Greg had to be heard from, of course. “You're leaving out the most obvious thing, Adam.”
“Which is what?”
“Size and build. It's a hell of a lot easier to be cool if you're tall and you spend half the week pumping yourself up on the Cybex machines. That's what makes me laugh, all these guysâ”
Goddamn Greg. “ANOTHER THING IS IF YOU START SOME CLUBâ” said Adam, but Greg was not one to let himself get walked over.
“âwho go around campus walking like this.” He stood up and startedâ
“âTHE ADMINISTRATION APPROVES OFâ”
The others were laughingâand ignoring him. Greg was walking across the floor with his thighs straddled and his chin pulled down and his trapezius
muscles flexed up, to make his neck look biggerâ“as if they're, you know, like so â¦
hung â¦
they can't get their legs any closer togetherâ”
“âLIKE SOME ENVIRONMENTALâ” It was no use. Fucking Greg had the floor, and the others found him so amusing ⦠laughter laughter laughter. Well, he, Adam, had held the floor for a good stretch, and he, Adam, had established the basic concept of cool, the theory of confidence. Although he hadn't dared look at Charlotte for more than an instant at a time, she had been ⦠engrossed ⦠so he chanced a glance now. She was engrossed, all right, but with Greg's stupid act, smiling and chucklingâ
âand then she spoke up! To Greg! “You know Jojo Johanssen? He's on the basketball team? He walks just like that except he also sneaks looks at himself in reflections in the windows? And he straightens his arm ⦠like this?âand all these
things
pop out back here.” She put her hand on the triceps of her straight arm.
Hawhawhaw
. Greg was delighted, of course, and Randy, Roger, and Edgar joined in the merriment, and Charlotte was mighty pleased with herself. Her implied approval of Greg's puerile form of humor bothered Adam, but there was something else as well. He had never seen Charlotte make fun of anybody before. Somehow this was an opening breach in her purity, her innocence. He didn't want her to be like other people, mocking, cutting, cynical, even though he didn't hesitate to be that way himself. But Charlotte was different. She had a different order of intelligence and charm.
“I thought you liked Jojo,” he said. It was actually a reprimand.
“I
do
like him,” said Charlotte. “I can comment on the way he walks and still
like
him, can't I?”
“Yeah, what's the matter with you, Adam?” said Randy. “You know Jojo. You're not saying Charlotte's
wrong
, are you? I've noticed that you have the occasional comment about Jojo, and I wouldn't exactly characterize them as flattering, and you're his tutor.”
Adam shook his head with exasperation. Somehow he couldn't stand Randy's referring to her as “Charlotte” that way, as if she was
theirs
, too, now.
“Adam Gellin and the mouths of babes,” said Camille.
So she knew exactly what he was thinking ⦠He wondered if everything he felt about Charlotte was obvious.
He had no way of knowing it, but he was filledâ
suffused
âwith a love for a woman that only a virgin could feel. In his eyes she was more than flesh
and blood and more than spirit. She was ⦠an essence ⦠an essence of
life
that remained tactile and
alive
âhis loins certainly remained alive at this moment, welling up beneath his tighty-whiteysâand yet a ⦠a ⦠a
universal solvent
that penetrated his very hide and commandeered his entire nervous system from his brain to the tiniest nerve endings. If he could only embrace herâand find that she had been
dying
for him to do just thatâshe, her tactile
essence
, would come flooding into every cell, into all the billion miles of spooled DNAâhe couldn't imagine a unit of his body so minute that she would not
suffuse
itâand they would â¦
explode
their virginities in a single sublime ineffable yet neurological, all too neurological, moment! They wouldâ
“âthe flip side of it, Adam? Does that mean it's cool for athletes to do that?”
Pop
. It was Edgar. Edgar had just asked him a questionâabout what? His mind spun.
“Except for athletes!” said Greg. Dependable old Greggoâimmediately taking advantage of his lapse in attention in order to leap back into the ring.
“What do you mean, except for athletes?” said Edgar.
“Treyshawn Diggs does good works,” said Greg. “Or they show pictures of him in the newspaper, and he's down in âthe ghetto' helping âthe youth'âand as long as it's
him
, that's cool.”
“What's wrong with that?” said Camille.
“There's nothing
wrong
with itâ”
“Then why are you saying”âshe mugged a prissy expression and minced out the wordsâ“
the ghetto
and
the youth
?
”
“Stop breaking my ⦠scones, Camille. All I'm saying is that if you're a sports star, you can act enthusiastic about some charity and still be cool, because you're precertified macho, and in that case you can show your tender sideâtike feminine side. Somebody like Tower, it even makes him look more macho by contrast.”
“Okay, I'll grant you that,” said Edgar, “but first you've got to be a
big
athlete.”
“Yeah,” said Greg. “Or else you've got to haveâ”
Adam glanced at Charlotte. She was looking from Edgar to Greg and from Greg to Edgar. She was
absorbed
in what they were saying. The urge overcame him. Got to break back inâ
But Greg beat him to the punch: “I'd describe cool in an entirely different way. I'd say cool is ⦔
At this point Greg made the mistake of rolling his eyes up and hesitating as he searched for
le mot juste
â
âand Adam slipped in a counterpunch: “Includes nobody at this table”âas if he were finishing Greg's sentence for him. He sped up and raised his voice before Greg could recover: “I MEAN, FACE IT. BY OUR OWN DEFINITIONâMILLENNIAL MUTANTSâwe're flaunting our enthusiasm for academics. We're all out to get Rhodes scholarshipsâ”
“Oh hoâthe boy bleeds ego!” said Greg.
“DON'T GIVE ME THAT SHIT, GREG! Are you really gonna sit there and pretendâI mean, this is
me
you're talking to and a table full of self-professed Millennial Mutants!”
“There's goals, and there's bleeding fucking egos, and yoursâ”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said Camille. “You guys are giving me a pain in the crank.”
“The
crank
?” said Randy Grossman with a whoop of delight. “Please, Madame Deng, be so kind as to show us your crank!”
“You wouldn't know what it was if you saw it,” said Camille. It was a snarl.
Randy's face, which he had lifted in majestic hauteur when he came out of the closet six months ago, fell and turned red. His eyelids were brimming with tears. In a low, hoarse, beaten voice he said, “I never expected thatâfrom
you
, Camille.”
So womanish! thought Adam. He immediately hated himself for the thought. After all, coming out wasn't like switching a light, probably. There must be a painful period during which someone like Randy remains terribly sensitive. But he looked like a woman, all the same. He looked like Adam's mother, like Frankie, on the brink of one of her crying jags after his father informed her that she hadn't “grown.” Adam felt guilty all over again.
But not Camille. “The fuck, Randy? Suck it up, Randy. I didn't say cunt, I said crank.”
Randy averted his eyes, turned his anguished face away, covered his eyes with his hand, and started pouting.
“Come on, Randy,” said Edgar solicitously, “Camille said crank. She was joking. Who
would
know what a crank was, even if they saw one? I wouldn't.”
After that, the weekly meeting of the Millennial Mutants deteriorated
rapidly. Adam kept glancing at Charlotte. She was obviously fascinated by the whole thing. Her eyes jumped from one combatant to the other. Adam was not fascinated. He was no longer even thinking about Randy and Camilleâor not in the sense of Randy versus Camille. He, if not they, had put it behind him and moved on to another question entirely. How had he performed in her eyesâCharlotte's? Was she saying to herself, He's weak. He let Greg break in and ram his own point about the Rhodes scholarship competition right down his throat ⦠and then just sat there like a dummy and let Camille and Randy take the conversation off on a whole other tangent about pariahism. Or would that be more than offset by the fact that it was he who had actually defined cool. It was he who had developed the concepts of confidence, defensiveness, the suppression of enthusiasm for anything or masking of enthusiasm for anything adults might want to pat you on the head forâ
He kept torturing himself with Doubt, swinging back and forth from the positive to the negative. Had she shown any signs at all of becoming comfortable with the Mutants? She was fascinated by the whole Mutant mission in an intellectually barren era, wasn't sheâbut what was she to make of Randy or Camille? The evening died a whimpering death, and Edgar drove them back through the City of God and to the campus in his Armor My Baby tank, the Denali.
Â
Â
Adam insisted on walking Charlotte back to Little Yard, and she was glad. She felt euphoric. She had just been witness to the sort of conversation she had just
known
Dupont would be thriving withâback when Dupont was an ⦠El Dorado, a glow, a vague but glorious destination on the other side of the mountains. The Millennial Mutants didn't just
use
this word cool like everybody else at Dupont, they analyzed it and broke it down into ⦠to ⦠to intellectual components that would never even occur to indisputably cool guys such as the Saint Ray house was full of, such as Hoyt himself first and foremost ⦠while the Mutants were openly, brazenly, proudly uncool â¦
They had barely reached the Great Yard when she felt Adam's hand snaking down the inner surface of her wrist. She let him. Then she let him intertwine his fingers with hers. He was so bright ⦠so much the sort of person she had hoped would become part of her life when she went off to Dupont. She suddenly felt so grateful to him, she leaned her shoulder
against his arm as they walked. He looked at her with searching intensity now, as opposed to all the little glances he kept flashing at her when they were at Edgar's.
Adam tightened the hold on her hand, and that plus the look he was giving her somehow made the silence hang heavier and heavier.
“Well, Charlotte ⦔ he said finally. His voice sounded funnyânervous, in fact. He paused, as if he really didn't know what he was going to say next. Then he said, “Did you have a good time?” His voice was a little clearer but still almost half a croak.
Charlotte said, “You know ⦠I really did.” She consciously prevented herself from pronouncing “did”
dee-ud.
“Everybody was so interâresting.” Likewise, she had almost let “interesting” loop up into four syllables with a question mark at the end, but she caught herself after the first syllables.
“Like who?” Adam's voice sounded a little better now.
“Oh, like Camille. You'd never know, the way she talks like a ⦠a ⦔
“A blitzed frat boy?”
“Yeah! But she's really got a sharp mind. Everybody at the table was so ⦠quick. You know?”
“Such asâgive me another example.”
“Well ⦠like Greg. Greg was funny, wasn't he? The way he was imitating an athlete walkingâit's so true! That's Jojo all over! I mean, I just love the way you all know how to ⦠to
isolate
a part of something, and then when you're able to see that, you're able to see the whole thing in a different way, in aâI don't knowâa more analytical way, I guess. I loved all that.”
Now it was Charlotte who intensified her grip on Adam's hand. She was thrilled. This evening was a real adventure of the mind. Right over there, in the weak antique glow of its streetlamps and immense shadows that all but swallowed them up, was the beginning of Ladding Walk. And far, far down Ladding Walk, deep, deep in the darkness, was the Saint Ray houseâthe library, which had no books ⦠the big plasma TV set, always turned on to ESPN SportsCenter ⦠There were Hoyt, and Julian and Vance and Boo ⦠and the sluts who feigned an interest in their dumb comments. She could
see
Hoyt ⦠so comfortable in his listless cynicism, which, in any eventâjust like Edgar had said!ânever had to do with anything but sports, sex, drink ⦠and contempt for people who weren't cool ⦠en route to the destination, which was always to get trashed, wasted, hammered, crunked up, bombed, wrecked, sloshed, fried, flapjacked, fucked-up, or get plain-long fucked, laid, drained, get some ass, get some head, some skull, a lube
job, get your oil changed, get some brown sugar, quiff, goo, pussy ⦠pussy â¦
pussy
⦠when hardly a step away was a world of ideasâabout everything from the psychology of the individual to the cosmology ofâofâ
everything
!