The Human Stain

she had no depth, that was her charm at the end of his day of being commander in chief. The intensity of the shallowness was its appeal. Not to mention the shallowness of the intensity. The stories about her childhood. The boasting about her adorable willfulness: ‘See, I was three but I was already a personality’ I'm sure he understood that everything he did that didn't conform to her delusions was going to be yet another brutal blow to her self- esteem. But what he didn't see was that he had to fuck her in the ass. Why? To shut her up. Strange behavior in our president. It was the first thing she showed him. She stuck it in his face. She offered it to him. And he did nothing about it. I don't get this guy. Had he fucked her in the ass, I doubt she would have talked to Linda Tripp. Because she wouldn't have wanted to talk about that.”

“She wanted to talk about the cigar.”

“That's different. That's kid stuff. No, he didn't give her regularly something she didn't want to talk about. Something he wanted that she didn't. That's the mistake.”

“In the ass is how you create loyalty.”

“I don't know if that would have shut her up. I don't know that shutting her up is humanly possible. This isn't Deep Throat. This is Big Mouth.”

“Still, you have to admit that this girl has revealed more about America than anybody since Dos Passos. She stuck a thermometer up the country's ass. Monica's U.S.A.”

“The trouble was she was getting from Clinton what she got from all these guys. She wanted something else from him. He's the president, she's a love terrorist. She wanted him to be different from this teacher she had an affair with.”

“Yeah, the niceness did him in. Interesting. Not his brutality but his niceness. Playing it not by his rules but by hers. She controls him because he wants it. Has to have it. It's all wrong. You know what Kennedy would have told her when she came around asking for a job? You know what Nixon would have told her? Harry Truman, even Eisenhower would have told it to her. The general who ran World War II, he knew how not to be nice. They would have told her that not only would they not give her a job, but nobody would ever give her a job again as long as she lived. That she wouldn't be able to get a job driving a cab in Horse Springs, New Mexico. Nothing. That her father's practice would be sabotaged, and he'd be out of work. That her mother would never work again, that her brother would never work again, that nobody in her family would earn another dime, if she so much as dared to open her mouth about the eleven blow jobs. Eleven. Not even a round dozen. I don't think under a dozen in over two years qualifies for the Heisman in debauchery, do you?”

“His caution, his caution did him in. Absolutely. He played it like a lawyer.”

“He didn't want to give her any evidence. That's why he wouldn't come.”

“There he was right. The moment he came, he was finished. She had the goods. Collected a sample. The smoking come. Had he fucked her in the ass, the nation could have been spared this terrible trauma.”

They laughed. There were three of them.

“He never really abandoned himself to it. He had an eye on the door. He had his own system there. She was trying to up the ante.”

“Isn't this what the Mafia does? You give somebody something they can't talk about. Then you've got them.”

“You involve them in a mutual transgression, and you have a mutual corruption. Sure.”

“So his problem is that he's insufficiently corrupt.”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely. And unsophisticated.”

“It's just the opposite of the charge that he's reprehensible. He's insufficiently reprehensible.”

“Of course. If you're engaged in that behavior, why draw the line there? Wasn't that fairly artificial?”

“Once you draw the line, you make it clear that you're frightened. And when you're frightened, you're finished. Your destruction is no further than Monica's cell phone.”

“He didn't want to lose control, you see. Remember he said, I don't want to be hooked on you, I don't want to be addicted to you? That struck me as true.”

“I thought that was a line.”

“I don't think so. I think probably the way she remembered it, it sounds like a line, but I think the motivation — no, he didn't want the sexual hook. She was good but she was replaceable.”

“Everybody's replaceable.”

“But you don't know what his experience was. He wasn't into hookers and that kind of stuff.”

“Kennedy was into hookers.”

“Oh yeah. The real stuff. This guy Clinton, this is schoolboy stuff.”

“I don't think he was a schoolboy when he was down in Arkansas.”

“No, the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can't touch it. This was hell. Especially with that goody two-shoes wife.”

“She's goody two-shoes, you think?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Her and Vince Foster?”

“Well, she would fall in love with somebody, but she never would have done anything crazy because he was married. She could make even adultery boring. She's a real de-transgressor.”

“You think she was fucking Foster?”

“Yes. Oh yeah.”

“Now the whole world has fallen in love with goody two-shoes. That's exactly what they've fallen in love with.”

“Clinton's genius was to give Vince Foster a job in Washington. Put him right there. Make him do his personal bit for the administration. That's genius. There Clinton acted like a good Mafia don and had that on her.”

“Yeah. That's okay. But that isn't what he did with Monica. You see, he had only Vernon Jordan to talk to about Monica. Who was probably the best person to talk to. But they couldn't figure that out. Because they thought she was blabbing just to her stupid little California Valley Girls. Okay. So what. But that this Linda Tripp, this Iago, this undercover Iago that Starr had working in the White House—”

At this point, Coleman got up from where he was seated and headed toward the campus. That was all of the chorus Coleman overheard while sitting on a bench on the green, contemplating what move he'd make next. He didn't recognize their voices, and since their backs were to him and their bench was around the other side of the tree from his, he couldn't see their faces. His guess was that they were three young guys, new to the faculty since his time, on the town green drinking bottled water or decaf out of containers, just back from a workout on the town tennis courts, and relaxing together, talking over the day's Clinton news before heading home to their wives and children. To him they sounded sexually savvy and sexually confident in ways he didn't associate with young assistant professors, particularly at Athena. Pretty rough talk, pretty raw for academic banter. Too bad these tough guys hadn't been around in his time. They might have served as a cadre of resistance against ... No, no. Up on the campus, where not everyone's a tennis buddy, this sort of force tends to get dissipated in jokes when it's not entirely self-suppressed — they would probably have been no more forthcoming than the rest of the faculty when it came to rallying behind him. Anyway, he didn't know them and didn't want to. He knew no one any longer. For two years now, all the while he was writing Spooks, he had cut himself off completely from the friends and colleagues and associates of a lifetime, and so not until today — just before noon, following the meeting with Nelson Primus that had ended not merely badly but stunningly badly, with Coleman astounding himself by his vituperative words — had he come anywhere near leaving Town Street, as he was doing now, and heading down South Ward and then, at the Civil War monument, climbing the hill to the campus. Chances were there'd be no one he knew for him to bump into, except perhaps whoever might be teaching the retired who came in July to spend a couple of weeks in the college's Elderhostel program, which included visits to the Tanglewood concerts, the Stockbridge galleries, and the Norman Rockwell Museum.

It was these very summer students he saw first when he reached the crest of the hill and emerged from behind the old astronomy building onto the sun-speckled main quadrangle, more kitschily collegiate-looking at that moment than even on the cover of the Athena catalog. They were heading to the cafeteria for lunch, meandering in pairs along one of the tree-lined quadrangle's crisscrossing paths. A procession of twos: husbands and wives