The Human Stain

After that, throughout dinner and until it was time for the young couple to return to New York, it was all unflagging rectitude, externally a Sunday like every nice family's dream of total Sunday happiness and, consequently, strikingly in contrast with life, which, as experience had already taught even the youngest of these four, could not for half a minute running be purged of its inherent instability, let alone be beaten down into a predictable essence.

Not until the train carrying Coleman and Steena back to New York pulled into Pennsylvania Station early that evening did Steena break down in tears.

As far as he knew, until then she had been fast asleep with her head on his shoulder all the way from Jersey—virtually from the moment they had boarded at Brick Church Station sleeping off the exhaustion of the afternoon's effort at which she had so excelled.

"Steena—what is wrong?"

"I can't do it!" she cried, and, without another word of explanation, gasping, violently weeping, clutching her bag to her chest-and forgetting her hat, which was in his lap, where he'd been holding it while she slept—she raced alone from the train as though from an attacker and did not phone him or try ever to see him again.

It was four years later, in 1954, that they nearly collided outside Grand Central Station and stopped to take each other's hand and to talk just long enough to stir up the original wonder they'd awakened in each other at twenty-two and eighteen and then to walk on, crushed by the certainty that nothing as statistically spectacular as this chance meeting could possibly happen again. He was married by then, an expectant father, in the city for the day from his job as a classics instructor at Adelphi, and she was working in an ad agency down the street on Lexington Avenue, still single, still pretty, but womanly now, very much a smartly dressed New Yorker and clearly someone with whom the trip to East Orange might have ended on a different note if only it had taken place further down the line.

The way it might have ended—the conclusion against which reality had decisively voted—was all he could think about. Stunned by how little he'd gotten over her and she'd gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he'd never had to understand before, how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made . . . on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do. That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if. . . if only such things were understandable.

The charming two-page letter she sent the next week, care of the college, about how incredibly good he'd been at "swooping" their first time together in his Sullivan Street room—"swooping, almost like birds do when they fly over land or sea and spy something moving, something bursting with life, and dive down . . . and seize upon it"—began, "Dear Coleman, I was very happy to see you in New York. Brief as our meeting was, after I saw you I felt an autumnal sadness, perhaps because the six years since we first met make it wrenchingly obvious how many days of my life are 'over.' You look very good, and I'm glad you're happy . . ." and ended in a languid, floating finale of seven little sentences and a wistful closing that, after numerous rereadings, he took as the measure of her regret for her loss, a veiled admission of remorse as well, poignantly signaling to him a subaudible apology: "Well, that's it. That's enough.

I shouldn't even bother you. I promise I won't ever again. Take care.

Take care. Take care. Take care. Very fondly, Steena."

He never threw the letter away, and when he happened upon it in his files and, in the midst of whatever else he was doing, paused to look it over—having otherwise forgotten it for some five or six years—he thought what he thought out on the street that day after lightly kissing her cheek and saying goodbye to Steena forever: that had she married him—as he'd wanted her to—she would have known everything—as he had wanted her to—and what followed with his family, with hers, with their own children, would have been different from what it was with Iris. What happened with his mother and Walt could as easily never have occurred. Had Steena said fine, he would have lived another life.

/ can't do it. There was wisdom in that, an awful lot of wisdom for a young girl, not the kind one ordinarily has at only twenty. But that's why he'd fallen for her—because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense. If she hadn't.. . but if she hadn't, she wouldn't have been Steena, and he wouldn't have wanted her as a wife.