"All right.
You want to know?
You're different.
You've changed.
And Im not talking about your I.Q.
It's your attitude toward people—you're not the same kind of human being—"
"Oh, come on now! Don't—"
"Don't interrupt me!"
The real anger in her voice pushed me back.
"I mean it.
There was something in you before. I don't know… a warmth, an openness, a kindness that made everyone like you and like to have you around.
Now, with all your intelligence and knowledge, there are differences that—"
I couldn't let myself listen.
"What did you expect?
Did you think I'd remain a docile pup, wagging my tail and licking the foot that kicks me?
Sure, all this has changed me and the way I think about myself.
I no longer have to take the kind of crap that people have been handing me all my life."
"People have not been bad to you."
"What do you know about it?
Listen, the best of them have been smug and patronizing—using me to make themselves superior and secure in their own limitations.
Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron."
After I said it, I knew she was going to take it the wrong way.
"You put me in that category too, I suppose."
"Don't be absurd.
You know damned well I—"
"Of course, in a sense, I guess you're right.
Next to you I am rather dull-witted.
Nowadays every time we see each other, after I leave you I go home with the miserable feeling that I'm slow and dense about everything.
I review things I've said, and come up with all the bright and witty things I should have said, and I feel like kicking myself because I didn't mention them when we were together."
"That's a common experience."
"I find myself wanting to impress you in a way I never thought about doing before, but being with you has undermined my self-confidence.
I question my motives now, about everything I do." I tried to get her off the subject, but she kept coming back to it.
"Look, I didn't come here to argue with you," I finally said.
"Will you let me take you home?
I need someone to talk to."
"So do I.
But these days I can't talk to you.
All I can do is listen and nod my head and pretend I understand all about cultural variants, and neo-Boulean mathematics, and post-symbolic logic, and I feel more and more stupid, and when you leave the apartment, I have to stare in the mirror and scream at myself:
'No, you're not growing duller every day!
You're not losing your intelligence! You're not getting senile and dull-witted.
It's Charlie exploding forward so quickly that it makes it appear as if you're slipping backwards.'
I say that to myself, Charlie, but whenever we meet and you tell me something and look at me in that impatient way, I know you're laughing.
"And when you explain things to me, and I can't remember them, you think it's because I'm not interested and don't want to take the trouble.
But you don't know how I torture myself when you're gone.
You don't know the books I've struggled over, the lectures I've sat in on at Beekman, and yet whenever I talk about something, I see how impatient you are, as if it were all childish.
I wanted you to be intelligent. I wanted to help you and share with you—and now you've shut me out of your life."
As I listened to what she was saying, the enormity of it dawned on me.
I had been so absorbed in myself and what was happening to me that I never thought about what was happening to her.
She was crying silently as we left the school, and I found myself without words. All during the ride on the bus I thought to myself how upside-down the situation had become.
She was terrified of me.