The Human Stain

Nathan drives by Coleman’s place to check on him, as Coleman hasn’t been answering his phone and has disconnected his answering machine. Nathan doesn’t go inside the house because with the lights on and music playing, he thinks Coleman is inside with Faunia. He also thinks Lester is watching the house, too: “I am not alone in listening to the music from the road” (204).

Nathan sees Coleman alive for the final time on a Saturday in August. He drives to Tanglewood to hear an open rehearsal of the orchestra’s next day concert. Nathan sees Coleman and Faunia at the concert and approaches them. He says that he misses Coleman, and then Nathan offers to take Coleman and Faunia to dinner some time. Coleman agrees, but Nathan thinks he is lying. As Coleman and Faunia walk away, Nathan imagines that Coleman has told Faunia his secret about passing.

Lester spends time with a support group led by fellow Vietnam veteran Louie Borrero. Louie takes all of the veterans in his support group to a Chinese restaurant, so they can adjust to being around people who look similar to the soldiers they were trying to kill in Vietnam. Lester goes back to the restaurant with this group four times before he can sit through the entire meal, eat, and interact with the waiter. Louie is pleased with his success and wants Lester to see a travelling exhibit of the Vietnam Wall, called the Moving Wall, as his next step in his recovery process.

While Coleman and Faunia are together, Coleman asks Faunia to dance for him. As Faunia dances, she realizes Coleman is falling in love with her, and she speaks to him openly and honestly, revealing a meaningful connection far different than the surface-level intelligence with which Coleman and others associate her. The next morning, Faunia becomes upset when Coleman reads her something from the paper about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. She shouts at Coleman, saying she is disinterested in his “seminar.” She then storms out of the house. Faunia goes to visit her favorite crow, Prince, at the Audubon Society. A worker there tells Faunia that Prince is unable to interact with other crows because they try to kill him. Faunia muses that being hand-raised is what ruined Prince, and she calls it “the human stain” (242). Faunia gives Prince the opal ring that Coleman originally gave to her and says, “Engaged to a crow. That’s the ticket” (247).

Lester goes with his group to see the Moving Wall in Pittsfield. Lester has a breakthrough at the Moving Wall but not the kind his support group believes he has. Lester believes he is actually dead—that he died in Vietnam and is never coming back: “It’s official: altogether dead and not merely inside” (253). He does not tell his group. They assume his serene behavior comes from making peace with the trauma of fighting in the Vietnam War. When the group returns home, Lester determines to kill Faunia and Coleman with his car. He executes his plan by later running them off the road, but there is no collision to link Lester to their accident. At the garage the next morning, Lester hears that Faunia and Coleman died in the car accident.

Professor Roux places a personal ad describing a man very similar to Coleman. She is horrified to realize her true longing for Coleman. In a rattled state, she accidentally emails it to her entire department at Athena College, rather than to the classifieds section of the New York Review of Books. She receives a call in the middle of the night that Coleman has died. She rushes to campus, ransacks her office in despair, and then calls campus security, claiming Coleman broke in and sent the personal ad to humiliate her.