She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, “I know that you’d like to do it.”
He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. “I think you know that it can’t be done,” he said. “Nobody does favors nowadays, if there’s nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can’t tell who’ll crack which way or when. So he’ll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death—and that’s practically the only kind of stakes we’re playing for now. Well, what’s your private life to any of those boys? That you’d like to hold your husband—what’s in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade—well, there’s nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn’t do it at any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband—he’s the man who’s safe from them right now—ever since that radio broadcast of my sister’s.”
“You asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!”
“I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us, now.”
“Yes,” she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, “both of us.”
It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless, unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if declaring her bondage.
“You’re a wonderful person, Jim,” she said. It had the sound of damnation. Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “you’re wrong about those butcher’s assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked Francisco d’Anconia?”
“I can’t stand him.”
“Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion staged by Senor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to nationalize d’Anconia Copper in about a month.”
She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly into a smile. “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his deed: a tone of admiration.
Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was the pleasure he had despaired of finding, this was the celebration he had wanted.
“Let’s have a drink, Lil.” he said.
Pouring the liquor, he glanced at her across the room, as she lay stretched limply in her chair. “Let him get his divorce,” he said, “He won’t have the last word. They will. The butcher’s assistants. Senor Gonzales and Cuffy Meigs.”
She did not answer. When he approached, she took the glass from him with a sloppily indifferent sweep of her hand. She drank, not in the manner of a social gesture, but like a lonely drinker in a saloon—for the physical sake of the liquor.
He sat down on the arm of the davenport, improperly close to her, and sipped his drink, watching her face. After a while, he asked, “What does he think of me?”
The question did not seem to astonish her. “He thinks you’re a fool,” she answered. “He thinks life’s too short to have to notice your existence.”
“He’d notice it, if—” He stopped.
“—if you bashed him over the head with a club? I’m not too sure.
He’d merely blame himself for not having moved out of the club’s reach. Still, that would be your only chance.”
She shifted her body, sliding lower in the armchair, stomach forward, as if relaxation were ugliness, as if she were granting him the kind of intimacy that required no poise and no respect.
“That was the first thing I noticed about him,” she said, “when I met him for the first time: that he was not afraid. He looked as if he felt certain that there was nothing any of us could do to him—so certain that he didn’t even know the issue or the nature of what he felt.”
“How long since you saw him last?”
“Three months. I haven’t seen him since . . . since the Gift Certificate . . .”
“I saw him at an industrial meeting two weeks ago. He still looks that way—only more so. Now, he looks as if he knows it.” He added, “You have failed, Lillian.”
She did not answer. She pushed her hat off with the back of her hand; it rolled down to the carpet, its feather curling like a question mark. “I remember the first time I saw his mills,” she said. “His mills!
You can’t imagine what he felt about them. You wouldn’t know the kind of intellectual arrogance it takes to feel as if anything pertaining to him, anything he touched, were made sacred by the touch. His mills, his Metal, his money, his bed, his wife!” She glanced up at him, a small flicker piercing the lethargic emptiness of her eyes. “He never noticed your existence. He did notice mine. I’m still Mrs. Rearden—at least for another month.”
“Yes . . .” he said, looking down at her with a sudden, new interest.
“Mrs. Rearden!” she chuckled. “You wouldn’t know what that meant to him. No feudal lord ever felt or demanded such reverence for the title of his wife—or held it as such a symbol of honor. Of his unbending, untouchable, inviolate, stainless honor!” She waved her hand in a vague motion, indicating the length of her sprawled body. “Caesar’s wife!” she chuckled. “Do you remember what she was supposed to be?
No, you wouldn’t. She was supposed to be above reproach,”
He was staring down at her with the heavy, blind stare of impotent hatred—a hatred of which she was the sudden symbol, not the object.
“He didn’t like it when his Metal was thrown into common, public use, for any chance passer-by to make . . . did he?”
“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.