The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  This was the Lester Farley who came roaring out of the bushes. This was the man who came upon Coleman and Faunia as they stood just inside the kitchen doorway, who came roaring at them out of the darkness of the bushes at the side of the house. And all of that was just a little of what was inside his head, night after night, all through the spring and now into early summer, hiding for hours on end, cramped, still, living through so much emotion, and waiting there in hiding to see her doing it. Doing what she was doing when her own two kids were suffocating to death in the smoke. This time it wasn’t even with a guy her age. Not even Farley’s age. This time it wasn’t with her boss, the great All-American Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck could give her something in return at least. You could almost respect her for Hollenbeck. But now the woman was so far gone she would do it for nothing with anybody. Now it was with a gray-haired skin-and-bones old man, with a high-and-mighty Jew professor, his yellow Jew face contorted with pleasure and his trembling old hands gripping her head. Who else has a wife sucks off an old Jew? Who else! This time the wanton, murdering, moaning bitch was pumping into her whoring mouth the watery come of a disgusting old Jew, and Rawley and Les Junior were still dead.

  Payback. There was no end to it.

  It felt like flying, it felt like Nam, it felt like the moment in which you go wild. Crazier, suddenly, because she is sucking off that Jew than because she killed the kids, Farley is flying upward, screaming, and the Jew professor is screaming back, the Jew professor is raising a tire iron, and it is only because Farley is unarmed—because that night he’d come there right from fire department drill and without a single one of the guns from his basement full of guns—that he doesn’t blow them away. How it happened that he didn’t reach for the tire iron and take it from him and end everything that way, he would never know. Beautiful what he could have achieved with that tire iron. “Put it down! I’ll open your fuckin’ head with it! Fuckin’ put it down!” And the Jew put it down. Luckily for the Jew, he put it down.

  After he made it home that night (never know how he did that either) and right through to the early hours of the morning—when it took five men from the fire department, five buddies of his, to hold him down and get him into restraints and drive him over to Northampton—Lester saw it all, everything, all at once, right there in his own house enduring the heat, enduring the rain, the mud, giant ants, killer bees on his own linoleum floor just beside the kitchen table, being sick with diarrhea, headaches, sick from no food and no water, short of ammo, certain this is his last night, waiting for it to happen, Foster stepping on the booby trap, Quillen drowning, himself almost drowning, freaking out, throwing grenades in every direction and shouting “I don’t want to die,” the warplanes all mixed up and shooting at them, Drago losing a leg, an arm, his nose, Conrity’s burned body sticking to his hands, unable to get a chopper to land, the chopper saying they cannot land because we are under attack and him so fucking angry knowing that he is going to die that he is trying to shoot it down, shoot down our own chopper—the most inhuman night he ever witnessed and it is right there now in his own scumbag house, and the longest night too, his longest night on earth and petrified with every move he makes, guys hollering and shitting and crying, himself unprepared to hear so much crying, guys hit in the face and dying, taking their last breath and dying, Conrity’s body all over his hands, Drago bleeding all over the place, Lester trying to shake somebody dead awake and hollering, screaming without stopping, “I don’t want to die.” No time out from death. No break time from death. No running from death. No letup from death. Battling death right through till morning and everything intense. The fear intense, the anger intense, no helicopter willing to land and the terrible smell of Drago’s blood there in his own fucking house. He did not know how bad it could smell. EVERYTHING SO INTENSE AND EVERYBODY FAR FROM HOME AND ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY RAGE!

  Nearly all the way to Northampton—till they couldn’t stand it anymore and gagged him—Farley is digging in late at night and waking up in the morning to find that he’s slept in someone’s grave with the maggots. “Please!” he cried. “No more of this! No more!” And so they had no choice but to shut him up.

  At the VA hospital, a place to which he could be brought only by force and from which he’d been running for years—fleeing his whole life from the hospital of a government he could not deal with—they put him on the lockup ward, tied him to the bed, rehydrated him, stabilized him, detoxified him, got him off the alcohol, treated him for liver damage, and then, during the six weeks that followed, every morning in his group therapy session he recounted how Rawley and Les Junior had died. He told them all what happened, told them every day what had failed to happen when he saw the suffocated faces of his two little kids and knew for sure that they were dead.

  “Numb,” he said. “Fuckin’ numb. No emotions. Numb to the death of my own kids. My son’s eyes are rolled in back of his head and he has no pulse. He has no heartbeat. My son isn’t fucking breathing. My son. Little Les. The only son I will ever have. But I did not feel anything. I was acting as if he was a stranger. Same with Rawley. She was a stranger. My little girl. That fucking Vietnam, you caused this! After all these years the war is over, and you caused this! All my feelings are all fucked up. I feel like I’ve been hit on the side of the head with a two-by-four when nothing is happening. Then something is happening, something fucking huge, I don’t feel a fucking thing. Numbed out. My kids are dead, but my body is numb and my mind is blank. Vietnam. That’s why! I never did cry for my kids. He was five and she was eight. I said to myself, ‘Why can’t I feel?’ I said, ‘Why didn’t I save them? Why couldn’t I save them?’ Payback. Payback! I kept thinking about Vietnam. About all the times I think I died. That’s how I began to know that I can’t die. Because I died already. Because I died already in Vietnam. Because I am a man who fucking died.”

  The group consisted of Vietnam vets like Farley except for two from the Gulf War, crybabies who got a little sand in their eyes in a four-day ground war. A hundred-hour war. A bunch of waiting in the desert. The Vietnam vets were men who, in their postwar lives, had themselves been through the worst—divorce, booze, drugs, crime, the police, jail, the devastating lowness of depression, uncontrollable crying, wanting to scream, wanting to smash something, the hands trembling and the body twitching and the tightness in the face and the sweats from head to toe from reliving the metal flying and the brilliant explosions and the severed limbs, from reliving the killing of the prisoners and the families and the old ladies and the kids—and so, though they nodded their heads about Rawley and Little Les and understood how he couldn’t feel for them when he saw them with their eyes rolled back because he himself was dead, they nonetheless agreed, these really ill guys (in that rare moment when any of them could manage to talk about anybody other than themselves wandering around the streets ready to snap and yelling “Why?” at the sky, about anybody else not getting the respect they should receive, about anybody else not being happy until they were dead and buried and forgotten), that Farley had better put it behind him and get on with his life.

  Get on with his life. He knows it’s shit, but it’s all he has. Get on with it. Okay.

  He was let out of the hospital late in August determined to do that. And with the help of a support group that he joined, and one guy in particular who walked with a cane and whose name was Jimmy Borrero, he succeeded at least halfway; it was tough, but with Jimmy’s help he was doing it more or less, was on the wagon for nearly three whole months, right up until November. But then—and not because of something somebody said to him or because of something he saw on TV or because of the approach of another familyless Thanksgiving, but because there was no alternative for Farley, no way to prevent the past from building back up, building up and calling him to action and demanding from him an enormous response—instead of it all being behind him, it was in front of him.

  Once again, it was his life.

  2

  Slipping the Punch
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br />   WHEN COLEMAN went down to Athena the next day to ask what could be done to ensure against Farley’s ever again trespassing on his property, the lawyer, Nelson Primus, told him what he did not want to hear: that he should consider ending his love affair. He’d first consulted Primus at the outset of the spooks incident and, because of the sound advice Primus had given—and because of a strain of cocky bluntness in the young attorney’s manner reminiscent of himself at Primus’s age, because of a repugnance in Primus for sentimental nonessentials that he made no effort to disguise behind the regular-guy easygoingness prevailing among the other lawyers in town—it was Primus to whom he’d brought the Delphine Roux letter.

  Primus was in his early thirties, the husband of a young Ph.D.—a philosophy professor whom Coleman had hired some four years earlier—and the father of two small children. In a New England college town like Athena, where most all the professionals were outfitted for work by L. L. Bean, this sleekly good-looking, raven-haired young man, tall, trim, athletically flexible, appeared at his office every morning in crisply tailored suits, gleaming black shoes, and starched white shirts discreetly monogrammed, attire that bespoke not only a sweeping self-confidence and sense of personal significance but a loathing for slovenliness of any kind—and that suggested as well that Nelson Primus was hungry for something more than an office above the Talbots shop across from the green. His wife was teaching here, so for now he was here. But not for long. A young panther in cufflinks and a pinstriped suit—a panther ready to pounce.

  “I don’t doubt that Farley’s psychopathic,” Primus told him, measuring each word with staccato exactitude and keeping a sharp watch on Coleman as he spoke. “I’d worry if he were stalking me. But did he stalk you before you took up with his ex-wife? He didn’t know who you were. The Delphine Roux letter is something else entirely. You wanted me to write to her—against my better judgment I did that for you. You wanted an expert to analyze the handwriting—against my better judgment I got you somebody to analyze the handwriting. You wanted me to send the handwriting analysis to her lawyer—against my better judgment I sent him the results. Even though I wished you’d had it in you to treat a minor nuisance for what it was, I did whatever you instructed me to do. But Lester Farley is no minor nuisance. Delphine Roux can’t hold a candle to Farley, not as a psychopath and not as an adversary. Farley’s is the world that Faunia only barely managed to survive and that she can’t help but bring with her when she comes through your door. Lester Farley works on the road crew, right? We get a restraining order on Farley and your secret is all over your quiet little backwoods town. Soon it’s all over this town, it’s all over the college, and what you started out with is going to bear no resemblance to the malevolent puritanism with which you will be tarred and feathered. I remember the precision with which the local comic weekly failed to understand the ridiculous charge against you and the meaning of your resignation. ‘Ex-Dean Leaves College under Racist Cloud.’ I remember the caption below your photograph. ‘A denigrating epithet used in class forces Professor Silk into retirement.’ I remember what it was like for you then, I think I know what it’s like now, and I believe I know what it will be like in the future, when the whole county is privy to the sexcapades of the guy who left the college under the racist cloud. I don’t mean to imply that what goes on behind your bedroom door is anybody’s business but yours. I know it should not be like this. It’s 1998. It’s years now since Janis Joplin and Norman O. Brown changed everything for the better. But we’ve got people here in the Berkshires, hicks and college professors alike, who just won’t bring their values into line and politely give way to the sexual revolution. Narrow-minded churchgoers, sticklers for propriety, all sorts of retrograde folks eager to expose and punish guys like you. They can heat things up for you, Coleman—and not the way your Viagra does.”

  Clever boy to come up with the Viagra all on his own. Showing off, but he’s helped before, thought Coleman, so don’t interrupt, don’t put him down, however irritating his being so with-it is. There are no compassionate chinks in his armor? Fine with me. You asked his advice, so hear him out. You don’t want to make a mistake for lack of being warned.

  “Sure I can get you a restraining order,” Primus told him. “But is that going to restrain him? A restraining order is going to inflame him. I got you a handwriting expert, I can get you your restraining order, I can get you a bulletproof vest. But what I can’t provide is what you’re never going to know as long as you’re involved with this woman: a scandal-free, censure-free, Farley-free life. The peace of mind that comes of not being stalked. Or caricatured. Or snubbed. Or misjudged. Is she HIV negative, by the way? Did you have her tested, Coleman? Do you use a condom, Coleman?”

  Hip as he imagines himself, he really can’t get this old man and sex, can he? Seems utterly anomalous to him. But who can grasp at thirty-two that at seventy-one it’s exactly the same? He thinks, How and why does he do this? My old-fart virility and the trouble it causes. At thirty-two, thought Coleman, I couldn’t have understood it either. Otherwise, however, he speaks with the authority of someone ten or twenty years his senior about the way the world works. And how much experience can he have had, how much exposure to life’s difficulties, to speak in such a patronizing manner to a man more than twice his age? Very, very little, if not none.

  “Coleman, if you don’t,” Primus was saying, “does she use something? And if she says she does, can you be sure it’s so? Even down-and-out cleaning women have been known to shade the truth from time to time, and sometimes even to seek remedy for all the shit they’ve taken. What happens when Faunia Farley gets pregnant? She may think the way a lot of women have been thinking ever since the act of begetting a bastard was destigmatized by Jim Morrison and The Doors. Faunia might very well want to go ahead and become the mother of a distinguished retired professor’s child despite all your patient reasoning to the contrary. Becoming the mother of a distinguished professor’s child might be an uplifting change after having been the mother of the children of a deranged total failure. And, once she’s pregnant, if she decides that she doesn’t want to be a menial anymore, that she wishes never again to work at anything, an enlightened court will not hesitate to direct you to support the child and the single mother. Now, I can represent you in the paternity suit, and if and when I have to, I will fight to keep your liability down to half your pension. I will do everything in my power to see that something is left in your bank account as you advance into your eighties. Coleman, listen to me: this is a bad deal. In every possible way, it is a bad deal. If you go to your hedonist counselor, he’s going to tell you something else, but I am your counselor at law, and I’m going to tell you that it’s a terrible deal. If I were you, I would not put myself in the path of Lester Farley’s wild grievance. If I were you, I would rip up the Faunia contract and get out.”