Free Old School by Tobias Wolff

sale. He is a free man among parasites who hate him and punish him with poverty and neglect. And he has sex with Dominique.
    Dominique seems like a regular glacier as she rolls over the men in her path. With her
air of cold serenity
and her
exquisitely vicious mouth,
she treats Roark like dirt, talking tough to him, even smacking his face with a branch, but underneath she’s dying for him and he knows it and one night he goes to her room and gives Dominique exactly what she wants, with her fighting him all the way, because part of what she wants is to be broken by Roark.
Taken.
    This was new and interesting to me—the idea that a woman’s indifference, even her scorn, might be an invitation to go a few rounds. I felt like a sucker. It seemed that all my routine gallantries and attentions had marked me as a weakling, a slave.
    I was discovering the force of my will. To read
The Fountainhead
was to feel this caged power, straining like a dammed-up river to break loose and crush every impediment to its free running. I understood that nothing stood between me and my greatest desires—nothing between me and greatness itself—but the temptation to doubt my will and bow to counsels of moderation, expedience, and conventional morality, and shrink into the long, slow death of respectability.
    That was where the contempt came in. I had stayed with my grandfather and his wife on other vacations, and found them kindly but dull. Grandjohn was a retired air force colonel whose specialty had been photo analysis. While studying pictures of German trains during the war, he’d spotted a certain marking that led to an important bombing run. My mother told me that story. Grandjohn didn’t tell stories. After the war he’d worked in an office at the Pentagon before getting put out to pasture. At first I’d attributed his blandness to a professional habit of secrecy, and made it romantic—monotony as cover.
    This time, though, I watched Grandjohn and his wife with a cold eye. How could he have spent so many years in the air force without learning to fly? Thirty years around Mustangs and Tomcats and Saber Jets, and he seemed happy to pilot a desk to his retirement party.
    Patty was his second wife, a friend of my grandmother’s who’d married him after Grandmargie died. Patty was boring too. She read him the day’s news while he peered at the crossword puzzle through his half-moon glasses.
They say they’re going to widen the road where that car went off with all those kids.
She had covered the floors of their house in thick white carpets that deadened the air and made whatever you said in that woolen silence sound like the sudden caw of a crow on a damp day.
    I began to feel their kindness as a form of aggression. Patty was pitilessly solicitous. I couldn’t touch a book without getting grilled about the sufficiency of light and the comfort of the chair. Was I warm enough? Did I need a pillow for my back? How about one of the five thousand Cokes they’d stored up in anticipation of my visit? Grandjohn kept telling me how lucky I was to have my mother’s eyes, and how proud of me she would have been. Sometimes I had to go into the bathroom and scream silently, rocking from side to side like a gorilla, my head thrown back, my teeth bared.
    This, I decided, this sadistic dullness, this excruciating compulsion to please, was how you ended up after a lifetime of getting A’s in obedience school. Roark had worked in a quarry, hewing granite blocks with a chisel, rather than take a job doing tame architecture. He refused to think as others would have him think. Had Grandjohn ever done anything else? Had Patty ever thought at all? Christ! How could they last another hour like this without cutting each other’s throats?
    I fled the house every chance I got, riding a bus the ten miles into Baltimore from Wilton Oaks, their housing development. It rained steadily through Christmas into the new year. I walked the glistening streets in a fury