The Human Stain

That night after coming back to the Village from East Orange, Coleman got a call from his brother in Asbury Park that took things further faster than he had planned. "Don't you ever come around her," Walt warned him, and his voice was resonant with something barely suppressed—all the more frightening for being suppressed-that Coleman hadn't heard since his father's time. There's another force in that family, pushing him now all the way over on the other side. The act was committed in 1953 by an audacious young man in Greenwich Village, by a specific person in a specific place at a specific time, but now he will be over on the other side forever. Yet that, as he discovers, is exactly the point: freedom is dangerous.

Freedom is very dangerous. And nothing is on your own terms for long. "Don't you even try to see her. No contact. No calls. Nothing.

Never. Hear me?" Walt said. "Never. Don't you dare ever show your lily-white face around that house again!"

3 What Do You Do with the Kid Who Can't Read?

IF CLINTON had fucked her in the ass, she might have shut her mouth. Bill Clinton is not the man they say he is. Had he turned her over in the Oval Office and fucked her in the ass, none of this would have happened."

"Well, he never dominated her. He played it safe."

"You see, once he got to the White House, he didn't dominate anymore. Couldn't. He didn't dominate Willey either. That's why she got angry with him. Once he became president, he lost his Arkansas ability to dominate women. So long as he was attorney general and governor of an obscure little state, that was perfect for him."

"Sure. Gennifer Flowers."

"What happens in Arkansas? If you fall when you're still back in Arkansas, you don't fall from a very great height."

"Right. And you're expected to be an ass man. There's a tradition."

"But when you get to the White House, you can't dominate. And when you can't dominate, then Miss Willey turns against you, and Miss Monica turns against you. Her loyalty would have been earned by fucking her in the ass. That should be the pact. That should seal you together. But there was no pact."

"Well, she was frightened. She was close to not saying anything, you know. Starr overwhelmed her. Eleven guys in the room with her at that hotel? Hitting on her? It was a gang bang. It was a gang rape that Starr staged there at that hotel."

"Yeah. True. But she was talking to Linda Tripp."

"Oh, right."

"She was talking to everybody. She's part of that dopey culture.

Yap, yap, yap. Part of this generation that is proud of its shallowness.

The sincere performance is everything. Sincere and empty, totally empty. The sincerity that goes in all directions. The sincerity that is worse than falseness, and the innocence that is worse than corruption. All the rapacity hidden under the sincerity. And under the lingo. This wonderful language they all have—that they appear to believe—about their lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything. Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem.' Hitler lacked self-esteem too. That was his problem.

It's a con these kids have going. The hyperdramatization of the pettiest emotions. Relationship. My relationship. Clarify my relationship.

They open their mouths and they send me up the wall.

Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There's one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliche. Any kid who says 'closure' I flunk. They want closure, there's their closure."

"Well, whatever she is—a total narcissist, a conniving little bitch, the most exhibitionistic Jewish girl in the history of Beverly Hills, utterly corrupted by privilege—he knew it all beforehand. He could read her. If he can't read Monica Lewinsky, how can he read Saddam Hussein? If he can't read and outfox Monica Lewinsky, the guy shouldn't be president. There's genuine grounds for impeachment.

No, he saw it. He saw it all. I don't think he was hypnotized by her cover story for long. That she was totally corrupt and totally innocent, of course he saw it. The extreme innocence was the corruption —it was her corruption and her madness and her cunning.

That was her force, that combination. That she had no depth, that was her charm at the end of his day of being commander in chief.