I Am Charlotte Simmons (31 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“The Odds!” he shouted.
“The odds?”
“The name of the band! The Odds! Fuck! I can't hear anything! Let's go downstairs.”
Downstairs
?
“The secret chamber!” Hoyt arched his eyebrows several times in an exaggerated way to indicate he was only being funny.
But what if he wasnt! Why had he put it that way
? On the other hand, she was still floating on the awed face Bettina had made and Mimi's sullen wonder—Mimi, who had made her feel so timid, hicklike, and awkward, in short, unconnected with anything at this elite place. Charlotte craned about for another glimpse of the two of them, who she was sure were tracking her every step, but she could no longer see them.
Absentmindedly she said to Hoyt, “All right.” Whatever his so-called secret chamber was, she now felt adventurous enough to take it.
The looks on their faces
!
Before she knew it, Hoyt had steered her down a dim, hazy corridor paneled with carved walnut. There were small, ribbed half columns of the same wood where the panels joined. The panels were so dark they soaked up what little light there was. The haze became a churning fog, and revelers wandered about yawping and cackling in a lunatic way.
Hoyt stopped behind two boys and two girls who were hovering over a table next to the wall. Seated at it was another brute—white, massive, young, but fast going bald, with a green T-shirt tight enough to show off great slabs of muscle, those and the dark triangle of wet sweat where the two bulging halves of his chest joined above the midsection. An argument was in progress.
“Well, how do you think we got in in the first place?” said a tall boy with a wide neck and a tough-guy face softened only by the thatch of brown curls coming down over his forehead.
The brute seated at the desk crossed his arms, which made them seem
twice as big, and leaned back in his chair and shrugged his shoulders. “I don't know. I just know you gotta be a member or have a ticket to go downstairs.”
The flat-faced boy, who had the dull stare of somebody drunk, launched into some heated remonstrances. Hoyt stepped forward and said to the sentinel behind the desk, “We got an issue here, Derek?”
The sentinel, Derek, said, “He says they had tickets, but they”—he motioned upward with his head, indicating the monitors on the floor above—“took them from them when they came in.”
Hoyt slipped his arm away from Charlotte's waist, stepped forward, and said in a challenging tone, “Who invited you? Who gave you the tickets?”
A pause. Sensing, hoping for a rude confrontation, random onlookers began gathering around. Finally the guy said, “His name's Johnson.”
“Eric Johnson?” said Hoyt.
“Unh hunh, Eric Johnson.”
“Well, there's nobody in this fraternity named Johnson, and there's nobody named Eric,” said Hoyt.
A couple of the gawkers laughed. Realizing he had been made to look like a fool in front of his friends and an audience, the guy felt compelled to begin the male battle. “And so who the hell are you?”
“God, as far as this conversation is concerned,” said Hoyt. “I'm a Saint Ray.” He had no expression except for an accusing stare and a slight thrust of his chin.
The guy set his jaw and lowered one eyebrow. Charlotte, like the others, quickly sized the two of them up in terms of male combat. The would-be crasher was taller, heavier, tougher looking, and more powerfully built. “That's very cute,” he said to Hoyt, “but you wanna know what I think?”
“Not particularly,” said Hoyt, “unless you'd like to explain why you shouldn't be a pal and fuck off.”
The boy took a step closer, opened his mouth slightly, pressed the tip of his tongue against his lower lip, and narrowed his eyes to slits, as if trying to decide exactly which way to tear his adversary limb from limb. Hoyt maintained his insulting stare. The brute manning the desk was on his feet. He held an open hand up in front of the boy's chest. His bare forearm was the size of a cured ham.
“Time out, tiger,” he said. “We can't let you go downstairs, and you don't want beef. Okay? Do like he said and take a walk.”
Furious and powerless, the boy turned and walked away. His bewildered friends followed him, and the gawkers took it all in, disappointed that things
hadn't progressed to bloodshed, cracked bone, and loosened teeth. After he had taken five or six steps, the guy wheeled about and pointed his forefinger at Hoyt.
“I'll remember you! And next time it'll be one on one!”
Hoyt raised his cupped hand to his mouth and pantomimed knocking back three gulps. You're just another drunk. The gawkers laughed some more.
Charlotte flashed back to Daddy and Sheriff Pike's confrontation with Channing Reeves and his buddies. Despite the language he had used, Hoyt's attitude of cool command impressed her.
The brute, Derek, smiled, shook his head, and said to Hoyt, “I always love these guys who are gonna come back and do something.” Then he put the heel of his hand on the carved walnut panel on the wall behind him. It swung inward. It was like a secret door from out of a movie. The brute gestured, indicating that Charlotte and Hoyt should come on through, and then he scanned the remaining gawkers to make sure they didn't have any ambitions of their own.
Hoyt slipped his arm around her waist again, as if he was just steering her through the doorway. She stiffened for a moment but didn't disengage. It was just … his way of being a host.
“Where are we going?” she wanted to know.
“Downstairs,” said Hoyt.
“What's downstairs?”
“You'll see.”
“I'll see what?”
“You'll see!” said Hoyt. He assessed her wary expression and sighed. “Oh, okay, you're ruining the surprise, but I might as well—no—I can't do that—I can't tell you, but there'll be a lot of people there. We won't stay very long. You just ought to see it.”
She was wary—no, plain-long scared.
Charlotte hesitated. Fear of the unknown and a chance at social triumph wrestled on the edge of a cliff above the abyss of doom … and … the social striver won. She followed Hoyt. The door closed behind them with a heavy
thunk.
The noise of the party was suddenly faint. Wherever they were, it was ten or twenty degrees cooler. They were on a landing, which was the threshold of a narrow, poorly lit stairway with black rubber treads that twisted downward around a curved wall. They headed down and around. The stairway, it turned out, led to a small cellar chamber consisting of a concrete
floor painted furnace-room gray, tired-beige walls, and a wide metal door of the same color with a small square window in it. The ceiling was so low it seemed to Charlotte like some immense mass about to crush her. Hoyt pressed a button beside the door, and a scowling face appeared at the window. The face saw Hoyt and relaxed, and the door opened.
“Yo, Hoyto!”
The face belonged to a suddenly cheery big boy wearing the everpresent—fashionable? —khakis with the tail of a button-down shirt hanging outside it. The dank, sour, oddly rich odor Charlotte had detected upstairs—in here it was ten times stronger—and she realized what it was: a room the size of a living room saturated, re-saturated, eternally soaked in spilt beer. Downlighters recessed in a low ceiling cast light on a bare wooden floor, and cigarette smoke hung in the beams. The ceiling and the walls were painted a lumpy dark brown. Over the sound system came a squeaky, staccato jazz saxophone and a voice that talked the lyrics and kept saying, “Chocolate City.” Some boisterous students were clustered about something or other on the wall opposite …
“Hey, Hunter,” Hoyt said to the keeper of the gate. “Had any issues?”
“Not so far,” the boy said. He embarked on a long discourse about how “the monitors” were supposedly everywhere tonight, about how you tell one from a genuine student, and why you had to be extremely careful all the same. Throughout this conversation, neither one, Hoyt or this Hunter, made the slightest acknowledgment of Charlotte's presence, even though Hoyt had his arm about her waist.
Her resentment was rising fast as he began steering her into the room, his arm still around her. Make him let go! On the other hand, this underground room, with its loud drinkers and smokers, made her claustrophobic, and he was her protector and her validation for being here at all. So she let him lead her that way toward the crowd. The students were hiving about an old-fashioned bar of dark wood, with a brass footrail. Happy—abnormally happy—to have made it into a special place where others couldn't go, they babbled, laughed, and shrieked. The bottom end of a bottle arced up above the head level of the swarm. It took a moment for Charlotte to realize that the bottle was in the grip of a boy who was pouring whatever was in it straight down his throat.
Cries of “Hoyt!” and “Was up, Hoyto!” from the crowd. The party had reached the stage at which conversation disintegrates into inarticulate jubilation over being young, drunk, and immune to disapproval in the company
of others who are likewise young and drunk and what of it. Off to the side, a boy and girl were lying together on a couch in a profound embrace, bodies pressed together. No one seemed to take any notice.
Behind the bar were two middle-aged black men in white shirts, their sleeves rolled up over their forearms, their black neckties pulled up tight at the throat. The shirts had great crescents of sweat beneath the armpits. Before them, on the bar, was a lineup of bottles of whiskey, rum, wine, vodka, and other things harder to figure out. Everything—big drinks, small drinks, beer, or vodka—they served in identical plastic cups.
Still holding Charlotte tightly, Hoyt said, “What would you like?”
“Nothing, thanks.” She forced a smile.
“Oh come on. You wouldn't dance with me! So you gotta at least have a drink!”
He said it so loud
! People at the table were turning around.
Barely above a whisper: “I don't drink.”
Hoyt boomed out, “Not even
beer
?”
She croaked out, “Uh … no.
You're
not drinking.”
The boomer: “I will if
you
will!”
More people were turning around. Charlotte could feel the color surging into her face. She tried to utter the word no, but could only say it by shaking her head. The smile on her face was meant to indicate to
them
that this was all in fun. In fact—and she was conscious of it—it was the sickly smile of someone who thinks she has just committed a terrible gaffe.
“Well then, how about some wine? Wine isn't even drinking! It doesn't even count!”
Everyone
could hear him.
“Don't listen to him! He's a lapsed recovering alcoholic!”
Out the corner of her eye Charlotte could tell that came from a big, strapping boy—khakis, blue button-down shirt, tail out—near the table. He had his arm around a lissome girl in a miniskirt. Her eyes were bleary and switched off. She looked as if she would fall to the floor if he took his arm away. But Charlotte didn't dare look at the guy, since she had no idea how she might possibly come up with an answer.
Once more looking at her, the boy said, “You know you're standing next to the poster boy for Mothers Against Binge Drinking?”
“Fun-nee,” said Hoyt. “Why don't you sing us a song, Julian? They say drunks can sing songs even after they start bubbling at the mouth.”
Hoyt still had his arm around Charlotte. He looked down at her, smiled, gave her a mighty squeeze, and began steering her toward the bar.
She had no idea what to say to this big guy who kept directing questions to her—or supposedly to her. Her face was aflame with embarrassment over the proprietary hugs Hoyt was giving her in front of everybody. She wanted to show everybody she didn't belong to him—but did she dare make a scene in this secret cellar or wherever she was? Worst of all, she could feel one of her greatest strengths, the fact that Charlotte Simmons was one of those rare young people who never caved in to peer pressure, ebbing away moment by moment. She couldn't have all these people, these sophisticated upperclassmen, staring at her as if she were some naïve freshman oddity. In the next moment, she heard herself saying to Hoyt, “Maybe some wine.”
“Way to go!” said Hoyt. Arm still around her, he led her into the throng by the table.
The big guy, Julian, edged over toward them and said, “You are so bad, Hoyt.” He said it as if she wasn't even there.
Hoyt leaned over toward him and said in a low voice, “You know what a cock block is, Julian?” To Charlotte: “Red wine or white?”
“I don't know. Red?”
He let go of her for a moment and started to muscle his way through the crowd to the table. He stopped and looked off to the side. Then he yelled out, “Yo! Get a room!”

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