Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Hold me—please hold me, Charlotte.” His eyes remained squeezed shut.

Charlotte put her arm around him again and pulled him close. He was shaking and chattering so violently, she thought he must have the flu. She put her other hand on his forehead…Whatever else he had, he didn’t have a fever.

“I’m—I’ve got to lie down.” With that, he let the upper half of his body flop onto the bed. His legs were twisted, but his feet still touched the floor. His eyes remained shut tight. Charlotte lifted his legs and swung them onto the bed. They were so light, his legs…She slipped his leather moccasins off. Now he was stretched out on a turmoil of wrenched and twisted bedclothes and blankets, a crumpled clear polyurethane bag from the cleaners with the bill stapled on it, abandoned underwear, socks, a T-shirt, the innards of a two-day-old copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Part of the blanket Charlotte had fetched for him was under his head and shoulders, but the rest was flopped down over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Charlotte retrieved it once more and made up the bed on top of him as best she could. Adam’s eyes were closed, and she hoped he was falling asleep; but with the next breath he said, “Charlotte, I’m so cold.”

“I’ve put your sheets and blanket on top of you. You’ll start feeling warmer.”

“No, hold me,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to hold me. I’m so cold. I’m afraid, Charlotte!”

Charlotte stared down at him for a moment. Adam was shaking and chattering to beat the band. That left only one thing. She took her Keds off and got under the covers with him, still in her jeans, socks, and sweatshirt. She embraced him from behind and pressed her body up against his back, just the way he had held her. He shook and rattled, but gradually his torment subsided.

When she got up to turn off the lights, he began pleading in a groggy voice, “No…no…Charlotte…don’t go away. I’m begging you! Don’t leave me alone. Hold me. You’re all I’ve got left.”

So she turned off the lights and got back into bed with him. As long as she held him, his breathing was regular. There they were in the dark. Both of her arms were around him. The circulation in the arm under him seemed to be cut off. She whispered, “Are you asleep?”

“No.” The voice of doom.

She knew he was staring wide-eyed and terrified into a black hole. She knew all about that.

She held him that way all night. She sank into naps now and again. Somehow he could tell. She would wake up to him saying, “Hold me. Please don’t leave me.”

After a while it became pretty tiresome being mother to someone like this. But she was repaying a steep debt. Adam had kept encouraging her, and he had brought her back from the depths. But Adam—she couldn’t think of anything to encourage him with.

She was holding a truly doomed boy—and then she thought of Jojo—and then she thought of Hoyt. This poor weak boy she held—he was like some kind of insipid Samson. He had brought the temple crashing down on everybody.

Hoyt came out of Phillips onto the Great Yard so angry, he was muttering to himself loudly enough for people to hear. At this particular moment, heading up the sidewalk that bordered the Yard, he had just become the prissy, fluty, faggoty, “sophisticated” voice of that little fucker Mr. Quat. “ ‘I’m not trying to cast doubt on your sincerity, Mr. Thorpe. I’m sure you’re all too sincere. I’m merely suggesting that unconsciously or otherwise you’ve cobbled together several rather weary nostrums of the religious right and presented them as an argument. And that would be tiresome coming from any one.’”

On a walkway that crossed the Yard diagonally past the Saint Christopher’s Fountain and in the direction of Mr. Rayon, he switched to his own voice: “Yeah? And I’m merely suggesting that you’re Jesus with his head cut off, flapping around squawking, ‘Tolerance! Tolerance! Tolerance for the meek so they can inherit the earth!’ and you don’t even know it. You think you’re some brave little intellectual Jew who’s above all this God shit.” That’s what he should have told him. But the fucker would hardly let him say any-thing…Mr. Jerome Quat and his “intellectual” “wit”: “ ‘We value freedom of speech and the play of differing viewpoints here at Dupont, Mr. Thorpe, but may I suggest that in the interest of time, we postpone this particular rant of yours? You can deliver it immediately after class, and I’m sure all who want to hear it will gather round.’ Fat, scarce-haired motherfucker…”

Students were staring at him as they passed by, but how would they know if he was talking to himself or not? Everybody on the whole campus sounded like he was talking to himself. Everybody had his head keeled over into the palm of his hand talking on his cell phone. The what?—four or five percent?—who didn’t walk around the campus with the usual cell phone had the kind with a microphone below the chin and an earpiece so small you had to look for it if you wanted to see it. They’d think that’s what he had, and if they didn’t—fuck’m.

Well, he had gone and shot himself in the ass again, hadn’t he…That obese, bald-headed little pisser Mr. Jerome Quat would have the last laugh. He’d give him a lousy grade. But how could the rest of them sit there and just listen to this PC shit and not say anything? Fucking sheep…they just swallow the sheep shit he gives them and regurgitate it every time he asks a question. If that’s all you do, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it yourself or not. It ends up being the only “proper” shit to say, and so you keep on saying it because why not be proper and not the kind of person you can’t invite anywhere because he might introduce a fart into a proper conversation.

As he passed the Saint Christopher’s Fountain—that magnificent piece of sculpture—what was the name of the Frenchman who did it?—a fucking genius that guy—was there another campus in the country with a piece of sculpture that great?—no, there was nothing even close—“I’m a Dupont man—I’m imbued with all the strength and all the beauty and all the traditions of that great figure—what’s it made of?—bronze, I guess—copper?—nahhhh—has to be bronze”—Hoyt cooled down. There was no way Quat could hurt him now. He wasn’t going to have to take a hopeless elevator up to every goddamn investment banking firm in the country trying to explain away his college transcript, which barked like a dog, so he could get a job. Miracles happen, his dad had once told him. “They happen to those who are already ready to roll. No lucky man is simply lucky. He’s the man who recognizes Fortune the moment he looks her in the face.” Hoyt Thorpe, a Dupont man, Hoyt Thorpe, a Saint Ray, had been ready, locked and loaded, and the miracle had come. Hoyt Thorpe had a job waiting for him, Mr. Jerome Quat or not, and not some flickering-fluorescent-lit cold-call boiler room in Chicago or Cleveland, either, but with the mightiest of the mighty, Pierce & Pierce, in New York. Ninety-five thousand a year to start—to start—with no limit in sight. It was hard for him to believe it himself…but he had it made.

It was cold out in the Yard whenever a gust of wind blew across the icy crust of the snow that remained. He buttoned up his overcoat. Given a choice, he preferred leaving it open. In the wintertime this was the Saint Ray look, the coolest look on campus: ankle-high boots, khaki pants with no crease, a bulky-knit crewneck sweater, a flannel shirt open at the throat—and on top of all that, a navy melton-cloth overcoat like this one, single-breasted, long, reaching down well below the knees, lined in navy silk, the kind of coat that would be perfectly correct with a tuxedo, too. It was the contrast between the casual stuff and the dressy look of the topcoat that made it so cool. You possessed the full give-a-shit freedom of youth, the MasterCard license, and at the same time you knew about the ultimate sway of the other world, an older world of money and power, two things that had excitements all their own. A coat like this one cost a thousand dollars at Ralph Lauren. Hoyt got his for forty-five dollars in a secondhand clothing store in South Philadelphia called Play It Again, Sam’s. Now, that was cool. The long, single-breasted coat gave you a tall, lean, glamorous silhouette. You were fairly bursting with the sexual power of the first ten years following puberty—and at the same time you already knew where the rice bowl was. Hoyt had once heard a friend of his dad’s, an old guy with a florid face, say that. Hoyt couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine at the time, but he always remembered the old guy saying, “I’m too old, too fat, and I drink too much—but I always know where the rice bowl is.”