The Human Stain

without backing down. She didn't have to defer to him, she didn't have to defer to anyone. He was no longer the dean who had hired her. Nor was he department chair. She was. Dean Silk was now nothing. She should indeed open that envelope to sign her name. He was nothing. It had all the comfort of a mantra: nothing.

She walked around with the sealed envelope in her purse for weeks, going over her reasons, not only to send it but to go ahead and sign it. He settles on this broken woman who cannot possibly fight back. Who cannot begin to compete with him. Who intellectually does not even exist. He settles on a woman who has never defended herself, who cannot defend herself, the weakest woman on this earth to take advantage of, drastically inferior to him in every possible way — and settles on her for the most transparent of antithetical motives: because he considers all women inferior and because he's frightened of any woman with a brain. Because I speak up for myself, because I will not be bullied, because I'm successful, because I'm attractive, because I'm independent-minded, because I have a first-rate education, a first-rate degree...

And then, down in New York, where she'd gone one Saturday to see the Jackson Pollock show, she pulled the envelope out of the purse and all but dropped the twelve-word letter, unsigned, into a mailbox in the Port Authority building, the first mailbox she saw after stepping from the Bonanza bus. It was still in her hand when she got on the subway, but once the train started moving she forgot about the letter, stuck it back in her bag, and let the meaningfulness of the subway take hold. She remained amazed and excited by the New York subway. When she was in the Metro in Paris she never thought about it, but the melancholic anguish of the people in the New York subway never failed to restore her belief in the Tightness of her having come to America. The New York subway was the symbol of why she'd come — her refusal to shrink from reality.

The Pollock show emotionally so took possession of her that she felt, as she advanced from one stupendous painting to the next, something of that swelling, clamorous feeling that is the mania of lust. When a woman's cell phone suddenly went off while the whole of the chaos of the painting entitled Number lA, 1948 was entering wildly into the space that previously that day — previously that year—had been nothing more than her body, she was so furious that she turned and exclaimed, “Madam, I'd like to strangle you!”

Then she went to the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street. She always did this in New York. She went to the museums, to the galleries, to concerts, she went to the movies that would never make their way to the one dreadful theater in backwoods Athena, and, in the end, no matter what specific things she'd come to New York to do, she wound up for an hour or so reading whatever book she'd brought with her while sitting in the main reading room of the library.

She reads. She looks around. She observes. She has little crushes on the men there. In Paris she had seen the movie Marathon Man at one of the festivals. (No one knows that at the movies she is a terrible sentimentalist and is often in tears.) In Marathon Man, the character, the fake student, hangs out at the New York Public Library and is picked up by Dustin Hoffman, and so it's in that romantic light that she has always thought of the New York Public Library. So far no one has picked her up there, except for a medical student who was too young, too raw, and immediately said the wrong thing. Right off he had said something about her accent, and she could not bear him. A boy who had not lived at all. He made her feel like a grandmother. She had, by his age, been through so many love affairs and so much thinking and rethinking, so many levels of suffering — at twenty, years younger than him, she had already lived her big love story not once but twice. In part she had come to America in flight from her love story (and, also, to make her exit as a bit player in the long-running drama — entitled Etc.— that was the almost criminally successful life of her mother). But now she is extremely lonely in her plight to find a man to connect with.

Others who try to pick her up sometimes say something acceptable enough, sometimes ironic enough or mischievous enough to be charming, but then — because up close she is more beautiful than they had realized and, for one so petite, a little more arrogant than they may have expected — they get shy and back off. The ones who make eye contact with her are automatically the ones she doesn't like. And the ones who are lost in their books, who are charmingly oblivious and charmingly desirable, are ... lost in their books. Whom is she looking for? She is looking for the man who is going to recognize her. She is looking for the Great Recognizer.

Today she is reading, in French, a book by Julia Kristeva, a treatise as wonderful as any ever written on melancholy, and across at the next table she sees a man reading, of all things, a book in French by Kristeva's husband, Philippe Sollers. Sollers is someone whose playfulness she refuses any longer to take seriously for all that she did at an earlier point in her intellectual development; the playful French writers, unlike the playful Eastern European writers like Kundera, no longer satisfy her ... but that is not the issue at the New York Public Library. The issue is the coincidence, a coincidence that is almost sinister. In her craving, restless state, she launches into a thousand speculations about the man who is reading Sollers while she is reading Kristeva and feels the imminence not only of a pickup but of an affair. She knows that this dark-haired man of forty or forty-two has just the kind of gravitas that she cannot find in anyone at Athena. What she is able to surmise from the way he quietly sits and reads makes her increasingly hopeful that something is about to happen.

And something does: a girl comes by to meet him, decidedly a girl, someone younger even than she is, and the two of them go off together, and she gathers up her things and leaves the library and at the first mailbox she sees, she takes the letter from her purse — the letter she's been carrying there for over a month — and she thrusts it into the mailbox with something like the fury with which she told the woman at the Pollock show that she wanted to strangle her. There! It's gone! I did it! Good!

A full five seconds must pass before the magnitude of the blunder overwhelms her and she feels her knees weaken. “Oh, my God!” Even after her having left it unsigned, even after her having employed a vulgar rhetoric not her own, the letter's origins are going to be no mystery to someone as fixated on her as Coleman Silk.

Now he will never leave her alone.

4. What Maniac Conceived It?

I SAW COLEMAN ALIVE only one more time after that July. He himself never told me about the visit to the college or the phone call from the student union to his son Jeff. I learned of his having been on the campus that day because he'd been observed there — inadvertently, from an office window — by his former colleague Herb Keble, who, near the end of his speech at the funeral, alluded to seeing Coleman standing hidden back against the shadowed wall of North Hall, seemingly secreting himself for reasons that Keble only could guess at. I knew about the phone call because Jeff Silk, whom I spoke with after the funeral, mentioned something about it, enough for me to know that the call had gone wildly out of Coleman's control. It was directly from Nelson Primus that I learned of the visit that Coleman had made to the attorney's office earlier on the same day he'd phoned Jeff and that had ended, like the other call, with Coleman lashing out in vituperative disgust. After that, neither Primus nor Jeff Silk ever spoke to Coleman again. Coleman didn't return their calls or mine — turned out he didn't return anyone's — and then it seems he disconnected his answering machine, because soon enough the phone just rang on endlessly when I tried to reach him.

He was there alone in the house, however — he hadn't gone away. I knew he was there because, after a couple of weeks of phoning unsuccessfully, one Saturday evening early in August I drove by after dark to check. Only a few lamps were burning but, sure enough, when I pulled over beside Coleman's hugely branched ancient maples, cut my engine, and sat motionless in the car on the blacktop road down at the bottom of the undulating lawn, there was the dance music coming from the open windows of the black-shuttered, white clapboard house, the evening-long Saturday FM program that took him back to Steena Palsson and the basement room on Sullivan Street right after the war. He is in there now just with Faunia, each of them protecting the other against everyone else — each of them, to the other, comprising everyone else. There they dance, as likely as not unclothed, beyond the ordeal of the world, in an unearthly paradise of earthbound lust where their coupling is the drama into which they decant all the angry disappointment of their lives. I remembered something he'd told me Faunia had said in the afterglow of one of their evenings, when so much seemed to be passing between them. He'd said to her, “This is more than sex,” and flatly she replied, “No, it's not. You just forgot what sex is. This is sex. All by itself. Don't fuck it up by pretending it's something else.”

Who are they now? They are the simplest version possible of themselves. The essence of singularity. Everything painful congealed into passion. They may no longer even regret that things are not otherwise. They are