Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

What did she care! Obviously she didn’t. She was only interested in more material to nod at Nicole with in mock sagacity. But it didn’t matter. Charlotte had no more fight left. She felt defeated and sad—sad about her own amateurishness, her shortcomings as…a girl. In that respect she had gotten absolutely nowhere since Alleghany High. Self-disappointment, self-pity, abject capitulation to a stronger foe, and that pathetic form of inverse aggression that goes along the lines of Now don’t you feel guilty for what you have reduced me to?—some of which she was quite conscious of—commandeered Charlotte Simmons—she who had been sent forth to do great things—not only to give herself up to an ignorant Lost Province but, with conscious inverse aggression, to exaggerate it: “What kind of dress?” Dreh—ess? “I don’t know what kind.” Kiii—und. “A dress, is all.” The self-abasement gave her what she wanted: a perverse thrill. Was the word masochism? She didn’t know. Up to now that had just been a concept she had picked up when Miss Pennington was telling her about what psychologists were saying way back in the early twentieth century—Freud, Adler, Krafft-Ebing, and all that.

Being on the elevator with Hoyt, who was joking about all the bags he had under both arms, lifted her spirits a bit. Her room turned out to be taken up mainly by two queen-size beds. The beds, plus two side tables, a low wooden bureau, a little commercial reproduction Louis writing table with two chairs, and a big freestanding wooden armoire—housing a gigantic television set—left very little space to walk. Hoyt came in behind her and dumped the luggage on a bed with a big sigh.

“This isn’t too bad,” he said.

“Where’s your room?” said Charlotte.

Blithely: “I’ll be in here, too.”

“But I thought—”

“Hey, we were lucky to get any room at all, Charlotte.”

He couldn’t—it couldn’t be that way—but on the other hand, he had called her by her actual name for the first time on the entire trip.

“Julian and Nicole are rooming with us,” Hoyt said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

A start of panic—but then she realized that it would be better that way. It would be sort of like an encampment. Certainly nothing funny would go on with everybody in the same room. Sort of like an encampment…she kept hanging on to this word encampment, with its overtones of a campfire and a good, tuckered-out sleep in a sleeping bag made from rubber ponchos and blankets.

Soon Julian and Nicole arrived, and Julian dumped his armful of bags on the other bed. Same sort of sigh. “That’s a shitload a luggage. Girl stuff,” he added, smiling at Nicole.

“Where are Vance and Crissy?” said Nicole.

“A couple of doors down the hall,” Hoyt said. Hoyt and Julian and Nicole started chatting, but Charlotte was busy checking out the room. She tried to figure out where the hotel could put the cots. The room was so crowded with stuff already.

“Ohmygod, it’s five-thirty,” said Nicole.

That was another thing, now that Nicole had raised the subject. Dinner was at six-thirty. Where were they all going to change? How were they going to take showers? Four people in a small space, boys and girls, changing clothes, taking showers, fixing their hair—making sure they looked right—

Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed where Hoyt had dumped all that luggage and crooked her forefinger around her chin and pondered the situation.

“Then I say we better get started,” said Julian. “Hey, Nicole, hand me that handle. It’s in my red-and-black bag, the tennis bag.”

“You get it Julian,” said Nicole. “Those things are heavy.”

Julian sighed.

Hoyt said, “I’ll get it.” He reached inside the bag and withdrew a huge plastic bottle, more like a jug really, with a big plastic handle. It was so heavy you could see Hoyt’s forearm trembling as he handed it to Julian. A yellow label on it said ARISTOCRAT VODKA.

Then Hoyt delved into one of his bags and produced a bottle of orange juice and a stack of eight-ounce paper cups, and Julian arranged them on top of the low-slung bureau—setting up a bar, Charlotte deduced. She immediately went on alert. Five-thirty in the afternoon!

Julian set about removing the plastic seal around the mouth of the big jug of vodka, and Hoyt went to work removing the one on the bottle of orange juice. They were so intense about it, as if they couldn’t wait another second to get at their alcohol. Charlotte tried to work it out in her mind that this was an adventure. She could hear Laurie’s voice on the telephone: “College is the only time in your life when you can really experiment—and when you leave, everybody’s memory evaporates.” That didn’t make her feel a whole lot better, however.

As Charlotte sat on the bed, Julian’s back was to her, but she could hear a voluble, voluminous plummet plummet plummet sound as Julian poured the first ration of vodka out of the great brimming jug into a paper cup. Then he added some orange juice, although it couldn’t have been much, because all that plummeting must have meant a lot of vodka.

He handed the cup to Nicole, sitting on the other bed, who immediately tilted it back, then rocked forward, her eyes squinted and tears forming, and let out a demonstrative half moan, half sigh: “Shit, Julian, you think you like put enough vodka in it?”

“You can handle it.”

Nicole hurried to prove him right, knocking back another gulp and then rocking forward and smiling and lifting her eyebrows way up and opening her eyes wide in a look to convey the notion that it was a little strong but hit the spot.

Julian set about pouring two more cups practically full of vodka.

Hoyt sat on the bed beside Charlotte and began stroking her back. Part of her wished he wouldn’t, not in front of these two people she barely knew, but at least it included her. Nothing else did.

Meantime, Nicole had drunk another gulp and picked up the telephone between the two beds. By the chummy, confidential way she spoke, Charlotte could tell she had called Crissy in her room.

“Oh, we’re just, you know, pre-gaming.” She cupped her hand over her mouth and lowered her voice, but Charlotte was so close she could still hear what she said: “Where’s what?…Ah. You mean the tumor?” She laughed at something Crissy said. “I’ll give you three guesses, and the last two are not eligible for this competition…” She laughed again. “Right…right here, if you know what I mean.”

Charlotte knew what she meant. They were talking about her. She was a tumor, a sick condition that just wouldn’t go away.

By now Hoyt had advanced from stroking her back to rubbing her shoulder with a circular motion. That was even more embarrassing; but as long as Hoyt wanted her—Hoyt, the best-looking, coolest guy in the entire fraternity—whatever the likes of Nicole and Crissy thought of her was nullified, she figured.

“What do you want?” he asked her. “Hey, relax.”

Only then did she realize how stiffly rigid her whole body was as she sat there. “Want?” she said.

“To drink.”

“Oh, nothing, thanks. Maybe some orange juice.”

“Orange juice—come on now, want me to put a little vodka in there for you?”

“No, it’s really okay,” she said.

He started rubbing her shoulder again, rubbing harder yet with tender concern, and that started to feel good, and not only good but important, important for Nicole and Julian to notice. His hands were big…and relaxing…and nice to have on her body. Her shoulder started feeling warmer, and she couldn’t resist looking up at him. She loved the way he was looking down at her. The tenderness and warmth of his smile—and he was so handsome! The cleft in his chin, those flashing hazel eyes that were totally absorbed in her—he was asking of her something she would not be comfortable doing, but she didn’t want him to stop looking at her with that impish expression, that mysteriously lascivious yet loving mien…The look on his face was her inviolable protection against the smirks, the Sarc 3 glances, and the mock ruminations of Nicole and Crissy.