The Human Stain

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.