Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

They recalled hilarious moments of hilarious parties past. Halloween—that girl Candy, wearing a silver lamé thong bikini, underneath the strobe lights with a spiked leather collar around her neck and a heavy chain as a leash in the hands of that greasy Goth, all dressed in black, the one with the slimy black ponytail and hoop earrings and his two front teeth with gold caps, each inset with a little diamond or rhinestone or whatever the fuck they were. Gales, roars of laughter over that precious memory.

Crissy said, “You think she’s really into S and M?”

“I don’t think so,” said Nicole. “She just blows too many lines, is her problem.”

With that, Hoyt lifted his chin way up and slightly to the right, vaguely in his little seatmate’s direction, and cleared his throat in a loud manner. The car went quiet. Charlotte had the impression that he was telling Nicole and the rest of them not to get on that subject with his date sitting there, although just what the subject—“blows too many lines”—was, she hadn’t the faintest idea.

Hoyt leaned over, put his hand on her forearm, smiled charmingly, and said, “I wish you’d been there. Too much Halloween was that girl’s problem. What did you do for Halloween?”

A nervous jolt hit Charlotte’s solar plexus. She could literally feel it. She was obliged to…say something in this alien company gone suddenly silent.

With a hoarse croak: “I guess—I don’t remember.”

That was so weak and lame she couldn’t possibly leave it at that. She had to say something more. She began hyperventilating. “I guess—I don’t exactly hold with Halloween?” Ohmygod! She had blurted out an old mountain countryism, the “hold with.” Her face was on fire.

More silence. Then Crissy said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Charl-uuuuunh”—she quickly swallowed the second syllable because, obviously, she knew she had gotten it wrong the first time, or had chosen to get it wrong, but had already forgotten what it actually was…or had chosen, with Sarc 3 finesse, to forget what it was—“where are you from?”

Fury overwhelmed the nervousness of inferiority. I am Charlotte Simmons. Without turning her head, Charlotte sat rigidly, looking straight at the road ahead. Since it had worked once before, she snapped, “Sparta, North Carolina—Blue Ridge Mountains—population nine hundred—you’ve never heard of it—don’t feel bad—nobody has.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized that this exhibition of peevishness and defensiveness had only made things worse. Hoyt began laughing in a vain attempt to turn it all into a little joke. Charlotte looked back at Crissy and forced a grin and a spastic laugh, as if it had been all in fun.

Crissy wasn’t sitting still for that. “I’m not worried at all. I certainly hope you aren’t.”

“Oh, no, Crissy. I was just kidding?”

Waves and waves of humiliation…Even her “Crissy” seemed to hang in the air like an impertinence. You?—presuming to be on a friendly basis with a Douche like Crissy?

She was aware of Hoyt looking at her out of the corner of his eye. A tremor of suppressed sniggers from both rows behind her. She began to feel it—the puncture wound at the base of her skull.

Hoyt said, “Remember that guy Lud Davis? They used to call him Lud the Stud? Played when I was a freshman. He was the only good white running back we’ve ever had, far as I know. He was from the Blue Ridge Mountains, too, someplace called Cumberland Gap. I don’t know why I remember that. Cumberland Gap.” He looked straight at Charlotte and in a voice stuffed full of intense interest, said, “Do you know Cumberland Gap?”

A subdued little voice: “No…I don’t think so…” She tried to think of some amiable way to expound upon the subject.

Silence.

“Well, he was a really cool guy,” said Hoyt. “He practically lived at the I.M.”

Oh, how encouraging. You could be from the mountains and still be cool…and how condescending.

“Then I’m sure you saw him a lot,” said Vance.

“No prob when you’re sobriety personified and you got maturity to burn.”

Julian said, “Well then, if I were you, I’d check the fucking gauge, because you sure burned up a lot of it Monday night.”

“Whattaya talking about, Monday night?”

“Over at that thing at Lapham, that reception. You were there, Crissy. It was eight fucking o’clock, and Hoyt’s so wrecked he’s asking the fucking master’s wife how many men she’s slept with in her life. She’s looking around like ‘Help! Somebody get this…thing off me!’ and Hoyt’s like, ‘Bottom line! Bottom line! How many!’”

Hoyt said, “I don’t know how you can sit back there and lie with a straight face.” He put his hand on Charlotte’s forearm again and said, “Don’t listen to him. What’s that story about the island where nobody tells the truth?”

“It’s not a story, Hoyto,” said Vance, “it’s some kind of math problem.”

“Bullshit,” Julian was already saying. “You must’ve yelled ‘Bottom line’ at that poor woman a hundred fucking times! Tell the truth, Big Dog.”

“Well…they do say she’s hot,” said Hoyt. “Guys at Lapham told me that. I doubt that old Wasserstein can get it up to her standards.”

The frat boys and the sorority girls broke up over that, and everything was back on course again. Nicole was saying, “I know for a fact that…” and she was off on a story about some other master’s wife.

Hoyt leaned over toward Charlotte again, and this time he grabbed her left hand as he bathed her in a smile of warm charm and said, “Wasserstein is the master of Lapham College. You know Lapham, the one with the gargoyles.”

“Oh, yes, I sure do!” said Charlotte with incredibly more joy in her voice than the topic could support. She added a merry little laugh, as if she sure had to admit it was amusing, bringing up those gargoyles. She began laughing at anything that seemed intended as funny—how-drunk-I-was stories, guy’s-such-a-loser stories, can-you-believe-what-a-slut-she-is stories, flaming-

queen stories, vulgarisms delivered with a burlesque Italian accent—“Uppa You Ess” (Julian).

She didn’t realize what a fool she was making of herself until Vance said that I.P. had a date for the formal and that she was very hot, believe it or not, a girl named Gloria.

“Holy shit!” said Julian. “Does that mean he’s cheating on his hand?”

That broke everybody up, Crissy and Nicole included. But when Charlotte, who hadn’t the faintest notion what I.P.’s “cheating on his hand” meant, joined in with her own wail of laughter—the others abruptly went silent. She turned about, and they were all casting significant glances at one another. Obviously, the “hilarious” phrase was some sort of inside joke. An outsider pretending to understand it was merely revealing how frantically, how fawningly, she wanted to be one of the gang.

It was all too shaming. By now all of them thought of her as a wretched little misfit. To make it worse, Hoyt felt like he had to lean over and pay attention to her periodically, to reassure her that she actually still existed in their Cool company, and then he’d rejoin the fun. So many idiotic stories…so much idiotic gossip…so much enthusiasm for such smutty humor and vulgar language…from rich girls who obviously spent hundreds of dollars on a jeans outfit, and rich boys, pampered boys, wearing black ghetto do-rags because the incongruity, the irony of it is so…smart and delicious—

—but how could she possibly quit! She had been so visibly proud of this “triumph”—being invited by a senior, an indisputably cool senior, to his fraternity formal. Mimi and Bettina had been impressed to a degree that was well beyond envy, because it was in a realm they couldn’t begin to qualify for. They could only wonder. And of course they had made her promise to tell them everything afterward…