Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Oh-oh; let’s back out of this alley, too. “I don’t mean ‘theirs’ like ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ in the ordinary sense.” He realized this wasn’t very expert double-talking, but he hurried on, hoping to sweep her along with his momentum. “I just mean there’s no conventional role, no existing codified role for a bad-ass. There’s no existing slot for the new aristo-meritocrat. ‘Theirs’ in that sense, in that circumscribed sense. You know?” Let’s get outta here! “Or that’s why some bad-asses go into consulting for like…McKinsey. That’s the one they shoot for, McKinsey. I mean, consulting is better than i-banking, because let’s say you’re starting out as an i-banker—”

“What’s an i-banker?” said the girl.

“An investment banker,” said Adam. Thank God. At least he’d faked and kept her from digging her heels in for some kind of anti-anti-Americanism number. “If you start out in investment banking, you’re going to be putting in hundred-hour weeks. You make a lot of money, but they use you like a slave. Some of these banks have dormitories, so if you’re still working at two or three in the morning, you can sleep over and be back at your desk at eight, in time to work another sixteen or eighteen hours straight. If you’re a consultant, you don’t make quite as much money, but you make plenty, and you travel out of town three or four times a week and you rack up incredible frequent-flier miles.”

The expression on the girl’s face as much as said, “You’re not making any sense.”

Adam rushed on: “The thing about all those frequent-flier miles is, you can fly all over the world for nothing. Let’s say you want to go to this new super-resort they’ve got in New Zealand—awesome golf course, the whole deal—you can fly there first-class for a vacation, and it doesn’t cost you anything.”

“I don’t understand,” said Charlotte. “What does that have to do with concepts and ideas and being an intellectual and having influence and everything?”

“Well, nothing directly,” said Adam. “It’s just an example of how you use the empire to live like an aristocrat without having to have a family pedigree or any of that stuff.”

“I don’t see why you call it the empire,” said Charlotte.

Damn. He’d blundered back onto that terrain again. “It’s sort of a…figure of speech,” he said. “I’m not even interested in consulting, myself, although if you’re invited for a McKinsey recruiting weekend, that shows you’re on the right track.”

“Have they invited you on one?”

“Yeah, and it’s coming up in about three and a half weeks.”

“Are you going?”

“Uh…yes. I mean I might as well.”

“Even though you’re not interested?”

“Well—I’m curious about it, I guess. And it won’t hurt to be seen there. You know—the word gets around that you’re out there on the right track. Actually, the track starts early, in high school, although I didn’t know that when I was at Roxbury Latin. If you’re interested in being a scientist, the big thing is being invited to the Research Science Institute at MIT or the Telluride Institute at Cornell. Princeton has one in the humanities, and it’s also a big thing to be invited to the Renaissance Weekend as one of the student attendees. You know about the Renaissance Weekends?”

“No.”

“They have them every year at Christmastime at Hilton Head, in South Carolina. All these politicians and celebrities and scientists and businessmen go there and talk about ideas and issues and things. They have student attendees so they can find out what’s on the minds of ‘the young’ and all that. That anoints you as somebody who’s already on the Millennial track, and you’re only seventeen or eighteen.”

“But I still don’t understand consulting,” said Charlotte. “What do you consult about?” Abay-ut.

“You get sent to these corporations, and you tell them how to improve their…oh, I don’t know, management techniques, I guess. But the important thing—”

“How could they know how to do that?”—they-ut—“if they’ve just graduated from college?”

“Well, I suppose they…uh…have some kind of—to tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve wondered the same thing. But I know they do it, and they make a lot of money. The important thing is to be an aristo-meritocrat and live at that higher level I was talking about. If you want to have some influence, then you’ve got to have the freedom to ram your ideas home.” Adam leaned back against the wall and gave her as warm, and at the same time as confident, a smile as he could. She seemed slightly bewildered, but that only made her open her eyes wider to look more lovely. Her eyes were so blue, blue like…he could see the flower…grew low to the ground, but he didn’t know its name—

“But the really important thing,” he heard himself saying, “is that you come meet the Millennial Mutants. You’ll see what Dupont ought to be about. Every Monday we get together for dinner.”

“Where?”

“Different places. I could let you know.”

She just looked at him, although not in a way one could attach any particular emotion to. Finally she said, “Monday nights? I reckon I could do that. Thank you.”

“Great,” said Adam. And it felt great. He looked into her eyes with the intention of looking deeply, profoundly…and then pouring his whole self into her through her optic chiasmas.

But—pop—her eyes were on his sweatpants, at hip level. “How does your hip feel now?”

His hip? “Oh, it’s okay,” said Adam. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, I’ve got four and a half more miles to go, I guess I’d better…”

“Oh sure,” he said, “you go ahead. And hey, thanks!”

By the time he said “thanks,” she was already on her way to the machine. But then she looked back over her shoulder and smiled and gave him a little wave.

Walking home in the dark, through the campus, through the streets of Chester, Adam kept visualizing that smile. Surely it wasn’t mere politeness, for there was definitely a certain gleam, a kind of…promise…or maybe the word was confirmation or like…sealing…and the way she tossed her hair when she looked back…sort of like an…unfurling…He began whistling a tune, “You Are So Beautiful,” even though it was a hard tune to whistle.

The next morning, a little past eleven-thirty, no sooner had the class begun than the professor, Mr. Quat, dissed Curtis Jones, fo’shizzle, as Curtis himself might say.

The course was called America in the Age of Revolution, referring to both the Revolution of 1776 and the industrial revolution. The class’s twenty-eight students convened in a ground-floor room of Stallworth College that had four large, solemn leaded casement windows looking out on a courtyard landscaped in the Tuscan manner. The room was lined with six-foot-high intricately carved oak bookshelves, replete with books. What with the early Renaissance look of the windows and the Old World woodwork, the room all but spoke aloud of the wisdom of the ages and the sanctity of learning and scholarship.

Everybody sat around two great oak library tables set end to end, creating the impression of a conference room. Mr. Quat was probably in his mid- to late fifties. He was a passionate, even hotheaded, pursuer of knowledge, and not even the most buff-brained athlete was likely to nod off during Quat time. But his physique was enough to make an athlete’s flesh crawl. He had a perfectly round head, thanks to his fat cheeks, his fat jowls, and the fact that his curly iron-gray hair had receded to the point where his forehead had the contours of a globe from the equator up to the North Pole. He had a mustache and a close-trimmed goatee. His torso was swollen with fat to the point where little breasts had formed on his chest, a detail all too apparent thanks to his penchant for too-tight V-neck sweaters with only a T-shirt underneath and no jacket on top. The T-shirt, ordinary white cotton, always showed in the V. But no athlete, least of all Jojo, was going to challenge him on any level. Mr. Quat always stood up at the table as he taught, while Jojo, André Walker, and Curtis Jones, along with the twenty-five authentic undergraduates, remained seated. Mr. Quat treated all students as antagonists, but he acted as if student-athletes—the sarcasm fairly dripped from his eyeteeth as he used the term—were cretins he would like to kill. This unpleasant situation was the result of a colossal blunder by a blond twinkie named Sonia in the Athletic Department. She had confused Quat with Tino Quattrone, a young associate professor who came to all the basketball games even though he could only get standing-room tickets, with this character, Jerome Quat, who would obviously like to blow up the entire Buster Bowl, given the chance, when she prepared the list of approved athlete-friendly teachers in the History Department. Speculation as to why Coach had ever hired this bimbo always ran in the same direction. On top of everything else, Mr. Jerome Quat lectured and hectored them in a highly scholarly, lofty manner pockmarked by unpleasant pronunciations, which were in fact a residue of his upbringing in Brooklyn, New York.