The Human Stain

There was an interlude, however. After Steena and before Iris there was a five-month interlude named Ellie Magee, a petite, shapely colored girl, tawny-skinned, lightly freckled across the nose and cheeks, in appearance not quite over the dividing line between adolescence and womanhood, who worked at the Village Door Shop on Sixth Avenue, excitedly selling shelving units for books and selling doors—doors on legs for desks and doors on legs for beds. The tired old Jewish guy who owned the place said that hiring Ellie had increased his business by fifty percent. "I had nothing going here," he told Coleman. "Eking out a living. But now every guy in the Village wants a door for a desk. People come in, they don't ask for me—they ask for Ellie. They call on the phone, they want to talk to Ellie. This little gal has changed everything." It was true, nobody could resist her, including Coleman, who was struck, first, by her legs up on high heels and then with all her naturalness. Goes out with white NYU guys who are drawn to her, goes out with colored NYU guys who are drawn to her—a sparkling twenty-three-yearold kid, as yet wounded by nothing, who has moved to the Village from Yonkers, where she grew up, and is living the unconventional life with a small u, the Village life as advertised. She is a find, and so Coleman goes in to buy a desk he doesn't need and that night takes her for a drink. After Steena and the shock of losing someone he'd so much wanted, he is having a good time again, he's alive again, and all this from the moment they start flirting in the store. Does she think he's a white guy in the store? He doesn't know. Interest-ing. Then that evening she laughs and, comically squinting at him, says, "What are you anyway?" Right out she spots something and goes ahead and says it. But now the sweat is not pouring off him as it did when he misread Steena's poem. "What am I? Play it any way you like," Coleman says. "Is that the way you play it?" she asks. "Of course that's the way I play it," he says. "So white girls think you're white?" "Whatever they think," he says, "I let them think." "And whatever I think?" Ellie asks. "Same deal," Coleman says. That's the little game they play, and that becomes the excitement for them, playing the ambiguity of it. He's not that close to anybody particularly, but the guys he knows from school think he's taking out a colored girl, and her friends all think she's going around with a white guy. There's some real fun in having other people find them important, and most everywhere they go, people do. It's 1951. Guys ask Coleman, "What's she like?" "Hot," he says, drawing the word out while floppily wiggling one hand the way the Italians did back in East Orange. There's a day-to-day, second-to-second kick in all this, a little movie-star magnitude to his life now: he's always in a scene when he's out with Ellie. Nobody on Eighth Street knows what the hell is going on, and he enjoys that. She's got the legs. She laughs all the time. She's a woman in a natural way—full of ease and a lively innocence that's enchanting to him. Something like Steena, except she's not white, with the result that they don't go rushing off to visit his family and they don't go visiting hers. Why should they? They live in the Village. Taking her to East Orange doesn't even occur to him. Maybe it's because he doesn't want to hear the sigh of relief, to be told, even wordlessly, that he's doing the right thing. He thinks about his motivation for bringing Steena home. To be honest with everyone? And what did that achieve? No, no families—not for now anyway.

Meanwhile, he so enjoys being with her that one night the truth just comes bubbling out. Even about his being a boxer, which he could never tell Steena. It's so easy to tell Ellie. That she's not disapproving gives her another boost up in his estimation. She's not conventional —and yet so sound. He is dealing with someone utterly unnarrow-minded. The splendid girl wants to hear it all. And so he talks, and without restraints he is an extraordinary talker, and Ellie is enthralled. He tells her about the navy. He tells her about his family, which turns out to be a family not much different from hers, except that her father, a pharmacist with a drugstore in Harlem, is living, and though he isn't happy about her having moved to the Village, fortunately for Ellie he can't stop himself from adoring her.