Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte lay there with her eyes closed, trying to dream up better evasions, smoother lies, credible lies, nimble lies, numbing lies, tranquilizing lies, and then she fell into the arms of the Sandman.

The telephone was ringing. It was dark! She felt disoriented. What time was it? It was dark outside and dark in here. No Beverly. The whole thing descended on her. Was it Hoyt? He’s apologizing! She knew inside that was—was—but she rolled off the bed and leaped for the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello-o-o-o-oh!” sang Bettina’s voice. “So-o-o-oh? How was it?”

“Oh, hi,” Charlotte said in a dead, toneless, obviously disengaged fashion.

“What’s wrong with you? If it was anybody but you, I’d say you sound hung over. Was it fun?”

“Yeah, it was fun.”

“You don’t exactly sound excited.”

“Well, I’m just so tired.”

“What happened?”

“You know, I just can’t talk about it right now. I’m in the middle of an English paper.”

“Oh, come on,” pleaded Bettina. “I’m calling from the library. I’m dying to know.”

“Seriously, I’m so late getting to this paper. I can’t talk to you now.”

“Okay. Fine. See you later, I guess.” Bettina hung up, obviously offended.

The phone rang several times that evening, but Charlotte didn’t answer it again. All she wanted to do was sleep and forget Dupont ever existed, or go home to Momma and Daddy and forget Dupont ever existed. Forget? Forget about forgetting in Sparta. The one and only thing everybody in the county would want to talk about would be Dupont. What grand lie could she dream up to explain away Charlotte Simmons’s dusty, scuffling, bungling hangdog retreat from the other side of the mountain, where great things had awaited…Charlotte Simmons’s return to Sparta and the three stoplights…Up her brain stem bubbled Lucien de Rubempre’s ignominious return to Angoulême from Paris on the outside baggage rack of a carriage, hidden beneath a heap of suitcases, carpetbags, and boxes in Lost Illusions…which in turn detonated a startling reminder of the paper she had to hand in tomorrow morning. Susan Sauer’s interpretation of Melanie Nethers…She didn’t agree with the stupid thing in the first place, but the seminar leader, a T.A., meaning not a real teacher but a graduate student, meaning her knowledge of pedagogy was nil—the T.A., the irritable Ms. Zuccotti, regarded Susan Sauer on Melanie Nethers as a piece of critical genius. She had gone so far as to hand out a pamphlet about Susan Sauer on Melanie Nethers. Charlotte had scanned it and sized it up immediately as metaphysical sentimentality multiplied by itself, and how was anybody supposed to derive the square root of metaphysical sentimentality taken to the second power and hidden behind a veil of cynicism?…The whole thing was a whiff of some old lady’s breath…She was damned if she would devote another second of her concentration to some old biddy’s gauzy exegesis of another old biddy’s gauzy exegesis that no one needed in order to understand that Melanie Nethers was a sick joke. So she sat down at her desk and took some lined loose-leaf notebook sheets and a pencil and wrote out a hasty, half-baked attack on both of them. Who was this Sauer idiot, anyway? And who was this ponderous old Renee Sammelband who wrote the pamphlet? When she finished, she picked up her three pages—she had never turned in a paper shorter than six or seven before—and read them over. She knew immediately that she had written something witless that gave every indication of having been slung together in a rush. But it was done. That was the main thing. In any case, it was the limit of her energy and patience. All she wanted right now was a little oblivion. Of course, she’d have to go over to the library before she crashed, to the computer cluster, and transcribe and print it out. But first she needed a break. She lay down again. In no time, the Sandman carried her back to the Land of Nod.

Some hours later—she had no idea how many—she was aware of Beverly returning to the room in the dark…aware, and that was all…This time she didn’t have to feign sleep, and Beverly didn’t contest the matter.

The next day, Monday, Charlotte couldn’t get out of bed. Her alarm clock sounded its grating buzz over and over again, and she kept hitting the snooze button. Beverly? Gone, thank God. What was the point of getting up? What was there to look forward to except a lot of uncomfortable questions from Bettina, assuming she would speak to her again, and Mimi, plus, sooner or later, the inevitable interrogation, inquisition, by Beverly, who had picked up the scent of blood. Between now and the beginning of Thanksgiving break—Friday after this-coming—she didn’t have a great many choices. In fact, it came down to one: hide in the library, do the schoolwork, and avoid everybody—

Ohmygod, it was already 9:50—and modern drama started at 10:00! Well—might as well just blow it off. For a moment, she was Self-destruction on a pedestal, smiling at Grief. But cutting a class and sleeping would only make her feel more depressed later on. She jumped out of bed. Her jeans were still on the floor where she had left them last night. Diesel…the jeans she just had to have…She couldn’t abide the sight of them. She pulled her wrinkled old print dress over her head, and over that a heavy old pale blue sweater her aunt Betty had knit for her ages ago, and put on her sandals. She didn’t even have time to brush her hair. She darted toward the door. Wait a minute—the paper. She wheeled about—damn!—she’d never gone to the library and typed it in and printed it out! She retrieved the three loose-leaf sheets from the desk. Once outside, she started to run—sprint—to the library. Damn! Couldn’t run in sandals! So she took them off and put them in her left hand. She had the sheets of paper in the other. Now she ran, she flew, across the courtyard, out onto the sidewalk, across the Great Yard toward the three-story-high majesty of the entrance to Dupont Memorial Library tower. Students laughed at the spectacle as she rushed past, distressed sheets of loose-leaf paper in one hand, a pair of sandals in the other, barefoot, hair wild. O-kaaaaaaaay…She came barreling into the library and sprinted to the computer cluster—sprinted across the grand lobby, beneath the great Gothic-beribbed dome, barefoot. She heard students laughing. A lot. The soulless carcass of Charlotte Simmons, her frantic bones, her pale, pale hide, her bare feet, were a scream, so far as Dupont was concerned.

By the time she finished furiously typing the pages into the computer and printing them out, sweat was running down her face from her temples and her forehead. She knew she must reek from the frenzy of it all. No time for a stapler. She sprinted as fast as she had ever run in her life to Dunston, where the class was, clutching the flapping printout pages in one hand and her sandals in the other. It was chillier out than she thought. She reached the classroom door almost twenty minutes late. She hastened to put the sandals back on, opened the door, and entered. Damn! The strap of the left sandal had twisted so that the sole was half on her foot and half off. But how could she stop now and correct it? So she came limping in, as if crippled. She was breathing with huge, audible heaves, and she shook spastically as a chill hit her. Sniggers all around. Her face was splotched with red and streaked with sweat, which continued to pop out on her forehead and stream downward. Her hair was mashed flat on one side, from sleeping on it, and shaggy as a patch of ragweed on the other. She had obviously thrown her clothes on with no other aim than to cover her body rapidly. The sweater turned out to have a particularly unfortunate stain that made it appear as if she had just dribbled something down the front. A big moth hole on the side made one wonder if she were wearing a bra, which she wasn’t. More sniggers. Her face was a picture of fear…of what everybody else in the room must surely think of her. Every inch of Ms. Charlotte Simmons gave off waves and waves of shiftlessness, incompetence, irresponsibility, sloth, flabby character, and the noxious funk of flesh abloom with heat, sweat, fear, and adrenaline. Then there was the…thing…the splayed-apart piece of paper she clutched…crumpled thanks to her fierce grip, wet from sweat. It looked like something the cat dragged in. Sniggers and more sniggers. Ms. Zuccotti broke off in the middle of a sentence and said nothing more until the embarrassment settled herself into a chair at the seminar table. The other twenty-five or -six of them had ample time to concentrate on the creature as it sat there sweating and heaving and gulping air. Ecce Charlotte Simmons!—she who was about to turn in a paper that was purposely, angrily calculated to offend every critical and aesthetic standard she knew Ms. Zuccotti to possess, and was whipped off in an archly juvenile display of cynicism unalloyed by wit, mellifluousness, or pertinent content. Down at the other end of the table, one boy was writing a note for the amusement of another, and the recipient glanced her way and then grinned at the note writer. Who was he? Charlotte was certain she had seen him once at the Saint Ray house. Monday morning—and he already knew!