The Human Stain

too well entrenched in disgust for that. They are out from under everything ever piled on top of them. Nothing in life tempts them, nothing in life excites them, nothing in life subdues their hatred of life anything like this intimacy. Who are these drastically unalike people, so incongruously allied at seventy-one and thirty-four? They are the disaster to which they are enjoined. To the beat of Tommy Dorsey's band and the gentle crooning of young Sinatra, dancing their way stark naked right into a violent death. Everyone on earth does the end differently: this is how the two of them work it out. There is now no way they will stop themselves in time. It's done.

I am not alone in listening to the music from the road.

When my calls were not returned, I assumed that Coleman wished to have nothing more to do with me. Something had gone wrong, and I assumed, as one does when a friendship ends abruptly — a new friendship particularly — that I was responsible, if not for some indiscreet word or deed that had deeply irritated or offended him, then by being who and what I am. Coleman had first come to me, remember, because, unrealistically, he hoped to persuade me to write the book explaining how the college had killed his wife; permitting this same writer to nose around in his private life was probably the last thing he now wanted. I didn't know what to conclude other than that his concealing from me the details of his life with Faunia had, for whatever reason, come to seem to him far wiser than his continuing to confide in me.

Of course I knew nothing then of the truth of his origins — that, too, I'd learn about conclusively at the funeral — and so I couldn't begin to surmise that the reason we'd never met in the years before Iris's death, the reason that he'd wanted not to meet, was because I had myself grown up only a few miles from East Orange and because, having more than a run-of-the-mill familiarity with the region, I might be too knowledgeable or too curious to leave his roots in Jersey unscrutinized. Suppose I turned out to have been one of the Newark Jewish boys in Doc Chizner's after-school boxing classes? The fact is that I was one, but not until '46 and '47, by which time Silky was no longer helping Doc teach kids like me the right way to stand and move and throw a punch but was at NYU on the GI Bill.

The fact is that, having befriended me during the time he was writing his draff of Spooks, he had indeed taken the risk, and a foolish one at that, of being exposed, nearly six decades on, as East Orange High's Negro valedictorian, the colored kid who'd boxed around Jersey in amateur bouts out of the Morton Street Boys Club before entering the navy as a white man; dropping me in the middle of that summer made sense for every possible reason, even if I had no way of imagining why.

Well, to the last time I saw him. One August Saturday, out of loneliness, I drove over to Tanglewood to hear the open rehearsal of the next day's concert program. A week after having parked down from his house, I was still both missing Coleman and missing the experience of having an intimate friend, and so I thought to make myself a part of that smallish Saturday-morning audience that fills about a quarter of the Music Shed for these rehearsals, an audience of summer folks who are music lovers and of visiting music students, but mainly of elderly tourists, people with hearing aids and people carrying binoculars and people paging through the New York Times who'd been bused to the Berkshires for the day.

Maybe it was the oddness born of my being out and about that did it, the momentary experience of being a sociable creature (or a creature feigning sociability), or maybe it was because of a fleeting notion I had of the elderly congregated together in the audience as embarkees, as deportees, waiting to be floated away on the music's buoyancy from the all-too-tangible enclosure of old age, but on this breezy, sunny Saturday in the last summer of Coleman Silk's life, the Music Shed kept reminding me of the open-sided piers that once extended cavernously out over the Hudson, as though one of those spacious, steel-raftered piers dating from when ocean liners docked in Manhattan had been raised from the water in all its hugeness and rocketed north a hundred and twenty miles, set down intact on the spacious Tanglewood lawn, a perfect landing amid the tall trees and sweeping views of mountainous New England.

As I made my way to a single empty seat that I spotted, one of the few empty seats close to the stage that nobody had as yet designated as reserved by slinging a sweater or a jacket across it, I kept thinking that we were all going somewhere together, had in fact gone and gotten there, leaving everything behind ... when all we were doing was readying ourselves to hear the Boston Symphony rehearse Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Rimsky- Korsakov. Underfoot at the Music Shed there's a packed brown earth floor that couldn't make it clearer that your chair's aground on terra firma; roosting at the peak of the structure are the birds whose tweeting you hear in the weighty silence between orchestral movements, the swallows and wrens that wing busily in from the woods down the hill and then go zipping off again in a way no bird would have dared cut loose from Noah's floating Ark. We were about a three-hour drive west of the Atlantic, but I couldn't shake this dual sense of both being where I was and of having pushed off, along with the rest of the senior citizens, for a mysterious watery unknown.

Was it merely death that was on my mind in thinking of this debarkation? Death and myself? Death and Coleman? Or was it death and an assemblage of people able still to find pleasure in being bused about like a bunch of campers on a summer outing, and yet, as a palpable human multitude, an entity of sensate flesh and warm red blood, separated from oblivion by the thinnest, most fragile layer of life?

The program that preceded the rehearsal was just ending when I arrived. A lively lecturer dressed in a sport shirt and khaki trousers stood before the empty orchestra chairs introducing the audience to the last of the pieces they'd be hearing—-on a tape machine playing for them bits of Rachmaninoff and speaking brightly of “the dark, rhythmic quality” of the Symphonic Dances. Only when he'd finished and the audience broke into applause did somebody emerge from the wings to uncover the timpani and begin to set out the sheet music on the music stands. At the far side of the stage, a couple of stagehands appeared carrying the harps, and then the musicians entered, chatting with one another as they drifted on, all of them, like the lecturer, casually dressed for the rehearsal — an oboist in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a couple of bass players wearing faded Levi's, and then the fiddle players, men and women alike outfitted, from the look of it, by Banana Republic. As the conductor was slipping on his glasses — a guest conductor, Sergiu Commissiona, an aged Romanian in a turtleneck shirt, white bush of hair up top, blue espadrilles below — and the childishly courteous audience once again began to applaud, I noticed Coleman and Faunia walking down the aisle, looking for a place close-up to sit.

The musicians, about to undergo their transformation from a bunch of seemingly untroubled vacationers into a powerful, fluid music machine, had already settled in and were tuning up as the couple — the tall, gaunt-faced blond woman and the slender, handsome, gray-haired man not so tall as she and much older, though still walking his light-footed athletic walk — made their way to two empty seats three rows down from me and off to my right some twenty feet.

The piece by Rimsky-Korsakov was a tuneful fairy tale of oboes and flutes whose sweetness the audience found irresistible, and when the orchestra came to the end of their first go-round enthusiastic applause again poured forth like an upsurge of innocence from the elderly crowd. The musicians had indeed laid bare the youngest, most innocent of our ideas of life, the indestructible yearning for the way things aren't and can never be. Or so I thought as I turned my gaze toward my former friend and his mistress and found them looking nothing like so unusual or humanly isolated as I'd been coming to envision the pair of them since Coleman had dropped out of sight. They looked nothing like immoderate people, least of all Faunia, whose sculpted Yankee features made me think of a narrow room with windows in it but no door. Nothing about these two seemed at odds with life or on the attack — or on the defensive, either. Perhaps by herself, in this unfamiliar environment, Faunia mightn't have been so at ease as she seemed, but with Coleman at her side, her affinity for the setting appeared no less natural than the affinity for him. They didn't look like a pair of desperadoes sitting there together but rather like a couple who had achieved their own supremely concentrated serenity, who took no notice whatsoever of the feelings and fantasies that their presence might foment anywhere in the world, let alone in Berkshire County.

I wondered if Coleman had coached her beforehand on how he wanted her to behave. I wondered if she'd listen if he had. I wondered if coaching was necessary. I wondered why he'd chosen to bring her to Tanglewood. Simply because he wanted to hear the music? Because he wanted her to hear it and to see the live musicians? Under the auspices of Aphrodite, in the guise of Pygmalion, and in the environs of Tanglewood, was the retired classics professor now bringing recalcitrant, transgressive Faunia to life as a tastefully civilized Galatea? Was Coleman embarked on educating her, on influencing her — embarked on saving her from the tragedy of her strangeness? Was Tanglewood a first big step toward making of their waywardness something less unorthodox? Why so soon? Why at all? Why, when everything they had and were together had evolved out of the subterranean and the clandestinely crude? Why bother to normalize or regularize this alliance, why even attempt to, by going