Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
…and “a strong, healthy, superior egoism”
Editor’s Note: The author’s insights into the mindset of Ayn Rand in this story bear some provocative parallels to today’s political conflicts, wherein the issue itself of the role of government is being fought through electoral politics—is the individual solely responsible for oneself and unconcerned about societal issues or should the good of the whole be paramount among the goals of a society, that is, achieving social justice?
An excerpt from Abortive Romances or The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand
By Gene Bell-Villada
I
The successes and the sorrows of young Joe, formally christened Jose Victoriano Gonzalez, are the chief subject of this story. Born and raised in Merced, Arizona, an obscure little border town ninety-six auto miles southeast of Tucson, Joe received crucial encouragement and support from two of his high-school teachers, and was the first of his sizeable extended family ever to attend the University.
There he majored in Applied Music (piano, trumpet, and string bass) on generous state scholarships, and found out, much to his delight, that his playing had the potential to charm girls, some of whom, for their part, saw in his playing a resource they might turn to their advantage, without his much realizing they were doing so.
A devout Roman Catholic until age seventeen, he began quietly doubting religion in his final year at Merced High, thoroughly though still quietly abandoning his faith early on as a college freshman, and in time latching onto the then-fashionable thought of Ayn Rand. Thus did young Joe discover the power of ideas, those of rational egoism overcoming the evils of altruism, in particular. But, of that, more later.
At this point let us start out with Joe in his music practice room, seated at the upright piano one mid-April morning in 1961, and dressed in his Army ROTC uniform, which he was required to wear Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had been working on Chopin’s “Black-Key” etude, and, having just muffed the final measures, he was poised to attempt the octaves once again, only to be stopped by the sound and breeze of the door swishing wide open, and further startled by the sight of Jennifer strolling in with minuet-like grace and saying, “Excuse me, Joe, I believe I forgot my book.”
The scent of her perfume brought back certain vivid memories.
In the room next door a trumpet player was going through Haydn’s concerto slowly, note by note.
She walked behind Joe all the way ‘round to his right, stretched her smooth, pale arm toward the furthermost top corner of the piano, and retrieved her copy of Jude the Obscure, which Joe had indeed noticed though failed to think of as hers, the book being so omnipresent at that time of the year.
“Thanks,” she said tersely, heading toward the door. Whereupon Joe blurted out, “No, wait, I’ve got to talk with you.”
Spinning around on her low heels she looked at him without expression and asked, “Oh, what about?”
And in order to understand just what it was about, we must flash back a full eight months to Joe Gonzalez’s initial weeks on campus and the start of his long correspondence with his elder brother Al.
(Joe’s letters to Al follow…)
IV
And now, for the first time in months, in the same practice room where they’d first met and our story had begun, Jennifer and Joe were together again.
“But, Jennifer, what did I do wrong?”
The pianist next door had skipped on to the second theme of the Rachmaninoff.
“Joe. Oh, Joe, you just don’t understand. It’s what you didn’t do.”
“Didn’t do? But I thought I was being tender and considerate.” (In his mind he heard his mother’s words, in border Spanish, “Try to be more considerate.”) He rolled his khaki sleeves down and buttoned them up.
“No, Joe.” The bell-like voice had never been more beautiful than when Jennifer, her face almost roseate from inspiration, said, “All that tenderness was about the last thing either of us needed. You never should have let me get away with acting as I did that night. You should’ve asserted yourself,” she stopped briefly, “and maybe threatened me with a slap or a put-down, anything but sit there and take it from me.”
Joe’s blood was coursing faster even as Rachmaninoff’s arpeggios rose in volume.
“And you never should have let me out of the car. But once you did, I’d actually have felt much more respect for you if you’d simply driven off and let me fend for myself out in the desert and then maybe phoned me at the dorm next day. Or even done to me what Roark first does to Dominique.”
“What? Who’re they?”
“Oooh, yes.” She cut the second word short. “I forget, you’ve never read The Fountainhead.” He could see her laugh, but somehow she made no sound. “Anyway, Dominique’s this beautiful, brilliant architectural writer, and powerful men worship her. One day she’s out in the country, getting distant glimpses of Roark, a genius architect who’s been reduced to cutting rocks at the local quarry. She struts about in her high heels, oozing scorn for him as he sweats down below. His own disdain for her is much stronger, though, and she can’t resist him. That night the guy shows up at her mansion, flings her silently onto the bed, and teaches her a lesson she’ll never forget. Being degraded like some piece of property was just what she wanted. She loves it.”
Joe remained steadily mute and immobile.
“There’s too few strong-willed men in our world, and too many people content with being second-raters. And Joe,” she shook her head, “the fact is, you’re not strong enough for me; it became painfully obvious that night.”
Joe’s grimace was involuntary. “I guess I’m not that lucky, to be so strong.”
Again Jennifer shook her head, much faster. “Lucky? No, Joe. I don’t believe in luck, I’ve told you more than once. Really, life is what the individual makes of it. And a superior man controls his life. He does not depend on others.” For at least a minute she said nothing and gazed toward the keyboard. Then she hummed briefly to the Rachmaninoff, and turned toward the door. “I must go.”
“Wait, Jennifer.” The question seemed to come to him from nowhere. “Lemme ask you: Did you start this whole thing just so I’d accompany you on the piano?”
Flushing red, the pretty face took on a deeply offended aspect. Her lips pursed up, looking fearsome as her indignant retort thundered out, “How could you say such a thing to me? For your information, Joe, I can manage perfectly well by myself, thank you. Did it ever occur to you that I sincerely admired your superior gifts? And still do? I am shocked at your unfair accusation.”
“Sorry, Jennifer, dunno, I was just wondering, OK?” He felt ashamed of having asked, and held out his right hand. “Friends, OK?”
She raised her eyebrows, rolled her green eyes, and, taking a deep breath, spoke more softly. “Oh, all right,” was her reluctant response. “I’m not so sure, though, after hearing you suggest something so vile. I don’t use people, Joe.”
He had already withdrawn his hand. “OK, OK, I apologize, honestly. Friends?” For a long time thereafter, Joe would feel a confused anguish and guilt about his accusation, but now he simply raised his hand once again.
Still radiating her noble fury, Jennifer extended her stiff palm and brusquely shook his, then hastened out. She left the door slightly ajar, and the lingering click of her high heels out in the hall mingled with the sounds of Rachmaninoff’s and Haydn’s difficult passage-work.
Joe stared at the keyboard, then positioned both his hands. Stretching all four outer fingers he surged through the black-key run as if it were a single and indivisible fluid entity. Flawless, his very best. He tightened his necktie, straightened his eyeglasses, and stared again.
Suddenly he reached for his scores, stacked them in no particular order, noticed his hands were trembling slightly, and just sat there, his music on his lap. Out in the corridor, the voice of a redheaded baritone, familiar to him from Theory class, was cracking some joke about parallel fifths. Another guy guffawed, a girl giggled. The trumpeter and pianist on either side were silent.
He donned his ROTC cap, leaped up, gave the door a little push, rushed out and veered left to his locker, gaze fixed downward and never once taking note of the still-bantering threesome, the baritone in a plaid shirt now laughing, in turn, at the Texas couple’s one-line jokes. Joe grabbed his battered schoolbag, threw in his scores, slammed the door shut, and caught sight of Wayne Belli, seated far off in the bandspeople’s cubbyhole with drummer Jake, who was also duly clad in Army ROTC uniform.
As he scurried toward the stairs, always looking downward, he could hear his regulation plain black shoes squeaking rhythmically, then Wayne joshing in his ever-jovial voice, “Hey, there’s our house Mex, goofin’ off again.” Joe bounded up the stairs two at a time, wondering why Wayne pronounced his last name Bel-eye instead of Belly, didn’t seem exactly right. Eleven forty-four, the wall clock said.
“Oh, damn, English class, I’d almost clean forgot,” he muttered.
The bike ride across campus felt almost exhilarating. There was almost no one on the paths as he coasted alongside the Library and on to Liberal Arts, where English 3, advanced section, took place in a basement room. Arriving more than ten minutes late, he took off his cap and sat alone in the back row, unable to shake from his mind what Jennifer had told him. Fumbling in his bag, he realized he’d left Jude the Obscure in his dorm room or his locker. It hardly mattered, though, inasmuch as there was little Joe could glean from class discussion while he sat in a back corner, staring at his open notebook. He did wonder if it were more than just coincidence when a pretty blonde coed in the front row firmly asserted that “Jude’s problem is he’s weak,” and he duly wrote down and pondered her insistent comments on this score. He also caught a few stray sentences from Mr. Green’s short lecture about Hardy’s “fatalism,” and considered looking up the word later that day, yet never did. The entirety of his notes added up to about twelve lines. Writing to his brother Al later that day, he related the morning’s episode, and finished saying, “Feel worthless. Wish I was dead sometimes.”
V
During the weeks that followed, Joe’s lack of appetite led to a seven-and-a-half pound weight loss. Even his letters to Al became shorter and less frequent. Still, the Chopin etudes he performed in a mid-May recital went well enough, if a trifle fast. Meanwhile he began being hired to play piano regularly, and trumpet occasionally, for Wayne Belli’s group –“Wayne’s Five” – and its series of end-of-year gigs. The relationship with the band was thereby cemented, and would last throughout Joe’s remaining three years up at the University. The group actually played another engagement at Kaibab Hall, and there as most everywhere else Jennifer Jaspers was in Joe’s thoughts. Save for a brief passing “hello,” however, the two never spoke again, scarcely saw one another in fact.
Because Jennifer was the first girl Joe had ever dated much or (excepting prostitutes) tasted physical contact with, he remained strongly attached to the memory of her, dwelling on it in his mind persistently if not obsessively. Yet he also felt that the romance had remained an incomplete and abortive matter, given Jennifer’s grasp of topics of which he, alas, knew nothing. And so, still overwhelmed by the experience, and hoping to understand it and learn from it, before departing for Merced for the summer he spent a portion of his most recent gig payment on crisp new paperback copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and a collection of essays, all by Ayn Rand. Reading her books was to be among Joe’s summer projects, along with some weekend dance jobs and other forms of employment.
Back in Merced, when not otherwise busy, Joe sat for hours on end in the bedroom he had once shared with Al, or on the front porch of the modest adobe-style house, immersing himself in one of Rand’s volumes – much to the annoyance of his parents, who occasionally would come looking for him and urge him to join in a family activity or meals. Being a slow reader, he needed time and exerted no small effort in getting through the two heftier tomes, but eventually he understood and gradually assimilated Rand’s thinking, and indeed was strongly persuaded by her logic and art as to the depth and power of Objectivist philosophy. Often he daydreamed of him and Jennifer, reclining side by side on their favorite lawn, holding hands, and reading long passages from The Fountainhead to one another. Sometimes he faintly wished he had been blessed with the steely blue eyes and jutting jaws of Ayn Rand’s strong, noble heroes.
Joe attended Mass exactly twice that June, if only to please his mother. On the afternoon of July 4th, however, he informed her that he no longer accepted “mysticism” and would not be going to church again, a development she accepted silently. At any rate, whenever he had a Saturday job with “Wayne’s Five” he’d usually been staying up in Tucson, so that he wasn’t back in Merced till Sunday afternoon. At his mom’s suggestion he did drop in one evening on Mrs. Pratt, who was warmly gratified at his rapid musical progress, while her husband, also a teacher, humorously asked Joe how he’d been treating “that old upright heap” they’d sold him at a nominal price some years ago. Joe smiled and said that he still practiced on it every day.
At the time of this visit Joe was temporarily employed part time in a work crew at the nearby stone quarry, and the boss’s leggy teen-aged daughter –a tall, aloof, strawberry blonde – actually used to come strolling in her tight capris and red pumps, making him wonder whether he or anybody else could be Howard Roark to her Dominique Francon someday.
Toward summer’s end he had thoroughly imbibed Ayn Rand’s system, so much so that both Joe’s parents (and brother Al, on furlough) expressed to him a certain curiosity about these books, this writer who seemingly had cast a spell over their Joe. In response, he tried summarizing Rand’s complex plotlines, as a means of conveying to them her philosophy, though time and again they’d either yawn and doze off without much comment, or give him a bewildered look and reflect, for example, thus:
MOTHER: ¿Que cosa es esa?
FATHER: ¿Que ideas mas extranas.
Or, AL: Esa mujer está loca!
Paquita, his kid sister, attempted to read Anthem but soon gave up, laying it aside on the turquoise-colored sofa and saying, “This stuff’s simply weird,” which made Joe assume that at her age – twelve-and-a-half – she was just too young to understand. During the last weekend in August, when their parents were off seeing friends in Las Cruces, Joe went for a solitary walk by the quarry and, standing at the rocky ledge while contemplating the rich sunset, he raised his hand and, slowly, made the sign of the dollar.
*
On his return to University the next month, Joe was hoping to impress Jennifer with his new knowledge. To his disappointment, however, he soon discovered that the girl hadn’t come back, and no one really knew why. His casual inquiries yielded conflicting accounts: she had eloped with a football-player sweetheart from high school, she had transferred to USC, she had done both or neither. Joe never found out for sure; nobody seemed to have her Palo Alto address, nor had he and she traded such information while they’d been dating. And it did not occur to him simply to inquire at the Registrar’s office.
Meanwhile Joe only dimly sensed the specifically personal, academic, and political reasons that had motivated Jennifer’s past interest in him. Rather he dwelled on the disturbing set of concepts that she’d introduced him to in the practice room during their final meeting, and he now accepted the painful lessons of those few months as his necessary initiation into the opaque, strange ways of male-female romance.
Joe was coming of age at a time when notions such as those voiced by Jennifer were far from uncommon fare. Certainly he’d always known that men sought and needed women who’d submit to male control. What was newly revealing for him was to think back on women who had made stray statements eerily suggestive of his ex-girl friend’s own. Sitting around Merced High cafeteria, the Desert Shack, or the University’s buildings he had actually overheard on different occasions a girl remark to another, “I want to be dominated,” “I need someone who’ll push me around,” or “If a man’s weak enough, I’ll walk all over him.” In the light of his learning experience with Jennifer, he began to grasp that those catch-phrases of late-adolescent and young-adult love-talk were indeed casual instances of the laws of life and love.
For the moral to be drawn from this whole episode, Joe grimly came to realize, was that, yes, Jennifer was right; alas: he had indeed not demonstrated manly strength out in the desert. He now recalled comparable past moments during which he had responded with sickly altruism and despicable weakness when a strong, healthy, superior egoism was what was called for. To his current regret, back in high school he had once allowed flute-player Cristy to send him fetching coffee, instead of his remaining seated and simply telling her, “Fetch it yourself.” He had let classmate and neighbor Angie be consistently grumpy with him at junior prom, had let newcomer Lucinda sass him for mispronouncing English words like “covet” or “won” at a party after their movie date, and so on... And yet, though they’d initiated verbal force with him, he’d then seen them home and even asked for a good-night kiss, rather than counter-mock them or maybe leave them stranded somewhere, as they deserved. Brooding on these matters over his sophomore year at college, Joe felt an odd gratitude toward Jennifer and wished he could drop her a note of thanks. But he also knew that any such token of gratitude would be taken by her as continuing weakness on his part.
And so Joe now readied himself to apply the lessons learned from Jennifer. The initial opportunity arose in February, just a few days after the anniversary of their key experience out in the desert. It was on a cool Thursday night; he had biked to a Juilliard String Quartet recital at the Music building and there casually encountered a pixyish little freshman from back East named Sue. He walked his bicycle as they headed for coffee at Mac’s (their third time out) and later sat on the grassy mound next to the Library, where they continued to chat about the concert and the new semester.
Then, at some point, as Joe was recounting the first-rate piano riff he had come up with at a gig last Tuesday, Sue got up and started dancing the Twist, a new rock-and-roll style that he did not much appreciate.
He stopped midway through his sentence and asked, somewhat irritably, “Why don’t you sit down?”
“’Cause I wanna dance, that’s why,” was her slightly defiant answer.
Joe bolted up, said curtly, “OK, you dance,” hopped onto his bike. As he pedaled off he scarcely heard her shouting, “Joe, wait, no, come back.” Thereafter he was approached by her a couple of times in the Music front hall and library, but he just ambled on, saying, “Have to go, see y’,” feeling that on each occasion the experiment had proved satisfactory.
An episode the following month provided him another measure of pride. He was at the A & W Drive-in up on Speedway with a cute sophomore from Kingman, Liz Willis, a psychology major and marching-band clarinetist, who for a good portion of their date had been discoursing on her many admirers and boy friends, both past and present.
“Strange breed, men are,” she said.
It being a weekday night, cars were few, and service was fast. Joe finished his root beer, signaled to have the tray picked up, and switched on the ignition as she talked, now about Ed, the engineering grad student who had a mad crush on her.
Suddenly he leaned over, unlocked her door and gave it a sharp push, followed by a soft tap on her bare shoulder. “Well, Liz, I guess you should be dating Ed and all those other guys instead. So why don’t you get out of my car.” He stared calmly through the windshield.
She gazed at him, speechless, and after some seconds had ticked by, shook her small blond head. “I don’t understand. I mean... is this a joke?”
“No, baby, it’s not.”
“Well,” she hesitated, “aren’t you supposed to escort me back home?”
Whipping his face around, he saw her huge, pained, sky-blue eyes, and stated coldly, “I have no obligation to you whatsoever.” Then, pointing with his right index finger, he added, simply, “Out.”
Biting a slightly curled lower lip, she plucked up her pink cardigan from the middle of the seat, placed it over her shoulders, slowly stepped out, gently shut the door, and presumably returned to Maricopa Hall by taxi, or perhaps by bus, he never knew, since he never troubled to speak to her again.
Meanwhile Joe was slowly evolving into the “make-out artist” he had once yearned to be. A major step took place next summer, in Tucson, where he’d stayed on to play a series of dance jobs that Wayne Belli had lined up at several hotels and rest homes, some as far away as Flagstaff. Needing to work on some new tunes, Joe headed for his habitual practice room one afternoon, absent-mindedly pulled open the door, and nearly collided head-on with a petite, slim coed with flaming red hair, sea-green eyes, and a UCLA T-shirt. The two of them burst into laughter, struck up a conversation. She was actually from Scottsdale, near Phoenix, a music education major and Spanish minor, who couldn’t take the L.A. smog and so’d come to U. of A. summer school to get her science out of the way and also keep up with oboe; Lynn was her name.
On their first full evening out days later they sat at one of the scarce free spots available around the “grassing” area next to the Library. She tried practicing her Spanish with him, he answered only in English. When a lull eventually ensued, the girl slithered up slowly onto her legs, yawning mezzo-piano as, fingers interlocked, she let her bare, freckled, moonlit arms stretch forward.
“And what if I were to step down right this minute?” she now inquired, raising a shapely, besandaled foot just inches above Joe’s flat belly.
Thinking fast, Joe grabbed her by the ankle, flipping her down onto the soft grass. She giggled in astonishment, her bright eyes big and wide. Then they hugged and kissed with a tremulous passion, necking as long as her dorm hours would permit, tonguing, petting, and pressing their denim-clad flesh to the allowable erotic limits of the time.
More than once over the next few weeks, as Joe lay on top of Lynn, taking his limited pleasures with her amid the aroma of freshly-cut grass, always by the same fruit tree, he’d wink at her and whisper, “Come on, Lynn, let’s go all the way. I know a nice secluded spot up in Sabino Canyon.”
She in turn would look up at him with her roguish smile, shake her head in a wide arc from side to side, and reply, “Naughty boy. Uh-uh, that’s for my wedding night.” The banter, with variations, became almost routine with them. Conversely, as they’d go strolling or be simply relaxing somewhere about the University grounds, Lynn would ask, “Hey, Joe, like to accompany me at oboe lesson tomorrow?”
And Joe too would shake his head, he in a fast quiver, then flash her a small grin and raise his jaw. “Nope. I’m not a boy scout, or some dumb altruist either.”
“God, you are really selfish,” Lynn observed once.
“That’s right,” he retorted quickly yet modestly.
As the couple sat at Memorial Fountain one cloudy night toward session’s end, at the height of the dog days, Lynn elbowed him and coaxed him yet again with, “C’mon, Joe, I need an accompanist for oboe jury this week.”
“OK, Lynn, I’m game,” he at long last conceded. “What’ll you pay me?” he asked.
Her green eyes now almost glowed bright with incredulity. “Pay? Are you serious? That’s so mercenary.” She emitted a nervous chuckle. “Greedy.”
“Greedy, right,” Joe echoed her. “Anything wrong with that? There’s no free lunch, you know.” He pushed on. “OK, I’ve got a better idea. We find some quiet place tonight and go all the way; then I’ll accompany you on your jury.”
After turning utterly silent, she remarked. “That’s really disgusting, Joe. You’re sick.”
“Not at all,” Joe struck a dignified, noble pose as he consciously drew from John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. “I’m a trader, and all I want is fair exchange and equal value. You give me sex, I’ll give you top-quality musical service.”
The girl merely said, “You’re weird.”
He blew out a gush of air, stood up to face down at her, gestured with his left index finger as he announced carefully, “So go accompany yourself.” Hands in his pocket, he rushed off, and managed never to cross paths with her for the remainder of summer school.
What kept surprising Joe over the next few years, as he’d often reflect to his brother Al, was the number of Anglo girls who seemed to appreciate his attitudes and actions. Repeatedly he’d pass their tests, prove to them he was strong, and their romantic interest in him actually increased.
On the other hand, the following summer an olive-skinned sophomore from New York called Ruthie, whose exotic features Joe at first construed as gypsy-like, responded differently to his newly-found philosophy of strength. A combined Art and History major at some progressive college back home, she also played decent alto sax, and the two had blown impromptu duets, just for fun, in her practice room.
As they drove up to A-Mountain one starry Friday night, Joe discoursed on his system of selfishness, and in time placed his hand on Ruthie’s bare knee.
Calmly, she plucked off the hand as if it were a starched clean napkin, restored it to the steering wheel, and said melodically, with good Spanish phonemes, “Macho, macho, macho.” Shifting back to her New York voice she then remarked, “Trying to pull some Latin-lover shtick on me? Looks like Spanish mentality dies hard.”
“False,” Joe countered quickly. “I picked up my ideas from Ayn Rand, who’s Anglo.” He raised his chin triumphantly. “And,” he added with a heightened sense of victory, “a woman, by the way.”
“So? I don’t care what she is.” As Ruthie got more impassioned her New York accent turned thicker. “Besides, since when are Russians ‘Anglos’ as you say? And for your information,” she remarked, “Ayn Rand is full of shit.”
“What?” Joe was completely taken aback. A “nice” girl who’d swear like that was something new to him.
“You heard me,” Ruthie continued, now more softly, with a smile, “Ayn Rand’s full of it and a fascist creep, too. Maybe you’re this hot-shot musical prodigy, Joe Gonzalez, but you don’t know zilch about much else.” She gave him a charming, friendly smile that contradicted the harsh judgments and made him feel better.
Her two words, “shtick” and “zilch,” were also new to Joe, and he asked for definitions on their next night out, since his dictionary had failed to list either of them. “Fascism” and “fascist” did have entries, though he couldn’t see how they squared with Rand’s opposition to tyrants and staunch belief in freedom, an inconsistency that he later mentioned to Ruthie yet elicited from her only a chuckle, a shrug of her shoulders, and then silence.
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| Photo by Stephanie Chiha |
Gene Bell-Villada, born in Haiti and raised in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Venezuela, is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. His essays include critiques on Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Art for Art’s Sake and Literary Life (1996), and an autobiography, Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics. As a novelist, he has published a collection of stories, The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand, and the satirical novel, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery: A Novel of College Life and Political Terror. Both are available from Amador Publishers, local bookstores and online booksellers.
The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand, a novella and 13 stories was originally published in 1998, copyright Gene Bell-Villada, but recently reprinted by Amador Publishers.
Hope en distancia
