Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Mr. Quat, standing, was staring at a stack of papers on the table as if he hated them. Then he looked up and said, “All right—” Awright—he paused, as if he had just caught them in the act, some act, any act. “Last time we saw that by 1790 such social eccentricities had been exacerbated”—We sawr that by seventeen ninedy such social eggzendrizzidies had been eggzazzerbated—“by her further attempts—” Huh fuhthuh attempts—

He stopped abruptly and stared toward the far end, where Jojo, Curtis, and André were sitting.

“Mr. Jones,” he said, “do you mind telling me what’s that you have on your head?”

Curtis was in fact wearing an Anaheim Angels baseball cap with the bill sticking out sideways. He now touched it and said in a tone of mock bemusement, “You mean this?”

“Yes.”

Curtis chose the cool and amused route. “Aw, hey, Prof, check it out! You looking at a—”

Quat cut him off. “Are you an orthodox Jew, Mr. Jones?”

“Me?” He looked around at his basketball buddies with bemusement and amusement. “Naw.”

“Does that cap have any other religious significance, Mr. Jones?”

Still cool and amused: “Aw naw. Like I say—”

Cold and not amused: “Then kindly remove it.”

“Aw, come on, Prof, the other—”

“Now, Mr. Jones. And by the way, starting now, you will not address me as Prof. You will say ‘Mr. Quat’ or, if three syllables is expecting too much, ‘Sir’—‘Mr. Quat’ or ‘Sir.’ Do I make myself clear?”

Their eyes locked. Jojo could tell that Curtis’s mind was scrolling scrolling scrolling scrolling, trying to figure out how much of his manhood was actually on the line here.

“I—”

“One of us will remove your headgear, Mr. Jones. Either you or me. Right now.”

Curtis was the one who broke. He removed the cap, looked away, and began shaking his head in a manner that was supposed to say, “I’m going to indulge you this time, but you’re one sick puppy.”

Mr. Quat’s angry gaze panned over every student in the room. “Other teachers may not care what you wear to class. I can’t speak for them. But you will not wear any form of headdress in this class, unless your particular religious faith requires it. Do I make myself clear?”

No one said a thing. Mr. Quat resumed his discourse on class, status, and power among the American colonials. Curtis lounged back in his library chair with his hands folded in his lap, craning his head this way and that, in any direction other than one that might make it seem as if he was paying any attention whatsoever to Mr. Quat. Smoke was coming out of his ears. Jojo could hear him muttering now and again. Had he been dissed? Obviously, he had come to the conclusion that he had been.

At the end of class Mr. Quat went around the table handing students back the ten-page papers they had turned in the week before. When he got to Curtis, Curtis took his with exaggerated nonchalance, as if Mr. Quat were nothing more than a stewardess handing out those slimy miniature “hot towels” they dispense on airplanes. Glancing sideways, Jojo noticed that both Curtis and André had received C’s. Jojo looked up at Mr. Quat, but the professor skipped over him entirely and resumed handing them out farther down the line.

Like the rest of the class, Jojo got up to depart…but then hung back a bit just in case Mr. Quat discovered he had failed to give him his paper. Finally he started following André and Curtis. Curtis kept leaning close to André and nudging him, going heghh heghh heghh, presumably settling Quat’s hash and explaining how he hadn’t backed down, it was actually something else or other…

Jojo was almost out the door when a voice behind him said, “Mr. Johanssen.”

Jojo stopped and turned around.

“May I see you for a moment?”

Sure enough, Mr. Quat had Jojo’s paper in his hand. He could make out the capital letters typed on the otherwise blank first page: THE PERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GEORGE III AS A CATALYST OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Mr. Quat held the paper up in front of Jojo—there was no grade on it—and said, “Mr. Johanssen, this is your paper?”

“Yeah…”

“Did you write it yourself?”

Jojo could feel the blood draining from his face. It was all he could do to answer in a halfway normal voice, “Yeah,” and arrange his eyes and lips in a fashion that registered astonishment over the very question.

“Well then, perhaps you can tell me what this word means.” The professor was pointing at CATALYST.

Jojo panicked. He couldn’t think. His tutor had just told him the other night! He had even said, albeit a bit sarcastically, “You might want to know what the word means, just in case you ever have to make somebody think you know what you’ve written.” But what had he said? Something about precipitation? Assassination? Damn! The rest of it had vanished from his memory.

“Well, I know,” Jojo sputtered, “but it’s one of those words you know you know, but you don’t know how to put it into words? You know what I mean?”

“It’s one of those words you know you know, but you don’t know how to put it into words,” Mr. Quat said drily. Then he flipped to an interior page. “You say here, ‘When George was a young boy, his mother is said to have ex-horted him constantly, “You must become a great king.” When he at last became king, he could never free himself of the memory of that metronomic maternal exhortation.’ What does exhortation mean?”

Fear turned Jojo’s very powers of logic to mush. He couldn’t even come up with a rationale for not knowing. All he could think of was why the hell the little twerp, Adam, had ever thrown in words like that. Finally he said, “It means…what she said?”

“Exhortation means ‘You must become a great king’?”

“No, but I mean, the meaning—I know the meaning and everything, but just defining the meaning by itself and that kinda thing—”

“Is meaning the meaning but not defining the meaning like knowing the word but not knowing how to put the word into words, Mr. Johanssen?”

Jojo knew the professor was purposely messing up his mind with all these meanings and knowings and word s, but he couldn’t figure out how to break up the game. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “All I meant was—”

Quat broke in. “What does maternal mean, Mr. Johanssen?”

“Mother!” Jojo blurted out.

“Wrong part of speech,” said Mr. Quat, “but I’ll accept that. Now, how about metronomic?”

Panic and uproar reigned inside Jojo’s head. He hadn’t a clue—and Mr. Quat had closed the door to waffling around with knowing and meaning. He just stood there with his mouth half open.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Johanssen,” said Mr. Quat, oozing with sarcasm, “that really wasn’t fair of me, was it? That’s a difficult word.”

Jojo remained speechless.

Mr. Quat flipped to another page. “Let’s try this one. You say here, ‘George regarded himself as the cleverest of political infighters, but what he took to be subtle strategy often struck others as the most—’” He put his fingertip upon the next word, which was “maladroit,” without pronouncing it. “ ‘—sort of meddling.’ How do you pronounce that word, Mr. Johanssen, and what does it mean?”

“I—” The first-person pronoun just hung in the air. Jojo felt that he had lost all power of articulation.

“Okay, maladroit is difficult, too—after all, its roots are French—so let’s try meddling. What does meddling mean, Mr. Johanssen?”

Jojo could feel his armpits sweating. “Meddling”—he certainly knew that one, but the words!—the words! The very words had fled his brain! “Well—” he said, but that was as far as he got. Well now hung in midair with I.