Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Even putting dicks in labial belly buttons was a more complicated thought than anything Charlotte was likely to hear at the Saint Ray house. She was there once or twice a week now, when Hoyt made the usual “invitation”: “If you want to, why don’t you come on by…” She didn’t end the evening by saying good night over her shoulder as she walked up the stairs with some Saint Ray’s arm around her, like most of the other girls who showed up that late. It was acknowledged, or assumed, that she was Hoyt’s “girlfriend,” which made her feel triumphantly cool, but he hadn’t pressured her to…hook up. She alternated between being grateful for that and wondering what was wrong. Each night he drove her back to Little Yard. They kissed for longer and longer times, in the front seat of the car.

Naturally, it was not something either of them ever said out loud, but since Hoyt knew they were going to kiss good night, he began driving into the parking lot instead of up to the entryway to Little Yard. There were never any parking places, so Hoyt would just pull over to the side of one of the lanes and stop and leave the motor running and the lights on. That reassured Charlotte and at the same time worried her. The running motor and the lights meant he wasn’t planning anything more than a kiss. The last one had been a pretty long kiss, but at the same time, she wanted him to want—but not have—more. She wanted it both ways.

And then came the night a car was actually backing out of a space.

“I don’t fucking believe this!” said Hoyt. “I thought they had the fucking things bolted to the pavement!”

Hoyt put the Suburban in gear, shot forward and cocked the wheel, and turned so sharply that Charlotte felt as if they were about to roll over. She let out a shriek—“Hoyt!”—and the next thing she knew, they were in the parking spot just vacated by the other car. Cars were parked on either side of them and in front—long rows of cars. Hoyt was laughing.

“That wasn’t funny, Hoyt! You liked to get me killed!” That had just slipped out. She sounded just like Aunt Betty.

“Liked to gitchoo killed, hunh?”

Charlotte hoped he wasn’t laughing at her. Perhaps he thought she was talking mountain talk for humorous effect.

In the next moment, that was no longer the thing to worry about. Hoyt turned off the engine and the lights. Now, in the dark, they were as much as hidden from sight, with rows of empty cars on either side.

Hoyt sank back into his seat and looked at her with a…significant…little smile. Signifying what, she couldn’t quite make out. She decided it was a smile of complicity, as if to say, “Well, here we are, Charlotte, here we are, just the two of us, inside the steel-and-glass shell of this vehicle, and we have an understanding we two.” But an understanding of precisely what?

It wasn’t a fully formed thought, but Charlotte could picture him giving her a long, loving kiss and then pulling her close to him, and the two of them would feel closer and closer, somehow part of one another, and gradually he would begin to tell her how much he loved her. Not in so many words, of course…but the accumulation of his musings would add up to that, and after a while she would say she had to go now, and they would have one last long, profound kiss, and she would open the door and descend from the Suburban and hurry through the Gothic tunnel of Mercer Gate and into Little Yard without looking back, and he would gaze longingly at her slim, athletic, perfect form until she disappeared from view. It was like a movie in her head.

In fact what he did was recline still farther in his leather bucket seat and stick his tongue sideways into his cheek, saying, “You know, you look a lot like Britney Spears.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you got a new line, Hoyt?” It gave her immense and inexplicable pleasure to use his name like that, in that natural, casual way.

“Line? Me? What line?”

Charlotte couldn’t tell whether he was just having fun, or what. “What line? I bet you were saying the same thing to that girl at the I.M.”

“What girl at the I.M.?”

“That freshman with the long blond hair and the skintight jeans. You came straight across the dance floor and headed right for her.”

“Boy, a blond freshman with tight jeans. That really narrows it down.”

“Oh, excuse me. I guess you go after so many girls with blond hair and tight jeans, it’s hard to keep them straight.” All the while, Charlotte was appraising her abilities at repartee. She found herself not too bad.

“How would you know, anyway?” said Hoyt.

“Oh, it wasn’t very hard to tell,” said Charlotte. “You weren’t exactly subtle about it.”

“No, I mean, what were you doing at the I.M.? You’re not twenty-one. Don’t tell me you lied about it. I hope you didn’t use a fake ID. I hope you know that’s a felony. I hope you haven’t told anybody about it. Now they’ve got you in the palm of their hand.”

Hoyt looked so serious she was afraid for a moment that he really meant all that. And Hoyt must have detected that moment on her face, because he all at once returned to his smile of…understanding…but much broader this time, and he held out his arms without giving up his deep recline and said, “Come here, Miz Spears.”

It crossed Charlotte’s mind, as she thrust her body toward him, that her pitching forward from her bucket seat, while he remained in his casual, kingly position, as much as said, “I can’t resist you.” Nevertheless, she found herself lunging, canting her torso into his arms. Found herself…oh sure…in the very moment that she had to halfway lurch out of the bucket seat—it was so deep—and over that stupid armrest-cupholder-cubby thing between the two seats—she tried to tell herself it just happened—it wasn’t really what you would call volition.

Now she was more or less on top of him, since he was…receiving her advances…and he had his arms around her and lifted one hand and placed it gently behind her head and pushed it toward the undamaged side of his face and launched into a kiss. Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, “Stop!”? No, she shouldn’t put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, “No, Hoyt,” in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table. On the other hand, for days and days and days she had wanted him to want to do something like this. All the while they were kissing, and Charlotte decided, well, she guessed the leg was all right—even though the hem of her dress, which she had already shortened in the first place, was pushed up toward the hip socket—because he wasn’t doing anything with the leg. Instead, his hand was now rubbing her side, from up around the shoulder down to the waist and up from the waist to the shoulder…and now down from the shoulder, past the rib cage, and slightly below the waist…and then up to the shoulder, which it began to rub in a slow, profoundly caressing way…and then it made a slow and profoundly caressing trip down the side and then slipped clear off the track just below her armpit, which also was the level of her breast, but then got back on the track and caress caress caress caress it began working on her waist—and thank God she ran and worked out and everything, because if it had found even a garter snake’s worth of a tube at her waist, she would have been mortified…uh-oh, it was caressing caressing caressing caressing down her side below the waist, where it found the big bone that was the summit of her ilial crest caress caress caress caress, but what if it came inland, moving toward there—what would she do then?…And it did! It moved down the crest and into the gulley formed by the leg meeting the lower abdomen, the gulley that leads down there—and she twitched in the gulley, involuntarily—