by Philip Roth
“He didn’t want to lose control, you see. Remember he said, I don’t want to be hooked on you, I don’t want to be addicted to you? That struck me as true.”
“I thought that was a line.”
“I don’t think so. I think probably the way she remembered it, it sounds like a line, but I think the motivation—no, he didn’t want the sexual hook. She was good but she was replaceable.”
“Everybody’s replaceable.”
“But you don’t know what his experience was. He wasn’t into hookers and that kind of stuff.”
“Kennedy was into hookers.”
“Oh yeah. The real stuff. This guy Clinton, this is schoolboy stuff.”
“I don’t think he was a schoolboy when he was down in Arkansas.”
“No, the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can’t touch it. This was hell. Especially with that goody two-shoes wife.”
“She’s goody two-shoes, you think?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Her and Vince Foster?”
“Well, she would fall in love with somebody, but she never would have done anything crazy because he was married. She could make even adultery boring. She’s a real de-transgressor.”
“You think she was fucking Foster?”
“Yes. Oh yeah.”
“Now the whole world has fallen in love with goody two-shoes. That’s exactly what they’ve fallen in love with.”
“Clinton’s genius was to give Vince Foster a job in Washington. Put him right there. Make him do his personal bit for the administration. That’s genius. There Clinton acted like a good Mafia don and had that on her.”
“Yeah. That’s okay. But that isn’t what he did with Monica. You see, he had only Vernon Jordan to talk to about Monica. Who was probably the best person to talk to. But they couldn’t figure that out. Because they thought she was blabbing just to her stupid little California Valley Girls. Okay. So what. But that this Linda Tripp, this Iago, this undercover Iago that Starr had working in the White House—”
At this point, Coleman got up from where he was seated and headed toward the campus. That was all of the chorus Coleman overheard while sitting on a bench on the green, contemplating what move he’d make next. He didn’t recognize their voices, and since their backs were to him and their bench was around the other side of the tree from his, he couldn’t see their faces. His guess was that they were three young guys, new to the faculty since his time, on the town green drinking bottled water or decaf out of containers, just back from a workout on the town tennis courts, and relaxing together, talking over the day’s Clinton news before heading home to their wives and children. To him they sounded sexually savvy and sexually confident in ways he didn’t associate with young assistant professors, particularly at Athena. Pretty rough talk, pretty raw for academic banter. Too bad these tough guys hadn’t been around in his time. They might have served as a cadre of resistance against . . . No, no. Up on the campus, where not everyone’s a tennis buddy, this sort of force tends to get dissipated in jokes when it’s not entirely self-suppressed—they would probably have been no more forthcoming than the rest of the faculty when it came to rallying behind him. Anyway, he didn’t know them and didn’t want to. He knew no one any longer. For two years now, all the while he was writing Spooks, he had cut himself off completely from the friends and colleagues and associates of a lifetime, and so not until today—just before noon, following the meeting with Nelson Primus that had ended not merely badly but stunningly badly, with Coleman astounding himself by his vituperative words—had he come anywhere near leaving Town Street, as he was doing now, and heading down South Ward and then, at the Civil War monument, climbing the hill to the campus. Chances were there’d be no one he knew for him to bump into, except perhaps whoever might be teaching the retired who came in July to spend a couple of weeks in the college’s Elderhostel program, which included visits to the Tanglewood concerts, the Stockbridge galleries, and the Norman Rockwell Museum.
It was these very summer students he saw first when he reached the crest of the hill and emerged from behind the old astronomy building onto the sun-speckled main quadrangle, more kitschily collegiate-looking at that moment than even on the cover of the Athena catalog. They were heading to the cafeteria for lunch, meandering in pairs along one of the tree-lined quadrangle’s crisscrossing paths. A procession of twos: husbands and wives together, pairs of husbands and pairs of wives, pairs of widows, pairs of widowers, pairs of rearranged widows and widowers—or so Coleman took them to be—who had teamed up as couples after meeting here in their Elderhostel classes. All were neatly dressed in light summer clothes, a lot of shirts and blouses of bright pastel shades, trousers of white or light khaki, some Brooks Brothers summertime plaid. Most of the men were wearing visored caps, caps of every color, many of them stitched with the logos of professional sports teams. No wheelchairs, no walkers, no crutches, no canes that he could see. Spry people his age, seemingly no less fit than he was, some a bit younger, some obviously older but enjoying what retirement freedom was meant to provide for those fortunate enough to breathe more or less easily, to ambulate more or less painlessly, and to think more or less clearly. This was where he was supposed to be. Paired off properly. Appropriately.
Appropriate. The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody “comfortable.” Doing not what he was being judged to be doing but doing instead, he thought, what was deemed suitable by God only knows which of our moral philosophers. Barbara Walters? Joyce Brothers? William Bennett? Dateline NBC? If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach “Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama,” a course that would be over before it began.
They were on their way to lunch, passing within sight of North Hall, the ivied, beautifully weathered colonial brick building where, for over a decade, Coleman Silk, as faculty dean, had occupied the office across from the president’s suite. The college’s architectural marker, the six-sided clock tower of North Hall, topped by the spire that was topped by the flag—and that, from down in Athena proper, could be seen the way the massive European cathedrals are discerned from the approaching roadways by those repairing for the cathedral town—was tolling noon as he sat on a bench shadowed by the quadrangle’s most famously age-gnarled oak, sat and calmly tried to consider the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety’s enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan call America’s core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else—as everything else. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women’s rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It’s not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened—it’s as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It’s, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It’s as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race—scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unkn
own throughout history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day . . . all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or it’s Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death. Their source of greatest moral despair, Faunia blowing me and me fucking Faunia. I’m depraved not simply for having once said the word “spooks” to a class of white students—and said it, mind you, not while standing there reviewing the legacy of slavery, the fulminations of the Black Panthers, the metamorphoses of Malcolm X, the rhetoric of James Baldwin, or the radio popularity of Amos ’n’ Andy, but while routinely calling the roll. I am depraved not merely because of . . .
All this after less than five minutes sitting on a bench and looking at the pretty building where he had once been dean.
But the mistake had been made. He was back. He was there. He was back on the hill from which they had driven him, and so was his contempt for the friends who hadn’t rallied round him and the colleagues who hadn’t cared to support him and the enemies who’d disposed so easily of the whole meaning of his professional career. The urge to expose the capricious cruelty of their righteous idiocy flooded him with rage. He was back on the hill in the bondage of his rage and he could feel its intensity driving out all sense and demanding that he take immediate action.
Delphine Roux.
He got up and started for her office. At a certain age, he thought, it is better for one’s health not to do what I am about to do. At a certain age, a man’s outlook is best tempered by moderation, if not resignation, if not outright capitulation. At a certain age, one should live without either harking too much back to grievances of the past or inviting resistance in the present by embodying a challenge to the pieties that be. Yet to give up playing any but the role socially assigned, in this instance assigned to the respectably retired—at seventy-one, that is surely what is appropriate, and so, for Coleman Silk, as he long ago demonstrated with requisite ruthlessness to his very own mother, that is what is unacceptable.
He was not an embittered anarchist like Iris’s crazy father, Gittelman. He was not a firebrand or an agitator in any way. Nor was he a madman. Nor was he a radical or a revolutionary, not even intellectually or philosophically speaking, unless it is revolutionary to believe that disregarding prescriptive society’s most restrictive demarcations and asserting independently a free personal choice that is well within the law was something other than a basic human right—unless it is revolutionary, when you’ve come of age, to refuse to accept automatically the contract drawn up for your signature at birth.
By now he had passed behind North Hall and was headed for the long bowling green of a lawn leading to Barton and the office of Delphine Roux. He had no idea what he was going to say should he even catch her at her desk on a midsummer day as glorious as this one, with the fall semester not scheduled to begin for another six or seven weeks—nor did he find out, because, before he got anywhere near the wide brick path encircling Barton, he noticed around at the back of North Hall, gathered on a shady patch of grass adjacent to a basement stairwell, a group of five college janitors, in custodial staff shirts and trousers of UPS brown, sharing a pizza out of a delivery box and heartily laughing at somebody’s joke. The only woman of the five and the focus of her coworkers’ lunchtime attention—she who had told the joke or made the wisecrack or done the teasing and who happened also to be laughing loudest—was Faunia Farley.
The men appeared to be in their early thirties or thereabouts. Two were bearded, and one of the bearded ones, sporting a long ponytail, was particularly broad and oxlike. He was the only one up on his feet, the better, it seemed, to hover directly over Faunia as she sat on the ground, her long legs stretched out before her and her head thrown back in the gaiety of the moment. Her hair was a surprise to Coleman. It was down. In his experience, it was unfailingly drawn tightly back through an elastic band—down only in bed when she removed the band so as to allow it to fall to her unclothed shoulders.
With the boys. These must be “the boys” she referred to. One of them was recently divorced, a successless one-time garage mechanic who kept her Chevy running for her and drove her back and forth from work on the days when the damn thing wouldn’t start no matter what he did, and one of them wanted to take her to a porn film on the nights his wife was working the late shift at the Blackwell paper box plant, and one of the boys was so innocent he didn’t know what a hermaphrodite was. When the boys came up in conversation, Coleman listened without comment, expressing no chagrin over what she had to say about them, however much he wondered about their interest in her, given the meat of their talk as Faunia reported it. But as she didn’t go endlessly on about them, and as he didn’t encourage her with questions about them, the boys didn’t make the impression on Coleman that they would have had, say, on Lester Farley. Of course she might herself choose to be a little less carefree and feed herself less cooperatively into their fantasies, but even when Coleman was impelled to suggest that, he easily managed to restrain himself. She could speak as pointlessly or pointedly as she liked to anyone, and whatever the consequences, she would have to bear them. She was not his daughter. She was not even his “girl.” She was—what she was.
But watching unseen from where he had ducked back into the shadowed wall of North Hall, it was not nearly so easy to take so detached and tolerant a view. Because now he saw not only what he invariably saw—what attaining so little in life had done to her—but perhaps why so little had been attained; from his vantage point no more than fifty feet away, he could observe almost microscopically how, without him to take her cues from, she took cues instead from the gruffest example around, the coarsest, the one whose human expectations were the lowest and whose self-conception the shallowest. Since, no matter how intelligent you may be, Voluptas makes virtually anything you want to think come true, certain possibilities are never even framed, let alone vigorously conjectured, and assessing correctly the qualities of your Voluptas is the last thing you are equipped to do . . . until, that is, you slip into the shadows and observe her rolling onto her back on the grass, her knees bent and falling slightly open, the cheese of the pizza running down one hand, a Diet Coke brandished in the other, and laughing her head off—at what? at hermaphroditism?—while over her looms, in the person of a failed grease monkey, everything that is the antithesis of your own way of life. Another Farley? Another Les Farley? Maybe nothing so ominous as that, but more of a substitute for Farley than for him.
A campus scene that would have seemed without significance had Coleman encountered it on a summer day back when he was dean—as he undoubtedly had numerous times—a campus scene that would have seemed back then not merely harmless but appealingly expressive of the pleasure to be derived from eating out of doors on a beautiful day was freighted now with nothing but significance. Where neither Nelson Primus nor his beloved Lisa nor even the cryptic denunciation anonymously dispatched by Delphine Roux had convinced him of anything, this scene of no great moment on the lawn back of North Hall exposed to him at last the underside of his own disgrace.
Lisa. Lisa and those kids of hers. Tiny little Carmen. That’s who came flashing into his thoughts, tiny Carmen, six years old but, in Lisa’s words, like a much younger kid. “She’s cute,” Lisa said, “but she’s like a baby.” And adorably cute Carmen was when he saw her: pale, pale brown skin, pitch-black hair in two stiff braids, eyes unlike any he’d ever seen on another human being, eyes like coals blue with heat and lit from within, a child’s quick and flexible body, attired neatly in miniaturized jeans and sneakers, wearing colorful socks and a white tube of a T-shirt nearly as narrow as a pipe clea
ner—a frisky little girl seemingly attentive to everything, and particularly to him. “This is my friend Coleman,” Lisa said when Carmen came strolling into the room, on her small, scrubbed first-thing-in-the-morning face a slightly amused, self-important mock smile. “Hello, Carmen,” Coleman said. “He just wanted to see what we do,” Lisa explained. “Okay,” said Carmen, agreeably enough, but she studied him no less carefully than he was studying her, seemingly with the smile. “We’re just gonna do what we always do,” said Lisa. “Okay,” Carmen said, but now she was trying out on him a rather more serious version of the smile. And when she turned and got to handling the movable plastic letters magnetized to the low little blackboard and Lisa asked her to begin sliding them around to make the words “want,” “wet,” “wash,” and “wipe”—“I always tell you,” Lisa was saying, “that you have to look at the first letters. Let’s see you read the first letters. Read it with your finger”—Carmen kept periodically swiveling her head, then her whole body, to look at Coleman and stay in touch with him. “Anything is a distraction,” Lisa said softly to her father. “Come on, Miss Carmen. Come on, honey. He’s invisible.” “What’s that?” “Invisible,” Lisa repeated, “you can’t see him.” Carmen laughed—“I can see him.” “Come on. Come on back to me. The first letters. That’s it. Good work. But you also have to read the rest of the word too. Right? The first letter—and now the rest of the word. Good—‘wash.’ What’s this one? You know it. You know that one. ‘Wipe.’ Good.” Twenty-five weeks in the program on the day Coleman came to sit in on Reading Recovery, and though Carmen had made progress, it wasn’t much. He remembered how she had struggled with the word “your” in the illustrated storybook from which she was reading aloud—scratching with her fingers around her eyes, squeezing and balling up the midriff of her shirt, twisting her legs onto the rung of her kiddie-sized chair, slowly but surely working her behind farther and farther off the seat of the chair—and was still unable to recognize “your” or to sound it out. “This is March, Dad. Twenty-five weeks. It’s a long time to be having trouble with ‘your.’ It’s a long time to be confusing ‘couldn’t’ with ‘climbed,’ but at this point I’ll settle for ‘your.’ It’s supposed to be twenty weeks in the program, and out. She’s been to kindergarten—she should have learned some basic sight words. But when I showed her a list of words back in September—and by then she was entering first grade—she said, ‘What are these?’ She didn’t even know what words were. And the letters: h she didn’t know, j she didn’t know, she confused u for c. You see how she did that, it’s visually similar, but she still has something of the problem twenty-five weeks later. The m and the w. The i and the l. The g and the d. Still problems for her. It’s all a problem for her.” “You’re pretty dejected about Carmen,” he said. “Well, every day for half an hour? That’s a lot of instruction. That’s a lot of work. She’s supposed to read at home, but at home there’s a sixteen-year-old sister who just had a baby, and the parents forget or don’t care. The parents are immigrants, they’re second-language learners, they don’t find it easy reading to their children in English, though Carmen never got read to even in Spanish. And this is what I deal with day in and day out. Just seeing if a child can manipulate a book—I give it to them, a book like this one, with a big colorful illustration beneath the title, and I say, ‘Show me the front of the book.’ Some kids know, but most don’t. Print doesn’t mean anything to them. And,” she said, smiling with exhaustion and nowhere near as enticingly as Carmen, “my kids supposedly aren’t learning-disabled. Carmen doesn’t look at the words while I’m reading. She doesn’t care. And that’s why you’re wiped out at the end of the day. Other teachers have difficult tasks, I know, but at the end of a day of Carmen after Carmen after Carmen, you come home emotionally drained. By then I can’t read. I can’t even get on the phone. I eat something and go to bed. I do like these kids. I love these kids. But it’s worse than draining—it’s killing.”
