Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Every—what?—half hour?—saline-depleted, sweating, she and Hoyt would sit down at one of the tables on the edge of the dance floor and have some more drinks. One thing she had come to realize about wine: it tasted so good. Wasn’t like vodka at all, and even if you were dizzy, as she was, with the roar of the bottom of a waterfall inside your head, it didn’t make you any dizzier, the waterfall didn’t roar any louder, it just kept you so alive to your body and unashamed of your love, proud of it, in fact, and she had overcome all the shyness of a little girl from 2,500 feet up a mountain.

Vance and Crissy sat down at the table and ordered tequilas from a little colonel. Vance was sweating so much, his collar was wet and wrinkled. Even the perfect Crissy’s face was flushed, and she didn’t look so disdainful. And the first thing Vance said was not to Hoyt but to her—by name!

“Charlotte, you ever had a date with a shit-faced Hell’s Angel before?” He nodded toward Hoyt.

She didn’t feel mousy and at a loss for words at all! “He’s not a Hell’s Angel, he’s a black-tie Holstein!”

Vance and Crissy looked blank at first. But then they turned toward one another and arched their eyebrows and pulled funny oh-I-get-it faces.

Vance said to Hoyt, “Hoyto, and that—whatever the fuck it is—is—fucking—that.”

The three of them—Vance, Crissy, and Hoyt—laughed, but without looking at her. Charlotte couldn’t help but smile. Beam, in fact. They got it! She had a wit that snuck up on people and—gotcha! All the while, Hoyt never took his hand off her. Every now and then, while he and Vance were talking, Hoyt would reach way over and wrap his hand around her shoulder and pull her toward him—practically pull her whole chair over!—and lean way over toward her and, from out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, say to Vance and Crissy, “Is this girl cute or what?” He always said the same thing, so she took to pulling her head away and looking at him crossly in a fake way, as if to say, “Why are you always so mischievous?”

Then they’d go back onto the dance floor and Hoyt would press her body against his and fondle…that and that and them and those and this…and he would overpower her with more tongue insertions.

The entire atrium was slowly turning clockwise. Then it stopped and began turning slowly counterclockwise. The flashes and slices came faster. The D.J. switched to a slow number, “Dear Mama” by Tupac Shakur. Charlotte remained pasted up against Hoyt, who was still visiting those and them and that and that, when she thought she heard someone wretching convulsively, a girl, if she had to guess, over near the privet-hedge entryway to this section. The putrid smell of vomit came wafting by but soon dissipated, probably thanks to the fact that there was no ceiling, unless you counted the skylight thirty stories above. Then came the familiar bracing smell of a mop bucket full of ammonia…Charlotte was in a…delirium…but a perfect delirium…and the perfection made her realize that she was superior to every other girl on the floor—being, as she was, Charlotte Simmons—and what she thought and what she felt physically had never been in more perfect accord as Hoyt’s body became a part of her central nervous system.

Tupac Shakur was still plaintively adoring his momma when Hoyt whispered in her ear, “Want to go upstairs?”

“But I’m not tired yet. What time is it?”

“Ohhh…twelve-thirty. I’m not tired, either. Let’s just go up for a sec, before Julian and Nicole get there.”

Charlotte knew what he was getting at, but there was also the fact that she wanted to hook up, without going all the way, of course. She wanted to please him, to run her hands through his hair, make him smile the way he smiled at her all night, but more intensely and ecstatically, have him eager for her, like an animal. That was what made her…thrill inside. He was a beautiful animal at the peak of his rude animal health. And yet she could always control him. “All the way”—that was exactly what she wanted him to want! To know that this beautiful animal named Hoyt—the coolest and sleekest and most beautiful animal, the elite animal of the elite Dupont—to know that she had reduced his world to a single obsessive thing—wanting Charlotte Simmons! That was what she wanted! He was the animal, and she was the hunted. He was in love with her. That she knew. He lusted for her. That she knew. To see his love and his lust and his very mind, for that matter, turned white-hot and forged into a single super-concentrated alloy—whose shape she would determine—that was all she wanted!

She followed him into the elevator.

They were alone in the elevator. Hoyt didn’t even wait for the doors to close before he started kissing Charlotte, pushing her up against the back wall, caressing her breasts, pressing his body against hers from chest to groin. She kissed him back in a spirited fashion and felt cool doing it, let her body go limp against the wall, wrapped her arms around his neck, allowed him to do whatever he wanted with his hands.

In no time at all, the elevator came to a stop. It was the lobby floor. The door opened, and a yahoo of drunken frat-boy noises welled up from the courtyard below. Hoyt had Charlotte flattened against the elevator’s back wall. The fact that his lust was now on display upon the most public floor of the Hyatt Ambassador Hotel didn’t hold him back for so much as an instant. So obsessed was he by his animal quest, he kept his hands cupped about her buttocks rutrutrutrutramming his mons pubis into hers. A man and a woman in their forties or fifties started to enter the elevator. Charlotte looked right into their faces. She smiled, hoping to assure them that this was not at all what it looked like—she and Hoyt just happened to be young and alive—but the couple wheeled about and retreated into the lobby, where the adolescent ululations of drunken Dupont students enveloped them all over again. Then the door closed, and the college-boy yawp vanished. The elevator was heading up. The known world consisted of Hoyt, his head buried in her hair, his mouth kissing her neck, his groin bucking and grinding, and him going from grunt to groan and back to grunt ungh ungh ungh ungh—

They reached their floor, and Hoyt intertwined his fingers and hers and led her down the hall. His hand was so hot. He looked at her only once. It was his loving smile—but nervous this time. He didn’t say a word.

As soon as they entered the room, he threw the door latch into the locked slant so hard it was like a gunshot, and he closed some sort of metal hasp up higher on the door. Without a word, just a lot of passionate ohhhhunghs, he started kissing her again and cupping her buttocks and pulling her toward him—ohhhhhhungh—and then he entwined his legs in hers, as if otherwise she might go away, while he struggled out of his tuxedo jacket with a lot of twisting and thrashing about. His face was red, his shirt was dark in the armpits, clouds of odor rose, but his chest swelled out, and it was manly, and once he got the jacket off, inside out, he began maneuvering the entwined legs to walk her backward to the bed. She felt the edge of the bed touch the back of her dress. Hoyt reached down, lifting her dress up on one side, feeling about for her underwear, and now she could feel the bed on her bare thighs. She pushed his hand away with a sharp thrust, only to find herself falling back on the bed, with him on top of her. He said nothing, and neither did she. She was excited, a bit frightened, but more than anything else curious. What exactly would he do now? He put one thigh between her thighs, practically smothered her with the heft of his body, and began kissing her again. He kissed her lips and then stuck his big tongue waaay down her throat until she thought she was going to gag, and then he began kissing her upper chest, where the cleavage was. She was afraid he might try to move lower, but instead he began kissing her shoulder, and then he began trying to pull the dress down and off that shoulder. She gave his wrist a good whack with the heel of her free hand, and all of a sudden he was halfway on his back. She hadn’t hit him that hard—and she realized that he had rolled himself over, keeping his leg between hers, however, and was now practically ripping his black bow tie off and unbuttoning his shirt and wriggling for all he was worth, getting out of it, and then going to work on his T-shirt, which got caught upside down and inside out on his head. With a mighty thrash and jerk he tore it off his skull. Neither of them said a word. She was amazed how well defined his abdominal muscles were. In the course of all this struggling, with his shoulders sinking into the bedspread, his abdominal muscles contracted and writhed and contracted some more. Amazing! She knew he worked out at the gym, but he seemed so slothful about everything, it had always seemed to her—but he hadn’t been slothful about his abs! He was wonderful all over again!—and she couldn’t help running her fingers over his wonderful abs and lingering in the crevices between the units, which must have driven him wild, because with another ohhhhungh he rolled on top of her, flattening her entire body into the bedcovers and the mattress. He started lifting her dress up slowly and methodically, all the while kissing her mouth, her neck, her shoulder, her chest, only lower down this time, and then he returned to her neck—oh God!—it sent shivers through her body when he kissed her neck that way, and she wasn’t going to stop him quite yet as he kept edging, edging, edging the dress up her body, because she wanted his hands on her, the way they were now as the dress slipped up, up, up as high as her breasts—where they stopped—and he embraced her around the chest, awkwardly—what was this all about, these two little fists he was making under her back? He was unhooking her bra! Was this what men did?—and pulling the straps out from under her and slipping the bra and her dress up, up, over her head—the feeling as his hands slid over her areolae and her nipples—she found herself—just so!—found herself!—naked except for her white cotton panties. Time to say something—but Hoyt’s bare chest and awesome abs were coming down on her to meet hers, and she wanted this, the feel of his skin on hers, which was not all that serious because he still had on his tuxedo pants and shoes, but even through the pants she was aware of how swollen his groin was. He started moving rhythmically on top of her, and she was so physically titillated—how wet she was all of a sudden!—and she arched her back so that it would titillate her more, and she wondered what she was supposed to do in this situation—maybe lift her loins up to meet his coming down?—go in the same rhythm so they moved together in a kind of dance?—thank God he still had his pants on, but should she say something now, before he had notions of going any further—or should she wait a little longer, so as not to destroy what she had now, which was his entire life, his entire being, his entire soul—but she didn’t know about the soul, how it figured in—