Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Julian stopped in his tracks.

“Please don’t distract him,” said Nicole. “I’ve never seen Ju folk dance in his underwear before.”

Julian spun about, lifted his palms up in a gesture of helplessness, and said, “We were just waiting for you to finish in there.”

This was not the Cool Julian of the Saint Ray house. No, it was the standard man caught with his pants down.

Charlotte found this deeply satisfying. The guilty response told her that Julian had been more than kidding around. On the other hand, she had a sudden desire not to be in the room for whatever happened next. So she stood up, picked up her canvas boat bag, and headed straight for the bathroom.

As she approached Nicole, she said, “You’re through in there?”

Nicole looked past her, as if she weren’t even there.

The bathroom was a cramped space done in sad pale tones of—what?—stale cheese. The bathtub and the toilet were the color of stale mozzarella. The shower curtain looked like rubbery stale mozzarella. The counter where the basin was ran the width of the wide plate-glass mirror. That counter was a thick piece of plastic with fake bluish veins in it. It was supposed to look like marble. Instead, it looked like Roquefort—and then the cheese conceit began to make her bilious, so she abandoned it.

She slipped off her jeans and T-shirt and stood before the mirror appraising herself…in a bra and panties…A young face white as snow stared back.

Time was going by! Hurriedly she took the mascara, the eyeliner, the eye shadow, the brush, and the lip gloss, which Bettina had given her, out of the bag—but she couldn’t make her hands apply the makeup. Momma’s condemnation of painted women had sunk in far, far too early. She settled for a little bit of clear lip gloss. But then she saw the mascara…A little wouldn’t hurt. So she put on a little…Not bad!

She slipped Mimi’s red dress on over her head and stepped into Mimi’s meretricious stiletto-heeled shoes. Wow! She seemed to rise up a foot higher in the mirror. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she said to the snow-white face, which smiled at her mischievously. She got a good look at the tops of Charlotte Simmons’s thighs now, because—ohmygod look at that!—the red dress hung barely four inches below her underwear line. It was a lot shorter than she remembered from when Mimi showed it to her! Hoisted way up on the high heels like this, the girl in the mirror looked like an ice-skater. She swirled left and right, dancing with Charlotte Simmons. Every time Charlotte Simmons swished her dress, she, on this side of the mirror, caught a flash of her panties and a bit of the taut, upward curve of her taut, perfectly curved bottom. Ordinarily, if Charlotte Simmons looked like this, it would scandalize her and make her shrivel at the thought of what people would think. But tonight she was giving Charlotte a pass. The girl had been through enough today, constantly worrying about what others were thinking. “Who cares what other people think?” the Charlotte Simmons in the mirror said out loud.

When she left the bathroom, she felt like a model on a runway, although she didn’t do anything foolish like trying to walk the way the models did. Sure enough, Hoyt and Julian looked stunned. They looked like they wanted to eat her up in one bite. They didn’t dare say anything, however, because of Nicole.

Nicole was getting an eyeful, too. Creases formed in her forehead. But she put on a cheery, friendly voice when she said, “Well, that’s awfully short! How are you going to sit down, Charlotte?”

Good sign! Now Nicole, too, had felt compelled to call her by her name!

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” said Charlotte.

She felt slightly bare—but also slightly careless, insouciant, as the French said. No, the word was not insouciant. The word was sexy. Not even when she wore her little white shorts and sandals, showing her legs from all the way up here to the tips of her toes, did she feel this sexy.

Hoyt became so attentive it was almost embarrassing. Anywhere she sat, he sat next to her, rubbing her shoulder, her back, her leg—just the outer flank, which didn’t seem so awful, since she had so much leg showing in the first place—stroking her cheek, stroking her hair where it cascaded down the back of her head and neck—

Nicole was not very talkative. For one thing, every now and then Julian, who was getting good and drunk, would direct his frat-boy one-liners to Charlotte instead of her. With Hoyt, there was no contest. He was rapt. Funny how rapidly things could turn around…and the last shall be first.

Finally the four of them went downstairs to dinner.

The party was in a section of the vast interior court that could be reserved for such affairs. Charlotte and Hoyt walked hand in hand down one of the country-tiled stairways that meandered lazily from landing to landing, down through a forest of trees in tubs. Mimi’s high heels were not made for walking downstairs. Charlotte had never even had a pair on before. Each step caused an ultra-contraction of the calf muscle…and yet there was something sexy about that, too. Up on their floor, before they descended, she had sneaked a look at her legs in the full-length mirror by the elevators. Propped way up as they were on a pair of heels as high as…as…as high as her feet were long, practically, and revealed as they were by a red hemline that barely cleared her hip sockets, those were a pair of…legs she had. She couldn’t help wondering what the view looked like to men, if any, coming down the stairs behind them.

Through the leaves of all the trees she could see a dusk lit up ever so romantically by candles on regular regatta tables with white tablecloths. Had she been told that the dusk was created by a maintenance man turning rheostat dials in a bank of light switches, it would not have diminished her awe. In this lush, romantic setting, she was meandering down a picturesque terra-cotta stairway hand in hand with the coolest guy in all of Dupont—who caressed her hand now and again with light squeezes. She couldn’t help but wonder who was looking—and she hoped that Crissy was one of them, although she no longer nursed a resentment against her. After all, even Crissy was a part of this, this magic moment.

The section of the court Saint Ray had booked was walled off by shrubs planted in the inevitable tubs and trimmed so that they looked like seven- or eight-foot-high privet hedges. At the entryway to the section, white stanchions had been embedded in the hedge tubs, and they reached a good fifteen feet above the floor. From one hung the mauve-and-gold flag of the university, with the famous coat of arms featuring a stylized cougar rampant. The cougar was mostly lost in the folds, thanks to the dead, still air of the atrium, but there was something grand about it all the same. Dupont! From the other stanchion hung the flag of the Saint Raymond fraternity, consisting of the Raymundus Vox Christi cross of royal purple and scarlet—against a field of deepest aubergine, embroidered with small corn-yellow stars. As every Saint Ray was told at the time of initiation—and forgot within a week—the scarlet represented the blood of Christ and the martyred Saint Raymond. The royal purple represented the martyred saint’s special place in the kingdom of Christ the King. The bent ring was a symbol of the loop of iron driven through Raymond’s lips to silence the evangelical voice with which he had begun to convert his Roman captors themselves to Christianity. At the moment, all that was lost in folds, too, but no one could help but be drawn to the brilliant swaths of scarlet against the royal purple and the deepest aubergine.

So gaudily rich were these two flagpole tapestries that the entryway between the hotel’s hedges in tubs came close to being a grand entrance—at least close enough for a group of Dupont men and their dates, who already felt swell about themselves. As Charlotte and Hoyt, still holding hands, made their entrance, a hundred, a thousand, pairs of eyes seemed to turn toward them. The place was packed with Saint Rays and their dates, and obviously most had done their share of pre-gaming. The usual rumble of party conversation was already shot through with cackles and hoots. Somebody deep in the pack cried out in a voice that strove to be deep and manly, “You can’t get any tonight, you might as well tie it in a fucking knot!”