Disgrace: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

David is bored after Soraya leaves, so he spends the majority of his time in the library, researching Lord Byron because he wants to start a new project. Instead of a scholarly piece of writing, though, this time he wants to compose an opera, “a meditation on love between the sexes.” After an afternoon in the library one day, he sees a student named Melanie Isaacs on campus. She is in his class on the Romantic poets, and is a very attractive twenty-year-old. Coming up to her, he invites her for a drink at his apartment, and after a “cautious” hesitation, she agrees, saying that she doesn’t have very long before she has to be back. Once inside his apartment, he serves her wine and puts on Mozart, asking her what she thinks about his class. As he tries to flirt with her, her answers are flat and guarded, though he isn’t discouraged.

“I am going to throw together some supper,” David says. “Come on!” he says when he sees Melanie’s doubting look. “Say yes!” In response, she agrees to stay, but says she has to make a call, so she goes to the phone and has a long conversation before returning, at which point he asks what she wants to do for a living. Telling him that she’s studying theater, she reveals that she wants to get into “stagecraft and design,” and then they have dinner, during which he continues to ask her questions and she continues to answer in a timid fashion. When they finish eating, Melanie prepares to leave, but David tells her not to go, leading her into the living room and playing her an old cassette tape of a dance performance. “He wills the girl to be captivated too,” Coetzee writes. “But he senses she is not.”

When the video ends, David and Melanie continue to make small-talk, as Melanie asks him about his life—his marriages, his book projects—and then again prepares to leave. “I’m going to invite you to do something reckless,” David says after giving Melanie coffee with a shot of whiskey. “Stay. Spend the night with me.” When she asks why she should do this, he says, “Because you ought to.” “Why I ought I to?” she asks, and he says, “Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.” As he says this, he places his hand against her cheek, and though she doesn’t move away, neither does she embrace the touch. “And what if I already share it?” she asks. “Then you should share it more widely,” he says.

David recognizes internally that what he’s saying is “as old as seduction itself,” but he realizes that he truly “believes” in his logic in this moment, thinking that Melanie “does not own herself.” Going on, he quotes Shakespeare, saying, “From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” This, he understands immediately, is a miscalculation, and he watches her face “lose its playful, mobile quality.” “I must leave, I’m expected,” she says, and when he embraces her to say goodnight, she “slips” away and departs.