The Fountainhead (87 page)

She handed him the checks and he slipped them into his pocket. They knew they must turn and walk up the platform to the exit, but the decisions both had made in advance broke down in the same instant, because they did not turn, but remained standing, looking at each other.

He made the first effort to correct the breach. He smiled lightly.

“If I had the right to say it, I’d say that I couldn’t have endured the waiting had I known that you’d look as you do. But since I have no such right, I’m not going to say it.”

She laughed. “All right, Gail. That was a form of pretense, too—our being too casual. It makes things more important, not less, doesn’t it? Let’s say whatever we wish.”

“I love you,” he said, his voice expressionless, as if the words were a statement of pain and not addressed to her.

“I’m glad to be back with you, Gail. I didn’t know I would be, but I’m glad.”

“In what way, Dominique?”

“I don’t know. In a way of contagion from you, I think. In a way of finality and peace.”

Then they noticed that this was said in the middle of a crowded platform, with people and baggage racks hurrying past.

They walked out to the street, to his car. She did not ask where they were going; and did not care. She sat silently beside him. She felt divided, most of her swept by a wish not to resist, and a small part of her left to wonder about it. She felt a desire to let him carry her—a feeling of confidence without appraisal, not a happy confidence, but confidence. After a while, she noticed that her hand lay in his, the length of her gloved fingers held to the length of his, only the spot of her bare wrist pressed to his skin. She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him. But she would not allow herself to want it.

“Where are we going, Gail?” she asked.

“To get the license. Then to the judge’s office. To be married.”

She sat up slowly, turning to face him. She did not withdraw her hand, but her fingers became rigid, conscious, taken away from him.

“No,” she said.

She smiled and held the smile too long, in deliberate, fixed precision. He looked at her calmly.

“I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand.”

He released her fingers, simply, without resentment. He looked abstracted for a moment, as if he were calculating a problem in arithmetic, not too difficult. Then he said:

“All right. That will take a week to arrange. I could have it done tonight, but if it’s engraved invitations, we must give the guests a week’s notice at the least. Otherwise it would look abnormal and you want a normal Gail Wynand wedding. I’ll have to take you to a hotel now, where you can live for a week. I had not planned for this, so I’ve made no reservations. Where would you like to stay?”

“At your penthouse.”

“No.”

“The Nordland, then.”

He leaned forward and said to the chauffeur:

“The Nordland, John.”

In the lobby of the hotel, he said to her:

“I will see you a week from today, Tuesday, at the Noyes-Belmont, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The invitations will have to be in the name of your father. Let him know that I’ll get in touch with him. I’ll attend to the rest.”

He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.

She did not see him during that week. She found herself waiting impatiently.

She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing the judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity. He had understood her wish and obeyed scrupulously; he had refused himself the relief of exaggeration, he had not staged the event crudely, but made it beautiful in the exact manner Gail Wynand, the publisher, would have chosen had he wished to be married in public. But Gail Wynand did not wish to be married in public.

He made himself fit the setting, as if he were part of the bargain, subject to the same style. When he entered, she saw him looking at the mob of guests as if he did not realize that such a mob was appropriate to a Grand Opera premiere or a royal rummage sale, not to the solemn climax of his life. He looked correct, incomparably distinguished.

Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge who spoke slowly, letting his words hang one by one in the air.

She glanced at Wynand. He was not looking at her nor at the judge. Then she knew that he was alone in that room. He held this moment and he made of it, of the glare, of the vulgarity, a silent height of his own. He had not wished a religious ceremony, which he did not respect, and he could have less respect for the state’s functionary reciting a formula before him—but he made the rite an act of pure religion. She thought, if she were being married to Roark in such a setting, Roark would stand like this.

Afterward, the mockery of the monster reception that followed, left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special, noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. He looked untouched by the lights, the haystacks of Easter lilies, the sounds of a string orchestra, the river of people flowing on and breaking into a delta when it reached the champagne; untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride were the only ones to whom the performance was hideous.

She watched him intently. She wanted to see him take pleasure in all this, if only for a moment. Let him accept and join, just once, she thought, let him show the soul of the New York Banner in its proper element. She saw no acceptance. She saw a hint of pain, at times; even the pain did not reach him completely. And she thought of the only other man she knew who had spoken about suffering that went down only to a certain point.

When the last congratulations had drifted past them, they were free to leave by the rules of the occasion. But he made no move to leave. She knew he was waiting for her decision. She walked away from him into the currents of guests; she smiled, bowed and listened to offensive nonsense, a glass of champagne in her hand.

She saw her father in the throng. He looked proud and wistful; he seemed bewildered. He had taken the announcement of her marriage quietly; he had said: “I want you to be happy, Dominique. I want it very much. I hope he’s the right man.” His tone had said that he was not certain.

She saw Ellsworth Toohey in the crowd. He noticed her looking at him and turned away quickly. She wanted to laugh aloud; but the matter of Ellsworth Toohey caught off guard did not seem important enough to laugh about now.

Alvah Scarret pushed his way toward her. He was making a poor effort at a suitable expression, but his face looked hurt and sullen. He muttered something rapid about his wishes for her happiness, but then he said distinctly and with a lively anger:

“But why, Dominique?
Why?”

She could not quite believe that Alvah Scarret would permit himself the crudeness of what the question seemed to mean. She asked coldly:

“What are you talking about, Alvah?”

“The veto, of course.”

“What veto?”

“You know very well what veto. Now I ask you, with every sheet in the city here, every damn one of them, the lousiest tabloid included, and the wire services too—everything but the
Banner!
Everything but the Wynand papers! What am I to tell people? How am I to explain? Is that a thing for you to do to a former comrade of the trade?”

“You’d better repeat that, Alvah.”

“You mean you didn’t know that Gail wouldn’t allow a single one of our boys here? That we won’t have any stories tomorrow, not a spread, not a picture, nothing but two lines on page eighteen?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t know it.”

He wondered at the sudden jerk of her movement as she turned away from him. She handed the champagne glass to the first stranger in sight, whom she mistook for a waiter. She made her way through the crowd to Wynand.

“Let’s go, Gail.”

“Yes, my dear.”

She stood, incredulously, in the middle of the drawing room of his penthouse, thinking that this place was now her home and how right it looked to be her home.

He watched her. He showed no desire to speak or touch her, only to observe her here, in his house, brought here, lifted high over the city; as if the significance of the moment were not to be shared, not even with her.

She moved slowly across the room, took off her hat, leaned against the edge of a table. She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else.

“You’ve had your way after all, Gail. You were married as you wanted to be married.

“Yes, I think so.”

“It was useless to try to torture you.”

“Actually, yes. But I didn’t mind it too much.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. If that’s what you wanted it was only a matter of keeping my promise.”

“But you hated it, Gail.”

“Utterly. What of it? Only the first moment was hard—when you said it in the car. Afterward, I was rather glad of it.” He spoke quietly, matching her frankness; she knew he would leave her the choice—he would follow her manner—he would keep silent or admit anything she wished to be admitted.

“Why?”

“Didn’t you notice your own mistake—if it was a mistake? You wouldn’t have wanted to make me suffer if you were completely indifferent to me.”

“No. It was not a mistake.”

“You’re a good loser, Dominique.”

“I think that’s also contagion from you, Gail. And there’s something I want to thank you for.”

“What?”

“That you barred our wedding from the Wynand papers.”

He looked at her, his eyes alert in a special way for a moment, then he smiled.

“It’s out of character—your thanking me for that.”

“It was out of character for you to do it.”

“I had to. But I thought you’d be angry.”

“I should have been. But I wasn’t. I’m not. I thank you.”

“Can one feel gratitude for gratitude? It’s a little hard to express, but that’s what I feel, Dominique.”

She looked at the soft light on the walls around her. That lighting was part of the room, giving the walls a special texture of more than material or color. She thought that there were other rooms beyond these walls, rooms she had never seen which were hers now. And she found that she wanted them to be hers.

“Gail, I haven’t asked what we are to do now. Are we going away? Are we having a honeymoon? Funny, I haven’t even wondered about it. I thought of the wedding and nothing beyond. As if it stopped there and you took over from then on. Also out of character, Gail.”

“But not in my favor, this time. Passivity is not a good sign. Not for you.”

“It might be—if I’m glad of it.”

“Might. Though it won’t last. No, we’re not going anywhere. Unless you wish to go.”

“No.”

“Then we stay here. Another peculiar manner of making an exception. The proper manner for you and me. Going away has always been running—for both of us. This time, we don’t run.”

“Yes, Gail.”

When he held her and kissed her, her arm lay bent, pressed between her body and his, her hand at her shoulder—and she felt her cheek touching the faded jasmine bouquet on her wrist, its perfume still intact, still a delicate suggestion of spring.

When she entered his bedroom, she found that it was not the place she had seen photographed in countless magazines. The glass cage had been demolished. The room built in its place was a solid vault without a single window. It was lighted and air-conditioned, but neither light nor air came from the outside.

She lay in his bed and she pressed her palms to the cold, smooth sheet at her sides, not to let her arms move and touch him. But her rigid indifference did not drive him to helpless anger. He understood. He laughed. She heard him say—his voice rough, without consideration, amused—“It won’t do, Dominique.” And she knew that this barrier would not be held between them, that she had no power to hold it. She felt the answer in her body, an answer of hunger, of acceptance, of pleasure. She thought that it was not a matter of desire, not even a matter of the sexual act, but only that man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else; that this man had the will of life, the prime power, and this act was only its simplest statement, and she was responding not to the act nor to the man, but to that force within him.

 

“Well?” asked Ellsworth Toohey. “Now do you get the point?”

He stood leaning informally against the back of Scarret’s chair, and Scarret sat staring down at a hamper full of mail by the side of his desk.