Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Charlotte stood there for a moment, trying to work up some courage and despising herself for being weak. Somewhere down the hall a monotonous, drawling rap CD—“Yo’, you take my testi-culls…Suck ’em like a popsi-cull”—not terribly loud but loud enough to hear out here in the hall. She looked this way and that, halfway expecting to see the boy, the one Beverly was so eager for. Instead, here came two boys and three girls, laughing as if fun couldn’t get any more intense. One of the boys kept saying in a put-on deep voice, “Your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.” Laughter, laughter, laughter. When they saw Charlotte standing there, they grew quiet. As they came by, they looked her up and down. Bathrobe, full set of pajamas, snuggy slippers…After they passed, one of the boys said, “Oh-kaaaayyyy,” and they all started laughing again.

The laughter, the mockery of that Oh-kaaaayyyy, struck Charlotte in her very solar plexus and invaded her body, her very neural pathways. She had just suffered a catastrophic defeat without fighting back. She had let herself be thrown out of her own bed, her own room, and that was all she had at the eminent Dupont, a bed in one half of a miserable room. All she had left now were the pajamas, slippers, and bathrobe she had on to cover her naked body—and somehow they made her an object of ridicule by total strangers. Charlotte Simmons! Her own name cried out inside her skull. Nothing! All that was…Charlotte Simmons…had been scoured out, and all that was left was this…this…this husk…dead but too helpless to fall down the way it should…it stands here to be mocked! Utter defeat…a feeling that immediately gave way to a desperate loneliness…not mere emotion but a condition, an affliction…Lethe! Oblivion! Not one soul to turn to—

—which left Hillary, next door, whom she didn’t even know. She took a deep breath and approached the door of 514. She took another breath, hesitated, and then knocked. Nothing. She knocked harder. From within, a boy’s voice said, apparently to somebody else in there, “Who the fuck is that?”

Dismay—but she didn’t know what else to do. She put her mouth close to the door. Softly: “Hillary, Hillary.” Nothing. Whispery but much louder: “Hillary! Hillary!” Nothing. “It’s Charlotte! From next door! Beverly’s roommate! I need—”

“Go away!”

That was Hillary. There was no mistaking that voice. She didn’t sound like the awesome person Beverly had described, the one who would do anything for anybody, but what alternative was there? “Hillary—please, can I—”

“I said GO AWAY!”

The boy was saying, “Who the fuck is that?”

Charlotte couldn’t believe it. She was stranded out in the hall, and she had a medieval history test in the morning. Crone was a very exacting professor. She had to get some sleep, but where?

“Yo, take my johnson…Knock it on some fox’s box, my cock, sucker, I’m the fucker you forgot…” The CD rapper droned on.

She abandoned 514 and stood in front of 512. Wait a minute. Two guys lived in 512. She moved on to 510. Two girls lived in there. She didn’t even know their names. But what else was there to do? She knocked on the door. Nothing. Please, God! She knocked louder. She knocked still louder. Nothing. She turned the doorknob and pushed gently. The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open far enough to stick her head in. A slice of light entered the room. A girl groaned and turned over. There was a girl asleep on each bed, and there was one on a futon on the floor. Charlotte recognized her. It was Joanne, Hillary’s roommate. Obviously Hillary had forced Joanne out the same way Beverly had forced her out. Charlotte was conscious of her heart rattling away in her rib cage. She was beside herself. She had a test in the morning—and no place to go, no place to sleep. She was stranded out in a hallway in her nightclothes at two-thirty a.m., all because somehow another girl’s desire to bring a boy up to the room in the middle of the night took precedence over everything else.

Where could she go to even get off her feet? The R.A., Ashley…It was two-thirty, but that was what R.A.’s existed for, wasn’t it—to help?

In the elevator on the way down, she tried to think of how she might put it, and the truth of the matter hit her. She could see Ashley’s wild hair and the thong panties lying on the floor. What a naïve little child Ashley must have thought her to be! With the straightest of faces Ashley had led her to believe that there would be no alcohol in Edgerton, because that was the regulation. Sex? No problem, since “dormcest” was looked down upon. She had sent her on her way relieved and even more clueless than when she arrived. She could see Ashley holding forth with such aplomb that first day in the Common Room on the ground floor…smiling so reassuringly at all her anxious young charges. She could see all the freshmen of Edgerton House, eager for the lowdown on life at Dupont, huddled together on the leather couches and chairs that had been shoved together in a great semicircle. Barely three weeks ago it was, and already that little show seemed so cynical. To ask Ashley about anything at this point would be a humiliation.

Well, Charlotte thought as the elevator reached the ground floor, at least there’s the Common Room. She would have someplace to lie down while she despised herself for her innocence and her weakness in giving in to Beverly’s sudden, besotted, utterly phony posture of friendship and intimacy.

In the Common Room, the couches and easy chairs were back at their appointed posts beneath the glum light of three big medieval-type wooden chandeliers, along with an array of dark wooden tables and straight-backed chairs.

Charlotte scanned the room. In the middle, amid this sea of furniture, a pair of enormous old couches upholstered in chestnut-brown leather were backed up, one on this side, one on the other, against a long, heavy old dark wooden library table, lit by a pair of tall but dim old Arts and Crafts lamps. In this gloomy, elephantine cluster of furniture sat the only three souls Charlotte could spy. At the far end of one couch sat a girl with her chunky legs crossed, reading a paperback book. On the other couch, a slender girl, her back to Charlotte, sat on the edge of a seat cushion, leaning forward, talking in a low voice to a slender boy who was leaning toward her from the edge of the armchair. Both wore T-shirts and blue jeans.

The girl reading the book—what on earth was she wearing? Apparently nothing but a floppy T-shirt and a pair of plaid boxer shorts, the kind boys wore. Not only that, the fly was popped open from the way her legs were crossed. Charlotte couldn’t imagine a girl just sitting like that in a public place, not even at two-thirty in the morning. It was bad enough having to be here in pajamas and a bathrobe.

She decided to sit far from all three, somewhere deep in the Middle Gothic recesses of the Common Room. She started walking that way—but her body wouldn’t obey. It was as if something independent of rational motor control was taking command. The new commander had had enough of isolation, enough scouring loneliness, and refused to venture beyond the settlement before her, with its plush leather, its ancient hand-carved wood, the snug light of its olden lamps, and its human beings.

But not even the commander could make her actually approach a human and strike up a conversation, and so she sat in a chair at the other end of the couch from the chunky girl with the open fly. True, this put her opposite the couple in the blue jeans, but there was the depth of both huge couches plus the width of the table plus the fact that both were leaning forward from the edges of their seats seemingly engrossed in each other…to make her feel properly distanced from them.