Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

More laughter.

“Come on, you guys,” said Hoyt. “Charlotte doesn’t want to see a bunch of assholes give a brother shit.”

Groans and laughter.

Charlotte felt Hoyt give her shoulders a squeeze. It all came back…his constant touching that night, but she had too many conflicting emotions to make an issue of it. She also felt she was at the center of a stage.

“Just pretend they’re gentlemen,” said Hoyt. “Charlotte, this is Vance.”

“Hi,” said a slim, handsome guy with an open, friendly face and tousled blond hair, sitting on the arm of a fat leather-upholstered easy chair, his arms around his knees.

“I think we met,” said Charlotte. Her voice seemed so tiny. Oh, she wasn’t likely to forget his face. He was the one Hoyt had chased off that night because We’ve got this room.

“Oh, yeahhh,” said Vance, obviously not remembering at all.

“And this is Julian…” Hoyt took his arm off Charlotte’s shoulders—to her considerable relief…she didn’t want to be presented to this room full of boys as his—and introduced her to them all, one by one. In fact, they did prove to be gentlemanly…hospitable, friendly…lots of welcoming smiles. Vance insisted that she have his easy chair, and Hoyt eased himself into the chair next to it.

Charlotte couldn’t imagine what she could possibly talk to any of them about, but it was a moot point, as it turned out. Everybody returned to watching the screen. The flaring light lit up everybody’s face in colors. On the screen…a seemingly interminable series of collisions…smacks, clatters, thuds, oooofs…of football players tackling one another, ramming each other headfirst, colliding torso to torso in midair. Charlotte’s pulse was rapid, but it had nothing to do with the TV screen. She was excited…the only girl in a room in a fraternity house with a whole bunch of cool boys. What did she look like to them? Terribly young and immature? They were all upperclassmen. Hoyt and Vance and Julian seemed a generation older than she was. Sunk this far down into an easy chair, she became terribly conscious of how tight her jeans were on her thighs. Her legs—were they really as great as she thought they were? Without moving her head, she glanced about to see if any of them were drawn irresistibly…to taking a look. To her disappointment, none seemed to be, not even Hoyt, who seemed to be watching TV and not watching it. He looked as if he had an appointment somewhere else.

On the TV a voice said, “Wait a minute, Jack, you’re not saying teams are instructing players to go out there and wreck the other guys’ knees—”

The roly-poly boy called Boo said, “You ever see those old-timers’ introductions before the Fiesta Bowl? Guys look like they got two-by-fours for legs.” He hopped off the arm of the couch and did a rocking, stiff-legged walk across the floor. “Fucking look like they just got a five-hour furlough from the rheumatoid arthritis ward.”

Much laughter. Even Hoyt smiled, Charlotte noticed out of the corner of her eye. But how could they find it funny? To Charlotte, what she had just seen was sickening. It filled her with alarm and pity. What was it about boys? These boys were rich, rich enough to pay dues, on top of everything else, just to belong to a fraternity. They were smart. They had to be, just to get into Dupont at all. But they were no different from the boys at Alleghany High. She glanced at Hoyt—and Channing popped into her head. They were all crazed on the subject of manliness, and manly violence was the manliest thing of all. Seeing an athlete being crippled—it didn’t drown them in pity, not for a moment. It intrigued them. They identified not with the victim but the assailant. Being here frightened her—and thrilled her. She was no longer on the outside desperately denying that she wanted to be inside. I’m Mr. Starling’s rock, she thought to herself, and I only think I have free will.

She felt three pats on her knee. Without looking, she knew it was Hoyt—three times? She tried to translate that as affection. Touching her again.

Now everybody’s eyes swung to the doorway. A beaming couple was peering in—a very tall, rawboned guy with a high forehead—Harrison!—and a much shorter blond girl, the cute sort, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt.

“It’s the hairy man!” said Boo. “And the Janester!”

“Hi-i,” said the girl, the Janester presumably, with an up tone and a down tone. She obviously knew them all.

Harrison was so tall that when he put his arm across the girl’s shoulder, it came down at an angle.

“Hoyt,” said the girl, “what happened to your head?”

Hoyt, without a smile: “Comes from banging it on the floor every time you hear the same question.” He still didn’t smile.

Recovering from a paroxysm of laughter, Boo said, “How bummed out is Hoyt, Jane?”

While Jane was saying something to Julian, Boo began singing a ditty under his breath: “CDs are a-coming, their tails are in sight…” He immediately looked to Hoyt for his reaction. Hoyt just looked back at him.

For the first time, Harrison noticed Charlotte. “Yo! Hey, uh…uh…”

“Charlotte,” said Hoyt. He still wasn’t smiling.

“Have you noticed?” said Boo. “Hoyt has a way with names.”

“Everybody knows that,” said Harrison. To Charlotte: “Wuzz good?”

“I just wanted to thank Hoyt.” She sounded so tiny and weak to herself.

“Thank Hoyt?” said Harrison, genuinely puzzled. Then he seemed to get it. “Oh yeah…”

Everybody was looking at the screen again.

Harrison said to Hoyt, “Hey, Dawg, I’d love to stay and shoot the shit and all, but we gotta bounce.” He looked at Charlotte. “Nice to see you, uh, uh—”

“Charlotte,” said Hoyt.

“Right, good going,” said Harrison. “Later.” Harrison and his little friend began climbing the shabby grand stairs.

Charlotte felt a tap on the outside of her leg, just above the knee. Touching her—

Alarmed, thrilled with alarm, she turned. Hoyt had withdrawn his hand but was still leaning toward her. He wasn’t smiling, and he didn’t have his cool, ironic gleam in his eye. If anything, he looked tired. He motioned toward the doorway with his head and stood up. So she stood up, too, and they headed out of the room. No one seemed to notice except Vance, who said to Hoyt, “Real nice, Clark.”

Hoyt said, “You need to hit manual reset, Vance.”

“Rock on, Clark.”

Once they were back in the entry gallery, Charlotte said, “Why does he call you Clark? He said, ‘Real nice, Clark.’”

“It’s from some movie.” Then he shrugged phlegmatically. “How about if I show you a little of the house without hundreds of people dancing and boozing all over it?”

Thrilling alarm! She felt as if her nervous system were doing millions of computations per second. Finally: “I have to get back. I just wanted to come by and thank you.”

Hoyt looked at her blankly for a moment, then began slowly nodding okay. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

It was a relief, and yet…he hadn’t even asked twice! What was wrong? The way she looked? Something she said—or all the things she hadn’t said, hadn’t been mature enough to know how to say—after he had introduced her to all his friends?

Hoyt insisted on driving her back, and she said no, he really shouldn’t, considering how he must be feeling, but he insisted, which pleased her.

Once they were outside, he took her hand as they walked toward his car, but he did it gently. Their conversation was one that any two students meeting for the first time might have had. He asked her how she happened to come to Dupont. Charlotte took great pleasure in describing Sparta, how small it was, how far up in the mountains it was, what hard times it was going through, all of which lit her up with a certain amount of underdog’s glory, she thought. Just an ordinary college conversation…made electric by the fact that their fingers were intertwined. She asked him the same question, and it was just as she suspected from the confident way he carried himself…a fancy suburb of New York…his father the international investment banker, the private schools he went to…Charlotte became almost giddy with the realization that she was walking along in the ancient, romantic grandeur of Ladding Walk with a sort of young man she had never known before, a wealthy, preppy, sophisticated young man who was a man through and through, a man willing to risk his life—that was what it had amounted to—for her, for a girl he barely knew!