say from whom. An unadmitted rage was boiling in his mind, struggling between escape and explosion, and it blew up into the sensation that this negligible little wife of his was depriving him of his triumph, that he would not surrender to her his new enjoyment.
“Sure!” he screamed. “So what? What are you going to do about it?”
She stared at him blankly.
“Sure! I was there with a woman! That’s what I did, because that’s what I felt like doing! Do you think you’re going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?” He snapped his fingers.
“That for your opinion! I don’t give a hoot in hell about your opinion!
Take it and like it!” It was her white, defenseless face that drove him on, lashing him into a state of pleasure, the pleasure of feeling as if his words were blows disfiguring a human face. “Do you think you’re going to make me hide? I’m sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction! Who the hell are you, you cheap little nobody?
I’ll do as I please, and you’ll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public, like everybody else, and stop demanding that I act in my own home!—nobody is virtuous in his own home, the show is only for company!—but if you expect me to mean it—to mean it, you damn little fool!—you’d better grow up in a hurry!”
It was not her face that he was seeing, it was the face of the man at whom he wanted and would never be able to throw his deed of this night—but she had always stood as the worshipper, the defender, the agent of that man in his eyes, he had married her for it, so she could serve his purpose now, and he screamed, “Do you know who she was, the woman I laid? It was—”
“No!” she cried. “Jim! I don’t have to know it!”
“It was Mrs. Rearden! Mrs. Hank Rearden!”
She stepped back. He felt a brief flash of terror—because she was looking at him as if she were seeing that which had to remain unadmitted to himself. She asked, in a dead voice that had the incongruous sound of common sense, “I suppose you will now want us to get divorced?”
He burst out laughing. “You goddamn fool! You still mean it! You still want it big and pure? I wouldn’t think of divorcing you—and don’t go imagining that I’ll let you divorce me! You think it’s as important as that? Listen, you fool, there isn’t a husband who doesn’t sleep with other women and there isn’t a wife who doesn’t know it, but they don’t talk about it! I’ll lay anybody I please, and you go and do the same, like all those bitches, and keep your mouth shut!”
He saw the sudden, startling sight of a look of hard, unclouded, unfeeling, almost inhuman intelligence in her eyes. “Jim, if I were the kind who did or would, you wouldn’t have married me.”
“No. I wouldn’t have.”
“Why did you marry me?”
He felt himself drawn as by a whirlpool, part in relief that the moment of danger was past, part in irresistible defiance of the same danger. “Because you were a cheap, helpless, preposterous little guttersnipe, who’d never have a chance at anything to equal me! Because I thought you’d love me! I thought you’d know that you had to love me!”
“As you are?”
“Without daring to ask what I am! Without reasons! Without putting me on the spot always to live up to reason after reason after reason, like being on some goddamn dress parade to the end of my days!”
“You loved me... because I was worthless?”
“Well, what did you think you were?”
“You loved me for being rotten?”
“What else did you have to offer? But you didn’t have the humility to appreciate it. I wanted to be generous, I wanted to give you security—what security is there in being loved for one’s virtues? The competition’s wide open, like a jungle market place, a better person will always come along to beat you! But I—I was willing to love you for your flaws, for your faults and weaknesses, for your ignorance, your crudeness, your vulgarity—and that’s safe, you’d have nothing to fear, nothing to hide, you could be yourself, your real, stinking, sinful, ugly self—everybody’s self is a gutter—but you could hold my love, with nothing demanded of you!”
“You wanted me to... accept your love... as alms?”
“Did you imagine that you could earn it? Did you imagine that you could deserve to marry me, you poor little tramp? I used to buy the likes of you for the price of a meal! I wanted you to know, with every step you took, with every mouthful of caviar you swallowed, that you owed it all to me, that you had nothing and were nothing and could never hope to equal, deserve or repay!”
“I... tried... to deserve it.”
“Of what use would you be to me, if you had?”
“You didn’t want me to?”
“Oh, you goddamn fool!”
“You didn’t want me to improve? You didn’t want me to rise? You thought me rotten and you wanted me to stay rotten?”
“Of what use would you be to me, if you earned it all, and I had to work to hold you, and you could trade elsewhere if you chose?”
“You wanted it to be alms... for both of us and from both?
You wanted us to be two beggars chained to each other?”
“Yes, you goddamn evangelist! Yes, you goddamn hero worshipper!
Yes!”
“You chose me because I was worthless?”
“Yes!”
“You’re lying, Jim.”
His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.
“Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them. You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling—didn’t you?”
“Yes!” he cried.
Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal—and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact—she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.
“What’s the matter with you?” he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.
She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: “You... you’re a killer... for the sake of killing...”
It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.
She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.
He stood motionless—and for a moment they looked at each other, as if neither dared to move.
She moved first. She sprang to her feet—and ran. She ran out of the room, out of the apartment—he heard her running down the hall, tearing open the iron door of the emergency stairway, not waiting to ring for the elevator.
She ran down the stairs, opening doors on random landings, running through the twisting hallways of the building, then down the stairs again, until she found herself in the lobby and ran to the street.
After a while, she saw that she was walking down a littered sidewalk in a dark neighborhood, with an electric bulb glaring in the cave of a subway entrance and a lighted billboard advertising soda crackers on the black roof of a laundry. She did not remember how she had come here. Her mind seemed to work in broken spurts, without connections.
She knew only that she had to escape and that escape was impossible.
She had to escape from Jim, she thought. Where?—she asked, looking around her with a glance like a cry of prayer. She would have seized upon a job in a five-and-ten, or in that laundry, or in any of the dismal shops she
