Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [211]
Before he slept with the young woman, he told her that he and his wife still had strong feelings for each other and were trying to repair their marriage. He also told her the history of his nine-year affair with the towering figure at the center of their lives. This was the primary obstacle to a love affair with her, he warned her: Ayn’s needs came first. Also, if Ayn ever discovered that the man to whom she had dedicated Atlas Shrugged had not only lost his desire for her but had also fallen in love with a beautiful young rival, it would mean the end of NBI, of The Objectivist Newsletter, and of “everything I’ve been trying to build since Ayn and I started.” He made a decision that would prove fateful. “I can’t let it go,” he told her. “I don’t want to. I love it.” Why couldn’t they be honest with Ayn? Patrecia asked. Wasn’t the older woman the very soul of reason and reality? Branden answered, “You would see an explosion such as you cannot even begin to imagine.”
He had another strong motive to keep the affair secret. By the standards of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the choice of this lovely, lighthearted, reflexively self-sacrificing girl in preference to Rand revealed in him an inner Peter Keating. “The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find,” Francisco tells Rearden in Atlas Shrugged. Nathaniel was sure that, in his and Rand’s cosmology, at least, Patrecia was not the highest type of woman. (To allay Rand’s initial suspicions about the meaning of his friendship with Patrecia, he described her as an “Eddie Willers,” i.e., an average person who has good premises but no special gifts.) Francisco’s speech continues with a kind of curse on any man who only pretends to love the highest type of woman or who tries to love her out of duty or charity. His body “will not obey him, it will not respond,” the striking copper baron warns, “it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.” Branden evidently believed this. Aside from his indebtedness to Rand and the mission they shared, she represented his worldview. The thought of being without her was intolerable to him. He anxiously told himself that his attraction to Patrecia would pass and that his life would return to normal.
Patrecia agreed to keep their affair concealed, even from her husband, and never to say a word about Branden’s clandestine relationship with Rand. The psychologist and Patrecia met for trysts in his office or in the Scotts’ nearby apartment, while Larry Scott was at work or traveling on business. She turned down modeling jobs to be available to him. He learned “to lie expertly,” he wrote, “as I became a master at inventing reasons to be away from the office.”
In early 1964, he reluctantly gave his wife permission to conduct her own affair with an NBI colleague she had grown fond of. (In addition to every other complication, Branden “really cared for me,” Barbara recalled. Consenting to such an affair was “agony,” he told her.) He didn’t reveal his affair with Patrecia until three years later, when he needed her help in keeping his secret from Rand. Meanwhile, however, she noticed his giddy, almost obsessive, often public banter about Patrecia and his frequent absences from home and NBI and reached the correct but, to her, incredible conclusion that he was deceiving both her and Ayn with Patrecia. She asked him outright if he and the young woman were having an affair. He denied it, assuring her that such suspicions were a symptom of her old demons: emotionalism, insecurity, and a lack of self-esteem. She took him at his word. Thus the new math of this real-life