The Human Stain

And then, down in New York, where she'd gone one Saturday to see the Jackson Pollock show, she pulled the envelope out of the purse and all but dropped the twelve-word letter, unsigned, into a mailbox in the Port Authority building, the first mailbox she saw after stepping from the Bonanza bus. It was still in her hand when she got on the subway, but once the train started moving she forgot about the letter, stuck it back in her bag, and let the meaningfulness of the subway take hold. She remained amazed and excited by the New York subway. When she was in the Métro in Paris she never thought about it, but the melancholic anguish of the people in the New York subway never failed to restore her belief in the rightness of her having come to America. The New York subway was the symbol of why she'd come—her refusal to shrink from reality.

The Pollock show emotionally so took possession of her that she felt, as she advanced from one stupendous painting to the next, something of that swelling, clamorous feeling that is the mania of lust. When a woman's cell phone suddenly went off while the whole of the chaos of the painting entitled Number 1A, 1948 was entering wildly into the space that previously that day—previously that year—had been nothing more than her body, she was so furious that she turned and exclaimed, "Madam, I'd like to strangle you!"

Then she went to the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street. She always did this in New York. She went to the museums, to the galleries, to concerts, she went to the movies that would never make their way to the one dreadful theater in backwoods Athena, and, in the end, no matter what specific things she'd come to New York to do, she wound up for an hour or so reading whatever book she'd brought with her while sitting in the main reading room of the library.

She reads. She looks around. She observes. She has little crushes on the men there. In Paris she had seen the movie Marathon Man at one of the festivals. (No one knows that at the movies she is a terrible sentimentalist and is often in tears.) In Marathon Man, the character, the fake student, hangs out at the New York Public Library and is picked up by Dustin Hoffman, and so it's in that romantic light that she has always thought of the New York Public Library. So far no one has picked her up there, except for a medical student who was too young, too raw, and immediately said the wrong thing. Right off he had said something about her accent, and she could not bear him. A boy who had not lived at all. He made her feel like a grandmother. She had, by his age, been through so many love affairs and so much thinking and rethinking, so many levels of suffering—at twenty, years younger than him, she had already lived her big love story not once but twice. In part she had come to America in flight from her love story (and, also, to make her exit as a bit player in the long-running drama—entitled Etc.-that was the almost criminally successful life of her mother). But now she is extremely lonely in her plight to find a man to connect with.

Others who try to pick her up sometimes say something acceptable enough, sometimes ironic enough or mischievous enough to be charming, but then—because up close she is more beautiful than they had realized and, for one so petite, a little more arrogant than they may have expected—they get shy and back off. The ones who make eye contact with her are automatically the ones she doesn't like. And the ones who are lost in their books, who are charmingly oblivious and charmingly desirable, are... lost in their books. Whom is she looking for? She is looking for the man who is going to recognize her. She is looking for the Great Recognizer.

Today she is reading, in French, a book by Julia Kristeva, a treatise as wonderful as any ever written on melancholy, and across at the next table she sees a man reading, of all things, a book in French by Kristeva's husband, Philippe Sollers. Sollers is someone whose playfulness she refuses any longer to take seriously for all that she did at an earlier point in her intellectual development; the playful French writers, unlike the playful Eastern European writers like Kundera, no longer satisfy her . . . but that is not the issue at the New York Public Library. The issue is the coincidence, a coincidence that is almost sinister. In her craving, restless state, she launches into a thousand speculations about the man who is reading Sollers while she is reading Kristeva and feels the imminence not only of a pickup but of an affair. She knows that this darkhaired man of forty or forty-two has just the kind of gravitas that she cannot find in anyone at Athena. What she is able to surmise from the way he quietly sits and reads makes her increasingly hopeful that something is about to happen.