I Am Charlotte Simmons

12. The H Word

Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals—male humiliation? Oh, the bards, the balladeers have stirred us with epics of the humiliated male’s obsession with revenge…but that is letting the poor devil off easy. After all, the very urge, Vengeance is mine, gives him back a portion of his manhood, retaliation being manly stuff. But the feeling itself, male humiliation, is unspeakable. No man can bring himself to describe it. The same man who will confess with relish and in lavish ghostwritten detail to every sort of debauchery and atrocity will not utter one peep about the humiliations that, in Orwell’s phrase, “make up seventy-five percent of life.” For confessing to humiliation means confessing that he has cringed, caved in, surrendered his honor without a fight to another man who has intimidated him—that he has been unsexed and has plunged into a misery worse than the prospect of imminent death. Eternally, the sheer fear of physical confrontation—even now—in the twenty-first century!—when life’s major victories are won not by knights in armor on the field of battle but by sedentary men in central-heating-weight worsted suits inside glass-walled electronic chambers. Nor will a man ever free himself from that sickening moment of capitulation. A word, an image, a smell, a face will bring it flashing back, and he will experience the very feeling, every neural sensation of that moment, and he will drown all over again in the shame of lying still for his own unsexing.

Fortunately, Adam Gellin was not flashing back to that moment as he walked across the Great Yard at sunset, even though his destination, the new Farquhar Fitness Center, had everything to do with it. Indian summer was fading, the days had become noticeably shorter and chillier, and Adam had put on his quilted forest-green Patagonia jacket, the kind that extends all the way down to the hips and has a drawstring enabling one to tighten it at the waist for greater snugness. Random souls went in and out of the great arch-ways of the library, but there was hardly a soul in the Yard itself. As the sun sank, bands of soft purples and pinks rimmed the horizon, and the low light did something wondrous to the Gothic buildings. Adam no longer saw them as individual structures, each with its distinctive details, but rather as a single, vast gray Gothic abstraction of stone tinged with pink, purple, and the sun’s last faint gold. The elms that rose to towering heights here were gray, but backlit by a soft golden mauve. He had never seen Dupont in quite this light before…solid, deep-rooted, unassailable, aglow…Fortunes fluctuated, but not Dupont…

Adam Gellin was high on the rush of optimism a young man enjoys when he first decides to transform his body by pumping iron.

He had begun working out on the Cybex machines at Farquhar. Not that he thought he would ever bulk up enough to overcome giants such as Curtis Jones and Jojo with his bare hands. He wasn’t crazy. All he wanted was a certain look that said, “Don’t even think about fucking with me. Don’t even try to make me your patsy. Save your patronizing cracks—You the man, Adam!—for wusses. You can’t play me like that.”

Adam ruminated upon some of the terminology of his new quest—pecs, abs, delts, traps, lats, tri’s, bi’s, obliques—as he approached the crossing of the Great Yard’s two big interior walkways. In the center of the intersection was the Saint Christopher fountain, featuring a huge, heroic granite sculpture of the saint himself in a toga, carrying the infant Jesus across a turbulent stream created by the rushing water of the fountain. The late-nineteenth-century French sculptor Jules Dalou had done the figures, which were now cast into the deep shadows of the verging twilight. What pecs Dalou had given Saint Christopher! What bulging delts! As he walked, Adam straightened his left arm and raised it to shoulder level, then felt the deltoid muscle with his right hand. Not much there yet, but—

Down in the locker room, Adam changed into an extra-large T-shirt and extra-long shorts, then headed up to the weight-training floor. Powerful overhead lights gave a slick look to the floor’s black-trimmed beige expanse and its regiment after regiment, rank after rank, of Cybex machines with white frames, black iron arms, and stainless-steel weight axles, all doubled in number by the mirrored walls. On his first day up here Adam had taken a look at the other weight lifters and decided that he needed a shirt with sleeves that came down to the elbows, so serious were his shortcomings in the upper arm, chest, and thigh departments. And these young brutes weren’t even athletes! Real athletes, the recruits who played on the football and basketball teams, never went near Farquhar. They had their own gyms, weight rooms, and training rooms. The muscular students here at Farquhar were merely subscribing to the new male body fashion—the jacked, ripped, buff look. They were all over the place here on the weight-lifting floor! Ordinary guys with such big arms, big shoulders, big necks, big chests, they could wear sleeveless T-shirts and strap-style I’m-Buff shirts to show off in! What were they going to do with all these amazing muscles?…Nothing, that’s what. They weren’t going to be athletes, and they weren’t going to fight anybody. It was a fashion, these muscles, just like anything else you put on your body…cargo shorts, jeans, the preppies’ pink button-down shirts and lime-green shorts, Oakley sunglasses, black rubber L. L. Bean boots with the leather tops…whatever. Pure fashion! Nevertheless, Adam wanted in.

Look at these fucking guys checking themselves out in the mirror…Practically every wall is a vast sheet of mirror. The cover story, you understand, is that the mirrors are here so you can see if you’re doing your exercises correctly. Pure bullshit, of course…They’re here so you can drink in and drool over the beauty of your fashionable body! Between exercises, our dense fashion plates sneak looks at themselves. They can’t even wait for the next exercise. Look at that one over there…casually straightening his arm down by his side…so he can sneak a look at the way his triceps pop out…and that one…he’s pretending he’s just stretching…so he can make his latissimi dorsi fan out like a giant stingray…and that one, over there…pretending to rub his hands together at waist level…when he’s really pressing them together with all his might so he can watch the mighty pectoral muscles pop out…Behold! The fashionable brutes! The diesels, they called them! Every thirty seconds—you could count on it—some brute-in-embryo would straighten an arm and sneak a look in the ubiquitous mirrors at his burgeoning triceps. Muscles were very much in fashion.

Adam stood there in his droopy clothes, panning his head this way and that, searching for—there! Up on the balcony he spotted it: a shoulder-shrug machine, designed expressly for bulking up the trapezius. Once he laid eyes on it, he yearned for it. Nobody had ever yearned more for a drug. Nothing could make you look tougher faster than a big neck merging with a trapezius bulging, swollen from shoulder to shoulder…But there was an unspoken piece of protocol that said only heavy lifters used the apparatus on the balcony. Adam agonized; the very thought of the diesels he would find up there made his arms and legs feel like noodles…but he couldn’t help that, could he? He all but ran up the treaded metal stairs, fearful that somebody else, some bona fide brute, would get to the shoulder-shrug machine before he did.

Sure enough, once he reached the balcony, he was in the realm of the thick, the dense, the swell, the diesels. From throughout the balcony came the strangled basso profundo of gonnabe buff boys pumping iron, lying on their backs on padded benches within the bench-press frames, bent legs atremble in the squat frames, bellying into strange, padded inclined planes for biceps curls and vertical lifts for the latissimi dorsi.

“Hey, dude, spot me, wouldja!”

“That’s it! That’s it! One more! Don’t be a pussy! One more!”—accompanied by ostentatious groans.

“…did five hundred.”

Groaning out of a strangled throat, “Bullshit—you—did—five—hundred—you—couldn’t—fucking—budge—five hundred,” followed by a desperate interjection halfway between a groan and a cry—“Oonaggh!”—and a dense young mesomorph emerges from the squat frame wearing a wrestler’s low-cut strap-style shirt (in order to display the pecs as well as the bi’s, tri’s, delts, and traps), inflating and deflating with deep breaths, holding his arms slightly curved and away from his body, as if the muscles through his chest, back, bi’s, and tri’s are too big for his arms ever to hang down straight again, and walking about with a curious, apelike straddle gait.

Adam involuntarily tugged on the arms of his T-shirt to bring them down below his elbows to make sure none of the brutes got a look at those sad little pipes of his. He imagined that every eye on the balcony was pinned on him…the featherweight weakling who had dared ascend to the balcony of the jacked…not realizing that every bodybuilder thinks the entire gym is watching him…to check out how much weight he’s lifting, how many reps he’s doing…and whether or not he’s going to try to sneak a look in the mirror afterward to see how much bigger his traps, delts, pecs, bi’s, tri’s, lats, quads, and obliques look, now that the exercise has gorged them with blood…

Adam loaded up the shoulder-shrug machine with weights—had to make it look respectably heavy—tried it…couldn’t budge it…had to take a lot of weights off…mortified at the thought of the brutes’ no doubt mounting scorn…finally reduced the weight enough to do three sets…ten, eight, and a final puny five repetitions. Between sets he took deep breaths, looked down at the floor with his face set in a terribly manly grimace, rolled his shoulders, and walked with a straddle in the accepted apelike fashion.

After an hour of lifting, Adam felt gratifyingly pumped up, and he headed downstairs, stealing glimpses of his traps where they were visible at the extra-big neck of his T-shirt as he passed mirrors, and wondering if they really did look a bit bigger or if it was just his imagination. No…they did look bigger.

He was enjoying that temporary high the male feels when his muscles, no matter what size they may be, are gorged with blood. He feels…more of a man.

The Farquhar Fitness Center had elevators, but it also had a wide, well-lit stairway, and Adam, high on muscle building, chose the scenic route. On each floor’s stairway landing you could look through a pair of big plate-glass doors and see what was going on within. One floor down, the sign above the double doors said CARDIOVASCULAR, which struck Adam as a pathetically medical term connoting the sickly, not the manly…but the sight of students, many of them girls, running in an odd fashion on a machine caught his eye, and he went inside…The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to run—if you could really call it running—without taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and “pumping” on a bicycle. There were many girls…Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, roomy shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as…girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back…was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage…Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in low-waisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated royal blue basketball jersey. She didn’t have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You had to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to…happen in this so-called fitness center…The push of a button, the flick of a switch…and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut…

Just beyond the StairMasters were rows and rows of treadmills, an extraordinary number of treadmills…wide black keyboards…green and orange diode lights. The noise was almost deafening. Row after row of boys and girls were running on the treadmills, some of them at quite a clip, adding the thuds of a hundred, perhaps two hundred feet pounding the treadmill belts, whose motors ground away in a bass register. Adam could see scores of breathless young buttocks…

He started to turn back to the StairMasters when a mane of long brown hair caught his eye. The girl was running, really running, on a treadmill next to a mirrored wall. He could see her from behind at a three-quarter angle. She was wearing ordinary sweatpants, not low-cut, but they fit tight on her buttocks—and that line! That line! A dark line of sweat had formed in the crevice between the two buttocks. It clove the declivity and reached down under into the very mystery of her loamy loins. He couldn’t keep his eyes off it—the dark, wet rivulet that led to…Oh, loamy, loamy loins! He caught sight of her profile in the mirror. He stared—he stared—and he was sure of it! It was that girl, that freshman, the one he had run into that night in the library when he had to do an all-nighter writing a paper for Jojo. All he had gotten out of her was her name, Charlotte. Other than that, she had frozen him out. She had cut him to shreds with her eyes. He had longed to run into her again—and, oh God, that line!

How to approach her, though. She was flying on that treadmill—looked as if she were running a four-minute mile…eyes fixed straight ahead. The treadmill next to hers was vacant. No more than eight inches between machines. He drew closer, walking slowly down an aisle between rows of treadmills. What a racket! It was her, all right. Such untouched, innocent beauty—with a temper! Well—if he worked up his nerve and got on the vacant treadmill, what would he do then? How could he even operate the damned keyboard? And could he run? Not the way she was running…maybe not at all…When was the last time he had done any kind of running? And how could he make himself heard if he got up on the thing? But—this was his chance.

Adam got up on the treadmill and looked at the girl, hoping she would notice him before he had to do any running at all. But her eyes remained pinned on some abstract vanishing point straight ahead. It took him a full minute—seemed like ten—to figure out how to start the thing. There were buttons for every damned thing in the world, including his own weight—weight?—the incline of the treadmill—incline? The racket was so loud he felt as if he were in the innards of a machine, a printing press. He finally punched the speed button until the treadmill belt beneath his feet reached 2 miles an hour, now 2.5, now 3…There was nothing to it, he could keep up with it by walking…then 3.5…By the time he got to 4 miles per hour, however, he had to walk so fast it became an effort…Maybe it would be easier to jog it, and she might show an interest in a runner rather than a walker…He started jogging, but the machine was actually going too slow for jogging, so he punched it up to 4.5. He kept jogging, but still she took no notice of him. Barely thirty seconds had gone by when he realized that his lungs weren’t up to this. So he leaned forward with his forearms resting on the big keyboard console, frantically trying to make his feet keep up with the belt while he reached beneath his chest to slow the machine down—damn!—hit the speedup button instead, and—whoa!—his legs went out from under him. He pushed against the console to try to straighten himself up…and in a helpless slow motion…he knew precisely what was happening but couldn’t do anything about it…he did a belly flop on the treadmill belt, which transported him and his whole body and dumped them on the floor. He was still lying there, thoroughly dazed, when the girl leaped acrobatically onto the frame of her own treadmill—which was really speeding—leaned over, hit a button that stopped his belt, then stopped her own, leapt like a goat, and—just like that—was on one knee by his side.

“Are you all right? What happened?”

Her face, framed by the flowing brown hair, was not only young and angelic but also, somehow, maternal. He was torn between the ignominy of a hopeless fool and the impulse to rise up on one elbow and press his cheek against hers and embrace her and say, “Thank you!” He settled for just propping himself up, smiling, shaking his head self-deprecatingly, and saying, “Wow…thank you.”

“What happened?”

In a daze: “I don’t know…My feet went out from under me…”

He started to get up, and a pain shot through his hip, and he winced—“Oooo!”—and settled back down.

“What’s wrong?” She had to shout to be heard over the ruckus of the machines.

“I did something to my hip!” He shook his head again to indicate that this wasn’t serious, merely stupid.

He started to get up again, and the girl extended her hand and said, “Here!”

He took her hand, and she pulled, and he finally got his feet beneath him. Adam tested his hip; and the pain, while not terrible, made him limp.

“Why don’t you sit down,” said the girl. She was pointing toward an exercise bench just beyond the regiment of treadmills.

So he limped over and sat down on the bench. The girl stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. It wasn’t quite so noisy over here. He looked up into her eyes and smiled and said, “Thanks.” The smile was supposed to carry more meaning than the word. He hoped she wouldn’t remember that night in the library.

She frowned. “Wait a minute, aren’t you the—”

“Yeah…I am…” said Adam. He lowered his head sheepishly and had to roll his eyes upward to keep looking at her. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice…Charlotte, right?”

She nodded.

“I’m Adam. I guess I owe you an apology, but I was desperate that night.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah…I had to write a ten-page paper for some athlete by ten o’clock in the morning.”

“You had to?”

Adam shrugged. “I have a job tutoring athletes. Otherwise I couldn’t even afford to be here.”

“You have to write their papers for them? Isn’t that illegal?”

“Oh yeah—or a serious academic violation anyway. But around here the athletes are the athletes, I guess. Far as I can tell, the faculty just sort of looks the other way.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” said Charlotte. “The athletes—what do they do? Do they just say, ‘Hey, write me a paper’?”

“That’s about it, I guess. Ordinarily, I wear a beeper.”

“Do they all do it? Aren’t some of them ashamed?”

“Maybe, but I’ve never met one. Some of them are just your ordinary dummies, eight-forty combined SATs, that sort of thing. The rest of them find it socially unacceptable to work hard. They’re above all that. Besides, their teammates would resent it and make fun of them, but it wouldn’t be fun fun, if you know what I mean. It’s sort of a point of honor not to make the others look bad. The one or two of them who actually make good grades, like this guy Bousquet on the basketball team, they try to hide it.”

“Who were you writing a paper for that night?”

“Another basketball player. Jojo Johanssen. He’s practically seven feet tall, and he must weigh three hundred pounds, all muscle, and white. He’s the only white player on the starting five. He’s got a big white head and a little blond buzz cut on top.” Adam made a level motion over the top of his head from back to front.

Charlotte gave her lips a rueful twist. “Oh, I know that guy.”

She proceeded to tell him about Jojo’s performance in a ridiculous French class known as Frère Jocko. After class he started hitting on her, and she told him what a fool he was and walked away, leaving him blathering like an idiot.

Adam chuckled and said, “I wish I’d seen that! These guys think they can come walking up to any girl on campus and she’ll fall down on her back in awe. The pathetic thing is, they’re usually right. I could tell you some stories…” He let his eyes drift off, and then he turned back. “The whole campus gets all excited—over what? What does it matter what Dupont does in basketball against Indiana or Duke or Stanford or Florida or Seton Hall? What does it mean? Our freaks beat their freaks, that’s all.”

The frown had disappeared from Charlotte’s face. She looked prettier than ever. Her face glowed with color from all the running. “I used to wonder the same thing when I was in high school,” she said, “ ’xact same thing. What was everybody all excited about?” Exact was ’xact, and about was abay-ut.

“Where’d you go?” said Adam.

“It was a little town”—tayun—“called Sparta? In North Carolina? Nobody here’s ever heard of it.” Uv it.

“I thought I detected a little Southern accent there,” said Adam.

He gave her a warm smile, but she seemed to stiffen a bit. “I’m a real pushover for Southern accents,” he added quickly. “How’d you happen to come to Dupont?”

“I had this English teacher? Miss Pennington? She wouldn’t even let me apply anywhere but Dupont, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. My safety school was Penn.”

Adam started chuckling. “Your safety school, hunh? So you got into Dupont.”

“I got into all five uv’em.” Charlotte blushed bright red, then tried to cover it up with a modest-looking smile. “Dupont gave me the best scholarship? And I really liked the French department. I was going to major in French.”

“And now you’re not?”

“Well, I’m kind of confused about it now. I’m taking this—” She broke off the sentence and gave him the tenderest of looks. “Are you feeling better?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be okay.” Adam slid himself over a bit on the bench. “Here…have a seat. You don’t have to stand like that.”

So she sat down…

The treadmills were still grinding and rumbling like a factory, but Adam was afraid that if they moved, it would…break the spell.

That look. Here was this girl from someplace called Sparta, North Carolina, and so young, and she had just given him a look so tender, it was maternal and at the same time it was opening, opening, opening like the tender virginal bud of the most gorgeous flower revealing its virginal petals to the world with a sublime innocence and at the same time a sublime invitation. Inside Adam’s head all this horticulture was no mere figure of speech, no mere extended metaphor, no mere conceit. He could see the pinkness of the petals opening, her petals, in the flesh. He wanted to lean forward and embrace her and press his lips upon the tender buds of hers. But if he did that, should he take his glasses off first? Or would that be like too much of an announcement of what he intended to do, thereby destroying the ineffable magic of the moment? Or should he leave the glasses on and risk poking her in the eye with the frame when he bent his neck at a forty-five-degree angle to make his lips fit hers right? Pop. What the hell, it was only an urge, in the first place, and so all he said was, “Anyhow, you were saying you’re taking this—this what?”

“Oh. This class in neuroscience? It’s the most exciting subject in the world. It’s like in the future it’s going to be the key to just about everything. And the teacher is so good. Mr. Starling.”

“He’s the one who won the Nobel Prize, right?”

“That’s right.” Riot. “But I didn’t even know that when I signed up for the course.”

A lightbulb went on over Adam’s head. “You know what? You ought to come by and meet this sort of group we have. We call ourselves the Millennial Mutants. I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

“The Millennial Mutants?”

“Yeah. This girl Camille Deng thought up the name. She writes these like long political pieces for the newspaper, the Daily Wave. I write for it, too. A lot of us do. In fact, one of the group, Greg Fiore, is the editor of the Wave.” Adam figured that might impress the girl. For once that arrogant little sonofabitch Greg might be of some use. The same went for Camille. “Anyway, Camille thought up the name. The idea is—well, here’s the thing. This school is full of smart kids. They’ve hosed the SATs and the APs and the GPAs like it’s their job. Then they come here and party and ‘network’ and like make a ‘transition from adolescence to adulthood’ and all of that ridiculous bullshit, which really means a transition from adolescence to preadolescence. You know? I mean, why not! I mean, here we are in one of the greatest universities in the world, and all these kids act like—like they’re taking four years of classes for…I don’t know…for—well, like they’re paying dues so they can enjoy Club Dupont for four years. Then there’s a whole bunch of kids who work very hard so they’ll end up with a transcript from Dupont that’ll be like a ticket to a lot of money. Investment banking for example—I mean, you could go to the Great Yard at noon and close your eyes and throw a rock, and you’d hit somebody who assumes they’re going to work for Gordon Hanley or some place like that. As a matter of fact, the son of the CEO of Gordon Hanley—” Adam decided to drop that subject. “I mean, the whole thing is pathetic, if you want to know what I think. We want to leave here and do things, and I don’t mean like working for some fu—goddamn”—somehow you just didn’t say fucking to a girl like this—“investment bank and crunching numbers fourteen hours a day to make money off evaporated property, which is what Schumpeter called it.”

“Doing what things?” said Charlotte.

“What things? The best thing is being a Bad-Ass Rhodie, capital B, capital A, capital R.”

Charlotte said, “What’s a—what’s that?”

“The Bad-Ass Rhodie…that’s an idea that just sort of developed after the end of the cold war, or right after the Gulf War, the first one, in 1991, I guess you could say. Up to then students like us—you know, students interested in ideas and concepts—which are what really move the world, not politics or plain military power, okay?—I mean, like Marxism—I mean, here’s this guy, this alien, this guy from Austria nobody ever heard of, sitting by himself in the British Museum in the 1880s writing a like really abstruse book on economics called Das Kapital, and that book, that idea, is what creates the history of the entire twentieth century!”

His eye strayed to another girl who had that sweat stain…that lubricious line…down the crack in the back of her sweatpants…

He grinned sheepishly. “Now I can’t even remember what I was saying.”

“You were talking about ‘students like us’? After the Gulf War in 1991?” Nine-teen niney wuh-un?

“Oh, yeah. Up ’til then, students like us used to just go to graduate school and become college teachers. But after that, a new type of intellectual comes on the scene: the bad-ass. The bad-ass is sort of a rogue intellectual. A bad-ass doesn’t want to do anything so boring and low-paid and like…codified…as teaching. The bad-ass types, they’re the types who don’t want to spend their twenties, they don’t want to spend the prime of life as a graduate student cooped up in some cubicle up in the stacks of the library. You’re an intellectual, but you want to operate on a higher level. This is a new millennium, and you want to be a member of the millennial aristocracy, which is a meritocracy, but an aristo-meritocracy. You’re a mutant. You’re an evolutionary advance. You’ve gone way beyond the ordinary ‘intellectual’ of the twentieth century. You’re not just some dealer in ideas who’s content to sell the ideas of a Marx or a Freud or a Darwin ora…a…a Chomsky…to the unenlightened.” He didn’t seem all that sure about Chomsky. “Those guys weren’t transmitters for other people’s ideas. Each one of them created a matrix, a mother of all ideas. That’s what a Millennial Mutant aims for. This is a new millennium, the twenty-first century is, and you’re going to create the new matrixes yourself, or matrices I guess it is, if you see what I’m saying?”

No, said the blank look the girl gave him.

“All right. You’re not going to be a graduate student, which to most people means some kind of geek or creep, and you’re not going to teach, which means some poor old guy who ends up with humped-over shoulders—you know the kind of professor I mean? Who wants to end up as this like…pathetic object of pity? So in college you don’t sign up for a conventional major. If you’re at Dupont, you do what I did. You go into the Hodges Fellows Program and you create your own major, along with a faculty adviser. I’m not bragging, because it’s not all that hard to do. But I have to tell you, I came up with the perfect title for my Hodges: ‘The Intellectual Foundations of Globalization.’ ‘Global’ is a key concept. It’s a big plus if you show an altruistic interest in the Third World. Tanzania is very hot right now. East Timor is not bad. Haiti will do, but you haven’t like…you haven’t like gone deep enough into the Third World. You know what I mean? It’s too easy to get to Haiti. I mean, you can take a plane from Philadelphia and be there in an hour and a half, that sort of thing.”

“What do you mean, ‘get there’?” said Charlotte.

“You actually go there. You go to Tanzania or some other country that’s hot for your junior year abroad. You never pick Florence or Paris or London, least of all London. It has to be the Third World, and you have to show what they call ‘service opportunity leadership.’ I went to Kenya, but it turns out everybody has this idea Kenya’s too civilized. I taught English in a village out in the re-mote, out in the bush about four hours west of Nairobi by pickup truck, and I mean there wasn’t a ballpoint pen within a fifty-mile radius, much less a word processor, and I got malaria like everybody else in my village. They gave me the best house they had, this little brick hut with two windows, since I was the teacher come all the way from America, but it didn’t have any screens—so I got malaria like everybody else—and I come back and other Mutants are telling me I made a bad choice. Kenya is too civilized. If I had it to do over, I’d do a project like a documentary photo study of Tanzania, with text, something like that.”

Adam detected a touch of reproof in the look Charlotte was giving him. Sure enough, she then said, “You went—people go all the way to Africa just to look good?”

“No, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” said Adam. It was time to back out of this particular dead end—and it had seemed so light and captivating and sophisticated while he was saying it. “Not at all. I mean if you don’t have a genuine interest, you don’t even think about anything like this. You don’t live in a brick hut with no screens and let toxic insects have their run of your hide. But it’s like anything else you want to do. There are strategies…and there are strategies.” He shook his head several times. “No, no, no, don’t get me wrong. But if you’re a bad-ass, you have a specific goal. You want to get a Rhodes scholarship. That’s the goal, and there are only thirty-two of them awarded in the whole country. If you get one, you go to Oxford and get a D.Phil. degree, and then it’s like magic. Every door opens. You can go into politics like Bill Clinton or Bill Bradley. Remember Bill Bradley? You can be a policy wonk like this guy Murray Gutman, who advises the president on demographics and cultural shifts. He’s only twenty-six, but—he’s your classic Bad-Ass Rhodie. You can write, like this guy Philip Gourevitch who does all these long pieces for The New Yorker on Africa and Asia or this guy Timmond who did the big coffee-table book on African leaders. I mean, Africa’s perfect, especially when you think about Cecil Rhodes’s idea when he set up the Rhodes scholarships. The idea was to bring bright young American barbarians over to England and make them citizens of the world. He wanted to lift them up to a higher plane and extend the reach of the British Empire with its American cousins in tow. The British Empire is gone, but a Rhodes still lifts you to a higher plane. You’re not doomed to being some obscure college teacher. You become a public intellectual. Everybody talks about your ideas.”

Charlotte said, “There are only thirty-two Rhodes scholarships?” Adam nodded yes. “Well, golly, that’s not very many. What if you’re a bad—what if that’s what you’re counting on and you don’t get one?”

“In that case,” said Adam, “you go after a Fulbright. That’s a pretty long way down from a Rhodes, but it’s okay. There’s also the Marshall Fellowships, but they’re the last resort. I mean that’s bottom-fishing. During the cold war a bad-ass couldn’t’ve accepted a Fulbright or a Marshall, because they’re government programs, and that would’ve made you look like a tool of imperialism. A Rhodes was okay because there was no British Empire left, and you couldn’t be accused of being a tool of something that wasn’t there anymore. Today the only empire is the American empire, and it’s omnipotent, and so if you don’t get a Rhodes you have to make use of it, the new empire. It’s okay as long as you’re using it for the sake of your own goals and not theirs.”

“Theirs?” said Charlotte. “What do you mean, theirs?”

Oh-oh; let’s back out of this alley, too. “I don’t mean ‘theirs’ like ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ in the ordinary sense.” He realized this wasn’t very expert double-talking, but he hurried on, hoping to sweep her along with his momentum. “I just mean there’s no conventional role, no existing codified role for a bad-ass. There’s no existing slot for the new aristo-meritocrat. ‘Theirs’ in that sense, in that circumscribed sense. You know?” Let’s get outta here! “Or that’s why some bad-asses go into consulting for like…McKinsey. That’s the one they shoot for, McKinsey. I mean, consulting is better than i-banking, because let’s say you’re starting out as an i-banker—”

“What’s an i-banker?” said the girl.

“An investment banker,” said Adam. Thank God. At least he’d faked and kept her from digging her heels in for some kind of anti-anti-Americanism number. “If you start out in investment banking, you’re going to be putting in hundred-hour weeks. You make a lot of money, but they use you like a slave. Some of these banks have dormitories, so if you’re still working at two or three in the morning, you can sleep over and be back at your desk at eight, in time to work another sixteen or eighteen hours straight. If you’re a consultant, you don’t make quite as much money, but you make plenty, and you travel out of town three or four times a week and you rack up incredible frequent-flier miles.”

The expression on the girl’s face as much as said, “You’re not making any sense.”

Adam rushed on: “The thing about all those frequent-flier miles is, you can fly all over the world for nothing. Let’s say you want to go to this new super-resort they’ve got in New Zealand—awesome golf course, the whole deal—you can fly there first-class for a vacation, and it doesn’t cost you anything.”

“I don’t understand,” said Charlotte. “What does that have to do with concepts and ideas and being an intellectual and having influence and everything?”

“Well, nothing directly,” said Adam. “It’s just an example of how you use the empire to live like an aristocrat without having to have a family pedigree or any of that stuff.”

“I don’t see why you call it the empire,” said Charlotte.

Damn. He’d blundered back onto that terrain again. “It’s sort of a…figure of speech,” he said. “I’m not even interested in consulting, myself, although if you’re invited for a McKinsey recruiting weekend, that shows you’re on the right track.”

“Have they invited you on one?”

“Yeah, and it’s coming up in about three and a half weeks.”

“Are you going?”

“Uh…yes. I mean I might as well.”

“Even though you’re not interested?”

“Well—I’m curious about it, I guess. And it won’t hurt to be seen there. You know—the word gets around that you’re out there on the right track. Actually, the track starts early, in high school, although I didn’t know that when I was at Roxbury Latin. If you’re interested in being a scientist, the big thing is being invited to the Research Science Institute at MIT or the Telluride Institute at Cornell. Princeton has one in the humanities, and it’s also a big thing to be invited to the Renaissance Weekend as one of the student attendees. You know about the Renaissance Weekends?”

“No.”

“They have them every year at Christmastime at Hilton Head, in South Carolina. All these politicians and celebrities and scientists and businessmen go there and talk about ideas and issues and things. They have student attendees so they can find out what’s on the minds of ‘the young’ and all that. That anoints you as somebody who’s already on the Millennial track, and you’re only seventeen or eighteen.”

“But I still don’t understand consulting,” said Charlotte. “What do you consult about?” Abay-ut.

“You get sent to these corporations, and you tell them how to improve their…oh, I don’t know, management techniques, I guess. But the important thing—”

“How could they know how to do that?”—they-ut—“if they’ve just graduated from college?”

“Well, I suppose they…uh…have some kind of—to tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve wondered the same thing. But I know they do it, and they make a lot of money. The important thing is to be an aristo-meritocrat and live at that higher level I was talking about. If you want to have some influence, then you’ve got to have the freedom to ram your ideas home.” Adam leaned back against the wall and gave her as warm, and at the same time as confident, a smile as he could. She seemed slightly bewildered, but that only made her open her eyes wider to look more lovely. Her eyes were so blue, blue like…he could see the flower…grew low to the ground, but he didn’t know its name—

“But the really important thing,” he heard himself saying, “is that you come meet the Millennial Mutants. You’ll see what Dupont ought to be about. Every Monday we get together for dinner.”

“Where?”

“Different places. I could let you know.”

She just looked at him, although not in a way one could attach any particular emotion to. Finally she said, “Monday nights? I reckon I could do that. Thank you.”

“Great,” said Adam. And it felt great. He looked into her eyes with the intention of looking deeply, profoundly…and then pouring his whole self into her through her optic chiasmas.

But—pop—her eyes were on his sweatpants, at hip level. “How does your hip feel now?”

His hip? “Oh, it’s okay,” said Adam. “I’ll be fine.”

“Well, I’ve got four and a half more miles to go, I guess I’d better…”

“Oh sure,” he said, “you go ahead. And hey, thanks!”

By the time he said “thanks,” she was already on her way to the machine. But then she looked back over her shoulder and smiled and gave him a little wave.

Walking home in the dark, through the campus, through the streets of Chester, Adam kept visualizing that smile. Surely it wasn’t mere politeness, for there was definitely a certain gleam, a kind of…promise…or maybe the word was confirmation or like…sealing…and the way she tossed her hair when she looked back…sort of like an…unfurling…He began whistling a tune, “You Are So Beautiful,” even though it was a hard tune to whistle.

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 mid- to 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 ex-horted 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 word s, 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.

Mr. Quat reappeared in the doorway. “By the way,” he snapped, “in case you’re wondering, that’s a xeroxed copy.” Then he was gone.

Jojo’s mind whirled and whirled…Fuck! So he got help from a tutor. That’s what they were there for! Besides, he knew those words! All right, he didn’t know maladroit and metro-whateveritwas, but damn it, he knew catalyst, or he knew it last week. He just couldn’t remember what his twerpy goddamn tutor had told him. He knew meddling and subtle, too, and he knew the gist of exhortation, more or less. He could use them in a sentence! No problem at all! Okay, he might have an issue with exhortation, but meddling and subtle—Goddamn it! It was just that he couldn’t rattle off formal definitions. What was he supposed to be, a CD-ROM? And what the hell was that scrawny little fuck Adam doing, throwing in maladroit and metro-whuzzywhuzzy and all that stuff. That kid was as bad as Mr. Quat! Had he sabotaged him intentionally? Why else would he stick in words nobody ever heard of? Except for those two words, hell, he knew the whole thing cold! And all these insults…Don’t display your ignorance, sir…and threats! Nobody but nobody can help you…If worse came to worse, he’d just have Coach come over and twist the guy’s head off for him and shit down his windpipe. Then he remembered: Jojo Johanssen was on Buster Roth’s shitlist, too. He felt bolted to the floor of this, the scene of his second devastating…uh…uh…experience.

He was not the first man to throw the h word down the memory hole when it applied to himself.