The Human Stain

Coleman tells her about Howard and how he couldn't stand the place. They talk a lot about Howard because that was where her parents had wanted her to go too. And always, whatever they're talking about, he finds he is effortlessly making her laugh. "I'd never seen so many colored people before, not even in south Jersey at the family reunion. Howard University looked to me like just too many Negroes in one place. Of all persuasions, of every stripe, but I just did not want to be around them like that. Did not at all see what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished. Completely diminished by a concentrated, false environment." "Like a soda that's too sweet," Ellie said. "Well," he told her, "it's not so much that too much has been put in, it's that everything else has been taken out." Talking openly with Ellie, Coleman finds all his relief.

True, he's not a hero anymore, but then he's not in any way a villain either. Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks—she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.

One evening she takes him around to a tiny Bleecker Street jewelry shop where the white guy who owns it makes beautiful things out of enamel. Just shopping the street, out looking, but when they leave she tells Coleman that the guy is black. "You're wrong," Coleman tells her, "he can't be." "Don't tell me that I'm wrong"—she laughs—"you're blind." Another night, near midnight, she takes him to a bar on Hudson Street where painters congregate to drink. "See that one? The smoothie?" she says in a soft voice, inclining her head toward a good-looking white guy in his mid-twenties charming all the girls at the bar. "Him," she says.

"No," says Coleman, who's the one laughing now. "You're in Greenwich Village, Coleman Silk, the four freest square miles in America.

There's one on every other block. You're so vain, you thought you'd dreamed it up yourself." And if she knows of three—which she does, positively—there are ten, if not more. "From all over everywhere," she says, "they make straight for Eighth Street. Just like you did from little East Orange." "And," he says, "I don't see it at all."

And that too makes them laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh because he is hopeless and cannot see it in others and because Ellie is his guide, pointing them out.

In the beginning, he luxuriates in the solution to his problem.

Losing the secret, he feels like a boy again. The boy he'd been before he had the secret. A kind of imp again. He gets from all her naturalness the pleasure and ease of being natural himself. If you're going to be a knight and a hero, you're armored, and what he gets now is the pleasure of being unarmored. "You're a lucky man," Ellie's boss tells him. "A lucky man," he repeats, and means it. With Ellie the secret is no longer operative. It's not only that he can tell her everything and that he does, it's that if and when he wants to, he can now go home. He can deal with his brother, and the other way, he knows, he could never have. His mother and he can go on back and resume being as close and easygoing as they always were. And then he meets Iris, and that's it. It's been fun with Ellie, and it continues to be fun, but some dimension is missing. The whole thing lacks the ambition—it fails to feed that conception of himself that's been driving him all his life. Along comes Iris and he's back in the ring.

His father had said to him, "Now you can retire undefeated. You're retired." But here he comes roaring out of his corner—he has the secret again. And the gift to be secretive again, which is hard to come by. Maybe there are a dozen more guys like him hanging around the Village. But not just everybody has that gift. That is, they have it, but in petty ways: they simply lie all the time. They're not secretive in the grand and elaborate way that Coleman is. He's back on the trajectory outward. He's got the elixir of the secret, and it's like being fluent in another language—it's being somewhere that is constantly fresh to you. He's lived without it, it was fine, nothing horrible happened, it wasn't objectionable. It was fun. Innocent fun. But insufficiently everything else. Sure, he'd regained his innocence. Ellie gave him that all right. But what use is innocence?

Iris gives more. She raises everything to another pitch. Iris gives him back his life on the scale he wants to live it.

Two years after they met, they decided to get married, and that was when, for this license he'd taken, this freedom he'd sounded, the choices he had dared to make—and could he really have been any more artful or clever in arriving at an actable self big enough to house his ambition and formidable enough to take on the world?-the first large payment was exacted.