Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [160]
Her love affair with Branden helped to relieve her crippling anxiety and its symptoms, bitterness and anger, as she pushed to finish the difficult expository section of the book. “You are my reward for everything,” she told him—”for my work, for my life.” As the writing dragged on, she depended on him more, both as a companion in her fictional world and as a mirror for the sexually desirable woman she was discovering in herself. “You’re turning me into an animal,” she sometimes told him, playfully. “Really?” he remembered answering with a grin. “What were you before?” “A mind,” she replied, believing it. He was vitally aware of his admiration for her and was amazed that he could bring her so much pleasure, even joy. But something—was it her age? her expectations of him?—disturbed him, he later noted. And he felt uncomfortable about both Barbara and Frank. Once he recalled entering the apartment to find Ayn quarreling with Frank over the older man’s lack of interest in helping her shop for clothes. Branden went shopping with her against her will, she was saying loudly to her husband, and he and Barbara both gave her advice on what to wear. Why couldn’t Frank be less passive? O’Connor didn’t seem to mind the comparison to Branden or the scolding and even gave the younger man a conspiratorial wink. But Branden felt both too large and too small for the role he was playing, and his uneasiness increased. He also thought that Frank must be suffering, even if he didn’t show it.
There were other early signs of trouble. Once they began meeting for sex, she protected their time together fiercely and became impatient, to say the least, if anything interfered. This included Branden’s occasional preoccupation with Barbara, who had recently begun suffering from panic attacks and night terrors. One night, Barbara called Rand’s apartment from a pay phone, choking with anxiety and pleading to come over for a little while. She had been walking for hours in a state of panic, an image that brings to mind the haunting scene in which James Taggart’s young wife, Cherryl, commits suicide after wandering the streets. She needed their help, Barbara told Nathaniel. In a rage, Rand took the phone and railed: “Do you think only of yourself? Am I completely invisible to you?” The older woman refused to let her join them, pointing out that no one had helped her in times of trouble. “Why should I be victimized for Barbara’s problems?” she said to Branden afterward, who though horrified and worried stayed with Rand, an indication of the loyalty and fear she already commanded in him. Amazingly, not until much later did either of the Brandens connect Barbara’s increasingly painful anxiety to the affair.
Rand became more demanding. She liked to talk to Branden about their feelings for each other and got angry when the twenty-five-year-old man squirmed and changed the subject. What’s the matter with you? she asked, again and again. Why are you being emotionally distant? Are you repressed? “Repression”—that is, refusing to face painful ideas, impulses, and feelings—became her code word for her lover’s inability or reluctance to discuss their romance. Yet the one time he tried to talk about his distress over Frank and Barbara, she instantly displayed a “distant, icy rage,” he wrote. “She became more than a stranger; she became an adversary.” She often phoned him as soon as he had walked the two blocks home at night, “still angry, scolding, accusing, denouncing him for what she termed his ‘emotional distance,’ for his periods of coldness and emotional withdrawal,” Barbara noted in 2007. The young husband, who had felt proud of his ascendant manhood, now sometimes drooped with a sense of failure. Still, he wanted to succeed as Rand’s lover and keep her high regard.
Barbara forgave her friend and mentor for the night of the telephone call and every other apparent act of callousness. She told herself that the writer was under enormous emotional and intellectual pressure, which was true, and that she had earned the