Ayn Rand - The Early Ayn Rand

"I've got to hang on to this job, sweetheart, much as you hate it. I hate it too, but I won't let you go through what we've been through ever again."

"Yes," said Sue, "of course." But she seemed to be looking past him, without hearing his voice.

He kissed her and hurried to the door, but Sue stopped him.

"Larry," she reminded him sweetly, "it's Saturday."

So it was. He had forgotten. He groped for his billfold and slipped her weekly allowance into her hand. Her hand seemed much too eager as it closed over the bills.

Then she smiled at him, her gay, impish smile, her eyes sparkling and open and innocent. And he left.

He raised the collar of his neat, modest gray overcoat against the thin drizzle of the street. He looked back once, with regret, at the light over their door, over the number 745, his number, his home, 745 Grant Street. Then he hurried to the subway.

When he alighted upon the milling platforms of Grand Central, Larry Dean did not walk to an exit. He hurried to a locker room instead, opened a locker, took from it a neat suitcase, and then walked to the men's room. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged from it, and the fat black attendant looked with respectful admiration at his tall, slender figure in full dress clothes, trim and resplendent from the tips of his shining pumps to his shining top hat set at the right careless angle of a dazzling man of the world bent upon a gay evening- He put the suitcase with his modest working clothes back in the locker, snapped his fingers lightly, and walked to an exit, carelessly, without hurry.

The gold-braided doorman at a magnificent entrance on Park Avenue greeted Larry with a respectful bow denoting a long acquaintance. Larry entered the elevator with just the right touch of nonchalant swagger. But he stopped and his gay smile vanished before an imposing door marked: CLAIRE VAN NUYS ESCORT BUREAU.

Larry hated the place and he hated his job. Each evening, night after night, he had to accompany fat dowagers, rich spinsters, and foolish, giggling out-of-town matrons on an endless round of dinners, suppers, dances, nightclubs. He had to bow gracefully, and smile enchantingly, and laugh, and dance, and throw tips to waiters as if he were a millionaire. He had to keep going an endless stream of charming, entertaining drivel, and listen to more drivel in answer, and try to know what he was talking about, while his thoughts ran miserably miles away, to a quiet little room and Sue's lonely shadow under the lamp.

At least, Sue did not know of this and she would never know. He would rather die than let her guess the kind of job he really had. It was respectable enough, oh yes, most respectable! Miss Van Nuys saw to that. But it was no job for a man, Larry felt. Still, he had to be grateful, for it was a job and it kept the little house at 745 Grant Street going.

Sue must never know of his sacrifice, the shy, quiet Sue who would be horrified at the thought of a nightclub and who had never seen one. At first, she had asked him timidly to take her out some night, but his anger had made her drop the subject, and she never asked it again. He could not let her enter one of those vile, noisy places where he was so well known, and his job as well. Besides, he was sick of the glitter, of the jazz, of the waiters.

He sighed, squared his shoulders for the night's ordeal, and walked into Miss Van Nuys' office...

When Larry had left his house, Sue stood for a long time looking at the closed door, the money clutched in her hand. Then she took out the little tin box hidden deep in a kitchen drawer, and added the last dollar to her secret fund. It was a hundred dollars now, an even hundred, and this was the night she had been waiting for.

She had saved the money out of the household allowance, so carefully, with such painstaking little economies, for such a long time. Now she was ready. She went to a closet and took out her evening gown, her lovely blue, shimmering evening gown, which she had had no chance to wear for two years. She laid it out cautiously on the bed, and stood looking at it happily. For one night, for just one night, she would wear it, and dance, and laugh, and see one of those brilliant nightclubs she had heard so much about ever since she came to New York. She was deceiving Larry, she thought, but it was such a harmless deception! Just a few hours of dancing and some innocent fun, which Larry would not understand, the earnest, hardworking Larry who never thought of such things. She loved him so much, she was so happy in their little home, but the lonely evenings were so long, and she was still young, and she looked so pretty in her blue evening gown. Just one night... there was no harm in that, and Larry need never know.

It would be different if she allowed some man to take her out. But she wasn't going to. She was going to pay for it herself, and do it right, one hundred dollars for one grand, reckless smash. She had heard how it could be arranged safely and respectably. Her heart beating, she went to the phone.

In the office on Park Avenue, a trimly permanented, efficient secretary looked up at Larry Dean standing before her desk.

"Your assignment for tonight, Mr. Dean," she said, "will be dinner, dancing, best place in town, full dress clothes. You are to call in an hour for Mrs. Dean — no relation, I presume? — at 745 Grant Street."

"Her Second Career" seems to date from 1929. It was probably written soon after Ayn Rand had begun working in the office of the RKO wardrobe department (a job she hated, but had to hold for three years, until she began to earn money by writing).

The subject matter of "Her Second Career" remains, in a broad sense, that of the early stories: the importance of values in human life. But here the focus is on the negative, on those who do not live life but merely posture at it, those who do something other than pursue values.

By 1929, Ayn Rand had a fund of observations on this subject: she had been working in and around Hollywood for three years. She respected the potential of the film medium, and she loved certain movies (her favorites were the great German Romantic silent films, with stars such as Conrad Veidt and Hans Albers, and directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang). But she rejected out of hand the syrupy, platitudinous stories enshrining mediocrity, offering odes to "the boy next door" or "the sweet maiden next door." She despised what she saw as Hollywood's trite values, its undiscriminating taste, its "incommunicable vulgarity of spirit," as she put it in The Romantic Manifesto.

Unlike most critics, however, Ayn Rand did not ascribe the movies' low estate to "commercialism" or "box-office chasing." She singled out as the basic cause an inner mental practice or default, described by the hero in this story as follows:

There's no one in this business with an honest idea of what's good and what's bad. And there's no one who's not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They're all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won't have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn't exist here.

The Fountainhead would not appear in print for fourteen years; but here is its author's first recognition in writing of the psychology of Peter Keating, the secondhander, the man who abdicates his inner sovereignty, then lives without real thought or values, as a parasite on the souls of others. Claire Nash in this story — again, a woman in the central role — is Peter Keating's earliest ancestor; she is the antonym of Irene in "The Husband I Bought"; she is the woman who does not even know that values exist.