Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [155]
During this period, Ayn and her recently married protégé Nathaniel Branden were neighbors and saw each other two or three times a week. Exchanging greetings at her apartment door, or saying good-bye after a Saturday evening of reading and group discussion, Branden was aware that their embraces lasted a little longer and were a little more intimate than they had been before. He felt “an enhanced sense of male power” when he kissed her good night, he later wrote, and sensed “that she felt a heightened awareness of herself as a woman.” Heretofore apprehensive in his relationships with women, even with his wife, he wrote, “I liked knowing I was the cause of what she was feeling.” Gradually, they began to hold hands in public and say aloud that they were soul mates. Oddly, no one in the Collective noticed, or acknowledged noticing, anything overly familiar in their behavior with each other or in the effusive compliments they traded. Later, Branden would claim that he and Rand were still unaware of what was coming.
In private moments, she asked him about the state of his marriage. Had the sex problem been cured? Predictably, the answer was no. When he attempted to make love to Barbara, she often turned away. Rand, acknowledging that the situation was frustrating, advised him, and also Barbara, to be patient and persevere. One evening, he told her that he sensed in himself a capacity for sexual passion that had never been fully aroused or released with his wife. To drive the point home, he compared himself to Dagny at a low ebb in the story, feeling downcast and yearning for an ideal lover at the very moment when the anonymous John Galt happens to be passing in the shadows outside her office window. Was Branden suggesting that Rand was his John Galt, or that he was willing to be hers? In either case, the analogy must have served to remind her that she was sexually lonely, too. Branden was throwing down a gauntlet. He later said that he did not know that she would pick it up.
From his teenaged years onward, Branden had wanted to be a writer as well as a psychologist. As it turned out, his first published piece of writing had been a letter to the editor of the UCLA newspaper while he was still a student there, in protest of an editorial that was sympathetic to a Communist professor who had committed suicide. He gave a copy of the published letter to Rand on Father’s Day of 1951, signing it, jokingly, “To my father—Ayn Rand.” In the spring of 1954, he applied to New York State to change his legal name from Nathan Blumenthal to Nathaniel Branden, which is a perfect anagram of the common Hebrew formulation for “son of Rand”: “ben Rand.” “Nathaniel,” in addition to being a variant of Nathan, was the first name of Dagny’s idealized ancestor, the self-made railroad tycoon Nathaniel Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. In September 1954, the courts approved the change. Now Rand and he were father and son, mother and child, romantic heroine and—grandfather. They were also sons and lovers. A few days after the official name change, the first act in their love affair began.
They were riding together in the front seat of a car alongside O’Connor, who was driving, with Branden’s sister Elayne and Barbara in the back. They were returning to New York from Toronto, where the group had been visiting Elayne and Nathaniel’s parents and sister Florence and her husband. In Florence’s living room one afternoon, Rand and Branden had been explaining some of her ideas when they found themselves performing a spontaneous duet, jointly fielding questions from the family and several acquaintances and laughingly completing each other’s sentences. They felt a degree of spiritual unity that was intoxicating.
The trip was Rand’s first outside the United States since O’Connor and she had gone to Mexico in 1929 to establish her permanent residency. Driving home,