The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “You want Chet to put some on your plate, or you want to take for yourself, Les?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “That’s all right,” Louie says, as Chet begins piling things on Les’s plate for him. “You don’t have to be hungry. That’s not the deal.”

  “This almost over?” Les says. “I gotta get out of here. I’m not kiddin’, guys. I really gotta get out of here. Had enough. Can’t take it. I feel like I’m gonna lose control. I’ve had enough. You said I could leave. I gotta get out.”

  “I don’t hear the code word, Les,” Louie says, “so we’re going to keep going.”

  Now the shakes have set in big-time. He cannot deal with the rice. It falls off the fork, he’s shaking so bad.

  And, Christ almighty, here comes a waiter with the water. Circling around and coming at Lester from the back, from out of fucking nowhere, another waiter. They are all at once but a split second away from Les yelling “Yahhh!” and going for the waiter’s throat, and the water pitcher exploding at his feet.

  “Stop!” cries Louie. “Back off!”

  The women shelling the peas start screaming.

  “He does not need any water!” Shouting, standing on his feet and shouting, with his cane raised over his head, Louie looks to the women like the one who is nuts. But they don’t know what nuts is if they think that Louie’s nuts. They have no idea.

  At other tables some people are standing, and Henry rushes over and talks to them quietly until they are all sitting down. He has explained that those are Vietnam veterans, and whenever they come around, he takes it as a patriotic duty to be hospitable to them and to put up for an hour or two with their problems.

  There is absolute quiet in the restaurant from then on. Les picks at a little food and the others eat up everything until the only food left on the table is the stuff still on Les’s plate.

  “You done with that?” Bobcat asks him. “You not gonna eat that?”

  This time he can’t even manage “take it.” Say just those two words, and everybody buried beneath that restaurant floor will come rising up to seek revenge. Say one word, and if you weren’t there the first time to see what it looked like, you sure as shit will see it now.

  Here come the fortune cookies. Usually they love that. Read the fortunes, laugh, drink the tea—who doesn’t love that? But Les shouts “Tea leaf!” and takes off, and Louie says to Swift, “Go out with him. Get him, Swiftie. Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him out of your sight. We’re gonna pay up.”

  On the way home there is silence: from Bobcat silence because he is laden with food; from Chet silence because he long ago learned through the repetitious punishment of too many brawls that for a man as fucked up as himself, silence is the only way to seem friendly; and from Swift silence too, a bitter and disgruntled silence, because once the flickering neon lights are behind them, so is the memory of himself that he seems to have had at The Harmony Palace. Swift is now busy stoking the pain.

  Les is silent because he is sleeping. After the ten days of solid insomnia that led up to this trip, he is finally out.

  It’s when everybody else has been dropped off and Les and Louie are alone in the van that Louie hears him coming round and says, “Les? Les? You did good, Lester. I saw you sweatin’, I thought, Umm-umm-umm, no way he’s gonna make it. You should have seen the color you were. I couldn’t believe it. I thought the waiter was finished.” Louie, who spent his first nights home handcuffed to a radiator in his sister’s garage to assure himself he would not kill the brother-in-law who’d kindly taken him in when he was back from the jungle only forty-eight hours, whose waking hours are so organized around all the others’ needs that no demonic urge can possibly squeeze back in, who, over a dozen years of being sober and clean, of working the Twelve Steps and religiously taking his meds—for the anxiety his Klonopin, for the depression his Zoloft, for the sizzling ankles and the gnawing knees and the relentlessly aching hips his Salsalate, an anti-inflammatory that half the time does little other than to give him a burning stomach, gas, and the shits—has managed to clear away enough debris to be able to talk civilly again to others and to feel, if not at home, then less crazily aggrieved at having to move inefficiently about for the rest of his life on those pain-ridden legs, at having to try to stand tall on a foundation of sand—happy-go-lucky Louie laughs. “I thought he didn’t have a chance. But, man,” says Louie, “you didn’t just make it past the soup, you made it to the fucking fortune cookie. You know how many times it took me to make it to the fortune cookie? Four. Four times, Les. The first time I headed straight for the bathroom and it took them fifteen minutes to get me out. You know what I’m gonna tell my wife? I’m goin’ to tell her, ‘Les, did okay. Les did all right.’”

  But when it came time to return, Les refused. “Isn’t it enough that I sat there?” “I want you to eat,” Louie said. “I want you to eat the meal. Walk the walk, talk the talk, eat the meal. We got a new goal, Les.” “I don’t want any more of your goals. I made it through. I didn’t kill anyone. Isn’t that enough?” But a week later back they drove to The Harmony Palace, same cast of characters, same glass of water, same menus, even the same cheap toilet water scent emitted by the sprayed Asian flesh of the restaurant women and wafting its sweet galvanic way to Les, the telltale scent by which he can track his prey. The second time he eats, the third time he eats and orders—though they still won’t let the waiter near the table—and the fourth time they let the waiter serve them, and Les eats like a crazy man, eats till he nearly bursts, eats as if he hasn’t seen food in a year.

  Outside The Harmony Palace, high fives all around. Even Chet is joyous. Chet speaks, Chet shouts, “Semper fi!”

  “Next time,” says Les, while they’re driving home and the feeling is heady of being raised from the grave, “next time, Louie, you’re gonna go too far. Next time you’re gonna want me to like it!”

  But what is next is facing the Wall. He has to go look at Kenny’s name. And this he can’t do. It was enough once to look up Kenny’s name in the book they’ve got at the VA. After, he was sick for a week. That was all he could think about. That’s all he can think about anyway. Kenny there beside him without his head. Day and night he thinks, Why Kenny, why Chip, why Buddy, why them and not me? Sometimes he thinks that they’re the lucky ones. It’s over for them. No, no way, no how, is he going to the Wall. That Wall. Absolutely not. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. That’s it.

  Dance for me.

  They’ve been together for about six months, and so one night he says, “Come on, dance for me,” and in the bedroom he puts on a CD, the Artie Shaw arrangement of “The Man I Love,” with Roy Eldridge playing trumpet. Dance for me, he says, loosening the arms that are tight around her and pointing toward the floor at the foot of the bed. And so, undismayed, she gets up from where she’s been smelling that smell, the smell that is Coleman unclothed, that smell of sun-baked skin—gets up from where she’s been lying deeply nestled, her face cushioned in his bare side, her teeth, her tongue glazed with his come, her hand, below his belly, splayed across the crinkled, buttery tangle of that coiled hair, and, with him keeping an eagle eye on her—his green gaze unwavering through the dark fringe of his long lashes, not at all like a depleted old man ready to faint but like somebody pressed up against a window-pane—she does it, not coquettishly, not like Steena did in 1948, not because she’s a sweet girl, a sweet young girl dancing for the pleasure of giving him the pleasure, a sweet young girl who doesn’t know much about what she’s doing saying to herself, “I can give him that—he wants that, and I can do it, and so here it is.” No, not quite the naive and innocent scene of the bud becoming the flower or the filly becoming the mare. Faunia can do it, all right, but without the budding maturity is how she does it, without the youthful, misty idealization of herself and him and everyone living and dead. He says, “Come on, dance for me,” and, with her easy laugh, she says, “Why not? I’m generous that way,” and she starts moving, smoothing her skin
as though it’s a rumpled dress, seeing to it that everything is where it should be, taut, bony, or rounded as it should be, a whiff of herself, the evocative vegetal smell coming familiarly off her fingers as she slides them up from her neck and across her warm ears and slowly from there over her cheeks to her lips, and her hair, her graying yellow hair that is damp and straggly from exertion, she plays with like seaweed, pretends to herself that it’s seaweed, that it’s always been seaweed, a great trickling sweep of seaweed saturated with brine, and what’s it cost her, anyway? What’s the big deal? Plunge in. Pour forth. If this is what he wants, abduct the man, ensnare him. Wouldn’t be the first one.

  She’s aware when it starts happening: that thing, that connection. She moves, from the floor that is now her stage at the foot of the bed she moves, alluringly tousled and a little greasy from the hours before, smeared and anointed from the preceding performance, fair-haired, white-skinned where she isn’t tanned from the farm, scarred in half a dozen places, one kneecap abraded like a child’s from when she slipped in the barn, very fine threadlike cuts half healed on both her arms and legs from the pasture fencing, her hands roughened, reddened, sore from the fiberglass splinters picked up while rotating the fence, from pulling out and putting in those stakes every week, a petal-shaped, rouge-colored bruise either from the milking parlor or from him precisely at the joining of her throat and torso, another bruise, blue-black at the turn of her unmuscled thigh, spots where she’s been bitten and stung, a hair of his, an ampersand of his hair like a dainty grayish mole adhering to her cheek, her mouth open just wide enough to reveal the curve of her teeth, and in no hurry at all to go anywhere because it’s the getting there that’s the fun. She moves, and now he’s seeing her, seeing this elongated body rhythmically moving, this slender body that is so much stronger than it looks and surprisingly so heavy-breasted dipping, dipping, dipping, on the long, straight handles of her legs stooping toward him like a dipper filled to the limit with his liquid. Unresisting, he’s stretched across the wavelets of bedsheets, a sinuous swirl of pillows balled together to support his head, his head resting level with the span of her hips, with her belly, with her moving belly, and he’s seeing her, every particle, he’s seeing her and she knows that he’s seeing her. They’re connected. She knows he wants her to claim something. He wants me to stand here and move, she thinks, and to claim what is mine. Which is? Him. Him. He’s offering me him. Okey-dokey, this is high-voltage stuff but here we go. And so, giving him her downturned look with the subtlety in it, she moves, she moves, and the formal transfer of power begins. And it’s very nice for her, moving like this to that music and the power passing over, knowing that at her slightest command, with the flick of the finger that summons a waiter, he would crawl out of that bed to lick her feet. So soon in the dance, and already she could peel him and eat him like a piece of fruit. It’s not all about being beat up and being the janitor and I’m at the college cleaning up other people’s shit and I’m at the post office cleaning up other people’s shit, and there’s a terrible toughness that comes with that, with cleaning up everybody else’s waste; if you want to know the truth, it sucks, and don’t tell me there aren’t better jobs, but I’ve got it, it’s what I do, three jobs, because this car’s got about six days left, I’ve got to buy a cheap car that runs, so three jobs is what I’m doing, and not for the first time, and by the way, the dairy farm is a lot of fucking work, to you it sounds great and to you it looks great, Faunia and the cows, but coming on top of everything else it breaks my fucking hump . . . But now I’m naked in a room with a man, seeing him lying there with his dick and that navy tattoo, and it’s calm and he’s calm, even getting a charge out of seeing me dance he’s so very calm, and he’s just had the shit kicked out of him, too. He’s lost his wife, he’s lost his job, publicly humiliated as a racist professor, and what’s a racist professor? It’s not that you’ve just become one. The story is you’ve been discovered, so it’s been your whole life. It’s not just that you did one thing wrong once. If you’re a racist, then you’ve always been a racist. Suddenly it’s your entire life you’ve been a racist. That’s the stigma and it’s not even true, and yet now he’s calm. I can do that for him. I can make him calm like this, he can make me calm like this. All I have to do is just keep moving. He says dance for me and I think, Why not? Why not, except that it’s going to make him think that I’m going to go along and pretend with him that this is something else. He’s going to pretend that the world is ours, and I’m going to let him, and then I’m going to do it too. Still, why not? I can dance . . . but he has to remember. This is only what it is, even if I’m wearing nothing but the opal ring, nothing on me but the ring he gave me. This is standing in front of your lover naked with the lights on and moving. Okay, you’re a man, and you’re not in your prime, and you’ve got a life and I’m not part of it, but I know what’s here. You come to me as a man. So I come to you. That’s a lot. But that’s all it is. I’m dancing in front of you naked with the lights on, and you’re naked too, and all the other stuff doesn’t matter. It’s the simplest thing we’ve ever done—it’s it. Don’t fuck it up by thinking it’s more than this. You don’t, and I won’t. It doesn’t have to be more than this. You know what? I see you, Coleman.

  Then she says it aloud. “You know what? I see you.”

  “Do you?” he says. “Then now the hell begins.”

  “You think—if you ever want to know—is there a God? You want to know why am I in this world? What is it about? It’s about this. It’s about, You’re here, and I’ll do it for you. It’s about not thinking you’re someone else somewhere else. You’re a woman and you’re in bed with your husband, and you’re not fucking for fucking, you’re not fucking to come, you’re fucking because you’re in bed with your husband and it’s the right thing to do. You’re a man and you’re with your wife and you’re fucking her, but you’re thinking you want to be fucking the post office janitor. Okay—you know what? You’re with the janitor.”

  He says softly, with a laugh, “And that proves the existence of God.”

  “If that doesn’t, nothing does.”

  “Keep dancing,” he says.

  “When you’re dead,” she asks, “what does it matter if you didn’t marry the right person?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter when you’re alive. Keep dancing.”

  “What is it, Coleman? What does matter?”

  “This,” he said.

  “That’s my boy,” she replies. “Now you’re learning.”

  “Is that what this is—you teaching me?”

  “It’s about time somebody did. Yes, I’m teaching you. But don’t look at me now like I’m good for something other than this. Something more than this. Don’t do that. Stay here with me. Don’t go. Hold on to this. Don’t think about anything else. Stay here with me. I’ll do whatever you want. How many times have you had a woman really tell you that and mean it? I will do anything you want. Don’t lose it. Don’t take it somewhere else, Coleman. This is all we’re here to do. Don’t think it’s about tomorrow. Close all the doors, before and after. All the social ways of thinking, shut ’em down. Everything the wonderful society is asking? The way we’re set up socially? ‘I should, I should, I should’? Fuck all that. What you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to do, all that, it just kills everything. I can keep dancing, if that’s the deal. The secret little moment—if that’s the whole deal. That slice you get. That slice out of time. It’s no more than that, and I hope you know it.”

  “Keep dancing.”

  “This stuff is the important stuff,” she says. “If I abandoned thinking that . . .”

  “What? Thinking what?”

  “I was a whoring little cunt from early on.”

  “Were you?”

  “He always told himself it wasn’t him, it was me.”

  “The stepfather.”

  “Yes. That’s what he told himself. Maybe he was even right. But I had no choi
ce at eight and nine and ten. It was the brutality that was wrong.”

  “What was it like when you were ten?”

  “It was like asking me to pick up the whole house and carry it on my back.”

  “What was it like when the door opened at night and he came into your room?”

  “It’s like when you’re a child in a war. You ever see those pictures in the paper of kids after they bomb their cities? It’s like that. It’s as big as a bomb. But no matter how many times I got blown over, I was still standing. That was my downfall: my still standing up. Then I was twelve and thirteen and starting to get tits. I was starting to bleed. Suddenly I was just a body that surrounded my pussy . . . But stick to the dancing. All doors closed, before and after, Coleman. I see you, Coleman. You’re not closing the doors. You still have the fantasies of love. You know something? I really need a guy older than you. Who’s had all the love-shit kicked out of him totally. You’re too young for me, Coleman. Look at you. You’re just a little boy falling in love with your piano teacher. You’re falling for me, Coleman, and you’re much too young for the likes of me. I need a much older man. I think I need a man at least a hundred. Do you have a friend in a wheelchair you can introduce me to? Wheelchairs are okay—I can dance and push. Maybe you have an older brother. Look at you, Coleman. Looking at me with those schoolboy eyes. Please, please, call your older friend. I’ll keep dancing, just get him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”

  And she knows, while she is saying this, that it’s this and the dancing that are making him fall in love with her. And it’s so easy. I’ve attracted a lot of men, a lot of pricks, the pricks find me and they come to me, not just any man with a prick, not the ones who don’t understand, which is about ninety percent of them, but men, young boys, the ones with the real male thing, the ones like Smoky who really understand it. You can beat yourself up over the things you don’t have, but that I’ve got, even fully dressed, and some guys know it—they know what it is, and that’s why they find me, and that’s why they come, but this, this, this is taking candy from a baby. Sure—he remembers. How could he not? Once you’ve tasted it, you remember. My, my. After two hundred and sixty blow jobs and four hundred regular fucks and a hundred and six asshole fucks, the flirtation begins. But that’s the way it goes. How many times has anyone in the world ever loved before they fucked? How many times have I loved after I fucked? Or is this it, the groundbreaker?