Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” he said, rocking back on two legs of his chair and smiling like a man who just shot the moon, “but I went to Japan the first semester of my junior year, and I spent a week with a family in a little fishing village two hours from Tokyo by train, way out by the ocean. For breakfast they didn’t have an entirely different menu the way we do. For breakfast, you know how we—or most people—have things we never think about the whole rest of the day? Juice, cereal, sliced bananas, eggs, pancakes, French toast, English muffins, cheese Danish.” He chuckled, quite delighted with himself. “Hmmm! Never noticed all that pan-European breakfast terminology before! That’s completely American, using all those foreign names for simple food. Greek coffee? Nahhh. I don’t know anybody who has Greek coffee for breakfast. Anyway, we have our special breakfast foods, and we never think about them again until the next morning. But you know what they have for breakfast out in a little village like the one I was in? They have leftovers from dinner the night before. Fish soup, warmed-over rice, stir-fried dumplings if there are any left; they’re really good. Now in that one thing, breakfast, you can read the story of the difference between two peoples, two cultures. For a start—”

And off he goes, thought Charlotte. It was endearing, this tendency of his…for the most part…after all, he did have the most wonderful intellectual curiosity.

“…things we’re trying to deny ourselves”—she realized she had lost track of what exactly had led to things we’re trying to deny ourselves.

“…the calories, the carbs, the bread, the butter, the cheese Danishes I mentioned, the eggs, whereas in Japan there’s nothing ‘scientific’ about it—”

A delicious aroma was wafting over from the other side of the salmon-colored LithoPlast divider. With the extraordinary power the olfactory sense has—Mr. Starling had talked about this—it went straight to a receptor in her memory, bypassing her “logical mind”—the very way Mr. Starling pronounced the words “logical mind” put them in quotation marks—the aroma summoned up a vision, in detail, from the time she and Jojo had sat at this very table and the same aroma had come wafting over from the Thai food counter on the other side of the LithoPlast divider. It was absolutely “ambrosial,” the adjective Momma used for food that was out of this world—in fact, Momma used to serve a dessert she called ambrosia, slices of orange with white coconut shavings and a little bit, no more than a sort of glaze, of molasses covering the bottom of the bowl—Momma used cereal bowls—but why was she putting ambrosia…and Momma…in the past tense? Did this—

“…and the yang of life, the passive and the aggressive, broadly speaking. As a result, the Japanese have the lowest incidence of—what’s the matter?”

He was looking at her quizzically.

Oh God, she must have let her eyes wander. Had she really been staring at a blank wall of LithoPlast?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, already centrifuging her brain to try to force some little white explanation to the surface…Got it: “What you said about different cultures and different foods? It made me think of—in neuroscience, you’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t—by what a hard time the neurophysiologists have trying to figure out exactly what neural pathways like…you know…what’s the word?—convey!—it’s convey—convey the sensation of hunger from the stomach to the brain.”

Adam just stared at her with his upper teeth overbiting his lower lip in puzzlement. The wonderfully happy look he had a moment ago was gone. That made her feel guilty all over again. He was sweet, and he really was smart—and why was she glad nobody else was here listening to all this? She consciously wanted to be Adam’s friend, his close friend—no, it was more than that…she wanted to love him! That would solve so many problems! She could live the life of the mind and the life of romance in one and the same person! All things that really counted would come together! She would once again be on the high road. She could return to Sparta and report to Miss Pennington without fear, without guilt, without…lies…but she didn’t love him, and she couldn’t force herself to love him…She didn’t feel butterflies in her stomach at the very thought of him…If she did, she was convinced, love would drive all the cheap, smug standards of Cool out of her mind. But Adam did have his blind spots, after all, such as trying to turn ordinary things into his beloved “matrical ideas,” and he didn’t even realize it was a form of showing off.

After breakfast, he insisted on walking her over to Phillips, to the very door of Mr. Starling’s amphitheater—and then he stood there smiling at her until she turned her back to climb up the amphitheater stairs to the top, where she sat. When she took her seat and looked down—he was still standing there, smiling. Then he gave her a little wave that halfway resembled a salute. To top it off, he mouthed, in a heavy, overripe mime, the words :::::I:::::LOVE:::::YOU:::::HONEY::::: Charlotte was embarrassed to the core—what if somebody saw that?—but she felt obliged to give him at least a nod and a little white smile, which she did, and he still stood there—so she looked down at the desk arm of her chair, as if studying something with maximum concentration. Why couldn’t he leave, like a normal person? Practically all the students in the class were juniors and seniors, and she didn’t know any of them, except for Jill, her seatmate, and she barely knew Jill—nevertheless she was glad Jill hadn’t arrived and wasn’t witnessing Adam mooning over her like this—and there were definitely some cashmere types in this class, and she could just hear them saying, “So now the country bumpkin is banging a loser, a nobody, an independent…She definitely makes the rounds”—and above all she could hear the sniggers sniggers sniggers sniggers…She lifted her eyes as covertly as she could, which is to say, without lifting her head…Thank God! No Adam; he had finally left. But why the “Thank God”?

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.”

It was Mr. Starling, at the lectern. He was wearing a tweed jacket that would have looked almost gaudy if the amphitheater’s stage lighting hadn’t brought out its colors so richly—orange, yellow, chocolate brown, luggage brown, and a certain light blue that sang harmony and brought them all alive…perfectly, in Charlotte Simmons’s eyes…Yet another stab of guilt and regret…She could have been so close to this man…and his pioneering in humankind’s understanding of itself…in the new matrix, as Adam would have it, except that Mr. Starling had already created a matrix, for real, not in dreams…and she could now be living on the very frontier of the life of the mind. He had given her her chance.

Her heart sank. Any day now, the final grades for the first semester would be out, and Momma and Miss Pennington would finally…find out…and she, the little mountain prodigy, could not think of any way to give them a little white forewarning that would soften the blow.

In his peripatetic, Socratic fashion, Mr. Starling was moving about the stage, lit up so resplendently by the lights overhead, talking about the origins of the concept of “sociobiology,” developed by a zoologist from Alabama named Edward O. Wilson. Wilson’s specialty had always been ants—ants and the complex social order and divisions of labor within ant colonies. He had been a newly minted Ph.D., a young assistant professor teaching at Harvard, when he went to an island in the Caribbean known as “Monkey Island” to help his first graduate student launch a study of macaque rhesus monkeys in their natural habitat. They talked about certain similarities—despite the enormous differences in size, strength, and intelligence—between ants and apes.