Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Once it ended, five or six students went up onstage and gathered about Mr. Starling. By the time Charlotte had made her way down from the upper rows of the amphitheater, he was just descending from the stage, and they came within two or three feet of each other. He excused himself from a tall young man who was hovering over him and turned toward her.

“Hello,” he said. “It was you—I’m afraid I have a hard time distinguishing faces in the upper rows—you’re the young…uh…the one who mentioned the Creator?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you made a very nice summary of a very subtle point. Can I assume you actually read The Origin of Species?”

“Yes, sir.”

Professor Starling smiled. “I assign it every year, but I’m not sure how many actually go to the trouble, although it’s well worth it. What’s your background in biology?”

“I went as far as molecular biology. My high school didn’t have that, so they sent me over to Appalachian State twice a week.”

“Appalachian State University? You’re from North Carolina?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What year are you?”

“I’m a freshman.”

He nodded several times, as if pondering that. “You took the A.P.”

“Yes, sir.”

He did some more nodding. “I try to get to know every student before Christmas, but we’ve got a very large class this year. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“Charlotte Simmons.”

Still more nodding. “Well, Ms. Simmons, keep going to the primary sources if you can, even when we get to neurobiology and some of the prose gets a little—a little steep.”

With that, he gave her a businesslike smile and turned back to the students who had been clustering about him.

Charlotte left the building and began walking aimlessly across the Great Yard. He had singled her out! The midmorning sun cast immense shadows of the buildings on this side upon the Yard’s lawn, which looked more lush and a richer green in shadow than in light. Beyond the shadows, the sun had transformed the Gothic buildings on the other side into gleaming monoliths. The bells of the Ridenour Carillon were tolling “The Processional,” and not knowing the lyrics Kipling had written for it, Charlotte found it stirring. The verdant foreground, the brilliant backdrop, the stirring music—all somehow arranged expressly for her! Sailing! Sailing! Gloriously drunk on cosmological theories and approbation.

On this sparkling, sunny morning, with its perfect, cloudless blue sky, amid the century-old majesty of the Dupont campus, it came to her in a rush…Yes! She had found the life of the mind and was…living it!

She gazed about at all the other students who were walking across the Great Yard. She was among the elite of the youth of America! Back home in Sparta, she was known as the Girl Who Went to Dupont. Here at Dupont she would be known, in the fullness of time, as…she didn’t know precisely what, but a radiant dawn had arisen…Before her, behind her, walking this way and that way across the Great Yard, enjoying the sun, enjoying the shade and the majesty of the ancient trees, chattering away into their cell phones, which their daddies could pay for as easily as drawing their next breath, suffused with the conspicuous lapidary consumption of all this royal Middle English Gothic architecture and the knowledge that they were among that elite minifraction of the youth of America—of the youth of the world!—who went to Dupont—all about her moved her 6,200 fellow students, or a great many of them, in midflight, blithely ignorant of the fact that they were merely conscious little rocks, every one of them, whereas…I am Charlotte Simmons.

The thought magnified the light of the sun itself. She was now beyond the Great Yard, but here, too, the lavish lawns, the way the sun lit up the tops of the leaves of the great trees and at the same time turned the undersides into vast filigrees of shadow—to Charlotte it became a magical tableau of green and gold. Just ahead, Briggs College…and even Briggs, generally regarded as a bit of an eyesore, had come alive as a pattern of brilliant stone surfaces incised by the shadows of arches and deep-set windows. Four or five guys and one girl were out on the steps of the main entrance. One of the guys, a string bean with a huge mass of dark curls, was on his feet. The others were sitting on the steps near him. Students hanging out on the front steps was a familiar sight at all the colleges, but Charlotte did a second take. If she wasn’t mistaken, one of them was the guy she had run into the other night at the gym: Adam.

On the steps, it so happened, Greg Fiore, the one standing, was saying to Adam, “Why do you keep pitching this Skull Fuck story? How many times do I have to tell you, this is something that may or may not have happened…last spring. People have been talking about this…this rumor…ever since school started. But there’s nothing concrete—and it’s not news anymore.”

Adam realized he was getting too worked up about it—this story required a smooth pitch—but he couldn’t hold back. “You’re not listening to me, Greg. I’ve got the whole thing on tape from a participant—two participants. This is strictly entre nous, okay? One is Hoyt Thorpe himself. He called me! He coudn’t tell me enough. He wants everybody to know about it, as long as we don’t say it came from him. That’s one. Now, the other—do you remember I finally found out the name of the governor’s bodyguard? They took him to a hospital in Philadelphia so his name wouldn’t be in the books in Chester? Well, I found out who he is! I’ve talked to him! He was a California state trooper. He just got canned, and he’s really pissed. He thinks it’s because some newspaper called about the story, and they want him long gone and out of the way. And guess who ‘some newspaper’ was?”

“You?” said Greg.

“Me. Me and the Wave. He’ll give us an affadavit if we want it.”

Greg sighed. “You’re a terrific reporter, Adam. I mean that. And you’ve done a lot of work. But I’m sorry—we can’t dredge up some random blow job from last May and run a story about it.”

Adam wanted to tell Greg the truth—namely, that he was one scared shitless fearless editor—but he knew that would only make him dig in for good. So he said, “Well…okay. I still think it’s a great story. So how about the other story, the basketball thing?”

Greg sighed again and said, “You don’t give up, do you? I don’t know why you’re taking the basketball thing so seriously. I don’t see how you can call it hypocrisy—”

Adam watched Greg’s lips move, and he tuned out…and fumed. Greg always positioned himself as the eminence of the Millennial Mutants, not merely in terms of authority but often physical stance. At the Wave office he sat in an outsize oak library armchair that overwhelmed any other stick of furniture in the dismal dump. And now out here on the steps, he ends up the only one standing, while the rest of the Mutants—Camille Deng, Roger Kuby, Edgar Tuttle, and himself—sit perched on the steps…at his feet, as it were.

All Adam could come up with was, “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” That was so lame, he looked away in an instinctive bid to disengage from combat. He blinked. Coming toward them on the walkway in front of Briggs was that girl, the Southern girl, the pretty freshman with the innocent look, Charlotte.

He stood up and waved. “Hey, Charlotte!”

So it was him. He couldn’t have sought her attention at a more propitious moment. Charlotte didn’t know quite what to make of this Adam, whom she had met only in awkward circumstances, but she could say one thing for him. He was the only student she had met who shared—or openly shared—her vision of what the university should be like intellectually. Millennial Mutants…She couldn’t say she really got it, but all the same—and he really wasn’t bad-looking.