I Am Charlotte Simmons (51 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

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Harrison said to Hoyt, “Hey, Dawg, I'd love to stay and shoot the shit and all, but we gotta bounce.” He looked at Charlotte. “Nice to see you, uh, uh—”
“Charlotte,” said Hoyt.
“Right, good going,” said Harrison. “Later.” Harrison and his little friend began climbing the shabby grand stairs.
Charlotte felt a tap on the outside of her leg, just above the knee.
Touching
her—
Alarmed, thrilled with alarm, she turned. Hoyt had withdrawn his hand but was still leaning toward her. He wasn't smiling, and he didn't have his cool, ironic gleam in his eye. If anything, he looked tired. He motioned toward the doorway with his head and stood up. So she stood up, too, and they headed out of the room. No one seemed to notice except Vance, who said to Hoyt, “Real nice, Clark.”
Hoyt said, “You need to hit manual reset, Vance.”
“Rock on, Clark.”
Once they were back in the entry gallery, Charlotte said, “Why does he call you Clark? He said, ‘Real nice, Clark.'”
“It's from some movie.” Then he shrugged phlegmatically. “How about if I show you a little of the house without hundreds of people dancing and boozing all over it?”
Thrilling alarm! She felt as if her nervous system were doing millions of computations per second. Finally: “I have to get back. I just wanted to come by and thank you.”
Hoyt looked at her blankly for a moment, then began slowly nodding okay. “I'll give you a ride home.”
It was a relief, and yet … he hadn't even asked twice! What was wrong? The way she looked? Something she said—or all the things she hadn't said, hadn't been mature enough to know how to say—after he had introduced her to all his friends?
Hoyt insisted on driving her back, and she said no, he really shouldn't, considering how he must be feeling, but he insisted, which pleased her.
Once they were outside, he took her hand as they walked toward his car, but he did it gently. Their conversation was one that any two students meeting for the first time might have had. He asked her how she happened to come to Dupont. Charlotte took great pleasure in describing Sparta, how small it was, how far up in the mountains it was, what hard times it was going through, all of which lit her up with a certain amount of underdog's glory, she thought. Just an ordinary college conversation … made electric by the fact that their fingers were intertwined. She asked him the same question, and it was just as she suspected from the confident way he carried himself … a fancy suburb of New York … his father the international investment banker, the private schools he went to … Charlotte became almost giddy with the realization that she was walking along in the ancient, romantic grandeur of Ladding Walk with a sort of young man she had never
known before, a wealthy, preppy, sophisticated young man who was a man through and through, a man willing to risk his life—that was what it had
amounted
to—for her, for a girl he barely knew!
Hoyt's car turned out to be a huge SUV—tan?—gray?—she couldn't tell in the dark—old and rather the worse for wear. On the side it said “Suburban.” To Charlotte it seemed somehow just right, even glamorous in an inverted way, that he would drive this … well … sort of
bohemian
old truck as opposed to something new and flashy—and ohmygod, he squeezed her hand … not for a second but five seconds, ten seconds before he released in order to get into the SUV.
“Oh—no, Hoyt … I can get back by myself all right.” This was the first time she had ever spoken to him by name! There was something profound about it, and thrilling.
He had squeezed her hand—
“No, it's cool,” said Hoyt. He smiled.
“I really shouldn't let you do this, Hoyt.” Was using his name again going too far?—
and he had squeezed her hand—
As they drove to Little Yard, neither spoke.
Charlotte's mind began churning. Was he going to drop her off on the sidewalk by the gateway or was he going into the parking lot? And if they stopped in the parking lot, was he going to suggest going in with her … or would he look at her with a look that makes the same suggestion without words … and if he did, what would she say? Or would he park in the parking lot and turn the engine off and, without a word, put his right arm around her shoulders, gently, look into her eyes—and what would she do if he did?
Hoyt drove straight to the main gateway … and he put an end to that dilemma: he never turned the motor off. He looked at her with the sort of warm, loving smile that says … everything … and said to her, “Okay?”
Okay?
The loving smile remained, radiant, upon his lips. It meant—meant—meant in one second I'm going to slide my arm across your shoulders and kiss you before you leave …
Charlotte looked more deeply into his eyes than she had ever looked into any guy's. Her lips were slightly parted, and it was an eternity of her making before she finally said, “Oh yes, this is fine. This is perfect.” But she didn't budge. She just kept looking at him, and part of her realized she was forcing … the issue … but how could it end with her just getting out and pushing the door shut. Then she heard herself saying, “Hoyt”—called him
by his name again!—“I just want you to know … I really mean it. That was the bravest thing I ever saw anybody do. You were so wonderful, and I'm so grateful.”
With that, the conscious little rock moved her head ever so slightly closer to his and ever so slightly parted her lips. To Charlotte the moment was pregnant to the point of bursting. But Hoyt's arm didn't move, and his head didn't move. Neither did his smile, which was so warm, warm, warm, loving, loving, loving, so warm and loving and commanding, all commanding, she couldn't move.
“Come on, now,” said Hoyt. “I wasn't being brave. You're embarrassing me. I got in a stupid brawl, that's all, but I'm glad it got you out of there. Lax boys are crazy. I guess you know that now.”
Her eyes still locked on his, Charlotte leaned forward and caressed the unbattered side of his face and put her lips upon his. He returned the kiss gently … and briefly … without trying to put his arm around her. They disengaged quickly.
Hoyt! Your smile! Brimming with love, isn't it?
“Good night, Charlotte.”
Charlotte!
Good night,
Charlotte!
The first time he had used her name … actively, with feeling.
She gazed into his eyes for just a second longer, then hurriedly opened the door and got out without saying a word and without looking back.
Without a word … without a look back …
Somehow that was what the moment demanded. She had a vague, fleeting recollection of having seen it in a movie.
She floated through Mercer Gate and into the courtyard. The lights in the windows around the quadrangle seemed like the Chinese paper lanterns in a painting by Sargent. In all of Little Yard, only she would know about that painting by Sargent. As she floated across the quadrangle, she could see exactly where the picture had been positioned on the page, a right-hand page it was, although she couldn't remember where she was when she saw it. Only she would know about that painting by Sargent. In all of Dupont College, only
she
was Charlotte Simmons!
C
harlotte had never been in a building like the Dupont Center for Neuroscience before, although she had seen pictures of such places, all lean and clean and bare and spare and white and bright and sharp and hard, with glass walls. In Mr. Starling's office, two glass walls came together to form a right angle on a corner without benefit of any column or other structural support. Mr. Starling, wearing a white lab coat, sat at a sci-fi outer-space-movie desk. Charlotte found all this glamorous and awesome, awesome in the more literal sense of wonder commingled with fear.
This was his, Mr. Starling's, building! It wouldn't even exist except for his pioneering at Dupont! He was chairman of the Neuroscience Department, father and ruler of this entire shining twenty-first-century Xanadu of Science! She was sitting not three feet from him in the presence of … the Future! An entirely new millennium in the life of the mind was in birth here! Yes … but just why had he—summoned her here by e-mail to go over the paper on Darwinism she had turned in? Her hopes were high—
He loves my paper!—
and fears of the worst made her highly anxious.
Mr. Starling's eyes were lowered, peering through a pair of tortoisecolored half-glasses perched way down on the ridge of his nose. He was scanning her paper and adding notes in the margin to ones already there. The
door to the room was wide open. Charlotte could hear the four women who worked in the outer office answering the telephones (“He's in a meeting”), complaining about the coffee (“What do they make this with, Fantastik?”), complaining about men (“Why would I want to go to this reunion and have to grin at a bunch of old men I've been introduced to three times in the last hour, and they still wonder why I look familiar? …”)
Mr. Starling put Charlotte's paper down on his desk, took off the half-glasses, put them in the breast pocket of the lab coat, and leaned so far forward in his chair that his forearms rested on top of his thighs.
Why such an extreme posture?
He smiled. Whether that smile expressed warmth, pity, or cynical mistrust of the wiles of the human beast, Charlotte didn't know. She couldn't decode it.
“Ms.”—
Miz
—“Simmons,” said Mr. Starling, “I want to ask you something. Did you by any chance think the assignment was to disprove the theory of evolution in fifteen to twenty pages?”
The irony cut her to the quick. “No, sir.” She could barely make her voice rise above a gasp.
“The assignment,” he continued, “was to assess the theory with regard to the conventional requirements of the scientific method. Perhaps you remember our discussing the fact that in science, no theory merits consideration unless you can provide a set of contraindications, which, if true, would prove it wrong.”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled Charlotte.
“From this standpoint,” said Mr. Starling, “evolution has to be considered as a special case. You may remember our talking about
that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because of the immensely long intervals between cause and effect—hundreds of thousands of years being ‘the short run' and millions of years being the norm—and because of the relative lack of paleontological evidence spanning such vast intervals—there is no way of stating what would prove it wrong.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you chose to leave that minor-league ballpark and go to work dismantling the entire theory … in fifteen to twenty pages.”
“No, sir,” said Charlotte in a strangled voice.
Mr. Starling picked her paper up from the desk, put his half-glasses back on, and riffled through to the last page. “Twenty-
three
pages,” he said. “You overshot the mark slightly … in more ways than one.”
This time, a completely incoherent gasp.
Mr. Starling was smiling at her in a kindly but devastating way. It was the kindly smile you bestow upon a child to show that even though you are compelled to give her a dressing-down for something very wrong that she's done, that doesn't mean you
dislike
her or
blame
her for still being a child.
Shot through the heart, she was! An abject failure for the first time in her life as a student! Unable to comprehend the most clear-cut of guidelines for a major assignment! A student's performance on the class's two term papers would account for two thirds of her grade! Even if she got an A-plus on the second term paper and in everything else in the course, she couldn't possibly receive more than a D for the entire semester!
D!—and
I
am Charlotte Simmons!
“No, sir!” she said in a voice made hoarse by fear and occluded by shock, but audible. “I would never do that! I would never be that presumptuous, Mr. Starling! I wouldn't even know where to begin!”
“No?” said Mr. Starling. “Let me summarize your argument very briefly.” He peered at her over the half-glasses. “If I wreak undue damage to it at any point, you won't hesitate to speak up, I hope.”
“Yes, sir—I mean, no, sir.” The triple negative had her dazed. The additional irony—sarcasm?—was like a punch in the stomach.
“All right.” Mr. Starling began going over the notes he had made in the margins of the paper. “Right off the bat you argue that the human beast—” He peered again. “That's the term you use, ‘the human beast.'” Drily: “I can't speak for Darwin, but Zola would have liked that, I suppose.”
Hoarsely: “Yes
,
sir
. La Bête Humaine.”
“Ah. You've read it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In translation or in French?”
“Both.”
“Ah.” That seemed to stymie him for a moment. “In any case”—his eyes returned to the paper—“you say that Darwin shared a common frailty, almost a superstition, of the human beast. He couldn't conceive of anything in the world, or the world itself, for that matter, not having had a beginning. And why? Because the human beast's own life had a beginning—and would have an end. Every living thing, the plants and animals he lived on, even the trees in the forest, had a beginning—and an end.”
Ever so meekly, Charlotte interrupted. “Sir, I didn't say ‘frailty' or ‘superstition.'”
“All right, we'll strike ‘frailty' and ‘superstition.' Now … you say that since human beasts, including Mr. Darwin, I presume, believe that everything must have a point of origin, then everything must start out very small … like a baby at birth or, if you'd rather, at the moment of conception—that's a political question, I suppose—or the cosmos at the moment of the Big Bang—or Darwin's single cells ‘in a warm pool somewhere.'”
He looked up. “I'm glad you remembered the warm pool. Oh, and incidentally, Darwin died in 1882 and never learned about the Big Bang, but I get your point.”
Blow after blow to the pit of the stomach!
“This you call ‘original fallacy.' After the point of origin, the newborn—the human beast, the cosmos and everything in it—grows larger and larger and more complex. It progresses. So the human beast believes that progress is normal and inevitable. This you call 'the progression fallacy.'”
Barely audible: “Yes, sir.”
“All right. Now you introduce a bit of intellectual history. Darwin was alive at a time when progress was on everybody's mind. It was a time in which modern industry was developing and changing the face of England. Also technology, mechanical invention, modern medicine, and the first widespread distribution of printed materials—books, magazines, newspapers. On top of everything else, and on every Englishman's mind, was the spread all over the world of the British Empire. Darwin, you tell us, was swept up in this general belief in progress, and long before he went to the Galapagos he intended to show that all animals, all species, had progressed from a single cell”—Mr. Starling looked up, smiling—“or those four or five cells in our famous warm pool.”
He returned to her paper. “In fact, you inform us”—he lifted a declamatory forefinger into the air in a gesture of ironic bombast—“that
nothing
begins, and nothing ends. No physical or chemical elements, no particles, ever leave the biosphere. They merely change in their combinations. Your ‘life,' which you say is merely another way of saying your ‘soul,' is over, finished, but all of the materials that comprised your body and your brain remain, destined to be recombined. In other words, ‘dust to dust.' Correct?”
Defeated: “Yes, sir.”
“Oh—and I mustn't forget this.” He had his forefinger on one of the pages of her paper. “You also inform us that time is nothing but one of the human beast's inventions. Your term is ‘mental constructs.' Other animals
react to light, darkness, and climate, but they have no sense or awareness of time.”
Mr. Starling put the paper on the surface of the desk. He leaned back in his chair and stared at Charlotte, smiling, inexplicably, for what seemed like a minute at least but was probably only a few seconds. She waited for the coup de grace.
“Ms. Simmons,” he said, still smiling in that certain way, “people, scholars and laymen, have been trying to undermine the theory of evolution for almost a century and a half. That aspect of your paper doesn't interest me at all, frankly. What impresses me about what you've done is your extraordinary use of the literature, some of it highly technical, even esoteric—”
Impresses?
“—and the nuanced way in which you are able to project the ramifications of a theory, whether Mr. Darwin's or your own. Just to cite one example, I'm a bit bowled over by the fact that you found and were capable of digesting and using Steadman and Levin's study of the lack of time sense in animals. That's a very elegant, very sophisticated—methodologically, very exhaustive, highly technical—in terms of brain physiology—it couldn't have been done before the development of three-dimensional electroencephalography in the nineties—and obscurely published paper. It appeared in the
Annals of Cognitive Biology.
How on earth did you find it?”
Could this actually be?
A bit breathlessly, “Well, I went to the library and I went online, and one thing led to another?—I guess.” Had she regressed to
I geh-us?
“And Nisbet's lecture on how Darwin had seized upon Russell's theory of progress, not to mention his theory of evolution.” Mr. Starling snorted a laugh. “How did you come upon that? Hardly anyone seems to cite Nesbit anymore, and in my opinion he was not only the greatest American sociologist of the last century but also the greatest philosopher.”
Is what seems to be happening—happening for real?
A small voice
—but a-wing … like a swallow!
“I was sort of lucky? That didn't take so long.”
Mr. Starling tapped the paper lightly with the back of the tips of his fingers. “This is an
outstanding
piece of work, Ms. Simmons … and despite what I just said, I did rather enjoy the sheer
nerve
of your taking on the old man.”
A-wing and soaring: “I didn't mean to be doing that, Mr. Starling. I'm sorry it—it—”
“Don't be sorry! Darwin hasn't been
beatified
yet. He's close, but it's not a done deal.”
Charlotte didn't really absorb all the things Mr. Starling had to say after that. What he seemed to be saying was … he didn't know what she was thinking about majoring in, but whatever it might be, she should consider working a few hours a week here in the Center for Neuroscience. Work in the laboratory with animals and with humans, using brain imaging, was the frontier. This sort of work, as he had mentioned in class, had already begun to re-create humankind's—“the human beast's, if you'd rather, Ms. Simmons”—conception of itself.
Yes!
she said to everything and all of it—
Yes! Yes! Yes!
And
Yes!
When she departed the Center for Neuroscience, it had become a sunny afternoon, and she flew like a swallow over the campus of Dupont University, with amazing speed and exhilarating swoops and dives, in Heaven, but with no destination. The
flight
itself … was the thing.
 
 
Charlotte, along with Mimi and Bettina, was standing in a long, loud, nervous line, made up mainly of Dupont students, on the sidewalk in front of the I.M. The sulfur streetlights turned their faces a chemical yellow and killed whatever color existed in their
nostalgie de la boue
gear. It didn't do much for the I.M. itself, either. It made the red paint on the clapboard façade look like dried blood. The place could have used a nice big backlit electro-plastic sign as a distraction from its itchy appearance. Instead, in the interest of indicating that this establishment was for those in the know, there was only an ordinary address plaque over the entrance, reading “I.M. 2019”—2019 being the street number. In short, the I.M. was as fashionably seedy and worn-out as its young patrons' clothes.

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