Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Hoyt showed her!”

“Wow, he’s an asshole. What a dick. Was it her period?”

“No. What I heard is—I heard that Hoyt told Gloria it was her first time, and he like totally didn’t know what to do. He like freaked out after.”

“What do you mean, freaked out?” said Bettina.

“I don’t know, I mean like he couldn’t deal with it. Why should he? I mean, it wasn’t like it was their wedding bed. It’s probably a little awkward to be some random girl’s fucking first time…at a frat formal!”

“That’s so awful. How did you find out?”

“My friend Sarah Rixey told me.”

“Sarah Rixey?—how did she know?”

“I don’t know. I think she said this girl Nicole told her. She’s a junior. I know they went to the same school in Massachusetts. I met her once.”

“And how did Nicole know?”

“She’s hooking up with this guy who’s a Saint Ray,” said Mimi. “I guess that’s how.”

“I still can’t believe Hoyt is such an asshole that he’d show Gloria Barrone, though. She’s like best friends with Lucy Page Tucker, who’s the president of Psi Phi.”

Charlotte had heard enough. She kept on walking…past her room. She couldn’t even deal with the remote chance that Beverly was in there. If a couple of freshmen as low down on the grapevine as Bettina and Mimi knew, then certainly Beverly, who seemed to be already wired into the sorority scene, would know. It was Monday evening, not even forty-eight hours…later…and who didn’t know! Her own friends were having a merry old time trashing her behind her back. Everyone knew! Hoyt had told two people, Gloria and Julian—and no doubt Vance, who no doubt told Crissy, who no doubt told Nicole as soon as they got together to tell war stories about the weekend—and now everybody she could possibly care about knew, and God knows how many others, as well, who might enjoy the incidental schadenfreude of pointing out the little hillbilly freshman from the mountains who “lost her pop-top” at a frat formal in a hotel.

How could he have told Gloria? Julian would have been bad enough, but Gloria? Was he utterly heartless, utterly cynical? Did he have a sadistically cruel streak? Was he so completely lacking in empathy for others—never mind sympathy—that he thought it was funny? She wanted to strangle him, kill him, obliterate him from the face of the earth. Yell at him…but in person, which meant she would at last see him again—look into his face. His hazel eyes, his smile, his cleft chin, his expression, which was not heartless at all but capable of such…love, and maybe if she had told him as soon as he invited her that she was a virgin, everything would have turned out differently, and he wouldn’t have freaked out—that must have been all that really happened—he just didn’t know, and the surprise freaked him out—yes, she had told him…just before, but by that time he was so aroused—after a certain point the male can’t restrain himself—and if he saw her, looked into her face again, he would sob an apology—O Hoyt!—

So caught up was she in this fantasy that she wasn’t aware of the Trolls just around the bend in the hallway until she was right on top of their ratty legs sticking out like a row of logs. She could scarcely believe it. Didn’t they ever move? Didn’t they have anything else to do? What were they, buzzards? The vile-looking, scrawny little Maddy turned her eyes up at Charlotte in the eerie way she had. Charlotte felt frustrated, but she steeled herself to the task of maintaining whatever cool she could. She smiled slightly, whispered “Hi,” and kept walking. Scrawny Maddy was already drawing her knees up to let her pass, when she piped up. “Hey, there.” She began giggling. “How you holding up?”

Another shock in the solar plexus—not so much the fact that the girl knew, which meant the whole bunch of them knew, as the fact that she dared to be so casually impudent about it.

“Fine,” Charlotte said curtly, as if to maintain the fiction that she still existed on a plane far above them. She continued on through the gauntlet, panicked over the possibility of other fish-eyed stares and impudent—

“You know you’re barefoot?” It was the big black girl, Helene. Giggles ran up and down the Trolls.

Charlotte rushed to the fire door and headed down the stairs toward—she had no idea where. Even the Trolls felt superior to her now! They didn’t talk to other freshmen who actually had lives. They only observed them, used them as gossip fodder, envied them, resented them, sought to tear them down like tarantulas—tarantulas. It registered on her that Miss Pennington had introduced her to the term in a moment as unpleasant as this one, although she couldn’t recall what it was. Maddy—that little limp-haired weasel-faced crone-in-embryo—even Maddy knew she had lost her virginity in the most public way—even Maddy was gloating over the fact that Charlotte Simmons and her aloof ego had gotten screwed over and plunged into the depths of campus loserdom.

She stopped at the next landing to put the sandals back on—they had dared to make fun of her bare feet! She was starting to sweat again. She was breathing in a rapid shallow fashion. She looked down the four flights of stairwell below. They were lit only by a single 22-watt circular fluorescent bulb at each landing. The walls were old-fashioned plaster, hard as rock, painted institutional green. The stair rail was some sort of molded metal painted black. When she tried to see all the way to the ground level, the stairwell became a narrow shaft full of tight right angles leading to a small terminal gloom.

It dawned on her that she had no idea what she was going to do when she reached the bottom…

Ordinarily, President Cutler received visitors not at his bombastic eight-foot-long desk, but at one of the office’s two furniture clusters. Over here was a bergère, two cabriole-legged armchairs, and an Oxford easy chair, all upholstered mauve morocco leather. Over there was the richest chestnut brown leather sofa you ever saw, a long coffee table, and chairs upholstered in cloth of assorted mauve-dominated designs—all resting on a vast custom-made tawny yellow rug with a repeat pattern of Dupont-mauve cougars, taken from the Dupont family coat of arms. The clusters provided important visitors with an intimate, personal setting—“intimate” as in inside the royal chambers and “personal” as in VIP. That, plus a festival of Gothic interior decor—windows within intricately compounded arches, a ceiling painted in elaborate medieval motifs, and so on—seemed to work wonders with prospective donors. Perversely, the breed appeared to be stimulated more poignantly in the lap of conspicuous consumption than in settings of ascetic self-denial.

But the President didn’t feel like getting intimate and personal with either of the two men he was looking at across his desk right now. They were the two worst extremists he had to deal with on the faculty, and their Weltanschauungs couldn’t have been more at odds. No, he preferred to have the immovable heft of his desk between him and them.

Where the two hotheads were seated, they were facing a painting on the wall behind the President, a famous larger-than-life full-length portrait of Charles Dupont in his riding outfit, his glossy black left boot in the stirrup shimmering with highlights as he prepares to mount his champion four-year-old, a glossy black stallion named Go to the Whip. Dupont’s stern face, broad shoulders, and mighty chest are twisted toward the viewer, as if someone has just been so foolish as to utter something impertinent. The artist, John Singer Sargent—it was his only known equestrian painting—had made the Founder’s riding crop oversize and placed it in his right hand at such an angle that he appears on the verge of whipping the offender across the mouth twice, forehand and then backhand.