“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.
But he knew the dangerous instability of her whims, and this was too valuable a whim to disturb. He stayed away from her and sent her flowers; he rode along and tried not to think of it; the little edge remained–a thin edge of uneasiness.
One day, he met her by chance in a restaurant. He saw her lunching alone and grasped the opportunity. He walked straight to her table, determined to act like an old friend who remembered nothing but her incredible benevolence. After many bright comments on his luck, he asked: “Dominique, why have you been refusing to see me?”
“What should I have wanted to see you for?”
“But good Lord Almighty!…” That came out involuntarily, with too sharp a sound of long-suppressed anger, and he corrected it hastily, smiling: “Well, don’t you think you owed me a chance to thank you?”
“You’ve thanked me. Many times.”
“Yes, but didn’t you think we really had to meet alone? Didn’t you think that I’d be a little…bewildered?”
“I haven’t thought of it. Yes, I suppose you could be.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What is it all about?”
“About…fifty thousand dollars by now, I think.”
“You’re being nasty.”
“Want me to stop?”
“Oh no! That is, not…”
“Not the commissions. Fine. I won’t stop them. You see? What was there for us to talk about? I’m doing things for you and you’re glad to have me do them–so we’re in perfect agreement.”
“You do say the funniest things! In perfect agreement. That’s
sort of a redundancy and an understatement at the same time,
isn’t it? What else could we be under the circumstances? You
wouldn’t expect me to object to what you’re doing, would you?”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“But agreeing is not the word for what I feel. I’m so terribly grateful to you that I’m simply dizzy–I was bowled over–don’t let me get silly now–I know you don’t like that–but I’m so grateful I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Fine, Peter. Now you’ve thanked me.”
“You see, I’ve never flattered myself by thinking that you thought very much of my work or cared or took any notice. And then you…That’s what makes me so happy and…Dominique,” he asked, and his voice jerked a little, because the question was like a nook pulling at a line, long and hidden, and he knew that this was the core of his uneasiness, “do you really think that I’m a great architect?”
She smiled slowly. She said: “Peter, if people heard you asking that, they’d laugh. Particularly, asking that of me.”
“Yes, I know, but…but do you really mean them, all those things you say about me?”
“They work.”
“Yes, but is that why you picked me? Because you think I’m good?”
“You sell like hot cakes. Isn’t that proof?”
“Yes…No…I mean…in a different way…I mean…Dominique, I’d like to hear you say once, just once, that I…”
“Listen, Peter, I’ll have to run along in a moment, but before I go I must tell you that you’ll probably hear from Mrs. Lonsdale tomorrow or the next day. Now remember that she’s a prohibitionist, loves dogs, hates women who smoke, and believes in reincarnation. She wants her house to be better than Mrs. Purdee’s–Holcombe did Purdee’s–so if you tell her that Mrs. Purdee’s house looks ostentatious and that true simplicity costs much more money, you’ll get along fine. You might discuss petit point too. That’s her hobby.”
He went away, thinking happily about Mrs. Lonsdale’s house, and he forgot his question. Later, he remembered it resentfully, and shrugged, and told himself that the best part of Dominique’s help was her desire not to see him.
As a compensation, he found pleasure in attending the meetings of Toohey’s Council of American Builders. He did not know why he should think of it as compensation, but he did and it was comforting. He listened attentively when Gordon L. Prescott made a speech on the meaning of architecture.
“And thus the intrinsic significance of our craft lies in the philosophical fact that we deal in nothing. We create emptiness through which certain physical bodies are to move–we shall designate them for convenience as humans. By emptiness I mean what is commonly known as rooms. Thus it is only the crass layman who thinks that we put up stone walls. We do nothing of the kind. We put up emptiness, as I have proved. This leads us to a corollary of astronomical importance: to the unconditional acceptance of the premise that ‘absence’ is superior to ‘presence.’ That is, to the acceptance of non-acceptance. I shall state this in simpler terms–for the sake of clarity: ‘nothing’ is superior to ‘something.’ Thus it is clear that the architect is more than a bricklayer–since the fact of bricks is a secondary illusion anyway. The architect is a metaphysical priest dealing in basic essentials, who has the courage to face the primal conception of reality as nonreality–since there is nothing and he creates nothingness. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is not a proof of bad logic, but of a higher logic, the dialectics of all life and art. Should you wish to make the inevitable deductions from this basic conception, you may come to conclusions of vast sociological importance. You may see that a beautiful woman is inferior to a non-beautiful one, that the literate is inferior to the illiterate, that the rich is inferior to the poor, and the able to the incompetent. The architect is the concrete illustration of a cosmic paradox. Let us be modest in the vast pride of this realization. Everything else is twaddle.”
One could not worry about one’s value or greatness when listening to this. It made self-respect unnecessary.
Keating listened in thick contentment. He glanced at the others. There was an attentive silence in the audience; they all liked it as he liked it. He saw a boy chewing gum, a man cleaning his fingernails with the corner of a match folder, a youth stretched out loutishly. That, too, pleased Keating; it was as if they said: We are glad to listen to the sublime, but it’s not necessary to be too damn reverent about the sublime.
The Council of American Builders met once a month and engaged in no tangible activity, beyond listening to speeches and sipping an inferior brand of root beer. Its membership did not grow fast either in quantity or in quality. There were no concrete results achieved.
The meetings of the Council were held in a huge, empty room over a garage on the West Side. A long, narrow, unventilated stairway led to a door bearing the Council’s name; there were folding chairs inside, a table for the chairman, and a wastebasket. The A.G.A. considered the Council of American Builders a silly joke. “Why do you want to waste time on those cranks for?”
Francon asked Keating in the rose-lit satin-stuffed rooms of the A.G.A., wrinkling his nose with fastidious amusement. “Damned if I know,” Keating answered gaily. “I like them.” Ellsworth Toohey attended every meeting of the Council, but did not speak. He sat in a corner and listened.
One night Keating and Toohey walked home together after the meeting, down the dark, shabby streets of the West Side, and stopped for a cup of coffee at a seedy drugstore. “Why not a drugstore?” Toohey laughed when Keating reminded him of the distinguished restaurants made famous by Toohey’s patronage. “At least, no one will recognize us here and bother us.”