I Am Charlotte Simmons (96 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“Mr. Quat,” he said … pause … “what I have to tell you … well, let me put it this way. In order to tell you, I'm going to have to throw myself upon your mercy. Otherwise, I don't see how—I don't know how it can be done.” He gave Mr. Quat a look that asked for immunity ahead of time. Mr. Quat nodded yes, as before, but without the little smile playing about the corners of the lips. “When the Athletic Department hired me,” Adam continued, “they gave me a … not really a pamphlet, more of a leaflet, I guess you'd call it, with these guidelines for being a tutor and the limits of what a
tutor could do for an athlete and so forth. I'm sure it was all very correct. It was like … there it was, in print. But gradually you got the message that you should forget that and do whatever the athletes wanted you to do, because the whole program depended on their getting by academically. They were always talking about the ‘program.'”
Mr. Quat continued to nod yes, and Adam gradually descended from the overview … down to Crowninshield House and the unofficial basketball wing on the fifth floor … and being summoned by Jojo at 11:55 p.m. that particular night …
“Mr. Quat—I'm not going to hold anything back,” said Adam. “I'm going to tell you exactly what happened. I'm—I'm entrusting my own fate to your hands.” He could feel his heart banging away even harder. He didn't know whether what he had just said sounded dramatic and morally compelling or dramatic and pompous. However it sounded, Mr. Quat gave him the broad, reassuring smile of a father and nodded yes some more.
Reassured, Adam plunged in.
He told it all, leaving out only the fact that Jojo and his roommate sat in their suite playing Stunt Biker on PlayStation 3 while he worked all night in the library writing about a complex subject against a terrible deadline. He told himself he was making it better for Jojo that way.
He told of the all-night race in the library of Time … versus Intellect … He told of how even in the very midst of the struggle he couldn't help but admire the subtlety, the complexity, the implicit insight of the assignment itself and regret that he didn't have time to savor the reading that should have gone into the preparation of such a paper. He told of the great ironic satisfaction of coming up with a psychological concept—oh, he knew he hadn't worked it out well—to account for the resonance that the unique psychological makeup of George III—fascinating figure—would have on world affairs—all this, even while knowing full well that this was a—well, an essentially … proscribed life preserver he was throwing to a sinking “student”athlete. Mr. Quat was still nodding yes in a pasha-paternal fashion when Adam reached the coda, the account of how he slipped the paper under Jojo's door at 8:30 a.m. and returned to his apartment in the City of God and crashed for twelve hours.
He stopped and gave Mr. Quat a look of supplication that all but bled for mercy.
Mr. Quat, still reared back in his swivel chair, continued to nod yes in his thoughtful manner. He wrapped a forefinger around his chin and over
his goatee and put his thumb beneath his chin, as if he were holding a pipe. He studied Adam's countenance for what seemed like an eternity. The silence turned into a sound inside Adam's skull, a sound like steam escaping from one of those glass vessels for boiling water before it starts whistling. Without a word, Mr. Quat stood up from his desk and slowly walked his pendulous bulk to the other side of the little office, head down. He was still holding his chin like a pipe. Then he walked back the same way, not once looking at Adam. Adam's eyes, on the other hand, never left Mr. Quat's face or, for that moment when he reached the other side of the room, the ruff of hair on the back of his bald head.
Mr. Quat stopped by the side of the desk. He looked down at Adam. Adam was no longer aware of his heart or any of the rest of his torso and limbs—only of the steam. He looked up into the face of judge and jury. The very words, “judge and jury,” bubbled up his brain stem.
Mr. Quat spoke. “Mr. Gellin, I take plagiarism very seriously. Offhand, I can't think of a worse crime against scholarship and learning and the entire mission of a university. There may be those weary cynics on the faculty here who think the university can no longer claim to have a mission, but I'm not one of them. At the same time, I resonate completely with what you have achieved here and what you've tried to achieve and your long-range goals, which are also mine. I also think I comprehend the pressures the Athletic Department must have put upon you. In light of that, I can't very well do what I would honestly prefer to do.” He gave Adam a trace of a smile, albeit weary. “I think what we have to do—both of us—is make an example of this case—”
An
example
?—
“—because it encompasses so many crucial issues that must be settled
now
… the power of an athletic program that has gone out of control, the corruption of the scholarly ideal, the corruption of a mind as bright and promising … as yours …”
What?
—
“ … and it's true that in the short run both of us, me as well as you, will have every cause to regret what will probably happen. But in the long run you will be a better, stronger person, and this institution will learn a lesson that has been a long time in coming.”
“Sir! No! You don't mean
—”
“I'm afraid I do. I'm afraid I must. There's something here bigger than your short-term outlook and my short-term outlook. And when this is all
over, you will have every reason to be grateful, along with many others, for the role you've played, however fortuitously.”
“Sir! You can't! I came to you in good faith! I placed myself in your hands! You're destroying me!”
“Hardly,” said Mr. Quat, with his biggest paternal smile yet. “You're young. That's a tremendous asset none of us comprehends until much, much later. You'll be fine. You've got what it takes.”
“No! I'm begging you! I'm begging you! You can't! I'm begging you!”
“I'm sorry. I truly am. But it will be over quickly, now that you've been forthright and told me everything. You won't have to go through an investigation or any judicial process. I know how you must feel at this moment. But trust me. This will be a catharsis, for you as well as for the undergraduate program and the hopelessly, needlessly corrupted young men we refer to euphemistically—without any regard for their true situation—as student-athletes. Without your confession we might not have gotten anywhere. Under the university code, we can't prove plagiarism without finding the specific source.”
“Please! I'm begging you, Mr. Quat! I'm
begging
you! Please don't do this to me! You
mustn't
do this to me! I trusted you completely! I put my whole … I put my
life
in your hands! I'm begging you! I'm begging you!”
“Mr. Gellin!” Mr. Quat said sharply. “All this begging is not becoming! The ultraright already enjoys portraying us as whiners, handwringers, crybabies. They portray our concern for the oppressed as something unrealistic, irrational, maternal, softheaded, feminine. Furthermore, they honestly believe that. So for the sake of yourself and all of us—be a man.”
“W
hat's wrong?” said Beverly, seeing Charlotte sitting at her desk in front of her “new” computer and staring into space. “You look like a statue. You haven't moved for the past fifteen minutes. You haven't even blinked. Are you all right?”
So that's the way it works, thought Charlotte. It was precisely
because
she had stood up to Beverly this morning for the first time, and been abrupt and sarcastic, dismissed her as a prurient schadenfreude-driven gossip, that Beverly was now asking an idle question, one roommate to another, about nothing special. Which is to say, open contempt had jarred the Groton snob who shared her room into treating her as an equal. Charlotte took a rueful satisfaction in this discovery about human nature, but it was no more than that, rueful and beside the point.
And brief. Nothing was likely to dislodge Charlotte from the foreboding that, as of half an hour ago, had metamorphosed from the larval stage into a catastrophe, official, documented, beyond fixing.
“I'm fine,” said Charlotte without turning her head so much as an inch toward Beverly, who was at her computer in the depths of her jungle of wires, knuckle sockets, and techie toys. “I'm just thinking.”
Beverly returned to her instant-message e-mail conversation with Hillary, who was all of three feet away, on the other side of the wall, in Room
514, amid a happy music of electronic-alert
pings
on the screen and Beverly's giggles. The silliness of yakking away with your next-door neighbor via the World Wide Web seemed to be what made it fun.
Charlotte scarcely noticed, so deeply imprinted in her brain was the very image of what she had seen on her screen:
B
B-
C-
D
Plain B, not B+, in French; B- in medieval history; C- in modern drama; D in neuroscience … D in neuroscience … D in neuroscience … Like many another student before her, Charlotte had thought that if she was pessimistic enough ahead of time, if she steeped herself deeply enough in foreboding, the result couldn't possibly be as bad as she had feared. Somehow the very act of thinking about it with such despair beforehand would be a form of magic that would ward off any truly ill fate. But there her grades had been on the screen, barely half an hour ago, flat out and explanation-proof. She hadn't printed them out. She hadn't clicked on KEEP AS NEW. She had immediately deleted it—which helped what? Nothing. It was just another exercise in magic—not that she had the remotest hope it might work.
B, B-, C-, D … So many things had been killed in her academic collapse, Charlotte had been sitting there paralyzed for at least thirty minutes, not just the fifteen Beverly had detected. D and C-minus—in fact any grade less than B-minus was tantamount to an F at Dupont these days, except that you wouldn't be kicked out for having failed two courses and barely scraping by in the others. As it was, she would be on academic probation for the second semester, and her parents would be apprised of that fact. Fortunately, Momma and Daddy had no computer, and it would probably take two days for the news to reach them by mail. What was she to do? Why hadn't she mustered up the courage to tell them over Christmas? They would have been ready for what they were about to learn. So now she had to call them—within the next twenty-four hours—to be sure the notification didn't reach them by mail first. She should make that call right now! But she would have to recite those grades to them herself, in all their stony definitiveness. Right now … but right now she was still in a state of shock, and so she would make that call … but later. And Miss Pennington … Once Momma had the bad news,
maybe she could revive her plan to ask Momma not to mention them to Miss Pennington. But what if Miss Pennington happened to call Momma? The thought of asking Momma to come up with a little white lie on the subject … it was beyond even imagining.
D in neuroscience
—and to think it wasn't many more than ninety days ago that she had been in Mr. Starling's office and he had offered her the keys to the kingdom, to the very laboratory wherein the human animals' new conception of themselves was being created a full generation before they would realize it had happened. She could hear—she seemed to actually be hearing—the change in Mr. Starling's tone of voice that day as he began to speak to her as something more than a student, as a young colleague in this, the greatest adventure in the life of the mind since the rise of rationalism in the seventeenth century—
The telephone rang, and out of sheer reflex she answered.
“Charlotte … this is Adam”—spoken with a note of breathless agony. “Something horrible has happened. You've got to help me.
Please
come over here …
please
! I need you! I need you right now—”
“Adam! Hold—”
“I'm having a—Charlotte!
Please
! It's all so horrible!”
“What's happened?”
“Please
,
Charlotte!
I haven't got the strength—I'll tell you everything— just come—as soon as you can!
Please!
Do this one thing for me, before I—” He broke off the sentence.
“You want a doctor?”
“
Hah.
” A sharp, dry, bitter laugh, it was. “Skip to step three—get a coroner. Step four—organize a celebration-of-his-life committee.”
“I'm calling a doctor.”
“No! There's nothing—the only person who can help is you! How soon can you be here?”
“You're in your apartment?”
“Yeah.” Bitterly: “My little slot, my little hole.”
“Well—I'll leave right now. I'll be there—however long it takes to walk over there.”
“Please hurry. I love you. I love you more than life itself.”
They hung up. Charlotte sat still in her rickety wooden straight-back chair and gave the world another vacant stare. It's all so horrible? She had her own catastrophe to worry about. The last thing in the world she wanted to have to deal with was Adam in an “I love you more than life itself” state of mind. But how could she say no? … after everything.
She put on her puffed-up hand-grenade jacket and left without a word to Beverly, who was still busy pinging and giggling and bouncing and blinging her instant messages to a relay station two thousand miles away in Austin, Texas.
 
 
Charlotte had barely reached the landing when Adam's door swung open. He had obviously been waiting at the very peephole. He stood in the doorway with one of his synthetic green blankets wrapped around him like a cape. His cheeks were gaunt and ashen, and his eyes were a perfect picture of fear. Before she knew what was happening, his arms shot out from beneath the blanket. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in unfortunate shades of hallway green, Rust-Oleum brown, and book-mailer-stuffing gray. He embraced her, causing the blanket to fall to the floor. It wasn't the embrace a boy gives a girl. It was the one Studs Lonigan gave his mother in the doorway when he came home to die, as best Charlotte could remember the book.
“Charlotte … oh Charlotte! … You came …”
She was afraid he'd want to kiss her. But he put his head on her shoulder and made a moaning sound. He hung on for dear life. It was all awkward. Charlotte didn't know where to put her hands. Embrace him likewise? Cradle his head? Everything she could think of, he might take the wrong way. So she said, “Adam … come on, let's go inside. Let's get out of the doorway.”
So they went inside, which at least got her free of the embrace. She took off her puffy jacket and sat down on the edge of the bed, which was a tortured mess. Adam immediately sat down beside her and began to put his arm around her. Charlotte jumped up and fetched Adam's folding deck chair, the one with the aluminum frame and the wide bands of Streptolon webbing in a plaid pattern that looked even cheaper than his shirt's. She unfolded it and sat down as fast as she could. Adam, still on the edge of the bed, stared at her as if she had abandoned and rejected him.
“Adam,” Charlotte said with just a touch of sternness, “you have to pull yourself together.”
“I know!” said Adam, close to tears. Then he hung his head. “I know, I know … I'm having a—I don't know anymore!” He left his head hanging that way, his chin touching his collarbone.
Charlotte switched to talking as calmly, softly, tenderly, maternally as she could. “I can't do anything, Adam, until you tell me what's happened.”
Adam slowly raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were bleary with tears, but at least he wasn't crying. In a morosely low voice he said, “I've been destroyed, is what's happened.”
Charlotte stuck to tender and maternal: “How?”
Adam went into a long but reasonably calm and straightforward account of his blighted strategy and his disastrous appointment with Mr. Quat. He looked straight at Charlotte and fought back his despair with deep breaths and sighs. “He wants to make”—deep breath, sigh—“an example. That means he wants to”—deep breath, sigh—“have me thrown out of school. But even if I'm merely—” He looked away and said, “Hah. Merely …” He looked back at Charlotte. “Even if I'm suspended is all … ‘all' … that happens, the result is the same. I'll have a suspension—for cheating—on my transcript. There goes the Rhodes. There goes graduate school even, which was my last resort. There goes any decent job, even teaching high school. What's left of me?” Deep breath, hopeless sigh. “There goes my big story in tomorrow's Wave. It'll be discredited, nullified, ignored. ‘Written by a plagiarist' … ‘a despicable smear job' … They'll hate me. That's all I'll get out of that story.” Utterly forlorn, he hung his head again.
Charlotte said, “What story, Adam?
Who's
going to hate you.”
Adam looked at her again, this time with his brow contorted and his eyebrows lopsided. “It's about Hoyt Thorpe.”
Charlotte felt her tender, maternal face jerk alert. She was so startled, it must have registered upon Adam, even in his current state.
“It's about how the governor of California bribed him to keep his mouth shut about the Night of the Skull Fuck. I tell the whole story. One of the most powerful Republicans in the country will want my head. He can have it … That wouldn't be as bad as having all of Dupont University despising me, students, alumni, faculty, administration, employees …”
“Why employees?” said Charlotte.
“Why?” Deep breath. With a profound collapsing sigh: “I don't know … I don't remember … so you agree about the rest of them, though. That's what you really mean.”
“That's not what I said,” said Charlotte.
“But that's what you mean, obviously.”
In fact, she wasn't even thinking about “all of Dupont,” only about Hoyt. She was frantically crunching this information to figure out what it would mean for him. Why? She couldn't have come up with a rational explanation
if she had tried. Who stood to get hurt was Hoyt … and Jojo. That gave her a start, too.
“What was Jojo's reaction to all this?” she said.
Adam lowered his head again and put his fingers over his eyes and face. In a muffled voice: “I haven't told him.”
“He doesn't even know? You have to call him, Adam! You told Mr. Quat everything. Isn't that true? You've—you've got to let Jojo know that.”
His head still in his hands, Adam began moaning. “Oh, shit … shit, shit, shit … Jojo … I was so sure Mr. Quat would drop the whole case. I thought I was doing Jojo a favor.”
“But you didn't tell him about it ahead of time.”
Adam shook his head no with his hands still covering his face. “Oh, shit … shit … shit … How can I tell him? He'll kill me. He's done for, the big bastard. Even if they don't kick him out, he's … finished …” More moans. “He'll miss this whole season, and if he doesn't play this season—if he's suspended for cheating—it won't matter what he does in his senior year. He'll kill me, he'll kill me.” Moans … pathetic moans.
He was close to whimpering. Charlotte had the terrible premonition he was about to break down in some uncontrollable way. She got up from the deck chair and went to the bed and stood over him. She put her hand on his shoulder and bent down until her face was barely six inches from his, which remained slumped over to a morbid degree. In the softest, tenderest tone she could, she said, “Jojo's not going to
kill
you. He'll understand. He'll know you meant only the best. He'll know you were trying to help
him
, too. You took what you thought was a good chance, but it didn't work. He'll understand what you were doing.”
Adam began shaking his bowed head so rapidly and with such a pathetic chorus of moans, Charlotte couldn't help but wonder if he had ever taken Jojo into consideration at all.
Adam took his hands away from his face, but if anything, he hung his head still lower, until his back was humped over like an arch. His eyes were shut tight. He began trembling. The trembling turned into the shakes. His teeth began chattering. You could hear them.

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