; she was shocked for a second; she had always felt as if he were the only inhabitant of that house. When she rode up in the small, self-operating elevator, she stood leaning against the wall, her arms crossed over her breast, her hands hugging her shoulders, feeling huddled and intimate, as in a stall under a warm shower.

She thought of that, while some gentleman was telling her about the latest show on Broadway, while Roark was sipping a cocktail at the other end of the room, while she heard the hostess whispering to somebody: “My Lord, I didn’t think Gordon would bring Dominique—I know Austen will be furious at me, because of his friend Roark being here, you know.”

Later, lying across his bed, her eyes closed, her cheeks flushed, her lips wet, losing the sense of the rules she herself had imposed, losing the sense of her words, she whispered: “Roark, there was a man talking to you out there today, and he was smiling at you, the fool, the terrible fool, last week he was looking at a pair of movie comedians and loving them, I wanted to tell that man: don’t look at him, you’ll have no right to want to look at anything else, don’t like him, you’ll have to hate the rest of the world, it’s like that, you damn fool, one or the other, not together, not with the same eyes, don’t look at him, don’t like him, don’t approve, that’s what I wanted to tell him, not you and the rest of it, I can’t bear to see that, I can’t stand it, anything to take you away from it, from their world, from all of them, anything, Roark ...” She did not hear herself saying it, she did not see him smiling, she did not recognize the full understanding in his face, she saw only his face close over hers, and she had nothing to hide from him, nothing to keep unstated, everything was granted, answered, found.

 

Peter Keating was bewildered. Dominique’s sudden devotion to his career seemed dazzling, flattering, enormously profitable; everybody told him so; but there were moments when he did not feel dazzled or flattered; he felt uneasy.

He tried to avoid Guy Francon. “How did you do it, Peter? How did you do it?” Francon would ask. “She must be crazy about you! Who’d ever think that Dominique of all people would ...? And who’d think she could? She’d have made me a millionaire if she’d done her stuff five years ago. But then, of course, a father is not the same inspiration as a ...” He caught an ominous look on Keating’s face and changed the end of his sentence to: “as her man, shall we say?”

“Listen, Guy,” Keating began, and stopped, sighing, and muttered: “Please, Guy, we mustn’t ...”

“I know, I know, I know. We mustn’t be premature. But hell, Peter,
entre nous,
isn’t it all as public as an engagement? More so. And louder.” Then the smile vanished, and Francon’s face looked earnest, peaceful, frankly aged, in one of his rare flashes of genuine dignity. “And I’m glad, Peter,” he said simply. “That’s what I wanted to happen. I guess I always did love Dominique, after all. It makes me happy. I know I’ll be leaving her in good hands. Her and everything else eventually ...”

“Look, old man, will you forgive me? I’m so terribly rushed—had two hours sleep last night, the Colton factory, you know, Jesus, what a job!—thanks to Dominique—it’s a killer, but wait till you see it! Wait till you see the check, too!”

“Isn’t she wonderful? Will you tell me,
why
is she doing it? I’ve asked her and I can’t make head or tail of what she says, she gives me the craziest gibberish, you know how she talks.”

“Oh well, we should worry, so long as she’s doing it!”

He could not tell Francon that he had no answer; he couldn’t admit that he had not seen Dominique alone for months; that she refused to see him.

He remembered his last private conversation with her—in the cab on their way from Toohey’s meeting. He remembered the indifferent calm of her insults to him—the utter contempt of insults delivered without anger. He could have expected anything after that—except to see her turn into his champion, his press agent, almost—his pimp. That’s what’s wrong, he thought, that I can think of words like that when I think about it.

He had seen her often since she started on her unrequested campaign; he had been invited to her parties—and introduced to his future clients; he had never been allowed a moment alone with her. He had tried to thank her and to question her. But he could not force a conversation she did not want continued, with a curious mob of guests pressing all around them. So he went on smiling blandly—her hand resting casually on the black sleeve of his dinner jacket, her thigh against his as she stood beside him, her pose possessive and intimate, made flagrantly intimate by her air of not noticing it, while she told an admiring circle what she thought of the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. He heard envious comments from all his friends. He was, he thought bitterly, the only man in New York City who did not think that Dominique Francon was in love with him.