The Human Stain

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 cliché. 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. The intensity of the shallowness was its appeal. Not to mention the shallowness of the intensity. The stories about her childhood. The boasting about her adorable willfulness: ‘See, I was three but I was already a personality’ I'm sure he understood that everything he did that didn't conform to her delusions was going to be yet another brutal blow to her self-esteem. But what he didn't see was that he had to fuck her in the ass. Why? To shut her up. Strange behavior in our president. It was the first thing she showed him. She stuck it in his face. She offered it to him. And he did nothing about it. I don't get this guy. Had he fucked her in the ass, I doubt she would have talked to Linda Tripp. Because she wouldn't have wanted to talk about that.”

“She wanted to talk about the cigar.”

“That's different. That's kid stuff. No, he didn't give her regularly something she didn't want to talk about. Something he wanted that she didn't. That's the mistake.”

“In the ass is how you create loyalty.”

“I don't know if that would have shut her up. I don't know that shutting her up is humanly possible. This isn't Deep Throat. This is Big Mouth.”

“Still, you have to admit that this girl has revealed more about America than anybody since Dos Passos. She stuck a thermometer up the country's ass. Monica's U.S.A.”

“The trouble was she was getting from Clinton what she got from all these guys. She wanted something else from him. He's the president, she's a love terrorist. She wanted him to be different from this teacher she had an affair with.”

“Yeah, the niceness did him in. Interesting. Not his brutality but his niceness. Playing it not by his rules but by hers. She controls him because he wants it. Has to have it. It's all wrong. You know what Kennedy would have told her when she came around asking for a job? You know what Nixon would have told her? Harry Truman, even Eisenhower would have told it to her. The general who ran World War II, he knew how not to be nice. They would have told her that not only would they not give her a job, but nobody would ever give her a job again as long as she lived. That she wouldn't be able to get a job driving a cab in Horse Springs, New Mexico. Nothing. That her father's practice would be sabotaged, and he'd be out of work. That her mother would never work again, that her brother would never work again, that nobody in her family would earn another dime, if she so much as dared to open her mouth about the eleven blow jobs. Eleven. Not even a round dozen. I don't think under a dozen in over two years qualifies for the Heisman in debauchery, do you?”

“His caution, his caution did him in. Absolutely. He played it like a lawyer.”

“He didn't want to give her any evidence. That's why he wouldn't come.”

“There he was right. The moment he came, he was finished. She had the goods. Collected a sample. The smoking come. Had he fucked her in the ass, the nation could have been spared this terrible trauma.”

They laughed. There were three of them.

“He never really abandoned himself to it. He had an eye on the door. He had his own system there. She was trying to up the ante.”

“Isn't this what the Mafia does? You give somebody something they can't talk about. Then you've got them.”

“You involve them in a mutual transgression, and you have a mutual corruption. Sure.”

“So his problem is that he's insufficiently corrupt.”

“Oh, yes. Absolutely. And unsophisticated.”

“It's just the opposite of the charge that he's reprehensible. He's insufficiently reprehensible.”

“Of course. If you're engaged in that behavior, why draw the line there? Wasn't that fairly artificial?”

“Once you draw the line, you make it clear that you're frightened. And when you're frightened, you're finished. Your destruction is no further than Monica's cell phone.”

“He didn't want to lose control, you see. Remember he said, I don't want to be hooked on you, I don't want to be addicted to you? That struck me as true.”

“I thought that was a line.”

“I don't think so. I think probably the way she remembered it, it sounds like a line, but I think the motivation — no, he didn't want the sexual hook. She was good but she was replaceable.”

“Everybody's replaceable.”

“But you don't know what his experience was. He wasn't into hookers and that kind of stuff.”

“Kennedy was into hookers.”

“Oh yeah. The real stuff. This guy Clinton, this is schoolboy stuff.”

“I don't think he was a schoolboy when he was down in Arkansas.”

“No, the scale was right in Arkansas. Here it was all out of whack. And it must have driven him crazy. President of the United States, he has access to everything, and he can't touch it. This was hell. Especially with that goody two-shoes wife.”

“She's goody two-shoes, you think?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Her and Vince Foster?”

“Well, she would fall in love with somebody, but she never would have done anything crazy because he was married. She could make even adultery boring. She's a real de-transgressor.”

“You think she was fucking Foster?”

“Yes. Oh yeah.”

“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. 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.

They were on their way to lunch, passing within sight of North Hall, the ivied, beautifully weathered colonial brick building where, for over a decade, Coleman Silk, as faculty dean, had occupied the office across from the president's suite. The college's architectural marker, the six-sided clock tower of North Hall, topped by the spire that was topped by the flag — and that, from down in Athena proper, could be seen the way the massive European cathedrals are discerned from the approaching roadways by those repairing for the cathedral town — was tolling noon as he sat on a bench shadowed by the quadrangle's most famously age-gnarled oak, sat and calmly tried to consider the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by masquerading itself as something else — as everything else. As a force, propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating, if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never happened — it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he thought, as though Babbitt had never been written. It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race — scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. Here in America either it's Faunia Farley or it's Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk! This, in 1998, is the wickedness they have to put up with. This, in 1998, is their torture, their torment, and their spiritual death. Their source of greatest moral despair, Faunia blowing me and me fucking Faunia. I'm depraved not simply for having once said the word “spooks” to a class of white students — and said it, mind you, not while standing there reviewing the legacy of slavery, the fulminations of the Black Panthers, the metamorphoses of Malcolm X, the rhetoric of James Baldwin, or the radio popularity of Amos 'n' Andy, but while routinely calling the roll. I am depraved not merely because of...

All this after less than five minutes sitting on a bench and looking at the pretty building where he had once been dean.

But the mistake had been made. He was back. He was there. He was back on the hill from which they had driven him, and so was his contempt for the friends who hadn't rallied round him and the colleagues who hadn't cared to support him and the enemies who'd disposed so easily of the whole meaning of his professional career. The urge to expose the capricious cruelty of their righteous idiocy flooded him with rage. He was back on the hill in the bondage of his rage and he could feel its intensity driving out all sense and demanding that he take immediate action.

Delphine Roux.

He got up and started for her office. At a certain age, he thought, it is better for one's health not to do what I am about to do. At a certain age, a man's outlook is best tempered by moderation, if not resignation, if not outright capitulation. At a certain age, one should live without either harking too much back to grievances of the past or inviting resistance in the present by embodying a challenge to the pieties that be. Yet to give up playing any but the role socially assigned, in this instance assigned to the respectably retired — at seventy-one, that is surely what is appropriate, and so, for Coleman Silk, as he long ago demonstrated with requisite ruthlessness to his very own mother, that is what is unacceptable.

He was not an embittered anarchist like Iris's crazy father, Gittelman. He was not a firebrand or an agitator in any way. Nor was he a madman. Nor was he a radical or a revolutionary, not even intellectually or philosophically speaking, unless it is revolutionary to believe that disregarding prescriptive society's most restrictive demarcations and asserting independently a free personal choice that is well within the law was something other than a basic human right — unless it is revolutionary, when you've come of age, to refuse to accept automatically the contract drawn up for your signature at birth.

By now he had passed behind North Hall and was headed for the long bowling green of a lawn leading to Barton and the office of Delphine Roux. He had no idea what he was going to say should he even catch her at her desk on a midsummer day as glorious as this one, with the fall semester not scheduled to begin for another six or seven weeks — nor did he find out, because, before he got anywhere near the wide brick path encircling Barton, he noticed around at the back of North Hall, gathered on a shady patch of grass adjacent to a basement stairwell, a group of five college janitors, in custodial staff shirts and trousers of UPS brown, sharing a pizza out of a delivery box and heartily laughing at somebody's joke. The only woman of the five and the focus of her coworkers' lunchtime attention — she who had told the joke or made the wisecrack or done the teasing and who happened also to be laughing loudest — was Faunia Farley.

The men appeared to be in their early thirties or thereabouts. Two were bearded, and one of the bearded ones, sporting a long ponytail, was particularly broad and oxlike. He was the only one up on his feet, the better, it seemed, to hover directly over Faunia as she sat on the ground, her long legs stretched out before her and her head thrown back in the gaiety of the moment. Her hair was a surprise to Coleman. It was down. In his experience, it was unfailingly drawn tightly back through an elastic band — down only in bed when she removed the band so as to allow it to fall to her unclothed shoulders.

With the boys. These must be “the boys” she referred to. One of them was recently divorced, a successless one-time garage mechanic who kept her Chevy running for her and drove her back and forth from work on the days when the damn thing wouldn't start no matter what he did, and one of them wanted to take her to a porn film on the nights his wife was working the late shift at the Blackwell paper box plant, and one of the boys was so innocent he didn't know what a hermaphrodite was. When the boys came up in conversation, Coleman listened without comment, expressing no chagrin over what she had to say about them, however much he wondered about their interest in her, given the meat of their talk as Faunia reported it. But as she didn't go endlessly on about them, and as he didn't encourage her with questions about them, the boys didn't make the impression on Coleman that they would have had, say, on Lester Farley. Of course she might herself choose to be a little less carefree and feed herself less cooperatively into their fantasies, but even when Coleman was impelled to suggest that, he easily managed to restrain himself. She could speak as pointlessly or pointedly as she liked to anyone, and whatever the consequences, she would have to bear them. She was not his daughter. She was not even his “girl.” She was — what she was.

But watching unseen from where he had ducked back into the shadowed wall of North Hall, it was not nearly so easy to take so detached and tolerant a view. Because now he saw not only what he invariably saw — what attaining so little in life had done to her — but perhaps why so little had been attained; from his vantage point no more than fifty feet away, he could observe almost microscopically how, without him to take her cues from, she took cues instead from the gruffest example around, the coarsest, the one whose human expectations were the lowest and whose self-conception the shallowest. Since, no matter how intelligent you may be, Voluptas makes virtually anything you want to think come true, certain possibilities are never even framed, let alone vigorously conjectured, and assessing correctly the qualities of your Voluptas is the last thing you are equipped to do ... until, that is, you slip into the shadows and observe her rolling onto her back on the grass, her knees bent and falling slightly open, the cheese of the pizza running down one hand, a Diet Coke brandished in the other, and laughing her head off — at what? at hermaphroditism?—while over her looms, in the person of a failed grease monkey, everything that is the antithesis of your own way of life. Another Farley? Another Les Farley? Maybe nothing so ominous as that, but more of a substitute for Farley than for him.

A campus scene that would have seemed without significance had Coleman encountered it on a summer day back when he was dean — as he undoubtedly had numerous times — a campus scene that would have seemed back then not merely harmless but appealingly expressive of the pleasure to be derived from eating out of doors on a beautiful day was freighted now with nothing but significance. Where neither Nelson Primus nor his beloved Lisa nor even the cryptic denunciation anonymously dispatched by Delphine Roux had convinced him of anything, this scene of no great moment on the lawn back of North Hall exposed to him at last the underside of his own disgrace.

Lisa. Lisa and those kids of hers. Tiny little Carmen. That's who came flashing into his thoughts, tiny Carmen, six years old but, in Lisa's words, like a much younger kid. “She's cute,” Lisa said, “but she's like a baby.” And adorably cute Carmen was when he saw her: pale, pale brown skin, pitch-black hair in two stiff braids, eyes unlike any he'd ever seen on another human being, eyes like coals blue with heat and lit from within, a child's quick and flexible body, attired neatly in miniaturized jeans and sneakers, wearing colorful socks and a white tube of a T-shirt nearly as narrow as a pipe cleaner — a frisky little girl seemingly attentive to everything, and particularly to him. “This is my friend Coleman,” Lisa said when Carmen came strolling into the room, on her small, scrubbed first-thing-in-the-morning face a slightly amused, self-important mock smile. “Hello, Carmen,” Coleman said. “He just wanted to see what we do,” Lisa explained. “Okay,” said Carmen, agreeably enough, but she studied him no less carefully than he was studying her, seemingly with the smile. “We're just gonna do what we always do,” said Lisa. “Okay,” Carmen said, but now she was trying out on him a rather more serious version of the smile. And when she turned and got to handling the movable plastic letters magnetized to the low little blackboard and Lisa asked her to begin sliding them around to make the words “want,” “wet,” “wash,” and “wipe”—“I always tell you,” Lisa was saying, “that you have to look at the first letters. Let's see you read the first letters. Read it with your finger”—Carmen kept periodically swiveling her head, then her whole body, to look at Coleman and stay in touch with him. “Anything is a distraction,” Lisa said softly to her father. “Come on, Miss Carmen. Come on, honey. He's invisible.” “What's that?” “Invisible,” Lisa repeated, “you can't see him.” Carmen laughed—“I can see him.” “Come on. Come on back to me. The first letters. That's it. Good work. But you also have to read the rest of the word too. Right? The first letter — and now the rest of the word. Good—‘wash.’ What's this one? You know it. You know that one. ‘Wipe.’ Good.” Twenty-five weeks in the program on the day Coleman came to sit in on Reading Recovery, and though Carmen had made progress, it wasn't much. He remembered how she had struggled with the word “your” in the illustrated storybook from which she was reading aloud — scratching with her fingers around her eyes, squeezing and balling up the midriff of her shirt, twisting her legs onto the rung of her kiddie-sized chair, slowly but surely working her behind farther and farther off the seat of the chair — and was still unable to recognize “your” or to sound it out. “This is March, Dad. Twenty-five weeks. It's a long time to be having trouble with ‘your’. It's a long time to be confusing couldn't' with ‘climbed,’ but at this point I'll settle for ‘your.’ It's supposed to be twenty weeks in the program, and out. She's been to kindergarten — she should have learned some basic sight words. But when I showed her a list of words back in September — and by then she was entering first grade — she said, ‘What are these?’ She didn't even know what words were. And the letters: h she didn't know, j she didn't know, she confused u for c. You see how she did that, it's visually similar, but she still has something of the problem twenty-five weeks later. The m and the w. The i and the l. The g and the d. Still problems for her. It's all a problem for her.” “You're pretty dejected about Carmen,” he said. “Well, every day for half an hour? That's a lot of instruction. That's a lot of work. She's supposed to read at home, but at home there's a sixteen-year-old sister who just had a baby, and the parents forget or don't care. The parents are immigrants, they're second-language learners, they don't find it easy reading to their children in English, though Carmen never got read to even in Spanish. And this is what I deal with day in and day out. Just seeing if a child can manipulate a book — I give it to them, a book like this one, with a big colorful illustration beneath the title, and I say, ‘Show me the front of the book.’ Some kids know, but most don't. Print doesn't mean anything to them. And,” she said, smiling with exhaustion and nowhere near as enticingly as Carmen, “my kids supposedly aren't learning-disabled. Carmen doesn't look at the words while I'm reading. She doesn't care. And that's why you're wiped out at the end of the day. Other teachers have difficult tasks, I know, but at the end of a day of Carmen after Carmen after Carmen, you come home emotionally drained. By then I can't read. I can't even get on the phone. I eat something and go to bed. I do like these kids. I love these kids. But it's worse than draining — it's killing.”

Faunia was sitting up on the grass now, downing the last of her drink while one of the boys — the youngest, thinnest, most boyish-looking of them, incongruously bearded at just the chin and wearing, with his brown uniform, a red-checkered bandanna and what looked like high-heeled cowboy boots — was collecting all the debris from lunch and stuffing it into a trash sack, and the other three were standing apart, out in the sunshine, each smoking a last cigarette before returning to work.

Faunia was alone. And quiet now. Sitting there gravely with the empty soda can and thinking what? About the two years of waitressing down in Florida when she was sixteen and seventeen, about the retired businessmen who used to come in for lunch without their wives and ask her if she wouldn't like to live in a nice apartment and have nice clothes and a nice new Pinto and charge accounts at all the Bal Harbour clothing shops and at the jewelry store and at the beauty parlor and in exchange do nothing more than be a girlfriend a few nights a week and every once in a while on weekends? Not one, two, three, but four such proposals in just the first year. And then the proposition from the Cuban. She clears a hundred bucks a John and no taxes. For a skinny blonde with big tits, a tall, good-looking kid like her with hustle and ambition and guts, got up in a miniskirt, a halter, and boots, a thousand bucks a night would be nothing. A year, two, and, if by then she wants to, she retires — she can afford to. “And you didn't do it?” Coleman asked. “No. Uh-uh. But don't think I didn't think about it,” she said. “All the restaurant shit, those creepy people, the crazy cooks, a menu I can't read, orders I can't write, keeping everything straight in my head — it was no picnic. But if I can't read, I can count. I can add. I can subtract. I can't read words but I know who Shakespeare is. I know who Einstein is. I know who won the Civil War. I'm not stupid. I'm just an illiterate. A fine distinction but there it is. Numbers are something else. Numbers, believe me, I know. Don't think I didn't think it might not be a bad idea at all.” But Coleman needed no such instruction. Not only did he think that at seventeen she thought being a hooker might be a good idea, he thought that it was an idea that she had more than simply entertained.

“What do you do with the kid who can't read?” Lisa had asked him in her despair. “It's the key to everything, so you have to do something, but doing it is burning me out. Your second year is supposed to be better. Your third year better than that. And this is my fourth.” “And it isn't better?” he asked. “It's hard. It's so hard. Each year is harder. But if one-on-one tutoring doesn't work, what do you do?” Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them — so Coleman believed more often than not. And for how long his whore? Is that what Faunia was thinking about before getting herself up to head back to North Hall to finish cleaning the corridors? Was she thinking about how long it had all gone on? The mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North, the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the two dead children. No wonder half an hour in the sun sharing a pizza with the boys is paradise to her.

“This is my friend Coleman, Faunia. He's just going to watch.”

“Okay,” Faunia says. She is wearing a green corduroy jumper, fresh white stockings, and shiny black shoes, and is not nearly as jaunty as Carmen — composed, well mannered, permanently a little deflated, a pretty middle-class Caucasian child with long blond hair in butterfly barrettes at either side and, unlike Carmen, showing no interest in him, no curiosity about him, once he has been introduced. “Hello,” she mumbles meekly, and goes obediently back to moving the magnetic letters around, pushing together the w's, the t's, the n's, the 's's, and, on another part of the blackboard, grouping together all the vowels.

“Use two hands,” Lisa tells her, and she does what she is told.

“Which are these?” Lisa asks.

And Faunia reads them. Gets all the letters right.

“Let's take something she knows,” Lisa says to her father. “Make not,' Faunia.”

Faunia does it. Faunia makes “not.”

“Good work. Now something she doesn't know. Make ‘got.’”

Looks long and hard at the letters, but nothing happens. Faunia makes nothing. Does nothing. Waits. Waits for the next thing to happen. Been waiting for the next thing to happen all her life. It always does.

“I want you to change the first part, Miss Faunia. Come on. You know this. What's the first part of ‘got’?”

“G.” She moves away the n and, at the start of the word, substitutes g.

“Good work. Now make it say ‘pot.’”

She does it. Pot.

“Good. Now read it with your finger.”

Faunia moves her finger beneath each letter while distinctly pronouncing its sound. “Puh — ah — tuh.”

“She's quick,” Coleman says.

“Yes, but that's supposed to be quick.”

There are three other children with three other Reading Recovery teachers in other parts of the large room, and so all around him Coleman can hear little voices reading aloud, rising and falling in the same childish pattern regardless of the content, and he hears the other teachers saying, “You know that—u, like ‘umbrella’—u, u—” and “You know that—ing, you know ing—” and “You know I—good, good work,” and when he looks around, he sees that all the other children being taught are Faunia as well. There are alphabet charts everywhere, with pictures of objects to illustrate each of the letters, and there are plastic letters everywhere to pick up in your hand, differently colored so as to help you phonetically form the words a letter at a time, and piled everywhere are simple books that tell the simplest stories: “...on Friday we went to the beach. Saturday we went to the airport.” “‘Father Bear, is Baby Bear with you?’ ‘No,’ said Father Bear.” “In the morning a dog barked at Sara. She was frightened. ‘Try to be a brave girl, Sara,’ said Mom.” In addition to all these books and all these stories and all these Saras and all these dogs and all these bears and all these beaches, there are four teachers, four teachers all for Faunia, and they still can't teach her to read at her level.

“She's in first grade,” Lisa is telling her father. “We're hoping that if we all four work together with her all day long every day, by the end of the year we can get her up to speed. But it's hard to get her motivated on her own.”

“Pretty little girl,” Coleman says.

“Yes, you find her pretty? You like that type? Is that your type, Dad, the pretty, slow-at-reading type with the long blond hair and the broken will and the butterfly barrettes?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to. I've been watching you with her,” and she points around the room to where all four Faunias sit quietly before the board, forming and reforming out of the colorful plastic letters the words “pot” and “got” and “not.” “The first time she spelled out ‘pot’ with her finger, you couldn't take your eyes off the kid. Well, if that turns you on, you should have been here back in September. Back in September she misspelled her first name and her second name. Fresh from kindergarten and the only word on the word list she could recognize was ‘not.’ She didn't understand that print contains a message. She didn't know left page before right page. She didn't know ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ ‘Do you know „Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, Faunia?’ ‘No.’ Which means that her kindergarten experience — because that's what they get there, fairy tales, nursery rhymes — wasn't very good. Today she knows ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ but then? Forget it. Oh, if you'd met Faunia last September, fresh from failing at kindergarten, I guarantee you, Dad, she would have driven you wild.”

What do you do with the kid who can't read? The kid who is sucking somebody off in a pickup in her driveway while, upstairs, in a tiny apartment over a garage, her small children are supposedly asleep with a space heater burning — two untended children, a kerosene fire, and she's with this guy in his truck. The kid who has been a runaway since age fourteen, on the lam from her inexplicable life for her entire life. The kid who marries, for the stability and the safeguard he'll provide, a combat-crazed veteran who goes for your throat if you so much as turn in your sleep. The kid who is false, the kid who hides herself and lies, the kid who can't read who can read, who pretends she can't read, takes willingly upon herself this crippling shortcoming all the better to impersonate a member of a subspecies to which she does not belong and need not belong but to which, for every wrong reason, she wants him to believe she belongs. Wants herself to believe she belongs. The kid whose existence became a hallucination at seven and a catastrophe at fourteen and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone, and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on, unintimidated, is enormous and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but, morally speaking, the least repellent person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction — because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction — and because the underlying feeling of Tightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade-in-arms than anyone else on earth.

And what do you do with such a kid? You find a pay phone as fast as you can and rectify your idiotic mistake.

He thinks she is thinking about how long it has all gone on, the mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North, the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the dead children ... and maybe she is. Maybe she is even if, alone now on the grass while the boys are smoking and cleaning up from lunch, she thinks she is thinking about crows. She thinks about crows a lot of the time. They're everywhere. They roost in the woods not far from the bed where she sleeps, they're in the pasture when she's out there moving the fence for the cows, and today they are cawing all over the campus, and so instead of thinking of what she is thinking the way Coleman thinks she is thinking it, she is thinking about the crow that used to hang around the store in Seeley Falls when, after the fire and before moving to the farm, she took the furnished room up there to try to hide from Farley, the crow that hung around the parking lot between the post office and the store, the crow that somebody had made into a pet because it was abandoned or because its mother was killed — she never knew what orphaned it. And now it had been abandoned for a second time and had taken to hanging out in that parking lot, where most everybody came and went during the course of the day. This crow created many problems in Seeley Falls because it started dive-bombing people coming into the post office, going after the barrettes in the little girls' hair and so on — as crows will because it is their nature to collect shiny things, bits of glass and stuff like that — and so the postmistress, in consultation with a few interested townsfolk, decided to take it to the Audubon Society, where it was caged and only sometimes let out to fly; it couldn't be set free because in the wild a bird that likes to hang around a parking lot simply will not fit in. That crow's voice. She remembers it at all hours, day or night, awake, sleeping, or insomniac. Had a strange voice. Not like the voice of other crows probably because it hadn't been raised with other crows. Right after the fire, I used to go and visit that crow at the Audubon Society, and whenever the visit was over and I would turn to leave, it would call me back with this voice. Yes, in a cage, but being what it was, it was better off that way. There were other birds in cages that people had brought in because they couldn't live in the wild anymore. There were a couple of little owls. Speckled things that looked like toys. I used to visit the owls too. And a pigeon hawk with a piercing cry. Nice birds. And then I moved down here and, alone as I was, am, I have gotten to know crows like never before. And them me. Their sense of humor. Is that what it is? Maybe it's not a sense of humor. But to me it looks like it is. The way they walk around. The way they tuck their heads. The way they scream at me if I don't have bread for them. Faunia, go get the bread. They strut. They boss the other birds around. On Saturday, after having the conversation with the redtail hawk down by Cumberland, I came home and I heard these two crows back in the orchards. I knew something was up. This alarming crow-calling. Sure enough, saw three birds — two crows crowing and cawing off this hawk. Maybe the very one I'd been talking to a few minutes before. Chasing it. Obviously the redtail was up to no good. But taking on a hawk? Is that a good idea? It wins them points with the other crows, but I don't know if I would do that. Can even two of them take on a hawk? Aggressive bastards. Mostly hostile. Good for them. Saw a photo once — a crow going right up to an eagle and barking at it. The eagle doesn't give a shit. Doesn't even see him. But the crow is something. The way it flies. They're not as pretty as ravens when ravens fly and do those wonderful, beautiful acrobatics. They've got a big fuselage to get off the ground and yet they don't need a running start necessarily. A few steps will do it. I've watched that. It's more just a huge effort. They make this huge effort and they're up. When I used to take the kids to eat at Friendly's. Four years ago. There were millions of them. The Friendly's on East Main Street in Blackwell. In the late afternoon. Before dark. Millions of them in the parking lot. The crow convention at Friendly's. What is it with crows and parking lots? What is that all about? We'll never know what that's about or anything else. Other birds are kind of dull next to crows. Yes, bluejays have that terrific bounce. The trampoline walk. That's good. But crows can do the bounce and the chesty thrust. Most impressive. Turning their heads from left to right, casing the joint. Oh, they're hot shit. They're the coolest. The caw. The noisy caw. Listen. Just listen. Oh, I love it. Staying in touch like that. The frantic call that means danger. I love that. Rush outside then. It can be 5 A.M., I don't care. The frantic call, rush outside, and you can expect the show to begin any minute. The other calls, I can't say I know what they mean. Maybe nothing. Sometimes it's a quick call. Sometimes it's throaty. Don't want to confuse it with the raven's call. Crows mate with crows and ravens with ravens. It's wonderful that they never get confused. Not to my knowledge anyway. Everybody who says they're ugly scavenger birds — and most everybody does — is nuts. I think they're beautiful. Oh, yes. Very beautiful. Their sleekness. Their shades. It's so so black in there you can see purple in there. Their heads. At the start of the beak that sprout of hairs, that mustache thing, those hairs coming forward from the feathers. Probably has a name. But the name doesn't matter. Never does. All that matters is that it's there. And nobody knows why. It's like everything else — just there. All their eyes are black. Everybody gets black eyes. Black claws. What is it like flying? Ravens will do the soaring, crows just seem to go where they're going. They don't just fly around as far as I can tell. Let the ravens soar. Let the ravens do the soaring. Let the ravens pile up the miles and break the records and get the prizes. The crows have to get from one place to another. They hear that I have bread, so they're here. They hear somebody down the road two miles has bread, so they're there. When I throw their bread out to them, there'll always be one who is the guard and another you can hear off in the distance, and they're signaling back and forth just to let everybody know what's going on. It's hard to believe in everybody's looking out for everybody else, but that's what it looks like. There's a wonderful story I never forgot that a friend of mine told me when I was a kid that her mother told her. There were these crows who were so smart that they had figured out how to take these nuts they had that they couldn't break open out to the highway, and they would watch the lights, the traffic lights, and they would know when the cars would take off — they were that intelligent that they knew what was going on with the lights — and they would place the nuts right in front of the tires so they'd be cracked open and as soon as the light would change they'd move down. I believed that back then. Believed everything back then. And now that I know them and nobody else, I believe it again. Me and the crows. That's the ticket. Stick to the crows and you've got it made. I hear they preen each other's feathers. Never seen that. Seen them close together and wonder what they're doing. But never seen them actually doing it. Don't even see them preen their own. But then, I'm next door to the roost, not in it. Wish I were. Would have preferred to be one. Oh, yes, absolutely. No two ways about that. Much prefer to be a crow. They don't have to worry about moving to get away from anybody or anything. They just move. They don't have to pack anything. They just go. When they get smashed by something, that's it, it's over. Tear a wing, it's over. Break a foot, it's over. A much better way than this. Maybe I'll come back as one. What was I before that I came back as this? I was a crow! Yes! I was one! And I said, “God, I wish I was that big-titted girl down there,” and I got my wish, and now, Christ, do I want to go back to my crow status. My status crow. Good name for a crow. Status. Good name for anything black and big. Goes with the strut. Status. I noticed everything as a kid. I loved birds. Always stuck on crows and hawks and owls. Still see the owls at night, driving home from Coleman's place. I can't help it if I get out of the car to talk to them. Shouldn't. Should drive straight on home before that bastard kills me. What do crows think when they hear the other birds singing? They think it's stupid. It is. Cawing. That's the only thing. It doesn't look good for a bird that struts to sing a sweet little song. No, caw your head off. That's the fucking ticket — cawing your head off and frightened of nothing and in there eating everything that's dead. Gotta get a lot of road kill in a day if you want to fly like that. Don't bother to drag it off but eat it right on the road. Wait until the last minute when a car is coming, and then they get up and go but not so far that they can't hop right back and dig back in soon as it's passed. Eating in the middle of the road. Wonder what happens when the meat goes bad. Maybe it doesn't for them. Maybe that's what it means to be a scavenger. Them and the turkey vultures — that's their job. They take care of all of those things out in the woods and out in the road that we don't want anything to do with. No crow goes hungry in all this world. Never without a meal. If it rots, you don't see the crow run away. If there's death, they're there. Something's dead, they come by and get it. I like that. I like that a lot. Eat that raccoon no matter what. Wait for the truck to come crack open the spine and then go back in there and suck up all the good stuff it takes to lift that beautiful black carcass off the ground. Sure, they have their strange behavior. Like anything else. I've seen them up in those trees, gathered all together, talking all together, and something's going on. But what it is I'll never know. There's some powerful arrangement there. But I haven't the faintest idea whether they know what it is themselves. It could be as meaningless as everything else. I'll bet it isn't, though, and that it makes a million fucking times more sense than any fucking thing down here. Or doesn't it? Is it just a lot of stuff that looks like something else but isn't? Maybe it's all just a genetic tic. Or tock. Imagine if the crows were in charge. Would it be the same shit all over again? The thing about them is that they're all practicality. In their flight. In their talk. Even in their color. All that blackness. Nothing but blackness. Maybe I was one and maybe I wasn't. I think I sometimes believe that I already am one. Yes, been believing that on and off for months now. Why not? There are men who are locked up in women's bodies and women who are locked up in men's bodies, so why can't I be a crow locked up in this body? Yeah, and where is the doctor who is going to do what they do to let me out? Where do I go to get the surgery that will let me be what I am? Who do I talk to? Where do I go and what do I do and how the fuck do I get out?

I am a crow. I know it. I know it!

At the student union building, midway down the hill from North Hall, Coleman found a pay phone in the corridor across from the cafeteria where the Elderhostel students were having their lunch. He could see inside, through the double doorway, to the long dining tables where the couples were all mingling happily at lunch.

Jeff wasn't at home — it was about 10 A.M. in L.A., and Coleman got the answering machine, and so he searched his address book for the office number at the university, praying that Jeff wasn't off in class yet. What the father had to say to his eldest son had to be said immediately. The last time he'd called Jeff in a state anything like this was to tell him that Iris had died. “They killed her. They set out to kill me and they killed her.” It was what he said to everyone, and not just in those first twenty-four hours. That was the beginning of the disintegration: everything requisitioned by rage. But this is the end of it. The end — there was the news he had for his son. And for himself. The end of the expulsion from the previous life. To be content with something less grandiose than self-banishment and the overwhelming challenge that is to one's strength. To live with one's failure in a modest fashion, organized once again as a rational being and blotting out the blight and the indignation. If unyielding, unyielding quietly. Peacefully. Dignified contemplation — that's the ticket, as Faunia liked to say. To live in a way that does not bring Philoctetes to mind. He does not have to live like a tragic character in his course. That the primal seems a solution is not news — it always does. Everything changes with desire. The answer to all that has been destroyed. But choosing to prolong the scandal by perpetuating the protest? My stupidity everywhere. My derangement everywhere. And the grossest sentimentality. Wistfully remembering back to Steena. Jokingly dancing with Nathan Zuckerman. Confiding in him. Reminiscing with him. Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him. But what can J transform this into? I am stuck with it. As is. Sans language, shape, structure, meaning — sans the unities, the catharsis, sans everything. More of the untransformed unforeseen. And why would anyone want more? Yet the woman who is Faunia is the unforeseen. Intertwined orgasmically with the unforeseen, and convention unendurable. Upright principles unendurable. Contact with her body the only principle. Nothing more important than that. And the stamina of her sneer. Alien to the core. Contact with that. The obligation to subject my life to hers and its vagaries. Its vagrancy. Its truancy. Its strangeness. The delectation of this elemental eros. Take the hammer of Faunia to everything outlived, all the exalted justifications, and smash your way to freedom. Freedom from? From the stupid glory of being right. From the ridiculous quest for significance. From the never-ending campaign for legitimacy. The onslaught of freedom at seventy-one, the freedom to leave a lifetime behind — known also as Aschenbachian madness. “And before nightfall”—the final words of Death in Venice—“a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.” No, he does not have to live like a tragic character in any course.

“Jeff! It's Dad. It's your father.”

“Hi. How's it going?”

“Jeff, I know why I haven't heard from you, why I haven't heard from Michael. Mark I wouldn't expect to hear from — and Lisa hung up on me last time I called.”

“She phoned me. She told me.”

“Listen, Jeff — my affair with this woman is over.”

“Is it? How come?”

He thinks, Because there's no hope for her. Because men have beaten the shit out of her. Because her kids have been killed in a fire. Because she works as a janitor. Because she has no education and says she can't read. Because she's been on the run since she's fourteen. Because she doesn't even ask me, “What are you doing with me?” Because she knows what everybody is doing with her. Because she's seen it all and there's no hope.

But all he says to his son is, “Because I don't want to lose my children.”

With the gentlest laugh, Jeff said, “Try as you might, you couldn't do it. You certainly aren't able to lose me. I don't believe you were going to lose Mike or Lisa, either. Markie is something else. Markie yearns for something none of us can give him. Not just you — none of us. It's all very sad with Markie. But that we were losing you? That we've been losing you since Mother died and you resigned from the college? That is something we've all been living with. Dad, nobody has known what to do. Since you went on the warpath with the college, it hasn't been easy to get to you.”

“I realize that,” said Coleman, “I understand that,” but two minutes into the conversation and it was already insufferable to him. His reasonable, supercompetent, easygoing son, the eldest, the coolest head of the lot, speaking calmly about the family problem with the father who was the problem was as awful to endure as his irrational youngest son being enraged with him and going nuts. The excessive demand he had made on their sympathy — on the sympathy of his own children! “I understand,” Coleman said again, and that he understood made it all the worse.

“I hope nothing too awful happened with her,” Jeff said.

“With her? No. I just decided that enough was enough.” He was afraid to say more for fear that he might start to say something very different.

“That's good,” Jeff said. “I'm terrifically relieved. That there've been no repercussions, if that's what you're saying. That's just great.”

Repercussions?

“I don't follow you,” Coleman said. “Why repercussions?”

“You're free and clear? You're yourself again? You sound more like yourself than you have for years. That you've called — this is all that matters. I was waiting and I was hoping and now you've called. There's nothing more to be said. You're back. That's all we were worried about.”

“I'm lost, Jeff. Fill me in. I'm lost as to what we're going on about here. Repercussions from what?”

Jeff paused before he spoke again, and when he did speak, it was reluctantly. “The abortion. The suicide attempt.”

“Faunia?”

“Right.”

“Had an abortion? Tried to commit suicide? When?”

“Dad, everyone in Athena knew. That's how it got to us.”

“Everyone? Who is everyone?”

“Look, Dad, there are no repercussions—”

“It never happened, my boy, that's why there are no ‘repercussions.’ It never happened. There was no abortion, there was no suicide attempt — not that I know of. And not that she knows of. But just who is this everyone? Goddamnit, you hear a story like that, a senseless story like that, why don't you pick up the phone, why don't you come to me?”

“Because it isn't my business to come to you. I don't come to a man your age—”

“No, you don't, do you? Instead, whatever you're told about a man my age, however ludicrous, however malicious and absurd, you believe.”

“If I made a mistake, I am truly sorry. You're right. Of course you're right. But it's been a long haul for all of us. You've not been that easy to reach now for—”

“Who told this to you?”

“Lisa. Lisa heard it first.”

“Who did Lisa hear it from?”

“Several sources. People. Friends.”

“I want names. I want to know who this everyone is Which friends?”

“Old friends. Athena friends.”

“Her darling childhood friends. The offspring of my colleagues. Who told them, I wonder.”

“There was no suicide attempt,” Jeff said.

“No, Jeffrey, there wasn't. No abortion that I know of, either.”

“Well, fine.”

“And if there were? If I had impregnated this woman and she'd gone for an abortion and after the abortion had attempted suicide? Suppose, Jeff, she had even succeeded at suicide. Then what? Then what, Jeff? Your father's mistress kills herself. Then what? Turn on your father? Your criminal father? No, no, no — let's go back, back up a step, back up to the suicide attempt. Oh, I like that. I do wonder who came up with the suicide attempt. Is it because of the abortion that she attempts this suicide? Let's get straight this melodrama that Lisa got from her Athena friends. Because she doesn't want the abortion? Because the abortion is imposed on her? I see. I see the cruelty. A mother who has lost two little children in a fire turns up pregnant by her lover. Ecstasy. A new life. Another chance. A new child to replace the dead ones. But the lover—no, says he, and drags her by her hair to the abortionist, and then — of course — having worked his will on her, takes the naked, bleeding body—”

By this time Jeff had hung up.

But by this time Coleman didn't need Jeff to keep on going. He had only to see the Elderhostel couples inside the cafeteria finishing their coffee before returning to class, he had only to hear them in there at their ease and enjoying themselves, the appropriate elderly looking as they should look and sounding as they should sound, for him to think that even the conventional things that he'd done afforded him no relief. Not just having been a professor, not just having been a dean, not just having remained married, through everything, to the same formidable woman, but having a family, having intelligent children — and it all afforded him nothing. If anybody's children should be able to understand this, shouldn't his? All the preschool. All the reading to them. The sets of encyclopedias. The preparation before quizzes. The dialogues at dinner. The endless instruction, from Iris, from him, in the multiform nature of life. The scrutinization of language. All this stuff we did, and then to come back at me with this mentality? After all the schooling and all the books and all the words and all the superior SAT scores, it is insupportable. After all the taking them seriously. When they said something foolish, engaging it seriously. All the attention paid to the development of reason and of mind and of imaginative sympathy. And of skepticism, of well-informed skepticism. Of thinking for oneself. And then to absorb the first rumor? All the education and nothing helps. Nothing can insulate against the lowest level of thought. Not even to ask themselves, “But does that sound like our father? Does that sound like him to me?” Instead, your father is an open-and-shut case. Never allowed to watch TV and you manifest the mentality of a soap opera. Allowed to read nothing but the Greeks or their equivalent and you make life into a Victorian soap opera. Answering your questions. Your every question. Never turning one aside. You ask about your grandparents, you ask who they were and I told you. They died, your grandparents, when I was young. Grandpa when I was in high school, Grandma when I was away in the navy. By the time I got back from the war, the landlord had long ago put everything out on the street. There was nothing left. The landlord told me he couldn't afford to blah blah, there was no rent coming in, and I could have killed the son of a bitch. Photo albums. Letters. Stuff from my childhood, from their childhood, all of it, everything, the whole thing, gone. “Where were they born? Where did they live?” They were born in Jersey. The first of their families born here. He was a saloon keeper. I believe that in Russia his father, your great-grandfather, worked in the tavern business. Sold booze to the Russkies. “Do we have aunts and uncles?” My father had a brother who went to California when I was a little kid, and my mother was an only child, like me. After me she couldn't have children — I never knew why that was. The brother, my father's older brother, remained a Silberzweig — he never took the changed name as far as I know. Jack Silberzweig. Born in the old country and so kept the name. When I was shipping out from San Francisco, I looked in all the California phone books to try to locate him. He was on the outs with my father. My father considered him a lazy bum, wanted nothing to do with him, and so nobody was sure what city Uncle Jack lived in. I looked in all the phone books. I was going to tell him that his brother had died. I wanted to meet him. My one living relative on that side. So what if he's a bum? I wanted to meet his children, my cousins, if there were any. I looked under Silberzweig. I looked under Silk. I looked under Silber. Maybe in California he'd become a Silber. I didn't know. And I don't know. I have no idea. And then I stopped looking. When you don't have a family of your own, you concern yourself with these things. Then I had you and I stopped worrying about having an uncle and having cousins ... Each kid heard the same thing. And the only one it didn't satisfy was Mark. The older boys didn't ask that much, but the twins were insistent. “Were there any twins in the past?” My understanding — I believe I was told this — was that there was either a great- or a great-great-grandfather who was a twin. This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris. This was the story he told her on Sullivan Street when they first met and the story he stuck to, the original boilerplate. And the only one never satisfied was Mark. “Where did our great-grandparents come from?” Russia. “But what city?” I asked my father and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never really knew. The old people didn't talk about it much, and the American children weren't that curious, they were het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many families, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer “Russia.” But Markie said, “Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia?” Markie would not be still. And why? Why? There was no answer. Markie wanted the knowledge of who they were and where they came from — all that his father could never give him. And that's why he becomes the Orthodox Jew? That's why he writes the biblical protest poems? That's why Markie hates him so? Impossible. There were the Gittelmans. Gittelman grandparents. Gittelman aunts and uncles. Little Gittelman cousins all over Jersey. Wasn't that enough? How many relatives did he need? There had to be Silks and Silberzweigs too? That made no sense at all as a grievance — it could not be! Yet Coleman wondered anyway, irrational as it might be to associate Markie's brooding anger with his own secret. So long as Markie was at odds with him, he was never able to stop himself from wondering, and never more agonizingly than after Jeff had hung up the phone on him. If the children who carried his origins in their genes and who would pass those origins on to their own children could find it so easy to suspect him of the worst kind of cruelty to Faunia, what explanation could there be? Because he could never tell them about their family? Because he'd owed it to them to tell them? Because to deny them such knowledge was wrong? That made no sense! Retribution was not unconsciously or unknowingly enacted. There was no such quid pro quo. It could not be. And yet, after the phone call — leaving the student union, leaving the campus, all the while he was driving in tears back up the mountain — that was exactly what it felt like.

And all the while he was driving home he was remembering the time he'd almost told Iris. It was after the twins were born. The family was now complete. They'd done it — he'd made it. With not a sign of his secret on any of his kids, it was as though he had been delivered from his secret. The exuberance that came of having pulled it off brought him to the very brink of giving the whole thing away. Yes, he would present his wife with the greatest gift he possessed: he would tell the mother of his four children who their father really was. He would tell Iris the truth. That was how excited and relieved he was, how solid the earth felt beneath his feet after she had their beautiful twins, and he took Jeff and Mikey to the hospital to see their new brother and sister, and the most frightening apprehension of them all had been eradicated from his life.

But he never did give Iris that gift. He was saved from doing it — or damned to leave it undone — because of the cataclysm that befell a dear friend of hers, her closest associate on the art association board, a pretty, refined amateur watercolorist named Claudia McChesney, whose husband, owner of the county's biggest building firm, turned out to have quite a stunning secret of his own: a second family. For some eight years, Harvey McChesney had been keeping a woman years younger than Claudia, a bookkeeper at a chair factory over near the Taconic by whom he'd had two children, little kids aged four and six, living in a small town just across the Massachusetts line in New York State, whom he visited each week, whom he supported, whom he seemed to love, and whom nobody in the McChesneys' Athena household knew anything about until an anonymous phone call — probably from one of Harvey's building-trade rivals — revealed to Claudia and the three adolescent children just what McChesney was up to when he wasn't out on the job. Claudia collapsed that night, came completely apart and tried to slash her wrists, and it was Iris who, beginning at 3 A.M., with the help of a psychiatrist friend, organized the rescue operation that got Claudia installed before dawn in Austin Riggs, the Stockbridge psychiatric hospital. And it was Iris who, all the while she was nursing two newborns and mothering two preschool boys, visited the hospital every day, talking to Claudia, steadying her, reassuring her, bringing her potted plants to tend and art books to look at, even combing and braiding Claudia's hair, until, after five weeks — and as much a result of Iris's devotion as of the psychiatric program — Claudia returned home to begin to take the steps necessary to rid herself of the man who had caused all her misery.

In just days, Iris had got Claudia the name of a divorce lawyer up in Pittsfield and, with all the Silk kids, including the infants, strapped down in the back of the station wagon, she drove her friend to the lawyer's office to be absolutely certain that the separation arrangements were initiated and Claudia's deliverance from McChesney was under way. On the ride home that day, there'd been a lot of bucking up to do, but bucking people up was Iris's specialty, and she saw to it that Claudia's determination to right her life was not washed away by her residual fears.

“What a wretched thing to do to another person,” Iris said. “Not the girlfriend. Bad enough, but that happens. And not the little children, not even that — not even the other woman's little boy and girl, painful and brutal as that would be for any wife to discover. No, it's the secret — that's what did it, Coleman. That's why Claudia doesn't want to go on living. 'Where's the intimacy?' That's what gets her crying every time. ‘Where is the intimacy,’ she says, ‘when there is such a secret?’ That he could hide this from her, that he would have gone on hiding it from her — that's what Claudia's defenseless against, and that's why she still wants to do herself in. She says to me, 'It's like discovering a corpse. Three corpses. Three human bodies hidden under our floor.'” “Yes,” Coleman said, “it's like something out of the Greeks. Out of The Bacchae?” “Worse,” Iris said, “because it's not out of The Bacchae. It's out of Claudia's life.”

When, after almost a year of outpatient therapy, Claudia had a rapprochement with her husband and he moved back into the Athena house and the McChesneys resumed life together as a family — when Harvey agreed to give up the other woman, if not his other children, to whom he swore to remain a responsible father — Claudia seemed no more eager than Iris to keep their friendship alive, and after Claudia resigned from the art association, the women no longer saw each other socially or at any of the organization meetings where Iris was generally kingpin.

Nor did Coleman go ahead — as his triumph dictated when the twins were born — to tell his wife his stunning secret. Saved, he thought, from the most childishly sentimental stunt he could ever have perpetrated. Suddenly to have begun to think the way a fool thinks: suddenly to think the best of everything and everyone, to shed entirely one's mistrust, one's caution, one's self-mistrust, to think that all one's difficulties have come to an end, that all complications have ceased to be, to forget not only where one is but how one has got there, to surrender the diligence, the discipline, the taking the measure of every last situation ... As though the battle that is each person's singular battle could somehow be abjured, as though voluntarily one could pick up and leave off being one's self, the characteristic, the immutable self in whose behalf the battle is undertaken in the first place. The last of his children having been born perfectly white had all but driven him to taking what was strongest in him and wisest in him and tearing it to bits. Saved he was by the wisdom that says, “Don't do anything.”

But even earlier, after the birth of their first child, he had done something almost equally stupid and sentimental. He was a young classics professor from Adelphi down at the University of Pennsylvania for a three-day conference on The Iliad; he had given a paper, he had made some contacts, he'd even been quietly invited by a renowned classicist to apply for a position opening at Princeton, and, on the way home, thinking himself at the pinnacle of existence, instead of heading north on the Jersey Turnpike, to get to Long Island, he had very nearly turned south and made his way down along the back roads of Salem and Cumberland counties to Gouldtown, to his mother's ancestral home where they used to hold the annual family picnic when he was a boy. Yes, then as well, having become a father, he was going to try to give himself the easy pleasure of one of those meaningful feelings that people will go in search of whenever they cease to think. But because he had a son didn't require him to turn south to Gouldtown any more than on that same journey, when he reached north Jersey, his having had this son required him to take the Newark exit and head toward East Orange. There was yet another impulse to be suppressed: the impulse he felt to see his mother, to tell her what had happened and to bring her the boy. The impulse, two years after jettisoning her, and despite Walter's warning, to show himself to his mother. No. Absolutely not. And instead he continued straight on home to his white wife and his white child.

And, some four decades later, all the while he was driving home from the college, besieged by recrimination, remembering some of the best moments of his life — the birth of his children, the exhilaration, the all-too-innocent excitement, the wild wavering of his resolve, the relief so great that it nearly undid his resolve — he was remembering also the worst night of his life, remembering back to his navy stint and the night he was thrown out of that Norfolk whorehouse, the famous white whorehouse called Oris's. “You're a black nigger, ain't you, boy?” and seconds later the bouncers had hurled him from the open front door, over the stairs to the sidewalk and into the street. The place he was looking for was Lulu's, over on Warwick Avenue — Lulu's, they shouted after him, was where his black ass belonged. His forehead struck the pavement, and yet he got himself up, ran until he saw an alleyway, and there cut away from the street and the Shore Patrol, who were all over the place on a Saturday, swinging their billy clubs. He wound up in the toilet of the only bar he dared to enter looking as battered as he did — a colored bar just a few hundred feet from Hampton Roads and the Newport News ferry (the ferry conveying the sailors to Lulu's) and some ten blocks from Oris's. It was his first colored bar since he was an East Orange schoolkid, back when he and a friend used to run the football pools out of Billy's Twilight Club down on the Newark line. During his first two years of high school, on top of the surreptitious boxing, he would be in and out of Billy's Twilight all through the fall, and it was there that he'd garnered the barroom lore he claimed to have learned — as an East Orange white kid — in a tavern owned by his Jewish old man.

He was remembering how he'd struggled to stanch his cut face and how he'd swabbed vainly away at his white jumper but how the blood dripped steadily down to spatter everything. The seatless bowl was coated with shit, the soggy plank floor awash with piss, the sink, if that thing was a sink, a swillish trough of sputum and puke — so that when the retching began because of the pain in his wrist, he threw up onto the wall he was facing rather than lower his face into all that filth.

It was a hideous, raucous dive, the worst, like no place he had ever seen, the most abominable he could have imagined, but he had to hide somewhere, and so, on a bench as far as he could get from the human wreckage swarming the bar, and in the clutches of all his fears, he tried to sip at a beer, to steady himself and dim the pain and to avoid drawing attention. Not that anyone at the bar had bothered looking his way after he'd bought the beer and disappeared against the wall back of the empty tables: just as at the white cathouse, nobody took him here for anything other than what he was.

He still knew, with the second beer, that he was where he should not be, yet if the Shore Patrol picked him up, if they discovered why he'd been thrown out of Oris's, he was ruined: a court-martial, a conviction, a long stretch at hard labor followed by a dishonorable discharge — and all for having lied to the navy about his race, all for having been stupid enough to step through a door where the only out-and-out Negroes on the premises were either laundering the linens or mopping up the slops.

This was it. He'd serve out his stint, do his time as a white man, and this would be it. Because I can't pull it off, he thought — I don't even want to. He'd never before known real disgrace. He'd never before known what it was to hide from the police. Never before had he bled from taking a blow — in all those rounds of amateur boxing he had not lost a drop of blood or been hurt or damaged in any way. But now the jumper of his whites was as red as a surgical dressing, his pants were soggy with caking blood and, from where he'd landed on his knees in the gutter, they were torn and dark with grime. And his wrist had been injured, maybe even shattered, from when he'd broken the fall with his hand — he couldn't move it or bear to touch it. He drank off the beer and then got another in order to try to deaden the pain.

This was what came of failing to fulfill his father's ideals, of flouting his father's commands, of deserting his dead father altogether. If only he'd done as his father had, as Walter had, everything would be happening another way. But first he had broken the law by lying to get into the navy, and now, out looking for a white woman to fuck, he had plunged into the worst possible disaster. “Let me get through to my discharge. Let me get out. Then I'll never lie again. Just let me finish my time, and that's it!” It was the first he'd spoken to his father since he'd dropped dead in the dining car.

If he kept this up, his life would amount to nothing. How did Coleman know that? Because his father was speaking back to him — the old admonishing authority rumbling up once again from his father's chest, resonant as always with the unequivocal legitimacy of an upright man. If Coleman kept on like this, he'd end up in a ditch with his throat slit. Look at where he was now. Look where he had come to hide. And how? Why? Because of his credo, because of his insolent, arrogant “I am not one of you, I can't bear you, I am not part of your Negro we” credo. The great heroic struggle against their we — and look at what he now looked like! The passionate struggle for precious singularity, his revolt of one against the Negro fate — and just look where the defiant great one had ended up! Is this where you've come, Coleman, to seek the deeper meaning of existence? A world of love, that's what you had, and instead you forsake it for this! The tragic, reckless thing that you've done! And not just to yourself — to us all. To Ernestine. To Walt. To Mother. To me. To me in my grave. To my father in his. What else grandiose are you planning, Coleman Brutus? Whom next are you going to mislead and betray?

Still, he couldn't leave for the street because of his fear of the Shore Patrol, and of the court-martial, and of the brig, and of the dishonorable discharge that would hound him forever. Everything in him was too stirred up for him to do anything but keep on drinking until, of course, he was joined on the bench by a prostitute who was openly of his own race.

When the Shore Patrol found him in the morning, they attributed the bloody wounds and the broken wrist and the befouled, disheveled uniform to his having spent a night in niggertown, another swingin' white dick hot for black poon who — having got himself reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned (as well as properly tattooed in the bargain)—had been deposited for the scavengers to pick over in that glass-strewn lot back of the ferry slip.

“U.S. Navy” is all the tattoo said, the words, no more than a quarter inch high, inscribed in blue pigment between the blue arms of a blue anchor, itself a couple inches long. A most unostentatious design as military tattoos go and, discreetly positioned just below the joining of the right arm to the shoulder, a tattoo certainly easy enough to hide. But when he remembered how he'd got it, it was the mark evocative not only of the turbulence of the worst night of his life but of all that underlay the turbulence — it was the sign of the whole of his history, of the indivisibility of the heroism and the disgrace. Embedded in that blue tattoo was a true and total image of himself. The ineradicable biography was there, as was the prototype of the ineradicable, a tattoo being the very emblem of what cannot ever be removed. The enormous enterprise was also there. The outside forces were there. The whole chain of the unforeseen, all the dangers of exposure and all the dangers of concealment — even the senselessness of life was there in that stupid little blue tattoo.

His difficulties with Delphine Roux had begun the first semester he was back in the classroom, when one of his students who happened to be a favorite of Professor Roux's went to her, as department chair, to complain about the Euripides plays in Coleman's Greek tragedy course. One play was Hippolytus, the other Alcestis; the student, Elena Mitnick, found them “degrading to women.”

“So what shall I do to accommodate Miss Mitnick? Strike Euripides from my reading list?”

“Not at all. Clearly everything depends on how you teach Euripides.”

“And what,” he asked, “is the prescribed method these days?” thinking even as he spoke that this was not a debate for which he had the patience or the civility. Besides, confounding Delphine Roux was easier without engaging in the debate. Brimming though she was with intellectual self-importance, she was twenty-nine years old and virtually without experience outside schools, new to her job and relatively new both to the college and to the country. He understood from their previous encounters that her attempt to appear to be not merely his superior but a supercilious superior—“Clearly everything depends” and so on — was best repulsed by displaying complete indifference to her judgment. For all that she could not bear him, she also couldn't bear that the academic credentials that so impressed other of her Athena colleagues hadn't yet overwhelmed the ex-dean. Despite herself, she could not escape from being intimidated by the man who, five years earlier, had reluctantly hired her fresh from the Yale graduate school and who, afterward, never denied regretting it, especially when the psychological numbskulls in his department settled on so deeply confused a young woman as their chair.

To this day, she continued to be disquieted by Coleman Silk's presence just to the degree that she wished for him now to be unsettled by her. Something about him always led her back to her childhood and the precocious child's fear that she is being seen through; also to the precocious child's fear that she is not being seen enough. Afraid of being exposed, dying to be seen — there's a dilemma for you. Something about him made her even second-guess her English, with which otherwise she felt wholly at ease. Whenever they were face to face, something made her think that he wanted nothing more than to tie her hands behind her back.

This something was what? The way he had sexually sized her up when she first came to be interviewed in his office, or the way he had failed to sexually size her up? It had been impossible to read his reading of her, and that on a morning when she knew she had maximally deployed all her powers. She had wanted to look terrific and she did, she had wanted to be fluent and she was, she had wanted to sound scholarly and she'd succeeded, she was sure. And yet he looked at her as if she were a schoolgirl, Mr. and Mrs. Inconsequential's little nobody child.

Now, perhaps that was because of the plaid kilt — the miniskirtlike kilt might have made him think of a schoolgirl's uniform, especially as the person wearing it was a trim, tiny, dark-haired young woman with a small face that was almost entirely eyes and who weighed, clothes and all, barely a hundred pounds. All she'd intended, with the kilt as with the black cashmere turtleneck, black tights, and high black boots, was neither to desexualize herself by what she chose to wear (the university women she'd met so far in America seemed all too strenuously to be doing just that) nor to appear to be trying to tantalize him. Though he was said to be in his mid-sixties, he didn't look to be any older than her fifty-year-old father; he in fact resembled a junior partner in her father's firm, one of several of her father's engineering associates who'd been eyeing her since she was twelve. When, seated across from the dean, she had crossed her legs and the flap of the kilt had fallen open, she had waited a minute or two before pulling it closed — and pulling it closed as perfunctorily as you close a wallet — only because, however young she looked, she wasn't a schoolgirl with a schoolgirl's fears and a schoolgirl's primness, caged in by a schoolgirl's rules. She did not wish to leave that impression any more than to give the opposite impression by allowing the flap to remain open and thereby inviting him to imagine that she meant him to gaze throughout the interview at her slim thighs in the black tights. She had tried as best she could, with the choice of clothing as with her manner, to impress upon him the intricate interplay of all the forces that came together to make her so interesting at twenty-four.

Even her one piece of jewelry, the large ring she'd placed that morning on the middle finger of her left hand, her sole decorative ornament, had been selected for the sidelight it provided on the intellectual she was, one for whom enjoying the aesthetic surface of life openly, nondefensively, with her appetite and connoisseurship undisguised, was nonetheless subsumed by a lifelong devotion to scholarly endeavor. The ring, an eighteenth-century copy of a Roman signet ring, was a man-sized ring formerly worn by a man. On the oval agate, set horizontally — which was what made the ring so masculinely chunky — was a carving of Danae receiving Zeus as a shower of gold. In Paris, four years earlier, when Delphine was twenty, she had been given the ring as a love token from the professor to whom it belonged — the one professor whom she'd been unable to resist and with whom she'd had an impassioned affair. Co-incidentally, he had been a classicist. The first time they met, in his office, he had seemed so remote, so judging, that she found herself paralyzed with fear until she realized that he was playing the seduction against the grain. Was that what this Dean Silk was up to?

However conspicuous the ring's size, the dean never did ask to see the shower of gold carved in agate, and that, she decided, was just as well. Though the story of how she'd come by the ring testified, if anything, to an audacious adultness, he would have thought the ring a frivolous indulgence, a sign that she lacked maturity. Except for the stray hope, she was sure that he was thinking about her along those lines from the moment they'd shaken hands — and she was right. Coleman's take on her was of someone too young for the job, incorporating too many as yet unresolved contradictions, at once a little too grand about herself and, simultaneously, playing at self-importance like a child, an imperfectly self-governed child, quick to respond to the scent of disapproval, with a considerable talent for being wounded, and drawn on, as both child and woman, to achievement upon achievement, admirer upon admirer, conquest upon conquest, as much by uncertainty as by confidence. Someone smart for her age, even too smart, but off the mark emotionally and seriously underdeveloped in most other ways.

From her c.v. and from a supplementary autobiographical essay of fifteen pages that accompanied it — which detailed the progress of an intellectual journey begun at age six — he got the picture clearly enough. Her credentials were indeed excellent, but everything about her (including the credentials) struck him as particularly wrong for a little place like Athena. Privileged 16th arrondissement childhood on the rue de Longchamp. Monsieur Roux an engineer, owner of a firm employing forty; Madame Roux (née de Walincourt) born with an ancient noble name, provincial aristocracy, wife, mother of three, scholar of medieval French literature, master harpsichordist, scholar of harpsichord literature, papal historian, “etc.” And what a telling “etc.” that was! Middle child and only daughter Delphine graduated from the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where she studied philosophy and literature, English and German, Latin, French literature: “...read the entire body of French literature in a very canonical way.” After the Lycée Janson, Lycée Henri IV: “...grueling in-depth study of French literature and philosophy, English language and literary history.” At twenty, after the Lycée Henri IV, the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay: “...with the élite of French intellectual society ... only thirty a year selected.” Thesis: “Self-Denial in Georges Bataille.” Bataille? Not another one. Every ultra-cool Yale graduate student is working on either Mallarmé or Bataille. It isn't difficult to understand what she intends for him to understand, especially as Coleman knows something of Paris from being a young professor with family on a Fulbright one year, and knows something about these ambitious French kids trained in the elite lycées. Extremely well prepared, intellectually well connected, very smart immature young people endowed with the most snobbish French education and vigorously preparing to be envied all their lives, they hang out every Saturday night at the cheap Vietnamese restaurant on rue St. Jacques talking about great things, never any mention of trivialities or small talk — ideas, politics, philosophy only. Even in their spare time, when they are all alone, they think only about the reception of Hegel in twentieth-century French intellectual life. The intellectual must not be frivolous. Life only about thought. Whether brainwashed to be aggressively Marxist or to be aggressively anti-Marxist, they are congenitally appalled by everything American. From this stuff and more she comes to Yale: applies to teach French language to undergraduates and to be incorporated into the Ph.D. program, and, as she notes in her autobiographical essay, she is but one of two from all of France who are accepted. “I arrived at Yale very Cartesian, and there everything was much more pluralistic and polyphonic.” Amused by the undergraduates. Where's their intellectual side? Completely shocked by their having fun. Their chaotic, nonideological way of thinking — of living! They've never even seen a Kurosawa film — they don't know that much. By the time she was their age, she'd seen all the Kurosawas, all the Tarkovskys, all the Fellinis, all the Antonionis, all the Fassbinders, all the Wertmullers, all the Satyajit Rays, all the René Clairs, all the Wim Wenderses, all the Truffauts, the Godards, the Chabrols, the Resnaises, the Rohmers, the Renoirs, and all these kids have seen is Star Wars. In earnest at Yale she resumes her intellectual mission, taking classes with the most hip professors. A bit lost, however. Confused. Especially by the other graduate students. She is used to being with people who speak the same intellectual language, and these Americans ... And not everybody finds her that interesting. Expected to come to America and have everyone say, “Oh, my God, she's a normalienne.” But in America no one appreciates the very special path she was on in France and its enormous prestige. She's not getting the type of recognition she was trained to get as a budding member of the French intellectual elite. She's not even getting the kind of resentment she was trained to get. Finds an adviser and writes her dissertation. Defends it. Is awarded the degree. Gets it extraordinarily rapidly because she had already worked so hard in France. So much schooling and hard work, ready now for the big job at the big school — Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Chicago — and when she gets nothing, she is crushed. A visiting position at Athena College? Where and what is Athena College? She turns up her nose. Until her adviser says, “Delphine, in this market, you get your big job from another job. Visiting assistant professor at Athena College? You may not have heard of it, but we have. Perfectly decent institution. Perfectly decent job for a first job.” Her fellow foreign graduate students tell her that she's too good for Athena College, it would be too déclassé, but her fellow American graduate students, who would kill for a job teaching in the Stop & Shop boiler room, think that her uppityness is characteristically Delphine. Begrudgingly, she applies — and winds up in her minikilt and boots across the desk from Dean Silk. To get the second job, the fancy job, she first needs this Athena job, but for nearly an hour Dean Silk listens to her all but talk her way out of the Athena job. Narrative structure and temporality. The internal contradictions of the work of art. Rousseau hides himself and then his rhetoric gives him away. (A little like her, thinks the dean, in that autobiographical essay.) The critic's voice is as legitimate as the voice of Herodotus. Narratology. The diegetic. The difference between diegesis and mimesis. The bracketed experience. The proleptic quality of the text. Coleman doesn't have to ask what all this means. He knows, in the original Greek meaning, what all the Yale words mean and what all the École Normale Supérieure words mean. Does she? As he's been at it for over three decades, he hasn't time for any of this stuff. He thinks: Why does someone so beautiful want to hide from the human dimension of her experience behind these words? Perhaps just because she is so beautiful. He thinks: So carefully self-appraising and so utterly deluded.

Of course she had the credentials. But to Coleman she embodied the sort of prestigious academic crap that the Athena students needed like a hole in the head but whose appeal to the faculty second-raters would prove irresistible.

At the time he thought that he was being open-minded by hiring her. But more likely it was because she was so goddamn enticing. So lovely. So alluring. And all the more so for looking so daughterly.

Delphine Roux had misread his gaze by thinking, a bit melodramatically — one of the impediments to her adroitness, this impulse not merely to leap to the melodramatic conclusion but to succumb erotically to the melodramatic spell — that what he wanted was to tie her hands behind her back: what he wanted, for every possible reason, was not to have her around. And so he'd hired her. And thus they seriously began not to get on.

And now it was she calling him to her office to be the interviewee. By 1995, the year that Coleman had stepped down from the deanship to return to teaching, the lure of petitely pretty Delphine's all-encompassing chic, with its gaminish intimations of a subterranean sensuality, along with the blandishments of her École Normale sophistication (what Coleman described as “her permanent act of self-inflation”), had appeared to him to have won over just about every wooable fool professor and, not yet out of her twenties — but with an eye perhaps on the deanship that had once been Coleman's — she succeeded to the chair of the smallish department that some dozen years earlier had absorbed, along with the other language departments, the old Classics Department in which Coleman had begun as an instructor. In the new Department of Languages and Literature there was a staff of eleven, one professor in Russian, one in Italian, one in Spanish, one in German, there was Delphine in French and Coleman Silk in classics, and there were five overworked adjuncts, fledgling instructors as well as a few local foreigners, teaching the elementary courses.

“Miss Mitnick's misreading of those two plays,” he was telling her, “is so grounded in narrow, parochial ideological concerns that it does not lend itself to correction.”

“Then you don't deny what she says — that you didn't try to help her.”

“A student who tells me that I speak to her in ‘engendered language’ is beyond being assisted by me.”

“Then,” Delphine said lightly, “there's the problem, isn't it?”

He laughed — both spontaneously and for a purpose. “Yes? The English I speak is insufficiently nuanced for a mind as refined as Miss Mitnick's?”

“Coleman, you've been out of the classroom for a very long time.”

“And you haven't been out of it ever. My dear,” he said, deliberately, and with a deliberately irritating smile, “I've been reading and thinking about these plays all my life.”

“But never from Elena's feminist perspective.”

“Never even from Moses's Jewish perspective. Never even from the fashionable Nietzschean perspective about perspective.”

“Coleman Silk, alone on the planet, has no perspective other than the purely disinterested literary perspective.”

“Almost without exception, my dear”—again? why not?—“our students are abysmally ignorant. They've been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of dealing with such students — and Miss Mitnick is merely typical — I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naive of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it's even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless ‘likes.’ I have trouble believing that an educated woman coming from a French academic background like your own believes there is a feminist perspective on Euripides that isn't simply foolishness. Have you really been edified in so short a time, or is this just old-fashioned careerism grounded right now in the fear of one's feminist colleagues? Because if it is just careerism, it's fine with me. It's human and I understand. But if it's an intellectual commitment to this idiocy, then I am mystified, because you are not an idiot. Because you know better. Because in France surely nobody from the Ecole Normale would dream of taking this stuff seriously. Or would they? To read two plays like Hippolytus and Alcestis, then to listen to a week of classroom discussion on each, then to have nothing to say about either of them other than that they are ‘degrading to women,’ isn't a ‘perspective,’ for Christ's sake — it's mouthwash. It's just the latest mouthwash.”

“Elena's a student. She's twenty years old. She's learning.”

“Sentimentalizing one's students ill becomes you, my dear. Take them seriously. Elena's not learning. She's parroting. Why she ran directly to you is because it's more than likely you she's parroting.”

“That is not true, though if it pleases you to culturally frame me like that, that is okay too, and entirely predictable. If you feel safely superior putting me in that silly frame, so be it, my dear,” she delighted now in saying with a smile of her own. “Your treatment of Elena was offensive to her. That was why she ran to me. You frightened her. She was upset.”

“Well, I develop irritating personal mannerisms when I am confronting the consequences of my ever having hired someone like you.”

“And,” she replied, “some of our students develop irritating personal mannerisms when they are confronting fossilized pedagogy. If you persist in teaching literature in the tedious way you are used to, if you insist on the so-called humanist approach to Greek tragedy you've been taking since the 1950s, conflicts like this are going to arise continually.”

“Good,” he said. “Let them come.” And walked out. And then that very next semester when Tracy Cummings ran to Professor Roux, close to tears, barely able to speak, baffled at having learned that, behind her back, Professor Silk had employed a malicious racial epithet to characterize her to her classmates, Delphine decided that asking Coleman to her office to discuss the charge could only be a waste of time. Since she was sure that he would behave no more graciously than he had the last time a female student had complained — and sure from past experience that should she call him in, he would once again condescend to her in his patronizing way, yet another upstart female daring to inquire into his conduct, yet another woman whose concerns he must trivialize should he deign even to address them — she had turned the matter over to the accessible dean of faculty who had succeeded him. From then on she was able to spend her time more usefully with Tracy, steadying, comforting, as good as taking charge of the girl, a parentless black youngster so badly demoralized that, in the first few weeks after the episode, to prevent her from picking up and running away — and running away to nothing — Delphine had gained permission to move her out of the dormitory into a spare room in her own apartment and to take her on, temporarily, as a kind of ward. Though by the end of the academic year, Coleman Silk, by removing himself from the faculty voluntarily, had essentially confessed to his malice in the spooks affair, the damage done Tracy proved too debilitating for someone so uncertain to begin with: unable to concentrate on her work because of the investigation and frightened of Professor Silk's prejudicing other teachers against her, she had failed all her courses. Tracy packed up not only to leave the college but to pull out of town altogether — out of Athena, where Delphine had been hoping to find her a job and get her tutored and keep an eye on her till she could get back into school. One day Tracy took a bus to Oklahoma, to stay with a half-sister in Tulsa, yet using the Tulsa address, Delphine had been unable to locate the girl ever again.

And then Delphine heard about Coleman Silk's relationship with Faunia Farley, which he was doing everything possible to hide. She couldn't believe it — two years into retirement, seventy-one years old, and the man was still at it. With no more female students who dared question his bias for him to intimidate, with no more young black girls needing nurturing for him to ridicule, with no more young women professors like herself threatening his hegemony for him to browbeat and insult, he had managed to dredge up, from the college's nethermost reaches, a candidate for subjugation who was the prototype of female helplessness: a full-fledged battered wife. When Delphine stopped by the personnel office to learn what she could about Faunia's background, when she read about the ex-husband and the horrifying death of the two small children — in a mysterious fire set, some suspected, by the ex-husband — when she read of the illiteracy that limited Faunia to performing only the most menial of janitorial tasks, she understood that Coleman Silk had managed to unearth no less than a misogynist's heart's desire: in Faunia Farley he had found someone more defenseless even than Elena or Tracy, the perfect woman to crush. For whoever at Athena had ever dared to affront his preposterous sense of prerogative, Faunia Farley would now be made to answer.

And no one to stop him, Delphine thought. No one to stand in his way.

With the realization that he was beyond the jurisdiction of the college and therefore restrained by nothing from taking his revenge on her — on her, yes, on her for everything she had done to prevent him from psychologically terrorizing his female students, on her for the role she had willingly played in having him stripped of authority and removed from the classroom — she was unable to contain her outrage. Faunia Farley was his substitute for her. Through Faunia Farley he was striking back at her. Who else's face and name and form does she suggest to you but mine — the mirror image of me, she could suggest to you no one else's. By luring a woman who is, as I am, employed by Athena College, who is, as I am, less than half your age — yet a woman otherwise my opposite in every way — you at once cleverly masquerade and flagrantly disclose just who it is you wish to destroy. You are not so unshrewd as not to know it, and, from your own august station, you are ruthless enough to enjoy it. But neither am I so stupid as not to recognize that it's me, in effigy, you are out to get.

Understanding had come so swiftly, in sentences so spontaneously explosive, that even as she signed her name at the bottom of the letter's second page and addressed an envelope to him in care of general delivery, she was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human being like Faunia Farley into a plaything only so as to revenge himself on her. How could even he do this? No, she would not alter by one syllable what she'd written nor would she bother to type it up so as to make it easier for him to read. She refused to vitiate her message where it was graphically demonstrated by the propulsive, driven slant of her script. Let him not underestimate her resolve: nothing was now more important to her than exposing Coleman Silk for what he was.

But twenty minutes later she tore up the letter. And luckily. Luckily. When the unbridled idealism swept over her, she could not always see it as fantasy. Right she was to reprimand so reprehensible a predator. But to imagine saving a woman as far gone as Faunia Farley when she hadn't been able to rescue Tracy? To imagine prevailing against a man who, in his embittered old age, was free now not only of every institutional restraint but — humanist that he was!—of every humane consideration? For her there could be no greater delusion than believing herself a match for Coleman Silk's guile. Even a letter so clearly composed in the white heat of moral repulsion, a letter unmistakably informing him that his secret was out, that he was unmasked, exposed, tracked down, would somehow, in his hands, be twisted into an indictment with which to compromise her and, if the opportunity presented itself, to outright ruin her.

He was ruthless and he was paranoid, and whether she liked it or not, there were practical matters to take into account, concerns that might not have impeded her back when she was a Marxist-oriented lycée student whose inability to sanction injustice sometimes, admittedly, overtook common sense. But now she was a college professor, awarded early tenure, already chairperson of her own department, and all but certain of moving on someday to Princeton, to Columbia, to Cornell, to Chicago, perhaps even triumphantly back to Yale. A letter like this, signed by her and passed from hand to hand by Coleman Silk until, inevitably, it found its way to whoever, out of envy, out of resentment, because she was just too damn successful too young, might wish to undermine her ... Yes, bold as it was, with none of her fury censored out, this letter would be used by him to trivialize her, to contend that she lacked maturity and had no business being anyone's superior. He had connections, he knew people still — he could do it. He would do it, so falsify her meaning...

Quickly she tore the letter into tiny pieces and, at the center of a clean sheet of paper, with a red ballpoint pen of the kind she ordinarily never used for correspondence and in big block letters that no one would recognize as hers, she wrote:

Everyone knows

But that was all. She stopped herself there. Three nights later, minutes after turning out the lights, she got up out of bed and, having come to her senses, went to her desk to crumple up and discard and forget forever the piece of paper beginning “Everyone knows” and instead, leaning over the desk, without even seating herself — fearing that in the time it took to sit down she would again lose her nerve — she wrote in a rush ten more words that would suffice to let him know that exposure was imminent. The envelope was addressed, stamped, the unsigned note sealed up inside it, the desk lamp nicked off, and Delphine, relieved at having decisively settled on the most telling thing to do within the practical limitations of her situation, was back in bed and morally primed to sleep untroubled.

But she had first to subdue everything driving her to get back up and tear open the envelope so as to reread what she'd written, to see if she had said too little or said it too feebly — or said it too stridently. Of course that wasn't her rhetoric. It couldn't be. That's why she'd used it — it was too blatant, too vulgar, far too sloganlike to be traced to her. But for that very reason, it was perhaps misjudged by her and unconvincing. She had to get up to see if she had remembered to disguise her handwriting — to see if, inadvertently, under the spell of the moment, in an angry flourish, she had forgotten herself and signed her name. She had to see if there was any way in which she had unthinkingly revealed who she was. And if she had? She should sign her name. Her whole life had been a battle not to be cowed by the Coleman Silks, who use their privilege to overpower everyone else and do exactly as they please. Speaking to men. Speaking up to men. Even to much older men. Learning not to be fearful of their presumed authority or their sage pretensions. Figuring out that her intelligence did matter. Daring to consider herself their equal. Learning, when she put forward an argument and it didn't work, to overcome the urge to capitulate, learning to summon up the logic and the confidence and the cool to keep arguing, no matter what they did or said to shut her up. Learning to take the second step, to sustain the effort instead of collapsing. Learning to argue her point without backing down. She didn't have to defer to him, she didn't have to defer to anyone. He was no longer the dean who had hired her. Nor was he department chair. She was. Dean Silk was now nothing. She should indeed open that envelope to sign her name. He was nothing. It had all the comfort of a mantra: nothing.

She walked around with the sealed envelope in her purse for weeks, going over her reasons, not only to send it but to go ahead and sign it. He settles on this broken woman who cannot possibly fight back. Who cannot begin to compete with him. Who intellectually does not even exist. He settles on a woman who has never defended herself, who cannot defend herself, the weakest woman on this earth to take advantage of, drastically inferior to him in every possible way — and settles on her for the most transparent of antithetical motives: because he considers all women inferior and because he's frightened of any woman with a brain. Because I speak up for myself, because I will not be bullied, because I'm successful, because I'm attractive, because I'm independent-minded, because I have a first-rate education, a first-rate degree...

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 Metro 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 Tightness 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 lA, 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 dark-haired 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.

And something does: a girl comes by to meet him, decidedly a girl, someone younger even than she is, and the two of them go off together, and she gathers up her things and leaves the library and at the first mailbox she sees, she takes the letter from her purse — the letter she's been carrying there for over a month — and she thrusts it into the mailbox with something like the fury with which she told the woman at the Pollock show that she wanted to strangle her. There! It's gone! I did it! Good!

A full five seconds must pass before the magnitude of the blunder overwhelms her and she feels her knees weaken. “Oh, my God!” Even after her having left it unsigned, even after her having employed a vulgar rhetoric not her own, the letter's origins are going to be no mystery to someone as fixated on her as Coleman Silk.

Now he will never leave her alone.