He took her elbow firmly, protectively, to cross the street where she had left her car. He opened the car’s door, let her slide behind the wheel and got in silently beside her. She leaned over across him and adjusted the glass wind screen on his side. She said: “If it’s not right, fix it any way you want when we start moving, so it won’t be too cold for you.” He said: “Get to the Grand Concourse, fewer lights there.” She put her handbag down on his lap while she took the wheel and started the car. There was suddenly no antagonism between them, but a quiet, hopeless feeling of comradeship, as if they were victims of the same impersonal disaster, who had to help each other.
She drove fast, as a matter of habit, an even speed without a sense of haste. They sat silently to the level drone of the motor, and they sat patiently, without shifting the positions of their bodies, when the car stopped for a light. They seemed caught in a single streak of motion, an imperative direction like the flight of a bullet that could not be stopped on its course. There was a first hint of twilight in the streets of the city. The pavements looked yellow. The shops were still open. A movie theater had lighted its sign, and the red bulbs whirled jerkily, sucking the last daylight out of the air, making the street look darker.
Peter Keating felt no need of speech. He did not seem to be Peter Keating any longer. He did not ask for warmth and he did not ask for pity. He asked nothing. She thought of that once, and she glanced at him, a glance of appreciation that was almost gentle. He met her eyes steadily; she saw understanding, but no comment. It was as if his glance said: “Of course,” nothing else.
They were out of the city, with a cold brown road flying to meet them, when he said:
“The traffic cops are bad around here. Got your press card with you, just in case?”
“I’m not the press any longer.”
“You’re not what?”
“I’m not a newspaper woman any more.”
“You quit your job?”
“No, I was fired.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where have you been the last few days? I thought everybody knew it.”
“Sorry. I didn’t follow things very well the last few days.”
Miles later, she said: “Give me a cigarette. In my bag.” He opened her bag, and he saw her cigarette case, her compact, her lipstick, her comb, a folded handkerchief too white to touch, smelling faintly of her perfume. Somewhere within him he thought that this was almost like unbuttoning her blouse. But most of him was not conscious of the thought nor of the intimate proprietorship with which he opened the bag. He took a cigarette from her case, lighted it and put it from his lips to hers. “Thanks,” she said. He lighted one for himself and closed the bag.
When they reached Greenwich, it was he who made the inquiries, told her where to drive, at what block to turn, and said, “Here it is,” when they pulled up in front of the judge’s house. He got out first and helped her out of the car. He pressed the button of the doorbell.
They were married in a living room that displayed armchairs of faded tapestry, blue and purple, and a lamp with a fringe of glass beads. The witnesses were the judge’s wife and someone from next door named Chuck, who had been interrupted at some household task and smelled faintly of Clorox.
Then they came back to their car and Keating asked: “Want me to drive if you’re tired?” She said: “No, I’ll drive.”
The road to the city cut through brown fields where every rise in the ground had a shade of tired red on the side facing west. There was a purple haze eating away the edges of the fields, and a motionless streak of fire in the sky. A few cars came toward them as brown shapes, still visible; others had their lights on, two disquieting spots of yellow.
Keating watched the road; it looked narrow, a small dash in the middle of the windshield, framed by earth and hills, all of it held within the rectangle of glass before him. But the road spread as the windshield flew forward. The road filled the glass, it ran over the edges, it tore apart to let them pass, streaming in two gray bands on either side of the car. He thought it was a race and he waited to see the windshield win, to see the car hurtle into that small dash before it had time to stretch.
“Where are we going to live now, at first?” he asked. “Your place or mine?”
“Yours, of course.”
“I’d rather move to yours.”
“No. I’m closing my place.”
“You can’t possibly like my apartment.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t fit you.”
“I’ll like it.”
They were silent for a while, then he asked: “How are we going to announce this now?”
“In any way you wish. I’ll leave it up to you.”
It was growing darker and she switched on the car’s headlights. He watched the small blurs of traffic signs, low by the side of the road, springing suddenly into life as they approached, spelling out: “Left turn,”
“Crossing ahead,” in dots of light that seemed conscious, malevolent, winking.
They drove silently, but there was no bond in their silence now; they were not walking together toward disaster; the disaster had come; their courage did not matter any longer.
He felt disturbed and uncertain as he always felt in the presence of Dominique Francon.
He half turned to look at her. She kept her eyes on the road. Her profile in the cold wind was serene and remote and lovely in a way that was hard to bear. He looked at her gloved hands resting firmly, one on each side of the wheel. He looked down at her slender foot on the accelerator, then his eyes rose up the line of her leg. His glance remained on the narrow triangle of her tight gray skirt. He realized suddenly that he had a right to think what he was thinking.
For the first time this implication of marriage occurred to him fully and consciously. Then he knew that he had always wanted this woman, that it was the kind of feeling he would have for a whore, only lasting and hopeless and vicious. My wife, he thought for the first time, without a trace of respect in the word. He felt so violent a desire that had it been summer he would have ordered her to drive into the first side lane and he would have taken her there.
He slipped his arm along the back of the seat and encircled her shoulders, his fingers barely touching her. She did not move, resist or turn to look at him. He pulled his arm away, and he sat staring straight ahead.
“Mrs. Keating,” he said flatly, not addressing her, just as a statement of fact.
“Mrs. Peter Keating,” she said.
When they stopped in front of his apartment house, he got out and held the door for her, but she remained sitting behind the wheel.
“Good night, Peter,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She added, before the expression of his face had turned into an obscene swearword: “I’ll send my things over tomorrow and we’ll discuss everything then. Everything will begin tomorrow, Peter.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have things to settle.”
“But what will I tell people tonight?”
“Anything you wish, if at all.”
She swung the car into the traffic and drove away.
When she entered Roark’s room, that evening, he smiled, not his usual faint smile of acknowledging the expected, but a smile that spoke of waiting and pain.
He had not seen her since the trial. She had left the courtroom after her testimony and he had heard nothing from her since. He had come to her house, but her maid had told him that Miss Francon could not see him.
She looked at him now and she smiled. It was, for the first time, like a gesture of complete acceptance, as if the sight of him solved everything, answered all questions, and her meaning was only to be a woman who looked at him.
They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed.
When he moved, she said: “Don’t say anything about the trial. Afterward.”
When he took her in his arms, she turned her body to meet his straight on, to feel the width of his chest with the width of hers, the length of his legs with the length of hers, as if she were lying against him, and her feet felt no weight, and she was held upright by the pressure of his body.