I Am Charlotte Simmons

4. The Dummy

Most of them hadn’t seen each other all summer, and classes had just begun this morning, but by evening the boys at the Saint Ray house had already sunk into a state of aimless lassitude. First day or not, it was still that nadir in the weekly cycle of Dupont social life, Monday night.

From the front parlor came the sound of “quarters,” a drinking game in which the boys gathered around a table in a circle, more or less, each with a jumbo translucent plastic cup of beer before him. They bounced quarters on their edges and tried to make them hop into the other players’ cups. If you were successful, your opponent had to tilt his head back and the container up and chugalug all twenty ounces. There was also a cup out in the middle. If you bounced a quarter into that one, all your opponents had to drink up. Much manly whooping when a quarter bounced home or just missed. Needless to say, the tables, magnificent old pieces that had been here ever since this huge Palladian mansion was built before the First World War, were by now riddled with dents. It was hard to believe there were once Saint Rays rich enough and religious enough about the great fraternal chain of being to build such a place and buy such furniture, not merely for themselves—after all, their own Dupont days would be few—but for generations of Saint Rays to come.

From the terrace room came the music of a Swarm CD banging out of a pair of speakers that were fixed in place for parties. Everybody was beginning to get tired of Swarm’s so-called bang beat; nevertheless, Swarm was banging away tonight in the terrace room. Terrace room, front parlor, back parlor, dining room, entry gallery (cavernous), billiard room (ancient pool table, felt chewed up and stained because one evil night a bunch of blitzed brothers used it to play quarters), card bay, bar—the variety of rooms for entertaining on this one floor would probably never be built in a house again.

Here in the library a dozen or so of the boys were sprawled back on couches, easy chairs, armchairs, side chairs, window seats—most of them wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops, watching ESPN SportsCenter on a forty-inch flat-screen television set, drinking beer, needling each other, making wisecracks, and occasionally directing sentiments of awe or admiration toward the screen. About ten years ago a flood from a bathroom up above had ruined the library’s aged and random accumulation of books, and the once-elegant walnut shelves, which had the remains of fine Victorian moldings along all the edges, now held dead beer cans and empty pizza delivery boxes funky with the odor of cheese. The library’s one trove of mankind’s accumulated knowledge at this moment in history was the TV set.

“Ungghh!” went two or three boys simultaneously. Up on the screen a huge football linebacker named Bobo Bolker had just sacked a quarterback so hard that his body crumpled on the ground beneath Bobo like a football uniform full of bones. Bobo got up and pumped his enormous arms and shimmied his hips in a dance of domination.

“You know how much that fucking guy weighs?” said a boy with tousled blond hair, Vance by name, who was sitting back in an armchair on the base of his spine, holding a can of beer. “Three hundred and ten fucking pounds. And he can fucking move.”

“Those guys are half human and half fucking creatine,” said another boy, Julian, a real mesomorph—his short, thick arms and long, ponderous gut made him look like a wrestler—who had sunk so far back into a couch, he was able to balance a can of beer on his upper abdomen.

“Creatine?” said Vance. “They don’t take creatine anymore. Creatine’s a boutique drug. Now they take like gorilla testosterone and shit like that. Don’t give me that look, Julian. I’m not kidding. Fucking gorilla testosterone.”

“The fuck, they take gorilla testosterone,” said Julian. “How do they get it?”

“They buy it. It’s out there for sale on the drug market.” Vance had managed to make an entire statement without using the word fuck or any of its derivatives. The lull would be brief.

“Okay,” said Julian, “then answer me this. I don’t care if you’re the greatest fucking drug lord in the history of the world. Who the fuck’s gonna go out there in the jungle and harvest the fucking crop?”

Everybody broke up over that, and they immediately turned to a boy sitting in a big easy chair in the corner, as if to say, “But…do you think it’s funny, Hoyt?”

Hoyt was genuinely amused by Julian, but mainly he was aglow with the realization that this happened all the time now. The boys would crack a joke or make what was meant to be an interesting observation, particularly in the area of what was or wasn’t cool, and they’d all turn to him to see what Hoyt thought. It was an unconscious thing, which made it even greater proof that what he had hoped for, what he had predicted, had come to pass. Ever since word had spread about how he and Vance had demolished the big thug bodyguard on what boys in the Saint Ray house now referred to as the Night of the Skull Fuck, they had become legends in their own time.

So Hoyt laughed, by way of bestowing his blessing upon Julian, and knocked back another big gulp of beer.

“Holy shit,” said Boo McGuire, a roly-poly boy who had one leg slung over the arm of a couch and one elbow crooked behind his head, “I don’t care how big they are. If they’re taking gorilla testosterone, then they’ve all got balls the size of fucking BBs.”

And everybody broke up over that, since it was well known to habitués of SportsCenter that the downside to taking testosterone supplements to build muscle was that the body’s own testosterone factory shut down and the testicles atrophied. The room glanced at Hoyt again, to ratify the fact that Boo McGuire had indeed gotten off a funny line.

Just then Ivy Peters, a boy notable for how fat his hips were—and the way his black eyebrows ran together over his nose—appeared in the doorway and said, “Anybody got porn?” Sticking up in front of his chin was the sort of microphone one wears in order to use a hands-free cell phone.

This was not an unusual request. Many boys spoke openly about how they masturbated at least once every day, as if this were some sort of prudent maintenance of the psychosexual system. On the other hand, among the cooler members, Ivy Peters was regarded as one of the fraternity’s “mistakes.” They had been carried away by the fact that his father, Horton Peters, was CEO of Gordon Hanley, and a majority of Saint Rays with no particular aptitudes assumed they would become investment bankers, Hoyt among them. At first behind his back and now sometimes to his face, they had begun calling him Ivy Poison or Mr. Poison or I.P., which they made sure he knew didn’t stand for Ivy Peters. Hoyt’s own face went glum all of a sudden, as it often did when he saw I.P. these days…Gordon Hanley…to get hired by an i-bank like that these days you needed a transcript that shined like fucking gold…and his grades…He refused to think about them. That’s next June’s problem, and this was only September.

Vance was making an insouciant upward gesture for I.P.’s benefit. Barely even looking at him, he said, “Try the third floor. They got some one-hand magazines up there.”

“I’ve built up a tolerance to magazines,” said the mistake. “I need videos.”

Boo McGuire said, “What’s the microphone for, I.P.? So you can call your sister while you jack off?”

I.P ignored that. Julian got up off the couch and left the room.

Hoyt lazily knocked back some more beer and said, “Oh, f’r Chrissake, I.P., it’s ten o’clock at night. In another hour the cum dumpsters will start coming over here to spend the night. Right, Vance-man?” He gave Vance a mock leer of a look, then turned back to I.P. “And you’re looking for porn videos and a knuckle fuck.”

The mistake shrugged and turned his palms up as if to say, “I want porn. What’s the big deal?” He didn’t seem to realize that Julian was sneaking up behind him…Bango! Julian wrapped his arms around I.P.’s chest, pinning the mistake’s arms to his sides, and began thrusting his wrestler’s gut and pelvis against the mistake’s big rear end like a dog in the park.

Everybody broke up again.

“Leggo a me, you grotesque faggot!” screamed I.P., his face contorted with anger as he thrashed his pinioned body about.

Convulsive laughter, waves and waves of it.

“What makes you so fucking grotesque, Julian?” said Boo McGuire, coming up briefly for air. The repetition of the fancy word threw everybody into a new round of paroxysms.

I.P. broke loose and stood there for a moment glowering at Julian, who put on a sad face and said, “Don’t I get one little hump?”

The mistake then turned and glowered at everybody in the room and started shaking his head. Without another word he stormed out into the entry gallery, toward the stairs.

A big, rugged varsity lacrosse player named Harrison Vorheese yelled after him, “Happy hand job, I.P.!”—and everybody cracked up, convulsed, and dissolved all over again.

Julian’s rutboar embrace was a form of fraternal gibe known as humping, generally inflicted upon brothers caught doing dorky things such as covertly working on a homework assignment in the library while SportsCenter was on or coming into the library at ten o’clock at night looking for porn videos, especially if you were a mistake in the first place.

“What is all this walking around the house with a fucking microphone in his face?” said Boo. “I.P.’s become some kind of wireless nut. You should see the shit he has up in his room.”

Once they finally got control of themselves, Harrison, invigorated by the success of his “hand job” crack, said to Hoyt, “Speaking of cum dumpsters, did you know—”

Boo broke in. “What the fuck’s this cum dumpster shit, Hoyt? Didn’t I see a little cutie-pie in disco clothes coming out of your room at seven-thirty this morning?”

Everybody went “Wooooooooooo!” in mock dismay.

Harrison said, “Like I was saying—”

“I was speaking generically, not specifically,” said Hoyt. “Specifically, I only allow discriminating visitors in my room.”

Horselaughs and groans. “Oh, brother”…“Discriminate this, Hoyt”…“Where’d she come from?”…“What’s her name?”

“Whattaya think I am,” said Hoyt, “a fucking playa? I wouldn’t tell you her name even if I knew it.”

Harrison said, “Like I was saying—” Laughs and groans directed at Hoyt drowned him out.

“What the fuck were you saying, Harrison?” said Vance.

“Thank you,” said Harrison. “It’s nice to run into a gentleman in this fucking place once in a while. What I was saying was”—he looked at Vance and then at Hoyt—“did you know Crawdon McLeod’s started hooking up with you guys’ favorite ice-cream eater?”

“Craw?” said Hoyt. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Does he know who she fucking is?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he can’t fucking resist. After all, she’s a fucking documented genius at skull work.”

They all convulsed and disintegrated yet once again. Harrison’s beefy square face was beaming. He was on a roll.

Julian said, “Does she know you guys know she was the one going down on the fucking governor?”

“I don’t know,” said Hoyt, who now tilted the beer can up almost vertically to get one last swallow. Idly he wondered how many of these things he had drunk tonight. “Probably not. I don’t think she ever got a real look at us. We were behind a tree.” He indicated with his arms how big around the tree was.

Then he noticed that Vance was grilling him with a certain stern look he was very familiar with by now. Vance didn’t want to be a legend in his own time. He continually beseeched Hoyt to bury the whole incident. They’d been lucky. So far nobody had come looking for them. Or maybe they had. Politicians had their own ways of getting even, and so forth and so on. Hoyt looked at Vance’s pained expression for a couple of seconds. A pleasant breeze was beginning to blow inside his head. Nevertheless, he decided to drop the subject.

But Julian said, “You think they’re ever gonna come looking for you guys?”

Vance got up and walked to the doorway in exasperation, pausing only long enough to say to Hoyt, without even a suggestion of a smile, “Hey, why don’t we talk about it some more?” He pointed toward the TV screen. “Why don’t you get SportsCenter to broadcast a replay for you? That way you can let the whole fucking country in on it.” He turned his back and left.

Hoyt hesitated, then said to Julian, but more for Vance’s benefit than Julian’s, “They ain’t coming looking for no body. All they’re looking to do is over look the whole fucking thing. Nothing they could do to anybody at Dupont would be worth the risk. The guy got himself fucking gobbled in the bushes by a little girl. Syrie’s nineteen, twenty years old, and he’s the fifty-whatever-year-old governor of California. She’s a little blond college girl, and he’s a big old cottontop—two and a half, maybe three times her age. Talk about grotesque.”

The others were watching Hoyt with big eyes. Hoyt and Vance weren’t boys any longer. They were real men who had been in an elemental physical fight with a bona fide professional tough guy. They had been in a real-life rumble with no rules, and they had won.

Hoyt looked up at the TV screen with a steady gaze and a somewhat cross expression, to indicate that this particular topic of discussion was now terminated. Not that he really cared; in fact, he did it mainly for effect. The happy wind was rising. Nobody said a word. Everybody became conscious all over again of the quarters bouncing in the front parlor and the boys whooping ironically and Swarm’s bang beat banging away in the terrace room.

Up on the screen, the SportsCenter anchorman was interviewing some former coach from the pros, an old guy whose bull neck creased every time he turned his head. The guy was explaining Alabama’s new “tilt” formation. A play diagram comes on the screen, and white lines start squiggling out to show how this guy blocks that guy and this guy blocks that guy and the running back goes through this hole here…At first Hoyt tried to concentrate on it. Of course, what they don’t fucking tell you is that this guy who blocks that guy better be the size of Bobo Bolker, because that guy’s gonna be three hundred pounds of gorilla-engineered cybermuscle. Otherwise that running back’s gonna be another sack of bones…After perhaps thirty seconds of it, Hoyt was still gazing at the screen, but his brain was no longer processing any of it. A thought had come to him, an intriguing and possibly very important thought.

A replay of what happened in the Grove up on the screen…Too bad that was impossible…Every Saint Ray should see something like that. They ought to all think about what that little adventure really meant. It was about more than him and Vance. It was about more than being a legend in your own time. It was about something serious. It was about the essence of a fraternity like Saint Ray, not a fraternity merely in the sense of him and Vance fighting shoulder to shoulder and all that…A concept was taking shape…Fraternities were all about one thing, and that one thing was the creation of real men. He would like nothing better than to call a meeting of the entire house and give them a talk about this very subject. But of course he couldn’t. They’d laugh him off the premises. Besides, he wasn’t sure he could give an inspirational speech. He had never tried. His strong suit was humor, irony, insouciance, and being coolly gross, Animal House–style. In the American lit classes, they were always talking about The Catcher in the Rye, but Holden Caulfield was a whining, neurotic wuss. For his, Hoyt’s, generation it was Animal House. He must have watched it ten times himself…The part where Belushi smacks his cheeks and says, “I’m a zit”…awesome…and Dumb and Dumber and Swingers and Tommy Boy and The Usual Suspects, Old School…He’d loved those movies. He’d laughed his head off…gross, coolly gross…but did anybody else in this house get the serious point that made all that so awesome? Probably not. It was actually all about being a man in the Age of the Wuss. A fraternity like Saint Ray, if you truly understood it, forged you into a man who stood apart from the ordinary run of passive, compliant American college boys. Saint Ray was a MasterCard that gave you carte blanche to assert yourself—he loved that metaphor. Of course, you couldn’t go through life like a frat boy, breaking rules just for the fun of it. The frat-boy stuff was sort of like basic training. One of the things you learned as a Saint Ray—if you were a real brother and not some mistake like I.P.—was how rattled and baffled people were when confronted by those who take no shit. His thoughts kept drifting back, almost every day, to one particular moment that night in the Grove…He cherished it…The pumped-up thug (he could see his huge neck), the bodyguard guy, grabs him from behind, totally surprises him, and says, “What the fuck you punks think you’re doing?” Ninety-nine out of a hundred college boys would have (a) been frightened by the brute’s tough-guy pose and bulked-up body and (b) tried to mollify him by taking the question at face value and saying, “Uh, nothing, we were just—” Instead, he, Hoyt Thorpe, had said, “Doing? Looking at a fucking ape-faced dickhead is what we’re doing!” That was the last thing in the world that motherfucker had expected to hear. It rattled his tiny brain, ruined his tough-guy intimidator act, and provoked him into launching the wild roundhouse punch that led to his downfall. The phrase fucking ape-faced dickhead and the insolent way he had thrown the dickhead’s own word, doing, back in his face—that wasn’t some strategy he had thought up. No, it was a conditioned reflex. He had shot that line quickdraw, like a bullet from the hip, in a moment of crisis. He had triumphed, thanks to a habit of mind, a take-no-shit instinct…He began to see something even bigger…Everywhere you looked at this university there were people knocking “the frats” and the frat boys—the administration, which blamed them for the evils of alcohol, pot, cocaine, ecstasy…the dorks, GPA geeks, Goths, lesbos, homobos, bi-bos, S and Mbos, black-bos, Latinos, Indians—from India and the reservation—and other whining diversoids, who blamed them for racism, sexism, classism, whatever the fuck that was, chauvinism, anti-Semitism, fringe-rightism, homophobia…The only value ingrained at this institution was a weepy tolerance for losers…The old gale began blowing, and the concept enlarged…If America ever had to go to war again, fight with the country’s fate on the line, not just in some “police action,” there would be only one source of officers other than the military academies: frat boys. They were the only educated males left who were conditioned to think and react…like men. They were the only—

The concept would have grown still larger had not a boy named Had-lock Mills—known as Heady, which was short for Headlock—come in from out of the entry gallery and said with a slight smirk, “Hoyt, there’s a young lady here to see you.”

Hoyt rose from the easy chair, put his dead beer can up on a walnut shelf, and said, “Sorry, guys, hospitality calls,” whereupon he left the room. He soon reappeared at the doorway with a pretty little brunette—clad in halter top, shorts, and flip-flops—behind him.

He looked back at her and said, “Come say hello to some of my friends, uhhh—come say hello.”

As she stepped forward, he put his arm lightly on her shoulders, and she said, “Hi!” and gave a little wave. She had a charming smile, which made her look even prettier.

The boys responded with smiles of their own, in a pleasant and gentlemanly fashion, plus a few Hi’s and polite waves and even a “Welcome!” from big Julian. Whereupon Hoyt said, “Well, see you guys,” and, his arm still resting lightly on her shoulders, steered the girl toward the stairway.

The boys sat in silence, merely exchanging glances. Then Boo said in a low voice, barely audible above the SportsCenter anchorman’s, “That’s the same girl, the one from last night. And couldn’t you tell? He still doesn’t know her fucking name.”

Charlotte looked from the professor, Dr. Lewin, to the windows to the ceiling and from the ceiling to the windows to Dr. Lewin. She was well into her second week of classes, and the puzzles and contradictions of Dupont kept mounting, unabated. She reckoned it was inevitable. She could now see that she had led a sheltered life up there behind the wall of the Blue Ridge Mountains—but even allowing for that, this…was odd.

The classroom was a spacious one on a corner, with two great English Gothic leaded-glass casement windows comprised of multitudes of small panes. Here and there, seemingly placed at random, were panes exquisitely etched with pictures of saints, knights, and what looked like characters from old books. If Charlotte had to guess, she would say that a couple of them came from The Canterbury Tales. And that knight…over there…certainly did look like Don Quixote on Rosinante…If anything, the ceiling was even grander. It was higher than any classroom ceiling she had ever imagined and was transversed by five or six shallow arches of a dark but warm wood. Where the arches met the walls, they rested atop carved wooden heads with comic faces that appeared to be looking down at open books, also carved of wood, just below their chins.

All that elegance was what made the personage of Dr. Lewin seem so curious. Last week, when the class first met, he had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants—nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of his gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old, a pair of eyeglasses with lenses thick as ice pushed up to the summit of his forehead—unaccountably addressing thirty college students, at Dupont, no less.

The title of the course was the Modern French Novel: From Flaubert to Houellebecq. At last week’s class Dr. Lewin had assigned Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for today. And today, as the transmogrified seven-year-old addressed the class, things, to Charlotte’s way of thinking, grew stranger and stranger.

Dr. Lewin had his nose in a paperback book he held open just below his chin, rather like the wooden heads that served as finials to the arches. Then he lowered the book, let the glasses flop down onto the bridge of his nose, looked up, and said, “For a moment let’s consider the very first pages of Madame Bovary. We’re in a school for boys…The very first sentence says”—he pushed the glasses back up on his forehead and brought the book back up under his chin, close to his myopic eyes—“ ‘We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in “civvies” and a school servant carrying a big desk.’ And so forth and so on…uhmmm, uhmmm”—he kept his face down in the book—“and then it says, ‘In the corner behind the door, only just visible, stood a country lad of about fifteen, taller than any of us—’ ”

He lowered the book, flopped the glasses down onto his nose again, looked up, and said, “Now, you’ll notice Flaubert begins the book with ‘We were at preparation’ and ‘taller than us,’ referring to Charles Bovary’s school-mates collectively, presumably, but he never tells the story in the first person plural again, and after a few pages we never see any of these boys again. Now, can anybody tell me why Flaubert uses this device?”

Dr. Lewin surveyed the students through his binocular lenses. Silence. Evidently, everybody else was stymied by the question, even though it didn’t seem difficult to Charlotte. Charlotte was puzzled by something else entirely. Dr. Lewin was reading this French classic to them in English—and this was an upper-level course in French literature. Thanks to her high advanced placement scores, Charlotte had been able to skip the entry-level French course, but just about everybody else must be an upperclassman—and he’s reading to them in English.

She was in the second row. She started to raise her hand to answer the question, but being new, only a freshman, she felt diffident. Finally a girl to her right, also in the second row, raised her hand.

“So the reader will feel like part of Charles’s class? It says here”—she looked down at her book and put her forefinger on the page—“it says here, ‘We began going over the lesson.’ ” She looked up hopefully.

“Well, that’s it up to a point,” said Dr. Lewin, “but not exactly.”

Charlotte was astonished. The girl was reading one of the greatest of all French novels in an English translation—and Dr. Lewin hadn’t so much as made note of the fact. Charlotte quickly glanced at the girl on her left and the boy on her right. They were both reading the book…in English translation. It was baffling. She had read it in translation way back in the ninth grade under Miss Pennington’s tutelage, and she had spent the better part of the past three days reading it in the original, in French. Flaubert was a very clear and direct writer, but there were many subtle constructions, many colloquialisms, many names of specific objects she’d had to look up, since Flaubert put a big emphasis on precise, concrete detail. She had analyzed every line of it, practically disassembled it and put it back together—and nobody else was reading it in French, including the professor. How could that be?

Meantime, three other girls had taken a stab at the question, and each answer was a bit more off than the one before. As she craned about to see the girls, Charlotte noticed that the boys in the class seemed extraordinarily…big…reared back, as they were, in their desk–arm chairs. They had big necks and big hands, and their thighs swelled out tightly against the fabric of their otherwise baggy pants legs. And none of them lifted a hand or uttered a peep.

Although she couldn’t have said why, Charlotte somehow felt a compulsion to rescue the reputation of the entire class. So she raised her hand.

“Yes?” said Dr. Lewin.

Charlotte said, “Well, I think he does it that way because what the first chapter really is, is Charles Bovary’s background up to the time he meets Emma, which is when the real story begins. The last two-thirds of the chapter are written like a plain-long biography, but Flaubert didn’t want to start the book that way”—she could feel her face reddening—“because he believed you should get your point across by writing a real vivid scene with just the right details. The point of the first chapter is to show that Charles is a country bumpkin and always has been and always will be, even though he becomes a doctor and everything.” She looked down at her text. “ ‘Une de ces pauvres choses, enfin, dont la laideur muette a des profondeurs d’expression’ ”—she looked up at Dr. Lewin again—“ ‘comme le visage d’un imbécile.’ So you start the book seeing Charles the way we—the other boys—saw him, and the way we saw him is so vivid that all the way through the book, you never forget that what Charles is, is a hopeless fool, an idiot.”

Dr. Lewin looked at her and said nothing for what seemed to Charlotte ten or fifteen seconds, although of course it wasn’t nearly that long.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he turned to the rest of the class. “That’s precisely why. Flaubert never simply explained a key point if he could show it instead, and to show it he needed a point of view, and as”—he turned toward Charlotte, but since he had no idea what her name was, he simply gestured in her direction—“has just said…”

Dr. Lewin continued in this vein, implicitly verifying the superiority of her intellect, but Charlotte kept her head lowered and didn’t dare look at him. Her cheeks were burning. She was overcome by a familiar feeling: guilt. The rest of the class would resent her, this freshman girl who had turned up in their midst and made them look bad.

She kept her eyes turned down toward Madame Bovary and made out like she was busy taking notes in her spiral notebook. The class discussion continued with the same fits, stops, silences, and starts as before. Gradually it deteriorated into Dr. Lewin asking students about nothing more than how the plot was developed. The girls—there weren’t many—supplied most of the answers.

By and by Dr. Lewin was saying, “In chapter eleven, Charles, who’s not even a surgeon, attempts a radical operation that’s supposed to correct the clubfoot of a stable hand named Hippolyte. He botches it and ruins his reputation, which becomes a turning point in the book. Now, can someone tell me what drives Charles, who is not exactly a cutting-edge medical pioneer—if you’ll pardon the unintentional pun—to attempt something so risky?”

The usual silence…Then, in a suddenly lively voice, Dr. Lewin said, “Yes! Mr. Johanssen?”

Charlotte looked up, and the professor was pointing toward the rear of the class. His sallow face had brightened. It was the first time he had called a student by name. Charlotte craned about to see who this Mr. Johanssen might be. In the back of the room, a big boy, a giant of a boy, was just lowering his hand. His neck was a thick white column rising up out of a muscular torso only barely obscured by his T-shirt. His head was practically shaved on the sides and had just a little crew cut crop of blond hair on top.

“He did it,” said the giant, “because his wife had all these ambitions, and the thing is—”

“Hey! Jojo read the book!” It was a gigantic black youth in the row in front of the white giant; he was so twisted about that Charlotte could see only the back of his completely shaved head. “The man read the book!”

“Aw-right!” said another huge black youth with a shaved head who was sitting next to the white giant, whereupon the two black giants bumped each other’s fists together in a celebratory gesture called “pounding.” “Outta sight!”

A third black giant, next to the second one, joined in. “Go go, Jojo! You the man!” Now all three were exchanging fist pounds. “Where’s Charles at? We got us another scholar!”…“Awwww yeah!”

All three had turned toward the white giant, Jojo, and were holding out their fists so he could join in this merry mockery of scholasticism.

The white giant started to raise his fist, then withdrew it. He started to smile, but the smile turned into lips parted in bewilderment. He crossed his arms in front of his chest as if to rescue his hands from their ribaldry, but then he summoned up a smile, as if to say he was amused, too.

“All right, gentlemen,” said Dr. Lewin in a placating tone, “let’s see if we can’t settle down. Thank you…Mr. Johanssen? As you were saying.”

“Lemme see,” said Mr. Johanssen, “lemme see…” He adopted a faint smirk as he reflected. “Oh yeah. He did the operation because…his wife wanted some money to buy some stuff?” He now smiled, as if sounding ignorant was funny.

Dr. Lewin spoke coldly this time. “I don’t think so, Mr. Johanssen. It’s made quite clear that he charged no fee for the operation.” He turned his gaze away from Mr. Johanssen and looked for other hands.

Charlotte was aghast. It was obvious that the boy had been serious when he raised his hand and started to answer the question. Moreover, he was right on target. Emma Bovary’s social ambitions were at the bottom of it. And then he’d decided to play the fool.

Her eyes scanned the leaded-glass windows…the arches, the carvings, the ceiling murals…the treasures of Dupont University. Whatever was taking place in this grand old room, she couldn’t comprehend.

After class she tarried, hoping to have a word with Dr. Lewin. That wasn’t difficult. Nobody else stuck around. He was stuffing his papers into a nylon backpack. Yet another subteen touch. His childish ensemble made him look not more youthful but more decrepit. Somehow it underscored the scoliotic slump of his shoulders, the concavity of his chest, the hirsute tabescence of his limbs.

“Dr. Lewin? Excuse me—”

“Yes?”

“My name’s Charlotte Simmons. I’m in your class.”

A dry smile. “I’m well aware. By the way, here at Dupont we don’t use ‘Professor’ or ‘Doctor.’ Everybody is ‘Mister’—or ‘Miz’ or ‘Mrs.’ Unless you’re referring to a medical doctor.”

“I’m sorry…Mr. Lewin…I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, it’s just a harmless bit of reverse snobbery, actually. The idea is, if you’re teaching at Dupont, of course you have a doctorate. Anyway, that’s the custom. But I cut you off.”

“Sir, I’m—well, I guess I’m sort of confused.” Her voice sounded so mousy and hoarse, from nervousness. “I thought we were reading Madame Bovary in French, but everybody else is reading it in English, and I read it in French.”

Mr. Lewin flipped his glasses down from the crest of his forehead and studied her for a moment. “What year are you, Ms. Simmons?”

“I’m a freshman.”

“Ah. Advanced Placement.”

“Yes, sir.”

Big sigh. Then his entire demeanor changed, and he looked at her with a world-weary but confidential smile. “My dear…We’re not supposed to call you that—I gather it’s considered demeaning to the female student—but anyway—I don’t think this is the course for you.”

Charlotte was taken aback. “Why?”

Mr. Lewin pursed his lips and slid them back and forth across his teeth. “To be perfectly honest with you, you’re overqualified.”

“Overqualified?”

“This course is designed for upperclassmen who are…uhmmm…linguafrankly challenged but nevertheless have to fulfill their language requirements some way. You’re obviously a very bright young woman. I’m sure you can figure out who most of these students are.”

Charlotte’s mouth fell open slightly. “I liked the title so much. It sounded wonderful.”

“Well—I’m sorry. I completely understand. I wish someone had red-flagged it for you. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about teaching this course myself, but it seems to be a necessary thing. One tries to think of it as community service.”

Jojo didn’t hurry anywhere after he left the class. His next class wasn’t for another hour, and breaks between classes gave him just about his only opportunities to stroll about the campus and…be noticed. It wasn’t something he thought about consciously. It was more like a mild addiction. What was best—and it happened a lot—was when some student he had never laid eyes on before would hail him with a “Go go, Jojo!” and a big grin and a little wave, which was in fact a salute.

It was one of those September days when the air is nice and dry and the sunshine is warm, toasty, and gentle, even to fair skin like his. He had a warm feeling inside, too. Treyshawn, André, and Curtis had treated him like…one of them. They’d even wanted to pound him. Mr. Lewin had gotten a little frosted off…but they had treated him like one of them.

Fiske Hall, the building he had just departed, was right on the Great Yard. Everywhere you looked were the old-fashioned stone buildings that said “Dupont” even to people who had seen them only in photographs. The famous library tower was right over there…All over the Yard’s lush green lawn, students were hustling along the walkways to their next classes. Jojo stood on a walkway pondering the matter of which direction would satisfy his urge quickest…He could already see, or thought he could see, some students nudging each other and discreetly pointing out his famous towering figure. Yes, it was a good feeling…His eminence at this particular crossroads of American college life, the Great Yard at Dupont, was incalculable…What an awesome day it was. He filled his lungs with the perfect air…He opened his very pores to the perfect sunshine…It wasn’t a question of whether, but when, some student would salute and sing out Go go, Jojo!

A girl from behind him walked past, heading in the direction of the library, a trim girl with nice legs, good calves, and long brown hair, who evidently hadn’t recognized him at all as she approached him from the rear. He liked what he could make out of the nice, firm bottom inside those denim shorts…Hey, wait a minute…It was the girl from the class, the brainy one. He recognized that hair. He had taken a long look at it from where he sat…It didn’t matter what a brain she was. In fact, there was something nice and feminine about that. It went with a look she had. She wasn’t just some hot number. She wasn’t beautiful in any way you usually thought about at this place. He couldn’t have given it a name, but whatever she had was above all that. She looked like an illustration from one of those fairy-tale books where the young woman is under a spell or something and can’t come to until she gets a kiss from the young man who loves her, the kind of girl who looks pure—yet that very thing about her gives you even more of the old tingle. And she had come walking by him obviously not even knowing what an eminence she had just been so close to.

He strode after her with his big long legs. “Hey! Hi!…Hi!…Wait a second!”

She stopped and turned, and he walked up to her, beaming a certain winning smile and waiting for the usual. But she didn’t even yield up a girlish grin, much less say, “You’re—Jojo Johanssen!” In fact, she didn’t make any positive response at all or exhibit even the slightest sign of vulnerability. She looked at him—well, like some guy she didn’t know, who had just accosted her. Her apprehensive expression seemed to be asking, “Why are you delaying me?” Aloud she said nothing at all.

Broadening his smile, he said, “I’m Jojo Johanssen”…and waited.

The girl merely stared.

“I’m in the class.” He gestured toward the building they had just left…and waited. Nothing. “I just wanted to say—you were really terrific. You really know this stuff!” She didn’t even smile, much less say thanks. If anything, she looked more apprehensive. “I’m not kidding! Honest! I was genuinely impressed.” Nothing; her lips didn’t move in any way, shape, or form. He vaguely realized that saying “I’m not kidding,” “Honest!” and “genuinely” one after the other was like erecting a billboard that said PHONY. Her eyes looked frightened. There was nothing left to say but what he was leading up to in the first place: “Wanna grab some lunch?”

To anybody on the basketball team, that—or something like it—was just clearing your throat before saying, “Would you like to see my suite?” which in turn was a polite formality before putting your hand on her shoulder and getting it on. In his mind he could see Mike going at it with that wild-haired blonde…gross, but a turn-on…

She stared at him but didn’t say a word.

“Well…how about it?”

For the first time her lips moved. “I can’t.” She turned her back and headed off at a good clip.

“Hey! Come on! Please! Whoa!”

She stopped but didn’t turn completely toward him. He tried on a look of as much warmth, friendliness, tenderness, and understanding as he was capable of and said softly, “You can’t—or you won’t?”

She turned away again, then spun about and confronted him. Her little voice was trembling. “You knew the answer to that question Mr. Lewin asked, didn’t you?”

He was speechless.

“But then you decided to say something foolish.”

“Well—you could maybe say—”

A hoarse little whisper: “Why?”

“Well, I mean, shit, I didn’t…” He was still ransacking his brain for an answer when she turned away once more and hurried in the direction of the library.

He called after her. “Hey! Listen! I’ll see you next week!”

She slowed down only enough to say over her shoulder, “I won’t be there. I’m switching out.”

He shouted after her, “What for?”

He thought he heard her say, something something “for dummies,” something something “cruise-ship French.”

Jojo stared after her retreating little figure. He was stunned. She had not only completely rejected him, she’d as much as called him a fool or a dummy or a dumb fool!

Godalmighty…the old tingle stirred and stirred and stirred his loins.