Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

While Charlotte stared at Blue-eyed Bondage and seethed, Beverly changed clothes rapidly. Charlotte could hear her groaning and saying Oh shit and breathing hard. The room became brighter. Beverly must have turned on her vanity mirror. There was a waft of perfume.

Presently Charlotte was aware that Beverly was standing just behind her.

“Well, Charlotte, bye-bye.”

Charlotte looked up. Beverly had done something amazing with her face. Mauve-purple shading and pencil liner and mascara or something made her eyes stand out like two big jewels. At the same time, she had somehow whitened the creases below the lower lids. Her lips were their natural color, but they glistened. Charlotte couldn’t imagine how she had done it, but she looked sexy and, more than that, provocative. Erica was finally deigning to gaze upon Charlotte…benevolently, the way you might bestow a moment’s attention upon some deserving urchin.

“Have a good time,” said Charlotte. Tiiiime. She said it without a trace of a smile or a note of goodwill. No doubt the resentment showed on her face. She should have been cool about it, of course, and acted breezily congenial, but she couldn’t begin to summon up the artful hypocrisy required to do it.

As the pair went through the door, Charlotte could see Erica leaning in toward Beverly’s ear and moving her square jaws. No doubt she was whispering, “What’s her problem?”

After they had gone, Charlotte got up from the desk and headed back toward the window to catch them laughing at her expense as they went out into the courtyard. But why lacerate herself like that? She stopped and stood there in the middle of the room instead, staring at Beverly’s vanity mirror, which was still on. Where were they going at this hour? Who would they see? Boys…and what would Beverly talk to boys about? Her ass? Would she talk that same way to boys? And to think that one of the bonuses, supposedly, of being so brilliant as to be admitted to Dupont was that I, Charlotte Simmons, will now ascend forever above the cheap, sordid, vulgar milieu and aimless vices of the Regina Coxes and the Channing Reeveses. What exactly did Beverly expect to achieve with a cerise silk shirt open down to there?

Charlotte went over to Beverly’s vanity mirror and studied her face under its hot little lights. Then she went to Beverly’s closet and opened the door and studied herself in Beverly’s full-length mirror. She wasn’t merely smarter than Beverly, she was prettier. There was something emaciated about Beverly…There was something…sick…about all of Beverly.

Charlotte returned to the desk and took another look at Blue-eyed Bondage. It was either that or contend with the juvenile noxiousness and pseudo-macho foul mouths of the privileged late-teenage American males in the courtyard below and the hallway outside…and the bathroom down the hall.

Upside down she was, way down here, a band of light across the ceiling, and something had her by the shoulder, shaking it, shaking it—

“Charlotte! Charlotte! Charlotte!” Barely above a whisper, but it wouldn’t stop.

Charlotte turned her head toward it and tried to prop herself up on one elbow. A wall of light streamed through a crack in the doorway and backlit the thin, bony silhouette leaning over her.

“Charlotte! Wake up! Wake up! You gotta do me a favor!” The low, urgent voice of a close confidante. Beverly.

Charlotte managed to raise herself on both elbows. She groaned and tried to adjust her eyes to the light and make sense of things. “What time is it?”

Same low, intimate voice, as if they were the very closest of roommates: “Two, two-thirty, I don’t know. It’s not late. I need a big, big favor from you.” Billows of alcohol.

“I was sleeping,” said Charlotte. It was a complaint, but she realized it came out sounding like merely a foggy statement of the obvious.

“I know, and I’m really sorry, but you gotta help me just this one time, Charlotte.” Now Beverly was massaging her shoulder, the one she had just been shaking. “Just this one time,” she said. “I promise I’ll never ask you again, I promise.” Her voice was so urgent.

Charlotte remained propped up on her elbow, stupefied, hypnopompic. “One time…what?”

The same hushed, urgent tone: “There’s this guy—Harrison—please don’t let me down. I really, really like him. Ever since we got here—you know what I mean, Charlotte!”

Beverly had sunk to her knees by the bed, so that her head was almost even with Charlotte’s. Billows and billows of alcohol. Her eyes seemed enormous…ablaze in the sockets of a skull. Charlotte turned away.

“Charlotte!”

Charlotte looked at her roommate again. The shaft of light from the hallway made her dizzy. It came from directly behind Beverly and created brilliant highlights on the shoulders of her silk shirt. The shirt was scarcely buttoned at all.

“I need to bring him up here. I really do. You’ve gotta, gotta, gotta help me out! How about sleeping somewhere else? Just this one time? I promise I’ll never ask you to do this again. Char lotte!” Beverly closed her eyes, thrust her chin upward, stretching out her neck, brought her fists up beside her cheeks, and shook them in the vibrating gesture that is supposed to convey desperate supplication among chums.

Bewildered: “I have a test tomorrow!”

“You can sleep next door, in Joanne and Hillary’s room! They have a futon.”

“How? I hardly even know them!”

“I know them. They’ll understand. People do it all the time.”

“I have a test! I need to sleep!”

Beverly turned her head aside and went Unnhhhh! in a way that made clear her astonishment that anyone on this earth could be so dense and uncooperative, so ignorant of the most ordinary protocol. Then she looked Charlotte in the eye and, in a voice that indicated she was doing her very best to keep her temper in check, said to her, “Charlotte, listen to me. You’re not gonna lose any sleep. You’ll lie down on that futon, and you won’t be awake three seconds. Please. Do I have to beg you? It’s not a big thing. I gotta have the room. Come…on, Charlotte! Can’t you do this one little thing for me? I’d do it for you.”

Charlotte could feel her willpower weakening. She was so groggy. Beverly was drunk, but she had somehow established the notion, by the way she put it rather than what she said, that to refuse such a request was to expose yourself as ignorant of the most elementary etiquette—or else stubborn or even spiteful, a willful violator of the unwritten rules of life among college women.

Charlotte pushed herself up to a sitting position. She knew she should say no, she knew there was no reason why she should give up a night’s sleep on the eve of a test in a difficult course, give up her very bed—yet she heard herself saying, “Whose futon is it? I don’t know either one of them.” With that, of course, she had already given in.

“Hillary’s, I think,” said Beverly, rushing to reinforce her advantage. “Ask Hillary, but it won’t matter. Hillary—Joanne—but ask Hillary. They’ll like totally understand, either one.”

Slowly, dizzily, and with the sinking feeling that she had just suffered a great defeat through sheer inability to stand her ground, Charlotte slid her legs off the bed, fished about for her slippers with her feet, and wriggled into her bathrobe.

“All you have to do is knock on the door,” said Beverly. “Hillary’s like totally awesome, she’s so great about everything. She’ll do anything for anybody, she’s so great—” The hushed words gushed out in a flood aimed at sweeping her wavering roommate right out the door.

Which they did. Without knowing how it happened, Charlotte found herself out in the hall, petrified at the thought of knocking on the door of somebody she barely knew at two-thirty or whatever it was in the morning. This Hillary had never struck Charlotte as the charitable type. She had a shrill voice and such an affected accent that Charlotte had thought she must be from England or something. In fact, she was from New York City, and about every time Charlotte had ever heard her say anything, she had worked the phrase “at St. Paul’s” into the conversation. St. Paul’s, Charlotte had deduced, was a boarding school much like Groton.