Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Hoyt switched the light off and closed the door.

“Did you hear somebody say something?” Charlotte asked.

“Maybe in their sleep or something,” said Hoyt. “I think there’s somebody sleeping in there.”

He hurried her down the hall. Another door. He opened it and stuck his head in. The lights were on. Two beds. One bed—what a rat’s nest! Sheets, blanket, and a pillow all twisted together, and a lot of bare mattress showing. On the other bed the blanket was pulled all the way up over the pillow in a stab at neatness, but there were inexplicable lumps and humps under it. Hoyt beckoned Charlotte in and closed the door. Resting an arm lightly across her shoulders, he gestured toward the wall opposite.

“Look at those windows. Must be eight or nine feet tall.”

They were big, all right, but their eminence in the world of windows was compromised by splotched and mottled old shades that sagged down full length, helplessly, never to roll up again, from bare wooden spindles whose spring mechanisms were done for.

“…and look at the height of that ceiling,” Hoyt was saying, “and those what do you call them? Cornices, cornice moldings. And this place was built as a fraternity house! Two alumni back in whatever it was put up the money for it. They’ll never build anything like this again. Of that you can be sure.”

“Is this your room?” said Charlotte.

“No,” said Hoyt. “Mine’s downstairs where all those people were. It’s actually bigger than this one, but this one’s pretty typical. You know what? I really love this house.”

He compressed his lips and shook his head, as if to indicate that he was feeling an emotion too profound to express. Then he gave her the smile of a man who has seen an awful lot in his time on this earth. He looked deep into her eyes—deep, deep, and deeper—and gave her an almost bashful smile.

At that moment the door to the room opened and a virtual yodel of happy conversation filled the doorway. Without relaxing his grip on Charlotte, Hoyt swung about. Coming into the room was a tall, slim boy with tousled blond hair. He had his arm around a cute little brunette who was practically popping out of a short spaghetti-strap camisole and a pair of low-cut jeans, while her belly button winked in between.

Hoyt barked out, “Damn it, Vance, get outta here! We’ve got this room!”

The little brunette stood stock-still with a now irrelevant smile frozen on her face.

“Sor-ree,” said Vance, his arm still around her. “Chill, chill, chill. Howard and Lamar told me—”

“Do you see Howard and Lamar in here?” said Hoyt. “We’re here now. We got this one.”

The boy looked at his watch and said, “I don’t know, Hoyt, but it looks like a lot over seven minutes to me.”

“Vance—”

Vance turned the palms of his hands up toward Hoyt and said, “Okay, that’s cool. Just let me know when you’re through? Okay? We’ll be down on the second floor.”

We got this room! Okay, let me know when you’re through!

Charlotte’s hands went cold. Her face was on fire. She wrenched herself free of Hoyt’s grip and said, “For your information, you’re wrong! We don’t have this room—you have this room! And we won’t ever be through—because we won’t ever begin!”

Hoyt shot a quick glance at Vance and the brunette in the doorway, then canted his head back and off to one side, rolled his eyes upward, and opened his arms in a helpless, crucified way. “I know—”

“You don’t know!” screamed Charlotte. “You’re gross!”

“Hey! Keep it down!” said Hoyt. “I mean—shit!” The eternal male, eternally mortified by the female Making a Scene.

“I won’t keep it down! I’m leaving!”

With that, she stormed past him, tears streaming down her face, past Vance and his little brunette—

Hoyt called out, lamely, “Hey—wait!”

Charlotte didn’t look back. She tossed her long brown hair over her shoulder in anger and kept going. As she ran down the big curved stairway, the bacchanal below raged on. All was uproar. Downstairs in the big entry hall, she frantically, physically, bodily forced her way between the revelers, who bobbed and shrieked and ululated and exulted in bawling music drunken screaming stroboscopic girls in slices boys dry-humping in-heat bitches he’s not cool got little dickie his cum dumpster is what she is oh fuck that sucks it’s so ghetto scarfed a whole line with a green straw from the heel of her Manolo gotta get laid she scored Jojo—

—“she scored Jojo?” That little lick of conversation caught Charlotte’s attention, but she was far beyond the gravitational pull of gossip in her headlong flight through the double doors and out onto Ladding Walk into God’s own air!—not befouled by decadence and lust—

—except for five or six stricken boys and girls crawling, lolling stuporously, bending over on the little fringe of a lawn in front of the Saint Ray house vomiting and chanting into the void in Fuck Patois. Charlotte ran down the Walk into the darkness and the monstrous shadows until her throat ached and she could no longer hold back the tears. She slowed to a walk, let her head slump over, held her forehead with her hand, and convulsed with sobs. Get outta here! We’ve got this room! Okay, that’s cool. Just let me know when you’re through. Okay? Oh dear God, was there any way Bettina and Mimi could find out?—about her cool guy and her terminal humiliation and what a fool she was?

She felt so small here in the infinite terminal darkness of Ladding Walk, all alone, sobbing and sobbing and racking her thorax, slogging pointlessly toward Little Yard, a little mountain girl—she couldn’t have pitied herself more—in an old cotton print dress hiked up two and a half inches with pins so she could show off more of her legs.

The dark hulks of the buildings along Ladding Walk, which were menacing, the stony silence—except for her own sobs, which she held back and then let out—held back, let out—there was a certain morbid, self-destructive pleasure in letting them out, wasn’t there?—a sick, morose self-abnegation in surrendering to the swirl of deceit she had been subjected to by Hoyt Whoeverhewas—the walk back to Edgerton was a nightmare, part of whose pain was that it seemed like it would never end.

When she stepped out of the elevator on the fifth floor, into that dead-silent vestibule, it seemed like a sanctuary, or the only one Charlotte Simmons would have, and she indulged herself in a real wailing sob as she headed down the hallway—then she heard whispers…Ohmygod!—six? seven? eight? girls sitting in a row, bottoms on the floor, backs against the wall, legs, or most of them, sticking straight out in a lineup of distressed jeans, shorts, sneakers, flip-flops, bare feet, lumpy knees—eyes, every eye, pinned on her. They were all freshmen who lived on this floor. What were they doing here out in the hall in the middle of the night? What must she look like to them? Tears, puffy eyes—her nose felt twice as big as it was, it was so congested from crying—and they were bound to have heard her wail when she left the elevator. They were a gauntlet. They would have to lift their legs in order for her to get to her room. If she had to speak to them, ask them to let her by—she couldn’t!—she would burst into tears again! She bit her lip and told herself to be strong, be strong, come on, don’t let on, hold it in. The first pair of knees and ratty jeans jackknifed to let her by. The puniest pair imaginable they were, too, those of a skinny, chinless girl with the palest of faces and hair the color of chamomile tea and cut like a young boy’s, a girl called Maddy—a wretched case despite the fact that she had won some big national science competition last spring, Westinghouse or something. Charlotte couldn’t stand looking at her, but she couldn’t escape those abnormally big eyes as they turned up toward her and runty Maddy said, “What happened?” Charlotte kept her head down and shook it, which was as close as she could come to a gesture signifying, “Nothing.” That only sharpened Maddy’s appetite. “We heard you crying.” The knees ahead began pulling up to the chests one by one. Each time, the big eyes studied her face, which Charlotte knew very well was contorted like that of a girl who would convulse with tears if she so much as opened her mouth. From behind, little Maddy wouldn’t give up. “Can we help?” A couple of other girls in this strange crew of now tiny, now skinny, now keg-legged, now obese, now plain ugly girls said, “Yeah, what happened?” She couldn’t tell which ones, because she avoided looking at any of them—these…these…these witches, assembled on the floor solely to torment her! But then she made the mistake of peeking—and locked eyes with a big black girl named Helene. As Helene raised her knees, she said with a voice of deep sisterly concern, “Hey, where’ve you been?” implying “Who did this to you?” Charlotte couldn’t think of any way to answer that one with a head motion—and besides, she had it in her mind, from social osmosis, that it was proto-racist to slough off what black students had to say—even a black girl like this one, whose father, as everybody on the floor seemed to know, was one of the biggest real estate developers in Atlanta—no doubt richer than all the Blue Ridge Mountain Simmonses in history put together—and so Charlotte fought to reinforce the dam holding back the flood and uttered just two words, “Frat party.” That did it. That was more than enough. The dam broke, and she staggered the rest of the way sobbing and convulsing. The little witches fired away from the rear. “Which frat?”…“What’d they do?”…“Sure you don’t want us to come help you?”…“Was it a guy?”