The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “After I hear the rest of the letter,” I replied to the invitation to dance. “Read me the rest of Steena’s letter.”

  “Three months out of Minnesota when we met. Just went down into the subway and brought her up with me. Well,” he said, “that was 1948 for you,” and he turned back to her letter. “‘I was quite taken with you,’” he read, “‘but I was concerned you might find me too young, an uninteresting midwestern bland sort of girl, and besides, you were dating someone “smart and nice and lovely” already, though you added, with a sly smile, “I don’t believe she and I will get married.” “Why not?” I asked. “I may be getting bored,” you answered, thereby ensuring that I would do anything I could think of not to bore you, including dropping out of contact, if necessary, so as to avoid the risk of becoming boring. Well, that’s it. That’s enough. I shouldn’t even bother you. I promise I won’t ever again. Take care. Take care. Take care. Take care. Very fondly, Steena.’”

  “Well,” I said, “that is 1948 for you.”

  “Come. Let’s dance.”

  “But you mustn’t sing into my ear.”

  “Come on. Get up.”

  What the hell, I thought, we’ll both be dead soon enough, and so I got up, and there on the porch Coleman Silk and I began to dance the fox trot together. He led, and, as best I could, I followed. I remembered that day he’d burst into my studio after making burial arrangements for Iris and, out of his mind with grief and rage, told me that I had to write for him the book about all the unbelievable absurdities of his case, culminating in the murder of his wife. One would have thought that never again would this man have a taste for the foolishness of life, that all that was playful in him and light-hearted had been destroyed and lost, right along with the career, the reputation, and the formidable wife. Maybe why it didn’t even cross my mind to laugh and let him, if he wanted to, dance around the porch by himself, just laugh and enjoy myself watching him—maybe why I gave him my hand and let him place his arm around my back and push me dreamily around that old bluestone floor was because I had been there that day when her corpse was still warm and seen what he’d looked like.

  “I hope nobody from the volunteer fire department drives by,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We don’t want anybody tapping me on the shoulder and asking, ‘May I cut in?’”

  On we danced. There was nothing overtly carnal in it, but because Coleman was wearing only his denim shorts and my hand rested easily on his warm back as if it were the back of a dog or a horse, it wasn’t entirely a mocking act. There was a semi-serious sincerity in his guiding me about on the stone floor, not to mention a thoughtless delight in just being alive, accidentally and clownishly and for no reason alive—the kind of delight you take as a child when you first learn to play a tune with a comb and toilet paper.

  It was when we sat down that Coleman told me about the woman. “I’m having an affair, Nathan. I’m having an affair with a thirty-four-year-old woman. I can’t tell you what it’s done to me.”

  “We just finished dancing—you don’t have to.”

  “I thought I couldn’t take any more of anything. But when this stuff comes back so late in life, out of nowhere, completely unexpected, even unwanted, comes back at you and there’s nothing to dilute it with, when you’re no longer striving on twenty-two fronts, no longer deep in the daily disorder . . . when it’s just this . . .”

  “And when she’s thirty-four.”

  “And ignitable. An ignitable woman. She’s turned sex into a vice again.”

  “‘La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall.’”

  “Seems so. I say, ‘What is it like for you with somebody seventy-one?’ and she tells me, ‘It’s perfect with somebody seventy-one. He’s set in his ways and he can’t change. You know what he is. No surprises.’”

  “What’s made her so wise?”

  “Surprises. Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom. But it’s a very narrow, antisocial wisdom. It’s savage, too. It’s the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That’s her wisdom, and that’s her dignity, but it’s negative wisdom, and that’s not the kind that keeps you on course day to day. This is a woman whose life’s been trying to grind her down almost for as long as she’s had life. Whatever she’s learned comes from that.”

  I thought, He’s found somebody he can talk with . . . and then I thought, So have I. The moment a man starts to tell you about sex, he’s telling you something about the two of you. Ninety percent of the time it doesn’t happen, and probably it’s as well it doesn’t, though if you can’t get a level of candor on sex and you choose to behave instead as if this isn’t ever on your mind, the male friendship is incomplete. Most men never find such a friend. It’s not common. But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results. This probably isn’t usual for him, I was thinking, but because he’d come to me in his worst moment, full of the hatred that I’d watched poison him over the months, he feels the freedom of being with someone who’s seen you through a terrible illness from the side of your bed. He feels not so much the urge to brag as the enormous relief of not having to keep something so bewilderingly new as his own rebirth totally to himself.

  “Where did you find her?” I asked.

  “I went to pick up my mail at the end of the day and there she was, mopping the floor. She’s the skinny blonde who sometimes cleans out the post office. She’s on the regular janitorial staff at Athena. She’s a full-time janitor where I was once dean. The woman has nothing. Faunia Farley. That’s her name. Faunia has absolutely nothing.”

  “Why has she nothing?”

  “She had a husband. He beat her so badly she ended up in a coma. They had a dairy farm. He ran it so badly it went bankrupt. She had two children. A space heater tipped over, caught fire, and both children were asphyxiated. Aside from the ashes of the two children that she keeps in a canister under her bed, she owns nothing of value except an ’83 Chevy. The only time I’ve seen her come close to crying was when she told me, ‘I don’t know what to do with the ashes.’ Rural disaster has squeezed Faunia dry of even her tears. And she began life a rich, privileged kid. Brought up in a big sprawling house south of Boston. Fireplaces in the five bedrooms, the best antiques, heirloom china—everything old and the best, the family included. She can be surprisingly well spoken if she wants to be. But she’s dropped so far down the social ladder from so far up that by now she’s a pretty mixed bag of verbal beans. Faunia’s been exiled from the entitlement that should have been hers. Declassed. There’s a real democratization to her suffering.”

  “What undid her?”

  “A stepfather undid her. Upper-bourgeois evil undid her. There was a divorce when she was five. The prosperous father caught the beautiful mother having an affair. The mother liked money, remarried money, and the rich stepfather wouldn’t leave Faunia alone. Fondling her from the day he arrived. Couldn’t stay away from her. This blond angelic child, fondling her, fingering her—it’s when he tried fucking her that she ran away. She was fourteen. The mother refused to believe her. They took her to a psychiatrist. Faunia told the psychiatrist what happened, and after ten sessions the psychiatrist too sided with the stepfather. ‘Takes the side of those who pay him,’ Faunia says. ‘Just like everyone.’ The mother had an affair with the psychiatrist afterward. That is the story, as she reports it, of what launched her into the life of a tough having to make her way on her own. Ran away from home, from high school, went down south, worked there, came back up this way, got whatever work she could, and at twenty married this farmer, older than herself, a dairy farmer, a Vietnam vet, thinking that if they worked hard and raised kids and made the farm work she could have a stable, ordinary life, even if the guy was on the dumb side. Especially if he was on the dumb s
ide. She thought she might be better off being the one with the brains. She thought that was her advantage. She was wrong. All they had together was trouble. The farm failed. ‘Jerk-off,’ she tells me, ‘bought one tractor too many.’ And regularly beat her up. Beat her black and blue. You know what she presents as the high point of the marriage? The event she calls ‘the great warm shit fight.’ One evening they are in the barn after the milking arguing about something, and a cow next to her takes a big shit, and Faunia picks up a handful and flings it in Lester’s face. He flings a handful back, and that’s how it started. She said to me, ‘The warm shit fight may have been the best time we had together.’ At the end, they were covered with cow shit and roaring with laughter, and, after washing off with the hose in the barn, they went up to the house to fuck. But that was carrying a good thing too far. That wasn’t one-hundredth of the fun of the fight. Fucking Lester wasn’t ever fun—according to Faunia, he didn’t know how to do it. ‘Too dumb even to fuck right.’ When she tells me that I am the perfect man, I tell her that I see how that might seem so to her, coming to me after him.”

  “And fighting the Lesters of life with warm shit since she’s fourteen has made her what at thirty-four,” I asked, “aside from savagely wise? Tough? Shrewd? Enraged? Crazy?”

  “The fighting life has made her tough, certainly sexually tough, but it hasn’t made her crazy. At least I don’t think so yet. Enraged? If it’s there—and why wouldn’t it be?—it’s a furtive rage. Rage without the rage. And, for someone who seems to have lived entirely without luck, there’s no lament in her—none she shows to me, anyway. But as for shrewd, no. She says things sometimes that sound shrewd. She says, ‘Maybe you ought to think of me as a companion of equal age who happens to look younger. I think that’s where I’m at.’ When I asked, ‘What do you want from me?’ she said, ‘Some companionship. Maybe some knowledge. Sex. Pleasure. Don’t worry. That’s it.’ When I told her once she was wise beyond her years, she told me, ‘I’m dumb beyond my years.’ She was sure smarter than Lester, but shrewd? No. Something in Faunia is permanently fourteen and as far as you can get from shrewd. She had an affair with her boss, the guy who hired her. Smoky Hollenbeck. I hired him—guy who runs the college’s physical plant. Smoky used to be a football star here. Back in the seventies I knew him as a student. Now he’s a civil engineer. He hires Faunia for the custodial staff, and even while he’s hiring her, she understands what’s on his mind. The guy is attracted to her. He’s locked into an unexciting marriage, but he’s not angry with her about it—he’s not looking at her disdainfully, thinking, Why haven’t you settled down, why are you still tramping and whoring around? No bourgeois superiority from Smoky. Smoky is doing all the right things and doing them beautifully—a wife, kids, five kids, married as a man can be, a sports hero still around the college, popular and admired in town—but he has a gift: he can also step outside of that. You wouldn’t believe it to talk to him. Mr. Athena Square squared, performing in every single way he is supposed to perform. Appears to have bought into the story of himself one hundred percent. You would expect him to think, This stupid bitch with her fucked-up life? Get her the fuck out of my office. But he doesn’t. Unlike everyone else in Athena, he is not so caught up in the legend of Smoky that he is incapable of thinking, Yeah, this is a real cunt I’d like to fuck. Or incapable of acting. He fucks her, Nathan. Gets Faunia in bed with him and another of the women from the custodial staff. Fucks ’em together. Goes on for six months. Then a real estate woman, newly divorced, fresh on the local scene, she joins the act. Smoky’s circus. Smoky’s secret three-ring circus. But then, after six months, he drops her—takes Faunia out of the rotation and drops her. I knew nothing about any of this till she told me. And she only told me because one night in bed, her eyes roll back into her head and she calls me by his name. Whispers to me, ‘Smoky.’ On top of old Smoky. Her being with him in that ménage gave me a better idea of the dame I was dealing with. Upped the ante. Gave me a jolt, actually—this is no amateur. When I ask her how Smoky manages to attract his hordes, she tells me, ‘By the force of his prick.’ ‘Explain,’ I say, and she tells me, ‘You know how when a real cunt walks into a room, a man knows it? Well, the same thing happens the other way round. With certain people, no matter what the disguise, you understand what they’re there to do.’ In bed is the only place where Faunia is in any way shrewd, Nathan. A spontaneous physical shrewdness plays the leading role in bed—second lead played by transgressive audacity. In bed nothing escapes Faunia’s attention. Her flesh has eyes. Her flesh sees everything. In bed she is a powerful, coherent, unified being whose pleasure is in overstepping the boundaries. In bed she is a deep phenomenon. Maybe that’s a gift of the molestation. When we go downstairs to the kitchen, when I scramble some eggs and we sit there eating together, she’s a kid. Maybe that’s a gift of the molestation too. I am in the company of a blank-eyed, distracted, incoherent kid. This happens nowhere else. But whenever we eat, there it is: me and my kid. Seems to be all the daughter that’s left in her. She can’t sit up straight in her chair, she can’t string two sentences together having anything to do with each other. All the seeming nonchalance about sex and tragedy, all of that disappears, and I’m sitting there wanting to say to her, ‘Pull yourself up to the table, get the sleeve of my bathrobe out of your plate, try to listen to what I’m saying, and look at me, damn it, when you speak.’”

  “Do you say it?”

  “Doesn’t seem advisable. No, I don’t—not as long as I prefer to preserve the intensity of what is there. I think of that canister under her bed, where she keeps the ashes she doesn’t know what to do with, and I want to say, ‘It’s two years. It’s time to bury them. If you can’t put them in the ground, then go down to the river and shake out the ashes from the bridge. Let them float off. Let them go. I’ll go do it with you. We’ll do it together.’ But I am not the father to this daughter—that’s not the role I play here. I’m not her professor. I’m not anyone’s professor. From teaching people, correcting people, advising and examining and enlightening people, I am retired. I am a seventy-one-year-old man with a thirty-four-year-old mistress; this disqualifies me, in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, from enlightening anyone. I’m taking Viagra, Nathan. There’s La Belle Dame sans Merci. I owe all of this turbulence and happiness to Viagra. Without Viagra none of this would be happening. Without Viagra I would have a picture of the world appropriate to my age and wholly different aims. Without Viagra I would have the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly. I would not be doing something that makes no sense. I would not be doing something unseemly, rash, ill considered, and potentially disastrous for all involved. Without Viagra, I could continue, in my declining years, to develop the broad impersonal perspective of an experienced and educated honorably discharged man who has long ago given up the sensual enjoyment of life. I could continue to draw profound philosophical conclusions and have a steadying moral influence on the young, instead of having put myself back into the perpetual state of emergency that is sexual intoxication. Thanks to Viagra I’ve come to understand Zeus’s amorous transformations. That’s what they should have called Viagra. They should have called it Zeus.”

  Is he astonished to be telling me all this? I think he may be. But he’s too enlivened by it all to stop. The impulse is the same one that drove him to dance with me. Yes, I thought, it’s no longer writing Spooks that’s the defiant rebound from humiliation; it’s fucking Faunia. But there’s more even than that driving him. There’s the wish to let the brute out, let that force out—for half an hour, for two hours, for whatever, to be freed into the natural thing. He was married a long time. He had kids. He was the dean at a college. For forty years he was doing what was necessary to do. He was busy, and the natural thing that is the brute was moved into a box. And now that box is opened. Being a dean, being a father, being a husband, being a scholar, a teacher, reading the books, giving the lectures, marking the papers, giving the grad
es, it’s over. At seventy-one you’re not the high-spirited, horny brute you were at twenty-six, of course. But the remnants of the 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.”