The Human Stain

attaining so little in life had done to her — but perhaps why so little had been attained; from his vantage point no more than fifty feet away, he could observe almost microscopically how, without him to take her cues from, she took cues instead from the gruffest example around, the coarsest, the one whose human expectations were the lowest and whose self-conception the shallowest. Since, no matter how intelligent you may be, Voluptas makes virtually anything you want to think come true, certain possibilities are never even framed, let alone vigorously conjectured, and assessing correctly the qualities of your Voluptas is the last thing you are equipped to do ... until, that is, you slip into the shadows and observe her rolling onto her back on the grass, her knees bent and falling slightly open, the cheese of the pizza running down one hand, a Diet Coke brandished in the other, and laughing her head off — at what? at hermaphroditism?—while over her looms, in the person of a failed grease monkey, everything that is the antithesis of your own way of life. Another Farley? Another Les Farley? Maybe nothing so ominous as that, but more of a substitute for Farley than for him.

A campus scene that would have seemed without significance had Coleman encountered it on a summer day back when he was dean — as he undoubtedly had numerous times — a campus scene that would have seemed back then not merely harmless but appealingly expressive of the pleasure to be derived from eating out of doors on a beautiful day was freighted now with nothing but significance. Where neither Nelson Primus nor his beloved Lisa nor even the cryptic denunciation anonymously dispatched by Delphine Roux had convinced him of anything, this scene of no great moment on the lawn back of North Hall exposed to him at last the underside of his own disgrace.

Lisa. Lisa and those kids of hers. Tiny little Carmen. That's who came flashing into his thoughts, tiny Carmen, six years old but, in Lisa's words, like a much younger kid. “She's cute,” Lisa said, “but she's like a baby.” And adorably cute Carmen was when he saw her: pale, pale brown skin, pitch-black hair in two stiff braids, eyes unlike any he'd ever seen on another human being, eyes like coals blue with heat and lit from within, a child's quick and flexible body, attired neatly in miniaturized jeans and sneakers, wearing colorful socks and a white tube of a T-shirt nearly as narrow as a pipe cleaner — a frisky little girl seemingly attentive to everything, and particularly to him. “This is my friend Coleman,” Lisa said when Carmen came strolling into the room, on her small, scrubbed first- thing-in-the-morning face a slightly amused, self-important mock smile. “Hello, Carmen,” Coleman said. “He just wanted to see what we do,” Lisa explained. “Okay,” said Carmen, agreeably enough, but she studied him no less carefully than he was studying her, seemingly with the smile. “We're just gonna do what we always do,” said Lisa. “Okay,” Carmen said, but now she was trying out on him a rather more serious version of the smile. And when she turned and got to handling the movable plastic letters magnetized to the low little blackboard and Lisa asked her to begin sliding them around to make the words “want,” “wet,” “wash,” and “wipe”—“I always tell you,” Lisa was saying, “that you have to look at the first letters. Let's see you read the first letters. Read it with your finger”—Carmen kept periodically swiveling her head, then her whole body, to look at Coleman and stay in touch with him. “Anything is a distraction,” Lisa said softly to her father. “Come on, Miss Carmen. Come on, honey. He's invisible.” “What's that?” “Invisible,” Lisa repeated, “you can't see him.” Carmen laughed—“I can see him.” “Come on. Come on back to me. The first letters. That's it. Good work. But you also have to read the rest of the word too. Right? The first letter — and now the rest of the word. Good—‘wash.’ What's this one? You know it. You know that one. ‘Wipe.’ Good.” Twenty-five weeks in the program on the day Coleman came to sit in on Reading Recovery, and though Carmen had made progress, it wasn't much. He remembered how she had struggled with the word “your” in the illustrated storybook from which she was reading aloud — scratching with her fingers around her eyes, squeezing and balling up the midriff of her shirt, twisting her legs onto the rung of her kiddie-sized chair, slowly but surely working her behind farther and farther off the seat of the chair — and was still unable to recognize “your” or to sound it out. “This is March, Dad. Twenty-five weeks. It's a long time to be having trouble with ‘your’. It's a long time to be confusing couldn't' with ‘climbed,’ but at this point I'll settle for ‘your.’ It's supposed to be twenty weeks in the program, and out. She's been to kindergarten — she should have learned some basic sight words. But when I showed her a list of words back in September — and by then she was entering first grade — she said, ‘What are these?’ She didn't even know what words were. And the letters: h she didn't know, j she didn't know, she confused u for c. You see how she did that, it's visually similar, but she still has something of the problem twenty-five weeks later. The m and the w. The i and the l. The g and the d. Still problems for her. It's all a problem for her.” “You're pretty dejected about Carmen,” he said. “Well, every day for half an hour? That's a lot of instruction. That's a lot of work. She's supposed to read at home, but at home there's a sixteen-year-old sister who just had a baby, and the parents forget or don't care. The parents are immigrants, they're second-language learners, they don't find it easy reading to their children in English, though Carmen never got read to even in Spanish. And this is what I deal with day in and day out. Just seeing if a child can manipulate a book — I give it to them, a book like this one, with a big colorful illustration beneath the title, and I say, ‘Show me the front of the book.’ Some kids know, but most don't. Print doesn't mean anything to them. And,” she said, smiling with exhaustion and nowhere near as enticingly as Carmen, “my kids supposedly aren't learning-disabled. Carmen doesn't look at the words while I'm reading. She doesn't care. And that's why you're wiped out at the end of the day. Other teachers have difficult tasks, I know, but at the end of a day of Carmen after Carmen after Carmen, you come home emotionally drained. By then I can't read. I can't even get on the phone. I eat something and go to bed. I do like these kids. I love these kids. But it's worse than draining — it's killing.”

Faunia was sitting up on the grass now, downing the last of her drink while one of the boys — the youngest, thinnest, most boyish-looking of them, incongruously bearded at just the chin and wearing, with his brown uniform, a red-checkered bandanna and what looked like high-heeled cowboy boots — was collecting all the debris from lunch and stuffing it into a trash sack, and the other three were standing apart, out in the sunshine, each smoking a last cigarette before returning to work.

Faunia was alone. And quiet now. Sitting there gravely with the empty soda can and thinking what? About the two years of waitressing down in Florida when she was sixteen and seventeen, about the retired businessmen who used to come in for lunch without their wives and ask her if she wouldn't like to live in a nice apartment and have nice clothes and a nice new Pinto and charge accounts at all the Bal Harbour clothing shops and at the jewelry store and at the beauty parlor and in exchange do nothing more than be a girlfriend a few nights a week and every once in a while on weekends? Not one, two, three, but four such proposals in just the first year. And then the proposition from the Cuban. She clears a hundred bucks a John and no taxes. For a skinny blonde with big tits, a tall, good-looking kid like her with hustle and ambition and guts, got up in a miniskirt, a halter, and boots, a thousand bucks a night would be nothing. A year, two, and, if by then she wants to, she retires — she can afford to. “And you didn't do it?” Coleman asked. “No. Uh-uh. But don't think I didn't think about it,” she said. “All the restaurant shit, those creepy people, the crazy cooks, a menu I can't read, orders I can't write, keeping everything straight in my head — it was no picnic. But if I can't read, I can count. I can add. I can subtract. I can't read words but I know who Shakespeare is. I know who Einstein is. I know who won the Civil War. I'm not stupid. I'm just an illiterate. A fine distinction but there it is. Numbers are something else. Numbers, believe me, I know. Don't think I didn't think it might not be a bad idea at all.” But Coleman needed no such instruction. Not only did he think that at seventeen she thought being a hooker might be a good idea, he thought that it was an idea that she had more than simply entertained.

“What do you do with the kid who can't read?” Lisa had asked him in her despair. “It's the key to everything, so you have to do something, but doing it is burning me out. Your second year is supposed to be better. Your third year better than that. And this is my fourth.” “And it isn't better?” he asked. “It's hard. It's so hard. Each year is harder. But if one-on-one tutoring doesn't work, what do you do?” Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them — so Coleman believed more often than not. And for how long his whore? Is that what Faunia was thinking about before getting herself up to head back to North Hall to finish cleaning the corridors? Was she thinking about how long it had all gone on? The mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North, the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the two dead children. No wonder half an hour in the sun sharing a pizza with the boys is paradise to her.

“This is my friend Coleman, Faunia. He's just going to watch.”