I Am Charlotte Simmons (26 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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When he reached the third floor, he found himself in a hallway with seven or eight identical flush doors, but he didn't have to guess which one was waiting for five orders of pizza. Belly laughs, whoops, the rumble of a lot of people talking at once, and the languid synthesizer sounds of a piece of so-called Sample Rap called “Elliptical Rider” by C. C. Good Jookin' were audible behind the door of what was undoubtedly Jones 3A. They sound black, Adam said to himself. Consciously, that made no difference. Inside his rib cage his heart had other ideas, however, and sped up. He took a deep breath and pressed the button. Nothing but the sound of people partying inside. He had to push it four times before the door opened. Adam found himself looking up at a towering young black man with a shaved head, clad in
cargo pants and a T-shirt that showed off his muscles. His shoulders, biceps, and forearms were so thick and highly defined they made Adam blink. Behind the brute, a hazy, smoky dimness was punctuated by flares of electric color, apparently from a television set. Black faces were chundering conversation, through which pulsed the slow, eccentric beat of “Elliptical Rider.” An oddly sweet odor hung in the air.
In the next instant Adam realized who Jones 3A was: Curtis Jones, the basketball team's shooting guard. On the court he looked small, since he was only—only, by Division I standards—six-five. Standing there in an ordinary apartment doorway, he looked gigantic. Adam felt relieved. The man might be a brute in a foul mood, but at least Adam knew who he was. Like the other players, Jones lived in Crowninshield, and Adam had been around him from time to time while tending Jojo. He started to say, Hi, Curtis, but thought better of it and settled for, “Hi—PowerPizza.”
If the big man recognized him, if he was at all happy that his five flats had arrived, or if he was in any other way pleased by Adam's presence, he successfully contained his enthusiasm. He motioned toward a table just inside the door and said, “Over there.”
Over there
—not even
put it
over there, much less
please
.
Adam did as he was told and glanced about the room, which was big but practically unfurnished except for an outsize DVD television screen tuned to ESPN SportsCenter, which nobody seemed to be watching, and a set of quadraphonic speakers currently devoted to the drones and percussions of “Elliptical Rider.” Jones was not the only tall, powerfully built young man in the room with a shaved head. Treyshawn Diggs over there—hard to miss him. André Walker, Dashorn Tippet … but also some young black men who didn't look like athletes or students, either. Smoky in here. The sweet odor—marijuana. The black athletes, Adam had noticed, liked weed—that was invariably the term—while the white athletes preferred alcohol, and nobody even paid lip service any longer to the rule that athletes shouldn't get high during the season. The TV screen flared and lit up a huge white head. Jojo! That was him, Jojo. He was in the back of the room talking to Charles Bousquet. That huge white head happened to turn his way.
“Hey, Jojo.” Somehow it seemed very important that the morose and intimidating Curtis Jones realized that he, Adam, knew someone here. Jojo gave him nothing but a blank stare. Couldn't he see who it was? Adam raised his voice this time—“Hey, Jojo!”—and waved.
Jojo nodded once, without a smile, then turned and resumed his conversation
with Charles Bousquet. Adam couldn't believe it—but then he knew it was true. Jojo was avoiding him. He didn't want to acknowledge his tutor's existence in the same room as his cohort of fellow giants. Just two days ago he had stayed up all night researching and writing a paper for him on a complicated subject—saved him from a catastrophic F—and now the big, ungrateful dummy cuts him half dead with a single stone-faced nod!
Curtis Jones was glowering. “Okay. How much I owe you?”
Adam fished the PowerPizza check out of the pocket of his Windbreaker, looked at it, and said, “Fifty dollars and seventy-four cents.”
Jones snatched the check from between his thumb and forefinger. “Lemme see that.” He stared at it until his eyebrows came together. “Shit.” He looked at Adam as if he were trying to perpetrate some outrageous scam. Belligerently he jammed his hand down into a pocket of his jeans, withdrew a thick fold of money clamped with a broad gold clip, riffled through it with his thumb, extracted two bills, handed them to Adam, and turned away without so much as another word.
The man's wide back was toward him before Adam comprehended what was in his hand. A fifty and a one. A fifty and a one?
Twenty-six cents
? Surely Curtis Jones was going to turn back and give him his real tip.
But he didn't. Adam was stunned. This was a fifty-dollar order! It didn't matter who the man was. He couldn't let himself get stiffed like this. He screwed up his courage. “Hey, wait a minute.” He'd started to say, “Wait a minute, Curtis,” but he wasn't brave enough to act that familiar, and he was too angry to grovel and say Mr. Jones. Not that it would have made any difference; Jones hadn't even heard him above the noise of the conversations and C. C. Good Jookin's Sample Rap.
Adam stared at the two bills again.
Twenty-six cents
. Anger wrestled with fear. Fear was winning. Okay, he'd—he'd—he knew what he'd do. He'd take twenty-six cents in change out of his pocket and say
Hey, you forgot your change
and then throw it at him. Well, not exactly throw—more like toss. He searched his pockets. He didn't have any change, not even a single coin. He ransacked his mind.
“Hey! Curtis!” It just came blurting out.
Jones, who had begun walking toward Treyshawn Diggs, stopped, turned his shoulders slightly, and looked back.
“What about my tip!” The trigger had been pulled now, and there was no holding back.
The big black man merely tilted his head, raised one eyebrow, narrowed
his eyes, and gave Adam a certain look of male challenge that as much as said, “Okay, what
about
it?” Adam was speechless. Jones turned his back and started toward the center of the room.
“THEY DON'T PAY ME TO DELIVER THIS STUFF! ALL I GET IS THE TIPS!”
The room grew quiet except for C. C. Good Jookin's synthesizer beat, which in the sudden silence seemed swollen with amplification. The odor of weed seemed somehow stronger. The lurid flashes of ESPN SportsCenter hurt Adam's eyes. He knew his face was a burning red.
Without even looking at him, Curtis Jones said, “Hey, the man says he wants a tip.” He sounded gloriously bored. Sniggers, chuckles, and the deep rumble—
hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhh—
of somebody's belly laugh. “One a you guys wanna give the man a tip?”
A few more low, restrained
hegghhh hegghhh heggghhhhs
, but nobody said a word, and nobody reached into his pocket, either. Adam was acutely conscious of a roomful of black faces, all turned toward him.
And one white face: Jojo's. Adam opened his eyes wide, imploringly, and fixed them upon Jojo. Jojo! You know these guys—don't let them do this to me!
Jojo stood there like a building. Finally he screwed his lips up to one side, shrugged his shoulders, and rolled his head in the direction of Curtis Jones, as if to say, “Hey, it's his party.”
The others were already tired of the spectacle of the whining delivery boy. Conversation resumed, and C. C. Good Jookin's “Elliptical Rider” sank into the general hubbub. Jojo turned back to Charles Bousquet as if his tutor had never existed. Out in the middle of the room, silhouetted against the garish rectangle of the big television screen, some black guy was nudging the great hulk of Treyshawn Diggs. Adam couldn't see their faces very well, but he was sure they were having themselves a good laugh at his expense: the little white boy, his face contorted into a wretched plea, standing there atremble, begging a room full of black males for his tip …
Aghast at his own abasement, Adam slunk out through the door. Why even bother slamming it? It would only make his humiliation complete, if by any remote chance it wasn't already. They—and Jojo—had treated him like the lowest form of servant and, worse, as the lowest form of male, a bitch who didn't dare do anything more than bleat for his tip.
As he shitkicked his way along the hallway's steel-wool-colored carpet toward the elevator, his chin hooked down over his clavicle, Adam tried to
console himself. After all, what could he have possibly done about it? He had been on alien terrain in a room full of young males of a different race, half of them giant pumped-up trained athletes. Was he supposed to loathe himself for not confronting the alpha-male challenge in Curtis Jones's eyes and fighting him? But that hadn't been his only choice, had it. He could have told him off. He could have told them all off. He could have informed them of what vulgar, illiterate, childish, ego-inflated, brain-stunted, reverseracist bastards they actually were. Except for Jojo, of course—and you're
worse
, you towering buzz-cut blockhead! You're so terrified of looking uncool in front of the other players, you're afraid to show even the most minimal common courtesy to someone who just rescued you from disaster, you nine-hundred-SAT, ninety-IQ, PlayStation 3 cretin! You didn't even want to be caught
knowing
me, you craven snob!
But he hadn't uttered a word of all that, had he. He had been the craven one. He had just stood there pleading for a tip, too much of a coward to do anything else. He could rationalize it all he wanted, but there was no getting around the simple fact of the matter. He had caved in at the first sign of male challenge.
He had almost reached the elevator when the belly laughs began in earnest. They came rolling out from behind the door of Jones 3A. The bastards had given him a few moments' grace, and now they were letting it all out.
Hegghhh heggghhh heggggghhhhh!
… His public unmanning was now complete.
Adam left the building and looked this way and that in the morbid darkness without actually taking in anything he saw. He got back into the Bitsosushi and just sat there, even though he had seven more orders to deliver, seven more orders that would soon grow cold.
All at once something stirred within him. It was Frankie Horowitz's His Majesty the Child coming out of his coma.
The Child blinked, stretched, and gulped some fresh air. As Adam sat there in an exhausted eight-year-old small-size hatchback, Frankie's prince's crown popped up magically on his curly head.
Destiny's Adam Gellin. In that very moment, he made himself a promise, the sweetest promise the human beast can make to himself: vengeance is mine, and I shall be repaid.
T
he next morning, shortly after ten o'clock, Charlotte had just come down from Mr. Crone's classroom on the third floor of Fiske, where she had spent the past hour in the blessed company of about ninety others taking the medieval history test. Two students she recognized from the class, a guy and a girl, juniors or seniors it looked like to her, were standing by the magnificent spiral finial of a brass balustrade that ornamented the wide swath of steps that swept from the Great Yard up to the Fiske entryway.
The girl was saying to the guy, “How'd
you
feel about the test?”
“How'd I
feel
?” He put his head back, rolled his eyes up until the irises almost disappeared, and expelled a noisy jet of air between his teeth. “I felt like I was getting ass-raped by a very large animal.”
The girl laughed and laughed, as if that were the wittiest thing she had ever heard in her life. Then she said, “What was that second
essay
question all about? ‘Compare the Dublin and Baghdad slave markets of the eleventh century and'—what was it?—‘the differing nature of the chattel trade in northern Europe and the Middle East'?”
“I had to wing it with that fucker,” said the guy. “Do you think he'll give me a few points for truly
inspired
bullshit?”
The girl laughed and laughed, as before. Nevertheless—blessed company!
Charlotte only wished she were
still
in the middle of the test! At least for that hour she was part of a group of human beings all doing the same thing. At least she had been completely engrossed in a task that made it impossible to think of …
how lonesome she was
.
Loneliness wasn't just a state of mind, was it? It was
tactile
. She could
feel
it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It
hurt …
it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn't merely that she had no friends. She didn't even have a sanctuary in which she could be
simply
alone. She had a roommate who froze her out in order to remind her daily what an invisible nonentity Charlotte Simmons, the erstwhile mountain prodigy, really was—and to underscore it by throwing her out when she felt like it in the dead of the night. Out to where? To a public lounge … which also burned with lust and sexual fear … in the dead of the night.
Charlotte scanned the Great Yard and all the scurrying bodies, all the happy heads atilt as they
bonded
with their
friends
over their cell phones, on the odd chance that somehow she might spot Bettina. Bettina might
become
a friend.
Sexiled?
Bettina seemed to regard sexiling as a perfectly normal part of college life. Charlotte was willing to make allowances—if only she could have a friend! Oh, how steadily the phagocytes devoured devoured devoured devoured …
In this mood, she
knew
there would be no Bettina to be found upon the sunny, shaded, majestic, massive, oh so delicately glinting tableau of the Great Yard, and there wasn't. So she finally pulled herself together and headed up the walkway that led to the library tower. In the library she could study … and sit alone in a setting where that didn't seem pathetic.
She was halfway there, walking through a stretch of deep, ancient leafy shadows, when she became aware of the scritching sound of someone in sneakers running up behind her. She didn't turn around; but then: “Yo! Hey! Excuse me!”
She looked back over her shoulder—and was so startled she stopped, paralyzed with dread. It was the huge guy from the French class, the wantonly stupid one who had tried to pick her up.
How about lunch?
She wheeled about and stiffened. He was almost upon her—the same hulk, the same tight T-shirt displaying the same grotesque muscles, the same odd
little plateau of buzz-cut blond hair. He came to a stop barely two feet from her. The urge to run clashed with her desire not to look childish. The yearning for mature status prevailed. Motionless, paralyzed, aghast, she managed, but barely managed, to say in a strangled voice, “What do you want?”
His mouth fell open, and he slowly raised his hands, palms upward, as if lifting a huge plastic exercise ball. He was the very picture of a good soul misunderstood.
“I just wanted to apologize, that's all. Honest.”
Still afraid: “For what?”
“For the other day,” said the giant, “for the way I acted, the way I just walked up …” He blushed, which to Charlotte was an indication he just might be sincere and hadn't simply devised a new way to “hit on” her, as the terminology here at Dupont seemed to be. But it was no more than that, an indication, and she said nothing.
He rushed in to fill the conversational vacuum. “I was sort of hoping I would run into you again. I was thinking about what it must have looked like to you, and I'm really sorry.”
Charlotte didn't say a word. She just glowered. He was so big, he was abnormal. His neck was so wide, his arms were so long, so packed with slabs of muscle …
“Come on, let me make it up to you. Let's go have lunch at Mr. Rayon—only this time,
lunch
. That's all. I swear.”
Charlotte continued to grill him with a malevolent stare. On the other hand, there was a certain … supplication in his voice.
“You don't know who I am, do you,” he said. Somehow the way he said it didn't reek of self-importance.
Charlotte oscillated her head as slowly as an electric fan, as if to say, “I don't know, and you're not even capable of conceiving how little I care about finding out,” even though she did know he was some sort of basketball player, and now a little flame had lit up her curiosity.
“My name is Joseph Johanssen, and I'm on the basketball team. Everybody calls me Jojo.”
Charlotte debated with herself.
“Come on,” said Jojo. “We'll just go in and grab a little something.”
All she had to do was say she was late for class or … In fact, she didn't owe him any explanation at all. All she had to do was say no and leave.
But she couldn't budge. It was as if her autonomic nervous system had
taken over. The other her, the autonomic her, the one aching so with loneliness, ruled.
So, without knowing why—the other her kept mum—she found herself saying, “All right.” She said it in a faintly disgusted way, as if she were doing him a reluctant and essentially pointless favor.
Charlotte had never set foot in Mr. Rayon before. It was on the ground floor of a huge and rather overbearing Gothic classroom building, Halsey Hall, whose exterior offered not the vaguest hint of the visual explosion that hit Charlotte as she and Jojo entered the restaurant. Slick white walls seemed to scream from all the winking electrographics and industrial lighting they reflected. Medievalish banners hung in martial ranks high above the floor. On the floor, a flotilla of black tables bordering on the cafeteria “sectors” were so slick they
smacked
with reflected light like the white walls.
Sectors—
six—different cafeterias, in effect, but not separated by walls, each with the same gleaming parallel U-shaped rows of chromed stainless-steel tubing for trays to slide on, stretched from one side of the hall to the other, presenting six different cuisines: Thai, Chinese, BurgAmerican, Vegan, Italian, and Middle Eastern. The sound system was playing an old number called “I'm Too Sexy,” whose mindlessly repeated disco sounds made the place seem far more crowded than it was. The real lunch traffic wouldn't build up for another hour.
The giant, Jojo, got a hamburger in the BurgAmerican sector and a can of Sprite. Charlotte refused to get anything, partly because she couldn't afford it and partly so that the giant wouldn't think she was deigning to “dine” with him or in any other fashion allowing this to be turned into some sort of “social” situation.
As they headed for one of the slick black tables, one of a group of four guys a couple of tables away halfway rose up from his seat, waved, and yelled, “Go go, Jojo!” The giant gave him a somewhat begrudging smile and nod and kept on going. A terrible thought crossed Charlotte's mind: If he
was
a basketball player, he might be very well known on campus, and suppose
she
were seen with him? … She wished she could put up a sign saying, THIS IS NOT A
DATE
. I DON'T KNOW HIM. I DON'T LIKE HIM. I'M NOT IMPRESSED BY HIM. I'M UNIMPRESSED. On the other hand, seen by whom? There was no one at Dupont University who could possibly care, except maybe Bettina. And what would
she
care?
They sat down, and this Jojo leaned forward over his plastic plate with
the hamburger on it, as if to make sure nobody else heard him. “Remember what you said to me that day? After Mr. Lewin's French class?”
Charlotte shook her head no. She remembered very well.
“You asked me why I ‘decided to say something foolish'—to Lewin when we were discussing
Madame Bovary.
”
Charlotte couldn't hold back any longer. “Well, why did you?”
“That's the question I've been asking myself ever since!” His voice was barely above a whisper. “I
liked
that book. It really made me think. And you remember what else you said?”
This time Charlotte didn't shake her head no. She looked at him for a moment and then ever so slowly nodded yes.
“You said, ‘You knew the answer to that question, didn't you?' And I
did
. And you wanna know why I acted as if I didn't?”
He paused, obviously eager for a response. So Charlotte obliged: “Why?”
“Three other players, my teammates, are in the class. It's okay to do the work, because you have to pass the courses, and you might even get away with good grades—although there's this one really bright guy on the team, and he always tries to keep anybody from knowing his grades. But you can't let anybody know you're actually
interested
in a course—you know, like you actually enjoyed the book?—then you're really fucked.”
“Don't talk that way,” snapped Charlotte, genuinely offended.
Jojo stared at her, motionless, as if he had been stunned. “Hey, I'm sorry! It just slipped out!” Awkward pause … Finally he said, “Where are you from?”
Charlotte fired back rat-tat-tat: “Sparta, North Carolina—it's up in the mountains—you never heard of it—nobody ever heard of it. Far's that goes, you don't even know my name, do you?”
Jojo was speechless.
Afraid she had gone too far, Charlotte said with a small, forgiving smile, “It's Charlotte. All right, you were saying how you're terrified of peer pressure.”
Jojo compressed his lips into a slit. “It's not like—it's not peer
pressure
exactly—” He broke it off. Charlotte had him pinned with a cold and dubious stare. “I mean, this thing starts in high school. In
junior
high school. Coaches, everybody, start telling you you've
got
it. You know what I'm saying? You're very big for your age, you're something special, you're on the way to being a great athlete. Three different high schools, I'm talking about public high schools, three of'm tried to recruit me out of junior high school! My
dad told me to go to the one that had the best record for getting players into the Division One basketball programs, and I ended up going to the one the furthest from where I lived, Trenton Central.”
“Where'd you live?”
Whirred
, she realized.
“Trenton, New Jersey. But everybody on the team, Treyshawn Diggs, André Walker, went through the same thing. You're a freshman in high school, and everybody's treating you like you're way up here, and down there's all the other students. The other students, they're worrying about books and tests and homework, but you're ‘special.' I mean like I'd sit in the last row of the class and kinda, you know, sprawl back in the chair and hold the book upside down. All the kids thought that was really cool. Then in high school I started getting all this ink in the local newspapers—for playing basketball—and that was a great feeling.”
Still timidly: “Well … isn't that what you wanted?”
“I guess. But now I'm getting interested in some things, like literature, even if it's only Frère Jocko.”
“Frère Jocko?”
“That's what everybody calls that course. That's French for Jocks. There's a German class they call Jock Sprache. There's a geology class they call Rocks for Jocks. There's a course in the Communications Department they call Vox for Jocks. I never got the Vox part.”
“
Vox
is voice in Latin,” said Charlotte. “You know, ‘vox populi'?”
Jojo drew a blank.
“The voice of the people?” said Charlotte.

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