The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

  Just driving. That’s all he’s doing. Planning and not planning. Knowing and not knowing. The other headlights are coming at him, and then they’re gone. No collision? Okay, no collision. Once they swerve off the road, he changes lanes and keeps going. He just keeps driving. Next morning, waiting with the road crew to go out for the day, he hears about it at the town garage. The other guys already know.

  There’s no collision so, though he has some sense of it, he’s got no details, and when he gets home from driving and gets out of the truck he’s not sure what happened. Big day for him. November the eleventh. Veterans Day. That morning he goes with Louie—that morning he goes to the Wall, that afternoon he comes home from the Wall, that night he goes out to kill everybody. Did he? Can’t know because there’s no collision, but still quite a day from a therapeutic point of view. Second half being more therapeutic than the first. Achieves a true serenity now. Now Kenny can speak to him. Firing side by side with Kenny, both of them opened up on fully automatic, when Hector, the team leader, gives the screaming order “Get your stuff and let’s get out of here!” and suddenly Kenny is dead. Quick as that. Up on some hill. Under attack, pulling back—and Kenny’s dead. Can’t be. His buddy, another farm boy, same background except from Missouri, they were going to do dairy farming together, guy who as a kid of six watched his father die and as a kid of nine watched his mother die, raised after that by an uncle he loved and was always talking about, a successful dairy farmer with a good-sized spread—180 milking cows, twelve machines milking six cows a side in the parlor at a time—and Kenny’s head is gone and he’s dead.

  Looks like Les is communicating with his buddy now. Showed Kenny that Kenny’s not forgotten. Kenny wanted him to do it, and he did it. Now he knows that whatever he did—even if he’s not sure what it was—he did it for Kenny. Even if he did kill someone and he goes to jail, it doesn’t matter—it can’t matter because he’s dead. This was just one last thing to do for Kenny. Squared it with him. Knows everything is now all right with Kenny.

  (“I went to the Wall and there was his name and it was silence. Waited and waited and waited. I looked at him, he looked at me. I didn’t hear anything, didn’t feel anything, and that’s the point I knew it wasn’t okay with Kenny. That there was more to be done. Didn’t know what it was. But he wouldn’t have just left me like that. That’s why there was no message for me. Because I still had more to do for Kenny. Now? Now it’s okay with Kenny. Now he can rest.” “And are you still dead?” “What are you, an asswipe? Oh, I can’t talk to you, you asswipe! I did it because I am dead!”)

  Next morning, first thing, he hears at the garage that she was with the Jew in a car crash. Everybody figures that she was blowing him and he lost control and they went off the road and through the barrier and over the embankment and front-end-first into the shallows of the river. The Jew lost control of the car.

  No, he does not associate this with what happened the night before. He was just out driving, in a different state of mind entirely.

  He says, “Yeah? What happened? Who killed her?”

  “The Jew killed her. Went off the road.”

  “She was probably going down on him.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  That’s it. Doesn’t feel anything about that either. Still feels nothing. Except his suffering. Why is he suffering so much for what happened to him when she can go on giving blow jobs to old Jews? He’s the one who does the suffering, and now she just up and walks away from it all.

  Anyway, as he sips his morning coffee at the town garage, looks that way to him.

  When everybody gets up to start for the trucks, Les says, “Guess that music won’t be coming from that house on Saturday nights anymore.”

  Though, as sometimes happens, nobody knows what he’s talking about, they laugh anyway, and with that, the workday begins.

  If she located herself in western Massachusetts, the ad could be traced back to her by colleagues who subscribed to the New York Review of Books, particularly if she went on to describe her appearance and list her credentials. Yet if she didn’t specify her place of residence, she could wind up with not a single response from anyone within a radius of a hundred, two, even three hundred miles. And since in every ad she’d studied in the New York Review, the age given by women exceeded her own by from fifteen to thirty years, how could she go ahead to reveal her correct age—to portray herself correctly altogether—without arousing the suspicion that there was something significant undisclosed by her and wrong with her, a woman claiming to be so young, so attractive, so accomplished who found it necessary to look for a man through a personal ad? If she described herself as “passionate,” this might readily be interpreted by the lascivious-minded to be an intentional provocation, to mean “loose” or worse, and letters would come pouring in to her NYRB box from the men she wanted nothing to do with. But if she appeared to be a bluestocking for whom sex was of decidedly less importance than her academic, scholarly, and intellectual pursuits, she would be sure to encourage a response from a type who would be all too maidenly for someone as excitable as she could be with an erotic counterpart she could trust. If she presented herself as “pretty,” she would be associating herself with a vague catchall category of women, and yet if she described herself, straight out, as “beautiful,” if she dared to be truthful enough to evoke the word that had never seemed extravagant to her lovers—who had called her éblouissante (as in “Éblouissante! Tu as un visage de chat”); dazzling, stunning—or if, for the sake of precision in a text of only thirty or so words, she invoked the resemblance noted by her elders to Leslie Caron who her father always enjoyed making too much of, then anyone other than a megalomaniac might be too intimidated to approach her or refuse to take her seriously as an intellectual. If she wrote, “A photo accompanying the letter would be welcome,” or, simply, “Photo, please,” it could be misunderstood to imply that she esteemed good looks above intelligence, erudition, and cultural refinement; moreover, any photos she received might be touched up, years old, or altogether spurious. Asking for a photo might even discourage a response from the very men whose interest she was hoping to elicit. Yet if she didn’t request a photo, she could wind up traveling all the way to Boston, to New York, or farther, to find herself the dinner companion of someone wholly inappropriate and even distasteful. And distasteful not necessarily because of looks alone. What if he was a liar? What if he was a charlatan? What if he was a psychopath? What if he had AIDS? What if he was violent, vicious, married, or on Medicare? What if he was a weirdo, someone she couldn’t get rid of? What if she gave her name and her place of employment to a stalker? Yet, on their first meeting, how could she withhold her name? In search of a serious, impassioned love affair leading to marriage and a family, how could an open, honest person start off by lying about something as fundamental as her name? And what about race? Oughtn’t she to include the kindly solicitation “Race unimportant”? But it wasn’t unimportant; it should be, it ought to be, it well might have been but for the fiasco back in Paris when she was seventeen that convinced her that a man of another race was an unfeasible—because an unknowable—partner.

  She was young and adventurous, she didn’t want to be cautious, and he was from a good family in Brazzaville, the son of a supreme court judge—or so he said—in Paris as an exchange student for a year at Nanterre. Dominique was his name, and she thought of him as a fellow spiritual lover of literature. She’d met him at one of the Milan Kundera lectures. He picked her up there, and outside they were still basking in Kundera’s observations on Madame Bovary, infected, the both of them, with what Delphine excitedly thought of as “the Kundera disease.” Kundera was legitimatized for them by being persecuted as a Czech writer, by being someone who had lost out in Czechoslovakia’s great historical struggle to be free. Kundera’s playfulness did not appear to be frivolous, not at all. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting they loved. There was something trustworthy about him. His Eastern Europeannes
s. The restless nature of the intellectual. That everything appeared to be difficult for him. Both were won over by Kundera’s modesty, the very opposite of superstar demeanor, and both believed in his ethos of thinking and suffering. All that intellectual tribulation—and then there were his looks. Delphine was very taken by the writer’s poetically prize-fighterish looks, to her an outward sign of everything colliding within.

  After the pickup at the Kundera lecture, it was completely a physical experience with Dominique, and she had never had that before. It was completely about her body. She had just connected so much with the Kundera lecture and she had mistaken that connection for the connection she had to Dominique, and it happened all very fast. There was nothing except her body. Dominique didn’t understand that she didn’t want just sex. She wanted to be something more than a piece of meat on a spit, turned and basted. That’s what he did—those were even his words: turning her and basting her. He was interested in nothing else, least of all in literature. Loosen up and shut up—that’s his attitude with her, and she somehow gets locked in, and then comes the terrible night she shows up at his room and he is waiting there for her with his friend. It’s not that she’s now prejudiced, it’s just that she realizes she would not have so misjudged a man of her own race. This was her worst failure, and she could never forget it. Redemption had only come with the professor who’d given her his Roman ring. Sex, yes, wonderful sex, but sex with metaphysics. Sex with metaphysics with a man with gravitas who is not vain. Someone like Kundera. That is the plan.

  The problem confronting her as she sat alone at the computer long after dark, the only person left in Barton Hall, unable to leave her office, unable to face one more night in her apartment without even a cat for company—the problem was how to include in her ad, no matter how subtly coded, something that essentially said, “Whites only need apply.” If it were discovered at Athena that it was she who had specified such an exclusion—no, that would not do for a person ascending so rapidly through the Athena academic hierarchy. Yet she had no choice but to ask for a photograph, even though she knew—knew from trying as hard as she could to think of everything, to be naive about nothing, on the basis of just her brief life as a woman on her own to take into account how men could behave—that there was nothing to stop someone sufficiently sadistic or perverse from sending a photograph designed to mislead specifically in the matter of race.

  No, it was too risky altogether—as well as beneath her dignity—to place an ad to help her meet a man of the caliber that she’d never find anywhere among the faculty of as dreadfully provincial a place as Athena. She could not do it and she should not do it, and yet all the while she thought of the uncertainties, the outright dangers, of advertising oneself to strangers as a woman in search of a suitable mate, all the while she thought of the reasons why it was inadvisable, as chair of the Department of Languages and Literature, to risk revealing herself to colleagues as something other than a serious teacher and scholar—exposing herself as someone with needs and desires that, though altogether human, could be deliberately misconstrued so as to trivialize her—she was doing it: fresh from e-mailing every member of her department her latest thoughts on the subject of senior theses, trying to compose an ad that adhered to the banal linguistic formula of the standard New York Review personal but one that managed as well to present a truthful appraisal of her caliber. At it now for over an hour and she was still unable to settle on anything unhumiliating enough to e-mail to the paper even pseudonymously.

  Western Mass. 29 yr. old petite, passionate, Parisian professor, equally at home teaching Molière as

  Brainy, beautiful Berkshire academic, equally at home cooking médaillons de veau as chairing a humanities dept., seeks

  Serious SWF scholar seeks

  SWF Yale Ph.D. Parisian-born academic. Petite, scholarly, literature-loving, fashion-conscious brunette seeks

  Attractive, serious scholar seeks

  SWF Ph.D., French, Mass.-based, seeks

  Seeks what? Anything, anything other than these Athena men—the wisecracking boys, the feminized old ladies, the timorous, tedious family freaks, the professional dads, all of them so earnest and so emasculated. She is revolted by the fact that they pride themselves on doing half the domestic work. Intolerable. “Yes, I have to go, I have to relieve my wife. I have to do as much diaper changing as she does, you know.” She cringes when they brag about their helpfulness. Do it, fine, but don’t have the vulgarity to mention it. Why make such a spectacle of yourself as the fifty-fifty husband? Just do it and shut up about it. In this revulsion she is very different from her women colleagues who value these men for their “sensitivity.” Is that what overpraising their wives is, “sensitivity”? “Oh, Sara Lee is such an extraordinary this-and-that. She’s already published four and a half articles . . .” Mr. Sensitivity always has to mention her glory. Mr. Sensitivity can’t talk about some great show at the Metropolitan without having to be sure to preface it, “Sara Lee says . . .” Either they overpraise their wives or they fall dead silent. The husband falls silent and grows more and more depressed, and she has never encountered this in any other country. If Sara Lee is an academic who can’t find a job while he, say, is barely holding on to his job, he would rather lose his job than have her think she is getting the bad end of the deal. There would even be a certain pride if the situation were reversed and he was the one who had to stay home while she didn’t. A French woman, even a French feminist, would find such a man disgusting. The Frenchwoman is intelligent, she’s sexy, she’s truly independent, and if he talks more than she does, so what, where’s the issue? What’s the fiery contention all about? Not “Oh, did you notice, she’s so dominated by her rude, power-hungry husband.” No, the more of a woman she is, the more the Frenchwoman wants the man to project his power. Oh, how she had prayed, on arriving at Athena five years back, that she might meet some marvelous man who projected his power, and instead the bulk of younger male faculty are these domestic, emasculated types, intellectually unstimulating, pedestrian, the overpraising husbands of Sara Lee whom she has deliciously categorized for her correspondents in Paris as “The Diapers.”

  Then there are “The Hats.” The Hats are the “writers in residence,” America’s incredibly pretentious writers in residence. Probably, at little Athena, she hasn’t seen the worst of them, but these two are bad enough. They show up to teach once a week, and they are married and they come on to her, and they are impossible. When can we have lunch, Delphine? Sorry, she thinks, but I am not impressed. The thing she liked about Kundera at his lectures was that he was always slightly shadowy, even slightly shabby sometimes, a great writer malgré lui. At least she perceived it that way and that’s what she liked in him. But she certainly does not like, cannot stand, the American I-am-the-writer type who, when he looks at her, she knows is thinking, With your French confidence and your French fashions and your elitist French education, you are very French indeed, but you are nonetheless the academic and I am the writer—we are not equals.

  These writers in residence, as far as she can surmise, spend an enormous amount of time worrying about their headwear. Yes, both the poet and the prose writer have an extraordinary hat fetish, and so she categorizes them in her letters as The Hats. One of them is always dressed as Charles Lindbergh, wearing his antique pilot gear, and she cannot understand the relationship between pilot gear and writing, particularly writing in residence. She muses about this in her humorous correspondence to her Paris friends. The other is the floppy-hat type, the unassuming type—which is, of course, so recherché—who spends eight hours at the mirror dressing carelessly. Vain, unreadable, married by now a hundred and eighty-six times, and incredibly self-important. It’s not so much hatred she feels for this one as contempt. And yet, deep in the Berkshires starving for romance, she sometimes feels ambivalent about The Hats and wonders if she shouldn’t take them seriously as erotic candidates, at least. No, she couldn’t, not after what she has written to Paris. She mu
st resist them if only because they try to talk to her with her own vocabulary. Because one of them, the younger, minimally less self-important one, has read Bataille, because he knows just enough Bataille and has read just enough Hegel, she’s gone out with him a few times, and never has a man so rapidly de-eroticized himself before her eyes; with every word he spoke—using, as he did, that language of hers that she herself is now somewhat uncertain about—he read himself right out of her life.

  Whereas the older types, who are uncool and tweedy, “The Humanists” . . . Well, obliging as she must be at conferences and in publications to write and speak as the profession requires, the humanist is the very part of her own self that she sometimes feels herself betraying, and so she is attracted to them: because they are what they are and always have been and because she knows they think of her as a traitor. Her classes have a following, but they think of that following contemptuously, as a fashionable phenomenon. These older men, The Humanists, the old-fashioned traditionalist humanists who have read everything, the born-again teachers (as she thinks of them), make her sometimes feel shallow. Her following they laugh at and her scholarship they despise. At faculty meetings they’re not afraid to say what they say, and you would think they should be; in class they’re not afraid to say what they feel, and, again, you would think they should be; and, as a result, in front of them she crumbles. Since she doesn’t herself have that much conviction about all the so-called discourse she picked up in Paris and New Haven, inwardly she crumbles. Only she needs that language to succeed. On her own in America, she needs so much to succeed! And yet everything that it takes to succeed is somehow compromising, and it makes her feel less and less genuine, and dramatizing her predicament as a “Faustian bargain” helps only a little.