“Leaving,” Banden replied, and, summoning all his energies, competence, and purpose, pushed and hoisted and managed to lift himself up out of the beanbag chair and rise to his feet.
“Where are you going?” the girl inquired.
“Where I belong,” he said, and left the apartment.
Chapter 2
To Have and Then Not to Have Any More
They returned Dragnie to her cell, a windowless cube with only a cot and a toilet, its door heavily barred. After several hours a guard appeared and announced that she had a visitor. The guard escorted her into a meeting room, where she was both astounded and utterly unsurprised to discover, waiting for her, Nathan A. Banden. He looked cowed and worn down, his normally crisp attire of khaki slacks and white dress shirt both wrinkled and unwashed. He looked as though he had not shaved in several days.
“Hello, Dragnie,” he said.
“Hello, Nathan,” she replied. “You’re looking well.”
“I?” Banden laughed bitterly, as if something were funny, not in a sweet way, but a bitter way. “I look ill-kempt and disreputable. You look great, though.”
“Thank you.”
“I… I saw you on TV,” he said. “Do you… do you really think they’ll let you go in forty-eight hours?”
“No.”
“Then… then what will you do?”
“We’ll see.” She gazed at him coolly, evenly, with her eyes. “How did you find me here?”
“My father is a man of some influence,” Banden replied. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons I wished to see you. I… I want to apologize. And to beg you to forgive me. And to take me back. I was a fool to have betrayed you. I indulged in a fit of childish pique when you wouldn’t let me accompany you to Glatt’s Gorge. I felt as though you disdained my youth. And so I convinced myself, despite ample evidence to the contrary both historically and introspectively, that your age made you unattractive to me. I sought revenge for my wounded feelings by giving my attention to a younger woman—and in so doing, I behaved like a rotter. How I regret my impulsive actions! Oh, it is true that she is younger than you, and in that respect can be said to be ‘prettier’ in a girlish, fledgling way. But such immature comeliness can, in the end, only be of interest to the callow youth, the boy-man whose romanticized notions of what is attractive and desirable are as shallow, limited, and transitory as his experience in love’s ways is primitive and half-baked. To the real man, to the true man, to the man of men, no manner of superficial maidenly prettiness can compare to the deep, feminine beauty of a mature woman who has encountered the world and bested it in the pursuit of her highest values. Yes, the body has its imperatives. Yes, the need for sexual activity is fundamental. But these imperatives and needs can be satisfied through the simplest mechanisms of sexual activity, with any passably desirable and compliant female. Beneath the body, however, is the spirit. I refer, of course, to the human spirit, since we, the two of us, spend our existence as human beings. It, too—the human spirit—asserts a repertoire of needs, but its requirements and criteria are orders of magnitude more profound, more demanding, and more important than those of mere adolescent physicality. It is those—as well as the more superficial but no less pleasurable needs—whose satisfaction I found with you, Dragnie. It is those which I must resume. It is those which you must vouchsafe to me again, now and forever more. Will you, dearest? Will you forgive my foolish transgression and allow me to worship and adore you as you deserve to be worshipped and adored—by a young, hyper-potent lover with a brilliant intellectual future ahead of him?”
“No.”
“I— What?”
“No.”
“But… but you have to! I am young and virile, brilliant and energetic, vibrant and handsome and bursting with potential! I am eighteen! You are forty-three!” For a moment he was at a loss for words. Then he added, “This is a good deal for you! Plus, my father can get you out of jail!”
“Nathan,” she said. And she said it quietly, calmly, without rancor or hostility, without resentment or feelings of betrayal or the desire for revenge. “How did the government’s men know where John and I were holding that dinner party?”
He blanched, and a look of terror appeared as an expression on the face of his head. “I… how should I know…”
“You told them, didn’t you?”
“Yes!” he sobbed. “Because you were making fun of us! Not just of her! But of me! Your sophisticated friends, the men and women of achievement with whom you socialize, treated us with mockery and contempt and sneering derision! Why? Why, Dragnie, why?”
“They treated you as you presented yourself to be treated. As a high school student with a silly girlfriend, out of your league and in over your head.”
He started, stunned. And then a look of shrewd calculation replaced the expression of dismay. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why’re you being so cruel to me? Can it be that you’re… jealous? Ha ha ha ha! The great Dragnie Tagbord, jealous of a silly, unworldly girl—who, by definition, ’s no threat to you. You can’t possibly imagine I find with her the kind of communion of kindred souls I find with you. What, then, ’s there to be jealous of? Mere sex? Does John Glatt behave this way? Is he jealous of me? Of course not. He knows I’m no threat to him. But you, who’re supposedly his female equivalent; you, who’re just as devoted as he is to only the highest codes of standards of ethics of the values of the behavior of principle of the meaning of life in the awareness of the human mind!; you, who’re committed to being so entirely conscious and rational about everything all the time: you’re jealous of a teenage girl named Angel Human! Ha ha ha ha! How amusing. How hypocritical. How… irrational!”
He thought, she could tell, that he had blocked her. He thought he had thwarted her. He thought he had won. But when she replied, it was without defiance, without heat, without self-congratulation. “Jealous? I?” She smiled. “I assure you, I am not jealous.”
“That’s what you say. That’s your mere subjective opinion.”
“No, it’s an objective fact.” From a pocket in her prison jumpsuit Dragnie produced a piece of paper. It was a standard sheet of typescript, folded in quarters, and when unfolded revealed a paragraph of typed text above a series of signatures. “I have here an affidavit attesting to the fact that I am not jealous, either of you or of your little girlfriend. It is not only signed by me, which would be of no significance, but it is also signed by other people. It therefore can be said to establish an objective fact.” She handed the sheet to him and watched as he perused it, as he squinted at the signatures of John Glatt, Hunk Rawbone, Sanfrancisco De Soto, and several others. “It is the first principle of Objectivismism: my friends all agree with me, which means that I’m right,” she said. “That is why it is important to surround yourself with people who believe what you believe. So they can help you create your reality. And that is why I can no longer allow you around me.”
She could see his defiance and confidence ebb, leaving behind the dispirited, defeated shell of a young man suddenly aware of his inability to live up to his own greatness—and to hers. “You win, Dragnie,” he muttered. “You were and are too much for me. I now realize that, even sexually, you are more desirable than Angel. As for intellectually, existentially, and psycho-epistemologically, well, there is no comparison.” He handed her the paper and stood up. “Good-bye, Dragnie. I will never forget you, nor how superior you are to every other woman in the world.”