Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Jojo had a picture of Socrates and his students in his mind, although he really didn’t know where he got it from…They’re all sitting around in togas…Socrates has long white hair and a long white beard and a white toga, and his students all have laurel wreaths around their heads…and the togas…He wondered how they carried anything in the togas. They were just sheets, as nearly as he could tell. But maybe they didn’t have so much…stuff…to carry…no car keys, cell phones, ballpoint pens, credit cards…Yeah, but what about money? They must have had to have money. Or maybe they didn’t, at least not every day. What the hell was there to buy? They didn’t have CDs or cars to buy gas for or Gatorade and Powerbars and all that…Then he wondered about what you did with your toga when you had to go to the bathroom…He could imagine all kinds of difficult situations…For that matter, if the students wore laurel wreaths every day, where did they get them from? Who made them? Women, he reckoned, but what women? Socrates didn’t say much about women…Who did the dishes? Or the laundry? Maybe they had slaves, or was that just the Romans? Well, he didn’t have time to go off on all these tangents. Back to the Metaphysics…This shit was hard to read…What’d he mean, “As man’s body is composed of materials gathered from the material world, so man’s reason is part of the universal Reason or Mind of the world”? It gave Jojo great satisfaction to figure this stuff out. If only he had started taking all this stuff seriously when he was a kid…or even when he was in high school. “Socrates overlooked the irrational parts of the soul,” Aristotle was saying, “and did not take sufficient notice of the fact of the weakness of man, which leads him to do what he knows to be wrong.” Jojo thought that over. Socrates just got through saying man’s reason is what it’s all about, not false happiness like going around fucking groupies, and all of a sudden here’s Aristotle saying moral weakness, such as fucking groupies, is what it’s all about, too. He wondered if Aristotle and Plato and Socrates had groupies. Just how well known were they? When they went away and checked into—but they probably didn’t even have hotels then, or not this kind, where—

There was a rap on the door, which was evidently metal, even though it was painted like wood.

“Who is it?” yelled Jojo.

“House keeper,”…accenting the first syllable and sort of singing the whole word, the way they did in hotels.

With a sigh, ticked off at being interrupted, Jojo went to the door and opened it.

“Jojo? I’m Marilyn.” Fair young face, lots of eye makeup—

—long legs, fabulous legs, looking even longer, since her foot was tilted up at a forty-five degree angle upon a pair of sandals with the most negligible of little slip-on straps and heels that must have been close to four inches high. They rose and rose, those fabulous legs, up to the most negligible little skirt in the world—it was her, all right.

Demurely: “Can I come in?’

“Oh…sure, sure,” said Jojo, ever the courteous giant. As he held the door open for her, he started trying to figure out how to tell her she couldn’t stay. How did she even know what room he was in?

She came in and stood right in front of him as he let go of the door, which closed by itself.

“Wow!” she said with big eyes and a lovely girlish smile. “You look tall on TV…but you’re really tall!”

Jojo was confused. She was one of those people you can just tell right away are nice and well-mannered.

“How did you know what room I was in?”

“Your teammates told me.” She continued to smile in the nicest, sunniest fashion. “They said you’ve been studying very hard and feeling lonesome, and you needed a break…and here I am.”

Jojo shook his head. “Oh, those—” He stared at the floor and shook his head some more. Then he lifted his head, and she hadn’t moved. Her face was no more than eighteen inches from his, and most of that was due to his being a foot taller than she was. “Look—Marilyn—it’s Marilyn, right?”

She nodded yes with the same simple, adoring look as before.

“You’re nice to come give me a break and all, but I got to study. Don’t listen to my—” He caught himself as he was just about to say “fucking” but caught himself. “—teammates, especially the guy—the white guy. Mike.”

Her expression never changed: cheery, lovely, straightforward, utterly non-ho’-like. “Well…could I just watch?”

“Watch? Whaddya mean, could you watch?”

“Watch you study.”

He searched her face for irony—and found none. She was different from most groupies. She didn’t gush with all the likes and seriouslys. She didn’t flirt with her eyes.

“Why would you want to watch me study?”

She looked up at him in the same open, guileless way, still smiling. But now her smile had a slight cant to it, as if to tell him he still didn’t understand, did he.

“I won’t stay long,” she said.

No sooner had the word long left her lips than—bango!—her hand cupped his crotch. She was still looking straight into his eyes with the same smile, which kept saying, “Oh, I wish you understood.” Now she had unzipped his khakis and put her hand inside.

Jojo shook his head…but without conviction. Now she had her hand inside the fly of his boxer shorts, and Jojo involuntarily closed his eyes and in an odd, trancelike way began saying, “Oh shiiiiit…oh shiiiiit…”

By the time they reached the bed, she had somehow managed to un-buckle his belt and undo the top button of his khakis. Like many a man before him, his brain had dropped like a stone into his groin.

He was barely cognizant of the next few hours…

Rising up toward an opening from out of some sort of dark shaft into a blinding light…For an instant he had absolutely no idea where he was. From deep darkness into excruciating light, it hurt his eyes, was all he knew, that and the odor of spilled beer.

In the next instant Mike’s voice: “Aw, shit, roomie, didn’t mean to—” He emitted a high-pitched whistle, using his tongue and upper teeth. “So that’s what your friend Soc—uh, your Greek friend looks like. Not bad. Go go, Jojo. If I’d known the Age of Soc, uh, uh, was like that, that’s who I’d be studying, too.”

Groggily, Jojo propped himself on one elbow. Mike and some sort of blond bimbo were standing about five feet inside the door staring at him—at them!—him and Whatshername? Marilyn? Whatshername was lying face-down, stark-naked, the inside of his right thigh lay athwart her bare bottom, and his foot was hooked beneath her thigh. They had fallen asleep! Jojo couldn’t think of what to say. He lay there sprawled and speechless, still deep in the hypnotic state. He tried to figure out which was worse, lying there like he was or removing his thigh from the girl’s naked bottom, giving Mike’s groupie an eyeful of his genitals.

“Jojo,” said Mike, “I want you to meet Samantha.”

Jojo just stared. The girl’s blond hair was so short but so curly, it reminded Jojo of ivy grown amok. She had on a lacy top, resembling a peignoir, with jeans, at the moment a fashionable teenage clash of chords deemed provocative.

“Samantha, say hello to Jojo.”

“Hi, Jojo,” the girl said.

“And Marilyn,” said Mike.

“Hi, Marilyn,” the blond groupie said, even though the naked girl in the bed looked dead to the world.

“It’s ‘Marilyn,’ right, roomie?” said Mike, with a mocking smile. “She looks wiped out.”

Jojo said nothing. He was staring groggily at Mike’s blond groupie. She was smiling at him flirtatiously—flirtatiously—and so broadly, it brought out the dimples in her cheeks and forced her eyes into squints. She had on such long, mascara-laden false eyelashes, they looked like rows of charred match-sticks. She wanted to flirt?—and him stark-naked with one leg wrapped around a stark-naked girl?