Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

The chunky girl with the open fly glanced up at her from the depths of the couch as Charlotte sat down in the chair, but she immediately returned to her book. Her book…reading her book—Charlotte felt an overwhelming need to not appear to be some hopeless refugee adrift in the dead of the night, not even to these three young strangers. Now it was essential to be busy at something, which is to say, anything.

She looked about…At the end of the table, near her, was a magazine. Blushing—actually feeling the rush of blood to her face—for fear one of them would notice that she was so desperate as to start reading anything she could lay hands on, she got up, put one knee on the seat of the couch, reached way over and picked up the magazine, and hurried back to her chair.

Only then did she notice the title: Cosmopolitan. Charlotte had heard of the magazine, and had the impression it had been around a long time, but she had never read it. It wasn’t in the Alleghany High library, and she had certainly never bought it. The price on the cover was $3.99, and that wasn’t for a year’s subscription. That was for this one issue. She had never seen any slick magazine in their house at home. Who was going to go out and pay four dollars for a magazine? On the cover a blond girl with big eyes was smiling at her in a friendly way. There were headlines all over the cover. The biggest one said, “99 SEXY WAYS TO TOUCH HIM. These Fresh, Frisky Tips Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy (Our Favorite Requires a Glazed Doughnut).” Couldn’t possibly mean what it suggested. She riffled through the magazine, which was very thick, until she found it…“You want to be his best ever. And that’s a goal we can definitely get behind. So get ready to step up and assume your rightful title of sex deity. After consulting some eager experts (gorgeous guys with loose lips and tons of sex-rated secrets to spill), we have 99 of the most erotic and ingenious ways for a girl to tantalize, tease, and thrill every inch of him.” The first one said, “Help me button my shirt or adjust my tie in the mirror. When you dress me, I just want to get undressed again.” The second one said, “Tugging on my earlobe just a bit with your teeth makes me lose all sense of the English language”…Sort of naughty overtones, Charlotte reckoned, but otherwise—then she hit “When we’re having sex and you’re on top, cup my balls and tug on them lightly. It’s an unexpected, awesome feeling.” And “Put the condom on me. It’s such a turn-on to see you prep me that way” and “Swirl your tongue around the tip of my penis, and then, without warning, take all of me in your mouth” and “Take your panties off, throw them in the freezer, then caress my bod with them. Don’t laugh. It’s actually awesome” and “My girlfriend gets a glazed doughnut and sticks my penis through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip”—

Charlotte closed the magazine and studied the cover again. Was this some sort of pornographic parody of Cosmopolitan? She opened it to the contents pages…a list a mile long of directors, managers, assistant managers, associate publishers, and then: “Published by Hearst Communications, Inc., President and Chief Executive Officer: Victor F. Ganzi.” It was all quite unbelievable. She put the magazine in her lap and looked straight ahead at nothing. The chunky girl glanced up at her but, as before, immediately returned to her book.

Charlotte’s face was blazing red. Suppose somebody—anybody—even one of these three strangers—saw her reading this…blatant pornography! It would be mortifying—terminally!

As nonchalantly as she could, which is to say, with her hands shaking only a little, she got up, knelt on the couch again, reached over, and put the magazine back on the table, then turned it over so that the cover would be face-down. Oh my God! She didn’t try to get back to her chair. Instead, she sank as deeply as she could into the couch, there being no available crack in the earth into which she could disappear.

She kept very still. Her heart was drumming away. Now she was directly across the table from the couple, the boy and girl in blue jeans. She had no interest in eavesdropping, but all at once the boy’s voice rose just enough for her to overhear.

“What? I don’t get it. You want me…to do…that for you?”

The girl’s whisper reached an audible level, too. “Please, Stuart…don’t you see? I’m a freshman. I don’t know any of these guys—and for you it wouldn’t be such a big thing. You’re a senior. And I trust you.”

“Yeah, but what’s in it for me?” said the boy.

“Don’t you think I’m attractive?”

“You’re gorgeous, in case you don’t already know it, which I’m sure you do, but what’s that got to do with it?”

“I’d think it would have a little…something to do with it.”

“No it wouldn’t. You’d just be using me.”

“Well, I’ll bet there’ve been plenty of times—”

“Brittany! I’ve known you since you were nine and I was thirteen. I always felt like your uncle. My God, it would be like incest or something.”

“I’ll bet you’ve—”

“I’m not sure I could even…you know, do it.”

“Unnhh. Then what am I gonna do?”

At that point their voices fell again, and Charlotte could no longer hear what they were saying, other than that the girl, Brittany, was using a lot of unnhs and ohhhhs and other sighs.

Charlotte’s chin sank down to her collarbone as what she had just heard began to register.

“Sexiled?”

Charlotte’s head jerked about. It was the girl in the boxer shorts at the other end of the couch. She was looking straight at Charlotte and smiling in a perfectly friendly manner. Charlotte must have looked dumbstruck, because the girl said it again.

“Sexiled?”

By now Charlotte had taken the term apart and put it back together again, and she said, “Yeah…I guess I am.”

“Me, too.”

“You are? That’s what it’s called, sexiled?”

“Unh hunh.” The girl shrugged, as if resigned to her fate. “This is the third time in two weeks. What about you?”

Charlotte was appalled to realize that any such abomination was so common, it had a name. “It never happened to me before. I just can’t—my roommate promised she’d never do it again.”

“Hah hah,” said the girl. She seemed rather jolly about it. “That’s what mine said. I can tell you, all she means is, she won’t do it again tonight. Maybe. If you’re lucky.”

Charlotte pursed her lips grimly. The whole thing was overwhelming. “Well—I’m not gonna put up with it.”

Dismissively: “Ahhhch…It’s like totally—it’s the way it works. You’ve just done her a favor, so she can’t very well say no when it’s your turn. Who’s your roommate?”

“Her name’s Beverly.” She said it in a distracted fashion. What was on her mind was, Good Lord! When it’s my turn?

“Mmmm, don’t know her. You have a boyfriend yet?”

Stunned. “No.”

“Me, neither. Oh, well. Guys come up to me, and I think they’re interested, and then they ask me to introduce them to some girlfriend of mine, or whatever.” She smiled and lifted her eyebrows in a self-deprecatory fashion.

The girl had a pretty face, in a rubicund country girl sort of way—Charlotte had seen that face plenty of times around Sparta—but she was buttery, stubby, and chubby. The chances of her ever achieving the twenty-first-century female ideal of a lean, hard, slim-hipped, well-defined body were remote, if not nil. She just wasn’t made for it. Yet here she was, sitting in her boxer shorts in a public lounge in the middle of the night, looking forward to boyfriends and having her turn at sexiling her roommate. A nice, cheery normal-looking girl—who assumed all this was the natural order of things!