“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 a 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.
“Katie…Katie, let’s say that this doesn’t count–this, now–it’s past counting anyway, isn’t it? This can’t touch what it was like, can it, Katie?…People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it–but I’m glad it’s so. We can’t spoil it. We can think of the past, can’t we? Why shouldn’t we? I mean, as you said, like grownup people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it….Do you remember when I came to your house in New York for the first time? You looked so thin and small, and your hair hung every which way. I told you I would never love anyone else. I held you on my lap, you didn’t weigh anything at all, and I told you I would never love anyone else. And you said you knew it.”
“I remember.”
“When we were together…Katie, I’m ashamed of so many things, but not of one moment when we were together. When I asked you to marry me–no, I never asked you to marry me–I just said we were engaged–and you said ‘yes’–it was on a park bench–it was snowing…”
“Yes.”
“You had funny woolen gloves. Like mittens. I remember–there were drops of water in the fuzz–round–like crystal–they flashed–it was because a car passed by.”
“Yes, I think it’s agreeable to look back occasionally. But one’s perspective widens. One grows richer spiritually with the years.”
He kept silent for a long time. Then he said, his voice flat:
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? You’re very sweet, Peter. I’ve always said men are the sentimentalists.”
He thought: It’s not an act–one can’t put on an act like that–unless it’s an act inside, for oneself, and then there is no limit, no way out, no reality….
She went on talking to him, and after a while it was about Washington again. He answered when it was necessary.
He thought that he had believed it was a simple sequence, the past and the present, and if there was loss in the past one was compensated by pain in the present, and pain gave it a form of immortality–but he had not known that one could destroy like this, kill retroactively–so that to her it had never existed.
She glanced at her wrist watch and gave a little gasp of impatience,
“I’m late already. I must run along.”
He said heavily:
“Do you mind if I don’t go with you, Katie? It’s not rudeness. I just think it’s better.”
“But of course. Not at all. I’m quite able to find my way in the streets and there’s no need for formalities among old friends.” She added, gathering her bag and gloves, crumpling a paper napkin into a ball, dropping it neatly into her teacup: “I’ll give you a ring next time I’m in town and we’ll have a bite together again. Though I can’t promise when that will be. I’m so busy, I have to go so many places, last month it was Detroit and next week I’m flying to St. Louis, but when they shoot me out to New York again, I’ll ring you up, so long, Peter, it was ever so nice.”
11.
GAIL WYNAND looked at the shining wood of the yacht deck. The wood and a brass doorknob that had become a smear of fire gave him a sense of everything around him: the miles of space filled with sun, between the burning spreads of sky and ocean. It was February, and the yacht lay still, her engines idle, in the southern Pacific.
He leaned on the rail and looked down at Roark in the water. Roark floated on his back, his body stretched into a straight line, arms spread, eyes closed. The tan of his skin implied a month of days such as this. Wynand thought that this was the way he liked to apprehend space and time: through the power of his yacht, through the tan of Roark’s skin or the sunbrown of his own arms folded before him on the rail.
He had not sailed his yacht for several years. This time he had wanted Roark to be his only guest. Dominique was left behind.
Wynand had said: “You’re killing yourself, Howard. You’ve been going at a pace nobody can stand for long. Ever since Monadnock, isn’t it? Think you’d have the courage to perform the feat most difficult for you–to rest?”
He was astonished when Roark accepted without argument. Roark laughed:
“I’m not running away from my work, if that’s what surprises you. I know when to stop–and I can’t stop, unless it’s completely. I know I’ve overdone it. I’ve been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff.”
“Do you ever do awful stuff?”
“Probably more of it than any other architect and with less excuse. The only distinction I can claim is that my botches end up in my own wastebasket.”
“I warn you, we’ll be away for months. If you begin to regret it and cry for your drafting table in a week, like all men who’ve never learned to loaf, I won’t take you back. I’m the worst kind of dictator aboard my yacht. You’ll have everything you can imagine, except paper or pencils. I won’t even leave you any freedom of speech. No mention of girders, plastics or reinforced concrete once you step on board. I’ll teach you to eat, sleep and exist like the most worthless millionaire.”
“I’d like to try that.”
The work in the office did not require Roark’s presence for the next few months. His current jobs were being completed. Two new commissions were not to be started until spring.
He had made all the sketches Keating needed for Cortlandt. The construction was about to begin. Before sailing, on a day in late December, Roark went to take a last look at the site of Cortlandt. An anonymous spectator in a group of the idle curious, he stood and watched the steam shovels biting the earth, breaking the way for future foundations. The East River was a broad band of sluggish black water; and beyond, in a sparse haze of snowflakes, the towers of the city stood softened, half suggested in watercolors of orchid and blue.
Dominique did not protest when Wynand told her that he wanted to sail on a long cruise with Roark. “Dearest, you understand that it’s not running away from you? I just need some time taken out of everything. Being with Howard is like being alone with myself, only more at peace.”
“Of course, Gail. I don’t mind.”
But he looked at her, and suddenly he laughed, incredulously pleased. “Dominique, I believe you’re jealous. It’s wonderful, I’m more grateful to him than ever–if it could make you jealous of me.”
She could not tell him that she was jealous or of whom.
The yacht sailed at the end of December. Roark watched, grinning, Wynand’s disappointment when Wynand found that he needed to enforce no discipline. Roark did not speak of buildings, lay for hours stretched out on deck in the sun, and loafed like an expert. They spoke little. There were days when Wynand could not remember what sentences they had exchanged. It would have seemed possible to him that they had not spoken at all. Their serenity was their best means of communication.