The Human Stain

And what about "tell"? How much can she tell to whom? By tell does she mean make—"how much can I make," et cetera—or does she mean reveal, expose? And what about "I am almost dangerous for this man." Is "dangerous for" different from "dangerous to"? Either way, what's the danger?

Each time he tried to penetrate her meaning, it slipped away. After two frantic minutes on his feet in the hallway, all he could be sure of was his fear. And this astonished him—and, as always with Coleman, his susceptibility, by catching him unprepared, shamed him as well, triggering an SOS, a ringing signal to self-vigilance to take up the slack.

Bright and game and beautiful as Steena was, she was only eighteen years old and fresh to New York from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and yet he was now more intimidated by her—and her almost preposterous, unequivocal goldenness—than by anybody he had ever faced in the ring. Even on that night in the Norfolk whorehouse, when the woman who was watching from the bed as he began to peel off his uniform—a big-titted, fleshy, mistrustful whore not entirely ugly but certainly no looker (and maybe herself two thirtyfifths something other than white)—smiled sourly and said, "You're a black nigger, ain't you, boy?" and the two goons were summoned to throw him out, only then had he been as undone as he was by Steena's poem.

I wonder what he does after he swallows me whole.

Even that he could not understand. At the desk in his room, he battled into the morning with the paradoxical implications of this final stanza, ferreting out and then renouncing one complicated formulation after another until, at daybreak, all he knew for sure was that for Steena, ravishing Steena, not everything he had eradicated from himself had vanished into thin air.

Dead wrong. Her poem didn't mean anything. It wasn't even a poem. Under the pressure of her own confusion, fragments of ideas, raw bits of thought, had all chaotically come tumbling into her head while she was under the shower, and so she'd torn a page from one of his notebooks, scribbled out at his desk whatever words jelled, then jammed the page into the mail slot before rushing off for work. Those lines were just something she'd done—that she'd had to do—with the exquisite newness of her bewilderment.

A poet? Hardly, she laughed: just somebody leaping through a ring of fire.

They were together in the bed in his room every weekend for over a year, feeding on each other like prisoners in solitary madly downing their daily ration of bread and water. She astonished him—astonished herself—with the dance she did one Saturday night, standing at the foot of his foldout sofa bed in her half slip and nothing else. She was getting undressed, and the radio was on—Symphony Sid—and first, to get her moving and in the mood, there was Count Basic and a bunch of jazz musicians jamming on "Lady Be Good," a wild live recording, and following that, more Gershwin, the Artie Shaw rendition of "The Man I Love" that featured Roy Eldridge steaming everything up. Coleman was lying semi-upright on the bed, doing what he most loved to do on a Saturday night after they'd returned from their five bucks' worth of Chianti and spaghetti and cannoli in their favorite Fourteenth Street basement restaurant: watch her take her clothes off. All at once, with no prompting from him—seemingly prompted only by Eldridge's trumpet—she began what Coleman liked to describe as the single most slithery dance ever performed by a Fergus Falls girl after little more than a year in New York City. She could have raised Gershwin himself from the grave with that dance, and with the way she sang the song. Prompted by a colored trumpet player playing it like a black torch song, there to see, plain as day, was all the power of her whiteness. That big white thing. "Some day he'll come along

... the man I love ... and he'll be big and strong... the man I love."

The language was ordinary enough to have been lifted from the most innocent first-grade primer, but when the record was over, Steena put her hands up to hide her face, half meaning, half pretending to cover her shame. But the gesture protected her against nothing, least of all from his enravishment. The gesture merely transported him further. "Where did I find you, Voluptas?" he asked. "How did I find you? Who are you?"

It was during this, the headiest of times that Coleman gave up his evening workout at the Chinatown gym and cut back his early morning five-mile run and, in the end, relinquished in any way taking seriously his having turned pro. He had fought and won a total of four professional bouts, three four-rounders and then, his finale, a six-rounder, all of them Monday night fights at the old St. Nicholas Arena. He never told Steena about the fights, never told anyone at NYU, and certainly never let on to his family. For those first few years of college, that was one more secret, even though at the arena he boxed under the name of Silky Silk and the results from St.