Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

“I can’t drive you anywhere,” said Charlotte, “least of all the I.M. You’ve had enough to drink. Here, why don’t I help you go to bed.”

Charlotte was just about to swing her legs over the side of the bed when Beverly grabbed one sleeve of her pajama top and tried to drag her toward the door. She was strong, too.

“Hey, let go! You’re going to rip my pajamas!”

“You gotta drive me!—drive me!—drive me!”

“Stop it, Beverly!”

Beverly let go and keeled over on her back, then struggled up into a sitting position. “Aw right, aw right, don’t drive me. Next time, no thanks, I’ll do the same for you. Don’t do me any favors…” Baffled, she began feeling about on the floor for her keys, finally found them, and looked up angrily at Charlotte. “Thanks a lot. I’m gonna go, I don’t care—”

She tried to get her feet beneath herself, but the high heels skidded and her bottom hit the floor hard. She began crying again. She rolled over toward her own bed, got up on all fours, and managed to pull herself upright by steadying herself on the metal bed frame. She glowered at Charlotte, then lurched off balance toward the door.

Charlotte sprang up and blocked her way. “You can’t do that, Beverly. You can’t drive! You can’t even walk!” Big sigh. “Okay, I’ll drive you there. I don’t even know why you want to, but I’ll drive you. You’ll get yourself killed. Just let me put on some pants.”

She stepped out of her pajama pants and into a pair of shorts without stopping to put on underwear, slid on her sandals and said, “Okay, now give me the keys.”

Beverly handed them over with the smile of a little girl who has gotten her way.

Outside in the dark, in the dead of the night, Charlotte regretted her generosity. She was still groggy. The massive wall of Little Yard seemed to pitch forward at an ominous angle, about to collapse and bury them under tons of stone. Windows were lit up here and there, and somebody was playing a country music song whose hook went “I’m not slick’s you, but I’m gon’ fix you. I’m gon’ eighty-six you hick sombitch.” There appeared to be no one else about down here at ground level. Beverly had left her car almost three feet from the curb in a no-parking zone on the drive that ran between Little Yard and the parking lot. The vehicle was enormous. Charlotte knew that Beverly had a car, but she never dreamed she had a monster like this one. It was a black thing called a Denali, an SUV, but as big and heavy as the pickup truck Daddy drove. The driver’s seat was so high Charlotte had to take two great pumping steps, one up to a running board, the second up to the seat itself. It was like sitting on a leather-upholstered throne. There was tan leather everywhere and superfluous panels of wood with a showy, highly polyurethaned grain. The windows were tinted black. The whole thing was disorienting. How could it be that she was way above the ground at the wheel of a leather-upholstered monster of a vehicle, getting ready to take a besotted girl back to a bar…in the dead of the night?

The I.M.—the bar’s name came from the Internet function “Instant Message”—was near PowerPizza and other enterprises geared mainly to students, on a strip just off campus on the edge of a slum known among students as the City of God, after a cult movie of that name about packs of homicidal boys in Rio de Janeiro. Under other circumstances it would be an easy walk.

As she drove, Charlotte said to Beverly, “Why do you like lacrosse players so much?”

“Why?” said Beverly. She turned away and looked out the side window, as if the matter was too obvious to bear explaining.

After a bit Charlotte said, “What’s his name?”

Beverly continued looking straight ahead. “His name?” A dark cloud formed, and she burst into tears again.

Charlotte said, “How about if I take you back and you go to bed? Come on.”

“No!” Beverly abruptly stopped crying but still didn’t bother to look at Charlotte or wipe off the tear tracks where they coursed through the makeup on her cheekbones. “I know his room number. He lives in Lapham. They all live in Lapham! All the lacrosse players!” Now she looked at Charlotte. “And he’s drunk.” (Don’t you understand?) “That’s the only time they talk to me!” (Please understand!)

“I thought you said he was at the I.M.”

“He is! Where’dya think I just fucking came from?”

Charlotte pulled up in front of the I.M. At this hour there was almost no traffic. Beverly opened the door, wriggled and lurched out of her soft leather bucket seat. The high heel of her right shoe slipped off the running board, and she nearly pitched face forward onto the pavement, finally staggering to a stop like an ice-skater who has lost control. She was listing perilously to port.

“I’ll come in with you!” said Charlotte.

“No!” said Beverly, offended, like most drunks, by any insinuation that she needed someone to babysit her.

A row of downlighters illuminated the front entrance. Beverly’s blond hair, cerise shirt, and the waifish bones of her backside beneath the black pants shimmered as she passed beneath the lights and opened the big plate-glass door. A rush of drumbeats, electrified wails, and the voice of an adolescent curdling his vocal cords in an attempt to sound like a hardened country-slacker, veteran of a thousand jook houses…and the door closed. Charlotte kept the engine running. What am I doing here?…Two-thirty a.m….

By and by Beverly emerged, walking at a terrific pace even though weaving slightly, opened the door of the Denali, and began blubbering and sobbing again.

“He…wasn’t…there…” She broke there into two long, plaintive, tear-sodden syllables.

“That’s all right,” Charlotte said almost maternally. “Let’s get in, and let’s go back and get some sleep.”

“No! I gotta find him! He was talking to me before! I know where he lives. You gotta take me to Lapham. You gotta!”

Beverly said it with such monomaniacal belligerence, Charlotte was intimidated. She was afraid of what the inebriated girl would do if she said no. So she drove her over to Lapham College. Everybody knew Lapham, thanks to the huge baroque gargoyles along the edges of its parapets. Here in the middle of the night, the faint streetlights threw the gargoyles and the building’s architraves, compound arches, and stone facing into deep relief.

This time Charlotte insisted on going inside with Beverly. She wasn’t going to wait out here in the SUV for the rest of the night.

Obviously this wasn’t Beverly’s first visit. She headed immediately for a side entrance secured by heavy, ornate wrought-iron gates and an oak door studded with iron bolts in the medieval fashion. Without hesitation, she punched a numerical code into a lock panel to the right of the gates. A low hum sounded, and she opened the gates and the door. They entered a small Gothic vestibule; straight ahead, a narrow staircase; to the right, another stout wooden door; to the left, the door to the elevator. The elevator took forever to arrive. Beverly was swearing under her breath. At last, with much ancient rattling and clanking of the outer and inner doors, it appeared, and they ascended. When they reached the fourth floor, Beverly lurched out, still listing to port. As she staggered down a corridor, she managed to do a regular tattoo on the floor with her high heels. The noise reverberated between hard-plastered yellow-ochre walls. Halfway down, she stopped—then flung herself upon a door and began hammering it with her fists. The door was so thick, this produced nothing more than muffled thumps, whereupon she started crying again and screaming, “Harrison! I know you’re in there! Harrison!” A couple of doors opened down the way; boys’ heads poked out, saw it was only some drunk girl, and withdrew. From inside the room…nothing.