Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte had barely reached the landing when Adam’s door swung open. He had obviously been waiting at the very peephole. He stood in the doorway with one of his synthetic green blankets wrapped around him like a cape. His cheeks were gaunt and ashen, and his eyes were a perfect picture of fear. Before she knew what was happening, his arms shot out from beneath the blanket. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in unfortunate shades of hallway green, Rust-Oleum brown, and book-mailer-stuffing gray. He embraced her, causing the blanket to fall to the floor. It wasn’t the embrace a boy gives a girl. It was the one Studs Lonigan gave his mother in the doorway when he came home to die, as best Charlotte could remember the book.

“Charlotte…oh Charlotte!…You came…”

She was afraid he’d want to kiss her. But he put his head on her shoulder and made a moaning sound. He hung on for dear life. It was all awkward. Charlotte didn’t know where to put her hands. Embrace him likewise? Cradle his head? Everything she could think of, he might take the wrong way. So she said, “Adam…come on, let’s go inside. Let’s get out of the doorway.”

So they went inside, which at least got her free of the embrace. She took off her puffy jacket and sat down on the edge of the bed, which was a tortured mess. Adam immediately sat down beside her and began to put his arm around her. Charlotte jumped up and fetched Adam’s folding deck chair, the one with the aluminum frame and the wide bands of Streptolon webbing in a plaid pattern that looked even cheaper than his shirt’s. She unfolded it and sat down as fast as she could. Adam, still on the edge of the bed, stared at her as if she had abandoned and rejected him.

“Adam,” Charlotte said with just a touch of sternness, “you have to pull yourself together.”

“I know!” said Adam, close to tears. Then he hung his head. “I know, I know…I’m having a—I don’t know anymore!” He left his head hanging that way, his chin touching his collarbone.

Charlotte switched to talking as calmly, softly, tenderly, maternally as she could. “I can’t do anything, Adam, until you tell me what’s happened.”

Adam slowly raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were bleary with tears, but at least he wasn’t crying. In a morosely low voice he said, “I’ve been destroyed, is what’s happened.”

Charlotte stuck to tender and maternal: “How?”

Adam went into a long but reasonably calm and straightforward account of his blighted strategy and his disastrous appointment with Mr. Quat. He looked straight at Charlotte and fought back his despair with deep breaths and sighs. “He wants to make”—deep breath, sigh—“an example. That means he wants to”—deep breath, sigh—“have me thrown out of school. But even if I’m merely—” He looked away and said, “Hah. Merely…” He looked back at Charlotte. “Even if I’m suspended is all…‘all’…that happens, the result is the same. I’ll have a suspension—for cheating—on my transcript. There goes the Rhodes. There goes graduate school even, which was my last resort. There goes any decent job, even teaching high school. What’s left of me?” Deep breath, hopeless sigh. “There goes my big story in tomorrow’s Wave. It’ll be discredited, nullified, ignored. ‘Written by a plagiarist’…‘a despicable smear job’…They’ll hate me. That’s all I’ll get out of that story.” Utterly forlorn, he hung his head again.

Charlotte said, “What story, Adam? Who’s going to hate you.”

Adam looked at her again, this time with his brow contorted and his eyebrows lopsided. “It’s about Hoyt Thorpe.”

Charlotte felt her tender, maternal face jerk alert. She was so startled, it must have registered upon Adam, even in his current state.

“It’s about how the governor of California bribed him to keep his mouth shut about the Night of the Skull Fuck. I tell the whole story. One of the most powerful Republicans in the country will want my head. He can have it…That wouldn’t be as bad as having all of Dupont University despising me, students, alumni, faculty, administration, employees…”

“Why employees?” said Charlotte.

“Why?” Deep breath. With a profound collapsing sigh: “I don’t know…I don’t remember…so you agree about the rest of them, though. That’s what you really mean.”

“That’s not what I said,” said Charlotte.

“But that’s what you mean, obviously.”

In fact, she wasn’t even thinking about “all of Dupont,” only about Hoyt. She was frantically crunching this information to figure out what it would mean for him. Why? She couldn’t have come up with a rational explanation if she had tried. Who stood to get hurt was Hoyt…and Jojo. That gave her a start, too.

“What was Jojo’s reaction to all this?” she said.

Adam lowered his head again and put his fingers over his eyes and face. In a muffled voice: “I haven’t told him.”

“He doesn’t even know? You have to call him, Adam! You told Mr. Quat everything. Isn’t that true? You’ve—you’ve got to let Jojo know that.”

His head still in his hands, Adam began moaning. “Oh, shit…shit, shit, shit…Jojo…I was so sure Mr. Quat would drop the whole case. I thought I was doing Jojo a favor.”

“But you didn’t tell him about it ahead of time.”

Adam shook his head no with his hands still covering his face. “Oh, shit…shit…shit…How can I tell him? He’ll kill me. He’s done for, the big bastard. Even if they don’t kick him out, he’s…finished…” More moans. “He’ll miss this whole season, and if he doesn’t play this season—if he’s suspended for cheating—it won’t matter what he does in his senior year. He’ll kill me, he’ll kill me.” Moans…pathetic moans.

He was close to whimpering. Charlotte had the terrible premonition he was about to break down in some uncontrollable way. She got up from the deck chair and went to the bed and stood over him. She put her hand on his shoulder and bent down until her face was barely six inches from his, which remained slumped over to a morbid degree. In the softest, tenderest tone she could, she said, “Jojo’s not going to kill you. He’ll understand. He’ll know you meant only the best. He’ll know you were trying to help him, too. You took what you thought was a good chance, but it didn’t work. He’ll understand what you were doing.”

Adam began shaking his bowed head so rapidly and with such a pathetic chorus of moans, Charlotte couldn’t help but wonder if he had ever taken Jojo into consideration at all.

Adam took his hands away from his face, but if anything, he hung his head still lower, until his back was humped over like an arch. His eyes were shut tight. He began trembling. The trembling turned into the shakes. His teeth began chattering. You could hear them.

“Put your arm around me, Charlotte,” he said in a pitiful way. “I’m so cold.”

So she sat down on the bed and put her arm around him and wondered what was coming next. He didn’t look at her or at anything else. He began shaking terribly.

“Please…bring me a blanket. I’m freezing.”

Charlotte stood up, walked toward the doorway, and fetched the blanket from the floor. It was a sickly green. The material was so stiff, so unnaturally dry, so cheaply synthetic, so synthetically horripilate, she could scarcely bear to touch it. Nevertheless, she brought it back to Adam. Slumped over this way, he looked like the sculpture of that Indian, the sculpture called The End of the Trail. The Indian is on his horse at the edge of a cliff with nowhere else to go. Indian civilization has come to an end. The white man has exterminated it. That picture, which she had seen in an American history textbook, had always fascinated her…and made her so sad. She draped the blanket over Adam’s narrow shoulders. When he reached up to pull it closed over his chest, his hand touched hers. His was as cold as ice.