Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Damn. The library catalog computer cluster was mobbed. There were some twenty computers arranged in a horseshoe behind a low retaining wall of oak carved with High Gothic tracery, and he had to locate some volumes of British and American history, and all those computer screens glowing with twenty-first-century electronic jaundice behind grand fourteenth-century flourishes of conspicuous wood-sculptural waste were occupied. But wait a minute—in the very back corner, hard to spot, a screen with nobody sitting in front of it. He began speed-walking toward the cluster. If it wouldn’t have looked so totally dorky, he would have made a run for it. Barely fifteen feet away when—Shit!—a girl with long brown hair, looked like a kid, came in from the side and went straight to that one last screen.

His mind spun. He couldn’t afford to be his passive, play-by-the-rules self, not this time. Besides, the girl looked so young. Unless his judgment was seriously off, she would be the sweet, pliant type who gives way to avoid friction. He entered the bull pen. It was packed with the hunched-over backs of students clattering away on the keyboards. The glow of the screens gave their faces a sickly dry-ice pallor. Resolute, he marched up to the girl, who was already seated, and said:

“Excuse me, but I was getting ready to use that one”—he gestured toward the screen—“when you cut in front of me, and I mean, I’ve got to use it.” He spoke as sternly as he could. “I’ve got a paper due in the morning. How about letting me use it for just a minute? Okay? Do you mind? How about it?”

He stood right over the girl. Stern insistence; no smile. She looked up at him warily, a touch of fear in her eyes, studied his face, deliberated, and finally managed to say in a frightened little voice, “Yes.”

“Grrrrreat! Thanks! Hey, I really appreciate it.” He let his face soften for the first time.

The girl hesitated again and then said in the same small voice, “I meant yes I do mind.”

She didn’t move, she didn’t change her expression, and he couldn’t stare her down. Her big blue eyes were fixed on his face. She wouldn’t budge.

It was he who wilted, as a flood of impressions swept over him all at once. The way she pronounced the i in I and mind—Iiii meant yes Iiii do miiind—a flat, drawn-out way that made him think of one of those Southern racial-conflict-turned-racial-amity movies where everybody sings “Amazing Grace” at the end. She wasn’t pliant, wouldn’t yield in the slightest, and she was beautiful in a way he wasn’t used to seeing, not in the slutty atmosphere of Turning Boys On at Dupont. She had an absolutely clear, open, guileless beauty. A graceful neck, big wondering eyes, no earrings, no eye makeup, no lip gloss—and such perfectly formed, untouched lips they were! Virginal…that was the only word for this sort of face. And she wouldn’t give an inch.

It was he who became pliant. “Well…” He lapsed into a weak, ingratiating smile. “Okay if I just stand here and wait till you’re through?”

The girl said, “All right.” Came out allriot.

“Thanks. I promise I won’t hover or anything.” Bigger ingratiating smile. “By the way, I’m Adam.”

About eleven o’clock the next night, Charlotte happened to be standing by the window in her pajamas and bathrobe, taking a break from medieval history, when a round of shrieks and manly laughs erupted in the courtyard below. Not that there was anything unusual about that; various adolescent cries were part of the ambient sound of Little Yard. But this time she peered down and searched the darkness. There had been a shower earlier, and the ground gave off a damp, ionized smell. Was it just girls and boys or girls with boys? She wanted to see them, but the lamps on the perimeter of the courtyard and the light from the windows across the way were hopeless against the gloom.

Now the cries were echoing in the big tunnel-like corridor that led from the courtyard out to the street. It definitely sounded like girls with boys. Moreover, they were leaving, going out, and it was eleven p.m. on a Thursday. What easy, sly, glib, coquettish charm did you have to have? She thought of the blond giant, who she had since learned was some sort of celebrated basketball player. She could still see the way the veins wrapped around his huge forearms. He was so sure of himself, and he had wanted her to go with him somewhere…The boy last night in the library, the one who was so rude and hostile one minute and suddenly came on to her the next—there was nothing frightening about him, and he wasn’t bad-looking, but he seemed so devious. He was totally manipulative and opportunistic.

She remained standing by the window, imagining she could still hear the songs of other students’ happiness heading off into the unimaginable world of “going out.” Her pity for herself knew no bounds…no longer had any home whatsoever…just a tiny room poisonous with the scorn of a tall, skinny, sarcastic, snobbish Groton girl who wouldn’t be caught dead having a normal conversation with some nobody of a country girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains…a bathroom where she could find only the opposite of privacy…the intrusion…the vulgar affront!…of bands of adolescent boys who gloried in the noxious noises and smells of bowel movements—gloried in them!—groaned, strained audibly, sighed ostentatiously with satisfaction, laughed at basso pig-bladdery blasts from the rectum and things that went plop or poot, and shouted running commentaries glorifying their own adolescent grossness.

She turned away from the window and became aware of the happy, noisy—drunken?—traffic of boys and girls in the hallway outside her door. She could hear the simpleminded chords and percussion of a CD somebody was playing too loud…Well, they could all go on living from impulse to impulse. Self-discipline was one of the things that had always made Charlotte Simmons…Charlotte Simmons…that, and her power of concentration. She had a medieval history test in the morning, and it was time to return to her desk for a final thirty minutes over the pages of Blue-eyed Bondage: Caucasian Chattel Slavery in Northern Europe in the Early Middle Ages.

Could have been lively, this book…the part about how Welshmen were sold as slaves on the Dublin slave market, so many, in fact, that the Old English word for slave was walsea—Welshman—just as the word slave came from the Slavs the Germans routinely kidnapped and pressed into forced labor…but it was so pedantic…lying there on the desk under her nose reflecting light, thanks to the cheap, slick paper university publishers printed pedantic books on…on…on the other hand they had singled her out on their own…No matter what they were like, the blond giant and the dark-haired conniver, they had been attracted, hadn’t they, they had noticed something about her…and they liked it…But why kid herself? Two wholly accidental encounters lasting a few blinks of the eye…What on earth could they do for a girl who was so lonely!

“Ohmygod, ohmygod…Seriously…Me?…Me, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction…” A girl’s voice just outside the door—Beverly.

The door opened, and in she came. As usual, she had her head cocked, the cell phone at her ear, and her eyes cast down and to the side toward some point in midair that didn’t exist. Walking in behind her was another girl, a blonde. Quite striking she was, thanks to her fine square jaws. Without really looking at Charlotte, Beverly flashed a smile and gave a distracted wave by way of acknowledging her roommate’s presence by the window. She removed her lips from the cell phone just long enough to gesture behind her at the blonde and say, “Charlotte…Erica,” whereupon she sat her skin and bones down on the edge of her bed and poured herself back into the little black device.