The Human Stain

She isn't flattered to be out with him—she wants to hear what he has to say about The German Ideology. And hadn't she first tried to have lunch with the three of them, and could they have been any more condescending? Of course, they don't bother to read her scholarship. None of them reads anything she's written. It's all about perception. All they see is Delphine using what she understands they sarcastically call "her little French aura" on all the tenured men. Yet she is strongly tempted to court the cabal, to tell them in so many words that she doesn't like the French aura—if she did, she'd be living in France! And she doesn't own the tenured men—she doesn't own anyone. Why else would she be by herself, the only person at the desk of a Barton Hall office at ten o'clock at night? Hardly a week goes by when she doesn't try and fail with the three who drive her nuts, who baffle her most, but whom she cannot charm, finesse, or engage in any way. "Les Trois Grâces" she calls them in her letters to Paris, spelling "grâces" maliciously "grasses" The Three Greaseballs. At certain parties—parties that Delphine doesn't really want to be at—Les Trois Grasses are invariably present.

When some big feminist intellectual comes along, Delphine would at least like to be invited, but she never is. She can go to the lecture but she's never asked to the dinner. But the infernal trio who call the shots, they are always there.

In imperfect revolt against her Frenchness (as well as being obsessed with her Frenchness), lifted voluntarily out of her country (if not out of herself), so ensnared by the disapproval of Les Trois Grasses as to be endlessly calculating what response might gain her their esteem without further obfuscating her sense of herself and misrepresenting totally the inclinations of the woman she once naturally was, at times destabilized to the point of shame by the discrepancy between how she must deal with literature in order to succeed professionally and why she first came to literature, Delphine, to her astonishment, is all but isolated in America. Decountried, isolated, estranged, confused about everything essential to a life, in a desperate state of bewildered longing and surrounded on all sides by admonishing forces defining her as the enemy. And all because she'd gone eagerly in search of an existence of her own.

All because she'd been courageous and refused to take the prescribed view of herself. She seemed to herself to have subverted herself in the altogether admirable effort to make herself. There is something very mean about life that it should have done this to her.

At its heart, very mean and very vengeful, ordering a fate not according to the laws of logic but to the antagonistic whim of perversity.

Dare to give yourself over to your own vitality, and you might as well be in the hands of a hardened criminal. I will go to America and be the author of my life, she says; I will construct myself outside the orthodoxy of my family's given, I will fight against the given, impassioned subjectivity carried to the limit, individualism at its best—and she winds up instead in a drama beyond her control.

She winds up as the author of nothing. There is the drive to master things, and the thing that is mastered is oneself.

Why should it be so impossible just to know what to do?

Delphine would be entirely isolated if not for the department secretary, Margo Luzzi, a mousy divorcée in her thirties, also lonely, wonderfully competent, shy as can be, who will do anything for Delphine and sometimes eats her sandwich in Delphine's office and who has wound up as the chairperson's only adult woman friend at Athena. Then there are the writers in residence. They appear to like in her exactly what the others hate. But she cannot stand them.

How did she get in the middle like this? And how does she get out?

As it does not offer any solace to dramatize her compromises as a Faustian bargain, so it isn't all that helpful to think of her in-themiddleness, as she tries to, as a "Kunderian inner exile."

Seeks. All right then, seeks. Do as the students say—Go for it!

Youthful, petite, womanly, attractive, academically successful SWF French-born scholar, Parisian background, Yale Ph.D., Mass.-based, seeks ... ? And now just lay it on the line. Do not hide from the truth of what you are and do not hide from the truth of what you seek. A stunning, brilliant, hyperorgasmic woman seeks . . . seeks... seeks specifically and uncompromisingly what?

She wrote now in a rush.

Mature man with backbone. Unattached. Independent. Witty.

Lively. Defiant. Forthright. Well educated. Satirical spirit. Charm.

Knowledge and love of great books. Well spoken and straightspeaking.

Trimly built. Five eight or nine. Mediterranean complexion.

Green eyes preferred. Age unimportant. But must be intellectual.

Graying hair acceptable, even desirable...