The Human Stain

"Now the whole world has fallen in love with goody two-shoes.

That's exactly what they've fallen in love with."

"Clinton's genius was to give Vince Foster a job in Washington.

WHAT DO YOU D O . . . ?

Put him right there. Make him do his personal bit for the administration.

That's genius. There Clinton acted like a good Mafia don and had that on her."

"Yeah. That's okay. But that isn't what he did with Monica. You see, he had only Vernon Jordan to talk to about Monica. Who was probably the best person to talk to. But they couldn't figure that out. Because they thought she was blabbing just to her stupid little California Valley Girls. Okay. So what. But that this Linda Tripp, this Iago, this undercover Iago that Starr had working in the White House—" At this point, Coleman got up from where he was seated and headed toward the campus. That was all of the chorus Coleman overheard while sitting on a bench on the green, contemplating what move he'd make next. He didn't recognize their voices, and since their backs were to him and their bench was around the other side of the tree from his, he couldn't see their faces. His guess was that they were three young guys, new to the faculty since his time, on the town green drinking bottled water or decaf out of containers, just back from a workout on the town tennis courts, and relaxing together, talking over the day's Clinton news before heading home to their wives and children. To him they sounded sexually savvy and sexually confident in ways he didn't associate with young assistant professors, particularly at Athena. Pretty rough talk, pretty raw for academic banter. Too bad these tough guys hadn't been around in his time. They might have served as a cadre of resistance against... No, no. Up on the campus, where not everyone's a tennis buddy, this sort of force tends to get dissipated in jokes when it's not entirely self-suppressed—they would probably have been no more forthcoming than the rest of the faculty when it came to rallying behind him. Anyway, he didn't know them and didn't want to.

He knew no one any longer. For two years now, all the while he was writing Spooks, he had cut himself off completely from the friends and colleagues and associates of a lifetime, and so not until today-just before noon, following the meeting with Nelson Primus that had ended not merely badly but stunningly badly, with Coleman astounding himself by his vituperative words—had he come anywhere near leaving Town Street, as he was doing now, and heading down South Ward and then, at the Civil War monument, climbing the hill to the campus. Chances were there'd be no one he knew for him to bump into, except perhaps whoever might be teaching the retired who came in July to spend a couple of weeks in the college's Elderhostel program, which included visits to the Tanglewood concerts, the Stockbridge galleries, and the Norman Rockwell Museum.

It was these very summer students he saw first when he reached the crest of the hill and emerged from behind the old astronomy building onto the sun-speckled main quadrangle, more kitschily collegiate-looking at that moment than even on the cover of the Athena catalog. They were heading to the cafeteria for lunch, meandering in pairs along one of the tree-lined quadrangle's crisscrossing paths. A procession of twos: husbands and wives together, pairs of husbands and pairs of wives, pairs of widows, pairs of widowers, pairs of rearranged widows and widowers—or so Coleman took them to be—who had teamed up as couples after meeting here in their Elderhostel classes. All were neatly dressed in light summer clothes, a lot of shirts and blouses of bright pastel shades, trousers of white or light khaki, some Brooks Brothers summertime plaid. Most of the men were wearing visored caps, caps of every color, many of them stitched with the logos of professional sports teams. No wheelchairs, no walkers, no crutches, no canes that he could see. Spry people his age, seemingly no less fit than he was, some a bit younger, some obviously older but enjoying what retirement freedom was meant to provide for those fortunate enough to breathe more or less easily, to ambulate more or less painlessly, and to think more or less clearly. This was where he was supposed to be. Paired off properly. Appropriately.

Appropriate. The current code word for reining in most any deviation from the wholesome guidelines and thereby making everybody "comfortable." Doing not what he was being judged to be doing but doing instead, he thought, what was deemed suitable by God only knows which of our moral philosophers. Barbara Walters? Joyce Brothers? William Bennett? Dateline NBC If he were around this place as a professor, he could teach "Appropriate Behavior in Classical Greek Drama," a course that would be over before it began.