The Human Stain

The nobody Faunia turned out mostly to be referring to was Lester Farley, her ex-husband. Not that she'd been knocked around in her life by this man alone—"How could I be, being out there on my own since I was fourteen?" When she was seventeen, for example, and down in Florida waitressing, the then-boyfriend not only beat her up and trashed her apartment, he stole her vibrator. "That hurt," Faunia said. And always, the provocation was jealousy. She'd looked at another man the wrong way, she'd invited another man to look at her the wrong way, she hadn't explained convincingly where she'd been for the previous half hour, she'd spoken the wrong word, used the wrong intonation, signaled, unsubstantially, she thought, that she was an untrustworthy two-timing slut—whatever the reason, whoever he might be would be over her swinging his fists and kicking his boots and Faunia would be screaming for her life.

Lester Farley had sent her to the hospital twice in the year before their divorce, and as he was still living somewhere in the hills and, since the bankruptcy, working for the town road crew, and as there was no doubting that he was still crazy, she was as frightened for Coleman, she said, as she was for herself, should he ever discover what was going on. She suspected that why Smoky had so precipitously dumped her was because of some sort of run-in or brush he'd had with Les Farley—because Les, a periodic stalker of his exwife, had somehow found out about her and her boss, even though Hollenbeck's trysting places were remarkably well hidden, tucked away in remote corners of old buildings that no one but the boss of the college physical plant could possibly know existed or have access to. Reckless as it might seem for Smoky to be recruiting girl-friends from his own custodial staff and then to be rendezvousing with them right on campus, he was otherwise as meticulous in the management of his sporting life as he was in his work for the college.

With the same professional dispatch that could get the campus roads cleared of a blizzard in a matter of hours, he could, if need be, equally expeditiously rid himself of one of his girls.

"So what do I do?" Coleman asked me. "I wasn't against keeping this thing concealed even before I'd heard about the violent ex-husband.

I knew that something like this was coming. Forget that I was once the dean where she now cleans the toilets. I'm seventy-one and she's thirty-four. I could count on that alone to do it, I was sure, and so, when she told me that it was nobody's business, I figured, She's taken it out of my hands. I don't even have to broach the subject.

Play it like adultery? Fine with me. That's why we went for dinner up in Vermont. That's why if our paths cross at the post office, we don't even bother to say hello."

"Maybe somebody saw you in Vermont. Maybe somebody saw you driving together in your car."

"True—that's probably what happened. That's all that could have happened. It might have been Farley himself who saw us. Christ, Nathan, I hadn't been on a date in almost fifty years—I thought the restaurant... I'm an idiot."

"No, it wasn't idiocy. No, no—you just got claustrophobic.

Look," I said, "Delphine Roux—I won't pretend I understand why she should care so passionately who you are screwing in your retirement, but since we know that other people don't do well with somebody who fails at being conventional, let's assume that she is one of these other people. But you're not. You're free. A free and independent man. A free and independent old man. You lost plenty quitting that place, but what about what you've gained? It's no longer your job to enlighten anyone—you said as much yourself.

Nor is this a test of whether you can or cannot rid yourself of every last social inhibition. You may now be retired but you're a man who led virtually the whole of life within the bounds of the communal academic society—if I read you right, this is a most unusual thing for you. Perhaps you never wanted Faunia to have happened. You may even believe that you shouldn't want her to have happened.

But the strongest defenses are riddled with weakness, and so in slips the last thing in the world you expected. At seventy-one, there is Faunia; in 1998, there is Viagra; there once again is the all-but-forgotten thing. The enormous comfort. The crude power. The disorienting intensity. Out of nowhere, Coleman Silk's last great fling.

For all we know, the last great last-minute fling. So the particulars of Faunia Farley's biography form an unlikely contrast to your own. So they don't conform to decency's fantasy blueprint for who should be in bed with a man of your years and your position—if anyone should be. Did what resulted from your speaking the word

'spooks' conform to decency's blueprint? Did Iris's stroke conform to decency's blueprint? Ignore the inanely stupid letter. Why should you let it deter you?"