Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

With a sly smile, Julian said to Hoyt, “Hope I didn’t interrupt.”

“Not at all,” said Hoyt with a casual, ambiguous laugh. “We were doing some more shots. Want some?” He was already walking toward the bureau, where he poured himself a shot of vodka and then poured another, which he held out toward Julian. Gloria stood there erectly, chin up, shoulders back, chest thrust forward, an inchoate smile on her sensual lips. Hoyt swung his arm to hand Gloria the shot and gave her a little wink, just a here’s-to-you, down-the-hatch wink, but a wink all the same. It began to register with Charlotte…Other than the “we” in “We were just doing some more shots,” Hoyt had not acknowledged her existence since Julian and Gloria arrived—not by word, not by gesture, not by so much as a roll of the eyes. She still sat on the edge of the bed, stunned by what was unfolding before her, unable to move. But then she felt tears rising in a flood, and she sprang from the bed and ran, literally ran, past the three of them, within inches of them in the narrow space between the foot of the beds and the front of the bureau—she had no choice—to reach the bathroom before she broke down completely and started sobbing in front of them. The last thing she heard before she shut the bathroom door was Julian saying, “O-kaaaaaay…”

The bathroom was a slop of sopping towels and washrags flung on the floor, over the edge of the tub, over the shower-curtain rod. Even with the door shut, she could hear Hoyt and Julian laughing about some girl—her!—no, it was some girl with glitter on her dress…and about how dumb Harrison’s toast had been and how it was a good thing he could play lacrosse because “he can’t speak on his feet for shit.” The beautiful dark lady, Gloria, was laughing and giggling along with every syllable of it.

Charlotte felt dirty and sore. She stepped out of her dress, her bra, and panties. She wet a washcloth and lathered it with soap and washed between her legs and washed some more and then washed again and repeated that and washed a few times more—no sign of blood—until she began feeling woozy. She was listing to the right. She had to do a quick little step to keep from keeling over. Her brain began to throb. She sat down, naked, on the toilet lid, shivering…and weeping…heaving convulsively but determined not to make a sound…and reveal how profoundly wounded she felt. After a while she made herself stand up. She stood before the mirror over the basin. She had to brace herself on the basin’s countertop with both arms. This time she didn’t appraise her body for a second. It was nothing but a weak, contemptible, corrupted piece of flesh. Her skin looked clammy and pale; sickly was the word. She was puffy and red about the eyes. Her entire brain felt inflamed. Her pulse was like a mallet. She saw double images of herself. Her hair was as disheveled as a dove’s nest, but she wasn’t about to go back out there and retrieve the canvas boat bag where her brush was. That would be another thing they could have a good time for themselves with—how she came out of the bathroom barefooted, looking like an automobile wreck, to fetch…her boat bag.

Well…she couldn’t stay locked up in here forever. She picked up her panties from where she had thrown them on the basin counter. Ohmygod they were disgusting…sodden to the touch, which, it occurred to her with the oddly fond lash of self-flagellation, was only appropriate for what she had now reduced herself to. She had to sit down on the toilet lid again in order to put them on without passing out. She fondly indulged the self-abnegating clamminess of them, their formerly lubricious, now merely unsanitary, wetness. She lowered her head and sniffed a few times to make her self-abnegation complete. How very foul they smelled…the sweat, the urine, the shit, the sheer filth, all the secretions that made them…slimy. Yet she wasn’t about to go back into that room without them. She snapped on the bra…and slipped the red dress over her head…No comb…Her hair was wild…mashed here…sticking out tangled there. She ran her fingers through it to push it all back at least…horrible…She gave up, gave in, left the bathroom, and reentered the bedroom barefooted to surrender herself, totally, to humiliation.

With her very first barefoot step onto the synthetic carpet, she began to feel bilious…There they were, Hoyt, Gloria, Julian, acting as if nothing had happened, still drinking their beloved “shots”…Hoyt and Gloria sitting next to each other on the low part of the bureau. Hoyt’s back was to Charlotte. He didn’t even look up…He was engrossed with Gloria…his head had the cool tilt he used when he was flirting…Oh, the dark lady had her breasts right out there first and foremost and an oh-so-sensual curl on her lips…Julian was on his back on the other bed in some sort of acrobatic or gymnastic position, with his hips and buttocks up off the bed, supported by his hands, and his feet directly up over his head. He was giggling, and then he went into a fake laugh, and then he began giggling again and kicking his feet up in the air as if he were dancing upside down. He was very drunk. Charlotte walked to within six inches of Hoyt and Gloria. Gloria flicked her a glance but immediately returned to Hoyt’s face. She was giving him a…suggestive…Dark Lady smile and holding a small paper cup with probably vodka in it, as if about to make a toast. Hoyt didn’t even look up. Gloria cocked her head back and threw the shot down her gullet. He acted as if he didn’t know Charlotte Simmons was there.

Only Julian took notice. He stopped giggling and dancing in the air and rolled forward to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “Hey, Charlotte, are you okay? You don’t look so great.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. I think I just had too much to drink. I feel a little sick.”

“You feel like you gonna puke?” said Julian. “ ’Cause I gotta sleep in this room tonight, and it better not smell rank and shit.”

With that, he started laughing and rolled back on the bed and started kicking his feet in the air over his head again.

About to cry, Charlotte lowered her head and brought her hand up over her eyes, but she managed to swallow her sobs and lift her head. In peripheral vision she could see Hoyt looking at her. He said, “You okay?”

She started to look at him but decided not to, for fear she might start boohooing and blubbering.

“I think I just have to lie down for a second, and I’ll be okay,” she said. The “I’ll be okay” part trailed down into inaudibility, and she collapsed onto the other bed at a 45-degree angle, her back to the room.

Her fondest hope was that Hoyt would come to the rescue and at least sit on the bed and rub her back and ask Julian and Gloria to go somewhere else. She didn’t want to talk to him, for she would surely burst into tears. She just wanted him to be with her.

She wanted to curl up on the bed, but Hoyt’s red-and-black bag was in the way. She pushed it toward the foot of the bed—and saw why he had put it on the bed in the first place: to cover up the bloodstain. There they were, a few dried-out drops of blood…now just inches from where they came from in the first place, the Charlotte Simmons reproductive tract…

She curled herself up into a ball. She took a self-destructive, self-hating pleasure in wrapping her body about such a filthy, sordid memorial, a shrine not only to a little fool but also to a little fool’s illusion that men fell in love. Men didn’t fall in love, which would be surrender. They made love—made being an active, transitive verb that rhymed with raid, the marauder out for blood, laid the raider who got laid, daid as a bug I got my killing ov’ere’at the Hyatt Ambassador Ho-tel in Washington, D.C.