I Am Charlotte Simmons

8. The View up Mount Parnassus

The next morning, shortly after ten o’clock, Charlotte had just come down from Mr. Crone’s classroom on the third floor of Fiske, where she had spent the past hour in the blessed company of about ninety others taking the medieval history test. Two students she recognized from the class, a guy and a girl, juniors or seniors it looked like to her, were standing by the magnificent spiral finial of a brass balustrade that ornamented the wide swath of steps that swept from the Great Yard up to the Fiske entryway.

The girl was saying to the guy, “How’d you feel about the test?”

“How’d I feel?” He put his head back, rolled his eyes up until the irises almost disappeared, and expelled a noisy jet of air between his teeth. “I felt like I was getting ass-raped by a very large animal.”

The girl laughed and laughed, as if that were the wittiest thing she had ever heard in her life. Then she said, “What was that second essay question all about? ‘Compare the Dublin and Baghdad slave markets of the eleventh century and’—what was it?—‘the differing nature of the chattel trade in northern Europe and the Middle East’?”

“I had to wing it with that fucker,” said the guy. “Do you think he’ll give me a few points for truly inspired bullshit?”

The girl laughed and laughed, as before. Nevertheless—blessed company!

Charlotte only wished she were still in the middle of the test! At least for that hour she was part of a group of human beings all doing the same thing. At least she had been completely engrossed in a task that made it impossible to think of…how lonesome she was.

Loneliness wasn’t just a state of mind, was it? It was tactile. She could feel it. It was a sixth sense, not in some fanciful play of words, but physically. It hurt…it hurt like phagocytes devouring the white matter of her brain. It wasn’t merely that she had no friends. She didn’t even have a sanctuary in which she could be simply alone. She had a roommate who froze her out in order to remind her daily what an invisible nonentity Charlotte Simmons, the erstwhile mountain prodigy, really was—and to underscore it by throwing her out when she felt like it in the dead of the night. Out to where? To a public lounge…which also burned with lust and sexual fear…in the dead of the night.

Charlotte scanned the Great Yard and all the scurrying bodies, all the happy heads atilt as they bonded with their friends over their cell phones, on the odd chance that somehow she might spot Bettina. Bettina might become a friend. Sexiled? Bettina seemed to regard sexiling as a perfectly normal part of college life. Charlotte was willing to make allowances—if only she could have a friend! Oh, how steadily the phagocytes devoured devoured devoured devoured…

In this mood, she knew there would be no Bettina to be found upon the sunny, shaded, majestic, massive, oh so delicately glinting tableau of the Great Yard, and there wasn’t. So she finally pulled herself together and headed up the walkway that led to the library tower. In the library she could study…and sit alone in a setting where that didn’t seem pathetic.

She was halfway there, walking through a stretch of deep, ancient leafy shadows, when she became aware of the scritching sound of someone in sneakers running up behind her. She didn’t turn around; but then: “Yo! Hey! Excuse me!”

She looked back over her shoulder—and was so startled she stopped, paralyzed with dread. It was the huge guy from the French class, the wantonly stupid one who had tried to pick her up. How about lunch? She wheeled about and stiffened. He was almost upon her—the same hulk, the same tight T-shirt displaying the same grotesque muscles, the same odd little plateau of buzz-cut blond hair. He came to a stop barely two feet from her. The urge to run clashed with her desire not to look childish. The yearning for mature status prevailed. Motionless, paralyzed, aghast, she managed, but barely managed, to say in a strangled voice, “What do you want?”

His mouth fell open, and he slowly raised his hands, palms upward, as if lifting a huge plastic exercise ball. He was the very picture of a good soul misunderstood.

“I just wanted to apologize, that’s all. Honest.”

Still afraid: “For what?”

“For the other day,” said the giant, “for the way I acted, the way I just walked up…” He blushed, which to Charlotte was an indication he just might be sincere and hadn’t simply devised a new way to “hit on” her, as the terminology here at Dupont seemed to be. But it was no more than that, an indication, and she said nothing.

He rushed in to fill the conversational vacuum. “I was sort of hoping I would run into you again. I was thinking about what it must have looked like to you, and I’m really sorry.”

Charlotte didn’t say a word. She just glowered. He was so big, he was abnormal. His neck was so wide, his arms were so long, so packed with slabs of muscle…

“Come on, let me make it up to you. Let’s go have lunch at Mr. Rayon—only this time, lunch. That’s all. I swear.”

Charlotte continued to grill him with a malevolent stare. On the other hand, there was a certain…supplication in his voice.

“You don’t know who I am, do you,” he said. Somehow the way he said it didn’t reek of self-importance.

Charlotte oscillated her head as slowly as an electric fan, as if to say, “I don’t know, and you’re not even capable of conceiving how little I care about finding out,” even though she did know he was some sort of basketball player, and now a little flame had lit up her curiosity.

“My name is Joseph Johanssen, and I’m on the basketball team. Everybody calls me Jojo.”

Charlotte debated with herself.

“Come on,” said Jojo. “We’ll just go in and grab a little something.”

All she had to do was say she was late for class or…In fact, she didn’t owe him any explanation at all. All she had to do was say no and leave.

But she couldn’t budge. It was as if her autonomic nervous system had taken over. The other her, the autonomic her, the one aching so with loneliness, ruled.

So, without knowing why—the other her kept mum—she found herself saying, “All right.” She said it in a faintly disgusted way, as if she were doing him a reluctant and essentially pointless favor.

Charlotte had never set foot in Mr. Rayon before. It was on the ground floor of a huge and rather overbearing Gothic classroom building, Halsey Hall, whose exterior offered not the vaguest hint of the visual explosion that hit Charlotte as she and Jojo entered the restaurant. Slick white walls seemed to scream from all the winking electrographics and industrial lighting they reflected. Medievalish banners hung in martial ranks high above the floor. On the floor, a flotilla of black tables bordering on the cafeteria “sectors” were so slick they smacked with reflected light like the white walls. Sectors—six—different cafeterias, in effect, but not separated by walls, each with the same gleaming parallel U-shaped rows of chromed stainless-steel tubing for trays to slide on, stretched from one side of the hall to the other, presenting six different cuisines: Thai, Chinese, BurgAmerican, Vegan, Italian, and Middle Eastern. The sound system was playing an old number called “I’m Too Sexy,” whose mindlessly repeated disco sounds made the place seem far more crowded than it was. The real lunch traffic wouldn’t build up for another hour.

The giant, Jojo, got a hamburger in the BurgAmerican sector and a can of Sprite. Charlotte refused to get anything, partly because she couldn’t afford it and partly so that the giant wouldn’t think she was deigning to “dine” with him or in any other fashion allowing this to be turned into some sort of “social” situation.

As they headed for one of the slick black tables, one of a group of four guys a couple of tables away halfway rose up from his seat, waved, and yelled, “Go go, Jojo!” The giant gave him a somewhat begrudging smile and nod and kept on going. A terrible thought crossed Charlotte’s mind: If he was a basketball player, he might be very well known on campus, and suppose she were seen with him?…She wished she could put up a sign saying, THIS IS NOT A DATE. I DON’T KNOW HIM. I DON’T LIKE HIM. I’M NOT IMPRESSED BY HIM. I’M UNIMPRESSED. On the other hand, seen by whom? There was no one at Dupont University who could possibly care, except maybe Bettina. And what would she care?

They sat down, and this Jojo leaned forward over his plastic plate with the hamburger on it, as if to make sure nobody else heard him. “Remember what you said to me that day? After Mr. Lewin’s French class?”

Charlotte shook her head no. She remembered very well.

“You asked me why I ‘decided to say something foolish’—to Lewin when we were discussing Madame Bovary.”

Charlotte couldn’t hold back any longer. “Well, why did you?”

“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself ever since!” His voice was barely above a whisper. “I liked that book. It really made me think. And you remember what else you said?”

This time Charlotte didn’t shake her head no. She looked at him for a moment and then ever so slowly nodded yes.

“You said, ‘You knew the answer to that question, didn’t you?’ And I did. And you wanna know why I acted as if I didn’t?”

He paused, obviously eager for a response. So Charlotte obliged: “Why?”

“Three other players, my teammates, are in the class. It’s okay to do the work, because you have to pass the courses, and you might even get away with good grades—although there’s this one really bright guy on the team, and he always tries to keep anybody from knowing his grades. But you can’t let anybody know you’re actually interested in a course—you know, like you actually enjoyed the book?—then you’re really fucked.”

“Don’t talk that way,” snapped Charlotte, genuinely offended.

Jojo stared at her, motionless, as if he had been stunned. “Hey, I’m sorry! It just slipped out!” Awkward pause…Finally he said, “Where are you from?”

Charlotte fired back rat-tat-tat: “Sparta, North Carolina—it’s up in the mountains—you never heard of it—nobody ever heard of it. Far’s that goes, you don’t even know my name, do you?”

Jojo was speechless.

Afraid she had gone too far, Charlotte said with a small, forgiving smile, “It’s Charlotte. All right, you were saying how you’re terrified of peer pressure.”

Jojo compressed his lips into a slit. “It’s not like—it’s not peer pressure exactly—” He broke it off. Charlotte had him pinned with a cold and dubious stare. “I mean, this thing starts in high school. In junior high school. Coaches, everybody, start telling you you’ve got it. You know what I’m saying? You’re very big for your age, you’re something special, you’re on the way to being a great athlete. Three different high schools, I’m talking about public high schools, three of’m tried to recruit me out of junior high school! My dad told me to go to the one that had the best record for getting players into the Division One basketball programs, and I ended up going to the one the furthest from where I lived, Trenton Central.”

“Where’d you live?” Whirred, she realized.

“Trenton, New Jersey. But everybody on the team, Treyshawn Diggs, André Walker, went through the same thing. You’re a freshman in high school, and everybody’s treating you like you’re way up here, and down there’s all the other students. The other students, they’re worrying about books and tests and homework, but you’re ‘special.’ I mean like I’d sit in the last row of the class and kinda, you know, sprawl back in the chair and hold the book upside down. All the kids thought that was really cool. Then in high school I started getting all this ink in the local newspapers—for playing basketball—and that was a great feeling.”

Still timidly: “Well…isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I guess. But now I’m getting interested in some things, like literature, even if it’s only Frère Jocko.”

“Frère Jocko?”

“That’s what everybody calls that course. That’s French for Jocks. There’s a German class they call Jock Sprache. There’s a geology class they call Rocks for Jocks. There’s a course in the Communications Department they call Vox for Jocks. I never got the Vox part.”

“Vox is voice in Latin,” said Charlotte. “You know, ‘vox populi’?”

Jojo drew a blank.

“The voice of the people?” said Charlotte.

Jojo nodded yes in a distracted fashion that as much as declared he didn’t get that, either. “Oh yeah, and I take a course in econ they call Stocks for Jocks,” he said. “At first you think, wow, this is cool. But one day somebody says something to you, the way you did, and it sort of like…zaps you.”

“Why would you care what I think? I’m just a freshman.”

Jojo cast his eyes down and massaged his huge forehead with his thumb and two fingers. Then he looked up at Charlotte with wide-open eyes. “I don’t have anybody to talk to about things like this. I don’t fucking dare! ’Scuse me. I just get—”

Without finishing his sentence, he leaned farther over the table. “You’re not just a freshman. What you said to me—it was like…like you had just arrived from Mars. You know what I mean? You didn’t come here already affected by a lot of—a lot of the usual sh—stuff. It’s like you came here with clear eyes, and you see things exactly like they are.”

“Sparta, North Carolina, is a long way away from here, but it isn’t on Mars.” She was conscious of smiling at him for the very first time.

Charlotte immediately detected that something other than his concern for academic achievement was now seeping into that sincere expression of his. She knew this was the moment to put a stop to it. The thought of his starting to “hit on” her again was unpleasant and even frightening…and yet she didn’t want to put a stop to it. The present moment was much too early in her experience for her to have expressed it in a sentence, but she was enjoying the first stirrings, the first in her entire life, of the power that woman can hold over that creature who is as monomaniacally hormono-centric as the beasts of the field, Man.

“Charlotte…I love that name,” said Jojo.

Charlotte rheostatted her expression down to a completely blank look.

Jojo apparently took that as the rebuke Charlotte meant it to be. He mopped up the hormonal seepage of his expression and said, “My problem is, I don’t know any a this…cultural stuff. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I mean like where did this idea come from and where did that idea come from. People mention these names, like everybody knows who that is, but I never know. I never paid attention before! It’s embarrassing. I mean like I got this teacher in American history, Mr. Quat, and he’s saying the first settlers in America were Puritans—” He stopped short. “That’s not right. What he said was not Puritans but Protestants, although there was something about Puritans, okay? Then he’s saying in England, the Protestant revolution—wait a minute, or did he say reformation?—yeah, that was it, reformation—he’s saying the Protestant Reformation—this is what he said almost exactly: ‘The Protestant Reformation fed on rationalism, but rationalism didn’t cause it.’ Okay? So I’m looking around, waiting for somebody to raise their hand and say, ‘What’s rationalism?’ But nobody does! All these kids have like ridiculous GPAs, and they know what he’s talking about. And here’s me, and I’m afraid to raise my hand, because they’ll all look at me and say, ‘You dumb jock.’ ”

“They’ll say, ‘You dumb jock’?”

“They’ll think, ‘You dumb jock.’ Do you know what rationalism means?”

Charlotte found herself feeling sorry for him. “Well, yeah, but I had a teacher who took a special interest in me? And she had me read all about Martin Luther, and John Calvin and John Wycliffe and Henry the Eighth and Thomas More and Descartes? I was sort of lucky.”

“All the same, you know what it means, just like all those kids in the class. I never read about Day Cart and—those other people. What did you say—Wycliff? I never even heard a any those names.”

“You never had to take philosophy?”

Self-pitying: “Jocks don’t take philosophy.”

Charlotte looked at him in a teacherly fashion. “You know what ‘liberal arts’ means?”

Pause. Rumination. “…No.”

“It’s from Latin?” Charlotte was the very picture of kind patience. “In Latin, liber means free? It also means book, but that’s just a coincidence, I think. Anyway, the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers? But only Roman citizens, the free people?—liber?—could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy? Because they were the arts of persuasion—and they didn’t want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something? So the ‘liberal’ arts are the arts of persuasion, and they didn’t want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people.”

Jojo looked at her with arched eyebrows and a compressed smile, a smile of resignation, and began nodding nodding nodding nodding. Dawn was breaking inside that big head of his. “So that’s what we are…athletes—we’re like slaves. They don’t even want us to think. All that thinking might distract us from what we were hired for.” He was still nodding. “That’s kind of cool, Charlotte.” It was the first time he had called her by name. Now he gave her an entirely different kind of smile. “You’re kind of cool.”

The look on his face as he said that frightened Charlotte all over again. She stuck rigidly to her role as schoolteacher: “Take some philosophy. I bet you’d like it.”

Jojo seemed to get the message, because he pulled his elbows back from where they supported his yearning hulk on the table and sat up straight. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“That’s easy,” said Charlotte. “You begin with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. That’s where all philosophy begins, with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” said Jojo.

What crossed Charlotte’s mind was, “Everybody knows that.” What she said was—shrugging, “I guess I just pay attention.”

Jojo remained seated upright. But the smile became even warmer, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and what had been mere seepage now flowed and flowed and flowed and flowed.

She couldn’t very well let that continue. Nevertheless, her very loins were astir with the power.