Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [212]
In his affair with Patrecia, too, Branden gradually lost discretion, dancing with his young mistress at formal parties and annual balls, driving her around town in his convertible car, appearing at a Los Angeles NBI event with her and her lovely identical twin sister, Liesha, also a model, on either arm, while employees and students gaped at his glamour. No one seems to have mentioned these sightings to Rand or, at first, to Barbara. But rumors swirled, and at last “the truth was evident [to me],” Barbara later wrote. The knowledge that she was being lied to led her, in the summer of 1965, to ask Branden for a separation. He moved out, into a temporary apartment on the third floor, explaining to friends and students that he needed extra office space; after the separation became final, Barbara settled in a one-bedroom penthouse apartment on the twentieth floor. In spite of Patrecia, he was not ready to publicly end a marriage he half hoped to save and whose conflicts “operated as a shield” against his older lover’s desires and expectations. He and Barbara continued to appear together in public, and they continued to meet with Rand for the marital counseling sessions she had initiated almost as soon as he mentioned that his troubled marriage was a barrier to sex with her.
In fact, at intervals from 1964 until 1966 and later, Rand spent many hours trying to help the Brandens repair their shattered “psycho-epistemology” (method of thinking) with respect to each other and their marriage and thus free her lover to return to her. For the first few months, before the two officially announced their separation, she treated them with a kindness and tenderness “that had long seemed absent from her personality,” Barbara later wrote, and appeared to be genuinely disappointed to discover that their personal relationship had dissolved into such an angry shambles. With Patrecia waiting offstage, Branden knew from the start that Rand’s efforts had very little chance of success. Barbara, who attended the sessions under protest, nevertheless did not tell Rand about her own ongoing affair. When the couple finally informed their unofficial therapist that the marriage was irreparable, she seemed relieved. “Now, darling,” she said to Branden, “perhaps there will be a chance for us to be in love again.”
Branden stood on a precipice: Should he tell the truth, risking Rand’s anger and his own disinheritance, or take up his duties as Rand’s lover? He chose a third way, finding other real but incidental ailments to complain of: exhaustion from overwork, trauma from the end of his marriage, fragile self-esteem because of Rand’s history of rebuking him, depression, “a sense of [emotional] deadness that made it exceedingly difficult to think of resuming a romance with her,” and, somewhat astonishingly at this point, anguish over his second-fiddle status in the triangle with Frank, which had caused him pain in the past, he said, and almost surely would again. “Are you asking me to leave Frank and live with you openly?” she asked him, shocked. No, no, he hastened to answer. Still, he said, her allegiance to Frank was difficult for him. Later, when trying to explain his persistent refusal to talk about their emotional and sexual relationship, he unearthed another, deeper problem to explain his “deadness.” He told her that “if the ability to think of people [read: Rand] in relation to himself was a special sense, it feels to him as if he were born without that sense.” She was appalled by this remark—reasoning that, if it were true, he had never had an authentic romantic attachment to her—but apparently did not recognize it as an almost verbatim quote from her. Writing of the murderer-hero of The Little Street in 1928, she had noted that the real murderer, Hickman, “doesn’t understand, because thankfully he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.