Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“He already knows that, Coach. That was the first thing he thought about when I told him what Quat said. He’s saying, ‘I didn’t actually write it, Jojo,’ and ‘I was just helping you polish the rough edges, right, Jojo?’ Like I told you, he’s not what you’d call a ballsy little guy.” Jojo smiled for the first time since they had started talking. It pleased him to think that he and Coach were two stand-up guys in a world full of weaklings.

Over the next few weeks, Charlotte didn’t know what to do about Adam. She was obviously on his mind all the time now. He’d call her room, he’d go out of his way to intercept her on the campus, he’d check by the treadmills in the gym to see if she was there, he’d leave notes saying why didn’t she come over and “hang” or “chill” with the Mutants, who would be getting together at such and such a place at such and such a time, and finally he had taken to doing the unheard-of at Dupont: he’d ask her out on “dates,” out to real restaurants even—and he’d pay for it!

At Dupont, nobody asked anybody out on a date unless they were already spending most nights in each other’s beds, and even then the boy would word it along the lines of “Whatcha doing tonight? Wanna chill?” Or: “Wanna go over to the I.M. and hang out for a while?” Adam had gone far beyond that. He’d come right out and asked her to a restaurant in town, like Le Chef, at a particular time…and then insisted on coming by and taking her there. Sometimes he would borrow a car from Roger, so he wouldn’t have to take her on a bus through the City of God.

Charlotte could no longer kid herself that she was going out on these dates just so she could have some decent food for a change. She was also willingly dropping by from time to time to hang out, to chill, with him and the Mutants. No—she literally did not know what to do with Adam. She didn’t know whether to encourage him or not encourage him…or, since in fact she was encouraging him, going on these dates, just how far to go with him. He obviously wanted more than just dinner, talk, and looking into her eyes and holding her hand on a checkered-tablecloth tabletop at Le Chef. Oh yes, she had allowed him to do that, hadn’t she…He kept trying to get her to “come by” his apartment, which she wasn’t about to do, or let him come up to her room, in which case she would talk about Beverly as if Beverly were tethered to the wall in there. She had taken to giving him good-night kisses, however—long mercy kisses—

Or was calling it a mercy kiss just another way of kidding herself? The truth was…she wanted to fall in love with Adam. If only she could! How much tidier life would be!

One night Adam took her to an event at the Phipps—it was hard to say what to call it, a concert, dance performance, or what—featuring a group called the Olfactory Workers. Charlotte had never even heard of anything like it. She guessed not many others had, either, because the Phipps was only about a quarter full. But Adam was eager to go. He didn’t know exactly what it was about, but he had read a reference to the Olfactory Workers somewhere. He had such a curiosity, it was infectious.

The Olfactory Workers were six young men and four young women, all dressed in black tights—even the four sort of fat ones—black tank tops, and black vests with mandarin collars and no buttons. Six of them played musical instruments, two trumpets, a French horn, an oboe, a bassoon, and drums. Four of them were dancers who did a kind of modern dance, Charlotte guessed it was, the kind of dancing she had seen in movies, very close to gymnastics, except crazier. But strangest of all were the four big black kettles with lids, up on black metal legs, two on this side of the stage and two on the other. The kettle lids were outfitted with nozzles and a series of levers. Two performers, one on each side, operated the braziers, spraying some sort of odor-bearing mists from the nozzles up into the air…musk, sandalwood, pine knot, cedar, tannery leather, rose, lily, lime, saltwater spume, and some that were not exactly noxious, but disturbing all the same. A system of blowers, exhaust fans, and olfactory “mops”—Charlotte took this on faith from the program…she couldn’t see them, although she could hear the blowers and exhaust fans—cleared the atmosphere between numbers—or mostly, it wasn’t perfect—and the odors created, or were supposed to create, a beyond rational harmony between the dancing, the brass, the woodwinds. The music was not definable, at least not by Charlotte. It would start off with what sounded like Roman Catholic chants—but always with rolling trap drums behind it—and dissolve into jazz, which would dissolve into disco music, or so Adam whispered to her, and the oboist and the bassoonist, both women, would lower their mouthpieces and sing mindlessly happy disco rhymes (Adam informed her) in soprano harmony—“It’s a disco evolution…Got to risk a revolution”—and then dissolve into a high-pitched a capella as the trumpets and the French horn were drummed up into something that had no name, or at least Adam didn’t know it, and the sublime geysers of sandalwood filled the air, although not all the nutmeg and cinnamon were out of the air yet—

A small matter, very small, for Charlotte was now transported!…not so much by the Olfactory Workers and their odors and music and dancing and singing as by the fact that this was something experimental, esoteric, cutting-edge (she had picked up that term in the modern drama course), one of the exciting, sophisticated things Miss Pennington had assured her awaited her on the other side of the mountain, the things that would open up her eyes to harness and to achieve great triumphs with…

As they left Phipps, Charlotte felt so transported that she voluntarily hooked her arm inside of Adam’s and leaned against his shoulder. Adam, she might have known, immediately misinterpreted the source of her excitement and sought out her hand, finally got it, and leaned his head against hers just as she was attempting to disengage.

There was an absolute blaze of light as they emerged from the opera house lobby and went out onto the portico, a blaze strong enough to light up the trees in the Grove—and what if someone saw her cuddling with a…dork?

She immediately hated herself for even thinking such a thing, but the worst of it was that it wasn’t even a fully formed thought. It was a visceral reaction.

And she wanted to want Adam! She wanted to want to kiss Adam good night in a deeply committed way. Adam had an interesting mind, an exciting mind, an adventurous mind, as did his friends, the Millennial Mutants…I mean ohmygod just compare them with an evening at the book-denuded “library” at the Saint Ray house…with its huge plasma TV screen tuned to ESPN and conversations in which wit, if any, consisted of smart, knowing remarks about sex and drinking and sports, featuring comments on the limitations of the metabolically swollen athletes they never tired of watching and sarcastic insults of one another. They would explode with laughter because Julian told I.P. that “Poison people” never got laid—they just got drunk and “blew chunks.” Oh, man, how funny was that! Julian could be counted on to make cracks like that, while Hoyt—but she refused to let herself think about Hoyt and the way Hoyt looked. She forced herself completely into the here and now—

—and here and now, Adam had an interesting mind, as did all the Millennial Mutants. Their conversations were exciting. They flared and gave off sparks and ranged from the highest—“You can’t ascribe ‘meaning’ to life,” Adam once said, “only purpose, which is reproduction, obviously”—to the lowest, or, Charlotte guessed, belly buttons were low enough. The other day Camille Deng had said, “Boys don’t grow up to be men; they shrink back into childhood. They look at the scar tissue inside all these bare belly buttons and think they’re looking at labia majora and labia minora. They think if they hook up with a girl with a bare belly button, they get to put their dicks in there.”