The Human Stain

bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have to live like a tragic character in his course. That the primal seems a solution is not news — it always does. Everything changes with desire. The answer to all that has been destroyed. But choosing to prolong the scandal by perpetuating the protest? My stupidity everywhere. My derangement everywhere. And the grossest sentimentality. Wistfully remembering back to Steena. Jokingly dancing with Nathan Zuckerman. Confiding in him. Reminiscing with him. Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him. But what can J transform this into? I am stuck with it. As is. Sans language, shape, structure, meaning — sans the unities, the catharsis, sans everything. More of the untransformed unforeseen. And why would anyone want more? Yet the woman who is Faunia is the unforeseen. Intertwined orgasmically with the unforeseen, and convention unendurable. Upright principles unendurable. Contact with her body the only principle. Nothing more important than that. And the stamina of her sneer. Alien to the core. Contact with that. The obligation to subject my life to hers and its vagaries. Its vagrancy. Its truancy. Its strangeness. The delectation of this elemental eros. Take the hammer of Faunia to everything outlived, all the exalted justifications, and smash your way to freedom. Freedom from? From the stupid glory of being right. From the ridiculous quest for significance. From the never-ending campaign for legitimacy. The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind — known also as Aschenbachian madness. “And before nightfall”—the final words of Death in Venice—“a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.” No, he does not have to live like a tragic character in any course.

“Jeff! It's Dad. It's your father.”

“Hi. How's it going?”

“Jeff, I know why I haven't heard from you, why I haven't heard from Michael. Mark I wouldn't expect to hear from — and Lisa hung up on me last time I called.”

“She phoned me. She told me.”

“Listen, Jeff — my affair with this woman is over.”

“Is it? How come?”

He thinks, Because there's no hope for her. Because men have beaten the shit out of her. Because her kids have been killed in a fire. Because she works as a janitor. Because she has no education and says she can't read. Because she's been on the run since she's fourteen. Because she doesn't even ask me, “What are you doing with me?” Because she knows what everybody is doing with her. Because she's seen it all and there's no hope.

But all he says to his son is, “Because I don't want to lose my children.”

With the gentlest laugh, Jeff said, “Try as you might, you couldn't do it. You certainly aren't able to lose me. I don't believe you were going to lose Mike or Lisa, either. Markie is something else. Markie yearns for something none of us can give him. Not just you — none of us. It's all very sad with Markie. But that we were losing you? That we've been losing you since Mother died and you resigned from the college? That is something we've all been living with. Dad, nobody has known what to do. Since you went on the warpath with the college, it hasn't been easy to get to you.”

“I realize that,” said Coleman, “I understand that,” but two minutes into the conversation and it was already insufferable to him. His reasonable, supercompetent, easygoing son, the eldest, the coolest head of the lot, speaking calmly about the family problem with the father who was the problem was as awful to endure as his irrational youngest son being enraged with him and going nuts. The excessive demand he had made on their sympathy — on the sympathy of his own children! “I understand,” Coleman said again, and that he understood made it all the worse.

“I hope nothing too awful happened with her,” Jeff said.

“With her? No. I just decided that enough was enough.” He was afraid to say more for fear that he might start to say something very different.

“That's good,” Jeff said. “I'm terrifically relieved. That there've been no repercussions, if that's what you're saying. That's just great.”

Repercussions?

“I don't follow you,” Coleman said. “Why repercussions?”

“You're free and clear? You're yourself again? You sound more like yourself than you have for years. That you've called — this is all that matters. I was waiting and I was hoping and now you've called. There's nothing more to be said. You're back. That's all we were worried about.”

“I'm lost, Jeff. Fill me in. I'm lost as to what we're going on about here. Repercussions from what?”

Jeff paused before he spoke again, and when he did speak, it was reluctantly. “The abortion. The suicide attempt.”

“Faunia?”

“Right.”

“Had an abortion? Tried to commit suicide? When?”

“Dad, everyone in Athena knew. That's how it got to us.”

“Everyone? Who is everyone?”

“Look, Dad, there are no repercussions—”

“It never happened, my boy, that's why there are no ‘repercussions.’ It never happened. There was no abortion, there was no suicide attempt — not that I know of. And not that she knows of. But just who is this everyone? Goddamnit, you hear a story like that, a senseless story like that, why don't you pick up the phone, why don't you come to me? ”

“Because it isn't my business to come to you. I don't come to a man your age—”

“No, you don't, do you? Instead, whatever you're told about a man my age, however ludicrous, however malicious and absurd, you believe.”

“If I made a mistake, I am truly sorry. You're right. Of course you're right. But it's been a long haul for all of us. You've not been that easy to reach now for—”

“Who told this to you?”

“Lisa. Lisa heard it first.”

“Who did Lisa hear it from?”

“Several sources. People. Friends.”

“I want names. I want to know who this everyone is Which friends?”

“Old friends. Athena friends.”

“Her darling childhood friends. The offspring of my colleagues. Who told them, I wonder.”

“There was no suicide attempt,” Jeff said.

“No, Jeffrey, there wasn't. No abortion that I know of, either.”

“Well, fine.”

“And if there were? If I had impregnated this woman and she'd gone for an abortion and after the abortion had attempted suicide? Suppose, Jeff, she had even succeeded at suicide. Then what? Then what, Jeff? Your father's mistress kills herself. Then what? Turn on your father? Your criminal father? No, no, no — let's go back, back up a step, back up to the suicide attempt. Oh, I like that. I do wonder who came up with the suicide attempt. Is it because of the abortion that she attempts this suicide? Let's get straight this melodrama that Lisa got from her Athena friends. Because she doesn't want the abortion? Because the abortion is imposed on her? I see. I see the cruelty. A mother who has lost two little children in a fire turns up pregnant by her lover. Ecstasy. A new life. Another chance. A new child to replace the dead ones. But the lover—no, says he, and drags her by her hair to the abortionist, and then — of course — having worked his will on her, takes the naked, bleeding body—”

By this time Jeff had hung up.

But by this time Coleman didn't need Jeff to keep on going. He had only to see the Elderhostel couples inside the cafeteria finishing their coffee before returning to class, he had only to hear them in there at their ease and enjoying themselves, the appropriate elderly looking as they should look and sounding as they should sound, for him to think that even the conventional things that he'd done afforded him no relief. Not just having been a professor,