Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [199]
“If we’re talking politics, Henry, I had an amusing thought. The side you represent—what is that slogan you all use so much, the motto you’re supposed to stand for? ‘The sanctity of contract’—is that it?”
She saw his swift glance, the intentness of his eyes, the first response of something she had struck, and she laughed aloud.
“Go on,” he said; his voice was low; it had the sound of a threat.
“Darling, what for?—since you understood me quite well.”
“What was it you intended to say?” His voice was harshly precise and without any color of feeling.
“Do you really wish to bring me to the humiliation of complaining? It’s so trite and such a common complaint—although I did think I had a husband who prides himself on being different from lesser men. Do you want me to remind you that you once swore to make my happiness the aim of your life? And that you can’t really say in all honesty whether I’m happy or unhappy, because you haven’t even inquired whether I exist?”
He felt them as a physical pain—all the things that came tearing at him impossibly together. Her words were a plea, he thought—and he felt the dark, hot flow of guilt. He felt pity—the cold ugliness of pity without affection. He felt a dim anger, like a voice he tried to choke, a voice crying in revulsion: Why should I deal with her rotten, twisted lying?—why should I accept torture for the sake of pity?—why is it I who should have to take the hopeless burden of trying to spare a feeling she won’t admit, a feeling I can’t know or understand or try to guess? -if she loves me, why doesn’t the damn coward say so and let us both face it in the open? He heard another, louder voice, saying evenly: Don’t switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards—you’re guilty—no matter what she does, it’s nothing compared to your guilt—she’s right—it makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know it’s she who’s right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it’s she who’s right!
“What would make you happy, Lillian?” he asked. His voice was toneless.
She smiled, leaning back in her chair, relaxing; she had been watching his face intently.
“Oh, dear!” she said, as in bored amusement. “That’s the shyster question. The loophole. The escape clause.”
She got up, letting her arms fall with a shrug, stretching her body in a limp, graceful gesture of helplessness.
“What would make me happy, Henry? That is what you ought to tell me. That is what you should have discovered for me. I don’t know. You were to create it and offer it to me. That was your trust, your obligation, your responsibility. But you won’t be the first man to default on that promise. It’s the easiest of all debts to repudiate. Oh, you’d never welsh on a payment for a load of iron ore delivered to you. Only on a life.”
She was moving casually across the room, the green-yellow folds of her skirt coiling in long waves about her.
“I know that claims of this kind are impractical,” she said. “I have no mortgage on you, no collateral, no guns, no chains. I have no hold on you at all, Henry—nothing but your honor.”
He stood looking at her as if it took all of his effort to keep his eyes directed at her face, to keep seeing her, to endure the sight. “What do you want?” he asked.
“Darling, there are so many things you could guess by yourself, if you really wished to know what I want. For instance, if you have been avoiding me so blatantly for months, wouldn’t I want to know the reason?”
“I have been very busy.”
She shrugged. “A wife expects to be the first concern of her husband’s existence. I didn’t know that when you swore to forsake all others, it didn’t include blast furnaces.”
She came closer and, with an amused smile that seemed to mock them both, she slipped her arms around him.
It was the swift, instinctive, ferocious gesture of a young bridegroom at the unrequested contact of a whore—the gesture with which