The Human Stain

the worst night of his life but of all that underlay the turbulence — it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of the ineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed. The enormous enterprise was also there. The outside forces were there. The whole chain of the unforeseen, all the dangers of exposure and all the dangers of concealment — even the senselessness of life was there in that stupid little blue tattoo.

His difficulties with Delphine Roux had begun the first semester he was back in the classroom, when one of his students who happened to be a favorite of Professor Roux's went to her, as department chair, to complain about the Euripides plays in Coleman's Greek tragedy course. One play was Hippolytus, the other Alcestis; the student, Elena Mitnick, found them “degrading to women.”

“So what shall I do to accommodate Miss Mitnick? Strike Euripides from my reading list?”

“Not at all. Clearly everything depends on how you teach Euripides.”

“And what,” he asked, “is the prescribed method these days?” thinking even as he spoke that this was not a debate for which he had the patience or the civility. Besides, confounding Delphine Roux was easier without engaging in the debate. Brimming though she was with intellectual self- importance, she was twenty-nine years old and virtually without experience outside schools, new to her job and relatively new both to the college and to the country. He understood from their previous encounters that her attempt to appear to be not merely his superior but a supercilious superior—“Clearly everything depends” and so on — was best repulsed by displaying complete indifference to her judgment. For all that she could not bear him, she also couldn't bear that the academic credentials that so impressed other of her Athena colleagues hadn't yet overwhelmed the ex-dean. Despite herself, she could not escape from being intimidated by the man who, five years earlier, had reluctantly hired her fresh from the Yale graduate school and who, afterward, never denied regretting it, especially when the psychological numbskulls in his department settled on so deeply confused a young woman as their chair.

To this day, she continued to be disquieted by Coleman Silk's presence just to the degree that she wished for him now to be unsettled by her. Something about him always led her back to her childhood and the precocious child's fear that she is being seen through; also to the precocious child's fear that she is not being seen enough. Afraid of being exposed, dying to be seen — there's a dilemma for you. Something about him made her even second-guess her English, with which otherwise she felt wholly at ease. Whenever they were face to face, something made her think that he wanted nothing more than to tie her hands behind her back.

This something was what? The way he had sexually sized her up when she first came to be interviewed in his office, or the way he had failed to sexually size her up? It had been impossible to read his reading of her, and that on a morning when she knew she had maximally deployed all her powers. She had wanted to look terrific and she did, she had wanted to be fluent and she was, she had wanted to sound scholarly and she'd succeeded, she was sure. And yet he looked at her as if she were a schoolgirl, Mr. and Mrs. Inconsequential's little nobody child.

Now, perhaps that was because of the plaid kilt — the miniskirtlike kilt might have made him think of a schoolgirl's uniform, especially as the person wearing it was a trim, tiny, dark-haired young woman with a small face that was almost entirely eyes and who weighed, clothes and all, barely a hundred pounds. All she'd intended, with the kilt as with the black cashmere turtleneck, black tights, and high black boots, was neither to desexualize herself by what she chose to wear (the university women she'd met so far in America seemed all too strenuously to be doing just that) nor to appear to be trying to tantalize him. Though he was said to be in his mid-sixties, he didn't look to be any older than her fifty-year-old father; he in fact resembled a junior partner in her father's firm, one of several of her father's engineering associates who'd been eyeing her since she was twelve. When, seated across from the dean, she had crossed her legs and the flap of the kilt had fallen open, she had waited a minute or two before pulling it closed — and pulling it closed as perfunctorily as you close a wallet — only because, however young she looked, she wasn't a schoolgirl with a schoolgirl's fears and a schoolgirl's primness, caged in by a schoolgirl's rules. She did not wish to leave that impression any more than to give the opposite impression by allowing the flap to remain open and thereby inviting him to imagine that she meant him to gaze throughout the interview at her slim thighs in the black tights. She had tried as best she could, with the choice of clothing as with her manner, to impress upon him the intricate interplay of all the forces that came together to make her so interesting at twenty-four.

Even her one piece of jewelry, the large ring she'd placed that morning on the middle finger of her left hand, her sole decorative ornament, had been selected for the sidelight it provided on the intellectual she was, one for whom enjoying the aesthetic surface of life openly, nondefensively, with her appetite and connoisseurship undisguised, was nonetheless subsumed by a lifelong devotion to scholarly endeavor. The ring, an eighteenth- century copy of a Roman signet ring, was a man-sized ring formerly worn by a man. On the oval agate, set horizontally — which was what made the ring so masculinely chunky — was a carving of Danae receiving Zeus as a shower of gold. In Paris, four years earlier, when Delphine was twenty, she had been given the ring as a love token from the professor to whom it belonged — the one professor whom she'd been unable to resist and with whom she'd had an impassioned affair. Co-incidentally, he had been a classicist. The first time they met, in his office, he had seemed so remote, so judging, that she found herself paralyzed with fear until she realized that he was playing the seduction against the grain. Was that what this Dean Silk was up to?

However conspicuous the ring's size, the dean never did ask to see the shower of gold carved in agate, and that, she decided, was just as well. Though the story of how she'd come by the ring testified, if anything, to an audacious adultness, he would have thought the ring a frivolous indulgence, a sign that she lacked maturity. Except for the stray hope, she was sure that he was thinking about her along those lines from the moment they'd shaken hands — and she was right. Coleman's take on her was of someone too young for the job, incorporating too many as yet unresolved contradictions, at once a little too grand about herself and, simultaneously, playing at self-importance like a child, an imperfectly self-governed child, quick to respond to the scent of disapproval, with a considerable talent for being wounded, and drawn on, as both child and woman, to achievement upon achievement, admirer upon admirer, conquest upon conquest, as much by uncertainty as by confidence. Someone smart for her age, even too smart, but off the mark emotionally and seriously underdeveloped in most other ways.

From her c.v. and from a supplementary autobiographical essay of fifteen pages that accompanied it — which detailed the progress of an intellectual journey begun at age six — he got the picture clearly enough. Her credentials were indeed excellent, but everything about her (including the credentials) struck him as particularly wrong for a little place like Athena. Privileged 16th arrondissement childhood on the rue de Longchamp. Monsieur Roux an engineer, owner of a firm employing forty; Madame Roux (nee de Walincourt) born with an ancient noble name, provincial aristocracy, wife, mother of three, scholar of medieval French literature, master harpsichordist, scholar of harpsichord literature, papal historian, “etc.” And what a telling “etc.” that was! Middle child and only daughter Delphine graduated from the Lycee Janson de Sailly, where she studied philosophy and literature, English and German, Latin, French literature: “...read the entire body of French literature in a very canonical way.” After the Lycee Janson, Lycee Henri IV: “...grueling in-depth study of French literature and philosophy, English language and literary history.” At twenty, after the Lycee Henri IV, the Ecole Normale Superieure de Fontenay: “...with the elite of French intellectual society ... only thirty a year selected.” Thesis: “Self-Denial in Georges Bataille.” Bataille? Not another one. Every ultra-cool Yale graduate student is working on either Mallarme or Bataille. It isn't difficult to understand what she intends for him to understand, especially as Coleman knows something of Paris from being a young professor with family on a Fulbright one year, and knows something about these ambitious French kids trained in the elite lycees. Extremely well prepared, intellectually well connected, very smart immature young people endowed with the most snobbish French education and vigorously preparing to be envied all their lives, they hang out every Saturday night at the cheap Vietnamese restaurant on rue St. Jacques talking about great things, never any mention of trivialities or small talk — ideas, politics, philosophy only. Even in their spare time, when they are all alone, they think only about the reception of Hegel in twentieth- century French intellectual life. The intellectual must not be frivolous. Life only about thought. Whether brainwashed to be aggressively Marxist or to be aggressively anti-Marxist, they are congenitally appalled by everything American. From this stuff and more she comes to Yale: applies to teach French language to undergraduates and to be incorporated into the Ph.D. program, and, as she notes in her autobiographical essay, she is but one of two from all of France who are accepted. “I arrived at Yale very Cartesian, and there everything was much more pluralistic and