Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

They spoke very little. Most of the way Charlotte continued sobbing softly, while Adam interjected his There theres , It’s all rights , and Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you, honeys. The not going to leave you, honeys did more to quiet her than anything else. Otherwise they barely spoke at all, but Adam’s brain and central nervous system were making the circuit at a furious rate.

One moment—euphoria! His fondest dream had come true just like that! Charlotte was moving in with him—and it was her idea! She wouldn’t take three steps without clinging to his body—holding his arm, putting her head on his shoulder! She beseeched him not to leave her. She did everything but say “Take me! I’m yours!” He was giddy, delirious, here in the dark from the radiant happiness soon to be his. Dupont, society, the world, the cosmos, all of existence was now compressed into two people, himself and Charlotte Simmons. It was that blissful suspension of disbelief called love.

The next moment—the Doubts. It was all too good to be true. He happens to bump into her, literally, in the library, and—bango!—all at once she’s his?—but specifically because she’s disgusted and chagrined by sex?—and suffered a trauma in losing her virginity? Where did that leave him—and his burning desire to lose his virginity to this girl, because she was as innocent as he was and wouldn’t look down on him for his lack of experience?

The next moment—she’ll be with me in my apartment all through the night, in the same room, because there is only one room, and it’s a small room and her body will be there and there’s only one real bed, and one thing leads to another in life, doesn’t it?

The next moment—but how do you get a girl into bed with you when she has come to you in flight from a frat-boy sexual predator? The next moment—

—and on it went and off it went on/off/on/off/on/off and the binary circuit burned and burned.

As they drew near Adam’s building, he began to tremble, aroused by the thought of what might possibly, miraculously, now be his…and anxious about how the dump might look to his beloved. What would she think? Place reeks from dirty, moldy clothes and shit lying around…The house itself was in a moldering old district full of brick houses with wood trim built way back in the early twentieth century as one-family residences on tiny lots. Each house was barely seven feet from the next, creating dank alleyways that never saw daylight and always felt damp. The bricks had long since turned five shades darker from grime and coal soot. The wood trim in the cornices, corbels, overhanging eaves, shutters, window frames, architraves, front doorways, and small front porches—everything was dry-rotting, warping, flaking from poor paint jobs or else too few. Generations of black wires slopped with white paint ran from top to bottom next to the gutter pipes, which had their own problems. Most of the houses, like the one Adam lived in, had long since been cut up into small apartments.

But tonight Charlotte was no sightseer. She whimpered and held on to him for dear life. The staircase up to his apartment was a steep, narrow, dingy shaft painted brown. It clattered from the aged metal strips on the leading edges of the steps. It was too cramped for them to ascend side by side; so as he led the way, Adam extended one hand behind him for Charlotte. She desperately insisted on holding on to him. The four-story climb was disorienting enough even when you did it every day. And this time Adam was dizzy with love. His hands trembled as he unlocked the three dead-bolt locks on his door. He opened it, clicked on the light—and his spirits plummeted—

—for he now saw his apartment through his loved one’s eyes. This was no “apartment”! This was a slot!—one of four created by cutting an ordinary front bedroom and rear bedroom in two. Three graduate students rented the other slots. Adam’s was ten feet wide and felt even smaller because it was beneath an eave whose slope eliminated half the ceiling and nearly all of one wall and threatened to pound your head down into your thoracic box from the moment you entered. The “kitchen” consisted of the smallest “stove,” “sink,” and “refrigerator” ever made squeezed into what had been a closet in a former, better life. The quotation marks spread like dermatitis in Adam’s brain as he thought of what must be going through the mind of the girl of his dreams. The “bed” was a mattress on a cheap, unfinished flush door from a lumber-yard, supported at the corners by cinder blocks. And the blankets, sheets, and pillow on that “bed”? A rat’s nest! And from that rat’s nest and the dust-ball-filthy floor—both strewn with dirty socks, sneakers, underwear, handkerchiefs, sweatpants, sweatshirts, sodden towels—there arose such an odor that it overwhelmed even him, he who breathed this foul air day in and day out. And the answer to his prayers couldn’t even see the worst of it yet: the bathroom…was in the hall…and the wretches in all four slots had to use it!

He glanced fearfully at her. She was looking at him with a pained expression.

He said, “I know it’s not what you—”

“Oh, Adam!” she exclaimed. “Thank…ank…ank…ank…ank”—the “thank” broke up into sobs—“…ank you…” Whereupon she threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. She began talking weirdly, her voice muffled by his North Face jacket. “I’m so tired, Adam. I feel so terrible. Please stay with me. There’s no way you can know how I feel. I can’t be alone tonight. I’ll—I can’t, Adam, I can’t…I just canh—anh-anh-anh-anh-anh’t.” She tightened her embrace of his rib cage.

A hail of thoughts blipped through the Wernicke’s area of his brain, one of which was that she no longer said caint for can’t.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said, “I’m right here with you, and I’m going to stay right here with you.”

She stopped crying, released her embrace, and stood up straight. “Adam, Adam, Adam,” she said, shaking her head in an expression of starry-eyed wonderment. “There’s just no way I can thank you—”

But there is!

“—enough. I’m so anxious and so tired.” Pause. “Could you show me where your futon is?”

“I’ll get it out, but you’re not sleeping on it. You’re my guest. You get the bed. I’m going to change the sheets and make it up for you.”

“No—”

“No no’s, Charlotte. This is my place, such as it is, and that’s the way I want it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I do have to, because that’s the way it’s got to be.”

She acceded, lowering her eyes and nodding Yes. Then she looked up at him, her eyes big and starry; she fixed them upon his face for what seemed like a very long time. His anticipation rose rose rose rose rose—

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Adam braced for this one. Oh, the bathroom’s out in the hall. Everybody else uses it, too. He tried to speak in a cool, offhand manner: “Oh, you just go out the door”—he nodded toward the entrance to the slot—“and it’s right next to it?—the first door on your left?” He failed. It occurred to him that he sounded like Charlotte, turning declarative sentences into questions.

In fact, she seemed oblivious to the sketchiness of his voice and the geographical implication of his instructions. She was long past caring about such things.

“Uhh…you might want to lock the bathroom door while you’re in there? Just in case?”

As soon as she went out the door, he hurriedly stripped the bed, throwing the random clothes in a pile on the floor, and made it up. His brain and nervous system were once again off in a wild synaptic and dendritic scramble. Yes…but what should he do? What dare he try?