Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Hoyt’s car turned out to be a huge SUV—tan?—gray?—she couldn’t tell in the dark—old and rather the worse for wear. On the side it said “Suburban.” To Charlotte it seemed somehow just right, even glamorous in an inverted way, that he would drive this…well…sort of bohemian old truck as opposed to something new and flashy—and ohmygod, he squeezed her hand…not for a second but five seconds, ten seconds before he released in order to get into the SUV.

“Oh—no, Hoyt…I can get back by myself all right.” This was the first time she had ever spoken to him by name! There was something profound about it, and thrilling.

He had squeezed her hand—

“No, it’s cool,” said Hoyt. He smiled.

“I really shouldn’t let you do this, Hoyt.” Was using his name again going too far?—and he had squeezed her hand—

As they drove to Little Yard, neither spoke.

Charlotte’s mind began churning. Was he going to drop her off on the sidewalk by the gateway or was he going into the parking lot? And if they stopped in the parking lot, was he going to suggest going in with her…or would he look at her with a look that makes the same suggestion without words…and if he did, what would she say? Or would he park in the parking lot and turn the engine off and, without a word, put his right arm around her shoulders, gently, look into her eyes—and what would she do if he did?

Hoyt drove straight to the main gateway…and he put an end to that dilemma: he never turned the motor off. He looked at her with the sort of warm, loving smile that says…everything…and said to her, “Okay?”

Okay? The loving smile remained, radiant, upon his lips. It meant—meant—meant in one second I’m going to slide my arm across your shoulders and kiss you before you leave…

Charlotte looked more deeply into his eyes than she had ever looked into any guy’s. Her lips were slightly parted, and it was an eternity of her making before she finally said, “Oh yes, this is fine. This is perfect.” But she didn’t budge. She just kept looking at him, and part of her realized she was forcing…the issue…but how could it end with her just getting out and pushing the door shut. Then she heard herself saying, “Hoyt”—called him by his name again!—“I just want you to know…I really mean it. That was the bravest thing I ever saw anybody do. You were so wonderful, and I’m so grateful.”

With that, the conscious little rock moved her head ever so slightly closer to his and ever so slightly parted her lips. To Charlotte the moment was pregnant to the point of bursting. But Hoyt’s arm didn’t move, and his head didn’t move. Neither did his smile, which was so warm, warm, warm, loving, loving, loving, so warm and loving and commanding, all commanding, she couldn’t move.

“Come on, now,” said Hoyt. “I wasn’t being brave. You’re embarrassing me. I got in a stupid brawl, that’s all, but I’m glad it got you out of there. Lax boys are crazy. I guess you know that now.”

Her eyes still locked on his, Charlotte leaned forward and caressed the unbattered side of his face and put her lips upon his. He returned the kiss gently…and briefly…without trying to put his arm around her. They disengaged quickly.

Hoyt! Your smile! Brimming with love, isn’t it?

“Good night, Charlotte.”

Charlotte! Good night, Charlotte! The first time he had used her name…actively, with feeling.

She gazed into his eyes for just a second longer, then hurriedly opened the door and got out without saying a word and without looking back. Without a word…without a look back…Somehow that was what the moment demanded. She had a vague, fleeting recollection of having seen it in a movie.

She floated through Mercer Gate and into the courtyard. The lights in the windows around the quadrangle seemed like the Chinese paper lanterns in a painting by Sargent. In all of Little Yard, only she would know about that painting by Sargent. As she floated across the quadrangle, she could see exactly where the picture had been positioned on the page, a right-hand page it was, although she couldn’t remember where she was when she saw it. Only she would know about that painting by Sargent. In all of Dupont College, only she was Charlotte Simmons!

Charlotte had never been in a building like the Dupont Center for Neuroscience before, although she had seen pictures of such places, all lean and clean and bare and spare and white and bright and sharp and hard, with glass walls. In Mr. Starling’s office, two glass walls came together to form a right angle on a corner without benefit of any column or other structural support. Mr. Starling, wearing a white lab coat, sat at a sci-fi outer-space-movie desk. Charlotte found all this glamorous and awesome, awesome in the more literal sense of wonder commingled with fear.

This was his, Mr. Starling’s, building! It wouldn’t even exist except for his pioneering at Dupont! He was chairman of the Neuroscience Department, father and ruler of this entire shining twenty-first-century Xanadu of Science! She was sitting not three feet from him in the presence of…the Future! An entirely new millennium in the life of the mind was in birth here! Yes…but just why had he—summoned her here by e-mail to go over the paper on Darwinism she had turned in? Her hopes were high—He loves my paper!—and fears of the worst made her highly anxious.

Mr. Starling’s eyes were lowered, peering through a pair of tortoise-colored half-glasses perched way down on the ridge of his nose. He was scanning her paper and adding notes in the margin to ones already there. The door to the room was wide open. Charlotte could hear the four women who worked in the outer office answering the telephones (“He’s in a meeting”), complaining about the coffee (“What do they make this with, Fantastik?”), complaining about men (“Why would I want to go to this reunion and have to grin at a bunch of old men I’ve been introduced to three times in the last hour, and they still wonder why I look familiar?…”)

Mr. Starling put Charlotte’s paper down on his desk, took off the half-glasses, put them in the breast pocket of the lab coat, and leaned so far forward in his chair that his forearms rested on top of his thighs. Why such an extreme posture? He smiled. Whether that smile expressed warmth, pity, or cynical mistrust of the wiles of the human beast, Charlotte didn’t know. She couldn’t decode it.

“Ms.”—Miz—“Simmons,” said Mr. Starling, “I want to ask you something. Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?”

The irony cut her to the quick. “No, sir.” She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp.

“The assignment,” he continued, “was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong.”

“Yes, sir,” mumbled Charlotte.

“From this standpoint,” said Mr. Starling, “evolution has to be considered as a special case. You may remember our talking about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because of the immensely long intervals between cause and effect—hundreds of thousands of years being ‘the short run’ and millions of years being the norm—and because of the relative lack of paleontological evidence spanning such vast intervals—there is no way of stating what would prove it wrong.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you chose to leave that minor-league ballpark and go to work dismantling the entire theory…in fifteen to twenty pages.”