The Human Stain

brute, the remnants of the natural thing — he is in touch now with the remnants. And he's happy as a result, he's grateful to be in touch with the remnants. He's more than happy — he's thrilled, and he's bound, deeply bound to her already, because of the thrill. It's not family that's doing it — biology has no use for him anymore. It's not family, it's not responsibility, it's not duty, it's not money, it's not a shared philosophy or the love of literature, it's not big discussions of great ideas. No, what binds him to her is the thrill. Tomorrow he develops cancer, and boom. But today he has this thrill.

Why is he telling me? Because to be able to abandon oneself to this freely, someone has to know it. He's free to be abandoned, I thought, because there's nothing at stake. Because there is no future. Because he's seventy-one and she's thirty-four. He's in it not for learning, not for planning, but for adventure; he's in it as she is: for the ride. He's been given a lot of license by those thirty-seven years. An old man and, one last time, the sexual charge. What is more moving for anybody?

“Of course I have to ask,” Coleman said, “what she's doing with me. What is really going through her mind? An exciting new experience for her, to be with a man as old as her grandfather?”

“I suppose there is that type of woman,” I said, “for whom it is an exciting experience. There's every other type, why shouldn't there be that type? Look, there is obviously a department somewhere, Coleman, a federal agency that deals with old men, and she comes from that agency.”

“As a young guy,” Coleman told me, “I was never involved with ugly women. But in the navy I had a friend, Farriello, and ugly women were his specialty. Down at Norfolk, if we went to a dance at a church, if we went at night to the USO, Farriello made a beeline for the ugliest girl. When I laughed at him, he told me I didn't know what I was missing. They're frustrated, he told me. They're not as beautiful, he told me, as the empresses you choose, so they'll do whatever you want. Most men are stupid, he said, because they don't know this. They don't understand that if only you approach the ugliest woman, she is the one who is the most extraordinary. If you can open her up, that is. But if you succeed? If you succeed in opening her up, you don't know what to do first, she is vibrating so. And all because she's ugly. Because she is never chosen. Because she is in the corner when all the other girls dance. And that's what it's like to be an old man. To be like that ugly girl. To be in the corner at the dance.”

“So Faunia's your Farriello.”

He smiled. “More or less.”

“Well, whatever else may be going on,” I told him, “thanks to Viagra you're no longer suffering the torture of writing that book.”

“I think that's so,” Coleman said. “I think that's true. That stupid book. And did I tell you that Faunia can't read? I found this out when we drove up to Vermont one night for dinner. Couldn't read the menu. Tossed it aside. She has a way, when she wants to look properly contemptuous, of lifting just a half of her upper lip, lifting it a hair, and then speaking what's on her mind. Properly contemptuous, she says to the waitress, ‘Whatever he has, ditto.’”

“She went to school until she was fourteen. How come she can't read?”

“The ability to read seems to have perished right along with the childhood when she learned how. I asked her how this could happen, but all she did was laugh. ‘Easy,’ she says. The good liberals down at Athena are trying to encourage her to enter a literacy program, but Faunia's not having it. And don't you try to teach me. Do anything you want with me, anything,' she told me that night, ‘but don't pull that shit. Bad enough having to hear people speak. Start teaching me to read, force me into that, push reading on me, and it'll be you who push me over the edge.’ All the way back from Vermont, I was silent, and so was she. Not until we reached the house did we utter a word to each other. ‘You're not up to fucking somebody who can't read,’ she said. 'You're going to drop me because I'm not a worthy, legitimate person who reads. You're going to say to me, ‘Learn to read or go.’ 'No,' I told her, 'I'm going to fuck you all the harder because you can't read.' ‘Good,’ she said, 'we understand each other. I don't do it like those literate girls and I don't want to be done to like them.' 'I'm going to fuck you,' I said, ‘for just what you are.’ 'That's the ticket,' she says. We were both laughing by then. Faunia's got the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble, and so she was laughing that laugh of hers, that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh — you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past — and by then she's unzipping my fly. But she was right on the money about my having decided to give her up. All the way back from Vermont I was thinking exactly what she said I was thinking. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to impose my wonderful virtue on her. Or on myself. That's over. I know these things don't come without a cost. I know that there's no insurance you can buy on this. I know how the thing that's restoring you can wind up killing you. I know that every mistake that a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator. But right now I happen not to care. I wake up in the morning, there's a towel on the floor, there's baby oil on the bedside table. How did all that get there? Then I remember. Got there because I'm alive again. Because I'm back in the tornado. Because this is what it is with a capital isness. I'm not going to give her up, Nathan. I've started to call her Voluptas.”

As a result of surgery I had several years ago to remove my prostate — cancer surgery that, though successful, was not without the adverse aftereffects almost unavoidable in such operations because of nerve damage and internal scarring — I've been left incontinent, and so, the first thing I did when I got home from Coleman's was to dispose of the absorbent cotton pad that I wear night and day, slipped inside the crotch of my underwear the way a hot dog lies in a roll. Because of the heat that evening, and because I wasn't going out to a public place or a social gathering, I'd tried to get by with ordinary cotton briefs pulled on over the pad instead of the plastic ones, and the result was that the urine had seeped through to my khaki trousers. I discovered when I got home that the trousers were discolored at the front and that I smelled a little — the pads are treated, but there was, on this occasion, an odor. I'd been so engaged by Coleman and his story that I'd failed to monitor myself. All the while I was there, drinking a beer, dancing with him, attending to the clarity — the predictable rationality and descriptive clarity — with which he worked to make less unsettling to himself this turn that life had taken, I hadn't gone off to check myself, as ordinarily I do during my waking hours, and so, what from time to time now happens to me happened that night.

No, a mishap like this one doesn't throw me as much as it used to when, in the months after the surgery, I was first experimenting with the ways of handling the problem — and when, of course, I was habituated to being a free and easy, dry and odorless adult possessing an adult's mastery of the body's elementary functions, someone who for some sixty years had gone about his everyday business unworried about the status of his underclothes. Yet I do suffer at least a pang of distress when I have to deal with something messier than the ordinary inconvenience that is now a part of my life, and I still despair to think that the contingency that virtually defines the infant state will never be alleviated.

I was also left impotent by the surgery. The drug therapy that was practically brand-new in the summer of 1998 and that had already, in its short time on the market, proved to be something like a miraculous elixir, restoring functional potency to many otherwise healthy, elderly men like Coleman, was of no use to me because of the extensive nerve damage done by the operation. For conditions like mine Viagra could do nothing, though even had it proved helpful, I don't believe I would have taken it.

I want to make clear that it wasn't impotence that led me into a reclusive existence. To the contrary. I'd already been living and writing for some eighteen months in my two-room cabin up here in the Berkshires when, following a routine physical exam, I received a preliminary diagnosis of prostate cancer and, a month later, after the follow-up tests, went to Boston for the prostatectomy. My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience — or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings. As a result, I was able to lessen a little my postoperative shock at the prospect of permanent impotence by remembering that all the surgery had done was to make me hold to a renunciation to which I had already voluntarily submitted. The operation did no more than to enforce with finality a decision I'd come to on my own, under the pressure of a lifelong experience of entanglements but in a time of full, vigorous, and restless potency, when the venturesome masculine mania to repeat the act — repeat it and repeat it and repeat it — remained undeterred by physiological problems.