I Am Charlotte Simmons (58 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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—Charlotte was transported. The way the downlight cast Victor Ransome Starling's face into planes of bright light and deep shadow struck her as something ineffably noble and majestic. Every time he gestured, his white fingers flashed with highlights, and she caught the glint of yet another heathery tone in the weave of his tweed jacket. He who would lead her to the innermost secrets of life—and to the utmost brilliance of the glow on the other side of the mountains Miss Pennington had called her attention to four years ago—
In that moment, in the theatrical darkness, as the sublime figure down on the stage moved in an electrifying succession of planes of chiaroscuro whose light, plus the light of the screen radiant with the image of the man who revolutionized the way the human animal sees herself, cast a glow upon the very crest of the heads of all the students—just that, the very crest, where here and there wisps of hair spun into pale golden gauze—Charlotte experienced a
kairos
, an ecstatic revelation of something too vast, too all-enveloping, too profound to be contained by mere words, and the rest of the world, a sordid world of the flesh and animals grunting for the flesh, fell away.
 
 
As she emerged from Phillips and out upon the Great Yard, Charlotte could see out of the corner of her eye that Jill, the girl who sat next to her, was barely a step behind her, but Charlotte didn't want to have to talk to her. She didn't want to descend long enough for even the most perfunctory so-long. She was too high for that, high in an important way, high on ideas—no, high on the excitement of discovery, of seeing the future from the peaks of Darién. O Dupont!
It was even gloomier and more on the raw side out here than it had been when she went into the building an hour ago, but the walls of the Gothic buildings across the way were built to withstand any threat … with an imperious confidence … O trefoil tracery! O ye buildings such as will never be built again! O ye fortress of language—and therefore memory—and
therefore ye key to the ideas that move a people, a society, and thereby history itself—ye key to prestige compounded by the prestige and authority of its origins! O Dupont! Dupont! O Charlotte Simmons of Dupont—
Pop
. The great hulk of Jojo Johanssen was heading straight toward her on the sidewalk, giving her an ingratiating grin again. Where had he come from this time? But … of course … he had been waiting for her somewhere down there, like a dog tethered outside a grocery store.
Bigger smile from the giant: “Well—how was it?”
Charlotte merely nodded okay. It would be silly to treat it as an actual question. What could she say about what she had just experienced that he would even begin to understand?
“Where can we talk?” said Jojo. “Mr. Rayon?”
Charlotte gave him a look of frustration and a sigh of resignation—and they went to Mr. Rayon. The lunchtime mob had already begun to assemble. From the moment they entered, heads were turning toward Jojo. A couple of boys piped up with low
Go go Jojos.
Jojo's reaction was not to look at them.
He was craning his head this way and that, looking for a spot quiet enough for a serious discussion. He led her to a table for two in a corner next to a wall just beyond the cafeteria's Thai food section. No one looking on could help but know he had chosen this spot not for convenience or ambience. It was in the dim corner formed by the restaurant's white blank wall and a five-foot-high salmon-colored LithoPlast room divider at this end of the steam counters and stainless-steel railings of the Thai section. The divider did not protect the tête-à-tête from rice and pulpy vegetables steamed with too much water and salt. The smell wafted here and wafted there, but it never went away.
Jojo had Charlotte sit in the seat in the very corner, looking out on the lunch crowd, while he sat across from her with his back to the room. What earthly good did he think that would do him? The back he had to the room was enormous.
Mischievous smile, or mischievous by the up-country reserve of Charlotte Simmons: “I like your shirt.”
“You do? Why?”
“I don't know—the collar.”
Jojo tucked his chin down and squirmed, trying to tuck it in deeper in a hopeless attempt to see the collar. When he finally looked up, he shrugged
with his eyebrows and one corner of his mouth, by way of making it clear he didn't care. He put his elbows on the table and said in a low voice, “I've got like—a serious problem.”
He let this revelation hang humid in the air while he stared at her.
Charlotte said nothing. Jojo had folded his eyebrows in so far toward his nose, it made his nostrils flare. Somehow … he looked ridiculous, this huge campus celebrity with his little scrunched-up features. He hadn't roused her curiosity much more than an eighth of a degree. She didn't
care
what basketball star Jojo Johanssen's great problem was. She didn't even so much as nod her head to encourage him to continue. Of course he was going to anyway.
“Lemme put it this way: I'm like”—searching for the right expression—“fucked.”
How illuminating, and how gross. She knew she should be used to students talking to each other that way by now, but she wasn't, and having some giant male talking to her like that only made it worse. She just looked at him with an expression that intimated nothing at all.
Jojo soldiered on. “It's this mother—this professor I got in American history, this guy Quat. You ever heard of him?”
Charlotte shook her head no, ever so slowly and ever so briefly.
“Well, he's a hard-ass—he's got a thing about athletes. How we ever ended up in that class, I'll never fucking know.”
Gross and grosser. Charlotte purposely didn't ask who “we” were.
Jojo provided the information nonetheless: “André and Curtis are in the same class.”
Charlotte looked at him blankly.
“You know … André Walker and Curtis Jones.”
Still a blank.
“Anyway, Quat assigns us this paper, and everybody's paper's on a different subject, and there's no book …”
Charlotte tuned out. What particular form of malingering or shiftlessness Jojo had indulged in didn't interest her … until he got to Adam, and she realized that this was the very paper Adam had been writing for Jojo when she first ran into him in the library.
Her expression came alive. “Do they
know
Adam wrote it for you?”
“I don't know what they know,” said Jojo. “This guy who calls himself a judicial officer showed up today. Do you know Adam?”
Warily: “Yeah …”
“How do you know him?”
Warily: “I know some friends of his. They have this sort of club.”
Jojo said, “Yeah, well, he's not exactly the type who …” He didn't complete the thought. “I left a message on his cell …” He averted his eyes and shook his head gloomily. “If the guy gets to Adam, I don't know if it'll make any difference if I
do
talk to him …” Forlorn, eyes still averted.
“What guy,” said Charlotte, “and make a difference in what?”
“This guy came by today. He calls himself a judicial officer. Coach says he's just like a cop. That means they're not gonna just drop this thing with a warning or something. They're cranking up for a fucking trial. If the guy gets enough evidence, they'll put my ass in front of some panel.”
Sharply: “Please don't talk like that.”
Genuinely surprised: “Like what?”
“Stop cursing. Must you curse every other word? I can't even understand what you're saying, much less help you.”
Jojo studied her face and attempted a little beginning of a smile, to see if she just might be joking.
“What's the worst that can happen?” she said.
“They can suspend me for a semester.”
“Well, that wouldn't be the end of the world, anyway.”
“The hell it wouldn't! It'd be the end of
my
world,” said Jojo. “The next semester is
the
basketball season! The postseason games are in March! The NCAA tournament! Everything!”
“So what are you going to do?”
The hangdog sag of the supplicant was in his face. “You can help me.”
“Me?”
He shook his head yes. “Remember when I came to you and said I wanted to turn myself around academically?”
“Yeah—yes.”
“And you said I oughta start by studying Socrates? Remember how you told me that?”
“Yes …”
“I
did
that. I switched into Philosophy 306, the Age of Socrates.”
“You did? You really did that?”
“Yeah, and it's the hardest course I ever took. I could spend the whole week reading and still not read enough. Mr. Margolies. He's a serious fuh—guy. I don't know what he's saying half the time, and I don't think the others do, either, but nobody's got the nerve to put his hand up and say, ‘What's
agon
mean?' or ‘Why do you say Socrates was the first philosophical rationalist?
' What the fuh—what's
that
supposed to mean? I actually go to the library after class and look up stuff. I never even went in there before, except for a couple of times Adam took me there. I always had the feeling I was standing in there blinking and everybody was laughing at me. Now I go in there because I don't want to just sit there with my mouth open in Margolies's class. I don't know if I can even pass the course, but you know what? I'm sorta proud of myself.” Jojo's face lit up for the first time. “Do you know the difference between Socrates's ‘universal definitions' and Plato's ‘Ideas'? You don't—right? Well, I …
do
.” Jojo had the smile of a child proud of an accomplishment. “Plato thought ‘Ideas' exist, actually exist in the world, independent of human beings, meaning no matter whether anybody uses them or not.”
Charlotte nodded and said, “That's very good, Jojo.”
Then his face darkened. “I know it's good. That's what makes this damn ‘judicial officer' shih—stuff such a ball-buh—makes me so mad. It was after that paper Adam wrote for me that I started … turning around—and being a student—and taking a lotta shih—catching a lotta hell for it. Coach started yelling at me when I told him I was gonna take the Socrates course, and then he started laughing, like it was a joke, me thinking I could pass a course like the Age of Socrates, and then, in practice, he started calling me Socrates, fuh—effin' Socrates this and effin' Socrates that. It's like … he's calling me a retard, right in front of everyone. But I'm putting up with all that. I'm gonna stick with Socrates. The hell with Coach. Socrates said you have to look to yourself for ‘virtue and wisdom.' That's what he said, ‘virtue and wisdom,' and I'm living by that now. And so it's now, after I've become a different person, it's now they're siccing this like … cop on me, over one fuh—one freaking paper from before! There's Before Socrates and After Socrates, B.S. and A.S.—” He barked a rueful laugh. “That don't sound right, but you know what I mean.”
Charlotte, but not Jojo, could see the panorama of the crowd in Mr. Rayon. Students at the tables and in the Thai food line were turning their heads to look at the two of them. At first Charlotte was embarrassed. But now she saw their little table in this dim, dismal corner the way all those celebrityhungry and celebrity-gossip-hungry, prurient swiveled heads saw it. There was the great Go go Jojo with his hulk stretched halfway across the table and his huge head thrust practically into the face of that—pretty?—girl and talking ever so earnestly and intently. Who is she? Something that intense—a
tête-à-tête was what it was, if any of them knew the term. Who is that girl? The thought made Charlotte smile in spite of herself.
“—know what I mean,” Jojo was saying. “What's funny?”
“Why do you say
don't?
” said Charlotte. “Nobody ever told you what the third-person singular of the verb
to do
is?”
Petulantly: “You think that's funny, don't you—and I'm trying to tell you something serious. Since you asked—everybody on the team says
don't
—he don't, she don't, it don't.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. If you say
he doesn't
, everybody thinks you're fronting.”
“Why do you care about that?”
“I don't … anymore,” said Jojo. He smiled a tight, grim little smile. “Not A.S.”
“After Socrates,” said Charlotte.
“Fucking A,” said Jojo. He held his palms up in front of his face in mock defense. “It's just an expression, just an expression. It don't—doesn't mean anything.” This time he smiled a little smile of resignation, as if resigning himself to the way the world was. “That's why I need you. You're the only person who can testify for me.”

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