Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“Yeah,” said Charlotte. “What do you think of it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “It was weird at first. The guys were totally loud all the time. But now it’s like calmed down. I don’t think about it much anymore.”

“Have you ever heard of sexiling?”

“Yeah…”

“Has it ever happened to you?”

“To me? No, but it happens.”

“Well—it happened to me,” said Charlotte. “My roommate comes in about three o’clock in the morning and—” She proceeded to tell the story. “But the worst thing was the way she made me feel guilty. I was supposed to know that if she gets drunk and picks up some guy somewhere and brings him up to the room, that’s more important than me being able to stay in my room and get some sleep before a test in the morning.”

A pause. “I guess it’s the same way here.”

“At Dupont,” said Charlotte, “everybody thinks you’re some kind of—of—some kind of twisted…uptight…pathetic little goody-goody if you haven’t had sex. Girls will come right out and ask you—girls you hardly even know. They’ll come right out and ask you—in front of other girls—if you’re a V.C., a member of the Virgins Club, and if you’re stupid enough to say yes, it’s an admission, like you have some terrible character defect. They practically sneer. If you don’t have a boyfriend, you’re a loser, and if you want a boyfriend, you have to have sex. There’s something perverted about that. Don’t you agree with me? This is supposed to be this great university, but it’s like if you haven’t ‘given it up,’ as Regina used to say, then you just don’t belong here. I’d say that’s perverted. Am I right—or do I just not get it or something? Is it like that there?”

Pause. “More or less.”

“So what do you do when it comes up? What do you say?”

Long pause. “I guess I like…don’t say anything.”

“Then what do you do?” said Charlotte.

Longer pause. “I guess I try to look at it in a different way. I’ve never lived anywhere but Sparta before. College—I don’t know, I guess I think of college as this opportunity to…to experiment. I needed to like get away from Sparta for a while.”

“Well—me, too,” said Charlotte. She couldn’t imagine why Laurie was saying anything so obvious.

Still longer pause. “You think maybe it’s possible you got away, but you brought a lot of Sparta with you to Dupont?” said Laurie. “Without knowing it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just asking…like suppose it’s something to consider. I guess what I really mean is college is like this four-year period you have when you can try anything—and everything—and if it goes wrong, there’s no consequences? You know what I mean? Nobody’s keeping score? You can do things that if you tried them before you got to college, your family would be crying and pulling their hair out and giving you these now-see-what-you’ve-gone-and-done looks?—and everybody in Sparta would be clucking and fuming and having a ball talking behind your back about it?—and if you tried these things after you left college and you’re working, everybody’s gonna fucking blow a fuse, and your boss or whoever will call you in for a—”

—the fucking just slipped out and hit Charlotte in the solar plexus—Laurie!

“—little talk, he’ll call it, or if you have a boyfriend or a husband, he’s gonna totally freak out or crawl off like a dog, which would be just as bad, because it’d make you feel guilty? I mean, look at it that way, Charlotte. College is the only time in your life, or your adult life anyway, when you can really experiment, and at a certain point, when you leave, when you graduate or whatever, everybody’s memory like evaporates. You tried this and this and this and this, and you learned a lot about how things are, but nobody’s gonna remember it? It’s like amnesia, totally, and there’s no record, and you leave college exactly the way you came in, pure as rainwater.”

“Tried what things?” said Charlotte. “What’s an example?”

“Well—” Laurie hesitated. “You were talking about boyfriends and what boyfriends expect and everything…”

“Yeah…”

Laurie’s voice rose. “Charlotte! That’s not the end of the world! This is the time to cut loose! To really learn about everything! To learn about guys, to really get to know them! Really find out what goes on in the world! You just have to let yourself fly for once, without constantly thinking about what you left behind on the ground! You’re a genius. Everybody knows that. I’m being sincere, Charlotte. Totally. Now there’s other things to learn, and this is the perfect time to do it. Take a chance! That’s one reason people go to college! It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason.”

Silence. Then Charlotte said, “So you’re talking about…going all the way…”

Silence. Then, “Not just that, but, well—yes.”

Embarrassed pause. “Have you done that, Laurie?”

Bravely, nothing to be ashamed of: “Yes, I have.” Silence. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not all that big a deal.” Silence. “And it’s a relief. I mean—well, you know.” Silence. “If you decide you want to, all you have to do is call me up, and I can tell you—I can tell you some things.”

Laurie went on for a while, in the abstract, about how little the deal was. Charlotte kept the receiver at her ear. She let her eyes wander…the pale gray wash up the side of the tower…the curious ragged diagonal the lit-up windows on the other side of the courtyard made…the bra that had somehow gotten tangled around the high heel of a shoe underneath Beverly’s bed. Laurie was going on about how every girl was on the pill, and it didn’t cause you to gain weight, the way she’d always heard…

Charlotte had a picture in her head of thousands of girls getting up out of bed in the morning and shuffling to the bathroom with sleepers in their eyes and standing in front of a small, discolored cream-gray enameled basin with an old-fashioned zinc-gray chain attached to a black rubber stopper and a medicine cabinet with a mirror on the door, and they’re all reaching up, in a fog, thousands of college girls—she can see thousands of arms and hands reaching up, in this building, that building, the one across the way, the one behind that—incalculable numbers of buildings—they’re all reaching up and opening the cabinets and taking The Pill, which she imagined must be the size of the pills they give mules on the Christmas-tree farms for heartworm.

That was the picture, but she didn’t actually hear anything after “Yes, I have.”

It was very nearly dark, and along the footpath on the edge of the Grove, blinking yellow lights came bobbing and bouncing by, one after the other, weak yellow lights, bunched together here, spread out there, but a whole train of them, all going in the same direction, bouncing and bobbing and blinking along the footpath by the arboretum. Adam squeezed the brake levers on his bicycle and stopped, even though he was already late for his meeting at The Daily Wave.

It took a moment or two to figure out this spectral locomotion: joggers. The yellow lights, which blinked in order to alert motorists at night, were built into the CD players they wore Velcro’d around their upper arms. But their arms—they were hardly even there! These joggers were girls, every one of them, so far as Adam could make out, and half of them were terribly thin, breastless, bottomless, nothing but bones, hair, T-shirts, shorts, big sneakers, and blinking lights. They were determined to burn up every last calorie they could squeeze out of their juiceless hides—or die, literally die, trying.