The Human Stain

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 Europeanness. 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 prizefighterish 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.