Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

"You're disgusting," he said. "Why such concern over something someone said about you?"

"But, Howard, he liked me. I want them all to like me."

He shrugged. She picked up her review and folded it carefully, but never brought it to his room again.

The play settled down for a run of many months. And as the months advanced into winter, she found herself cursing the first hit in which she had ever appeared, watching the audience anxiously each night, looking hopefully for the holes of empty seats, waiting for signs of the evening when the show would close; the evening when she would be free to sit again in Roark's room and wait for his return from work and hear his steps up the stairs. Now she could only drop in on him, late at night, and she rushed home after the performance, without stopping to remove her makeup, ignoring the people in the subway, who stared at the bright-tan greasepaint on her face. She flew up the stairs, she burst into his room without knocking, she stood breathless, not knowing why she had had to hurry, not knowing what to do now that she was here; she stood, mascara smeared on her cheeks, her dress buttoned hastily on the wrong buttons. Sometimes he allowed her to remain there for a while. Sometimes he said: "You look like hell. Go take the filth off your face." She resolved fiercely not to see him too often; every night, she came up, promising herself to miss the next time.

On the evenings when he was willing to stop and rest and talk to her, it was she who often broke off the conversation and left him as soon as she could. She had accepted the feeling of her disappearance, which she had known so often with him; but she could not bear the feeling of his own destruction. On those evenings, between long stretches of work, he sat there before her, he spoke, he listened, he answered her and it seemed normal and reasonable, but she felt cold with panic suddenly, without tangible cause. It was as if something had wiped them out of existence; it was as if he did not know in what position his limbs had fallen as he lay stretched on his old cot, or whether he had any limbs; he did not know his words beyond the minute. He was vague, quiet, tired. She could have faced active hatred toward her, toward the room, toward the world. But the utter void of a complete indifference made her shudder and think of things she had learned vaguely in physics, things supposed to be impossible on earth: the absolute zero, the total vacuum. Sometimes, he would stop in the middle of a sentence and not know that he had stopped. He would sit still, looking at something so definite that she would turn and follow the direction of his glance but find nothing there. Then she would guess, not see, the hint of a shadow of a smile in the hard corners of his lips. She would see the long fingers of his hand grow tense and move strangely, stretching, spreading slowly. Then it would stop abruptly, and he would raise his head and ask: "Was I saying something?"

Long in advance, she had asked him to let her celebrate the New Year with him, the two of them together, she planned, alone in his room. He had promised. Then, one night, he told her quietly: "Look, Vesta, stay away from here, will you? I'm busy. Leave me alone for a couple of weeks."

"But, Howard," she whispered, her heart sinking, "the New Year..."

"That's ten days off. That will be fine. Come back New Year's Eve. I'll be waiting for you then."

She stayed away. And through the fury of her desire for him there grew slowly a burning resentment. She found that his absence was a relief. It was a gray relief, but it was comfortable. She felt as if she were returning to a green cow pasture after the white crystal of the north pole. She went to parties with her friends from the theater, she danced, she laughed, she felt insignificant and safe. The relief was not in his absence, but in the disappearance of that feeling of her own importance which his mere presence, even his contempt gave her. Without him, she did not have to look up to herself.

She decided that she would never see him again. She made the violence of her longing for him into the violence of her rebellion. She resolved to make of the one night, which she had awaited breathlessly for so many weeks, the symbol of her defiance: she would not spend New Year's Eve with him. She accepted an invitation to a party for that night. And at eleven o'clock, her head high, her lips set, enjoying the torture of her new hatred, she climbed firmly the stairs to his room, to tell him that she was not coming.

She knew, when she entered, that he had forgotten the day and the date. He was sitting on a low box by the window, one shoulder raised, contorted behind him, his elbow resting on the windowsill, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. She saw the fingers of his hand hanging at his shoulder, the long line of his thigh thrust forward, his knee bent, his leg stretched limply, slanting down to the floor. She had never seen him in such exhaustion. He raised his head slowly and looked at her. His eyes were not tired. She stood still under his glance. She had never loved him as in that moment.

"Hello, Vesta," he said. He seemed a little astonished to see her. She knew, in the bright clarity of one swift instant, that she was afraid of him; not of her love for him, but of something deeper, more important, more permanent in the substance of his being. She wanted to escape it. She wanted to be free of him. She felt her muscles become rigid with the spasm of all the hatred she had felt for him in the days of his absence and felt more sharply now. She said, her voice precise, measured, husky:

"I came to tell you that I'm not staying here tonight."

"Tonight?" he asked, astonished. "Why come to tell me that?"

"Because it's New Year's Eve, as of course you've forgotten."

"Oh, yes. So it is."

"And you can celebrate it alone, if at all. I'm not staying."

"No?" he said. "Why?"

"Because I'm going to a party." She knew, without his mocking glance, that it had sounded silly. She said through her teeth: "Or, if you want to know, because I don't want to see you."

He looked at her, his lower lids raised across his eyes.

“I don't want to see you," she said. "Not tonight or ever. I wanted you to know that. You see, here, I'm saying it to you. I don't want to see you. I don't need you. I want you to know that."

He did not seem surprised by the irrelevance of her words. He understood what had never been said between them, what should have been said to make her words coherent. He sat watching her silently.

"You think you know what I think of you, don't you?" she said, her voice rising. "Well, you don't. It isn't that. I can't stand you. You're not a human being. You're a monster of some kind. I would like to hurt you. You're abnormal. You're a perverted egotist. You're a monster of egotism. You shouldn't exist."

It was not the despair of her love. It was hatred and it was real. Her voice, clear and breaking, was free of him. But she could not move. His presence held her there, rooted to one spot. She threw her shoulders back, her arms taut behind her, bent slightly at the elbows, her hands closed, her wrists heavy, beating. She said, her voice choked:

"I'm saying this because I've always wanted to say it and now I can. I just want to say it, like this, to your face. It's wonderful. Just to say that you don't own me and you never will. Not you. Anyone but you. To say that you're nothing, you, nothing, and I can laugh at you. And I can loathe you. Do you hear me? You..."

And then she saw that he was looking at her as he had never looked before. He was leaning forward, his arm across his knee, and his hand, hanging in the air, seemed to support the whole weight of his body, a still, heavy, gathered weight. In his eyes, she saw for the first time a new, open, eager interest, an attention so avid that her breath stopped. What she saw in his face terrified her: it was cold, bare, raw cruelty. She was conscious suddenly, overwhelmingly of what she had never felt in that room before: that a man was looking at her.