I Am Charlotte Simmons (29 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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Sure enough, down the hall in Bettina's room Bettina and Mimi had severely tested patience written all over their faces. Mimi was wearing her jeans and Bettina's Chinese red halter top, and Bettina had on jeans and a tight T-shirt, the expensive, dressy kind. But above all, there was the makeup. Both girls' eyes were set in the shadows of the night, just the way Beverly's always were when she went out. Both girls were fair-haired, but their eyebrows and eyelashes were now black.
Mimi looked Charlotte up and down and said, “I'm glad you don't want to stand out.”
“Is it terrible?” said Charlotte. How inadequate she was! “Is it all wrong?”
“It's fine,” Mimi said. “You look great. Let's go.”
“But you're both wearing jeans.”
“Sooner or later you'll need to get some jeans. But not tonight. Tonight you look great.”
“Yeah, you totally do,” said Bettina. “You've got the body for it. I think we ought to get going.”
“It looks awful, doesn't it?” said Charlotte. “Listen, I'm gonna—”
“Gonna what?” said Mimi. It was more of a challenge than a question.
“Oh—I'm just gonna go like this, I guess.”
 
 
Soon they were walking in the dark along Ladding Walk, which was in the very oldest part of the campus. The Walk was an extravagantly wide promenade paved with stone and lined with huge ancient trees and late-nineteenth-century mansions, built close together, now used mainly for administrative
offices, and, at some juncture, if Bettina had it right, the Saint Ray fraternity house. The light from the ornate old streetlamps overhead succeeded mainly in casting the trees and the buildings into monstrous, indecipherable shadows. Such a heavy stillness enveloped the place, it was hard to believe that they were going to come upon a big fraternity party in this vicinity.
That gave Charlotte a flicker of hope. Perhaps Bettina had it wrong, and the fraternity wasn't on Ladding Walk, or the party wasn't tonight but some other night, or it was already over or something. Up ahead in the dark, a ping, as if someone had thrown an empty beer can onto the pavement, followed by the
wooooooo
! that boys cut loose with to express mock astonishment—and Charlotte's last hope guttered out.
Soon they heard laughter and voices, although not very loud, and then music, which sounded like nothing more than a dull throbbing. Nevertheless, Charlotte's heart sped up all over again. As they came closer, a light at the entrance was sufficient to bring a grand Palladian villa out of the shadows. The portico close to the pavement had columns, like Monticello's. The windows were exceptionally tall but heavily curtained, so that only the faintest sort of light seeped out.
Fifteen or twenty boys and girls, mostly boys, were hanging around in clumps in the little yard out front, chatting and laughing in the subdued voices of people on edge about what might or might not happen. Just then a girl's voice piped up. “Oh, wow, you
think you're in love
. Like I totally care. You think all girls look the same upside down, is what you think.”
This rated a chorus of
Woooooooo!
from the boys.
A tall, bony boy appeared in front of them. He had long light brown hair parted in the middle and flopping over his ears, and he was clad in khaki shorts, flip-flops, and a polo shirt with a Dupont golf team emblem. He had a drunken, I'm-very-amusing look on his face. “Where've
you
—I mean, where've you been?—I mean where've you been?” It seemed to be directed at Charlotte. His I'm-very-amusing voice degenerated into small-animal sounds:
“Enh enh enh enh enh enh enh.”
Mimi murmured out the side of her mouth, “Just make out you're talking to somebody else.”
They went up four or five low steps onto the portico and through a pair of dignified old double doors into—
bango!
—whines, thuds, shrieks, cries, and other agonies of electric guitars, electric basses, electric keyboards, amped-up drums, digital synthesizers, and young singers screaming their throats raw in defiance of God knew what—a regular storm, in short, raging
through a swarm of boys and girls yammering, yawping, squirming this way and that, rooting about like weevils in a delirious twilight rank with a sour, rich, rotting sweet odor swelling up like a gas in the heat—the ungodly heat!—of so many bodies mashing in on one another and combusting with adrenaline—
Panicked, Charlotte turned toward Bettina and Mimi with the intention of saying “Let's leave!” but already the pressure of people who had come in behind them was forcing her toward the center of the swarm. Mimi had a vacant look, far from sophisticated. Bettina arched her eyebrows and pulled a face, as if to say, “I'm as bewildered as you are! Just press on!”
Blocking the way was a heavy wooden table commanded by two boys in blue button-down shirts, open at the throat, with great half-moons of sweat under their armpits. God it was hot in here! Behind them, arms crossed, face deadpan, stood a massive boy with a neck wider than his head and a tight green T-shirt that brought out the heft of his chest and the slabs of meat that were his upper arms, glistening with sweat. The boys in the blue shirts were shaking their heads no to three boys, two of them black, who were leaning over the table, supporting themselves on the heels of their hands. Immediately in front of Charlotte, a big girl with low-cut jeans and a bare midriff squeezed past the boys without so much as pausing at the table, and Charlotte could hear Bettina, just behind her: “Go ahead! Go ahead!” So Charlotte squeezed by, too, feeling reckless, guilty, frightened, baking with heat. She turned about. Bettina and Mimi had made it through, and the three of them huddled together.
Mimi leaned in close to Charlotte, to overcome the uproar of the revelry, and said, “See? Nothing to it!” Her face didn't look all that confident.
They stood still for a moment, trying to get their bearings. The storm bore down on them from … where? There were evidently two different bands at opposite ends of the house. In the darkness of the far side of the hall, strobe lights were flashing, illuminating a mob of white faces one moment and abandoning them to darkness the next, so that the faces themselves seemed to be flashing on and off amid laughter, shouts, and inexplicable ululations. Ostentatiously drunk boys weaved through the crowd carrying big twenty-ounce translucent cups, grinning with their mouths open, and bouncing off people. Two boys stood side by side, their faces, eyes, necks, and hands twitching spastically, while three others looked on, convulsed with laughter. The feverishness of it all dumbfounded Charlotte. Here were
hundreds of boys and girls in a state of bawling rapture—over what? … Her eyes jumped from one girl to another out in that heaving disco gloaming.
So many wearing makeup—talking to boys … So many with glistening lips—talking to boys … So many eyes blazing like jewels in their dark occipital orbits—looking up, as if enchanted, at boys … So many leather skirts ending a foot or more above the knees, so many low-cut jeans and black pants, so many abbreviated halter tops, so many belly buttons winking in between—at boys. Their flesh, wherever it showed, seemed oiled. In fact, they were merely sweating, and the sweat reflected what little light there was. The sight of it made Charlotte feel the heat herself. Her armpits were humid. She wondered if the sweat would discolor her dress. She literally couldn't afford to ruin a dress, not even a pathetic one like this … hem hiked up by safety pins … She felt like a child … with her pale, unadorned face, her long little-girl hair, and her little print dress—hanging onto Bettina and Mimi for dear life. The very hair on her head was getting wet with sweat.
And the targets of the seductive artifices she saw all around her? The boys looked the same as they did every day, except that they were sweating. They still wore their shirts pulled out and flopping down over their jeans and khakis … They still wore T-shirts, polo shirts, khaki shorts, sneakers, and flip-flops. Exact same clothes as fifth-graders', Charlotte said to herself—fifth-graders with faces grizzled by seven- or eight-day growths of beard … They still wore their hair unparted and unruly, so that it tumbled down over their foreheads in half bangs … except for some who had combed in hair gel to give it shape …
A group of girls walked past, bunched together, blocking Charlotte's line of sight. They didn't look happy. She recognized two of them as freshmen. They all wore jeans, and they were practically stepping on one another's heels as they coursed through the crowd, glum and sweaty … a little herd of freshmen. The heat was becoming ferocious. Sweat was breaking out on Charlotte's forearms. She felt grungy and dirty, and she just got here. Over there … another bunch of freshman girls moving about like a single organism with many denim legs, blank looks on their faces—or, if not blank, anxious, as was she, and she didn't even have the saving grace of blue jeans. A little country girl's daytime print dress! How could she have let Mimi intimidate her from going back to her room and taking this thing off?
She turned back toward Bettina and Mimi, but Mimi was no longer there. She leaned close to Bettina's ear. “What happened to Mimi?”
Bettina shrugged and gestured vaguely into the midst of the crowd all around them.
“Bettina! Bettina!” Amid the heaving bodies, a girl was waving and grinning. She wore heavy scarlet lipstick, and her eyes beamed from out of a pair of deep purple dreamlike sockets. She seemed to be with three or four other girls. Charlotte recognized two of them as freshmen.
“Hadley!” Bettina shrieked the name, and Charlotte knew precisely why. She would have shrieked, too, had she been so blessed as to find a friend somewhere in this drunken rout and thereby be rescued from social oblivion on an alien planet to which she hadn't been invited in the first place.
Bettina headed toward her Hadley, looking back at Charlotte just long enough to smile and raise her forefinger, as if to indicate she'd be back in a moment. But Charlotte knew she wouldn't be, and sure enough, in no time Bettina and Hadley and those other girls had been swallowed up by the mob of revelers.
Barely five feet from Charlotte, a boy with big hips and heavy black eyebrows that ran together above his nose lurched through the crowd, drunk, proudly drunk, carrying a white plastic drink container and bawling, “I WANT SOME ASS! I NEED SOME ASS! ANYBODY KNOW WHERE'S SOME ASS?” and vastly enjoying the laughs he got from the boys and the mock shock on the faces of the girls. One of the boys yelled back, “Who you kidding, I.P.? You're ass negative! All you want is a knuckle fuck!” And everybody laughed again.
The rawness left Charlotte numb and frightened, and a fast-rising fear of some as yet nameless catastrophe made things worse. Charlotte Simmons was now a castaway in the hellish uproar—and everyone would see that! How she must look in their eyes! A little country girl dressed as inappropriately as a girl could be in an atmosphere like this, wearing no makeup—a waif alone in the storm.
She stood on tiptoes and searched the crowd for Bettina and Mimi. She would fight her way through the mob and attach herself to one of them, no matter how hopeless that would make her look.
Why not just leave, for God's sake!
But the walk back alone in the dark, back to the hollow place from which she had come—she could hear Bettina or Mimi or both asking her tomorrow, “What happened to you?” and not really caring in the slightest and not asking her to go anywhere again. She had no choice but to persevere and undertake the grim task of making this houseful of bawling boys and shrieking
girls believe she was actually with someone and as deliriously happy as everybody else.
She tried smiling smugly and staring confidently at blank spots on the walls, as if she had just seen someone she knew only too well—and she was convinced they would all see that for what it was, namely, a look of curdled fear. The electric wails, whines, thuds, percussion, the bawling, the screaming, louder and louder—
Over near a wait—a line of girls. Some were talking into each other's ears, the only way to make yourself heard in the storm, but others were talking to no one. They were merely in line. Well—no matter how haplessly, she would be … with somebody. So she got in line, too. Soon enough it became apparent that this was a line to a bathroom. Pathetic … but an identifiable role, however temporary, however lowly—that was the main thing. She could catch stray overtones of girls chattering up ahead but couldn't make out what they were saying. The girl immediately ahead of her, a brunette with short, bobbed hair, had a worried, distracted look on her face and seemed to be alone. She should strike up a conversation with her—but how? What was there to say to a stranger in a line of girls waiting to get into the bathroom? Did she dare put her mouth up to the ear of someone she never laid eyes on before? That wouldn't hold back Bettina for a second. Bettina had just piped up and said, “Sexiled?” Charlotte couldn't imagine saying such a thing to a girl she didn't know.
The line inched forward, inched forward, while the party raged. That was all right with Charlotte. The slower the line, the longer she would have her protective cover. When she finally came close to the bathroom door, there was an amateurish but big sign on it: BOOTING ROOM. Booting? She could hear someone inside retching and vomiting. Or was it two people? Presently a tall, skinny girl came out, her face a ghastly white. Beverly! Charlotte thought at first. But that's not her. On the other side of the door the sound of retching went on, unabated. The only way Charlotte could kill more time before having to face social humiliation once again was by actually entering the bathroom. Finally her turn came. Two toilet stalls—one closed—the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up—and the overpowering odor of vomitus swept over her like something liquid and tangible in the air. She turned about and hurried back out into the storm.

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