Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

She discovered that even though her back was to the room and she was rolled up in a ball with her eyes closed, the angle she had collapsed in enabled her to see the others. If she parted her eyelids ever so slightly, a mere millimeter or so, her upper eye could make out Hoyt, Gloria, and Julian in a blurry outline. She went “Ooooonuh,” as if sinking into a coma. She began breathing deeply and slowly, as if asleep. Four or five minutes later…Hoyt was coming over! He was leaning over her!

He whispered ever so softly and from ever so deeply in his throat, “You okay?”

Now he was leaning over farther! She could tell from his breathing. There was something in front of her face. She didn’t dare open her lids any wider. After a couple of beats she deciphered the shape. It was his forefinger…Now there were two fingers…now three…now four…And now all four were waving back and forth in front of her face like a fan…Then—nothing.

A few seconds went by, and Charlotte could make out the shapes again. Julian and Gloria had also gotten up from their seats on the other bed. All three were near the armoire, and Hoyt was facing the other two. They spoke in low, she’s-asleep voices.

“Whattaya think?” said Julian. “Is she okay? Should we find another room?”

“Yeah, probably,” whispered Hoyt from down there low in his throat. “It looks like she’s not moving again for the rest of the night.” A pause. “I had to knock the dust off her.”

Julian’s voice: “You’re kidding! You’re shitting me?”

Silence—broken by the piping wheeze of a couple of laughs, Julian’s and Gloria’s being suppressed, contained in the lower lobes of the lungs only by the most intense and self-denying of pressures. Hoyt was whispering, “Yeah”…inaudible…“sorta, freaks”…inaudible…“fucking formal”…inaudible…“haven’t seen a hillbilly beaver like that…”

Julian’s voice: “You’re terrible, Hoyto.”

Julian’s laughter and Gloria’s came out in spurts of air through the nostrils. Charlotte thought of bullets going through a silencer. I had to knock the dust off her. Hoyt’s whisper again: “…like fucking Astroturf…”

She could see just well enough to make out Julian giving his buddy-bro a good-job jab on the arm.

“I heard Harrison has booze in his room,” said Julian. “Why don’t we go up there? I bet everyone went up there after the D.J. stopped.”

Julian and Gloria started walking toward the door, and Hoyt followed. Julian opened the door, then stopped. He motioned toward Charlotte. “So you think she’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, she’s passed out,” said Hoyt. Whereupon he clicked off the lights. He became a silhouette against the light from the hallway for a moment—and then the door slammed shut from its own hinge-spring mechanism.

Charlotte propped herself up on one elbow and looked around the room in the dark. It wasn’t completely dark. A vertical line of noxious sulphur-yellow light from the parking lot below seeped in where the white plastic wands used for closing the curtains failed to bring the two halves together truly across the ribbon of plate glass that served as a window.

Lifting her head proved to be a perilous decision. The room was spinning, and she felt nauseated. She stood up and staggered—something was seriously wrong with her vestibular system—to the bathroom, clicked on the light, which she found blinding. There was the slop of sopping towels and washrags. She knelt before the toilet bowl, hiccuped once, and then vomited. Some of it got all over the rim of the bowl, and some of it got all over the bodice of Mimi’s dress, which had hung down when she knelt. Still on her knees, she reached up and flushed the toilet, then crawled on all fours toward the bathtub. She had the distinct feeling that if she stood up, she would pass out. She fished a washrag from out of the slop on the floor by the tub and crawled back to the toilet and wiped off the rim and crawled back to the tub and retrieved another rag and a hand towel and crawled back to the toilet bowl and dipped the rag into the now more or less clean water in the bowl and tried to scrub the bodice clean and dipped the towel and washed off her face and wiped her mouth. She was all right as long as she stayed on all fours, like an animal, and didn’t have to raise her head. She crawled out of the bathroom, leaving the light on, and crawled on the carpet all the way back to the bed and crawled up on the bed on all fours and pulled the covers down and crawled under the covers, puked-on wet dress and all, and curled up on her side and sobbed herself to sleep.

She didn’t know what time it was when she halfway woke up and could hear something on the other bed…unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh… and could make out—who? Gloria?—on her knees and elbows and somebody mounted on her from behind and going unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh—and then she lost consciousness again.

It must have been about five a.m. when she hazily heard people stumbling into the room and some clumping and clunking about and some muttering, male, along the lines of “Aw shit.” Charlotte pretended to be fast asleep and kept her eyes shut tight, since from the position she was now in, she couldn’t see anything anyway without lifting her head or turning over. The odor of vomitus on her own dress was sickening.

A muffled thunk…

“Ow! Fucking—”

Hoyt’s mutter. “Fuck. What died in here?”

He got into bed with Charlotte and never budged from the outer edge of his side of the bed, and neither their skin nor their clothing touched for the rest of the time they spent together in that queen-size bed, which must have been five hours, because it was shortly past ten in the morning when Charlotte woke up to someone banging on the door—smelled like puke in here—and an angry girl shouting, truly shouting,“JULIAN, YOU FUCKING DICK, OPEN THE DOOR! I NEED MY BAG!”

This time Charlotte didn’t bother feigning sleep, and she rolled over and lifted her head to see what was happening. She was alone in the bed, and she could hear the shower running in the bathroom.

Bang bang bang bang. “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, YOU LITTLE SHIT! YOU EITHER OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR OR I’M GETTING THE HOTEL TO OPEN IT! I NEED MY BAG!”

Sunlight was pouring into the room through the gap in the curtains. In the other bed—Julian. He rolled himself over halfway and was resting on one shoulder, eyeing the door. Then his head, just his head, keeled over toward the floor.

Slowly he lifted his head and muttered in a hoarse voice, “Aw, fuck.” He closed his eyes and clamped the thumb and middle finger of his free hand on his temples and massaged them. Gloria’s head popped up on the other side of the bed. Her mouth hung open slightly, and her eyes were the very picture of alarm. Julian swung his legs out from under the covers and over the edge of the bed, sat there for a moment with his head hung way down, then stood up, emitting a profound sigh. The sigh set off a phlegmy cough that came dredging up from the deep recesses of his lungs. He trudged toward the door with a conspicuous lack of psychomotor control, squinting against the sunlight.

He opened the door just a crack and said, “Sorry, Nicole, which one’s yours?”

“I can get it myself, thank you very much.”

“No, I’ll get it for you. No problem.”

“YOU MEAN I CAN’T FUCKING COME IN AND GET MY OWN BAG?” Nicole was really screaming now. “YOU ARE SUCH A SCUMBAG, JULIAN! YOU KNOW WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT? OR DO YOU EVEN GIVE A SHIT! I SLEPT ON CRISSY’S FUCKING FLOOR!”

Julian clenched his teeth and stretched his lips out very wide in a grimace. Charlotte could see all sorts of little tendons or whatever they were popping taut on the surface in his neck. Sheer feminine intuition told her what that was all about. Julian wasn’t worried about Nicole’s predicament. He was worried that her shit- and fuck-laced screams would rouse other people in the hotel and thereby Create a Scene.