Through the open door of his study, James Taggart had seen Cherryl cross the anteroom and walk out of the apartment. He had slammed his door and slumped down on the davenport, with patches of spilled champagne still soaking the cloth of his trousers, as if his own discomfort were a revenge upon his wife and upon a universe that would not provide him with the celebration he had wanted.
After a while, he leaped to his feet, tore off his coat and threw it across the room. He reached for a cigarette, but snapped it in half and flung it at a painting over the fireplace.
He noticed a vase of Venetian glass—a museum piece, centuries old, with an intricate system of blue and gold arteries twisting through its transparent body. He seized it and flung it at the wall; it burst into a rain of glass as thin as a shattered light bulb.
He had bought that vase for the satisfaction of thinking of all the connoisseurs who could not afford it. Now he experienced the satisfaction of a revenge upon the centuries which had prized it—and the satisfaction of thinking that there were millions of desperate families, any one of whom could have lived for a year on the price of that vase.
He kicked off his shoes, and fell back on the davenport, letting his stocking feet dangle in mid-air.
The sound of the doorbell startled him: it seemed to match his mood. It was the kind of brusque, demanding, impatient snap of sound he would have produced if he were now jabbing his finger at someone’s doorbell.
He listened to the butler’s steps, promising himself the pleasure of refusing admittance to whoever was seeking it. In a moment, he heard the knock at his door and the butler entered to announce, “Mrs. Rearden to see you, sir.”
“What? ... Oh ... Well! Have her come in!”
He swung his feet down to the floor, but made no other concession, and waited with half a smile of alerted curiosity, choosing not to rise until a moment after Lillian had entered the room.
She wore a wine-colored dinner gown, an imitation of an Empire traveling suit, with a miniature double-breasted jacket gripping her high waistline over the long sweep of the skirt, and a small hat clinging to one ear, with a feather sweeping down to curl under her chin. She entered with a brusque, unrhythmical motion, the train of her dress and the feather of her hat swirling, then flapping against her legs and throat, like pennants signaling nervousness.
“Lillian, my dear, am I to be flattered, delighted or just plain flabbergasted?”
“Oh, don’t make a fuss about it! I had to see you, and it had to be immediately, that’s all.”
The impatient tone, the peremptory movement with which she sat down were a confession of weakness: by the rules of their unwritten language, one did not assume a demanding manner unless one were seeking a favor and had no value—no threat—to barter.
“Why didn’t you stay at the Gonzales reception?” she asked, her casual smile failing to hide the tone of irritation. “I dropped in on them after dinner, just to catch hold of you—but they said you hadn’t been feeling well and had gone home.”
He crossed the room and picked up a cigarette, for the pleasure of padding in his stocking feet past the formal elegance of her costume. “I was bored,” he answered.
“I can’t stand them,” she said, with a little shudder; he glanced at her in astonishment: the words sounded involuntary and sincere. “I can’t stand Señor Gonzales and that whore he’s got himself for a wife. It’s disgusting that they’ve become so fashionable, they and their parties. I don’t feel like going anywhere any longer. It’s not the same style any more, not the same spirit. I haven’t run into Balph Eubank for months, or Dr. Pritchett, or any of the boys. And all those new faces that look like butcher’s assistants! After all, our crowd were gentlemen.”
“Yeah,” he said reflectively. “Yeah, there’s some funny kind of difference. It’s like on the railroad, too: I could get along with Clem Weatherby, he was civilized, but Cuffy Meigs—that’s something else again, that’s ...” He stopped abruptly.
“It’s perfectly preposterous,” she said, in the tone of a challenge to the space at large. “They can’t get away with it.”
She did not explain “who” or “with what.” He knew what she meant. Through a moment of silence, they looked as if they were clinging to each other for reassurance.
In the next moment, he was thinking with pleasurable amusement that Lillian was beginning to show her age. The deep burgundy color of her gown was unbecoming, it seemed to draw a purplish tinge out of her skin, a tinge that gathered, like twilight, in the small gullies of her face, softening her flesh to a texture of tired slackness, changing her look of bright mockery into a look of stale malice.
He saw her studying him, smiling and saying crisply, with the smile as license for insult, “You
are
unwell, aren’t you, Jim? You look like a disorganized stableboy.”
He chuckled. “I can afford it.”
“I know it, darling. You’re one of the most powerful men in New York City.” She added, “It’s a good joke on New York City.”
“It is.”
“I concede that you’re in a position to do anything. That’s why I had to see you.” She added a small, gruntlike sound of amusement, to dilute her statement’s frankness.
“Good,” he said, his voice comfortable and noncommittal.
“I had to come here, because I thought it best, in this particular matter, not to be seen together in public.”
“That is always wise.”
“I seem to remember having been useful to you in the past.”
“In the past—yes.”
“I am sure that I can count on you.”
“Of course—only isn’t that an old-fashioned, unphilosophical remark ? How can we ever be sure of anything?”
“Jim,” she snapped suddenly, “you’ve got to help me!”
“My dear, I’m at your disposal, I’d do anything to help you,” he answered, the rules of their language requiring that any open statement be answered by a blatant lie. Lillian was slipping, he thought—and he experienced the pleasure of dealing with an inadequate adversary.
She was neglecting, he noted, even the perfection of her particular trademark: her grooming. A few strands were escaping from the drilled waves of her hair—her nails, matching her gown, were the deep shade of coagulated blood, which made it easy to notice the chipped polish at their tips—and against the broad, smooth, creamy expanse of her skin in the low, square cut of her gown, he observed the tiny glitter of a safety pin holding the strap of her slip.
“You’ve got to prevent it!” she said, in the belligerent tone of a plea disguised as a command. “You’ve got to stop it!”
“Really? What?”
“My divorce.”
“Oh ... !” His features dropped into sudden earnestness.
“You know that he’s going to divorce me, don’t you?”
“I’ve heard some rumors about it.”
“It’s set for next month. And when I say set, that’s just what I mean. Oh, it’s cost him plenty—but he’s bought the judge, the clerks, the bailiffs, their backers, their backers’ backers, a few legislators, half a dozen administrators—he’s bought the whole legal process, like a private thoroughfare, and there’s no single crossroad left for me to squeeze through to stop it!”
“I see.”
“You know, of course, what made him start divorce proceedings?”
“I can guess.”
“And I did it as a favor to
you!”
Her voice was growing anxiously shrill. “I told you about your sister in order to let you get that Gift Certificate for your friends, which—”
“I swear I don’t know who let it out!” he cried hastily. “Only a very few at the top knew that you’d been our informer, and I’m sure nobody would dare mention—”
“Oh, I’m sure nobody did. He’d have the brains to guess it, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Well, then you knew that you were taking a chance.”
“I didn’t think he’d go that far. I didn’t think he’d ever divorce me. I didn.‘t—”
He chuckled suddenly, with a glance of astonishing perceptiveness. “You didn’t think that guilt is a rope that wears thin, did you, Lillian?”
She looked at him, startled, then answered stonily, “I don’t think it does.”
“It does, my dear—for men such as your husband.”
“I don’t want him to divorce me!” It was a sudden scream. “I don’t want to let him go free! I won’t permit it! I won’t let the whole of my life be a total failure!” She stopped abruptly, as if she had admitted too much.
He was chuckling softly, nodding his head with a slow movement that had an air of intelligence, almost of dignity, by signifying a complete understanding.
“I mean ... after all, he’s my husband,” she said defensively.
“Yes, Lillian, yes, I know.”
“Do you know what he’s planning? He’s going to get the decree and he’s going to cut me off without a penny—no settlement, no alimony, nothing! He’s going to have the last word. Don’t you see? If he gets away with it, then ... then the Gift Certificate was no victory for me at all!”
“Yes, my dear, I see.”
“And besides ... It’s preposterous that I should have to think of it, but what am I going to live on? The little money I had of my own is worth nothing nowadays. It’s mainly stock in factories of my father’s time, that have closed long ago. What am I going to do?”
“But, Lillian,” he said softly, “I thought you had no concern for money or for any material rewards.”
“You don’t understand! I’m not talking about money—I’m talking about poverty! Real, stinking, hall-bedroom poverty! That’s out of bounds for any civilized person!
I-I
to have to worry about food and rent?”
He was watching her with a faint smile; for once, his soft, aging face seemed tightened into a look of wisdom; he was discovering the pleasure of full perception—in a reality which he could permit himself to perceive.
“Jim, you’ve got to help me! My lawyer is powerless. I’ve spent the little I had, on him and on his investigators, friends and fixers—but all they could do for me was find out that they can do nothing. My lawyer gave me his final report this afternoon. He told me bluntly that I haven’t a chance. I don’t seem to know anyone who can help against a setup of this kind. I had counted on Bertram Scudder, but ... well, you know what happened to Bertram. And that, too, was because I had tried to help you. You pulled yourself out of that one. Jim, you’re the only person who can pull me out now. You’ve got your gopher-hole pipe line straight up to the top. You can reach the big boys. Slip a word to your friends to slip a word to their friends. One word from Wesley would do it. Have them order that divorce decree to be refused. Just have it be refused.”
He shook his head slowly, almost compassionately, like a tired professional at an overzealous amateur. “It can’t be done, Lillian,” he said firmly. “I’d like to do it—for the same reasons as yours—and I think you know it. But whatever power I have is not enough in this case.”
She was looking at him, her eyes dark with an odd, lifeless stillness; when she spoke, the motion of her lips was twisted by so evil a contempt that he did not dare identify it beyond knowing that it embraced them both; she said, “I know that you’d like to do it.”
He felt no desire to pretend; oddly, for the first time, for this one chance, truth seemed much more pleasurable—truth, for once, serving his particular kind of enjoyment. “I think you know that it can’t be done,” he said. “Nobody does favors nowadays, if there’s nothing to gain in return. And the stakes are getting higher and higher. The gopher holes, as you called them, are so complex, so twisted and intertwisted that everybody has something on everybody else, and nobody dares move because he can’t tell who’ll crack which way or when. So he’ll move only when he has to, when the stakes are life or death—and that’s practically the only kind of stakes we’re playing for now. Well, what’s your private life to any of those boys? That you’d like to hold your husband—what’s in it for them, one way or another? And my personal stock-in-trade-well, there’s nothing I could offer them at the moment in exchange for trying to blast a whole court clique out of a highly profitable deal. Besides, right now, the top boys wouldn’t do it at any price. They have to be mighty careful of your husband—
he’s
the man who’s safe from them right now—ever since that radio broadcast of my sister’s.”
“You
asked me to force her to speak on that broadcast!”
“I know, Lillian. We lost, both of us, that time. And we lose, both of us, now.”
“Yes,” she said, with the same darkness of contempt in her eyes, “both of us.”
It was the contempt that pleased him; it was the strange, heedless. unfamiliar pleasure of knowing that this woman saw him as he was, yet remained held by his presence, remained and leaned back in her chair, as if declaring her bondage.
“You’re a wonderful person, Jim,” she said. It had the sound of damnation. Yet it was a tribute, and she meant it as such, and his pleasure came from the knowledge that they were in a realm where damnation was value.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “you’re wrong about those butcher’s assistants, like Gonzales. They have their uses. Have you ever liked Francisco d.‘Anconia?”
“I can’t stand him.”
“Well, do you know the real purpose of that cocktail-swilling occasion staged by Señor Gonzales tonight? It was to celebrate the agreement to nationalize d.‘Anconia Copper in about a month.”
She looked at him for a moment, the corners of her lips lifting slowly into a smile. “He was your friend, wasn’t he?”
Her voice had a tone he had never earned before, the tone of an emotion which he had drawn from people only by fraud, but which now, for the first time, was granted with full awareness to the real, the actual nature of his deed: a tone of admiration.
Suddenly, he knew that this was the goal of his restless hours, this was the pleasure he had despaired of finding,
this
was the celebration he had wanted.