I Am Charlotte Simmons (39 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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The next morning, a little past eleven-thirty, no sooner had the class begun than the professor, Mr. Quat, dissed Curtis Jones, fo'shizzle, as Curtis himself might say.
The course was called America in the Age of Revolution, referring to both the Revolution of 1776 and the industrial revolution. The class's twenty-eight students convened in a ground-floor room of Stallworth College that had four large, solemn leaded casement windows looking out on a courtyard landscaped in the Tuscan manner. The room was lined with six-foot-high intricately carved oak bookshelves, replete with books. What with the early Renaissance look of the windows and the Old World woodwork, the room all but spoke aloud of the wisdom of the ages and the sanctity of learning and scholarship.
Everybody sat around two great oak library tables set end to end, creating the impression of a conference room. Mr. Quat was probably in his midto late fifties. He was a passionate, even hotheaded, pursuer of knowledge, and not even the most buff-brained athlete was likely to nod off during Quat time. But his physique was enough to make an athlete's flesh crawl. He had a perfectly round head, thanks to his fat cheeks, his fat jowls, and the fact that his curly iron-gray hair had receded to the point where his forehead had the contours of a globe from the equator up to the North Pole. He had a mustache and a close-trimmed goatee. His torso was swollen with fat to the point
where little breasts had formed on his chest, a detail all too apparent thanks to his penchant for too-tight V-neck sweaters with only a T-shirt underneath and no jacket on top. The T-shirt, ordinary white cotton, always showed in the V. But no athlete, least of all Jojo, was going to challenge him on any level. Mr. Quat always stood up at the table as he taught, while Jojo, André Walker, and Curtis Jones, along with the twenty-five authentic undergraduates, remained seated. Mr. Quat treated all students as antagonists, but he acted as if student-athletes—the sarcasm fairly dripped from his eyeteeth as he used the term—were cretins he would like to
kill
. This unpleasant situation was the result of a colossal blunder by a blond twinkie named Sonia in the Athletic Department. She had confused Quat with Tino Quattrone, a young associate professor who came to all the basketball games even though he could only get standing-room tickets, with this character, Jerome Quat, who would obviously like to blow up the entire Buster Bowl, given the chance, when she prepared the list of approved athlete-friendly teachers in the History Department. Speculation as to why Coach had ever hired this bimbo always ran in the same direction. On top of everything else, Mr. Jerome Quat lectured and hectored them in a highly scholarly, lofty manner pockmarked by unpleasant pronunciations, which were in fact a residue of his upbringing in Brooklyn, New York.
Mr. Quat, standing, was staring at a stack of papers on the table as if he hated them. Then he looked up and said, “All right—”
Awright
—he paused, as if he had just caught them in the act, some act, any act. “Last time we saw that by 1790 such social eccentricities had been exacerbated”—
We sawr that by seventeen ninedy such social eggzendrizzidies had been eggzazzerbated—“
by her further attempts
—” Huh fuhthuh attempts—
He stopped abruptly and stared toward the far end, where Jojo, Curtis, and André were sitting.
“Mr. Jones,” he said, “do you mind telling me what's that you have on your head?”
Curtis was in fact wearing an Anaheim Angels baseball cap with the bill sticking out sideways. He now touched it and said in a tone of mock bemusement, “You mean
this?”
“Yes.”
Curtis chose the cool and amused route. “Aw, hey, Prof, check it out! You looking at a—”
Quat cut him off. “Are you an orthodox Jew, Mr. Jones?”
“Me?” He looked around at his basketball buddies with bemusement and amusement. “Naw.”
“Does that cap have any other religious significance, Mr. Jones?”
Still cool and amused: “Aw naw. Like I say—”
Cold and not amused: “Then kindly remove it.”
“Aw, come on, Prof, the other—”
“Now, Mr. Jones. And by the way, starting now, you will not address me as Prof. You will say ‘Mr. Quat' or, if three syllables is expecting too much, ‘Sir'—‘Mr. Quat' or ‘Sir.' Do I make myself clear?”
Their eyes locked. Jojo could tell that Curtis's mind was scrolling scrolling scrolling scrolling, trying to figure out how much of his manhood was actually on the line here.
“I—”
“One of us will remove your headgear, Mr. Jones. Either you or me.
Right now.”
Curtis was the one who broke. He removed the cap, looked away, and began shaking his head in a manner that was supposed to say, “I'm going to indulge you this time, but you're one sick puppy.”
Mr. Quat's angry gaze panned over every student in the room. “Other teachers may not care what you wear to class. I can't speak for them. But you will not wear any form of headdress in
this
class, unless your particular religious faith requires it. Do I make myself clear?”
No one said a thing. Mr. Quat resumed his discourse on class, status, and power among the American colonials. Curtis lounged back in his library chair with his hands folded in his lap, craning his head this way and that, in any direction other than one that might make it seem as if he was paying any attention whatsoever to Mr. Quat. Smoke was coming out of his ears. Jojo could hear him muttering now and again. Had he been dissed? Obviously, he had come to the conclusion that he had been.
At the end of class Mr. Quat went around the table handing students back the ten-page papers they had turned in the week before. When he got to Curtis, Curtis took his with exaggerated nonchalance, as if Mr. Quat were nothing more than a stewardess handing out those slimy miniature “hot towels” they dispense on airplanes. Glancing sideways, Jojo noticed that both Curtis and André had received C's. Jojo looked up at Mr. Quat, but the professor skipped over him entirely and resumed handing them out farther down the line.
Like the rest of the class, Jojo got up to depart … but then hung back a bit just in case Mr. Quat discovered he had failed to give him his paper. Finally he started following André and Curtis. Curtis kept leaning close to André and nudging him, going
heghh heghh heghh,
presumably settling Quat's hash and explaining how he hadn't backed down, it was actually something else or other …
Jojo was almost out the door when a voice behind him said, “Mr. Johanssen.”
Jojo stopped and turned around.
“May I see you for a moment?”
Sure enough, Mr. Quat had Jojo's paper in his hand. He could make out the capital letters typed on the otherwise blank first page: THE PERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GEORGE III AS A CATALYST OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
Mr. Quat held the paper up in front of Jojo—there was no grade on it—and said, “Mr. Johanssen, this is your paper?”
“Yeah …”
“Did you write it yourself?”
Jojo could feel the blood draining from his face. It was all he could do to answer in a halfway normal voice, “
Yeah
,” and arrange his eyes and lips in a fashion that registered astonishment over the very question.
“Well then, perhaps you can tell me what this word means.” The professor was pointing at CATALYST.
Jojo panicked. He couldn't
think
. His tutor had just
told
him the other night! He had even said, albeit a bit sarcastically, “You might want to know what the word means, just in case you ever have to make somebody think you know what you've written.” But
what had he said?
Something about
precipitation? Assassination?
Damn! The rest of it had vanished from his memory.
“Well, I
know
,” Jojo sputtered, “but it's one of those words you
know
you know, but you don't know how to put it into words? You know what I mean?”
“It's one of those words you
know
you know, but you don't know how to put it into words,” Mr. Quat said drily. Then he flipped to an interior page. “You say here, ‘When George was a young boy, his mother is said to have exhorted him constantly, “You must become a great king.” When he at last became king, he could never free himself of the memory of that metronomic maternal exhortation.' What does
exhortation
mean?”
Fear turned Jojo's very powers of logic to mush. He couldn't even come
up with a rationale for not knowing. All he could think of was why the hell the little twerp, Adam, had ever thrown in words like that. Finally he said, “It means … what she said?”
“
Exhortation
means ‘You must become a great king'?”
“No, but I mean, the meaning—I
know
the meaning and everything, but just
defining
the meaning by itself and that kinda thing—”
“Is meaning the meaning but not defining the meaning like knowing the word but not knowing how to put the word into words, Mr. Johanssen?”
Jojo knew the professor was purposely messing up his mind with all these
meanings
and
knowings
and
words
, but he couldn't figure out how to break up the game. “I didn't mean that,” he said. “All I meant was—”
Quat broke in. “What does
maternal
mean, Mr. Johanssen?”
“Mother!” Jojo blurted out.
“Wrong part of speech,” said Mr. Quat, “but I'll accept that. Now, how about
metronomic
?”
Panic and uproar reigned inside Jojo's head. He hadn't a clue—and Mr. Quat had closed the door to waffling around with
knowing
and
meaning
. He just stood there with his mouth half open.
“Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Johanssen,” said Mr. Quat, oozing with sarcasm, “that really wasn't fair of me, was it? That's a difficult word.”
Jojo remained speechless.
Mr. Quat flipped to another page. “Let's try this one. You say here, ‘George regarded himself as the cleverest of political infighters, but what he took to be subtle strategy often struck others as the most—'” He put his fingertip upon the next word, which was “maladroit,” without pronouncing it. “‘—sort of meddling.' How do you pronounce that word, Mr. Johanssen, and what does it mean?”
“I—” The first-person pronoun just hung in the air. Jojo felt that he had lost all power of articulation.
“Okay,
maladroit
is difficult, too—after all, its roots are French—so let's try meddling. What does
meddling
mean, Mr. Johanssen?”
Jojo could feel his armpits sweating. “Meddling”—he certainly knew that one, but the words!—the words! The very words had fled his brain! “Well—” he said, but that was as far as he got.
Well
now hung in midair with I.
“Okay, let's try
subtle.
What does
subtle
mean, Mr. Johanssen?”
With the most profound effort, Jojo managed to say, “I know what it
means
—” But that was it.
I know what it means
floated away and joined the others.
“Let's bring this rather dreary demonstration to a conclusion,” said Mr. Quat.
“Honest, I
know
all these words, Mr. Quat! I
know
them! The only problem I have is saying the meaning the way you want me to!”
“Which means you know the words but you have just one little problem: you don't know what they mean.”
“Honest—”
“Stop displaying your ignorance, sir! Here's your paper.”
Still holding it up before Jojo, he flipped it to the first page once more. Jojo thought he was giving it back, and he reached for it. But Mr. Quat withdrew it and held it close to his chest. Then he reached inside his jacket and produced a big mechanical china marker. He set the paper down on the table and with a furious flourish printed a huge red F on the first page beneath the title. Then he handed it to Jojo, who, shocked, accepted it robotically.
“When this is averaged in with your other grades, Mr. Johanssen, you are in deep trouble in this course. But that's a secondary problem. I have the grounds here for filing a serious honors violation … and I intend to file it immediately. I have no idea how much you've enjoyed making a mockery of the academic life of this university, but your fun is over. Do I make myself clear?
Over …
And if you try to get anybody to intervene on your behalf—
any
body—can you possibly imagine who I mean by
any
body?—that will only make it worse. Do I make myself clear?”
Jojo was speechless.
The fat man gathered up his papers and, without so much as another glance at Jojo, walked out of the room. Jojo stood there, bewildered, holding the tainted paper as if his fingers were frozen to it.

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