The Fountainhead (98 page)

“It has to be mine,” said Roark. “But in another sense, Gail, you own that house and everything else I’ve built. You own every structure you’ve stopped before and heard yourself answering.”

“In what sense?”

“In the sense of that personal answer. What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word—‘Yes.’ The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that ‘Yes’ is more than an answer to one thing, it’s a kind of ‘Amen’ to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it. But the ability to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ is the essence of all ownership. It’s your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function—the act of valuing. ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ ‘I wish’ or ‘I do not wish.’ You can’t say ‘Yes’ without saying ‘I.’ There’s no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours.”

“In this sense, you share things with others?”

“No. It’s not sharing. When I listen to a symphony I love, I don’t get from it what the composer got. His ‘Yes’ was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience. I’m alone when I design a house, Gail, and you can never know the way in which I own it. But if you said your own ‘Amen’ to it—it’s also yours. And I’m glad it’s yours.”

Wynand said, smiling:

“I like to think that. That I own Monadnock and the Enright House and the Cord Building ...”

“And the Stoddard Temple,” said Dominique.

She had listened to them. She felt numb. Wynand had never spoken like this to any guest in their house; Roark had never spoken like this to any client. She knew that the numbness would break into anger, denial, indignation later; now it was only a cutting sound in her voice, a sound to destroy what she had heard.

She thought that she succeeded. Wynand answered, the word dropping heavily:

“Yes.”

“Forget the Stoddard Temple, Gail,” said Roark. There was such a simple, careless gaiety in his voice that no solemn dispensation could have been more effective.

“Yes, Howard,” said Wynand, smiling.

She saw Roark’s eyes turned to her.

“I have not thanked you, Mrs. Wynand, for accepting me as your architect. I know that Mr. Wynand chose me and you could have refused my services. I wanted to tell you that I’m glad you didn’t.”

She thought, I believe it because none of this can be believed; I’ll accept anything tonight; I’m looking at him.

She said, courteously indifferent: “Wouldn’t it be a reflection on my judgment to suppose that I would wish to reject a house you had designed, Mr. Roark?” She thought that nothing she said aloud could matter tonight.

Wynand asked:

“Howard, that Yes’—once granted, can it be withdrawn?”

She wanted to laugh in incredulous anger. It was Wynand’s voice that had asked this; it should have been hers. He must look at me when he answers, she thought; he must look at me.

“Never,” Roark answered, looking at Wynand.

“There’s so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions,” said Wynand. “I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them.”

The butler entered, carrying a tray of cocktails. Holding her glass, she watched Roark take his off the tray. She thought: At this moment the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine; we have this much in common.... Wynand stood, holding a glass, looking at Roark with a strange kind of incredulous wonder, not like a host, like an owner who cannot quite believe his ownership of his prize possession.

... She thought: I’m not insane, I’m only hysterical, but it’s quite all right, I’m saying something, I don’t know what it is, but it must be all right, they are both listening and answering, Gail is smiling, I must be saying the proper things....

Dinner was announced and she rose obediently; she led the way to the dining room, like a graceful animal given poise by conditioned reflexes. She sat at the head of the table, between the two men facing each other at her sides. She watched the silverware in Roark’s fingers, the pieces of polished metal with the initials “D. W.” She thought: I have done this so many times—I am the gracious Mrs. Gail Wynand—they were Senators, judges, presidents of insurance companies, sitting at dinner in that place at my right—and this is what I was being trained for, this is why Gail has been rising through tortured years to the position of entertaining Senators and judges at dinner—for the purpose of reaching an evening when the guest facing him would be Howard Roark.

Wynand spoke about the newspaper business; he showed no reluctance to discuss it with Roark, and she pronounced a few sentences when it seemed necessary. Her voice had a luminous simplicity; she was being carried along, unresisting, any personal reaction would be superfluous, even pain or fear. She thought, if in the flow of conversation Wynand’s next sentence should be: “You’ve slept with him,” she would answer: “Yes, Gail, of course,” just as simply. But Wynand seldom looked at her; when he did, she knew by his face that hers was normal.

Afterward, they were in the drawing room again, and she saw Roark standing at the window, against the lights of the city. She thought: Gail built this place as a token of his own victory—to have the city always before him—the city where he did run things at last. But this is what it had really been built for—to have Roark stand at that window—and I think Gail knows it tonight—Roark’s body blocking miles out of that perspective, with only a few dots of fire and a few cubes of lighted glass left visible around the outline of his figure. He was smoking and she watched his cigarette moving slowly against the black sky, as he put it between his lips, then held it extended in his fingers, and she thought: they are only sparks from his cigarette, those points glittering in space behind him.

She said softly: “Gail always liked to look at the city at night. He was in love with skyscrapers.”

Then she noticed she had used the past tense, and wondered why.

She did not remember what she said when they spoke about the new house. Wynand brought the drawings from his study, spread the plans on a table, and the three of them stood bent over the plans together. Roark’s pencil moved, pointing, across the hard geometrical patterns of thin black lines on white sheets. She heard his voice, close to her, explaining. They did not speak of beauty and affirmation, but of closets, stairways, pantries, bathrooms. Roark asked her whether she found the arrangements convenient. She thought it was strange that they all spoke as if they really believed she would ever live in this house.

When Roark had gone, she heard Wynand asking her:

“What do you think of him?”

She felt something angry and dangerous, like a single, sudden twist within her, and she said, half in fear, half in deliberate invitation:

“Doesn’t he remind you of Dwight Carson?”

“Oh, forget Dwight Carson!”

Wynand’s voice, refusing earnestness, refusing guilt, had sounded exactly like the voice that had said: “Forget the Stoddard Temple.”

 

The secretary in the reception room looked, startled, at the patrician gentleman whose face she had seen so often in the papers.

“Gail Wynand,” he said, inclining his head in self-introduction. “I should like to see Mr. Roark. If he is not busy. Please do not disturb him if he is. I had no appointment.”

She had never expected Wynand to come to an office unannounced and to ask admittance in that tone of grave deference.

She announced the visitor. Roark came out into the reception room, smiling, as if he found nothing unusual in this call.

“Hello, Gail. Come in.”

“Hello, Howard.”

He followed Roark to the office. Beyond the broad windows, the darkness of late afternoon dissolved the city; it was snowing; black specks whirled furiously across the lights.

“I don’t want to interrupt if you’re busy, Howard. This is not important.” He had not seen Roark for five days, since the dinner.

“I’m not busy. Take your coat off. Shall I have the drawings brought in?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about the house. Actually, I came without any reason at all. I was down at my office all day, got slightly sick of it, and felt like coming here. What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing. Only you said that it wasn’t important.”

Wynand looked at him, smiled and nodded.

He sat down on the edge of Roark’s desk, with an ease which he had never felt in his own office, his hands in his pockets, one leg swinging.

“It’s almost useless to talk to you, Howard. I always feel as if I were reading to you a carbon copy of myself and you’ve already seen the original. You seem to hear everything I say a minute in advance. We’re unsynchronized.”

“You call that unsynchronized?”

“All right. Too well synchronized.” His eyes were moving slowly over the room. “If we own the things to which we say ‘Yes,’ then I own this office?”

“Then you own it.”

“You know what I feel here? No, I won’t say I feel at home—I don’t think I’ve ever felt at home anywhere. And I won’t say I feel as I did in the palaces I’ve visited or in the great European cathedrals. I feel as I did when I was still in Hell’s Kitchen—in the best days I had there—there weren’t many. But sometimes—when I sat like this—only it was some piece of broken wall by the wharf—and there were a lot of stars above and dump heaps around me and the river smelt of rotting shells. ... Howard, when you look back, does it seem to you as if all your days had rolled forward evenly, like a sort of typing exercise, all alike? Or were there stops—points reached—and then the typing rolled on again?”

“There were stops.”

“Did you know them at the time—did you know that that’s what they were?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t. I knew afterward. But I never knew the reasons. There was one moment—I was twelve and I stood behind a wall, waiting to be killed. Only I knew I wouldn’t be killed. Not what I did afterward, not the fight I had, but just that one moment when I waited. I don’t know why that was a stop to be remembered or why I feel proud of it. I don’t know why I have to think of it here.”

“Don’t look for the reason.”

“Do you know it?”

“I said don’t look for it.”

“I have been thinking about my past—ever since I met you. And I had gone for years without thinking of it. No, no secret conclusions for you to draw from that. It doesn’t hurt me to look back this way, and it doesn’t give me pleasure. It’s just looking. Not a quest, not even a journey. Just a kind of walk at random, like wandering through the countryside in the evening, when one’s a little tired.... If there’s any connection to you at all, it’s only one thought that keeps coming back to me. I keep thinking that you and I started in the same way. From the same point. From nothing. I just think that. Without any comment. I don’t seem to find any particular meaning in it at all. Just ‘we started in the same way’ ... Want to tell me what it means?”

“No.”

Wynand glanced about the room—and noticed a newspaper on top of a filing cabinet.

“Who the hell reads the
Banner
around here?”

“I do.”

“Since when?”

“Since about a month ago.”

“Sadism?”

“No. Just curiosity.”

Wynand rose, picked up the paper and glanced through the pages. He stopped at one and chuckled. He held it up: the page bore photographed drawings of the buildings for “The March of the Centuries” exposition.

“Awful, isn’t it?” said Wynand. “It’s disgusting that we have to plug that stuff. But I feel better about it when I think of what you did to those eminent civic leaders.” He chuckled happily. “You told them you don’t co-operate or collaborate.”

“But it wasn’t a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can’t collaborate on one’s own job. I can co-operate, if that’s what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can’t help them to lay bricks and they can’t help me to design the house.”

“It was the kind of gesture I’d like to make. I’m forced to give those civic leaders free space in my papers. But it’s all right. You’ve slapped their faces for me.” He tossed the paper aside, without anger. “It’s like that luncheon I had to attend today. A national convention of advertisers. I must give them publicity—all wiggling, wriggling and drooling. I got so sick of it I thought I’d run amuck and bash somebody’s skull. And then I thought of you. I thought that you weren’t touched by any of it. Not in any way. The national convention of advertisers doesn’t exist as far as you’re concerned. It’s in some sort of fourth dimension that can never establish any communication with you at all. I thought of that-and I felt a peculiar kind of relief.”

He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly:

“Howard, I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me—a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones—followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger—anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn’t know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean—clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world’s ugliness. I can’t tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat’s belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better.... There, Howard. I’ve called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That’s my way of paying homage.”