Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“I’m not saying it’s because of him, Momma! It’s because of me.” The good daughter generously concedes that the buck stops here. “I guess I got too interested in him. You know? He’s very courteous and respectful, and the last thing he would do is try to take advantage—” She stopped, realizing that the fantastic leaps of logic—of illogic—she was making from sentence to sentence were as much of a clue as Momma needed. She charged off in a different direction. “I’m already making a complete turnaround, Momma. I’m setting up a discipline for myself. I’m—”

“Good. So far I haven’t understood one thing you’ve told me, not one thing, except you got terrible grades. When you decide to tell me what’s happened—what’s going on—then we can talk about it.” Momma’s voice was terribly controlled, which was somehow worse than testy or sarcastic. “Does Miss Pennington know about any of this?”

“No, Momma, she doesn’t. You think I should tell her?” Desperately, Charlotte hoped to receive…some low-voltage approval…for having come to Momma first.

“What are you going to tell her, Charlotte, the same as you told me?”

Charlotte couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.

“Sounds to me like what you need right now is a talk with your own soul, an honest talk.”

“I know, Momma.”

“Do you?…’Deed I do hope so.”

“I’m sorry, Momma.”

“Sorry don’t change a thing, darling. Never did, never will.”

Long pause. “I love you, Momma.” The last and lowest resort of the sinner.

“I love you, Charlotte, and so does your daddy and Buddy and Sam. And Aunt Betty…and Miss Pennington. You got a lot of folks you don’t want to be letting down.”

After they hung up, Charlotte sat stricken in her wooden chair, too empty to cry. She had thought it would be a relief to “get it over with.” It wasn’t a relief, and she had gotten nothing over with. She was an ungrateful coward and a liar. What she had accomplished was to egest a putrid, obvious lie.

She had even sunk so low as to pass off Adam Gellin, perhaps soon to be on television, as her boyfriend. Such a lie, such a lie, and to what earthly end? Momma wasn’t stupid. She hadn’t believed a word of it. All she found out for sure was that her little prodigy was, for some no doubt vile reason, a little liar.

“I probably shouldn’t be calling you, but I just had to tell you: you’re awesom, dude, awesome.” As the words came through the receiver of his cell phone, Adam purred. He had been purring a lot this morning. Calls! E-mails!—like a thousand e-mails! Letters slipped under the door! Even a couple of FedExes! He was high, high in the best way a human being could be high, high with the triumph…and high with vengeance satisfied, paid in full. Even this shithole he lived in…glowed as he looked about it, glowed like some…well, holy place…

Nevertheless, this particular call was special. He owed this guy…a lot.

“Thanks, Ivy,” he said into the cell phone. “That means a lot to me, coming from you. I couldn’t have—”

“What’s better than ‘awesome’?” said the exuberant voice. “ ‘Dynamite’ maybe? It was fucking dynamite, dude! Mission Ayyyy-complished. I wish you could come over and see the sonofabitch dragging his rotten fucking ass around this place. He hasn’t said a word about it, as far as I know, but body language says it all. That fucker’s gotten some baaaaaaad news.”

“You’re the one who’s dynamite, Ivy,” said Adam. “I gotta run off to this fucking press conference pretty soon, but I gotta ask you again, because I’ve racked my fucking brain, and I just—cannot—figure—out—how you got those documents from Pierce and Pierce and those tapes from your house there. How did you?”

The voice laughed heartily. “Some things it’s better you—especially you—don’t know. You know what I mean? Let’s just say there’s certain…friends of the family…who used to work at Gordon Hanley and have moved along to…let us say, other investment banks and who’ve—well, let’s just leave it at that. As for the tapes…let’s just say that most Saint Rays are above working with their hands and fooling around with wiring and shit, but every now and then, I guess, somebody comes along who—who—and I think I’ll leave that…at that. Do yourself a favor. Forget I even told you that much.”

“Look, Ivy,” said Adam, “I really do have to run, but we’ve got to get together sometime and let each other in on the complete war stories.”

“Great idea,” said Ivy. “Once all this shit blows over. I tell you what. I’ll take you to dinner some night at Il Babuino in Philadelphia. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s as good as any restaurant in New York, and it’s a place where you can hear each other talk. Also, I know there’s not a fucking soul in this house who feels rich enough to go there. Not even our Mr. Phipps.”

“Sounds great!”

“I’ll tell you about all the shit that the shitheads, the major shithead and the minor shithead—well, Phipps isn’t so bad—what the number-one shithead and his pals have dumped on me. I’ll tell you what they fucking did at this formal we had in Washington.”

“I know a little bit about that particular formal, Ivy.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, and I know a little bit about a girl named Gloria.”

“You’re shitting me! Well, obviously you aren’t. You’re too fucking much, Adam! You know everything!”

“Not everything, believe me…not everything, by a long shot. But hey! We can talk about that, too! Right now I really do have to get to this fucking press conference.”

As he lugged his bicycle down the narrow stairway, Adam repeated the words to himself. Not everything…not everything…He hadn’t known enough to hold on to Charlotte and make her love him the way he loved her. He could see her from yesterday as if she were still here today. Not even the greatest triumph of his life, not even an accomplishment of this magnitude, was enough to win Charlotte. There was not a more beautiful girl on this earth…

But he mustn’t let himself be so down right now. There was the press conference, and right after that, a whole segment on the Mike Flowers show on PBS. He just couldn’t believe this was all really happening! He couldn’t let himself wilt now.

Hoyt was drinking alone at the bar of the I.M. with the shell-backed bar stool slump of…the loser who comes to a bar and drinks alone.

Not that by the strictest of definitions one could have described Hoyt as alone. His peripheral vision detected yet another student he never saw before in his life approaching him…and now leaning over the empty seat beside him and saying, “You’re Hoyt Thorpe, right?”

Hoyt turned his head just far enough to get a glimpse of the guy, and he responded, “Yeah,” wearily, as if he had been asked the same question a thousand times already, which he had, or at least it seemed like that many. This guy was very tall and very bony and very pale and acne-scarred, and he had an ingratiating smile. He had grown one of those little stubbly patches of beard not on but underneath his chin. He was a tool, obviously.

“Aw-right!” the tool said. “You’re awesome, dude! I just wanted to tell you that!” So saying, he made a fist and put it practically in front of Hoyt’s nose. So Hoyt made a fist and touched the tool’s fist without even looking.

“Keep on truckin’!” the tool said with comradely warmth as he walked away. “Good stuff!”

Keep on truckin’…Good stuff…That was from Old School…Couldn’t you cram in any more cornball Cool into it?…you toolshed…

It was only nine-thirty, and the evening was just beginning to buzz at the I.M. Fortunately, it was too early for the band and the customary balls-to-the-wall excitement of being “out” at a bar. The sound system was playing CDs…Right now lonesome James Matthews and his lonesome guitar were singing and sighing that lonesome…ballad?—is that the word?—called “But It’s All Right.” It was a relief from the usual, in any case.