Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“They’re all about Henry the Eighth and England’s break with the Church of Rome,” he said, nodding at the stack of books he now cradled in his arms.

Charlotte couldn’t hold the flood back any longer.

“Charlotte! What’s wrong?”

She lifted her head and, feeling the tears rattling down her face, lowered it again. “Oh nothing, just a bad day, that’s all.” The first little convulsions began silently.

“I think it’s more than just a bad day. Can I help?”

The full convulsions overwhelmed her. She put her head on Adam’s shoulder and began sobbing.

“Let me put these down.” He placed his stack of books on the floor up against the wall. When he stood up, he put an arm about Charlotte. She nestled her head on his chest, and the convulsions came in waves.

“Hey, it’s okay, shhhh,” said Adam. Students were staring at them. “Want to go downstairs? Why don’t we go down to the stacks so we can talk.”

The best she could do was nod yes as her head lay on his chest, so uncontrollable were her heaving lungs.

Adam left his books where they were and led her toward the stairs ever so slowly, with his arm around her. “Oh, Adam,” she said in a weak, congested voice, “I don’t mean for you to—what about your books?”

“Hah. Don’t worry. Nobody’ll touch them. They’re all full of arcane religious history. Nobody will know what a matrix is in those books. Henry’s break with Rome was the most important event in modern history. All of modern science flows from that. People don’t get the point of all the pioneers of human biology being Englishmen and Dutchmen—oh.”

He stopped when she put her arm around his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her head fell forward now and again as the sobs rolled on and rolled on.

“It’s going to be okay,” said Adam. “Just let it out, honey. I’m with you.”

Even in the watery depths of her misery the Honey, I’m with you struck her as an off-key…dorky…expression that assumed too much…And “just let it out.” What trendy, sappy theory was that based on? In the mountains everyone was raised to “hold it in,” on the theory that emotional disintegration is contagious…In the mountains men were strong…but at the same time she had…only Adam.

She had been back at Dupont for less than twenty-four hours and was already ravaged by a loneliness more desperate than anything she had felt as a little girl from the mountains arriving at the great Dupont for the first time five months ago. She had been living under the illusion that she had made friends—Bettina and Mimi. The bitter cold but utterly clear light of schadenfreude—Bettina- and Mimi-style—had proved otherwise. They were merely three girls who had found themselves thrown together in the first circle of loserdom. The Lounge Committee…They had huddled together for warmth, all the while resenting the fact that fate had cast them out among the losers, namely, one another. What Charlotte suffered from now could not be given any diagnosis so benign as homesickness. She had just been home, only to learn that Sparta, Alleghany County, and County Road 1709 were no longer a retreat she could return to.

There existed on this earth no home, no peaceful place where she could lay her head. After a twelve-hour bus trip, counting the two hours she had to wait at the bus station in Philadelphia for the bus to Chester and the half hour she had to wait for the local bus to the Dupont campus, Charlotte had arrived at Edgerton House, room 516, at midnight, praying to God that Beverly would not be there. God answered her prayers. Beverly was back—her half-opened luggage was on her bed where she had left it—but she was out. Charlotte unpacked, undressed, got into bed, lights out, at a frantic pace, and was lying there in the now implacable grip of insomnia when Beverly came in at about three a.m. in a drunken stupor, talking incoherently. Charlotte pretended to be asleep. She lay awake all night listening to Beverly snoring, talking, bubbling, belching, crepitating in her stuporous sleep. Charlotte got up in the dark at six a.m. It took a tremendous exertion of will. A depressed girl seeks total inertia and never wants to get up, but with Charlotte the fear of humiliation and its obverse, pity, overcame it. Above all, she wanted to make sure she could get dressed and get out of the room while her alien roommate was still unconscious. The thought of having Beverly look her up and down, ask questions, make insidious Sarc 3 comments—or ignore her, the way she had for the first month—was more than she could bear.

As soon as she stood up, her head had felt like a desiccated husk. Splashing water on her face in the bathroom had done nothing to revive her. The ordinary motions of getting dressed only made her yearn more for sleep. All the while she was terribly anxious lest Beverly wake up. How morbid it all was! How desolate! To be mortified by the very possibility that your roommate might become conscious of your presence! To have no old friends, no new friends—to be afraid of the most elementary gestures toward making friends—how very hopeless was her life! Why wouldn’t God come take her away in the night?

She had made sure she was there waiting the moment the dining hall opened. Very few students had breakfast that early. The moment she finished, she put on her old quilted jacket, pulled the hood up over her head until it covered most of her face, and hurried to her two classes, medieval history and French, saying nothing in either class. From French, her face still stashed away beneath the hood, she rushed to the library, seeking refuge and anonymity. She had skipped lunch. The idea of being abroad on the campus in the middle of the day made her too anxious. In the afternoon, when the Reading Room was its quietest, she sought to concentrate on a monograph entitled “Neuroscientific exigeses of ‘self,’ ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ and ‘ego,’” and she began trembling. She—who had been studying the illusion of free will all semester with the calm and comfort of the conceptually enlightened observer—was cornered! Here! There was nowhere to go, no new direction to consider…nothing to aim for except the Big Inertia. She took advantage of the early nightfall to scurry to the dining hall the moment it opened for dinner, at five-thirty. She bolted down some pasta and departed before other students had even begun arriving in any numbers. Briefly buoyed by carbohydrates, she had returned to the Reading Room resolved to concentrate on neuroscience truly conceptually, to keep its insidious hands off her own central nervous system and that chemical analog computer known as her own brain—and had collapsed into the arms of Adam, who called her Honey but whose bony embrace was all she had.

Adam kept his arm around Honey as they reached the basement stacks. These were stacks of the venerable sort, cliffs of metal shelves supporting rack after rack of books. The cliffs were so numerous and crunched so close together, floor to ceiling, the sensation that they were about to fall over on you would have been overwhelming if the ceiling hadn’t been so low, no more than seven and a half feet. Floor to ceiling, with no more than thirty inches between cliffs, in a windowless space so vast and so miserably lit—by trays of fever-blue fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling—that on the far side the cliffs seemed to recede into a terminal gloom choked with the dust of tens of thousands of dead books. In fact this soaring tower of academe had been retrofitted with the latest twenty-first-century HVC (heating, ventilation, and cooling) systems in an age of particulate matter phobia. Adam maintained his one-armed savior’s embrace, which forced them to squeeze together as they made their way through the narrow spaces between the cliffs.