Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

"Don't pay me any compliments," he said, "if you want to come here again."

"May I come here again?" she asked eagerly.

"Look, here's what we'll do. I'll leave you my key in the mornings — I'd better lock the room from now on, I don't want anyone else studying my handwriting around here — I'll slip the key under your door. You can rehearse here all day long, but try to get out by seven. I don't want visitors when I get home. Drop the key in my mailbox."

She looked at him, her eyes radiant.

"It's the nastiest way I've ever heard anyone offering the nicest thing," she said. "All right, I won't bother you again. But leave the key. It's the third door down the hall, to the right."

"You'll have it tomorrow. Now run along. I have work to do."

"Can't I," she asked, "be a little late some evenings and overstep the seven-o'clock deadline by ten minutes?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Goodnight, Howard." She smiled at him from the threshold. "Thank you."

"Goodnight, Vesta."

In the spring, the windows of Roark's room stood open, and through the long, bright evenings Vesta Dunning sat on a windowsill, strands of lights twinkling through the dark silhouettes of the city behind her, the luminous spire of a building far away at the tip of her nose. Roark lay stretched on his stomach on the floor, his elbows propped before him, his chin in his hands, and looked up at her and at the glowing sky. Usually, he saw neither. But she had noticed that in him long ago and had come to take it for granted, without resentment or wonder. She breathed the cool air of the city and smiled secretly to herself, to the thought that he allowed her sitting there and that he did notice it sometimes.

She had broken her deadline often, remaining in his room to see him come home; at first, because she forgot the time in her work; then, because she forgot the work and watched the clock anxiously for the hour of his return. On some evenings, he ordered her out because he was busy; on others he let her stay for an hour or two; it did not seem to matter much, in either case, and this made her hate him, at first, then hate herself — for the joy of the pain of his indifference.

They talked lazily, aimlessly, of many things, alone over the city in the evenings. She talked, usually; sometimes, he listened. She had few friends; he had none. It was impossible to predict what subject she would fling out suddenly in her eager, jerking voice; everything seemed to interest her; nothing interested him. She would speak of plays, of men, of books, of holdups, of perfumes, of buildings; she would say suddenly: "What do you think of that gas-station murder?" "What gas-station murder?" "Don't you read the news? You should see what the Wynand papers are making of it. It's beautiful, what an orgy they're having with it." "Nobody reads the Wynand papers but housewives and whores." "Oh, but they have such nice grisly pictures!"... Then: "Howard, do you think that there is such a thing as infinity? Because if you try to think of it one way or the other, it doesn't make sense — and I thought that..." Then: "Howard, Howard, do you still think that I'll be a great actress someday? You said so once." Then her voice would be low, and even, and hard, and reluctant somehow.

He noticed that this was the one thing which made her hesitant and still and drawn. When she spoke of her future, she was like an arrow, stripped to a thin shaft, poised, ready, aimed at a single point far away, an arrow resting on so taut a string that one wished it to start upon its flight before the string would break. She hated to speak of it; but she had to speak of it, and something in him forced her to speak, and then she would talk for hours, her voice flat, unfriendly, without expression, but her lips trembling. Then she would not notice him listening; and then he would be listening, and his eyes would be open, as if a shutter had clicked off, and his eyes would be aware of her, of her thin, slouched shoulders, of the line of her throat against the sky, of her twisted [pose], [3] The manuscript is illegible at this point. always wrong, always graceful.

She did not know that she had courage or purpose. She struggled as she was struggling because she had been born that way and she had no choice in the matter, nor the time to wonder about an alternative. She did not notice her own dismal poverty, nor her fear of the landlord, nor the days when she went without dinner. You're Telling Me, the show which she would not allow Roark to see, had closed within two weeks. She had made the rounds of theatrical producers, after that, grimly, stubbornly, without plaints or questions. She had found no work, and it gave her no anger and no doubts.

She was eighteen, without parents, censors, or morals, and she was, indifferently and incongruously, a virgin.

She was desperately in love with Roark.

She knew that he knew it, even though she had never spoken of it. He seemed neither flattered nor annoyed. She wondered sometimes why he allowed her to see him so often and why they were friends when she meant nothing to him. Then she thought that she did mean something, but what or how she could never decide. He liked her presence, but he liked it in that strange way which seemed to tell her that he would not turn his head were she to drop suddenly beyond the window ledge. Her body grew rigid sometimes with the sudden desire to touch his arm, to run her fingers on the soft edge of the collarbone in his open shirt; yet she knew that were she to sink her fingers into his freckled skin, were she to hold that head by its orange hair, she could never hold it close enough, nor reach it, nor own it. There were days when she hated him and felt relieved at the knowledge that she could exist without needing him. She always came back, for that look of indifferent curiosity in his eyes; it was indifferent, but it was curiosity and it was directed at her. She had learned it was more than others ever drew from him.

Sometimes, in the warm spring evenings, they would go together for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It was a trip he liked, and she loved and dreaded. She loved to be alone with him, late at night, on a half-empty deck, with the sky black and low, pressing down to her forehead, so that she felt lost in a vast darkness, in spite of the raw lights on deck, as if she could see in the dark, and see the hard, straight, slanting line of his nose, his chin against the black water beyond them, and the night gathered in little pools on his hollow cheeks. Then he would lean against the railing and stand looking at the city, at the high pillars of twinkling dots pierced through an empty sky where no buildings could be seen or seemed to have existed. Then she knew how it would feel to die, because she did not exist then, save in the knowledge of her nonbeing, because the boat did not exist, nor the water, nothing but the man at the railing and what he saw beyond those strings of light. Sometimes, she would lean close to him and let her hand on the railing press against his; he would not move his hand away; he would do worse; he would not notice it.

In the summer, she went away for three months with the road tour of a stock company. She did not write to him and he had not asked her to write. When she returned, in the fall, he was glad to see her, glad enough to show her that he was glad; but it did not make her happy, because he showed also that he knew she would return and return exactly as she did: hard, unsmiling, hungrier for him than ever, angry and tingling under the pleasure of the contempt in his slow, understanding smile.

She managed — by losing her patience and calling a producer the names she had always wanted to call him — to get a part in a new play, that fall. It was not a big part, but she had one good scene. She let Roark come to the opening. What he saw, for six minutes on that stage, was a wild, incredible little creature whom he barely recognized as Vesta Dunning, a thing so free and natural and simple that she seemed fantastic. She was unconscious of the room, of the eyes watching her, and of all rules: her postures absurd, reversed, her limbs swinging loosely, aimlessly — and ending in the precision of a sudden gesture, unexpected and thrillingly right, her voice stopping on the wrong words, hard in tenderness, smiling in sorrow, everything wrong and everything exactly as it had to be, inevitable in a crazy perfection of her own. And for six minutes, there was no theater and no stage, only a young, radiant voice too full of its own power and its own promise. One review, on the following day, mentioned the brilliant scene of a girl named Vesta Dunning, a beginner, it stated, worth watching. Vesta cut the review out of the paper and carried it about with her for weeks; she would take it out of her bag, in Roark's room, and spread it on the floor and sit before it, her chin in her hands, her eyes glowing; until, one night, he kicked it with his foot from under her face and across the room.