—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!”