Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Oh, hey, wait a second,” he said.

Stiff-arming the door against invasion with one hand, he reached way down and way over with the other and picked up a sleek navy leather-trimmed nylon bag with chrome zippers. He hoisted it so Nicole could see it through the crack in the doorway.

“Isn’t this it?”

“Yes, but I need my fucking makeup case. It’s in the fucking bathroom!”

Julian froze for what seemed like thirty seconds—but couldn’t have been—while his brain churned, trying to choose between Creating a Scene and the Sordid Truth. The Sordid Truth evidently seemed the less horrible of the two, because his shoulders slumped in resignation and he opened the door all the way and admitted his date. Nicole pushed past him without so much as a glance. She was wearing the same black tube dress. It couldn’t have been more wrinkled if she had balled it up and thrown it on the floor in the back of a closet and forgotten about it for a year. Her perfect blond hair looked like a forkful of hay in a sheep trough. Her face was bleary, puffy, bereft of makeup except for a smear of last night’s mascara that had somehow reached her cheekbone. Her skin was the color of a tombstone.

Gloria now had the covers pulled up over her head. Nicole looked at the great lump and spat out the side of her mouth, “You’re such a slut, Gloria!”—and opened the door to the bathroom, magnifying the noise from the shower.

“What the fuck?” That was Hoyt’s voice from behind the shower curtain. “Oh, hey, Nicole babe, it’s you! Whyn’t you jump in here with me? I give a great soap job!”

“Fuck you, Hoyt! Whyn’t you soap up your fist and stick it up your ass.”

Leaving the bathroom with her makeup case, she craned her head into the bedroom and lasered a look at Gloria, who by now had eased her eyes, forehead, and matted mop of dark hair out from under the covers.

“So long—Miss Community Cunt!” said Nicole.

Then she stormed out, slowing down only long enough for a farewell to Julian, who was still standing, stricken, near the door. In a frigidly calm voice she said, “You know, Ju, you really are a puny, pathetic little limp dick.”

On the drive back, everybody was too hung over to say much. Gloria was stretched out on the entire third row of seats, sleeping. Vance, Crissy, and Charlotte were crowded into the second row—Charlotte mashed up against the window, Crissy in the middle, and Vance in the third seat, behind Julian, who was in the passenger-side bucket seat up front. Hoyt drove.

Hoyt and Julian talked to each other, laughing about how drunk they’d gotten and how great Harrison’s after-party had been and how they now felt like a pile of bricks had fallen on top of their eyeballs. Charlotte was sitting directly behind Hoyt, so he could have easily explained to her who So-and-so was or asked her if she wanted to stop for a drink or to go to the bathroom or told her any of the words to the songs, but he didn’t.

Dreadfully hung over, a malady she had never experienced before, Charlotte had a brief coughing spasm in Maryland, and Hoyt said, “You okay?”

She went, “Mmmnh,” just so he would have a response, and she wouldn’t say anything more. A couple of hours later, as he let her out in front of Little Yard, he said, “You okay?”

She didn’t so much as glance at him. She just walked away with her boat bag. He didn’t ask twice.

Like a fool—and she knew it—Charlotte glanced back at the Suburban just before she reached the archway tunnel into Little Yard. She knew it wouldn’t happen, but somehow it had to happen—he would be standing beside the driver-seat’s door, looking across the roof of the Suburban, shouting, “Hey! Yo! Char! Come here!” Instead, what she saw was Gloria, risen from the back row, where she had lain motionless and soundless for the entire trip—staring at her. Right at her. Her nose was practically up against the window. Her dark hair was a big, messy wreath around her face. Her eye sockets were a pair of mascara sinkholes. She didn’t smile, wave good-bye, or betray any other sentiment. No, Gloria was…studying little Charlotte Simmons, still clutching her canvas boat bag…a specimen of…what? The Suburban started pulling away just as Charlotte saw Gloria turn her head toward the front seat. She was grinning and saying something…about what?—and then the Suburban was gone…But Charlotte already knew, didn’t she…

By the time Charlotte took her first few steps into the tunnel, she had an ache in her throat, the ache a girl gets after a long period of trying to hold back tears. Rejection and dismay turned into an all-enveloping fear of imminent doom. She who had departed soaring, she thought, in social ascension, she who knew how to handle herself, she who had been so aloof from girls who just lay down and gave it up, she who had announced that she had Hoyt Thorpe trained like a dog—Charlotte Simmons had returned. Oh, yes, she, Charlotte Simmons, the girl of the hour. What was she going to tell everybody? Above all, Beverly—of the boarding school elite she professed to have only contempt for—who had warned her not to go off on an out-of-town fraternity formal with Hoyt Thorpe, of all frat boys on God’s earth…I am not a good liar, thought Charlotte. I am not even a half-decent actress. In our house nobody ever showed you how to deceive. Momma—but I can’t let myself think about you right now, Momma.

Momma!—Before she had even made it through the archway tunnel, the ache in her throat became so severe that she truly didn’t know if she could make it all the way back up to the room without bursting into tears. If Beverly was in the room—she’d die.

She approached the courtyard with such apprehension that she could actually hear her heart beating whenever she opened her mouth to take a deep breath. It made a rasping sound from down deep, as if the wall of her heart were scraping against the underside of her sternum with every beat. Thank God…practically nobody around, just a few people on a crosswalk…over there…She wanted very badly to run to the door of Edgerton—but someone might look down and wonder what’s wrong with her. Inside, she didn’t take the elevator, because everybody took the elevator. She walked up four flights, opened the fire door—

The Trolls…What were they doing at this end of the hall? It was as if some sadistic god really had created them specifically to make Charlotte Simmons suffer. Why? Why else would they be here now? A sunny Sunday afternoon—why had the Trolls set up their gauntlet…for this moment? At the less-traveled end of the hallway? She had never seen so many of them…eight? nine? ten Trolls? Don’t even look at them. Act as if they—do—not—exist. But once again she felt powerless…against the strange little shrimpy Maddy and those huge E.T. eyes of hers. “What’s the matter, the elevator’s not running again?” Charlotte got away with just shaking her head no—but there were so many more of them to go. The knees ahead began pulling up to the chests one by one, as if choreographed specifically to drive Charlotte Simmons mad. And once more, Helene said, “Hey, how was your weekend?”—and Charlotte couldn’t think of any way to answer that one with a gesture, either, and once more guilt convinced her autonomous nervous system that she had to respond to black girls—and she responded as brightly as she could—“Good!” Good came out at such a high, frantic pitch, she prayed to God the Trolls would take it as meaning it had been such an amazing weekend, she was ecstatic—or would they divine the truth and realize it was the first flash of a flash flood of tears?—which nothing could hold back now. Sure enough, Maddy again, from the rear: “Anything wrong?”