I Am Charlotte Simmons

21. Get What?

The next morning was one of those damp, chilly, gloomy, gray affairs, and windy on top of that. The wind got to you when you walked across the Great Yard, especially if, like Charlotte, your only pair of jeans was dirty and you didn’t have tights or boarding-school-girl high wool socks or even a pair of panty hose. The wind invaded her shanks, flanks, and declivities as if her skirt wasn’t there. Much of it wasn’t, since she had hemmed it so high—and sloppily, since Momma had never insisted that her precocious little genius reduce herself to such Alleghany County housewifely toil as sewing and darning. Didn’t matter; showing off her athletic legs was the main thing. She no longer thought of it as vanity. It was a necessity.

That being the case, the chill that gripped her nether parts scarcely bothered her. At the moment her consciousness was centered in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions of the brain, home of the higher mental functions—as she had learned in the class she was heading for, Mr. Starling’s.

She was feeling quite intellectual this morning. The evening with the Millennial Mutants had put her in that mood, which at the moment seemed glamorous. Mr. Starling would be lecturing in his peripatetic and Socratic way about José Delgado, the first giant of modern neuroscience, as he called him. This business of hanging out at the Saint Ray house and indulging in long workouts at the gym and whiling the time away puzzling over Hoyt…and Adam…had begun to take its toll. Ordinarily, she would be heading for Mr. Starling’s class knowing José Delgado’s book Physical Control of the Mind backward and forward…

So caught up was she in thoughts of the higher things that she scarcely noticed the big figure rushing down the steps of Isles Hall and hustling toward her on one of the walkways that converged on the Saint Christopher’s fountain. Charlotte was walking right by the fountain when he seemed to drop from the sky to right in front of her: Jojo, big as life.

“Hey, Charlotte!” Jojo’s smile didn’t seem so much one of happiness or surprise as of ingratiation.

“Oh, hi.” She stopped, but gave him a flat smile and some body language that said, “I really have to be somewhere.”

“Stocks for Jocks just let out,” said Jojo, “and you know what? This is the truth. I was just saying to myself I hope I’d run into you.”

His eyes were wide open in an attitude of supplication. “Can I—I gotta talk to you for a second. Can we go somewhere?”

“I can’t.” It occurred to her that she at last had “can’t” under control. Without even thinking first, she had pronounced it can’t instead of caint. “I don’t want to be late for class.”

“It’ll take two seconds.” Jojo’s face turned serious. What was it that was different about him? Ah, he was wearing a shirt with a collar and some sort of loose warm-up jacket. He wasn’t giving the world an eyeful of his muscles. “It’s important,” he said.

“I can’t, Jojo.”

“It’ll only—” His face fell. “Okay, I’m not gonna lie to you. It won’t take just a second. When do you get outta class? I’ve got a real problem.”

Charlotte breathed a deep breath of frustration. Whatever problem Jojo had, it wasn’t going to be on a very high level, and she was primed for a high level—the highest, Victor Ransome Starling. But not knowing how to parlay the question, she said tonelessly, “In an hour.”

“Can I meet you somewhere—then? Please?”

With such a begrudging reluctance it didn’t even sound like a question: “Where.”

“How about out front of Mr. Rayon?”

By the time she nodded a down-in-the-mouth yes, she was already on the move around him.

The huge athlete looked whipped, the way his eyes tracked her as she went. It gave her an odd sensation, having the upper hand with this enormous sports star and campus celebrity. As she turned away, there rising above them both, Jules Dalou’s statue of Saint Christopher carrying the infant Jesus across a stream. The great French sculptor had rendered the figures so dramatically that Charlotte had the sensation that they were actually moving. It stirred her. She was capable of experiencing art, not just looking at it. The rest of the world, or most of it, was like Jojo; which is to say, cut off from the life of the mind.

The lights were down, and on the amphitheater’s stage an eight-foot-high slide screen gleamed with a photographic portrait of a swarthy white man with a grand mustache and a trimmed beard that swooped down from his temples along a pair of strong jawlines to the thick but carefully coifed beard on his chin. The widow’s peak of his hairline was by now, in his middle years, well out in front of the rest of the stand of hair on his pate, but the avant-garde strands on the peak had been combed back with such blow-dry bravura that the overall effect was of a unified flowing mane. He looked rather like one of the Three Musketeers, except that at the bottom of the picture you got a glimpse of the knot of a necktie and the collar of a white smock.

Mr. Starling was saying, “Delgado was one of those scientists who faced death—or so it seemed to other people—by using themselves as guinea pigs to test their own discoveries.”

The lectern was off to one side of the stage so that everyone in the class could see the screen. A beam of light from above illuminated Mr. Starling’s slim figure and his heathery blue-green tweed jacket ever so romantically, in Charlotte’s eyes. She found it easy to imagine Victor Ransome Starling as one of those death-defying heroes of discovery, even though she knew that aside from cat scratches, he had been in no danger during the experiment for which he had won science’s highest award.

“I’m not mentioning this so you’ll admire their courage,” he was saying. “In fact, it’s quite the—well, not the opposite, but the obverse, I suppose is the word. Friends and colleagues were terrified for them, but here we have two men, Walter Reed and José Delgado, and one woman, Madame Curie, who had such faith in the empirical validity of their physical knowledge and their own powers of logic—such faith in rationalism, which was barely two centuries old, to touch upon that theme again—they had no more fear than the conjurer who swallows fire, although even if you take that into account, I think you may be impressed by how Delgado proved his point.”

Now the picture on the screen was a long shot of a bullfighting ring. There were no more than a couple dozen people in the stands. On one side of the picture, in the ring, was a charging bull. On the other side was a man in a white smock standing stock-still and holding a small black object in his hands at waist level. Other than Mr. Starling’s voice, there was not a sound in the amphitheater. Charlotte was completely absorbed in Mr. Starling and the slide screen. There was no periphery, not in this hall, not in this world. Hoyt and his hand and Adam and his anxious lips and Jojo and his hangdog face no longer existed. The El Dorado that Charlotte Simmons had come to Dupont to find was at last the entire known world.

“That’s José Delgado,” said Mr. Starling, “and that’s a two-thousand-pound Andalusian bull…and those…

sticks…you see sticking out of his shoulders are the picas the picadors—you know picador?—have stabbed him with to make him angry.”

“Oh—my—God!” It was an indignant yelp from a girl somewhere below. Charlotte had no trouble interpreting it. Animal rights was one of the issues some people on campus really got heated over. “That—is—horrible! It’s—so—wrong!”

From the lectern Mr. Starling said sharply, “That’s your reaction to a culture different from your own? I’m sure I mentioned that José Delgado was Spanish, and in case I didn’t mention it, that’s a bullring in Madrid. Spanish culture is far older than ours, by a factor of millennia. You are perfectly free to object to it. You are free to object to all cultures different from your own. Would you favor us with a list of alien cultures you find most objectionable?”

Laughter spread slowly through the amphitheater. Clever parry, Mr. Starling. Denigration of another culture, especially one whose people are less well off than your own, and referring to anything as evil, which would indicate you might very well have religious convictions, were more socially unacceptable at Dupont than cruelty to animals.

Mr. Starling returned to his discourse. “Now. What is about to happen in this picture is actually not as important as what leads up to it.” He gestured toward the screen. “This photograph was taken in 1955. In 1955 Delgado was known not as a neuroscientist but as a brain physiologist.” He moved out from behind the lectern. “Can anyone tell me what the status of brain physiology, the physical study of the brain, was at that time?”

No takers. Charlotte silently berated herself. If she had studied harder—had gone to the sources, as Mr. Starling had advised—had been the student she was supposed to be—she would be able to star at this very moment. Mr. Starling was still surveying the class…

Finally he gave up and said, “It barely existed at that time, brain physiology. It had been rendered irrelevant medically by Freudianism. If psychoanalysis was the ultimate cure for dysfunctional mental capabilities and behaviors, why waste time on the taxidermy of the matter? That was the idea. Freud stopped the study of the brain cold for half a century, especially in this country, which by the 1930s had become the very headquarters, so to speak, of the Freudian method. Delgado was a rare creature. His contention was that you couldn’t understand human behavior without understanding how the brain worked. Today that seems obvious. It seems axiomatic. But it didn’t then. Delgado had found a way of mapping the brain—which is to say, determining which areas of the brain controlled what behavior—by using stereotaxic needle implants and stimulating them electronically.”

A loud gasp, probably from the girl who had yelped when Mr. Starling mentioned the picadors’ handiwork. But she said nothing, and this time Mr. Starling ignored her.

He gestured toward the screen again. “In this case Delgado has implanted an electrode in the bull’s caudate nucleus, which is just under the amygdala. As you can see, the bull was charging full tilt. When it came close enough to make it interesting, Delgado pressed a button on the little radio transmitter in his hand, and the bull’s aggressiveness vanished”—he snapped his fingers—“like that. The sheer momentum brought the bull all the way to Delgado. You have to imagine a ton of beef with horns coming at you.”

Another slide, a close-up. “The bull appears to be a foot or so on the other side of Delgado. The animal’s legs are bent in the attitude of a lazy canter. But you’ll note that the anger has vanished. The bull’s head is up, and it appears to be loping. This picture doesn’t show it, but in fact the bull actually altered its course to keep from hitting Delgado.”

Mr. Starling seemed to be enjoying himself, perhaps because he knew he had them all, even the animal rights girl. “Now, what was the lesson of this experiment? The instantaneous lesson was that an emotion as powerful as a raging urge to kill can be turned off”—he snapped his fingers again—“by stimulating a particular area of the brain. The more profound lesson was that not only emotions but also purpose and intentions are physical matters. They can be turned on and off physically. Delgado could have turned a perfectly peaceful, bashful bull—there used to be a children’s book called The Bashful Bull—or a cow, for that matter—he could have turned either one into a raging killer by stimulating the amygdala itself. As I’ve mentioned, Delgado was a physician as well as an experimental neuroscientist, and he hoped to find a way to improve people’s health and behavior through ‘physical control of the mind.’ That was the title of the one book he ever wrote—although he must have written a hundred scientific monographs recording his various experiments—that was the title of his book, Physical Control of the Mind. The philosophical implications were enormous, and he recognized that right away. His position was that the human mind, as we conceive it—and I think all of us do—bears very little resemblance to reality. We think of the mind—we can’t help but think of the mind—as something from a command center in the brain, which we call the ‘self,’ and that this self has free will. Delgado called that a ‘useful illusion.’ He said there was a whole series of neural circuits—most of which the human animal isn’t aware of—that work in parallel to create the illusion of a self—‘me,’ an ‘individual’ with free will and a soul. He called the self nothing more than a ‘transient composite of materials from the environment.’ It’s not a command center but a village marketplace, an arcade, or a lobby, like a hotel lobby, and other people and their ideas and their mental atmosphere and the Zeitgeist—the spirit of the age, to use Hegel’s term from two hundred years ago—can come walking right on in, and you can’t lock the doors, because they become you, because they are you. After Delgado, neuroscientists began to put the words self and mind and, of course, soul in quotation marks. Delgado’s conception of the self as a product of a physical mechanism has begun to turn philosophy and psychology upside down. It’s occurring right now, in our time. The most influential theories of the self throughout most of the last century were external theories. Marxism was a philosophical theory that said that you, your self, were the product of the competing forces in the class struggle between the proletariat—or the working class, including the lumpenproletariat, the term for what we now call the ‘underclass’—and the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Freudianism was a psychological theory that said each of us is the product of the oedipal conflict within our families. In both theories we are the product of external forces—social class, in one case, the family you’re born into, in the other. Marxists prided themselves on being materialists—realists who faced facts and didn’t fall for the usual idealism peddled by the philosophers. But the Marxist notion of materialism is sheer whimsy compared to that of the neuroscientists. Neuroscience says to us, ‘You want materialism? We’ll show you the real thing, the material of your own brains and central nervous systems, the autonomous circuits that operate outside of what you conceive of as “consciousness,” the behavioral responses you couldn’t change even if you trained for a lifetime, the illusions you will never—’”

—Charlotte was transported. The way the downlight cast Victor Ransome Starling’s face into planes of bright light and deep shadow struck her as something ineffably noble and majestic. Every time he gestured, his white fingers flashed with highlights, and she caught the glint of yet another heathery tone in the weave of his tweed jacket. He who would lead her to the innermost secrets of life—and to the utmost brilliance of the glow on the other side of the mountains Miss Pennington had called her attention to four years ago—

In that moment, in the theatrical darkness, as the sublime figure down on the stage moved in an electrifying succession of planes of chiaroscuro whose light, plus the light of the screen radiant with the image of the man who revolutionized the way the human animal sees herself, cast a glow upon the very crest of the heads of all the students—just that, the very crest, where here and there wisps of hair spun into pale golden gauze—Charlotte experienced a kairos, an ecstatic revelation of something too vast, too all-enveloping, too profound to be contained by mere words, and the rest of the world, a sordid world of the flesh and animals grunting for the flesh, fell away.

As she emerged from Phillips and out upon the Great Yard, Charlotte could see out of the corner of her eye that Jill, the girl who sat next to her, was barely a step behind her, but Charlotte didn’t want to have to talk to her. She didn’t want to descend long enough for even the most perfunctory so-long. She was too high for that, high in an important way, high on ideas—no, high on the excitement of discovery, of seeing the future from the peaks of Darién. O Dupont!

It was even gloomier and more on the raw side out here than it had been when she went into the building an hour ago, but the walls of the Gothic buildings across the way were built to withstand any threat…with an imperious confidence…O trefoil tracery! O ye buildings such as will never be built again! O ye fortress of language—and therefore memory—and therefore ye key to the ideas that move a people, a society, and thereby history itself—ye key to prestige compounded by the prestige and authority of its origins! O Dupont! Dupont! O Charlotte Simmons of Dupont—

Pop. The great hulk of Jojo Johanssen was heading straight toward her on the sidewalk, giving her an ingratiating grin again. Where had he come from this time? But…of course…he had been waiting for her somewhere down there, like a dog tethered outside a grocery store.

Bigger smile from the giant: “Well—how was it?”

Charlotte merely nodded okay. It would be silly to treat it as an actual question. What could she say about what she had just experienced that he would even begin to understand?

“Where can we talk?” said Jojo. “Mr. Rayon?”

Charlotte gave him a look of frustration and a sigh of resignation—and they went to Mr. Rayon. The lunchtime mob had already begun to assemble. From the moment they entered, heads were turning toward Jojo. A couple of boys piped up with low Go go Jojo s. Jojo’s reaction was not to look at them.

He was craning his head this way and that, looking for a spot quiet enough for a serious discussion. He led her to a table for two in a corner next to a wall just beyond the cafeteria’s Thai food section. No one looking on could help but know he had chosen this spot not for convenience or ambience. It was in the dim corner formed by the restaurant’s white blank wall and a five-foot-high salmon-colored LithoPlast room divider at this end of the steam counters and stainless-steel railings of the Thai section. The divider did not protect the tête-à-tête from rice and pulpy vegetables steamed with too much water and salt. The smell wafted here and wafted there, but it never went away.

Jojo had Charlotte sit in the seat in the very corner, looking out on the lunch crowd, while he sat across from her with his back to the room. What earthly good did he think that would do him? The back he had to the room was enormous.

Mischievous smile, or mischievous by the up-country reserve of Charlotte Simmons: “I like your shirt.”

“You do? Why?”

“I don’t know—the collar.”

Jojo tucked his chin down and squirmed, trying to tuck it in deeper in a hopeless attempt to see the collar. When he finally looked up, he shrugged with his eyebrows and one corner of his mouth, by way of making it clear he didn’t care. He put his elbows on the table and said in a low voice, “I’ve got like—a serious problem.”

He let this revelation hang humid in the air while he stared at her.

Charlotte said nothing. Jojo had folded his eyebrows in so far toward his nose, it made his nostrils flare. Somehow…he looked ridiculous, this huge campus celebrity with his little scrunched-up features. He hadn’t roused her curiosity much more than an eighth of a degree. She didn’t care what basketball star Jojo Johanssen’s great problem was. She didn’t even so much as nod her head to encourage him to continue. Of course he was going to anyway.

“Lemme put it this way: I’m like”—searching for the right expression—“fucked.”

How illuminating, and how gross. She knew she should be used to students talking to each other that way by now, but she wasn’t, and having some giant male talking to her like that only made it worse. She just looked at him with an expression that intimated nothing at all.

Jojo soldiered on. “It’s this mother—this professor I got in American history, this guy Quat. You ever heard of him?”

Charlotte shook her head no, ever so slowly and ever so briefly.

“Well, he’s a hard-ass—he’s got a thing about athletes. How we ever ended up in that class, I’ll never fucking know.”

Gross and grosser. Charlotte purposely didn’t ask who “we” were.

Jojo provided the information nonetheless: “André and Curtis are in the same class.”

Charlotte looked at him blankly.

“You know…André Walker and Curtis Jones.”

Still a blank.

“Anyway, Quat assigns us this paper, and everybody’s paper’s on a different subject, and there’s no book…”

Charlotte tuned out. What particular form of malingering or shiftlessness Jojo had indulged in didn’t interest her…until he got to Adam, and she realized that this was the very paper Adam had been writing for Jojo when she first ran into him in the library.

Her expression came alive. “Do they know Adam wrote it for you?”

“I don’t know what they know,” said Jojo. “This guy who calls himself a judicial officer showed up today. Do you know Adam?”

Warily: “Yeah…”

“How do you know him?”

Warily: “I know some friends of his. They have this sort of club.”

Jojo said, “Yeah, well, he’s not exactly the type who…” He didn’t complete the thought. “I left a message on his cell…” He averted his eyes and shook his head gloomily. “If the guy gets to Adam, I don’t know if it’ll make any difference if I do talk to him…” Forlorn, eyes still averted.

“What guy,” said Charlotte, “and make a difference in what?”

“This guy came by today. He calls himself a judicial officer. Coach says he’s just like a cop. That means they’re not gonna just drop this thing with a warning or something. They’re cranking up for a fucking trial. If the guy gets enough evidence, they’ll put my ass in front of some panel.”

Sharply: “Please don’t talk like that.”

Genuinely surprised: “Like what?”

“Stop cursing. Must you curse every other word? I can’t even understand what you’re saying, much less help you.”

Jojo studied her face and attempted a little beginning of a smile, to see if she just might be joking.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” she said.

“They can suspend me for a semester.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be the end of the world, anyway.”

“The hell it wouldn’t! It’d be the end of my world,” said Jojo. “The next semester is the basketball season! The postseason games are in March! The NCAA tournament! Everything!”

“So what are you going to do?”

The hangdog sag of the supplicant was in his face. “You can help me.”

“Me?”

He shook his head yes. “Remember when I came to you and said I wanted to turn myself around academically?”

“Yeah—yes.”

“And you said I oughta start by studying Socrates? Remember how you told me that?”

“Yes…”

“I did that. I switched into Philosophy 306, the Age of Socrates.”

“You did? You really did that?”

“Yeah, and it’s the hardest course I ever took. I could spend the whole week reading and still not read enough. Mr. Margolies. He’s a serious fuh—guy. I don’t know what he’s saying half the time, and I don’t think the others do, either, but nobody’s got the nerve to put his hand up and say, ‘What’s agon mean?’ or ‘Why do you say Socrates was the first philosophical rationalist?’ What the fuh—what’s that supposed to mean? I actually go to the library after class and look up stuff. I never even went in there before, except for a couple of times Adam took me there. I always had the feeling I was standing in there blinking and everybody was laughing at me. Now I go in there because I don’t want to just sit there with my mouth open in Margolies’s class. I don’t know if I can even pass the course, but you know what? I’m sorta proud of myself.” Jojo’s face lit up for the first time. “Do you know the difference between Socrates’s ‘universal definitions’ and Plato’s ‘Ideas’? You don’t—right? Well, I…do.” Jojo had the smile of a child proud of an accomplishment. “Plato thought ‘Ideas’ exist, actually exist in the world, independent of human beings, meaning no matter whether anybody uses them or not.”

Charlotte nodded and said, “That’s very good, Jojo.”

Then his face darkened. “I know it’s good. That’s what makes this damn ‘judicial officer’ shih—stuff such a ball-buh—makes me so mad. It was after that paper Adam wrote for me that I started…turning around—and being a student—and taking a lotta shih—catching a lotta hell for it. Coach started yelling at me when I told him I was gonna take the Socrates course, and then he started laughing, like it was a joke, me thinking I could pass a course like the Age of Socrates, and then, in practice, he started calling me Socrates, fuh—effin’ Socrates this and effin’ Socrates that. It’s like…he’s calling me a retard, right in front of everyone. But I’m putting up with all that. I’m gonna stick with Socrates. The hell with Coach. Socrates said you have to look to yourself for ‘virtue and wisdom.’ That’s what he said, ‘virtue and wisdom,’ and I’m living by that now. And so it’s now, after I’ve become a different person, it’s now they’re siccing this like…cop on me, over one fuh—one freaking paper from before! There’s Before Socrates and After Socrates, B.S. and A.S.—” He barked a rueful laugh. “That don’t sound right, but you know what I mean.”

Charlotte, but not Jojo, could see the panorama of the crowd in Mr. Rayon. Students at the tables and in the Thai food line were turning their heads to look at the two of them. At first Charlotte was embarrassed. But now she saw their little table in this dim, dismal corner the way all those celebrity-hungry and celebrity-gossip-hungry, prurient swiveled heads saw it. There was the great Go go Jojo with his hulk stretched halfway across the table and his huge head thrust practically into the face of that—pretty?—girl and talking ever so earnestly and intently. Who is she? Something that intense—a tête-à-tête was what it was, if any of them knew the term. Who is that girl? The thought made Charlotte smile in spite of herself.

“—know what I mean,” Jojo was saying. “What’s funny?”

“Why do you say don’t?” said Charlotte. “Nobody ever told you what the third-person singular of the verb to do is?”

Petulantly: “You think that’s funny, don’t you—and I’m trying to tell you something serious. Since you asked—everybody on the team says don’t—he don’t, she don’t, it don’t.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. If you say he doesn’t, everybody thinks you’re fronting.”

“Why do you care about that?”

“I don’t…anymore,” said Jojo. He smiled a tight, grim little smile. “Not A.S.”

“After Socrates,” said Charlotte.

“Fucking A,” said Jojo. He held his palms up in front of his face in mock defense. “It’s just an expression, just an expression. It don’t—doesn’t mean anything.” This time he smiled a little smile of resignation, as if resigning himself to the way the world was. “That’s why I need you. You’re the only person who can testify for me.”

“Testify?”

“If they take me in front of this panel. You’re the only person who can say something like I came to you on such and such a day, after I handed that paper in and before Quat started breaking my—giving me a hard time.”

“You think they’ll believe you? You went to a freshman for advice?”

“That’s the way it happened! Will you do it? Will you testify for me?”

Charlotte didn’t know what to say. Jojo—a trial—testify?—questions?—whose?—something told her it was a mess well worth avoiding. But she was already experiencing the guilt she would feel if she refused.

“Yes.” Flatly, in a put-upon voice.

Jojo lurched still farther across the table and grasped both her small hands with his big hands and held them as if he were making a snowball. He squeezed them.

“Thank you! I owe you one! Good girl! Good stuff!”

His big smile was not so much a smile of happiness and relief as happiness and victory, as if he had talked her into something. That made her uneasy. She didn’t much like this “good girl, good stuff.” It was patronizing. Did he think he had put one over on her?

On the other hand…the way it must have looked to everybody in the room…Jojo has a real thing for this girl. She looks so young! Who is she?

“Did anybody ever tell you you’re beautiful? And different? You’re not like the other girls on this campus.”

It being Monday night, Hoyt and eight or nine other Saint Rays had gravitated to the library couches and easy chairs, cracked leather upholstery and all, to chill, i.e., drift through the evening in as aimless and effortless a manner as possible, bolstered by the presence of others like themselves. Naturally ESPN SportsCenter was on the big plasma TV screen. Hot colors and orangey slices of postadolescent flesh flared in a Gatorade commercial…and now four poorly postured middle-aged white sportswriters sat slouched in little low-backed, smack-red fiberglass swivel chairs panel-discussing the “sensitive” matter of the way black players dominated basketball.

“Look,” the well-known columnist Maury Fieldtree was saying, his chin resting on a pasha’s cushion of jowls, “just think about it a second. Race, ethnicity, all that—that’s just a symptom of something else. There’s been whole cycles, every generation, whole cycles of different minorities using sports as a way out of the ghetto. Am I right? I mean, like boxing. A hundred years ago or whatever it was, you had the Irish, John L. Sullivan, Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney. Then here came the Italians: the Rockys—Marciano, and Graziano—and Jake LaMotta and so on. Or take football. Way back, you had the Germans, like Sammy Baugh. So now you get to basketball. In the 1930s and 1940s, you know who dominated professional basketball long before the African Americans? Jewish players. Yeah! Jewish players from the Jewish ghettos of New York! Oh, there was—”

“You notice that?” said Julian. His voice rose up from out of a canyon of leather, he had sunk so far down into the couch. The question was for the room, but he looked first at Hoyt, who had settled into the easy chair that was, by silent consensus, his, as Saint Ray’s heroic fighting man. His assault, even though unsuccessful, on a huge all-American lacrosse player, coming on top of the Night of the Skull Fuck, had dramatically increased the awe factor.

“Notice what?” Hoyt said—idly, as befitted his status. He immediately turned and tilted his head back on the leather to take another swallow of his fourth—fifth?—can of beer. He was losing count again.

“The way they always say ‘Jewish players’ or whatever it is,” said Julian. “They don’t say ‘Jews,’ they say ‘Jewish players.’ They call Irishmen, ‘Irishmen’; they call Italians ‘Italians,’ Germans ‘Germans,’ Swedes ‘Swedes,’ Poles ‘Poles,’ but they don’t call Jews ‘Jews.’ They say ‘Jewish players.’ It’s like saying ‘Jew,’ even if the guy is a Jew, is like a—a—an insult. It’s like automatically anti-Semitic.”

“Anti-Semitic?” said Boo McGuire, who was sitting on the arm of a couch with his roly-poly legs hanging down either side, as if he were riding a horse. “Maybe, but the fucking Canadians themselves won’t say ‘Jew,’ either.”

General laughter.

“Whattya mean?” said Julian. “I don’t get it.”

“That guy, Maury Fieldtree”—Boo gestured toward the TV screen—“he’s a Canadian himself.”

“Aw, come on,” said Julian, “Maury Fieldtree.”

“You didn’t know that?” said Boo. “His real name’s not Fieldtree. It’s Feldbaum. I’ll bet you anything. And Maury—you know where that comes from? Moishe…They make it Maurice, which is where Maury comes from, or Murray or Mort. So that’s old Moishe Feldbaum you’re looking at.”

“How do you know all that?” said Heady Mills, who sat on the couch on the base of his spine. “You a fucking Canadian yourself and not telling us?”

Laughter all around.

“No, I’m just naturally smarter than you,” said Boo. “Besides, some of my best friends are Canadians.”

More laughter. Hoyt was automatically laughing along with the rest of them, as befit a cool brother, but in fact he felt irritable and anxious, and the four—or five?—beers had not helped any. It was just dawning on him what a catastrophe his college transcript was going to be…Coasting along for three years just assuming that somehow he would drift into investment banking in New York when he finished at Dupont. That’s what you did when you graduated from a university like Dupont. You went to work for an investment bank in New York. Nobody had a clue what investment banking actually was. The main thing was, once you got the job, you were making two hundred, three hundred thousand a year by the time you were twenty-five…It was just dawning on him that the guys who had done that had two sides to them, the cool side and the secret side. They had a lot of secret dork in them, these guys. When they went over to the library at midnight, they weren’t just going over there to hit on girls, the way he did. They went over there and nerded down for the night, like Vance. It had taken Hoyt a long time to realize that half the time when Vance came back to the room at three or four in the morning, he’d been over at the library hammering the shit out of econ and statistics. Even if he, Hoyt, hammered the shit out of econ and statistics and everything else for the rest of the year, he’d still have C’s and B-minuses that were already on his transcript…and reports coming back from guys who graduated last year said the i-banks went over your transcript with a vengeance. Even B’s made you a questionable case, and B minuses and C’s might as well be F’s. Being cool meant nothing; being handsome with a cleft chin meant nothing; beating the living shit out of buff bodyguards, all-American lacrosse players, and school bullies meant nothing. The whole thing made his head hurt, and this time the beer wasn’t giving him a lift or even ordinary numb relief. In fact, this time it had him bloated with self-pity.

Julian was saying, “It’s the same thing with fags. Like they don’t want to hear the word ‘homosexual.’ It’s like there’s something dirty about the word.”

“They got that right,” said Vance. “It’s the medical term for buncha brown-dick ass-bangers.”

Laughter laughter laughter.

“Yeah,” said Heady. “If you say homosexual instead of gay, then that makes you a bigot.”

“I love this fucking word ‘gay,’” said Boo. “You got some fucking faggot weighs ninety pounds and’s got AIDS maggots crawling in and out of his asshole, and he’s ‘gay.’ Gimme a fucking break.”

Another round of laughter.

“Yeah,” said Julian, “and they got Queer Studies listed in the fucking course catalog. For some fucking reason, ‘queer’ is okay. But just let some professor call it by its right name, Homosexual Studies, and he’d get fucking canned.”

Hoyt wasn’t listening any longer. Lying back on his easy chair, pissing away the time…When he thought of all the evenings he’d diligently pissed away in this broken-down room—

Another commercial was on, and more hot, slick colors flared…girls on a beach at spring break, squealing with laughter from being high, or maybe embarrassed by the way they’re hanging out of their bikinis—

Julian was in the middle of saying something when Hoyt stood up, stretched without looking at anybody, and started walking out of the library. The group went silent and watched him, as if wondering if anybody had said anything he didn’t like.

Vance spoke up. “Where you going, Hoyto?”

Hoyt stopped and stared at him in a distracted way and finally said in a tired voice, “Come on, dude, I’m going over to the I.M.”

So Vance got up, and they headed over to the I.M.

The I.M. was pretty dead. There was no live music on Monday nights. Some melancholy country rock CD was playing over the sound system. It was early on the daily club-and-saloon circadian cycle, the prime hours being 11:30 to 2:00. Without a crowd to animate it, the place looked as gloomy and shoddily constructed as it actually was. The black lengths of splintery rough-cut lumber that covered the walls didn’t look so much Collegiate Bohemian as ineptly designed and assembled. Most of the round black tables were empty; and, empty, they looked battered and cheap. It was hard to believe that just two nights ago hundreds of students were vying and lying, trying to pry their way into this place, dying to be where things were happening.

Tonight Hoyt didn’t even want a table. He found it a relief to be hunched over the bar in this quiet, decrepit joint with yet another beer in front of him. A gale had begun to kick up inside his skull, and he knew the line had moved up pretty far on the graph, and he knew he could always deal with that, except that he kept losing track of what Vance was saying.

“…the fucking Inn at Chester?” was the end of the sentence.

“No shit,” said Hoyt, hoping to extract some details that would put him back in the picture. “The Inn at Chester?”

Vance gave him a funny look and said, “Hoyt—what the fuck, dude, I just told you the Inn at Chester is where they’d stay if they came…looking.”

Despite the rising gale and defective information, Hoyt picked up the scent of Vance’s usual paranoia. So he said, “They come look for you?” He was vaguely aware that he sounded like a movie Indian. Incipient diction impairment.

“That’s the problem,” said Vance. “I don’t know.”

No, Hoyt said to himself, the problem is bad drinking. You feel lousy, you can’t halfway sleep, and you dread the clarity of morning…or even early afternoon…which in turn made him think of the dreaded Afternoon Hangover—

At first he was only vaguely aware…A couple had taken seats at the empty end of the bar, seven or eight seats away. They were young, but they weren’t students. The guy had the face of a twenty-year-old, but he was bald on top, which made him look weak and pathetic. Despite the turtleneck sweater the guy wore, anybody could tell he had a scrawny neck underneath. In short, a nonentity. Hoyt paid no attention to them until he caught the girl—woman—staring at him. He turned away for a few seconds, then glanced at her again. She was still staring at him.

He nudged Vance. “Theh girl”—he motioned toward the end of the bar with his head—“theh girl staring at me?”

Vance stole a look. “Yeah. Probably at me, though. She’s hot.”

The girl—woman—was, indeed, hot. She had quite a head of straight dark brown hair, trimmed to just above her shoulders, more done than any student’s. She had a lean face but a full lower lip, with some dark lipstick smooth enough to create little highlights, and a long, slender neck with a tiny gold necklace that also picked up the light…in such a delicate, defenseless way. She wore a black sweater with a V-neck. She wore a short black jacket on top of the sweater, but mainly there was…the V in the V-neck. The point came down so deep that Hoyt could see…could see…

“Def’ny me,” he said to Vance. “Well…fuck.” He got up from the stool.

“Yo, da playa gits up,” said Vance with as close to a ghetto accent as any Phipps was likely to get. “Da playa makes his move. Be cool, Hoyt. What about the guy?”

“The fuck, I’m gon’ be nice’t motherfucker.” Oh shit, he hadn’t even meant to talk ghetto. It just came out that way because Vance had said “playa”…The diction problem…

As he walked toward the girl, the gale was…up. He glanced at himself in the big mirror behind the bar…Could see only his head and shoulders, but that was enough. Both hims took a good look at him. With his head turned that way and tilted slightly back so that his cleft chin came to the fore, a small, confident smile playing on his lips—the objective him wondered if maybe that smile wasn’t too much like a smirk, but both hims agreed he looked awesome and awesomely cool. Also, with his head turned this far, his neck looked a mile wide, like a column rising up from out of the open neck of his polo shirt. The gale was blowing.

Only when he was practically right there did it occur to Hoyt that he didn’t really know what he was going to say to the girl. He couldn’t very well say the usual, because the closer you got, the more she looked like an actual woman. She must have caught him in her peripheral vision, because she turned her head toward him. Her face was like her hair, which is to say, perfect…done…The way that full and glossy lip of hers played against her lean face…the high cheekbones…the brilliant eyes…Like most males, Hoyt knew nothing about the subtleties of makeup. Not that it mattered. Nothing could challenge his confidence, not at this point on the graph. He was now quite close to her, and he leaned on the bar with his forearm and spoke with the utmost certainty.

“Excuse me, don’t mean to interrupt…” He gave her the most charming of smiles, and then he looked at her companion and gave him one. “…but I just had to ask you”—now he was looking straight into her eyes—“you must—I swear, where I’m sitting, you…get tired of people saying you look just like Britney Spears.”

The woman—holy shit, she was good-looking! She didn’t giggle. But she didn’t look annoyed, either. She smiled, but in a cool way, and said, “Britney Spears is blond. Do you get tired of people telling you you look just like Hoyt Thorpe?”

The great playa was speechless. The playa’s light in his eyes went out. “Hey…How’d you do that? You know my name?”

“I wasn’t sure,” she said, “but you do look like Hoyt Thorpe.” She glanced at her companion, and he nodded in confirmation. Then she looked back at Hoyt, still smiling. “We were looking at a photograph of you this afternoon. I hope you didn’t notice me staring at you just now.”

Hoyt tried a chuckle and gestured with his hand casually—cool—and said, “Well, I mean…” He didn’t know what to say beyond that.

“This is quite a coincidence.” She glanced toward her companion again. As before, he nodded confirmation. “I’m Rachel Freeman,” she said. She extended her hand in a businesslike way.

Hoyt shook her hand and, feeling exceptionally smooth all of a sudden, gave it an extra little squeeze before they disengaged. He looked deep into her eyes and said, “Dya have a ride back?”

“A ride back?” said Rachel Freeman. She didn’t seem to find the question worth answering. Without a pause she gestured toward the man. “And this is my associate, Mike Marash.”

So Hoyt shook hands again. The bald, baby-faced Mr. Marash smiled politely.

“We’re with Pierce and Pierce,” said the most gorgeous woman in the world.

“Pierce and Pierce?”

“We’re an invest—”

“I know,” said Hoyt. He didn’t want this Rachel to think he was so inexperienced as not to know what Pierce & Pierce was. Even somebody who had cut as many econ classes as he had knew what a position Pierce & Pierce occupied in the investment banking industry. He was merely surprised. The crummy I.M. was not the sort of place you expected to find people from Pierce & Pierce knocking back a couple of drinks on a Monday night.

“We’re in town on a recruiting trip,” said the rutrutrut-eyed Rachel. “That’s why this is such a coincidence. You’re on our Dupont list! I’m supposed to call you! That’s why I was so surprised to see you. We were supposed to call you up tomorrow and arrange an interview.”

“Me?” He meant to say it coolly, without the one-octave-up note of surprise.

She assured him yes and suggested they meet for lunch at the Inn at Chester. The Inn at Chester…he’d bet anything that was where she was staying. He looked into her eyes. They were glistening…sizzling…aflame…with the inner fire you couldn’t see at first, thanks to the perfectly composed façade of her done hair, high cheekbones, glossy lips, swan’s neck, tiny twinkling chain of gold…What were those eyes saying?…

“In at the Inny!” said Hoyt. He was aware that the diction problem was getting worse.

“What?”

“In and out, in and out at the Inn!” This was so bad he laughed to cover it up. He was saying stupid things, but so what? Score! Victory! He nodded yes and gave her a smile, a sincere smile.

Pop.

—he’d been pouring lust into her eyes for many beats longer than he should have…before he walked away and returned to where Vance was sitting.

The diction problem getting worse, but he was able to get across to Vance the gist of the business side, the Pierce & Pierce side, of his conversation with the gorgeous V-neck brunette.

“I’ll be damned,” said Vance. “That’s great, Hoyt. Pierce and Pierce…”

Hmmmmm…Vance’s voice sang a note of happiness for his brother Saint Ray and comrade-in-arms. He knew how bad Hoyt’s grades were. Hoyt had moaned about them many times. Then Hoyt felt so sad. He was overcome with sympathy for the Vancerman. Sure hoped he wouldn’t get jealous. If the sexy little i-banker had Vance Phipps on her list, she obviously hadn’t been studying his picture…

The objective Hoyt, the one looking over his shoulder, had begun to wonder if this wasn’t just a stroke of dumb luck…but the inner Hoyt made sure the sound of the gale drowned out and overpowered the outer Hoyt and his chronic case of the Doubts.

Over the speaker system, a country rock singer named Connie Yates was singing. The drums, the bass, and the electric guitars were banging and sloshing away. Hoyt sang along with Connie Yates for a while. Vance was looking straight ahead into the mirror behind the bar. Vance Phipps of the Phipps Phipps…It would be just like Vance not to get it, listening to someone who can’t sing, sing. Get what? Hoyt felt like some essential part, the part that made it all clear, had blown away in the gale. So he cast a sideways glance at Rachel, who would get it…but she and the guy weren’t there anymore.