The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  And no one to stop him, Delphine thought. No one to stand in his way.

  With the realization that he was beyond the jurisdiction of the college and therefore restrained by nothing from taking his revenge on her—on her, yes, on her for everything she had done to prevent him from psychologically terrorizing his female students, on her for the role she had willingly played in having him stripped of authority and removed from the classroom—she was unable to contain her outrage. Faunia Farley was his substitute for her. Through Faunia Farley he was striking back at her. Who else’s face and name and form does she suggest to you but mine—the mirror image of me, she could suggest to you no one else’s. By luring a woman who is, as I am, employed by Athena College, who is, as I am, less than half your age—yet a woman otherwise my opposite in every way—you at once cleverly masquerade and flagrantly disclose just who it is you wish to destroy. You are not so unshrewd as not to know it, and, from your own august station, you are ruthless enough to enjoy it. But neither am I so stupid as not to recognize that it’s me, in effigy, you are out to get.

  Understanding had come so swiftly, in sentences so spontaneously explosive, that even as she signed her name at the bottom of the letter’s second page and addressed an envelope to him in care of general delivery, she was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human being like Faunia Farley into a plaything only so as to revenge himself on her. How could even he do this? No, she would not alter by one syllable what she’d written nor would she bother to type it up so as to make it easier for him to read. She refused to vitiate her message where it was graphically demonstrated by the propulsive, driven slant of her script. Let him not underestimate her resolve: nothing was now more important to her than exposing Coleman Silk for what he was.

  But twenty minutes later she tore up the letter. And luckily. Luckily. When the unbridled idealism swept over her, she could not always see it as fantasy. Right she was to reprimand so reprehensible a predator. But to imagine saving a woman as far gone as Faunia Farley when she hadn’t been able to rescue Tracy? To imagine prevailing against a man who, in his embittered old age, was free now not only of every institutional restraint but—humanist that he was!—of every humane consideration? For her there could be no greater delusion than believing herself a match for Coleman Silk’s guile. Even a letter so clearly composed in the white heat of moral repulsion, a letter unmistakably informing him that his secret was out, that he was unmasked, exposed, tracked down, would somehow, in his hands, be twisted into an indictment with which to compromise her and, if the opportunity presented itself, to outright ruin her.

  He was ruthless and he was paranoid, and whether she liked it or not, there were practical matters to take into account, concerns that might not have impeded her back when she was a Marxist-oriented lycée student whose inability to sanction injustice sometimes, admittedly, overtook common sense. But now she was a college professor, awarded early tenure, already chairperson of her own department, and all but certain of moving on someday to Princeton, to Columbia, to Cornell, to Chicago, perhaps even triumphantly back to Yale. A letter like this, signed by her and passed from hand to hand by Coleman Silk until, inevitably, it found its way to whoever, out of envy, out of resentment, because she was just too damn successful too young, might wish to undermine her . . . Yes, bold as it was, with none of her fury censored out, this letter would be used by him to trivialize her, to contend that she lacked maturity and had no business being anyone’s superior. He had connections, he knew people still—he could do it. He would do it, so falsify her meaning . . .

  Quickly she tore the letter into tiny pieces and, at the center of a clean sheet of paper, with a red ballpoint pen of the kind she ordinarily never used for correspondence and in big block letters that no one would recognize as hers, she wrote:

  Everyone knows

  But that was all. She stopped herself there. Three nights later, minutes after turning out the lights, she got up out of bed and, having come to her senses, went to her desk to crumple up and discard and forget forever the piece of paper beginning “Everyone knows” and instead, leaning over the desk, without even seating herself—fearing that in the time it took to sit down she would again lose her nerve—she wrote in a rush ten more words that would suffice to let him know that exposure was imminent. The envelope was addressed, stamped, the unsigned note sealed up inside it, the desk lamp flicked off, and Delphine, relieved at having decisively settled on the most telling thing to do within the practical limitations of her situation, was back in bed and morally primed to sleep untroubled.

  But she had first to subdue everything driving her to get back up and tear open the envelope so as to reread what she’d written, to see if she had said too little or said it too feebly—or said it too stridently. Of course that wasn’t her rhetoric. It couldn’t be. That’s why she’d used it—it was too blatant, too vulgar, far too sloganlike to be traced to her. But for that very reason, it was perhaps misjudged by her and unconvincing. She had to get up to see if she had remembered to disguise her handwriting—to see if, inadvertently, under the spell of the moment, in an angry flourish, she had forgotten herself and signed her name. She had to see if there was any way in which she had unthinkingly revealed who she was. And if she had? She should sign her name. Her whole life had been a battle not to be cowed by the Coleman Silks, who use their privilege to overpower everyone else and do exactly as they please. Speaking to men. Speaking up to men. Even to much older men. Learning not to be fearful of their presumed authority or their sage pretensions. Figuring out that her intelligence did matter. Daring to consider herself their equal. Learning, when she put forward an argument and it didn’t work, to overcome the urge to capitulate, learning to summon up the logic and the confidence and the cool to keep arguing, no matter what they did or said to shut her up. Learning to take the second step, to sustain the effort instead of collapsing. Learning to argue her point 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 Métro 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 rightness 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 pai
nting 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 1A, 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 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.