The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  “Do you want to know what I feel like?” she asks him.

  “Yes.”

  “I feel so good.”

  “So,” he asks, “who can get out of this alive?”

  “I’m with you there, mister. You’re right, Coleman. This is going to lead to disaster. Into this at seventy-one? Turned around by this at seventy-one? Uh-uh. We’d better go back to the raw thing.”

  “Keep dancing,” he says, and he hits a button on the bedside Sony and “The Man I Love” track starts up again.

  “No. No. I beg you. There’s my career as a janitor to think about.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  “‘Don’t stop.’” she repeats. “I’ve heard those words somewhere before.” In fact, rarely has she ever heard the word “stop” without “don’t.” Not from a man. Not much from herself either. “I’ve always thought ‘don’t stop’ was one word,” she says.

  “It is. Keep dancing.”

  “Then don’t lose it,” she says. “A man and a woman in a room. Naked. We’ve got all we need. We don’t need love. Don’t diminish yourself—don’t reveal yourself as a sentimental sap. You’re dying to do it, but don’t. Let’s not lose this. Imagine, Coleman, imagine sustaining this.”

  He’s never seen me dance like this, he’s never heard me talk like this. Been so long since I talked like this, I’d have thought I’d forgotten how. So very long in hiding. Nobody’s heard me talk like this. The hawks and the crows sometimes in the woods, but otherwise no one. This is not the usual way I entertain men. This is the most reckless I have ever been. Imagine.

  “Imagine,” she says, “showing up every day—and this. The woman who doesn’t want to own everything. The woman who doesn’t want to own anything.”

  But never had she wanted to own anything more.

  “Most women want to own everything,” she says. “They want to own your mail. They want to own your future. They want to own your fantasies. ‘How dare you want to fuck anybody other than me. I should be your fantasy. Why are you watching porn when you have me at home?’ They want to own who you are, Coleman. But the pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you. Oh, I see you, Coleman. I could give you away my whole life and still have you. Just by dancing. Isn’t that true? Am I mistaken? Do you like this, Coleman?”

  “What luck,” he says, watching, watching. “What incredible luck. Life owed me this.”

  “Did it now?”

  “There’s no one like you. Helen of Troy.”

  “Helen of Nowhere. Helen of Nothing.”

  “Keep dancing.”

  “I see you, Coleman. I do see you. Do you want to know what I see?”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to know if I see an old man, don’t you? You’re afraid I’ll see an old man and I’ll run. You’re afraid that if I see all the differences from a young man, if I see the things that are slack and the things that are gone, you’ll lose me. Because you’re too old. But you know what I see?”

  “What?”

  “I see a kid. I see you falling in love the way a kid does. And you mustn’t. You mustn’t. Know what else I see?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I see it now—I do see an old man. I see an old man dying.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ve lost everything.”

  “You see that?”

  “Yes. Everything except me dancing. You want to know what I see?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t deserve that hand, Coleman. That’s what I see. I see that you’re furious. And that’s the way it’s going to end. As a furious old man. And it shouldn’t have been. That’s what I see: your fury. I see the anger and the shame. I see that you understand as an old man what time is. You don’t understand that till near the end. But now you do. And it’s frightening. Because you can’t do it again. You can’t be twenty again. It’s not going to come back. And this is how it ended. And what’s worse even than the dying, what’s worse even than the being dead, are the fucking bastards who did this to you. Took it all away from you. I see that in you, Coleman. I see it because it’s something I know about. The fucking bastards who changed everything within the blink of an eye. Took your life and threw it away. Took your life, and they decided they were going to throw it away. You’ve come to the right dancing girl. They decide what is garbage, and they decided you’re garbage. Humiliated and humbled and destroyed a man over an issue everyone knew was bullshit. A pissy little word that meant nothing to them, absolutely nothing at all. And that’s infuriating.”

  “I didn’t realize you were paying attention.”

  She laughs the easy laugh. And dances. Without the idealism, without the idealization, without all the utopianism of the sweet young thing, despite everything she knows reality to be, despite the irreversible futility that is her life, despite all the chaos and callousness, she dances! And speaks as she’s never spoken to a man before. Women who fuck like she does aren’t supposed to talk like this—at least that’s what the men who don’t fuck women like her like to think. That’s what the women who don’t fuck like her like to think. That’s what everyone likes to think—stupid Faunia. Well, let ’em. My pleasure. “Yes, stupid Faunia has been paying attention,” she says. “How else does stupid Faunia get through? Being stupid Faunia—that’s my achievement, Coleman, that’s me at my most sensible best. Turns out, Coleman, I’ve been watching you dance. How do I know this? Because you’re with me. Why else would you be with me, if you weren’t so fucking enraged? And why would I be with you, if I wasn’t so fucking enraged? That’s what makes for the great fucking, Coleman. The rage that levels everything. So don’t lose it.”

  “Keep dancing.”

  “Till I drop?” she asks.

  “Till you drop,” he tells her. “Till the last gasp.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Where did I find you, Voluptas?” he says. “How did I find you? Who are you?” he asks, tapping the button that again starts up “The Man I Love.”

  “I am whatever you want.”

  All Coleman was doing was reading her something from the Sunday paper about the president and Monica Lewinsky, when Faunia got up and shouted, “Can’t you avoid the fucking seminar? Enough of the seminar! I can’t learn! I don’t learn! I don’t want to learn! Stop fucking teaching me—it won’t work!” And, in the midst of their breakfast, she ran.

  The mistake was to stay there. She didn’t go home, and now she hates him. What does she hate most? That he really thinks his suffering is a big deal. He really thinks that what everybody thinks, what everybody says about him at Athena College, is so life-shattering. It’s a lot of assholes not liking him—it’s not a big deal. And for him this is the most horrible thing that ever happened? Well, it’s not a big deal. Two kids suffocating and dying, that’s a big deal. Having your stepfather put his fingers up your cunt, that’s a big deal. Losing your job as you’re about to retire isn’t a big deal. That’s what she hates about him—the privilegedness of his suffering. He thinks he never had a chance? There’s real pain on this earth, and he thinks he didn’t have a chance? You know when you don’t have a chance? When, after the morning milking, he takes that iron pipe and hits you in the head with it. I don’t even see it coming—and he didn’t have a chance! Life owes him something!

  What it amounts to is that at breakfast she doesn’t want to be taught. Poor Monica might not get a good job in New York City? You know what? I don’t care. Do you think Monica cares if my back hurts from milking those fucking cows after my day at the college? Sweeping up people’s shit at the post office because they can’t bother to use the fucking garbage can? Do you think Monica cares about that? She keeps calling the White House, and it must have been just terrible not to have her phone calls returned. And it’s over for you? That’s terrible too? It never began for me. Over before it began. Try having an iron pipe knock you down. Last night? It happened. It was nice. It
was wonderful. I needed it too. But I still have three jobs. It didn’t change anything. That’s why you take it when it’s happening, because it doesn’t change a thing. Tell Mommy her husband puts his fingers in you when he comes in at night—it doesn’t change a thing. Maybe now Mommy knows and she’s going to help you. But nothing changes anything. We had this night of dancing. But it doesn’t change anything. He reads to me about these things in Washington—what, what, what does it change? He reads to me about these escapades in Washington, Bill Clinton getting his dick sucked. How’s that going to help me when my car craps out? You really think that this is the important stuff in the world? It’s not that important. It’s not important at all. I had two kids. They’re dead. If I don’t have the energy this morning to feel bad about Monica and Bill, chalk it up to my two kids, all right? If that’s my shortcoming, so be it. I don’t have any more left in me for all the great troubles of the world.

  The mistake was to stay there. The mistake was to fall under the spell so completely. Even in the wildest thunderstorm, she’d driven home. Even when she was terrified of Farley following behind and forcing her off the road and into the river, she’d driven home. But she stayed. Because of the dancing she stayed, and in the morning she’s angry. She’s angry at him. It’s a great new day, let’s see what the paper has to say. After last night he wants to see what the paper has to say? Maybe if they hadn’t talked, if they’d just had breakfast and she’d left, staying would have been okay. But to start the seminar. That was just about the worst thing he could have done. What should he have done? Given her something to eat and let her go home. But the dancing did its damage. I stayed. I stupidly stayed. Leaving at night—there is nothing more important for a girl like me. I’m not clear about a lot of things, but this I know: staying the next morning, it means something. The fantasy of Coleman-and-Faunia. It’s the beginning of the indulgence of the fantasy of forever, the tritest fantasy in the world. I have a place to go to, don’t I? It isn’t the nicest place, but it’s a place. Go to it! Fuck until all hours, but then go. There was the thunderstorm on Memorial Day, a thunderstorm ripping, pounding, volleying through the hills as though a war had broken out. The surprise attack on the Berkshires. But I got up at three in the morning, got my clothes on, and left. The lightning crackling, the trees splitting, the limbs crashing, the hail raining down like shot on my head, and I left. Whipped by all that wind, I left. The mountain is exploding, and still I left. Just between the house and the car I could have been killed, by a bolt of lightning ignited and killed, but I did not stay—I left. But to lie in bed with him all night? The moon big, the whole earth silent, the moon and moonlight everywhere, and I stayed. Even a blind man could have found his way home on a night like that, but I did not go. And I did not sleep. Couldn’t. Awake all night. Didn’t want to roll anywhere near the guy. Didn’t want to touch this man. Didn’t know how, this man whose asshole I’ve been licking for months. A leper till daybreak at the edge of the bed watching the shadows of his trees creep across his lawn. He said, “You should stay,” but he didn’t want me to, and I said, “I think I’ll take you up on that,” and I did. You could figure on at least one of us staying tough. But no. The two of us yielding to the worst idea ever. What the hookers told her, the whores’ great wisdom: “Men don’t pay you to sleep with them. They pay you to go home.”

  But even as she knows all she hates, she knows what she likes. His generosity. So rare for her to be anywhere near anyone’s generosity. And the strength that comes from being a man who doesn’t swing a pipe at my head. If he pressed me, I’d even have to admit to him that I’m smart. Didn’t I do as much last night? He listened to me and so I was smart. He listens to me. He’s loyal to me. He doesn’t reproach me for anything. He doesn’t plot against me in any way. And is that a reason to be so fucking mad? He takes me seriously. That is sincere. That’s what he meant by giving me the ring. They stripped him and so he’s come to me naked. In his most mortal moment. My days have not been carpeted with men like this. He’d help me buy the car if I let him. He’d help me buy everything if I let him. It’s painless with this man. Just the rise and fall of his voice, just hearing him, reassures me.

  Are these the things you run away from? Is this why you pick a fight like a kid? A total accident that you even met him, your first lucky accident—your last lucky accident—and you flare up and run away like a kid? You really want to invite the end? To go back to what it was before him?

  But she ran, ran from the house and pulled her car out of the barn and drove across the mountain to visit the crow at the Audubon Society. Five miles on, she swung off the road onto the narrow dirt entryway that twisted and turned for a quarter of a mile until the gray shingled two-story house cozily appeared between the trees, long ago a human habitat but now the society’s local headquarters, sitting at the edge of the woods and the nature trails. She pulled onto the gravel drive, bumping right up to the edge of the log barrier, and parked in front of the birch with the sign nailed to it pointing to the herb garden, hers the only car to be seen. She’d made it. She could as easily have driven off the mountainside.

  Wind chimes hanging adjacent to the entrance were tinkling in the breeze, glassily, mysteriously, as though, without words, a religious order were welcoming visitors to stay to meditate as well as to look around—as though something small but touching were being venerated here—but the flag hadn’t been hoisted up the flagpole yet, and a sign on the door said the place wasn’t open on Sundays until 1 P.M. Nonetheless, when she pushed, the door gave way and she stepped beyond the thin morning shadow of the leafless dogwoods and into the hallway, where large sacks heavy with different mixes of bird feed were stacked on the floor, ready for the winter buyers, and across from the sacks, piled up to the window along the opposite wall, were the boxes containing the various bird feeders. In the gift shop, where they sold the feeders along with nature books and survey maps and audiotapes of bird calls and an assortment of animal-inspired trinkets, there were no lights on, but when she turned in the other direction, into the larger exhibit room, home to the scanty collection of stuffed animals and a small assortment of live specimens—turtles, snakes, a few birds in cages—there was one of the staff, a chubby girl of about eighteen or nineteen, who said, “Hi,” and didn’t make a fuss about the place not yet being open. This far out on the mountain, once the autumn leaves were over, visitors were rare enough on the first of November, and she wasn’t about to turn away someone who happened to show up at nine-fifteen in the morning, even this woman who wasn’t quite dressed for the outdoors in the middle of fall in the Berkshire Hills but seemed to be wearing, above her gray sweatpants, the top of a man’s striped pajamas, and on her feet nothing but backless house slippers, those things called mules. Nor had her long blond hair been brushed or combed as yet. But, all in all, she was more disheveled-looking than dissipated, and so the girl, who was feeding mice to a snake in a box at her feet—holding each mouse out to the snake at the end of a pair of tongs until the snake struck and took it and the infinitely slow process of ingestion began—just said, “Hi,” and went back to her Sunday morning duties.

  The crow was in the middle cage, an enclosure about the size of a clothes closet, between the cage holding the two saw-whet owls and the cage for the pigeon hawk. There he was. She felt better already.

  “Prince. Hey, big guy.” And she clicked at him, her tongue against her palate—click, click, click.

  She turned to the girl feeding the snake. She hadn’t been around in the past when Faunia came to see the crow, and more than likely she was new. Or relatively new. Faunia herself hadn’t been to visit the crow for months now, and not at all since she’d begun seeing Coleman. It was a while now since she’d gone looking for ways to leave the human race. She hadn’t been a regular visitor here since after the children died, though back then she sometimes stopped by four or five times a week. “He can come out, can’t he? He can come just for a minute.”

  “Sure,” t
he girl said.

  “I’d like to have him on my shoulder,” Faunia said, and stooped to undo the hook that held shut the glass door of the cage. “Oh, hello, Prince. Oh, Prince. Look at you.”

  When the door was open, the crow jumped from its perch to the top of the door and sat there with its head craning from side to side.

  She laughed softly. “What a great expression. He’s checking me out,” she called back to the girl. “Look,” she said to the crow, and showed the bird her opal ring, Coleman’s gift. The ring he’d given her in the car on that August Saturday morning that they’d driven to Tanglewood. “Look. Come over. Come on over,” she whispered to the bird, presenting her shoulder.

  But the crow rejected the invitation and jumped back into the cage and resumed life on the perch.

  “Prince is not in the mood,” the girl said.

  “Honey?” cooed Faunia. “Come. Come on. It’s Faunia. It’s your friend. That’s a boy. Come on.” But the bird wouldn’t move.

  “If he knows that you want to get him, he won’t come down,” the girl said, and, using the tongs, picked up another mouse from a tray holding a cluster of dead mice and offered it to the snake that had, at long last, drawn into its mouth, millimeter by millimeter, the whole of the last one. “If he knows you’re trying to get him, he usually stays out of reach, but if he thinks you’re ignoring him, he’ll come down.”

  They laughed together at the humanish behavior.

  “Okay,” said Faunia, “I’ll leave him alone for a moment.” She walked over to where the girl sat feeding the snake. “I love crows. They’re my favorite bird. And ravens. I used to live in Seeley Falls, so I know all about Prince. I knew him when he was up there hanging around Higginson’s store. He used to steal the little girls’ barrettes. Goes right for anything shiny, anything colorful. He was famous for that. There used to be clippings about him from the paper. All about him and the people who raised him after the nest was destroyed and how he hung out like a big shot at the store. Pinned up right there,” she said, pointing back to a bulletin board by the entryway to the room. “Where are the clippings?”