“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.” He 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 grownup, 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.”