Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

He was in the same state of confusion when she returned. When he turned toward her, she gave him a tender, almost fearful—glorious! glorious!—smile, then once more threw her arms around his rib cage and pressed one side of her face into his chest, and eagerly, eagerly, he embraced her. He took a stray shot at pressing his mons pubis against hers, but he couldn’t find it.

“Oh, Adam, Adam, Adam”—he could feel her jaw muscles moving on his sternum—“someday I’ll know how to tell you—I’ll know how to explain…Last night I prayed to God. I prayed to God to come take me away in the night. But I couldn’t sleep, and God will only come take you in your sleep. You’re a good person, Adam. I’m sure you don’t know what it is like to have so led your life that you will never sleep—”

“Shhhhh. Come on, Charlotte, don’t keep flagellating yourself. You haven’t done anything wrong! You’ve been done wrong to, that’s all.”

She released her grip around him and straightened up. But he still had his arms around her, and she was looking up at him. This was the moment—for a soulful, lingering kiss—but that wasn’t a take my lips look she was giving him. She was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “I didn’t mean—I can’t let myself fall to pieces like this and expect you—”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I wish I could explain it all. I’m like…desolate, Adam. You’ve pulled me back from…like an edge. Thank God it was you I hit with that door.” That made her smile…oh so wanly.

“Then I guess we both thank God,” said Adam. He figured that gave her an opening as big as the moon.

She looked up into his eyes searchingly. “I need to try to sleep.” She glanced toward the bed. “I’m so tired. But you don’t have to turn the lights off. If you want to stay up, that’s okay. It won’t make any difference.”

If you want to stay up, that’s okay—it won’t make any difference? Adam took this poorly. He abandoned his embrace. “Oh, by all means!” he said, gesturing toward the bed with his palm up, as if making a formal presentation. “Your bed awaits you.”

He said it with just a shade of irony, which she didn’t get, obviously. She immediately turned, headed for the bed, and got in without undressing. She pulled the covers way up.

Pouting a bit, Adam proceeded to slide the futon out from under the bed and prepare to turn in. The damned thing was covered in dust, which he instinctively blamed on Charlotte, who had accepted the bed after first saying she wouldn’t.

He made a point of not looking at her, but then she said, “Adam? Oh, Adam, I’ll never be able to thank you—you’ve saved my life tonight—saved—my—life, Adam…I’ll never forget thi-i-i-i-i-”—she was sobbing—“i-i-is…Oh, Adam! Don’t leave me…”

He said, “Everything’s okay, Charlotte. I’m right here. Try to sleep.” He didn’t say it as warmly, let alone as lovingly, as he might have.

He turned away, swept the dust off the damned futon, threw a couple of ratty old blankets on it, folded up his damned North Face jacket to use as a pillow, turned off the damned lights, stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts in the dark, stretched out on the damned futon, expelled a big, noisy hangdog sigh, and went to sleep…

The clinic! Great honor! Poor, anorexic girls—pale, bony girls with barely any mammary capacity at all—reaching out to him with their paper-pale, bony arms…Before him: a pale, pale starveling with a potbelly the size of a cantaloupe—asking why? Why? Why? Simple, said the distinguished consultant—who was himself! You’re beginning to eat now, and your body is storing fat where it can draw upon it fastest, which is there—your belly. A beautiful girl behind him—he couldn’t see her but he knew she was beautiful—said in a soft, kind voice, “But that’s not true, Adam…Adam?…Adam?…Adam!…Adam!”—

He woke up in the dark.

“Adam!”—such anguish in her voice. As he ascended from the hypnopompic depths and reached the surface, he realized that it was Charlotte, and she was up on the bed and he was down here on the floor, on the futon.

“Adam!”

“What is it?”

“I—don’t—know—what’s happening!” The words were coming in spurts. “Please—hold me! Please—hold me!”

What time was it? Here in the dark of the night, he had no idea. He threw back the blankets on the futon and knelt by the bed. He could feel the mattress shaking as soon as his chest touched it.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t—know…Hold me—Adam.”

She was lying on her side, facing him. That was all he could make out in the dark. He leaned forward and slipped one arm under her neck and wrapped the other around her shoulder. She was shaking like someone with a fever.

“Adam, I’m so—get in beside me. Lie next to me. Please! I’m so frightened!”

“Next to you?”

“Yes! Hold me in my skin! I’m trying to get out of my skin! Please!”

Baffled, excited, bewildered, thrilled, he got into the bed, and his knees pressed against the undersides of her thighs. She had rolled over, so that her back was to him.

She continued to shake terribly. “Hold me! I don’t know what’s happening! Oh God, please! Put your arms around me!”

So he did. His chest was pressed up against her back. He could feel the snap of her bra. His head was behind her. She kept shaking.

“Oh God—closer…Put your legs under my legs—please!”

She had curled into a fetal position. He had to lift his knees to make contact with the undersides of her thighs again. It was as if he were a chair lying on its side, and she was sitting in it.

He felt no more lust at all. She was finally in his bed, and she was a wreck. Her body was rigid.

“Hold me tighter, Adam…Keep me in my skin…Tighter…”

It was some time before the shaking stopped and her muscles relaxed and her breathing became normal, more or less. During that time, his thoughts raced. Hoyt Thorpe had done this to her. Adam reduced the guy to a coward begging for mercy in a variety of ways. One time he had him in a full nelson, which was illegal in college wrestling, and he gave him a choice of surrendering or having his neck broken. You don’t believe me, you pathetic little shit? Try a little of this…His fingers intertwined behind Hoyt Thorpe’s neck, he forced his head down down down until he screamed, begged, and whimpered for mercy.

Meanwhile, he held the girl he loved in his arms and pressed his body against hers, to keep her inside her very hide.

They stayed that way for a long time. Even after he ran out of ways to maim Hoyt Thorpe, Adam continued to think of what the frat boy had done…the barbarity of it…the evil. It was not cool for a Millennial Mutant to regard Evil as an absolute, but as he held this girl in his arms, he knew that in fact it was.

At that very moment, about 2:45 a.m., that very person, Hoyt Thorpe, was in the library with Vance and Julian. He was in his chair knocking back a can of beer, but mainly he was riding into the night on a few lines of cocaine he had sucked up into his nose through a straw. The exhilaration always made him feel more than ever like a born leader of the warrior class. It also did wonders for his imagination, he was convinced, like those French poets who smoked hashish or something, although he never could think of their names. The one sure thing was that it made him very voluble.

“…fucking Stand Up Straight for Gay Day. Straight Up the Brown Canal Day is more fucking like it…and they want everyone on campus, ‘straight or gay’—gay…which is spelled ‘straight up the Hershey highway’—they want everybody to wear blue jeans to show ‘solidarity.’ So I say, let’s show ’em some solidarity.” He extended his middle finger. “I say we all turn up at Stand Up Straight for Gay Day wearing khaki shorts. Can’t you fucking picture that?” Eyes aglitter, he looked to Vance and Julian for approval of this inspiration.