Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

She barely managed to get to the door, duck inside, close it—take one look about—no Beverly!—thank you, God!—and dive onto her bed and put the pillow over her head—to muffle the sound—and give way to sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs racking racking racking racking racking racking convulsive sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs with a polyester down pillow muffling her head. Far from disliking the pillow, she wished it were bigger, big enough to enclose her whole body, muffle her existence at Dupont University, where there was nothing left for her. How could she possibly face all those girls she had so proudly lorded her virginity over—had so proudly shocked with her contempt for Dupont’s easy virtue—had bragged to about her ability to control guys and keep them at bay, most specifically a guy named Hoyt Thorpe? What had she done? How could she have allowed herself to do it? She was unclean, she had let herself be used in the filthiest way, she was a ratty hotel washrag, a cum dumpster. That was what Charlotte Simmons was, a filthy cum rag that had been tossed onto the floor of a hotel bathroom with the rest of the slop. Here she was, trying to hide from herself under a pillow, from her Diesel jeans, on which she had spent one fourth of her money for the semester, and her red T-shirt, which she had thought looked so cool and now seemed so juvenile and tacky…And that wasn’t the end of it, was it. This was Bettina’s T-shirt, and those were Mimi’s dress and heels in that pathetic boat bag…and she would have to return those things, tomorrow at the very latest, and there was no way she could face either one of them and proceed to lie about what had taken place. They would want a minute-by-minute description of the formal—and they were not to be denied. She might be able to lie to Beverly, but she would become such a nervous wreck doing it, Beverly would know she was lying.

Hoyt…hah. She said the hah to herself with such force, it popped out of her mouth in the form of a rueful sigh. Right now, at this moment, Hoyt was probably smoking pot with Julian and Vance and some other brothers of “the best fucking fraternity at Dupont,” mellowing his way through his hangover, listening to Dave Matthews or O.A.R., mellowing mellowing mellowing the afternoon away while she lay here with a pillow around her head and the Trolls whispering and sniggering about her on the other side of the wall. Oh…let them whisper and snigger all they want. The best she could hope for from them was that they would maintain their delusion that she considered herself too cool to talk to them. She wasn’t about to confide in them and give them some inkling of what had taken place over the past twenty-four hours, the past twenty-four hours of debasement and humiliation, of floundering in muck and slime. Every time she closed her eyes, she flashed back to that fitful sleep…in which she was lying there on a hotel bed…while the rest of them were playing drinking games, talking about her, talking about her body—about her old-fashioned hillbilly beaver—about knocking the dust off her. That was what her losing her virginity in such a squalid way meant to them: a few chuckles about knocking the dust off a musty up-country beaver, a little stray that somehow had wandered down from the hills.

She took the pillow off her head and rolled over onto her back. Doing so must have raised dust from the pillow, because the sun was coming into the room in such a way that she could see the particles suspended in the air above her, stuttering and jittering every which way in the light—and she flashed back to the day Channing and the others invaded the yard for the sole purpose of humiliating her and showing the world their contempt for her fine airs…and she had lain down on the bed in her little slot of a room…watching dust particles dance in a shaft of afternoon sunlight and thinking of how impossible life would now be in Sparta—now that the whole county knew about Daddy threatening to castrate Channing if he so much as laid a finger on his perfect little girl again. And oh God the memory of how she had been revived by the sight, on television, of the most-talked-about politician in American, the governor of California, possibly the next President of the United States, giving the commencement address at this place that was to be her salvation, Dupont University, the most magnificent setting in which the great man could address the nation last spring, a Gothic tower soaring behind him, a pageant spread out before him, a field of mauve and gold robes—a rich mauve that had entered the language as “Dupont mauve”—the flags of forty-eight nations represented by the graduates, heraldic banners representing God knew how many mysteries of Christendom a thousand years ago, kept alive on the looms of the twenty-first century because they went so well with the compound arches and rib-rife vaulted ceilings, the random Chaucerian casement windowpane etchings of ancient Gothic buildings erected en masse in the 1920s. This great eminence, who had so stirred and girded her loins—her loins!—was known at Dupont as the ridiculous, fat-flanked cottontop stooge of a fellationic farce known as the Night of the Skull Fuck, starring a drunk frat boy named Hoyt Thorpe, with Master Vance Phipps of the Phipps Phippses in a supporting role…

Charlotte got up—it made her dizzy—could her body still be drunk?—trying not to see what she couldn’t help but see out the window, which was the highest-soaring of Dupont’s many soaring tributes to the glory of God, the library tower, and went over to Beverly’s side of the room—what did “Beverly’s side of the room” matter any longer?—and rifled through her heap of CDs until she found the Ben Harper CD and brazenly lifted the lid of Beverly’s CD player—what did “brazen” mean any longer?—and flipped to song number 3, “Another Lonely Day,” and sank back onto her own bed and listened to Ben Harper’s sentimental young voice sing about how the whole thing wouldn’t have worked out anyway and how all that’s left is just another lonely day. She couldn’t help it…she couldn’t keep her face from scrunching up or the tears from bursting forth from her eyes, from her aching throat, from the deepest reaches of her lungs, her solar plexus, her convulsively contracting abdomen. She put the pillow over her head again so the Trolls couldn’t hear, but not so forcefully that she herself couldn’t hear the slow, sad ballad of the inevitability of loneliness. Her entire nervous system was depressed by her hangover, in any event, and it became a relief, bordering on joy—the feeling was so near the absolute limit—to give up, let all her defenses collapse, capitulate, wallow in the hopelessness of her ruined life at Dupont. On the other hand, she made sure the Trolls couldn’t hear her—

Would Hoyt ever call? She knew he wouldn’t. She knew he’d never speak to her again. He’d already dumped the cum rag into the slop. She could never set foot in the Saint Ray house again. Never again in the Saint Ray house…What will Bettina say about that? It was ironic. Bettina was the one who had first led her there that night, which now seemed so very long ago. What would Mimi say? No doubt they had had conflicting emotions when they learned that Charlotte Simmons was going off on a formal with a senior, a very cool senior. It didn’t take much imagining…They were envious. But her ascension also gave them hope. She had seen it in their faces when the three of them met in this room and Beverly and Erica had barged in. They wanted to see her on that bridge, the bridge to the frat world, where sorority girls would be apprised of your presence at Dupont and cool guys would regard you as hot and hookupable and you would be invited wherever the cool and the hot and hookupable went to have their fun and display their status…