Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

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 she—but 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.

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 with—back 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…

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 funny—nervous, 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 inter—resting.” 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 as—give me another example.”

“Well…like Greg. Greg was funny, wasn’t he? The way he was imitating an athlete walking—it’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 a—I don’t know—a 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 house—the 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 event—just like Edgar had said!—never 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…pussy…when hardly a step away was a world of ideas—about everything from the psychology of the individual to the cosmology of—of—everything!

Charlotte found herself holding Adam’s hand tightly and once more leaning against his shoulder. He stopped. He released her hand and turned to face her. It was obvious what should come next. She experienced such a tender feeling for him, and she wanted to let him know that—and in that same instant she wished…he just wouldn’t. He slipped an arm around her waist and pulled her toward him and at the same time pulled his head back so as to look into her eyes, she guessed…and what was that look?—that little smile? Mainly he looked nervous. And then he took hold of one of the temples of his glasses; and he pulled it up slightly, abandoned that activity, returned the hand to the back of her waist, and then cocked his head slightly and brought it closer and closer to hers. He was blinking rapidly, and it dawned on Charlotte that he had been trying to figure out whether to take his glasses off first or not. He brought his lips down to hers, and she parted her lips the way she had learned to do it with Hoyt—and her lips landed above and below Adam’s. She brought her lips closer together in order to engage his, but in that same moment he had opened his wider, seeking out hers, and when the two sets of lips finally met squarely, it was more like a…mash…than a kiss, and so she, with a mixture of sympathy and guilt—why guilt?—uttered a little moan. He pulled his head back just far enough to mouth the words, “Oh, Charlotte!”—then mashed her lips again.

Charlotte was too embarrassed—embarrassed?—but that was the way she felt!—to look at his face again. So she pulled her head downward from his lips and rested it on his chest, to spare his feelings. Big mistake. This merely spurred him on to more passionate moaning. He began rocking her body from one side to the other, saying, “Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte,” and then moaning some more. Now he seemed to draw her even closer, and he pressed his hip bones up against hers. And then—Charlotte couldn’t be absolutely sure—he seemed to be thrusting his mons pubis in search of hers. She stuck her buttocks out far enough for that to be impossible. She took her head off his chest and looked at his face. Fog was developing on the lower part of his glasses, which made his eyes appear to be peering over a wall. “What are you thinking?” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have—but how else to evade, gently, the quest of his rocking mons pubis?

Sure enough, he stopped rocking, although he kept an arm around her waist. He looked into her eyes and said, “I’m thinking—I’m thinking I’ve wanted to do this, to hold you like this, from the very moment I first laid my eyes on you.”

His throat had gone dry, and his voice was so hoarse and low and raspy it was as if he were pushing it on a sled on a dusty road.

“From the very first moment?” She pulled her head back so that he could see she was smiling. She thought she’d try to lighten the tone of this tête-à-tête. “You sure didn’t look that way! Matter of fact, it looked to me you weren’t very happy to see me sitting at that computer there in the library.”

“All right, then why don’t we call it the second moment.”

He was smiling, but it wasn’t what you would call a merry old smile. It appeared to be underwater, in a pool of the tears of a happy but terribly poignant recollection.

“It didn’t take me long to change,” he said. “I hope you remember that, too. Don’t you remember how I all of a sudden changed and introduced myself? And asked you your name?” The same dry voice, but this time with a certain extra note, a note of tender hush that one adopts when revealing lovely secrets that lie just below the surface. “I guess I can tell you this now. Afterward, I was sorry I had introduced myself to you as just Adam. You know how you get in the habit here of introducing yourself just by your first name? So naturally you just said Charlotte. Did you know there are five freshmen named Charlotte?”