I Am Charlotte Simmons (76 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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It dawned on her that she had no idea what she was going to do when she reached the bottom …
 
 
Ordinarily, President Cutler received visitors not at his bombastic eight-foot-long desk, but at one of the office's two furniture clusters. Over here was a bergère, two cabriole-legged armchairs, and an Oxford easy chair, all upholstered mauve morocco leather. Over there was the richest chestnut brown leather sofa you ever saw, a long coffee table, and chairs upholstered in cloth of assorted mauve-dominated designs—all resting on a vast custom-made tawny yellow rug with a repeat pattern of Dupont-mauve cougars, taken from the Dupont family coat of arms. The clusters provided important visitors with an intimate, personal setting—“intimate” as in inside the royal chambers and “personal” as in VIP. That, plus a festival of Gothic interior decor—windows within intricately compounded arches, a ceiling painted in elaborate medieval motifs, and so on—seemed to work wonders with prospective donors. Perversely, the breed appeared to be stimulated more poignantly in the lap of conspicuous consumption than in settings of ascetic self-denial.
But the President didn't feel like getting intimate and personal with either of the two men he was looking at across his desk right now. They were the two worst extremists he had to deal with on the faculty, and their Weltanschauungs couldn't have been more at odds. No, he preferred to have the immovable heft of his desk between him and them.
Where the two hotheads were seated, they were facing a painting on the wall behind the President, a famous larger-than-life full-length portrait of Charles Dupont in his riding outfit, his glossy black left boot in the stirrup shimmering with highlights as he prepares to mount his champion four-year-old, a glossy black stallion named Go to the Whip. Dupont's stern face, broad shoulders, and mighty chest are twisted toward the viewer, as if someone has just been so foolish as to utter something impertinent. The artist,
John Singer Sargent—it was his only known equestrian painting—had made the Founder's riding crop oversize and placed it in his right hand at such an angle that he appears on the verge of whipping the offender across the mouth twice, forehand and then backhand.
But if either of the two extremists, Jerome Quat or Buster Roth, was intimidated, he hadn't shown it yet.
Jerry Quat—a butterball clad in a tight sweater—V-necked with a white T-shirt showing in the V—was saying, “Yeah, but I don't give a damn what the coordinate search showed, Fred! The fact remains, there is no way in the world that anabolic moron wrote that paper—and you know what, Fred? I'm not going to shut up about this until somebody”—pause, long enough to suggest that Somebody just might be the anabolic caveman sitting about three feet away from him, Buster Roth, uncharacteristically clad in a blazer and tie—“comes clean.”
Oh you little pisser,
thought the President. Jerry Quat was ratcheting his impertinence up to the point where he would be forced to reprimand him or else lose face in front of Roth. Fortunately, he had already told Roth what to expect where Quat was concerned, which was free-floating resentment. But look at Roth. He's clenching his teeth. At a certain point he's going to explode over cracks like “anabolic moron.” That's as much as accusing him of feeding his team steroids. Either of these hotheads was too much to have to deal with, and having both on his hands at the same time … how was he going to butter up Jerry Quat—whose life was one long, inflamed itch for revenge against the Buster Roths of this world—without detonating Buster Roth, who regarded the Jerry Quats of this campus as unsexed subversives out to sink “the program”?
Well, here goes: “Now, Jerry,” said the President, “I hope you realize that I don't
want
you to shut up. I really mean that. One of your greatest contributions has been calling things by their right names, which makes it very hard to just finesse or bury the issues.” He smiled warmly. “Perhaps I shouldn't say this—I may be asking for more than I'm bargaining for—but I want you to keep on calling a”—he started to say “a spade a spade,” but that was not acceptable any longer, even though it was an old, old expression and had nothing to do with “spade” as a piece of vulgar slang for African American—“calling things as you see them. You're an outstanding history scholar, Jerry, but right now that's one of the most important things you can do—keep everybody's eyes open and thinking clearly, as only Jerry Quat can do it.”
The President was relieved to see that Quat's grim frown failed him just
long enough for a smile of childish pleasure to flicker at the corners of his mouth. Just a flicker, of course; he immediately returned to looking every inch a bitter and obnoxious little shithead. Look at him … in his late fifties … him and his Lenin goatee, his shapeless, baggy, unpressed khaki pants and a grim gray sweater so tight it hugged every fold and flop of flab of his upper body, making his chest look like breasts lying on a swollen gut. Nothing under it but a T-shirt, the absence of a collar fully exposing his frog's swell of a double chin … into which has settled a round face whose fat smoothness is interrupted by the bags under his eyes, a pair of age-narrowed lips, and gulleys running from each side of his nostrils down past his lips, almost down to his jawline … and the goatee … all of which is topped by a thinning stand of black hair turning scouring-pad gray, cut short with no part, like an undergraduate's. What is this look, this getup, supposed to represent? His aloofness from the Neckties and Dark Blue Suits (such as the President was wearing) who still run the world? His solidarity with rebelling youth (if any)? Or just a simple eternal adolescent bohemian poke in the eye? A combination of all that, probably.
Oh, the President knew the type very well by now, being Jewish himself. Only a fool would ever talk about it, of course, but there was more than one type of “Jewish intellectual.” The President, like Jerry Quat, probably, was three generations down the line from a penniless young immigrant from Poland named Moiscz Kutilizhenski. Immigration changed his last name to Cutler, and life on the streets of New York changed his first name to Mo. Mo became an electrician, started out on his own in New York as Cutler Commercial Wiring, and flourished in the building boom following World War I. Under his son, Frederick, a City College of New York graduate, the firm became Cutler Electric, which grew so big during the building boom of the 1950s and 60s that Frederick began to mix easily—on a business-social level—with the old Protestant establishment, and he became a member of the Ethical Culture church, one of two churches of choice for Jews who decided to completely assimilate, the Unitarian Church being the other. Frederick named one of his four sons Frederick junior, which was a true gesture of assimilation, since no traditional Jew ever named a child after a living person. By now the Cutlers were so well off that he enjoyed the luxury of packing Fred junior off to Harvard to study the higher things, as certified in due course by the boy's B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton. After a brief teaching stint at Princeton, he became a career diplomat, serving for years as first secretary to the American embassy in Paris.
Fred junior's son, Frederick Cutler III, B.A., Harvard, Ph.D., Dupont, had a sterling academic career as a Middle East historian and at this moment, sitting at this vast desk, was the president of Dupont.
The man sitting across from him, the butterball grotesquely squeezed into a dark gray sweater, was of another sort entirely, despite the fact that they were both Jewish and agreed on practically every public issue of the day. Both believed passionately in protecting minorities, particularly African Americans, as well as Jews. Both regarded Israel as the most important nation on earth, although neither was tempted to live there. Both instinctively sided with the underdog; police violence really got them steamed. Both were firm believers in diversity and multiculturalism in colleges. Both believed in abortion, not so much because they thought anyone they knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place. For the same reason, both believed in gay rights, women's rights, transgender rights, fox, bear, wolf, swordfish, halibut, ozone, wetland, and hardwood rights, gun control, contemporary art, and the Democratic Party. Both were against hunting and, for that matter, woods, fields, mountain trails, rock climbing, sailing, fishing, and the outdoors in general, except for golf courses and the beach.
The difference, as the President saw it, was that Quat was a resentful petit bourgeois Jewish intellectual, as the Marxists used to say. Not that Frederick Cutler III had ever enunciated this insight to a living soul, other than his wife. He hadn't lost his mind, after all. In the Cutler theory, the Jerome Quats of the academic world were born to parents in the middling strata of American society who told them from as far back as they could remember that life was a Manichaean battle—i.e., the forces of Light versus the forces of Dark, of “us” against the goyim, with white Christians, especially the Catholics and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, being the most powerful and most treacherous. Every incoming Jerry Quat on the Dupont faculty immediately established the fact that despite the last name, Buster Roth was not Jewish. He was of German stock, stone German and stone Catholic. In Fred Cutler's taboo theory, the parents of the Jerome Quat types had never reached the business and social elevation where non-Jews at that altitude very much
wanted
you in their orbit, and your self-interest and theirs became interdependent. In the eyes of Jerome Quat, whose father had been a mid-level civil servant in Cleveland or some such place, there could never be a true accommodation. The WASPs and Catholics could make all the
protestations they wanted, but they would forever remain insensitive, powerful, treacherous, and by now genetically anti-Semitic. Or to put it another way, the Quats were the usual little people with limited vision. The Cutlers were men of the world.
Figuring he had lubricated little Jerry with enough praise and acknowledged his position as leader of the forces of Light at this great university, the President now cupped both hands and brought his palms within inches of one another and twisted them this way and that as if he were making an imaginary snowball and said, “At the same time, Jerry—”
“Don't you start at-the-same-timing and but-on-the-other-handing and still-neverthelessing me, Fred!”
The President couldn't believe it. The little shitbird insisted on putting him right against the wall.
“You know, I know, and Mr. Roth here knows that
Jojo”
—uttered contemptuously—“Johanssen, whose SAT scores, if we had access to them, which we don't”—he gave the President a sharp look—“and why not, Fred?—would no doubt prove to be lower than his hat size, assuming he knows what a hat is, other than an adjustable baseball cap, which he wears sideways—”
“That's not true, Professor! You're dead wrong about his SATs.”
Buster Roth couldn't hold back any longer, and the President knew he had to jump in fast lest the whole meeting turn into a pissing match. Merely being called “Professor”—just that, Professor rather than Professor Quat or Mr. Quat—was enough to set Jerry Quat off, since Jerry would know that in the mouths of coaches and recruited athletes the title Professor, all by itself, carried the connotation of Pretentious Fool.
“Oh yeah?” Quat snapped. “Then why won't anybody—”
“Mr. Quat! Mr. Roth!” said the President, “Please! Let's remember one thing! Whatever any of us may think, Mr. Johanssen retains some basic rights here!”
He knew the word “rights” would get to Jerry Quat. To Jerry, rights would be the civic equivalent of angels. Sure enough, Quat shut up, and Buster Roth was shrewd enough to shut up, too, and let the President argue the case for Jojo's “rights.” The President continued: “Now, I gather we all agree that Mr. Johanssen's paper was suspiciously far above the rhetorical level of any other work he had submitted.”
“
Rhetorical
level?” said Jerry Quat. “He doesn't even have a clue what the
words
mean!”
“All right, it looks suspicious in terms of vocabulary, too. But that is prima facie evidence, which presents us with a problem. No one has less tolerance for plagiarism than I do. No one is more of an absolutist when it comes to the penalties for plagiarism than I am. But the language of the judicial code is very clear on this point. Plagiarism must be proved by discovering the source of the material in question. Stan Weisman has done the best job he could, it seems to me.” He was careful to use the man's name, which was Jewish, rather than his title, judicial officer. “He did a coordinate search of all the usual suspects, all the rogue Web sites that offer to provide students with papers. He did a coordinate search of every other paper submitted for that assignment, including those from three of Mr. Johanssen's teammates. And he came up with nothing. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen, who denies receiving any help other than the books cited in his bibliography. He interrogated Mr. Johanssen's tutor, a senior named Adam Gellin, who denied writing the paper or even assisting on it.”
“Adam
Gellin
?” said Jerry Quat. “Why do I know that name?”
“I believe he works for
The Daily Wave
,” said the President, who by now knew very well that he did.

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