Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [143]
Ruth and Buzzy were on hand to witness some of the phone calls that took place during that summer and fall of 1951. “It’s the kids!” O’Connor would call, and Rand would hurry to the phone. Always a phone enthusiast, she talked to Branden for hours at a time—about New York, about his classes and the relatively advanced intellectual atmosphere at NYU, about her day’s work on the novel. They discussed Barbara; Branden reported that during a summer trip to Canada Barbara had again been involved with an old boyfriend. She seemed to be full of confusion about her behavior, he said, but didn’t add, and perhaps didn’t need to add, that he was frustrated, humiliated, and enraged by it. Rand and he also exchanged letters. The aspiring psychologist wrote to the thinker that he looked at her photograph on his mantel every day, and every day he found her more attractive. “I don’t know whether it’s love or what,” he wrote. To Frank, he joked, “My offer is still open to trade the picture for the real thing. What do you say?” He recalled thinking that his letters were funny. He wasn’t aware that he was behaving seductively, he later wrote.
It had to be obvious to O’Connor that his wife and Branden were flirting, and had been for months, although she, too, professed not to know it at the time. “I suppose it was a kind of suppression or repression or something,” she later told Branden. “I was so cautious in the beginning. And yet, wasn’t I already feeling … almost everything?” Barbara, too, claimed that none of them was conscious of what was rising to the surface. “If Ayn had designs on Nathaniel,” she said, “it wasn’t Nathaniel at age nineteen. He was [only] a kid.” To a retrospective observer, it appears likely that she did.
In late September 1951, Rand completed the twenty-first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, the first chapter of what would become the third and final part of the novel. It was called “Atlantis.” In it, 640 pages into the book, Dagny meets Rand’s ultimate hero, John Galt. “The shape of his mouth was pride,” Rand writes of Galt. Like Leo Kovalensky’s face in We the Living, Galt’s is ruthless and certain; like Nathaniel Branden’s, it is “a face with no fear of being seen or of seeing.” For Dagny, and for Rand, “This was her world … this was the way men were meant to be.” Although in the next chapter the heroine turns back to the world to try to save it, the author, elated by her days and nights in company with the “real people” of Galt’s Gulch, decided to pursue her own Atlantis, now.
On the evening after she finished “Atlantis,” she phoned Branden and announced that she and Frank were moving to New York. “I can’t stand California any longer, darling!” she cried, breathless with excitement. She repeated a comment O’Connor had made, as though it were a joke: “He says … I can’t live without you!” Frank felt the same way she did about leaving California, she assured him; Frank, too, couldn’t wait to arrive in New York. Pincus Berner, her old friend and lawyer, was searching for a suitable apartment. They would pack, drive across the country, and arrive within three weeks.
On the long drive in Frank’s new Cadillac convertible, they stopped for a day or two in Ouray, Colorado, an old gold-mining town a few miles east of Telluride, whose surroundings contributed to the topography of Galt’s Gulch. As they continued east, they may have passed the former site of Nikola Tesla’s scientific laboratory, which had stood on a mountaintop near Colorado Springs in the early 1900s; the experiments the eccentric genius had made in harnessing electricity from the atmosphere and transmitting it wirelessly through earth and air may have provided a model for the revolutionary new motor invented by Galt. (Tesla also invented a fantastical but possibly