Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Are you all right? What happened?”

Her face, framed by the flowing brown hair, was not only young and angelic but also, somehow, maternal. He was torn between the ignominy of a hopeless fool and the impulse to rise up on one elbow and press his cheek against hers and embrace her and say, “Thank you!” He settled for just propping himself up, smiling, shaking his head self-deprecatingly, and saying, “Wow…thank you.”

“What happened?”

In a daze: “I don’t know…My feet went out from under me…”

He started to get up, and a pain shot through his hip, and he winced—“Oooo!”—and settled back down.

“What’s wrong?” She had to shout to be heard over the ruckus of the machines.

“I did something to my hip!” He shook his head again to indicate that this wasn’t serious, merely stupid.

He started to get up again, and the girl extended her hand and said, “Here!”

He took her hand, and she pulled, and he finally got his feet beneath him. Adam tested his hip; and the pain, while not terrible, made him limp.

“Why don’t you sit down,” said the girl. She was pointing toward an exercise bench just beyond the regiment of treadmills.

So he limped over and sat down on the bench. The girl stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. It wasn’t quite so noisy over here. He looked up into her eyes and smiled and said, “Thanks.” The smile was supposed to carry more meaning than the word. He hoped she wouldn’t remember that night in the library.

She frowned. “Wait a minute, aren’t you the—”

“Yeah…I am…” said Adam. He lowered his head sheepishly and had to roll his eyes upward to keep looking at her. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice…Charlotte, right?”

She nodded.

“I’m Adam. I guess I owe you an apology, but I was desperate that night.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah…I had to write a ten-page paper for some athlete by ten o’clock in the morning.”

“You had to?”

Adam shrugged. “I have a job tutoring athletes. Otherwise I couldn’t even afford to be here.”

“You have to write their papers for them? Isn’t that illegal?”

“Oh yeah—or a serious academic violation anyway. But around here the athletes are the athletes, I guess. Far as I can tell, the faculty just sort of looks the other way.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” said Charlotte. “The athletes—what do they do? Do they just say, ‘Hey, write me a paper’?”

“That’s about it, I guess. Ordinarily, I wear a beeper.”

“Do they all do it? Aren’t some of them ashamed?”

“Maybe, but I’ve never met one. Some of them are just your ordinary dummies, eight-forty combined SATs, that sort of thing. The rest of them find it socially unacceptable to work hard. They’re above all that. Besides, their teammates would resent it and make fun of them, but it wouldn’t be fun fun, if you know what I mean. It’s sort of a point of honor not to make the others look bad. The one or two of them who actually make good grades, like this guy Bousquet on the basketball team, they try to hide it.”

“Who were you writing a paper for that night?”

“Another basketball player. Jojo Johanssen. He’s practically seven feet tall, and he must weigh three hundred pounds, all muscle, and white. He’s the only white player on the starting five. He’s got a big white head and a little blond buzz cut on top.” Adam made a level motion over the top of his head from back to front.

Charlotte gave her lips a rueful twist. “Oh, I know that guy.”

She proceeded to tell him about Jojo’s performance in a ridiculous French class known as Frère Jocko. After class he started hitting on her, and she told him what a fool he was and walked away, leaving him blathering like an idiot.

Adam chuckled and said, “I wish I’d seen that! These guys think they can come walking up to any girl on campus and she’ll fall down on her back in awe. The pathetic thing is, they’re usually right. I could tell you some stories…” He let his eyes drift off, and then he turned back. “The whole campus gets all excited—over what? What does it matter what Dupont does in basketball against Indiana or Duke or Stanford or Florida or Seton Hall? What does it mean? Our freaks beat their freaks, that’s all.”

The frown had disappeared from Charlotte’s face. She looked prettier than ever. Her face glowed with color from all the running. “I used to wonder the same thing when I was in high school,” she said, “ ’xact same thing. What was everybody all excited about?” Exact was ’xact, and about was abay-ut.

“Where’d you go?” said Adam.

“It was a little town”—tayun—“called Sparta? In North Carolina? Nobody here’s ever heard of it.” Uv it.

“I thought I detected a little Southern accent there,” said Adam.

He gave her a warm smile, but she seemed to stiffen a bit. “I’m a real pushover for Southern accents,” he added quickly. “How’d you happen to come to Dupont?”

“I had this English teacher? Miss Pennington? She wouldn’t even let me apply anywhere but Dupont, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. My safety school was Penn.”

Adam started chuckling. “Your safety school, hunh? So you got into Dupont.”

“I got into all five uv’em.” Charlotte blushed bright red, then tried to cover it up with a modest-looking smile. “Dupont gave me the best scholarship? And I really liked the French department. I was going to major in French.”

“And now you’re not?”

“Well, I’m kind of confused about it now. I’m taking this—” She broke off the sentence and gave him the tenderest of looks. “Are you feeling better?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be okay.” Adam slid himself over a bit on the bench. “Here…have a seat. You don’t have to stand like that.”

So she sat down…

The treadmills were still grinding and rumbling like a factory, but Adam was afraid that if they moved, it would…break the spell.

That look. Here was this girl from someplace called Sparta, North Carolina, and so young, and she had just given him a look so tender, it was maternal and at the same time it was opening, opening, opening like the tender virginal bud of the most gorgeous flower revealing its virginal petals to the world with a sublime innocence and at the same time a sublime invitation. Inside Adam’s head all this horticulture was no mere figure of speech, no mere extended metaphor, no mere conceit. He could see the pinkness of the petals opening, her petals, in the flesh. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her and press his lips upon the tender buds of hers. But if he did that, should he take his glasses off first? Or would that be like too much of an announcement of what he intended to do, thereby destroying the ineffable magic of the moment? Or should he leave the glasses on and risk poking her in the eye with the frame when he bent his neck at a forty-five-degree angle to make his lips fit hers right? Pop. What the hell, it was only an urge, in the first place, and so all he said was, “Anyhow, you were saying you’re taking this—this what?”

“Oh. This class in neuroscience? It’s the most exciting subject in the world. It’s like in the future it’s going to be the key to just about everything. And the teacher is so good. Mr. Starling.”

“He’s the one who won the Nobel Prize, right?”

“That’s right.” Riot. “But I didn’t even know that when I signed up for the course.”

A lightbulb went on over Adam’s head. “You know what? You ought to come by and meet this sort of group we have. We call ourselves the Millennial Mutants. I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

“The Millennial Mutants?”

“Yeah. This girl Camille Deng thought up the name. She writes these like long political pieces for the newspaper, the Daily Wave. I write for it, too. A lot of us do. In fact, one of the group, Greg Fiore, is the editor of the Wave.” Adam figured that might impress the girl. For once that arrogant little sonofabitch Greg might be of some use. The same went for Camille. “Anyway, Camille thought up the name. The idea is—well, here’s the thing. This school is full of smart kids. They’ve hosed the SATs and the APs and the GPAs like it’s their job. Then they come here and party and ‘network’ and like make a ‘transition from adolescence to adulthood’ and all of that ridiculous bullshit, which really means a transition from adolescence to preadolescence. You know? I mean, why not! I mean, here we are in one of the greatest universities in the world, and all these kids act like—like they’re taking four years of classes for…I don’t know…for—well, like they’re paying dues so they can enjoy Club Dupont for four years. Then there’s a whole bunch of kids who work very hard so they’ll end up with a transcript from Dupont that’ll be like a ticket to a lot of money. Investment banking for example—I mean, you could go to the Great Yard at noon and close your eyes and throw a rock, and you’d hit somebody who assumes they’re going to work for Gordon Hanley or some place like that. As a matter of fact, the son of the CEO of Gordon Hanley—” Adam decided to drop that subject. “I mean, the whole thing is pathetic, if you want to know what I think. We want to leave here and do things, and I don’t mean like working for some fu—goddamn”—somehow you just didn’t say fucking to a girl like this—“investment bank and crunching numbers fourteen hours a day to make money off evaporated property, which is what Schumpeter called it.”