I Am Charlotte Simmons (78 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Oh shit,
oh shit,
oh shit
. The President could see the Cuder-Roth strategy tanking right before his eyes.
“—with any such thing ever again.” The hotheaded little ball of fat, resentment, and revenge wasn't addressing his tirade to Buster Roth, however—he didn't dare look that force of nature in the eye—but to the President. “If Mr. Roth wants to deal with a bunch of seven-foot bab—uh—brainless athletes, that's his business, but I think—”
The President was positive that Quat had been on the verge of saying “baboons.”
“—he has an obligation to do what he can to keep them out of courses where teachers are serious about—”
Buster Roth's face had turned red. He leaned toward Jerry Quat, trying to get him to look him in the eye. “Now, you hold on! You don't even know what you're talking about!”
“I don't?” said Jerry Quat, although he still wasn't looking straight at Buster Roth. “I've got
four
of your ‘student-athletes' in my class, and they all sit together side by side like lengths of lumber. I call them the Four Monkeys:
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and Comprehend Nothing Whatsoever.”
A pissing match. The President had to step in and break this thing up. “You sure you want to say monkeys, Jerry?”
“What? Am I sure—” He halted.
The President looked on with some satisfaction as it dawned on the butterball that three of the four athletes he was referring to were black.
He began sputtering, “I didn't mean it—I mean, it's just an old expression—a cliché in a way—I mean it's totally removed from—I mean, I retract that. It was just a manner of speaking …” He began backpedaling as fast as he could. “One of them, a Mr. Curtis Jones,
does
wear a baseball hat to class, on sideways, and when I—” He paused. His face turned redder than Buster Roth's. He was boiling with anger again. He looked straight at Roth. “The bottom line is, I want your student-athletes out of my class, all four of them! I don't intend to teach your fucking ‘Jojo boys' ever again! They belong in fucking junior high school! Jesus Christ, you guys are such a fucking disgrace! I don't want to have to fucking think about it again!”
He stood up abruptly, and the globs of fat on his body oozed this way and that beneath the sweater, and he glowered at Buster Roth and the President, both. “Nice chatting with you … about pediatrics.” With that, he turned his back on them and walked out of the room.
Speechless, the President and Buster Roth looked at one another. The President wondered idly why so many Jews of a certain age used the expression “Jesus Christ.” You never heard it from undergraduates anymore, Christian or Jewish.
 
 
Only Adam and Greg and the usual Jolt stains, empty pizza boxes, crumpled straw sleeves, and abandoned white plastic forks and spoons were to be seen in the office of the
Wave
. Adam was excited enough for a whole office-full.
“Now Thorpe calls me and says he's changed his mind. He doesn't want to run the Skull Fuck story after all. As if
he's
running it.”
“What did you tell him?” said Greg.
“I said I'd tell you that. So I've told you—and
fuck him
. I didn't say we
wouldn't
run it. Don't you see, Greg? Something's up, and he's scared all of a sudden, and the story's hotter than ever.”
“Well … I don't know,” said Greg. “This is
still
something that happended last spring …”
You don't know? thought Adam. Or you're still as scared shitless as he is?
 
 
Beverly had already left, and even with the door closed Charlotte could hear others on the floor yodeling cheery good-byes and rolling their wheelie suitcases down the hall as the great Thanksgiving exodus began. Thank God! Solitude! No one around to look cockeyed at Charlotte Simmons. Thank God she and Momma and Daddy had long ago agreed that the Thanksgiving break and the Christmas break were so close to each other this year—barely two weeks apart—that she shouldn't take two trips and spend all that money.
It turned out there were quite a few other freshmen who had made the same decision. And thank God she didn't know them. They all smiled at each other in a same-boat fashion as they ate their three meals a day in the gloomy Abbey. The Abbey drummed up a roast turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day for all the holiday orphans. For the next four days, all she had to worry about was Christmas. There was no way around that one.
T
he last six miles up Route 21 are what makes a person realize just how high up in the mountains Sparta is. The old two-lane road winds and winds and remains so unremittingly steep the whole way, it makes even a passenger feel, in her gizzard, the car or the truck struggling struggling struggling to make it—any car, any truck. In a bus, particularly a full bus, it used to make Charlotte feel as if at any moment the clutch would snap and they would go careening backward down the mountain; but buses no longer go to Sparta, not because of the steep grade—although 21 can become impassable pretty quickly when it snows—but because of a grim slide in demand. Ever since the factories moved to Mexico, and the movie theater, the only one in all of Alleghany County, shut down, Sparta hadn't been what one would call a prime destination, except for vacationers and tourists who loved the county's beauty, which was pristine, undefiled by the hand of man.
On those last six miles up Route 21, on this particular December night, all was pristine. The first real snow of the season had just begun to fall, and the way the wind blew it—in a darkness made yet darker by the towering woods that came right up to the edge of the road and obscured most of the sky—the two-lane hand of man would suddenly vanish before the driver's eyes as great skiffs of snow came rolling across it; and then it would reappear,
and Daddy would keep hunching forward, squinting and muttering imprecations, since he knew the road would only disappear again. The old pickup was struggling struggling struggling, and once or twice it had skidded slightly on a curve. Daddy had become so single-minded he was no longer asking Charlotte, who was squeezed in next to him in the front seat, all sorts of questions about Dupont. Momma, who sat on her other side, had stopped talking, too. Momma was looking ahead as intently as Daddy, and she had begun shadow-braking the car with her right foot an instant before Daddy did it for real and then twisting her torso an instant before Daddy turned the wheel to navigate the next curve; and as Daddy switched from low beam to high beam and high beam to low beam to see if there was any angle of light that would help him define the road amid the skiffs and swirls of snow, she would hunch over and lean forward the same way he did, as if moving their heads closer to the road's surface was actually going to help them see it better.
Only Buddy and Sam, jackknifed into the little excuse for a backseat, remained oblivious enough of the driving conditions to continue the ebullient family fusillade of questions about the awesome college
their own sister
had come back from on her Christmas break.
“Charlotte,” said Buddy, eleven years old last week, “What's Treyshawn Diggs like?”
“I don't know him,” said Charlotte. She said it flatly, tonelessly, even though she knew the least she should do was say, “I'm afraid I never have met him, Buddy,” and say it with a congenial lilt. But she couldn't. She couldn't manufacture any lilt.
“You don't?” Both surprise and disappointment were in Buddy's voice. “But you've met him.”
“No,” said Charlotte in the same dead voice, “I never have.”
“But you've seen him, I bet. What's it look like, him being seven feet tall?”
Charlotte paused. She knew this performance was inexcusable, but she was so depressed that Self-destruction couldn't come down off her pedestal, so enamored was she of Grief.
“I've never seen him, Buddy.”
“You've seen him
play
.” It was spoken like a plea.
“I've never seen him at all. It's almost impossible to get a ticket for a game, and it costs a lot of money. I haven't even seen him on television.”
Sam said, “How about André Walker? He's really cool.” Sam was only eight, and he knew who André Walker was. It seemed so odd and sad somehow. “I've never seen him, either,” she said. She couldn't have said it more lifelessly.
“How about Vernon Congers?” said Sam.
“Nope.”
A groan of disappointment in the backseat—Buddy's. A slightly whining sigh, Sam's.
After all other emotions have died, guilt survives. To her own surprise, Charlotte found herself saying, “I do know one of the players. Jojo Johanssen.”
“Who's he?” said Sam.
“I think I heard of him,” said Buddy. “Which one is he?”
“He's a forward, I think,” said Charlotte. “He's white.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Buddy. “Dupont's got this white guy. They were playing Cincinnati. Is he any good?”
“I guess,” said Charlotte.
“Is he big?” said Sam.
“Yeah, he's very big,” said Charlotte. Poor Jojo, she thought. Even my little brothers know about Vernon Congers, and nobody knows about you. It was merely that, however, a thought. There was no emotion attached to it. It all seemed so pointless.
“How big?” said Sam, persevering.
“I don't know.” She started to leave it at that, but guilt intervened. “When I stand next to him, he might as well be ten feet tall. That's how big he is.”
“Wow,” said Sam.
More guilt. Jojo's height was the only “colorful” detail about Dupont she had volunteered since she got off the bus in Galax. Galax was just over the state line, in Virginia. Eleven-thirty p.m. the bus had arrived, and all four of them, Momma, Daddy, Buddy, and Sam, had been there waiting for her, beaming smiles of joy—no, more than that, excitement!—that lit up the night. Our daughter—our sister—is home for the first time in four months from the legendary Dupont. Just imagine!
Our
little girl—
our
big sister—goes to Dupont! And here she is!
Charlotte had forced herself to smile, but she was aware that the smile didn't involve the rest of her face. And God knows how her face must have looked. She hadn't been able to sleep for two nights now. Maybe she should
have gone to the Health Center. Maybe they would have put her in the hospital … Maybe God would have come to take her away in the night. She couldn't imagine a better solution.
Daddy as well as Momma had immediately begun spraying her with questions about Dupont. Their blissful assumption that she would be as excited as they were to talk about it—that she would react with the same joy of triumph with which she had approached Dupont in August—struck her as naïve and irritating. How irritating, how childish it was of them to stand there with big smiles, displaying enthusiasm concerning something they knew absolutely nothing about. In other words (which she never said to herself), how uncool was that?
It made her extremely nervous, all these questions. How was Beverly? Were they getting along? What was living in the dorm like? They were so proud of her grades, even though they had just known she would set Dupont on fire. What courses did she like best? Then Buddy chimed in and asked her, teasingly, if she had a boyfriend. And Daddy said, teasingly,
he
wanted to hear the answer to that one.
Only Momma noticed that her little girl was deflecting the questions, saying she just didn't know, even acting dumb, but Momma obviously wanted the weariness of the ten-hour trip to account for it. She wasn't yet ready to consider the fact that her little genius might be moody or, as it happened, worse than moody.
The fact was, Charlotte had not minded the length and the grind of the trip at all. The trip had been the sort that people refer to as “endless.” The depressed person wants trips to be literally endless, because as long as she is in transit from one point to another, her worries, her despair, are removed from where they originated … and where they will inevitably resume. Under the circumstances, what could be better than being in a soft reclining chair in a spaceship with strangers, a spaceship in that it moves fast and makes you feel detached from earth (way up here in this chair) as you behold, from behind big sheets of thick plate glass so darkly tinted that no one outside can even see you, blissfully alien landscapes drifting by … Please, God, let it last forever—or else come take me away in the night.
In the here and now, in the struggling old pickup, Charlotte peered out at the snow, which now looked wild and demonic, lit up the way it was by the headlights. Maybe they would skid, turn over, plunge into the darkness over there on the left, down that nearly sheer incline, tumbling end over end until the old vehicle burst open and came apart. A crash—her consciousness
departs, there is
nihil;
and
ex nihilo
, God comes and takes her away in the night.
Such plunges, such fatal wrecks, had occurred before on 21—but what would happen to Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam? No one would emerge unscathed from such a crash. She wasn't so far gone as to wish anything to happen to their lives just to create an acceptable end to hers, one that would provide no satisfaction, no super-delicious schadenfreude for the Beverlys, the Glorias, the Mimis … and no frat-boy notoriety for … for … No, nothing must happen to Daddy and Momma, who loved her, loved her unquestioningly, Dupont or no Dupont, who would undoubtedly take her back into their bosoms, as unclean as she was. She tried to think of ways the wreck could occur so that God would come take only her away in the night.
Hours from now, when daylight came, it would be too late. Oh what a genius Charlotte Simmons is, but the little genius would not be nearly smart enough. How long would it take Momma to see clear through her and know that something fundamentally wrong had occurred—that her good girl had committed moral suicide? How long, Momma? Twenty minutes? Thirty? A whole hour? And what was she to say to Miss Pennington? That everything was fine? That she had never felt more vibrantly alive in her life—alive with the life of the mind?—and in that way allow her, the teacher who saw Charlotte Simmons as the justification for the entire forty years she had spent toiling at a country high school up in that Athens of the Blue Ridge Mountains called Sparta—allow her to have three and a half or four more weeks of illusions before little Justification's grades for the fall semester come home in a letter to Momma and Daddy? They didn't comprehend Rhodes scholarships and cénacles and matrices of ideas, much less Millennial Mutants. They didn't know how nearly perfect your grade point average had to be to go to graduate school at any major university in America. But Miss Pennington would know about such things.
Daddy didn't plunge off the road into the void. He didn't even take as long as a depressed girl might have reasonably hoped for. In no time, there they were in the middle of Sparta, stopped at one of the three stoplights, the one where 21 crossed 18. The stoplight, which was suspended over the intersection, was rocking in the wind. The snow was really beginning to stick. There was nobody walking along the street, nobody anywhere on the street. There was the old redbrick courthouse, looking suitably ancient and mute in the darkness and the drifting snow. Could have been a movie about the early 1800s, except for the big, modern polished granite marker that had
been erected on the Main Street side. They moved on … past the spot where she had jaywalked behind Regina because she didn't have the fortitude to refuse to break the law …
“Recognize that?” said Momma, pointing to the right.
The snow was coming down so hard, it was hard to see it at first, but there it was, about two hundred feet from the road, on the upslope of the hill, looking as ghostly as the courthouse … the high school. Charlotte leaned forward, almost across Momma, and peered into the darkness and the snow. At first she felt nothing. There it was, that was all … There was the extension where the basketball court was, where
the young woman who
had held forth as valedictorian. There it was—it was just a building, a dark, dead building in the middle of a storm. The tears caught her unaware. They seemed to be pouring down from the sinuses beneath her cheekbones. Thank God she had a handkerchief. She stifled them by burying her head in it and feigning a coughing fit, and Daddy inadvertently helped by saying, “Look't the motel.”
Mo
-tel. “All I see's three automobiles.”
They were already beyond the town. The only lights now were the old pickup's headlights reflecting off the snow, which was coming down in great gusts and spinning crazily before the dusky rusky forests.
“Well, good girl,” Momma sang out, “know where we're at?”
Charlotte pretended to come awake with a start.
“Look familiar?” said Momma. “You been away for four whole months!”
Charlotte managed to croak out, “It's good to be home, Momma,” whereupon she pressed her face against the shoulder of Momma's rough work jacket so that Momma would just think she was being sweet and loving and not see the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She managed to hold herself together until they entered the house and went into the living room and Daddy clicked on the light … and there it was, the picnic table, only there was a nice, freshly pressed white tablecloth over it and an arrangement of pinecones, pine sprigs, and red holly berries in a little wicker basket in the middle of it. There were some light next-to-nothing bentwood chairs she hadn't seen before. There was the Christmas tree, as usual. There were little holly wreaths, brilliant with the red berries—must have been six wreaths—hung about the room at eye level on the walls. That was something new. The floor had been waxed. Every square inch of the room was spick-and-span. Momma had done all this … for her. Daddy was already stoking the grate in the potbellied stove. Charlotte took a deep
breath. The countrified odor of a room saturated over the years in coal fumes rushed in—suffused all of her, it felt like.

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