I Am Charlotte Simmons (95 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

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Charlotte cut him off. “You said two problems.” She didn't feel like listening to a rant about Mr. Quat, especially since Mr. Quat happened to be right.
“Yeah,” said Jojo with a long, sad sigh. “You gotta help me on both of them, Charlotte. I told you how I'm taking French 232 this semester. I'm proud of myself. Frère Jocko French and all that stuff …” He gave Frère Jocko French and all that stuff a dismissive flip of the hand. “But now I got a
problem. Miz Boudreau—I don't know what the woman's saying! She teaches the class … in French! I'm a new person now, and I'm proud a that. But I don't know what the fuh—what the hell she's
saying!
You know what I mean? I can read the poetry. I don't mean I can read it exactly—I'm in the dictionary about eight fuh—about eight times more than I'm in the book … but I can read it, I can get through it. Right now we're reading Victor Hugo. That old dude—the world must have been way different back in the day …”
“Victor Hugo? I didn't even know he wrote poetry.”
“See? Now I know something you don't!” He stared straight into Charlotte's eyes. “But you gotta help me! If you don't, I'm fuh—I'm screwed.”
“Help you how, Jojo?”
“I passed the Age of Socrates, and nobody thought I could do it,” said Jojo. “Now, if I can do okay in real French and this other philosophy course I'm taking this semester—I didn't tell you about that—Religion and the Decline of Magic in the Seventeenth Century—yeah!—if I do okay in that too, the bastards'll have to have microprocessors instead a hearts not to give me a break on this other thing. You know?”
Monotonously: “Help you how, Jojo?”
Jojo said, “Well, the way I figure it is, you know French. The way you were reading that book in Mr. Lewin's class that time—I can't remember the name of the book—I mean, people were looking around at each other—”
“
Madame Bovary
,” said Charlotte.
“Yeah! That's the one. If you hadn't said what you said that time, I'd still be—what did you call it?—‘playing the fool.' That's what you said, playing the fool. You
know
that stuff. So I figured the only way I can save my—save myself is if I take a tape recorder to class, and then I come back and you tell me what she said. Maybe you could help me with some of the poetry? I mean, I can
do
it … but you know metaphors and all that stuff? Sometimes it's … you know … hard.”
Charlotte said, “You know what they
call
people who will do that for you?”
Jojo, tonelessly distrustful: “No. What.”
“Tutors.”
“No!” said Jojo. “I told you! I'm finished with all that stuff! I'm going—” And Jojo was off on an explanation of why if Charlotte helped him, it would be different …
Out of the corner of her eye she spotted Lucy Page Tucker and Gloria coming into Mr. Rayon. They were bound to come close to the table if they
headed for the cafeteria rails, and the positioning was perfect. First they would see Jojo, who was more or less facing them. Then their curiosity would get the better of them. They'd be dying to know who the girl was. Charlotte wasn't really following what Jojo was saying, but she figured she knew the gist of it. As soon as his lips stopped moving, she lifted her chin and put on a smile of abnormal animation and coquettishness and said, “Oh, Jojo, Jojo, what makes you think
I
”—she lowered her head, brought the fingers of one hand up to the middle of her chest, opened her eyes wide, and looked up at Jojo—“know enough French to be a tutor?”
“That's what I just got through telling you!” said Jojo, also with great animation. “You're a lot more than a tutor … to
me
… You're the girl who turned me around! You were the only person who had the guts to stand up to me and tell me the truth! I thought I was cool … and all the time I was playing the fool. You're the one who …
inspired me
.” Now he was leaning way toward her … giving her a look of … significance. Before she knew it, he had taken her hand in both of his. Charlotte instinctively cut a glance to the left and to the right. Lucy Page Tucker and Gloria—they had both taken trays at the Italian section and were looking back at her. Charlotte, fixing her gaze upon Jojo, manufactured the merriest of laughs and withdrew her hand from his. And the two witches—they couldn't have helped but get an eyeful of it.
“What's so funny?” Jojo wanted to know.
“Nothing,” said Charlotte. “I was just thinking of the look on a lot of people's faces when they find out you've really become a student.”
Jojo smiled for a moment, then became very serious and once more gave her the look that said he wanted to pour his whole soul into her through her optic chiasma. “Charlotte, I think you know—I hope you know—there's no way you could just be a tutor to me.”
Charlotte
. Interesting. It was the first time he had said her name in the entire conversation. And that look … soulful was the word …
In reply, Charlotte gave him a smile of sympathetic understanding, which was quite different—and she meant it to be—from a smile of excitement, joy, or tenderness, much less love. In that same moment she cut another glance toward the Italian section rails to see if perhaps … they … Still there! They had only moved a few feet along the cafeteria rails. She didn't have time to study their faces to see if they were still looking at her, because Jojo was off on another speech and pouring more soul into her eyes.
“It ain't—id'n just the academic stuff,
Charlotte
.” Charlotte; check,
check. “I don't know if you know it or not, but you've showed me like a … I don't wanna get all—you know … but you've showed me a new way to like …” He threw his enormous body into it, the struggle to deliver this speech fluently, twisting this way and that, as if to give his brain momentum, and shaping a large lump of invisible clay with his hands. “ … like … you know … think about things … being at Dupont and everything … and it's not enough to just do things with a round orange ball … and what a … relationship is, or oughta be … I'm not very good at saying all this—but you know what I'm saying …”
Charlotte maintained her benign smile. She sure hoped Lucy Page and Gloria got a load of Jojo's anxious body language.
 
 
Greg and Adam were the only ones left in the office at the
Wave.
“I'm telling you,” said Adam, “you'll be the biggest fucking editor in the country, Greg! You'll be publishing the dynamite of all dynamite! This thing is fireproof! It's locked down! We've got two lawyers from Dunning Sponget and Leach, Greg
—Dunning Sponget and Leach
!
—
who've vetted it and given the thumbs-up!—it's
fireproof
!—it's
libel-proof
!—you'll be the hottest editor who ever worked on a college newspaper and went straight to
The New York Times
! Now that's Millennial Mutant stuff, Greg! We're always talking about public intellectuals and shit—public intellectual is fucking looking at you in the mirror! Carpe diem, dude!”
Pause … Pause … “Now, who was the last guy we talked to at Dunning Sponget—the old guy, Button, or—”
I think the Fearless Editor's getting over the shakes, Adam said to himself. At least
something's
going right.
“C
ome on in, Mr. Gellin,” said Mr. Quat, a ball of fat in a sweater and T-shirt, tilting himself way back in a glorious sprawl in the swivel chair behind his desk. He swept one fat arm up in the air in a beckoning gesture grand enough for a … a … Adam didn't know what it reminded him of—a pasha?—but he didn't have the capacity to pursue the comparison, not the way his heart was pounding pounding pounding pounding him on on on on into doing … whatever he was doing here in Mr. Quat's office.
Was he kidding himself? He knew what he was doing. Otherwise, this was the last place he would be likely to show up. It was just that he wanted to leave himself room … to change his mind and bail out at the last minute.
Like most professors' offices at Dupont, this one was small, oldfashioned—dark wooden furniture, dark wooden cornices, a pair of tall double-hung windows side by side—but Mr. Quat's walls were lurid with posters … from the 1960s, if Adam knew anything about it … a poster of Bob Dylan, rendered so that his hair looked like a conglomeration of hair extensions dyed different hot pastels … a poster full of swirly lines and swirly lettering advertising the Grateful Dead … a poster with a cobra, proclaiming the martial might of something called the Symbionese Liberation Army—
“So?” said Mr. Quat. “You like my posters?”
“Yes, sir,” said Adam. Nerves popped the words out an octave too high. He cleared his throat.
“You know what they are?”
“No, sir. From the 1960s?”
“Ah! So you do know your ancient history, Mr. Gellin,” Mr. Quat said. He smiled the smile of a man who has known the score for a long time.
The pasha. Maybe the word was pasha because pasha made Adam think of a smug fat man. The same old ratty gray V-neck sweater with a T-shirt visible in the V—or it looked like the same one he wore to Stand Up Straight for Gay Day—hugged Mr. Quat's rolls of fat, which sagged and otherwise changed shape every time he moved. They were bobbing like gelatin at this moment, in fact, as he made another grand, sweeping gesture toward a chair on the other side of the desk, a library chair, the wooden kind with stout arms and a low, curved back. “Go ahead, Mr. Gellin, have a seat.”
Adam sat down, and Mr. Quat said, “How do you know about the 1960s? Most students—you might as well be talking about the 1760s.”
“I took Mr. Wallerstein's course,” said Adam. “Social Crosscuts in Twentieth-Century America.”
“
Crosscuts
,” said Mr. Quat with a chortle, as if the word was a source of rich good humor. “That's what he calls it? I haven't heard that word since … I can't remember. Goes back to Talcott Parsons … Everybody underestimates Parsons. Being that tedious to read is a problem.” Mr. Quat looked away, out a window, smiling, as if recalling some funny times.
Adam didn't venture a comment. Who the fuck was Talcott Parsons? In any case, Mr. Quat seemed to be in a good mood and kindly disposed … Adam knew his beloved 1960s!
“The sixties …” said Mr. Quat with an inexplicable chortle. “Seems like an incredible anomaly now, going on half a century or so later.” He looked out the window toward the Great Yard. Another chortle without any indication of what was funny. His gaze returned to Adam. “You saw”—
sawr
—“what we've got to work with now … Stand Up Straight for Gay Day … or subcontractors for the university caterers are paying slave wages to their help … most of whom are undocumented Latinos …
”
Another chortle. He looked away. “You can cut the hypocrisy with a knife.” He looked back at Adam. “Fifty years … and nothing has changed. And you know why nothing has changed?”
He kept staring at Adam while the question floated in the air.
“Yes, sir,” said Adam, not knowing what else to do with it.
“It's because you know what all the progressive forces are doing now? They're all busy fighting smoke. Everybody seems to think if the smoke is gone, there's no more fire.”
Now
this
comment hung in the air. Adam had no idea what Mr. Quat was talking about. So he said, “Yes, sir.”
“And you wanna know why nobody dares try to extinguish the fire again? That's what nobody understands. Nobody's supposed to see the fire anymore. That's been demonized—pointing straight at it and saying, ‘
That … is fire
… you're looking at. Right there.'” He pointed toward the floor with an accusing finger. “That's not allowed, not even in so-called PC circles in academia. Whichever one of them thought up ‘PC' was a genius in his own slimy way. It's because of that clever little smear that it's now considered … vulgar … to call the fire the holocaust—that's the word for it, except that
holocaust
has taken a specific meaning—in Greek it means something completely burned up—anyway, it's ‘vulgar' to mention it. You wanna know what PC
should
mean? ‘Progressive causes' is what it should mean. You wanna know what it actually means today?”
Mr. Quat's lips stopped moving, and he stared at Adam … waiting … Adam was baffled. What fire? So he croaked out, “Yes, sir.”
“What it actually means is prison-bound citizens … prison-bound citizens … PC … think about it … We're being pinned down by snipers and hooligans. You saw the hooligans the other day. They were so brazen, they even put on a paramilitary uniform, the short khaki pants. They're ready to go after something as mild as Stand Up Straight for Gay Day. How many times does history have to repeat itself? This goes back to 1917 in Russia, where the hooligans lost—that was a miracle!—and 1933 in Germany, where the hooligans won—meaning, of course, those who sent them forth, the forces … the fire …”
Mr. Quat let that one loose in the air like a blimp. Reflexively, Adam said, “Yes, sir,” even though Mr. Quat had not asked him a question. Mr. Quat now stared at Adam intently and cocked his head in a way people do when they are just about to excavate your soul. “Now … you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this.”
To put it mildly. All that Adam could make out of it so far was that a wind was rising, and in some vague way it was blowing in his favor. Mr. Quat would have never gone on that way about “progressive” this and “progressive” that if he didn't think he was talking to a sympathizer. But Adam
didn't dare utter anything more adventurous than his all-purpose standby, “Yes, sir.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Quat, “I'm going to tell you. In the grand sweep of things”—he made a grand sweep with his hand and forearm—“Stand Up Straight for Gay Day is about as soft-core as protests get. You know what I mean? I've been involved in
protests
.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nevertheless, you were right there in the front line holding a placard. That shows courage in two ways. One is the very fact that you were willing to stand up for an unpopular cause.
And
… Camille tells me—Camille …” The very thought made Mr. Quat break into a huge grin and close his eyes and lower his head and shake it. He looked at Adam again, still grinning. “That woman is … a
pistol
! She was born too late, though. If she'd been around in 1968, she would have blown the top off this place!” Grinning grinning grinning he closed his eyes, lowered his head, and shook it some more, apparently having visions of Camille Deng as an acetylenemouthed Chinese Mother Bloor—Mr. Wallerstein talked about Mother Bloor—battling atop the burning barricades in the streets of Chicago during the war in Vietnam.
Mr. Quat pulled himself together. “Anyway, Camille tells me you're not gay, but you were one of the students willing to stand right there in front of the platform holding a placard reading I forget what, something something ‘Queer.' That shows me what we used to call intestinal fortitude. ‘Guts,' I believe, is the term that has survived.” He who knew the score gave Adam a smile of approval.
“Yes, sir,” said Adam, who had lost all track of what the question, if any, might be. His heart pounded pounded pounded pounded.
Mr. Quat cocked his head in that certain way again. “Now, I take it, you can … uh … shed some light on the Johanssen case. You were his tutor, you said?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay … So what can you tell me about it? Where did that paper come from?”
“Yes, sir,” said Adam. “But may I give you some background?”
Mr. Quat granted him another pasha sweep of the arm, as if to say, “Go right ahead.”
“Camille and I,” said Adam, “and Randy Grossman, the student who spoke right before you?—we're all members of a group … well, actually a
cénacle is what we call it—like the cénacle in Balzac's Lost Illusions?” He lowered his eyes and smiled in an embarrassed fashion, to show that he was aware of the immodesty of the comparison. Now was the time to enter his evidence for the defense. He had worked on it until four o'clock this morning, and he could say it by heart. He told of how hard he and the other Millennial Mutants had worked to take control of the
Wave
and how, now that they had it, they were determined to print
real
stories about Dupont, such as the series on the board of trustees. In explaining what “Millennial Mutants” meant, he was careful not to mention their fundamental assumption, which was that to be a mere college teacher was too humble and self-effacing for words. He quickly moved on to the Mutants' role as the ideological core of progressive causes on the campus, whether it was standing up for gay rights or simply mobilizing students to be active and vote against the Republican Party. He enumerated the many ways they had devoted the Wave to that end. Then he moved to the more personal terrain. He came from a family—and he had already rehearsed how to let it be known that his family was Jewish, by packing his great-grandparents, pogroms in eastern Europe, fear of being forcibly dragooned into military service in Poland, Ellis Island, the Lower East Side, and sweatshops into a single sentence, without losing track of the syntax—he came from a family that had fought for progressive causes for generations. That flicked on, in the very moment he spoke the words, a flashback to his father, Nat Gellin, Mr. Congeniality, maestro of Egan's, the Jew who could butter up Irishmen better that any other Jew in Boston, but it was only that, a flash, and did not break up the flow of his words. He had also rehearsed how to let it be known that the Gellins, formerly Gellininskys, were Jews without money, as witness the fact that he was the first Gellin in all those generations who ever went to college. Big Nat, the tender of the sons of Erin, he reasoned to himself, had dropped out of B.U. and didn't count. Furthermore, not even he, Adam, could have come to Dupont had he not been awarded a scholarship and held down two jobs, one delivering pizza at night in a Bitsosushi and the other, as Mr. Quat was aware, tutoring athletes for the Athletic Department. Then he moved to the climax. He had a dream—and now this dream was close to becoming real: a Rhodes scholarship. He omitted the part about the “Bad-Ass Rhodie.” He included the part about “opening doors”—and added a part about how, once inside those doors, he would be in a position to devote his life to advancing progressive causes in a substantial way. He figured now was not the moment to mention his intention of becoming a matrix who originates the great theories and
concepts that are then spread by “the intellectuals,” the people with the dealerships, such as college history teachers … if one need edit.
Throughout this recitation, Mr. Quat kept his lips compressed in a thoughtful manner but allowed a friendly smile to play about the corners. He also kept nodding toward Adam with obvious approval and encouragement to continue. During Adam's peroration concerning his dream of reaching the high ground where he could devote his life to progressive causes, Mr. Quat nodded more enthusiastically and continually than ever, even closing his eyes from time to time in the midst of a full bobbing nod, as if to concentrate to the utmost upon what he was hearing.
When Adam's lips stopped moving, Mr. Quat nodded some more and said, “Well—I hope you get your Rhodes. It sounds like you've worked hard and done well, and I commend you.” A pause. “So I guess that brings us up to Mr. Johanssen and his paper.” Once more he cocked his head and waited.
Adam took a deep breath. This was it. He was at the border. He either crossed over into unknown territory or stayed here. Which was riskier? If he stayed here, Buster Roth was his strategist. But Buster Roth was not his friend. What was to keep Buster Roth from making him a sacrificial lamb to save Jojo? Nothing. He didn't even
know
Roth, and technically he had been working for him for two years. They were two totally different types of people. Whereas Quat—he had been with the man now for maybe thirty minutes, and he already felt as if he was with a landsman, a compatriot. He felt it … he
knew
it … there was no way Mr. Quat would now turn on him … Where would this leave Jojo? That, he hadn't thought through … but it stood to reason that if Mr. Quat dropped the case against one of them, he'd have to drop the case against both … This limbo … this not knowing … this having a sword over his neck
constantly
… it was unbearable … and the window of opportunity was now open … while the demonstration was still live in Mr. Quat's memory …
Now
!—and suddenly he was across the border.

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