Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [158]
Rand swore everyone to silence, not yet imagining that the affair would “involve all four of us in a life of deception,” as Barbara later said. Because of her concern with privacy, she dismissed Nathaniel’s suggestion that they lease a separate apartment or book hotel rooms for their meetings rather than use the O’Connors’ apartment. She couldn’t risk their being seen together in a hotel lobby or entering a strange apartment and becoming the subject of a scandal. Though proud of her love for him, she said, she drew the line at furnishing gossip to malicious detractors. Like Dagny in her first ecstatic encounters with Francisco as a teenager, she wanted to keep their intimacy “immaculately theirs,” locked away from prying eyes and prurient minds. Frank agreed to leave the apartment twice a week, while the two made love in his bed. Thus, like Hank Rearden after Dagny meets John Galt, the older man stepped aside to make way for a more ideal man.
The matter settled, Rand comforted the spouses. The affair would last only a year or two, she promised. She would not allow herself to become that ludicrous figure, “an old woman pursuing a younger man.” She decreed that they would all continue to tell the truth to one another. If anyone in the world could handle such a situation, they could. They were superior people; like the characters in her novels, they lived on an emotional plane far above the irrational jealousies and fears of ordinary men. “If the four of us were of lesser stature, this would not have happened,” she assured them. “And if it somehow had [happened], you would not accept it.” Interestingly, her remarks contained echoes of a twenty-year-old letter from her father, who after reading The Night of January 16th wrote to her, “I’m amused that you condemned Karen for her disreputable behavior, as you called it. Don’t you see that words like this do not apply to people like Karen? For those who surround them are of so little stature that they [Karen and her lover Bjorn] cannot be held to the same standard.”
In any case, the once-lonely Russian girl with a crush on a storybook hero now had the power to win the handsome young prince for herself.
Ayn and Nathaniel began sleeping together in January or early February of 1955. He later recalled the pleasure he took in playing the role of sexual aggressor with a woman who was ravenous for the experience of sexual surrender. “Ayn frightened most people,” he reflected in 1989. “What she wanted was a man whose esteem would reduce her to a sex object.” He added, “Her progressive loss of control in our encounters disclosed the depths” of her desire to be ravished and submit. Like Dominique, she seems to have found both pleasure and release in “the act of a master taking … possession of her.” The difference was that this master was younger than Roark and that his self-esteem was tied to her approval of him. If Rand was sexually vulnerable, she also had control. Her lover was not an emotional threat. Seen from a certain perspective, he made an ideal mistress, even as Frank had become an ideal wife.
The affair provided excitement and deep fulfillment at a crucial, and essentially pleasureless, moment in her writing life. By early 1955, she was stuck on the now-famous fourth-from-final chapter of Atlas Shrugged called “This Is John Galt Speaking,” in which Galt presents his radio speech explaining what has gone wrong with the world and what must be done to fix it and giving the first complete account of the history and purpose of the strike. It lays bare Rand’s argument that the evils of altruism—by which Rand meant the proposition that men have no right to exist for their own sake—are at the root of America’s deterioration into a pre-Jeffersonian, potentially preindustrial era in the book, and, in life, into a communistic trap, and it summarizes