Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte Simmons wasn’t going to be invited anywhere. She had gambled. She had let her classes slide, she had let Adam and the Mutants and her dreams of a cénacle slide…and her promise to Miss Pennington, the one and only thing she had asked of her—yes, that, too—so sure had she become that Charlotte Simmons was about to ascend from clueless public school hillbilly girl hidden up-hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to the summit of female competition at the great Dupont. How foolish, how egotistical, how shallow her goal, how low her aim, how twisted her priorities—

O Hoyt! O Hoyt! She wanted that smirk again! She wanted him to press her against the back wall of an elevator again! She wanted him to want her! He would call her any moment now—

With that one, she realized just how crazy she had become. He would never call. The very idea would make him recoil. No, he wouldn’t even recoil. Recoiling presumes an emotion, and nothing about Charlotte Simmons would any longer rouse an emotion in Hoyt Thorpe.

As she lay there on her back, the flood tide rose again, and she could feel the tears spilling from the corners of her eyes and pooling inside the lids, and so she opened them—and the particles were no longer dancing in the air, or at least she could no longer see them. The light had dimmed. A cloud must have passed across the sun. She looked toward the window, and her eye hit on the library books stacked up on her desk—oh God she didn’t need this! She had a paper due in the morning in modern drama on Susan Sauer’s interpretation of the work of the performance artist Melanie Nethers—which was so convoluted and lit’ry and tortuously dull and lifeless…what little she had read of it…she would have to read every word of it from the beginning and staple every word into her brain—they were such floating little wisps of thought, those words. There was no way she could possibly concentrate on any such task. There was no sense even beginning. She’d have to get up tomorrow early and do it before class, and she knew that would never happen. There was no holding back the inevitable. What use was it?—what earthly use? Why struggle with the metaphysical idiocy of something Susan Sauer wrote?

She was so wretched, so completely ruined, the only possible course left was to stop resisting in this doomed struggle with misery. O how knotted her throat was! Not just sore but twisted into a knot! Surrender, Charlotte—even though she could tell that this crying jag would be different from all others, this jag would have its own head, this jag would rack and wrench her body and soul beyond all hope of relief through surrender—and here they came, the tears, scrunching the muscles of her lips, her chin, her neck, her brow, bursting through her optic chiasma to force their way out between her eyelids, flooding her nose, her entire rhinal cavity, in a stinging rage—

What was that!

She could swear she heard a girl’s voice syncopating in the sort of one-sided conversation you overhear during other people’s cell-phone calls—

Never was there a quicker-acting antidote for a crying jag. Off went the waterworks. Charlotte rolled toward the wall and pulled her knees up into the fetal position, feigning sleep, barely in time—

The door swung open and, “Ohmygod!…Yeah, totally—” Good and loud.

Charlotte could see every inch of her roommate in her mind’s eye, the very angle at which she canted her head into the cell phone, the way her eyes lolled, focusing on nothing, the cockeyed dip her new Takashi Muramoto bag took as it hung from the crook of her elbow, with all this stuff about to fall out of it—

“Yeah…yeah…yeah…like totally! I can’t wait to hear about it!” Beverly shrieked into the phone. “Where are you studying tonight?—wait, hold on a sec—Charlotte, you bitch! That’s my CD—ohmygod, sorry, babe, my roommate’s playing my fucking CDs now”—as she simultaneously yapped into the phone and went to the CD player and stopped Ben Harper and switched the CD to Britney Spears’s In the Zone—“Okay, yeah, going to the café tonight, definitely—oh, wait, he’ll be at the library? Maybe we should go there—ooooh, we can sit next to them! Awesome, okay, meet you at seven.”

Whereupon she clicked the phone shut and let her bones collapse on her swivel chair, by the sound of it.

“Hung over?” Beverly said in a hearty voice not to be denied.

“Yeah,” croaked Charlotte, as if Beverly had interrupted an afternoon hangover nap. She didn’t dare turn over and let Beverly see…

Beverly’s response to that was, “So—spill it!” She really barked it out. She wasn’t about to let her roommate hide behind this nap shit, as she would have no doubt put it.

Charlotte could hear Beverly making little breath sounds in time to Britney Spears. Britney Spears! No doubt Beverly’s head and shoulders were bobbing to the beat, too. Part of her was deep inside the music, half whispering, half singing, “Come on, Britney, lose control!” The rest of her was right here in the room with a real lungful: “I can’t hear you, Charlotte!”

“It was fun,” Charlotte said, extra-foggily.

“Fun? What else? What’d you do?” Under her breath: “Shake it, Britney, shag and roll…”

The groggy fog who faced the wall: “Do? We went to dinner and went dancing and stuff.”

“You must have stayed up all night! You sound like shit! You’re all curled up on the fucking bed in the middle of the afternoon with the sun shining—ohmygod, I can’t believe you! You! Of all people—hung over! My roomie! Got fucking ripped with Hoyt Thorpe! I mean where did little Miss Charlotte Library Stacks go? What were you doing all night, anyway?”

“I told you, Beverly.”

“You didn’t tell me anything! I want details. Come on! Ohmygod, I never thought I’d be fucking living vicariously through you! I mean, you have to tell me everything—I mean everything!”

“There’s nothing to tell. I’m so tired, really, I just have to take a nap.”

“Well, I mean, you shared a room, right?”

Awkward pause…Charlotte wanted to lie, but she couldn’t even imagine what the lie would be. She now realized that no Saint Ray, least of all Hoyt, would be caught dead providing a private room for a date. It wouldn’t be so much the cost as the…whipped, unmanly wussiness of it. Beverly would see right through that one.

So she gave in and said, “Yeah.”

“Welllllll…”

“There were other people in the room, too.”

“So?”

“So there were four of us in the room. It was like a…a…an encampment. So there’s nothing to tell.”

“Wow, an encampment. You mean nothing happened? You’re such a fucking prude!”

“I didn’t say that. But nothing really major or anything.”

“Ohhhhhhh! So something did happen!”

“Look, I don’t even remember. I got so drunk I can’t remember anything.”

“Ahhh, a blackout baby. Our Miss Charlotte! Who’d a fucking thought it! Don’t you realize that every blackout baby tries to cop out with this can’t-remember shit?”

“I’m not copping out. I can’t remember.”

“You’re not going to tell me, you little bitch.” Beverly giggled. “You’re not going to tell your own roommate? Come on!”

The fog, closing in thicker: “No…I just have to get some sleep; then I have to go write a paper. I’ll tell you another time.”

Silence. Long pause. Sarcastic sigh with much musical expelling of the breath between the teeth. Finally: “You know what I say to that, Roomie? That blows. Eccccchhhhh. Pardon me while I take my finger out of my throat.”

Beverly departed. She didn’t slam the door, she merely gave it a smart clack.