Atlas Shrugged [582]
She stood in the middle of her room, unable to grasp what action was now possible to her. Then her knees gave way, folding gently, she found herself sitting on the floor and she stayed there, staring at the carpet, shaking.
It was neither anger nor jealousy nor indignation, but the blank horror of dealing with the grotesquely senseless. It was the knowledge that neither their marriage nor his love for her nor his insistence on holding her nor his love for that other woman nor this gratuitous adultery had any meaning whatever, that there was no shred of sense in any of it and no use to grope for explanations. She had always thought of evil as purposeful, as a means to some end; what she was seeing now was evil for evil's sake.
She did not know how long she had sat there, when she heard their steps and voices, then the sound of the front door closing. She got up, with no purpose in mind, but impelled by some instinct from the past, as if acting in a vacuum where honesty was not relevant any longer, but knowing no other way to act.
She met Jim in the anteroom. For a moment, they looked at each other as if neither could believe the other's reality.
"When did you come back?" he snapped. "How long have you been home?"
"I don't know . . ."
He was looking at her face. "What's the matter with you?"
"Jim, I-" She struggled, gave up and waved her hand toward his bedroom. "Jim, I know."
"What do you know?"
"You were there . . . with a woman."
His first action was to push her into his study and slam the door, as if to hide them both, he could no longer say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.
"Sure!" he screamed. "So what? What are you going to do about it?"
She stared at him blankly.
"Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did, because that's what I felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?" He snapped his fingers.
"That for your opinion! I don't give a hoot in hell about your opinion!
Take it and like it!" It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. "Do you think you're going to make me hide? I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody?
I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!-nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!-but if you expect me to mean it-to mean it, you damn little fool!-you'd better grow up in a hurry!"
It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night-but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, "Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was-"
"No!" she cried. "Jim! I don't have to know it!"
"It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!"
She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror-because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, "I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?"
He burst out laughing. "You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want