The Human Stain

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 windowpane —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.