I Am Charlotte Simmons, page 48
“You’re absolutely right, Greg … up to a point.” Suavely masking his anger … “But there’s a more fundamental principle here. Being a basketball star doesn’t guarantee you’re cool. I’ll give you a good example. You know this freshman, Vernon Congers? He’s taken Jojo Johanssen’s place on the starting five away from him. You’ll see why when we play Maryland next week.”
The Mutants never admitted to being sports fans … themselves … but this bit of news had their attention.
Edgar said, “But I saw him—”
Adam quickly pulled a Greg and cut Edgar off once more. “I know, you saw him start the last game. That’s only because Buster”—first name familiarity—“still starts him in the Buster Bowl because he doesn’t want to start an all-black team at home. But Congers plays twice as many minutes as Jojo even at home, and Buster’s already starting Congers on the road.” Peripheral glance: good; now Charlotte was absorbed in him.
He proceeded to regale them with an account of how Charles Bousquet made life miserable for Congers and how pathetic Congers’s attempted comebacks were. “But you wanna know the reason they don’t think Congers is cool? This gets down to the underlying principle I’m talking about. It’s not because he’s stupid, it’s because—”
Camille broke in: “Is this Congers by any chance black?”
Warily: “Unh-hunh …”
Camille said, “So here we go again, right?”
“Whattaya talking about, Camille? Bousquet’s black, too!” said Adam.
“Oh, that really does make a huge difference, doesn’t it.”
Not about to let this degenerate into a squabble with Camille, Adam raised his voice and bellowed right on over her: “IT’S NOT BECAUSE HE’S STUPID! It’s because he’s defensive! Charles”—I’m on a first-name basis with him, too, of course—“asks him what’s the capital of Pennsylvania, and the poor bastard freezes up. He knows he’s doomed. He starts to say Philadelphia, but he knows Charles would’ve never asked him if it was that easy. You can see the humiliation in his face. He knows he’s been reduced to a 250-pound loser. He wants a trapdoor so he can fall right through it and disappear. So the main thing is confidence … confidence and insouciance.” He hoped the big word impressed Charlotte. “All he had to do was act like he didn’t give a shit about what Charles”—first-name basis—“or anybody else thought of his intelligence. Confidence plus a little roughhousing isn’t bad, either. Next time he ought to grab Charles in a headlock and say, ‘This is an IQ test, Chuck, and the question is, how you gon’ get your head back.’” Without meaning to, Adam had put so much emotion into saying “This is an IQ test, Chuck” and the rest of it that he half realized he was actually acting out a revenge fantasy. He had involuntarily made a fist and lowered his shoulder and cocked his arm into a choke-hold clamp as if it were he who wanted to crush somebody’s windpipe. Actually, Bousquet would be about the last member of the basketball team he would want to finish off. The anabolic bastard he really had in the grip was Jojo—no, Curtis Jones, who had gone out of his way to be rude and humiliating—no, it was every big-time athlete he held in that lethal lock, every lacrosse player—those cretinous bastards—every jock, every bully who had ever walked over him as if it were in the natural order of things that little Adam Gellin was a weakling.
Already, with peripheral vision, he could see Charlotte looking at him in a funny way—
—and so he quickly tried to cover up his hatred of the Curtis Joneses and Jojo Johanssens of the world by amping up his insight’s brilliant light. “Of course, a guy like Congers, he got into Dupont with three-figure SATs. We’re talking low seven hundreds, maybe—”
“Aw, that can’t be true,” said Greg. “They couldn’t afford to take a chance like that.”
“Wanna bet?” said Adam. “What’s the average SAT at Dupont now? Fourteen-ninety? They’ll knock off five hundred points for a basketball or football player—”
Greg broke in. “Yeah, and that’s not even close to low seven hun—”
Gamely, Adam overrode Greg. “But the point I’m making is confidence or putting on the appearance of confidence. That’s at the core of being cool, and I don’t care who you’re talking about.”
“Confident about what?” said Randy.
“Everything,” said Adam. “Taste, status, appearance, opinions, confrontations—you know, like dealing with other students who are trying to fuck you over or professors who are reprimanding you—”
“Shit, the professors don’t reprimand anybody at Dupont,” said Randy. “I wish they did. What they actually do is, they tell the T.A. to give the guy a bad grade, and they hide in their office.”
Camille sighed, as if about to fire another Deng rocket, probably because of the word “guy,” but she said nothing.
“Did you ever have Ms. Gomdin in psych—” Randy began.
But Adam wasn’t about to allow the subject to change to the eccentricities of Dupont pedagogy, so he walked right over Randy: “THE OTHER SIDE OF BEING CONFIDENT”—Randy looked startled—“IS NEVER TO PLEASE PEOPLE”—Randy was vanquished, so Adam lowered his voice—“or not obviously. The cool guy doesn’t flatter anybody or act obsequious or even impressed by somebody—unless it’s some athlete, maybe, maybe—and you don’t act enthusiastic unless it’s about sports, sex, or getting high. It’s okay to be enthusiastic about something, like Dickens—although if you want my honest opinion, I don’t know how anybody could be enthusiastic about Dickens—”
Randy smiled and raised the first two fingers of his right hand and said, “Peace,” which Adam took to be approval, and so he couldn’t resist dilating upon this extraneous obiter dictum: “I mean, you can be a lot of things about Dickens, but I don’t see ‘enthusiastic’ being one of them—”
“You really can’t see being enthusiastic about Great Expectations or Dombey and Son?” said Greg.
Fucking Greg again. Nothing to do but walk right over him again: “OKAY, I CAN SEE IT, but the point I’m making is, sure, you can be enthusiastic about Dickens or Foucault—or Derrida, for that matter—but if you want to be cool, you don’t show it, you don’t say it, you don’t even let on. A cool guy—and I’ve seen this happen—can secretly work his ass off five—no, four—nights a week at the library, but he has to make light of it if anybody catches on. You know what the favorite major of the cool guy is? Econ. Econ is fireproof, if you know what I mean. It’s practical. You can’t possibly be taking it because you really love economics.”
Greg had to be heard from, of course. “You’re leaving out the most obvious thing, Adam.”
“Which is what?”
“Size and build. It’s a hell of a lot easier to be cool if you’re tall and you spend half the week pumping yourself up on the Cybex machines. That’s what makes me laugh, all these guys—”
Goddamn Greg. “ANOTHER THING IS IF YOU START SOME CLUB—” said Adam, but Greg was not one to let himself get walked over.
“—who go around campus walking like this.” He stood up and started—
“—THE ADMINISTRATION APPROVES OF—”
The others were laughing—and ignoring him. Greg was walking across the floor with his thighs straddled and his chin pulled down and his trapezius muscles flexed up, to make his neck look bigger—“as if they’re, you know, like so … hung … they can’t get their legs any closer together—”
“—LIKE SOME ENVIRONMENTAL—” It was no use. Fucking Greg had the floor, and the others found him so amusing … laughter laughter laughter. Well, he, Adam, had held the floor for a good stretch, and he, Adam, had established the basic concept of cool, the theory of confidence. Although he hadn’t dared look at Charlotte for more than an instant at a time, she had been … engrossed … so he chanced a glance now. She was engrossed, all right, but with Greg’s stupid act, smiling and chuckling—
—and then she spoke up! To Greg! “You know Jojo Johanssen? He’s on the basketball team? He walks just like that except he also sneaks looks at himself in reflections in the windows? And he straightens his arm … like this?—and all these things pop out back here.” She put her hand on the triceps of her straight arm.
Hawhawhaw. Greg was delighted, of course, and Randy, Roger, and Edgar joined in the merriment, and Charlotte was mighty pleased with herself. Her implied approval of Greg’s puerile form of humor bothered Adam, but there was something else as well. He had never seen Charlotte make fun of anybody before. Somehow this was an opening breach in her purity, her innocence. He didn’t want her to be like other people, mocking, cutting, cynical, even though he didn’t hesitate to be that way himself. But Charlotte was different. She had a different order of intelligence and charm.
“I thought you liked Jojo,” he said. It was actually a reprimand.
“I do like him,” said Charlotte. “I can comment on the way he walks and still like him, can’t I?”
“Yeah, what’s the matter with you, Adam?” said Randy. “You know Jojo. You’re not saying Charlotte’s wrong, are you? I’ve noticed that you have the occasional comment about Jojo, and I wouldn’t exactly characterize them as flattering, and you’re his tutor.”
Adam shook his head with exasperation. Somehow he couldn’t stand Randy’s referring to her as “Charlotte” that way, as if she was theirs, too, now.
“Adam Gellin and the mouths of babes,” said Camille.
So she knew exactly what he was thinking … He wondered if everything he felt about Charlotte was obvious.
He had no way of knowing it, but he was filled—suffused—with a love for a woman that only a virgin could feel. In his eyes she was more than flesh and blood and more than spirit. She was … an essence … an essence of life that remained tactile and alive—his loins certainly remained alive at this moment, welling up beneath his tighty-whiteys—and yet a … a … a universal solvent that penetrated his very hide and commandeered his entire nervous system from his brain to the tiniest nerve endings. If he could only embrace her—and find that she had been dying for him to do just that—she, her tactile essence, would come flooding into every cell, into all the billion miles of spooled DNA—he couldn’t imagine a unit of his body so minute that she would not suffuse it—and they would … explode their virginities in a single sublime ineffable yet neurological, all too neurological, moment! They would—
“—the flip side of it, Adam? Does that mean it’s cool for athletes to do that?”
Pop. It was Edgar. Edgar had just asked him a question—about what? His mind spun.
“Except for athletes!” said Greg. Dependable old Greggo—immediately taking advantage of his lapse in attention in order to leap back into the ring.
“What do you mean, except for athletes?” said Edgar.
“Treyshawn Diggs does good works,” said Greg. “Or they show pictures of him in the newspaper, and he’s down in ‘the ghetto’ helping ‘the youth’—and as long as it’s him, that’s cool.”
“What’s wrong with that?” said Camille.
“There’s nothing wrong with it—”
“Then why are you saying”—she mugged a prissy expression and minced out the words—“the ghetto and the youth?”
“Stop breaking my … scones, Camille. All I’m saying is that if you’re a sports star, you can act enthusiastic about some charity and still be cool, because you’re precertified macho, and in that case you can show your tender side—tike feminine side. Somebody like Tower, it even makes him look more macho by contrast.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that,” said Edgar, “but first you’ve got to be a big athlete.”
“Yeah,” said Greg. “Or else you’ve got to have—”
Adam glanced at Charlotte. She was looking from Edgar to Greg and from Greg to Edgar. She was absorbed in what they were saying. The urge overcame him. Got to break back in—
But Greg beat him to the punch: “I’d describe cool in an entirely different way. I’d say cool is …”
At this point Greg made the mistake of rolling his eyes up and hesitating as he searched for le mot juste—
—and Adam slipped in a counterpunch: “Includes nobody at this table”—as if he were finishing Greg’s sentence for him. He sped up and raised his voice before Greg could recover: “I MEAN, FACE IT. BY OUR OWN DEFINITION—MILLENNIAL MUTANTS—we’re flaunting our enthusiasm for academics. We’re all out to get Rhodes scholarships—”
“Oh ho—the boy bleeds ego!” said Greg.
“DON’T GIVE ME THAT SHIT, GREG! Are you really gonna sit there and pretend—I mean, this is me you’re talking to and a table full of self-professed Millennial Mutants!”
“There’s goals, and there’s bleeding fucking egos, and yours—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said Camille. “You guys are giving me a pain in the crank.”
“The crank?” said Randy Grossman with a whoop of delight. “Please, Madame Deng, be so kind as to show us your crank!”
“You wouldn’t know what it was if you saw it,” said Camille. It was a snarl.
Randy’s face, which he had lifted in majestic hauteur when he came out of the closet six months ago, fell and turned red. His eyelids were brimming with tears. In a low, hoarse, beaten voice he said, “I never expected that—from you, Camille.”
So womanish! thought Adam. He immediately hated himself for the thought. After all, coming out wasn’t like switching a light, probably. There must be a painful period during which someone like Randy remains terribly sensitive. But he looked like a woman, all the same. He looked like Adam’s mother, like Frankie, on the brink of one of her crying jags after his father informed her that she hadn’t “grown.” Adam felt guilty all over again.
But not Camille. “The fuck, Randy? Suck it up, Randy. I didn’t say cunt, I said crank.”
Randy averted his eyes, turned his anguished face away, covered his eyes with his hand, and started pouting.
“Come on, Randy,” said Edgar solicitously, “Camille said crank. She was joking. Who would know what a crank was, even if they saw one? I wouldn’t.”
After that, the weekly meeting of the Millennial Mutants deteriorated rapidly. Adam kept glancing at Charlotte. She was obviously fascinated by the whole thing. Her eyes jumped from one combatant to the other. Adam was not fascinated. He was no longer even thinking about Randy and Camille—or not in the sense of Randy versus Camille. He, if not they, had put it behind him and moved on to another question entirely. How had he performed in her eyes—Charlotte’s? Was she saying to herself, He’s weak. He let Greg break in and ram his own point about the Rhodes scholarship competition right down his throat … and then just sat there like a dummy and let Camille and Randy take the conversation off on a whole other tangent about pariahism. Or would that be more than offset by the fact that it was he who had actually defined cool. It was he who had developed the concepts of confidence, defensiveness, the suppression of enthusiasm for anything or masking of enthusiasm for anything adults might want to pat you on the head for—
He kept torturing himself with Doubt, swinging back and forth from the positive to the negative. Had she shown any signs at all of becoming comfortable with the Mutants? She was fascinated by the whole Mutant mission in an intellectually barren era, wasn’t she—but what was she to make of Randy or Camille? The evening died a whimpering death, and Edgar drove them back through the City of God and to the campus in his Armor My Baby tank, the Denali.
Adam insisted on walking Charlotte back to Little Yard, and she was glad. She felt euphoric. She had just been witness to the sort of conversation she had just known Dupont would be thriving with—back when Dupont was an … El Dorado, a glow, a vague but glorious destination on the other side of the mountains. The Millennial Mutants didn’t just use this word cool like everybody else at Dupont, they analyzed it and broke it down into … to … to intellectual components that would never even occur to indisputably cool guys such as the Saint Ray house was full of, such as Hoyt himself first and foremost … while the Mutants were openly, brazenly, proudly uncool …
They had barely reached the Great Yard when she felt Adam’s hand snaking down the inner surface of her wrist. She let him. Then she let him intertwine his fingers with hers. He was so bright … so much the sort of person she had hoped would become part of her life when she went off to Dupont. She suddenly felt so grateful to him, she leaned her shoulder against his arm as they walked. He looked at her with searching intensity now, as opposed to all the little glances he kept flashing at her when they were at Edgar’s.
Adam tightened the hold on her hand, and that plus the look he was giving her somehow made the silence hang heavier and heavier.
“Well, Charlotte …” he said finally. His voice sounded funny—nervous, in fact. He paused, as if he really didn’t know what he was going to say next. Then he said, “Did you have a good time?” His voice was a little clearer but still almost half a croak.
Charlotte said, “You know … I really did.” She consciously prevented herself from pronouncing “did” dee-ud. “Everybody was so inter—resting.” Likewise, she had almost let “interesting” loop up into four syllables with a question mark at the end, but she caught herself after the first syllables.
“Like who?” Adam’s voice sounded a little better now.
“Oh, like Camille. You’d never know, the way she talks like a … a …”
“A blitzed frat boy?”
“Yeah! But she’s really got a sharp mind. Everybody at the table was so … quick. You know?”
“Such as—give me another example.”
“Well … like Greg. Greg was funny, wasn’t he? The way he was imitating an athlete walking—it’s so true! That’s Jojo all over! I mean, I just love the way you all know how to … to isolate a part of something, and then when you’re able to see that, you’re able to see the whole thing in a different way, in a—I don’t know—a more analytical way, I guess. I loved all that.”
Now it was Charlotte who intensified her grip on Adam’s hand. She was thrilled. This evening was a real adventure of the mind. Right over there, in the weak antique glow of its streetlamps and immense shadows that all but swallowed them up, was the beginning of Ladding Walk. And far, far down Ladding Walk, deep, deep in the darkness, was the Saint Ray house—the library, which had no books … the big plasma TV set, always turned on to ESPN SportsCenter … There were Hoyt, and Julian and Vance and Boo … and the sluts who feigned an interest in their dumb comments. She could see Hoyt … so comfortable in his listless cynicism, which, in any event—just like Edgar had said!—never had to do with anything but sports, sex, drink … and contempt for people who weren’t cool … en route to the destination, which was always to get trashed, wasted, hammered, crunked up, bombed, wrecked, sloshed, fried, flapjacked, fucked-up, or get plain-long fucked, laid, drained, get some ass, get some head, some skull, a lube job, get your oil changed, get some brown sugar, quiff, goo, pussy … pussy … pussy … when hardly a step away was a world of ideas—about everything from the psychology of the individual to the cosmology of—of—everything!
