The Human Stain

And the girls, in turn, liked Coleman's legs. Steena Palsson, the eighteen-year-old exile from Minnesota, even wrote a poem about Coleman that mentioned his legs. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined notebook paper, signed "S," then folded in quarters and stuck into his mail slot in the tiled hallway above his basement room. It had been two weeks since they'd first flirted at the subway station, and this was the Monday after the Sunday of their first twentyfour-hour marathon. Coleman had rushed off to his morning class while Steena was still making up in the bathroom; a few minutes later, she herself set out for work, but not before leaving him the poem that, in spite of all the stamina they'd so conscientiously demonstrated over the previous day, she'd been too shy to hand him directly. Since Coleman's schedule took him from his classes to the library to his late evening workout in the ring of a rundown Chinatown gym, he didn't find the poem jutting from the mail slot until he got back to Sullivan Street at eleven-thirty that night.

He has a body.

He has a beautiful body-the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

Also he is bright and brash.

He's four years older, but sometimes I feel he is younger.

He is sweet, still, and romantic, though he says he is not romantic.

I am almost dangerous for this man.

How much can I tell of what I see in him? I wonder what he does after he swallows me whole.

Rapidly reading Steena's handwriting by the dim hall light, he at first mistook "neck" for "negro"—and the back of his negro... His negro what? Till then he'd been surprised by how easy it was. What was supposed to be hard and somehow shaming or destructive was not only easy but without consequences, no price paid at all. But now the sweat was pouring off him. He kept reading, faster even than before, but the words formed themselves into no combination that made sense. His negro WHAT? They had been naked together a whole day and night, for most of that time never more than inches apart. Not since he was an infant had anyone other than himself had so much time to study how he was made. Since there was nothing about her long pale body that he had not observed and nothing that she had concealed and nothing now that he could not picture with a painterlike awareness, a lover's excited, meticulous connoisseurship, and since he had spent all day stimulated no less by her presence in his nostrils than by her legs spread-eagled in his mind's eye, it had to follow that there was nothing about his body that she had not microscopically absorbed, nothing about that extensive surface imprinted with his self-cherishing evolutionary uniqueness, nothing about his singular configuration as a man, his skin, his pores, his whiskers, his teeth, his hands, his nose, his ears, his lips, his tongue, his feet, his balls, his veins, his prick, his armpits, his ass, his tangle of pubic hair, the hair on his head, the fuzz on his frame, nothing about the way he laughed, slept, breathed, moved, smelled, nothing about the way he shuddered convulsively when he came that she had not registered. And remembered.

And pondered.

Was it the act itself that did it, the absolute intimacy of it, when you are not just inside the body of the other person but she is tightly enveloping you? Or was it the physical nakedness? You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what the shyness is all about and what everybody fears. In that anarchic crazy place, how much of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered? Now I know who you are. I see dear through to the back of your negro.

But how, by seeing what? What could it have been? Was it seeable to her, whatever it was, because she was a blond Icelandic Dane from a long line of blond Icelanders and Danes, Scandinavianraised, at home, in school, at church, in the company all her life of nothing but . . . and then Coleman recognized the word in the poem as a four- and not a five-letter word. What she'd written wasn't "negro." It was "neck." Oh, my neck! It's only my neck!.. .the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.

But what then did this mean: "How much can I tell / of what I see in him?" What was so ambiguous about what she saw in him? If she'd written "tell from" instead of "tell of," would that have made her meaning clearer? Or would that have made it less clear? The more he reread that simple stanza, the more opaque the meaning became—and the more opaque the meaning, the more certain he was that she distinctly sensed the problem that Coleman brought to her life. Unless she meant by "what I see in him" no more than what is colloquially meant by skeptical people when they ask someone in love, "What can you possibly see in him?"