The Human Stain

could be misunderstood to imply that she esteemed good looks above intelligence, erudition, and cultural refinement; moreover, any photos she received might be touched up, years old, or altogether spurious. Asking for a photo might even discourage a response from the very men whose interest she was hoping to elicit. Yet if she didn't request a photo, she could wind up traveling all the way to Boston, to New York, or farther, to find herself the dinner companion of someone wholly inappropriate and even distasteful. And distasteful not necessarily because of looks alone. What if he was a liar? What if he was a charlatan? What if he was a psychopath? What if he had AIDS? What if he was violent, vicious, married, or on Medicare? What if he was a weirdo, someone she couldn't get rid of? What if she gave her name and her place of employment to a stalker? Yet, on their first meeting, how could she withhold her name? In search of a serious, impassioned love affair leading to marriage and a family, how could an open, honest person start off by lying about something as fundamental as her name? And what about race? Oughtn't she to include the kindly solicitation “Race unimportant”? But it wasn't unimportant; it should be, it ought to be, it well might have been but for the fiasco back in Paris when she was seventeen that convinced her that a man of another race was an unfeasible — because an unknowable — partner.

She was young and adventurous, she didn't want to be cautious, and he was from a good family in Brazzaville, the son of a supreme court judge — or so he said — in Paris as an exchange student for a year at Nanterre. Dominique was his name, and she thought of him as a fellow spiritual lover of literature. She'd met him at one of the Milan Kundera lectures. He picked her up there, and outside they were still basking in Kundera's observations on Madame Bovary, infected, the both of them, with what Delphine excitedly thought of as “the Kundera disease.” Kundera was legitimatized for them by being persecuted as a Czech writer, by being someone who had lost out in Czechoslovakia's great historical struggle to be free. Kundera's playfulness did not appear to be frivolous, not at all. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting they loved. There was something trustworthy about him. His Eastern Europeanness. The restless nature of the intellectual. That everything appeared to be difficult for him. Both were won over by Kundera's modesty, the very opposite of superstar demeanor, and both believed in his ethos of thinking and suffering. All that intellectual tribulation — and then there were his looks. Delphine was very taken by the writer's poetically prize-fighterish looks, to her an outward sign of everything colliding within.

After the pickup at the Kundera lecture, it was completely a physical experience with Dominique, and she had never had that before. It was completely about her body. She had just connected so much with the Kundera lecture and she had mistaken that connection for the connection she had to Dominique, and it happened all very fast. There was nothing except her body. Dominique didn't understand that she didn't want just sex. She wanted to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit, turned and basted. That's what he did — those were even his words: turning her and basting her. He was interested in nothing else, least of all in literature. Loosen up and shut up — that's his attitude with her, and she somehow gets locked in, and then comes the terrible night she shows up at his room and he is waiting there for her with his friend. It's not that she's now prejudiced, it's just that she realizes she would not have so misjudged a man of her own race. This was her worst failure, and she could never forget it. Redemption had only come with the professor who'd given her his Roman ring. Sex, yes, wonderful sex, but sex with metaphysics. Sex with metaphysics with a man with gravitas who is not vain. Someone like Kundera. That is the plan.

The problem confronting her as she sat alone at the computer long after dark, the only person left in Barton Hall, unable to leave her office, unable to face one more night in her apartment without even a cat for company — the problem was how to include in her ad, no matter how subtly coded, something that essentially said, “Whites only need apply.” If it were discovered at Athena that it was she who had specified such an exclusion — no, that would not do for a person ascending so rapidly through the Athena academic hierarchy. Yet she had no choice but to ask for a photograph, even though she knew — knew from trying as hard as she could to think of everything, to be naive about nothing, on the basis of just her brief life as a woman on her own to take into account how men could behave — that there was nothing to stop someone sufficiently sadistic or perverse from sending a photograph designed to mislead specifically in the matter of race.

No, it was too risky altogether — as well as beneath her dignity — to place an ad to help her meet a man of the caliber that she'd never find anywhere among the faculty of as dreadfully provincial a place as Athena. She could not do it and she should not do it, and yet all the while she thought of the uncertainties, the outright dangers, of advertising oneself to strangers as a woman in search of a suitable mate, all the while she thought of the reasons why it was inadvisable, as chair of the Department of Languages and Literature, to risk revealing herself to colleagues as something other than a serious teacher and scholar — exposing herself as someone with needs and desires that, though altogether human, could be deliberately misconstrued so as to trivialize her — she was doing it: fresh from e-mailing every member of her department her latest thoughts on the subject of senior theses, trying to compose an ad that adhered to the banal linguistic formula of the standard New York Review personal but one that managed as well to present a truthful appraisal of her caliber. At it now for over an hour and she was still unable to settle on anything unhumiliating enough to e-mail to the paper even pseudonymously.

Western Mass. 29 yr. old petite, passionate, Parisian professor, equally at home teaching Moliere as

Brainy, beautiful Berkshire academic, equally at home cooking medaillons de veau as chairing a humanities dept., seeks

Serious SWF scholar seeks

SWF Yale Ph.D. Parisian-born academic. Petite, scholarly, literature-loving, fashion-conscious brunette seeks

Attractive, serious scholar seeks

SWF Ph.D., French, Mass.-based, seeks

Seeks what? Anything, anything other than these Athena men — the wisecracking boys, the feminized old ladies, the timorous, tedious family freaks, the professional dads, all of them so earnest and so emasculated. She is revolted by the fact that they pride themselves on doing half the domestic work. Intolerable. “Yes, I have to go, I have to relieve my wife. I have to do as much diaper changing as she does, you know.” She cringes when they brag about their helpfulness. Do it, fine, but don't have the vulgarity to mention it. Why make such a spectacle of yourself as the fifty-fifty husband? Just do it and shut up about it. In this revulsion she is very different from her women colleagues who value these men for their “sensitivity.” Is that what overpraising their wives is, “sensitivity”? “Oh, Sara Lee is such an extraordinary this-and-that. She's already published four and a half articles...” Mr. Sensitivity always has to mention her glory. Mr. Sensitivity can't talk about some great show at the Metropolitan without having to be sure to preface it, “Sara Lee says...” Either they overpraise their wives or they fall dead silent. The husband falls silent and grows more and more depressed, and she has never encountered this in any other country. If Sara Lee is an academic who can't find a job while he, say, is barely holding on to his job, he would rather lose his job than have her think she is getting the bad end of the deal. There would even be a certain pride if the situation were reversed and he was the one who had to stay home while she didn't. A French woman, even a French feminist, would find such a man disgusting. The Frenchwoman is intelligent, she's sexy, she's truly independent, and if he talks more than she does, so what, where's the issue? What's the fiery contention all about? Not “Oh, did you notice, she's so dominated by her rude, power-hungry husband.” No, the more of a woman she is, the more the Frenchwoman wants the man to project his power. Oh, how she had prayed, on arriving at Athena five years back, that she might meet some marvelous man who projected his power, and instead the bulk of younger male faculty are these domestic, emasculated types, intellectually unstimulating, pedestrian, the overpraising husbands of Sara Lee whom she has deliciously categorized for her correspondents in Paris as “The Diapers.”

Then there are “The Hats.” The Hats are the “writers in residence,” America's incredibly pretentious writers in residence. Probably, at little Athena, she hasn't seen the worst of them, but these two are bad enough. They show up to teach once a week, and they are married and they come on to her, and they are impossible. When can we have lunch, Delphine? Sorry, she thinks, but I am not impressed. The thing she liked about Kundera at his lectures was that he was always slightly shadowy, even slightly shabby sometimes, a great writer malgre lui. At least she perceived it that way and that's what she liked in him. But she certainly does not like, cannot stand, the American I-am-the-writer type who, when he looks at her, she knows is thinking, With your French confidence and your French fashions and your elitist French education, you are very French indeed, but you are nonetheless the academic and I am the writer — we are not equals.