The Human Stain

That's enough was by now so clearly written in Coleman's gaze that even Primus realized that it was time to shut up. Throughout the meeting, Coleman had silently listened, suppressing his feelings, trying to keep an open mind and to ignore the too apparent delight Primus took in floridly lecturing on the virtues of prudence a professional man nearly forty years his senior. In an attempt to humor himself, Coleman had been thinking, Being angry with me makes them all feel better—it liberates everyone to tell me I'm wrong. But by the time they were out on the street, it was no longer possible to isolate the argument from the utterance—or to separate himself from the man in charge he'd always been, the man in charge and the man deferred to. For Primus to speak directly to the point to his client had not required quite this much satiric ornamentation.

If the purpose was to advise in a persuasive lawyerly fashion, a very small amount of mockery would have more effectively done the job. But Primus's sense of himself as brilliant and destined for great things seemed to have got the best of him, thought Coleman, and so the mockery of a ridiculous old fool made potent by a pharmaceutical compound selling for ten dollars a pill had known no bounds.

"You're a vocal master of extraordinary loquaciousness, Nelson.

So perspicacious. So fluent. A vocal master of the endless, ostentatiously overelaborate sentence. And so rich with contempt for every last human problem you've never had to face." The impulse was overwhelming to grab the lawyer by the shirt front and slam the insolent son of a bitch through Talbots's window. Instead, drawing back, reining himself in, strategically speaking as softly as he could—yet not nearly so mindfully as he might have—Coleman said, "I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug fucking lily-white face."

"'Lily-white'?" Primus said to his wife that evening. "Why 'lilywhite'?

One can never hold people to what they lash out with when they think they've been made use of and deprived of their dignity.

But did I mean to seem to be attacking him? Of course not. It's worse than that. Worse because this old guy has lost his bearings and I wanted to help him. Worse because the man is on the brink of carrying a mistake over into a catastrophe and I wanted to stop him.

What he took to be an attack on him was actually a wrong-headed attempt to be taken seriously by him, to impress him. I failed, Beth, completely mismanaged it. Maybe because I was intimidated. In his slight, little-guy way, the man is a force. I never knew him as the big dean. I've known him only as someone in trouble. But you feel the presence. You see why people were intimidated by him.

Somebody's there when he's sitting there. Look, I don't know what it is. It's not easy to know what to make of somebody you've seen half a dozen times in your life. Maybe it's primarily something stupid about me. But whatever caused it, I made every amateurish mistake in the book. Psychopathology, Viagra, The Doors, Norman O. Brown, contraception, AIDS. I knew everything about everything.

Particularly if it happened before I was born, I knew everything that could possibly be known. I should have been concise, matter-of-fact, unsubjective; instead I was provocative. I wanted to help him and instead I insulted him and made things worse for him. No, I don't fault him for unloading on me like that. But, honey, the question remains: why white?"