• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1760 0

was denouncing,” Barbara recalled in 1986. “She was in Russia, she was a girl again, and she was damning [all] those who had inflicted upon her a lifetime of rejection.” “You have rejected me?” she shouted. “You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest value, you said, the woman you couldn’t live without, the woman you had dreamed of but never hoped to find!” Did he even begin to grasp what he had thrown away? Did he understand the magnitude of the prize that she had offered him—her love and her name, which she had wrested out of the opposition of a jealous world? Did he realize that he had abandoned the universe of Atlas Shrugged? And for what? For a social metaphysician’s backstairs romance, sealed by a winking familiarity with each other’s weaknesses and flaws! If Nathaniel were the man he pretended to be, he would have been blind to all other women on earth and would feel sexual desire for her “even if I were eighty years old and in a wheelchair!” she railed at him, in grief and rage, according to both Brandens.

As she spoke, her eyes were glaring. Her mouth was loose and wide. She didn’t speak about Patrecia. With her gift for translating twists of plot and character into a tapestry of ideas, she chose not to address the blunt fact of sex between her protégé and her beautiful young rival. Patrecia physically resembled Dominique and Dagny and possessed the kind of Nordic glamour Rand had always celebrated and could never have. But she was the one who controlled her fictional fair-haired heroines; she maneuvered them into position with her mind and awarded them their dashing lovers based on their allegiance to her values. She had even managed to steer the courtship and marriage of Barbara and Nathaniel. Somehow, Patrecia had escaped from the world of symbols and abstractions, of “Patrecia or some equivalent,” and now taunted the novelist from beyond the covers of her books. Her loss was immense. Branden had been her “reward for everything—my life, my work” and the only man who had ever really made “visible” and touched the hot-blooded woman in Ayn Rand. His lying and apparent intellectual looting enraged her. Again, she did not admit to sexual jealousy. Yet when she cried that he had hurt her more effectively than her enemies ever could, she was speaking for that wounded stranger, pain, who was absorbing a mortal blow.

She had created Branden and she would destroy him, she thundered. When she got through with him he wouldn’t have a career or money or prestige. “You’ll have nothing!” she shouted. She would stop the publication of his book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem. She would remove his name from the dedication page of future editions of Atlas Shrugged. She would denounce and pauperize him.

Suddenly, she paused. She moved ominously closer to his chair. Had he told Patrecia about his relationship with her? she asked.

Yes. He’d had to, he answered.

Enraged by this final betrayal, she raised her hand and brought it down, once, twice, three times across his face. “God damn you!” she spat as red marks appeared on his cheek. “Now get out of here.” He rose to go, murmuring, “I’m sorry,” but she had one more thing to say. “If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health,” she said, “you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years.” And if by some chance he were not impotent, she added, any sexual pleasure he found would be a further sign of immorality.

Before leaving, Branden looked at Frank. The older man’s eyes were open but vacant as he sat half swallowed by his armchair. Gazing at Ayn one last time, Branden was struck by an insight all pervasive in Atlas Shrugged. If she was hoping to injure him with her recriminations, he reflected, she must still believe he was a moral man; otherwise, she would know that he couldn’t be hurt by her malice. Ironically, it was she who was now depending on the sanction of the victim (himself), he thought, and closed the door behind him.

Much has been made by Rand aficionados of her parting curse against her lover, first described in Barbara Branden’s The