Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

By and by, she maneuvered her way through the crowds, head still down, carrying a tray on which rested her breakfast—four slices of health-nut bread (at the deli counter they scratched their heads and let her have them for 40 cents), a metallically wrapped little square of butter and a vacuum-sealed miniature jar of jelly (both free), and a 50-cent cup of orange juice (cheaper than the only water available, which came in bottles at 75 cents each). She found a small table against a wall. There were two chairs. She put Descartes, Darwin, and the Mind-Brain Problem across from her by way of discouraging anyone who might consider occupying the other seat. The health-nut bread, which seemed to be made of dried husks, was tough going, as were Descartes, Darwin, and the mind-brain problem. “Whereas the doctrine that cultural changes represent nothing more than the organism’s constant probing in the process of natural selection begs the question of whether or not the ‘mind’ is in any way autonomous, the argument that ‘minds’ are capable, through a process of organized ‘wills,’ of creating cultural changes wholly independent of that process revives, ultimately, the discredited notion of the ghost in the machine.” Charlotte understood the gist of it, but the effort of dealing with such stultifying rhetoric at breakfast made her…“mind”…“brain”…“will”—all those quotation marks were like dermatitis!—feel unbearably heavy. Besides, she had to use one hand to keep the book open, which created an annoying problem when she tried to put butter and jelly on the health-nut bread. So she closed it and looked up to give the room a quick survey—

Dear God. There were Bettina and Mimi, not thirty feet away, threading their way between tables. At Mr. Rayon, finding the right place to sit seemed to strike everybody as a vital, crucial, all-consuming matter. Charlotte ducked her head back down over the book, but it was already too late. Even though it was for only an instant, her eyes had locked with Bettina’s in a way that made it impossible to pretend she hadn’t seen her. So she lifted her head just as Bettina, in the heartiest Bettina fashion, sang out, “Charlotte!”

Charlotte put on a flat smile and waved, at the same time tilting her book up with the other hand, as if to say, “I’m acknowledging your presence in a friendly way, but you can see I’m busy reading, so you’ll just keep on walking, won’t you?”

If that got across to Bettina and Mimi, they didn’t show it for a second. They immediately changed direction and headed straight for Charlotte. Both had big smiles. She did her best to look enthusiastic as Bettina made herself at home at the little table’s other chair and Mimi pulled over a chair from a table nearby. Charlotte braced herself for…last night.

“Where’d you go last night?” said Bettina. “We looked all over for you before we left.” Bettina and Mimi were both leaning forward in their chairs.

“I walked back,” said Charlotte. “I couldn’t find you all, either, so I figured I’d get on back by myself. It was sort of scary walking all that way in the dark.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t have to get back,” said Mimi with a suggestive smile.

“Yeah,” said Bettina. “Who was that guy? He was hot.” Her smile and her gleaming eyes said she wanted to hear it all, every tasty detail of it.

“What guy?” said Charlotte.

“Oh—come—on!” said Mimi. “What guy. Were there ten guys or something?” But it wasn’t the irritated tone of last night. She was looking at her with the glittering eye of someone pumped up for an exciting story and waiting to be impressed.

“I guess you mean…”

“I guess I mean the guy who was all over Charlotte Simmons at the Saint Ray party, that guy. Who is he?” Big eyes, hungry smile.

Charlotte was overwhelmed by the urge to make it clear that whatever they had seen, the patting, the pawing, the squeezing, meant nothing. “His first name’s Hoyt. Or that’s what everybody called him. He never told me himself. He’s in that fraternity. That’s all I know about him, except that you can’t trust him.”

“What do you mean?” said Bettina. “What did he do?” Her eyes said, “Come on, every detail.”

“Oh, he pretended he was just being a good host. He was going to give me a tour of the house and this stupid secret room he was so proud of and everything. Then he kept touching me. All he really wanted to do was get me alone in a bedroom. It was so…so…He was really gross.”

“Hold on a second,” said Mimi. “How did you meet him in the first place?”

“I was just standing there, and he came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and said—oh, it was so corny…I’m too embarrassed to tell you. I can’t believe I fell for it.”

“What’d he say?” Mimi and Bettina said, practically in unison.

“I’m too embarrassed,” said Charlotte. She hesitated, but then the pleasure of being at the center of a drama outweighed everything else. “He said, ‘I bet you get tired of being mistaken for Britney Spears.’ It was so corny!”

“And then he started touching you?” said Mimi.

“Yes.”

“But not really, not touching you…ummm—”

“Well, not like that!”

“And then he asked you if you wanted to dance, and you went out there and started grinding, right?” Mimi leaned back in the chair and rotated her hips.

“He tried to—how did you know?”

Mimi shrugged and cocked her head and rolled her eyes in an arch mime show of ignorance. “Just a wild guess. And then I guess he said, ‘Why don’t we go somewhere?’”

“I wouldn’t dance with him,” said Charlotte. “I saw the way they were all dancing out there. It was so gross. I just wouldn’t do it.”

“And how did he take that?” said Mimi.

“He kept on insisting that I had to dance with him. He begged, and then he practically got mad. He finally gave up and took me to see this stupid secret room they’ve got down in the basement.”

High on stardom, Charlotte gave a full account of the secret door in the wood paneling upstairs and getting past the bouncer sort of guy—she tucked her chin down into her clavicle to pantomime his bulked-up body—and the scene in “the stupid secret room”…it was all “so immature”…omitting, however, the big cup of wine she had accepted. She treated them to the trip upstairs and, indignantly, the incriminating lines We’ve got this room and Let me know when you’re through, and the way she stormed out. Mimi and Bettina were hanging on every word.

“You’re sure you left?” said Mimi.

Charlotte looked at her quizzically for a moment. “Of course I’m sure!”

“Okay, okay, just asking. You know, these frat guys like to brag to each other the next day about how fast they scored with some girl, some total stranger. They time it! They actually time it with a watch!”

Charlotte hated Mimi for that. She was trying to ridicule the very idea that Hoyt had found her genuinely attractive, that he actually felt something toward her, even if he did want to…score, as she put it.

But then the roly-poly guy Hoyt called Boo-man popped into Charlotte’s head—You got seven minutes, Hoyto, and the clock is running. That was the last thing she was going to reveal.

“They love to run that game on freshmen,” said Mimi. “You’ve probably heard the expression ‘fresh meat.’ I hope you didn’t do anything. You can count on them telling all their buddies about it—everything, from the size of your tits to—well…everything.”

Charlotte raised her head and looked past Mimi in an ostentatious pantomime of boredom. Mimi wanted her to feel small, didn’t she—yet another clueless victim of a heartless sexual prank, another piece of fresh meat, anything but a beautiful girl who had attracted a hot guy. Mimi…one of the tarantulas Miss Pennington had talked about, only this was not Alleghany High but Dupont—