I Am Charlotte Simmons (25 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Nat Gellin's divorce papers had roused all the bouncy spunk Frances Horowitz Gellin had possessed the day she met him, except that now it came out not as “cute,” but as revenge. There had been a time when Nat
used to love regaling Frankie with war stories of the restaurant business, and she knew that restaurateurs treasured customers who paid cash. At that time, the only record of cash receipts was the tape that came out of the register—and the tape was thrown into the trash the moment the joint closed at night. The cash itself was a pie, up to the owners to divide as they thought best. For three months, Frankie and her lawyer went out in the middle of the night and retrieved those tapes from the trash outside Egan's. The lawyer thought she was going to use the evidence as a threat to squeeze a better settlement out of her prosperous entrepreneur husband, but Frankie went straight to the federal government. Nat got off with a fine, but the fine was so enormous that he had to sell his half interest in Egan's and the house in Brookline, and even after that he remained nailed to the ground by the bankers. The settlement, the alimony, the child support—those became nothing but words on a document. There was no longer any more than a pittance to be extracted from that well-known host and boulevardier Nat Gellin. And boy, did Frankie leave one dumbfounded, flummoxed, outstanding-billoxed lawyer staring at the remains of her case.
At the time, Frankie didn't care, because she had had her revenge, and yes, it was sweet. She cared later on, when things got so bad that she had to take a job making cold telephone calls for the retail sales department of a cable television company, the sort of calls that interrupt people at home and make them wonder what kind of loathsome creep was so hard up as to take a job doing that. But not even free-floating scorn daunted her, since she was serving a higher cause: turning Adam into a star who would light up her life.
Until Adam started going to Roxbury Latin, no two people were more devoted to each other. Adam was an academic star throughout his school days, and the constant praise of others and the glitter of success in the boy's own eyes did, indeed, light up Frankie's life. As her part of the deal, Frankie kept Adam's confidence—and ego—pumped up to astonishing proportions. There was nothing that could hold him back from going forth from West Roxbury and conquering the world. Frankie had never gone to synagogue again after her social downfall, and Adam grew up without any religion—or any but the most cursory knowledge of Judaism. But she did tell him about the Jewish people. Again he couldn't remember exactly how she put it, but it was clear that the Jews were the greatest people on earth and Israel was the greatest nation on earth, and the United States, although a wonderful country in other ways, was riddled with anti-Semitism. Such was the foundation upon which Adam Gellin's Weltanschauung, like many another's, was built.
At Roxbury Latin, Adam learned a little too much about status distinctions for Frankie's good. Roxbury Latin was anything but a snobbish school. In fact, it had an atmosphere of old-fashioned Protestant scrubbed-wood asceticism about it. Nevertheless, there were quite a few socially well-placed boys who went there and lots of sophisticated parents active in school projects. It was at Roxbury Latin that it first dawned on Adam that his mother, Frankie Gellin, the former Frances Horowitz, the woman who had not only nurtured him but fed his ego, fed his ego, fed it, fed it, fed it, fed it until he was a giant amid Boston's swarms of ordinary people—this woman who had done all that was in fact a very ordinary person, an aging, tiny, roundshouldered woman with no education, no sophistication, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity about it, a poorly read person who couldn't possibly converse with him about Shakespeare, much less Virgil, and still less Emily Dickinson or J. D. Salinger. It was pretty hard to understand irony or allusion or metaphor if you didn't have the faintest notion of what it was playing off of. His mother didn't get it and never had. Adam went into his later teens believing himself to be a brilliant and infinitely promising young star who had been born to the wrong parents.
From worshiping his mother, he veered overnight into resenting her. Why? He had no idea. He didn't even know it was resentment. He thought it was a matter of cultivation, her lack of it and his Roxbury Latinized depth of it. He was unable to face the truth, which was that he didn't want to believe that it was an intellectual and social nullity like this, his mom, his embarrassing, ill-spoken cipher of a mom, who had created Destiny's Adam Gellin. That would have made his grand ego seem like a fraud. (Nor was his the first case of Shrunken Mommy complex among those who regard themselves as intellectuals.)
“—or was that before you got here?”
With a start, Adam realized Greg was looking straight at him and asking him a question, probably containing a barb about his being late for the meeting, but he hadn't a clue as to what the question actually was. His mind churned for a moment, and then he said, “Sorry about being late”—he made a point of looking at the others when he said it, to avoid the appearance of apologizing to Greg—“but I've just come across something like totally incredible but totally true.”
Greg sighed in an impatient I-don't-have-time-for-this manner. “Okay, like what?”
Adam now realized this was the wrong moment to pitch his story, but
the drive known as information compulsion overrode common sense. “Well, the speaker at commencement last spring is the leading contender for the Republican nomination for president, right?”
Greg nodded even more impatiently.
“Well, one night two days before commencement last spring, the guy's already on campus, and two frat boys—two Saint Rays, in fact—catch him getting a blow job out in the Grove from this girl, a junior—and I know her name, although I guess we can't run it—and there's a brawl with the guy's bodyguard—”
Greg broke in. “This is something that's supposed to have happened two days before
commencement
?”
“Exactly,” said Adam.
“That was what—one, two …
four
months ago? That's really awesome, Adam, but we've got to go to press three hours from now, okay? And the story I got to deal with right now happened this morning, okay?”
“I know that,” said Adam, “but I'm talking about one of the most important politicians in America here, and—”
Greg broke in again, sarcastically. “That's bangin', Adam, but—”
Camille broke in on Greg: “Did it ever occur to you, Adam, that all your story ideas are like designed to make women look pathetic? Or is the problem that it
does
occur to you?”
Oh you pathetic skank
. But what he said was, “Whattaya mean, all my story ideas?”
“I mean like this Predatory Professor thing you want to do. You want to make women look like—”
“Whattaya talking about, Camille? That's not a story about women; it's a story about male faculty members.”
Greg said, “Can we please get back to—”
“What am
I
talking about?” said Camille. “The question is, what are
you
talking about? You know very well that the subtext is, Oh, wow, nothing has changed, has it. Female students are still little sexual lambs who need protecting against all-powerful males who want to seduce them. We can't just let them go around having affairs with whoever they feel like, can we. Your narrative is the same old story, the same as”—she paused, her mouth slightly open, obviously searching for some historical or possibly literary analogy—“the same story it's always been,” she concluded lamely. “The subtext makes sure female undergraduates remain the stereotypical Little Red Riding Hoods.”
“Oh,
fuck,
Camille, subtext me no subtexts. Let's
talk
about the text. The text is—”
“THE TEXT IS WE GOTTA COME TO A CONCLUSION ABOUT THE FIST AND THE ‘WE'RE QUEER' SHIT! IT'S ONLY TWO HOURS TO DEADLINE!” Greg's voice had become shrill.
“Why is ‘We're Queer' shit?” said Randy.
Greg sighed, rolled his eyes, looked away, and tamped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Softly, his gaze panning from Randy to Camille to Adam, he said, “We—haven't—got—time—for—semantics. We haven't got time for deconstructing texts, we haven't got time for four-month-old blow jobs, we haven't got time for horny professors. We only have time for—”
Adam tuned out. He knew exactly what poor Greg would do, as did everybody in the room who stopped and thought about it. Not only would Greg be afraid to touch THE GOVERNOR, THE BLOW JOB AND THE BRAWL, he would run a completely straight-faced account of today's WE'RE QUEER fiasco, even though the whole thing was comical, and he would write one of his nevertheless editorials, assuming he had the nerve to run any editorial at all. In his nevertheless editorials, Greg always said something like, “While the administration is probably not being evasive in referring to the erasure as an honest mistake, nevertheless the Gay and Lesbian Fist has every right to hold the administration to the strictest standards of yackety yackety yak …” And Greg would see to it that he never had time for THE BLOW JOB. The very mention of it had scared poor Greg to death.
Greg was arguing with Camille and Randy and looking at his watch, as if the sheer logic of the deadline would make them willing to acquiesce. Greg didn't have the balls to just assert his authority and say—as he, Adam, would have—“Look, it's getting late, and here's what we're going to do …”
Adam looked at his own watch and realized, resentfully, that he wouldn't have the luxury of hanging around long enough to see his prediction come to pass. He had fifteen minutes to get over to his night job. Destiny's Adam Gellin would spend the next four hours in a little Bitsosushi hatchback delivering slices of anchovy-and-olive, pastrami-mozzarella-and-tomato, prosciutto-Parmesan-red-pepper-and-egg, sausage-artichoke-and-mushroom, smoked-salmon-stracchino-and-dill, and eggplant-bresaola-arugula-pesto-pignoli-fontina-Gorgonzola-bollito-misto-capers-basil-crème-fraîche-and-garlic
cheese pizza to every indolent belly-stuffing time-squandering oaf on or off the Dupont campus who picked up the phone and called PowerPizza.
 
 
Adam couldn't stand pizza, but tonight, as he stood at the stainless-steel takeout counter inside the alley entrance to PowerPizza, the sound of the Mexicans dicing all the onions and red peppers and the smell of sausages cooking in their cheese lava cut right into his stomach and made him painfully hungry. He hadn't eaten since noon and wouldn't be able to eat for four more hours, and here he was staring into a hot maw, the PowerPizza kitchen, where a motley hive of people were furiously shoveling food in gross quantities. The counter girls up front were yelling at the cooks, the cooks were yelling at the Mexicans, the Mexicans were yelling at each other, in Spanish, and Denny, the owner, was yelling at the whole lot of them in what passed for English.
“‘Eyyyyy, whattayou do standin'eh?” He had spotted Adam. He threw both hands up in the gesture that said “Useless!”
“I've only got seven orders!” said Adam, indicating the stack of pizza flats beside him on the counter. “I'm supposed to have eight!”
“Okay. You get a you eight, you get a you ess moving.”
Denny, whose actual first name was Demetrio, was like a caricature of a pizza parlor proprietor, an immigrant from Naples, too fat, bald, hotheaded, and harried, and he couldn't even yell at you without using his hands. In the evenings his entire business depended on speed—speed at the front counter, in the kitchen, and above all in the take-out deliveries, which were supposed to go out fast and arrive hot. To ensure that, Denny had devised a shrewd form of bottom-dog capitalist motivation. Delivery boys like Adam got no wages, only tips. Adam's take each night depended solely on how fast he could get the orders to their destination. Volume was what counted, because students were not the greatest tippers in the world. He wished he could arrive at every door with a sign around his neck that said I DON'T GET PAID TO DO THIS, I ONLY GET YOUR TIPS.
One of the Mexicans slid another pizza box down the counter, and Adam had barely touched it before the all-seeing Neapolitan yelled, “You got a you eight! You get a you ess on da road! You stan' aroun' when you t'ru!”
Adam staggered away from the counter holding a stack of pizza flats that
rose up higher than his head. Delivery boys used a battered, underpowered eight-year-old Bitsosushi hatchback. PowerPizza was part of a gaudy strip of student-oriented shops, and Adam's first stop would be six or eight blocks behind it in an apartment building he was only vaguely aware of, since he had never heard of any student living there. On the other hand, he couldn't imagine anybody other than students with rude animal appetites craving five full-size flats of pizza. The order came to more than fifty dollars, in any event. It would take somebody mean or clueless to tip him less than five dollars. Off the job, he was cautious at the wheel of a car. On this job you had to be a stock-car driver if you wanted to make any money. He sped through the seedy, feebly lit old residential area behind PowerPizza, barely even onepumping the stop signs.
The apartment building was a dingy brick affair, four or five stories high, with a small entry vestibule containing a deck of about twenty mailboxes, a panel of apartment buzzers, and a glass interior door through which Adam could see a lobby that wasn't much but had an elevator, thank God. The five flats of pizza were so unwieldy, Adam had to put them down in order to study the buzzer panel. Jones 3A … Jones 3A … Found it, pushed the button, waited for the clicking sound, pushed the door open, and did the usual acrobatics, holding the door open with the heel of his sneaker while he bent over and lifted the five flats up off the floor. Christ! Did something to his back, which put him in an even worse mood. What was Destiny's child doing in a situation like this? How could it be that he, Adam Gellin, was a delivery boy backing his way into a third-rate apartment building in a shady part of a dreary little city in Pennsylvania, carrying five boxed slabs of idiot food while a lock-mad security-hinged plate-glass door pressed against his butt, trying to deny him entry? And his back hurt like hell.

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