Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

This gave Charlotte an opening to break free of him by jumping backward and putting her fists on her hips and her arms akimbo in the look of mock reproof a girl adopts when her boyfriend reveals emotions he couldn’t very well have confessed to before now…“You actually looked it up?” She went up to the coloratura level on the up. “You went through the whole list of freshmen?”

Adam opened his eyes very wide, compressed his lips, and began nodding yes in the way lovers do when they admit to a euphoric guilt over something irrational the obsessiveness of their love has driven them to do.

“I don’t—believe it!” cried Charlotte with the same smile and her eyes wide in wonderment. Above all, she wanted to keep things…out of the mush.

But his face went very serious. “Charlotte—” His voice was as dry and constricted as could be. “Why don’t you come to my apartment, where we can really talk? I have so much to tell you. I don’t live very far from here. I can walk you back.”

This caught her unprepared. He could probably read the dismay on her face, but she managed to say, “I can’t.” She just blurted it out, and yet, oddly, she said it correctly, can’t instead of caint. Then she began ransacking her brain madly for the answer to the question that was bound to come next.

“Why not?” said Adam.

“I’ve got to study. I’ve got a neuroscience quiz in the morning”—which she didn’t—“and I should’ve been studying when we went over to Edgar’s.”

“Not even for a little while? It’s really not very far from here.” The way he said it, he was all but begging.

“No, Adam!” she said, managing to smile at the same time. “It’s a hard course!”

“Well…okay. I just wish—” He broke off the sentence. He came toward her with an uneasy expression on his face—the opposite of confident, it occurred to Charlotte—fiddled with his glasses, and this time took them off. It was like printing an announcement.

Charlotte mashed her lips against his for a moment, then adroitly slid her head forward until they were cheek to cheek and let him hold her for a few seconds. He started the rocking business again, so she broke free and smiled at him as if giving up the bliss of that embrace was the hardest thing in the world for her, but she had to be stern with herself.

“I’ve just got to go, Adam. I wish I didn’t.” She had already turned and started walking toward the entrance of the Little Yard by the time the didn’t passed her lips.

“Charlotte.”

From the grave, beseeching tone, she knew she’d better stop. She turned about. Soundlessly but unmistakably, his lips, tongue, and mouth formed the words “I love you.” He opened his mouth so wide on the love that when he snapped his tongue from the roof of his mouth to just behind his lower teeth, she could see his glottis guarding the descent into the larynx. He gave her a little wave and a smile of sweet sorrow. He had his glasses back on. Being nearsighted, he used them for distance.

Charlotte gave him the same sort of wave back and some sweet sorrow along with it and hurried through the deep archway.

For the first time since she had come here, the courtyard seemed like a marvelously cozy, comforting, and at the same time luxurious haven. The luxury was in the way the lights here and there lit up the extravagantly leaded casement windows and brought the incisions of the brick and stonework into deep shadows.

Had she ever felt this confused, this delightfully confused, in her entire life? Being with the Mutants and feeling the…lift…of their intelligence and their ravenous appetite…for knowledge and their ceaseless…quest—even in light moments—to find the very structure, the very psychological and social structure, of the world…What a rush the evening had given her! She wanted to fall in love with Adam. He was the best looking of the boys in the group. Actually, Edgar was basically the best looking, but he had a babyish coating of buttery flesh, and he was so unrelentingly serious, which only made it worse when he tried to be cool—leaning back aristocratically in his bulbous “elephant” chair—the insouciant way Hoyt settled himself into the leather upholstery of the Saint Rays’ liber-less library. Insouciance was the word. It was as if some Frenchman had coined it knowing that Hoyt Thorpe was coming into the world. But Hoyt did care about things if they were important enough. He had assaulted a brute twice his size…for her.

She felt so confused—yet she was soaring!

The next morning was one of those damp, chilly, gloomy, gray affairs, and windy on top of that. The wind got to you when you walked across the Great Yard, especially if, like Charlotte, your only pair of jeans was dirty and you didn’t have tights or boarding-school-girl high wool socks or even a pair of panty hose. The wind invaded her shanks, flanks, and declivities as if her skirt wasn’t there. Much of it wasn’t, since she had hemmed it so high—and sloppily, since Momma had never insisted that her precocious little genius reduce herself to such Alleghany County housewifely toil as sewing and darning. Didn’t matter; showing off her athletic legs was the main thing. She no longer thought of it as vanity. It was a necessity.

That being the case, the chill that gripped her nether parts scarcely bothered her. At the moment her consciousness was centered in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions of the brain, home of the higher mental functions—as she had learned in the class she was heading for, Mr. Starling’s.

She was feeling quite intellectual this morning. The evening with the Millennial Mutants had put her in that mood, which at the moment seemed glamorous. Mr. Starling would be lecturing in his peripatetic and Socratic way about José Delgado, the first giant of modern neuroscience, as he called him. This business of hanging out at the Saint Ray house and indulging in long workouts at the gym and whiling the time away puzzling over Hoyt…and Adam…had begun to take its toll. Ordinarily, she would be heading for Mr. Starling’s class knowing José Delgado’s book Physical Control of the Mind backward and forward…

So caught up was she in thoughts of the higher things that she scarcely noticed the big figure rushing down the steps of Isles Hall and hustling toward her on one of the walkways that converged on the Saint Christopher’s fountain. Charlotte was walking right by the fountain when he seemed to drop from the sky to right in front of her: Jojo, big as life.

“Hey, Charlotte!” Jojo’s smile didn’t seem so much one of happiness or surprise as of ingratiation.

“Oh, hi.” She stopped, but gave him a flat smile and some body language that said, “I really have to be somewhere.”

“Stocks for Jocks just let out,” said Jojo, “and you know what? This is the truth. I was just saying to myself I hope I’d run into you.”

His eyes were wide open in an attitude of supplication. “Can I—I gotta talk to you for a second. Can we go somewhere?”

“I can’t.” It occurred to her that she at last had “can’t” under control. Without even thinking first, she had pronounced it can’t instead of caint. “I don’t want to be late for class.”

“It’ll take two seconds.” Jojo’s face turned serious. What was it that was different about him? Ah, he was wearing a shirt with a collar and some sort of loose warm-up jacket. He wasn’t giving the world an eyeful of his muscles. “It’s important,” he said.

“I can’t, Jojo.”

“It’ll only—” His face fell. “Okay, I’m not gonna lie to you. It won’t take just a second. When do you get outta class? I’ve got a real problem.”

Charlotte breathed a deep breath of frustration. Whatever problem Jojo had, it wasn’t going to be on a very high level, and she was primed for a high level—the highest, Victor Ransome Starling. But not knowing how to parlay the question, she said tonelessly, “In an hour.”