The Human Stain

"As a young guy," Coleman told me, "I was never involved with ugly women. But in the navy I had a friend, Farriello, and ugly women were his specialty. Down at Norfolk, if we went to a dance at a church, if we went at night to the USO, Farriello made a beeline for the ugliest girl. When I laughed at him, he told me I didn't know what I was missing. They're frustrated, he told me. They're not as beautiful, he told me, as the empresses you choose, so they'll do whatever you want. Most men are stupid, he said, because they don't know this. They don't understand that if only you approach the ugliest woman, she is the one who is the most extraordinary. If you can open her up, that is. But if you succeed? If you succeed in opening her up, you don't know what to do first, she is vibrating so.

And all because she's ugly. Because she is never chosen. Because she is in the corner when all the other girls dance. And that's what it's like to be an old man. To be like that ugly girl. To be in the corner at the dance."

"So Faunia's your Farriello."

He smiled. "More or less."

"Well, whatever else may be going on," I told him, "thanks to Viagra you're no longer suffering the torture of writing that book."

"I think that's so," Coleman said. "I think that's true. That stupid book. And did I tell you that Faunia can't read? I found this out when we drove up to Vermont one night for dinner. Couldn't read the menu. Tossed it aside. She has a way, when she wants to look properly contemptuous, of lifting just a half of her upper lip, lifting it a hair, and then speaking what's on her mind. Properly contemptuous, she says to the waitress, 'Whatever he has, ditto.'" "She went to school until she was fourteen. How come she can't read?"

"The ability to read seems to have perished right along with the childhood when she learned how. I asked her how this could happen, but all she did was laugh. 'Easy,' she says. The good liberals down at Athena are trying to encourage her to enter a literacy program, but Faunia's not having it. 'And don't you try to teach me. Do anything you want with me, anything,' she told me that night, 'but don't pull that shit. Bad enough having to hear people speak. Start teaching me to read, force me into that, push reading on me, and it'll be you who push me over the edge.' All the way back from Vermont, I was silent, and so was she. Not until we reached the house did we utter a word to each other. 'You're not up to fucking somebody who can't read,' she said. 'You're going to drop me because I'm not a worthy, legitimate person who reads. You're going to say to me, 'Learn to read or go.' 'No,' I told her, 'I'm going to fuck you all the harder because you can't read.' 'Good,' she said, 'we understand each other. I don't do it like those literate girls and I don't want to be done to like them.' 'I'm going to fuck you,' I said, 'for just what you are.' 'That's the ticket,' she says. We were both laughing by then. Faunia's got the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble, and so she was laughing that laugh of hers, that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh—you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past—and by then she's unzipping my fly. But she was right on the money about my having decided to give her up. All the way back from Vermont I was thinking exactly what she said I was thinking. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to impose my wonderful virtue on her. Or on myself. That's over. I know these things don't come without a cost. I know that there's no insurance you can buy on this. I know how the thing that's restoring you can wind up killing you. I know that every mistake that a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator. But right now I happen not to care. I wake up in the morning, there's a towel on the floor, there's baby oil on the bedside table. How did all that get there? Then I remember. Got there because I'm alive again. Because I'm back in the tornado. Because this is what it is with a capital isness. I'm not going to give her up, Nathan. I've started to call her Voluptas."