I Am Charlotte Simmons (73 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“Fuck you, Hoyt! Whyn't you soap up your fist and stick it up your ass.”
Leaving the bathroom with her makeup case, she craned her head into the bedroom and lasered a look at Gloria, who by now had eased her eyes, forehead, and matted mop of dark hair out from under the covers.
“So long—Miss Community
Cunt!”
said Nicole.
Then she stormed out, slowing down only long enough for a farewell to Julian, who was still standing, stricken, near the door. In a frigidly calm voice she said, “You know, Ju, you really
are
a puny, pathetic little limp dick.”
 
 
On the drive back, everybody was too hung over to say much. Gloria was stretched out on the entire third row of seats, sleeping. Vance, Crissy, and Charlotte were crowded into the second row—Charlotte mashed up against the window, Crissy in the middle, and Vance in the third seat, behind Julian, who was in the passenger-side bucket seat up front. Hoyt drove.
Hoyt and Julian talked to each other, laughing about how drunk they'd gotten and how great Harrison's after-party had been and how they now felt like a pile of bricks had fallen on top of their eyeballs. Charlotte was sitting directly behind Hoyt, so he could have easily explained to her who So-and-so was or asked her if she wanted to stop for a drink or to go to the bathroom or told her any of the words to the songs, but he didn't.
Dreadfully hung over, a malady she had never experienced before, Charlotte had a brief coughing spasm in Maryland, and Hoyt said, “You okay?”
She went, “Mmmnh,” just so he would have a response, and she wouldn't say anything more. A couple of hours later, as he let her out in front of Little Yard, he said, “You okay?”
She didn't so much as glance at him. She just walked away with her boat bag. He didn't ask twice.
L
ike a fool—and she knew it—Charlotte glanced back at the Suburban just before she reached the archway tunnel into Little Yard. She knew it wouldn't happen, but somehow it had to happen—he would be standing beside the driver-seat's door, looking across the roof of the Suburban, shouting, “Hey! Yo! Char! Come here!” Instead, what she saw was Gloria, risen from the back row, where she had lain motionless and soundless for the entire trip—staring at her.
Right at her
. Her nose was practically up against the window. Her dark hair was a big, messy wreath around her face. Her eye sockets were a pair of mascara sinkholes. She didn't smile, wave good-bye, or betray any other sentiment. No, Gloria was … studying little Charlotte Simmons, still clutching her canvas boat bag … a specimen of … what? The Suburban started pulling away just as Charlotte saw Gloria turn her head toward the front seat. She was grinning and saying something … about what?—and then the Suburban was gone … But Charlotte already knew, didn't she …
By the time Charlotte took her first few steps into the tunnel, she had an ache in her throat, the ache a girl gets after a long period of trying to hold back tears. Rejection and dismay turned into an all-enveloping fear of imminent doom. She who had departed soaring, she thought, in social ascension, she who knew how to handle herself, she who had been so aloof from
girls who just lay down and gave it up, she who had announced that she had Hoyt Thorpe trained like a dog—Charlotte Simmons had returned. Oh, yes,
she
, Charlotte Simmons, the girl of the hour. What was she going to tell everybody? Above all, Beverly—of the boarding school elite she professed to have only contempt for—who had warned her not to go off on an out-of-town fraternity formal with Hoyt Thorpe, of all frat boys on God's earth … I am not a good liar, thought Charlotte. I am not even a half-decent actress. In our house nobody ever showed you how to deceive. Momma—but I can't let myself think about you right now, Momma.
Momma!
—Before she had even made it through the archway tunnel, the ache in her throat became so severe that she truly didn't know if she could make it all the way back up to the room without bursting into tears. If Beverly was in the room—she'd die.
She approached the courtyard with such apprehension that she could actually hear her heart beating whenever she opened her mouth to take a deep breath. It made a rasping sound from down deep, as if the wall of her heart were scraping against the underside of her sternum with every beat. Thank God … practically nobody around, just a few people on a crosswalk … over there … She wanted very badly to run to the door of Edgerton—but someone might look down and wonder what's wrong with her. Inside, she didn't take the elevator, because everybody took the elevator. She walked up four flights, opened the fire door—
The Trolls …
What were they doing at this end of the hall? It was as if some sadistic god really had created them specifically to make Charlotte Simmons suffer. Why? Why else would they be here
now
? A sunny Sunday afternoon—why had the Trolls set up their gauntlet … for this moment? At the less-traveled end of the hallway? She had never seen so many of them … eight? nine? ten Trolls?
Don't even look at them. Act as if they
—
do—not—exist.
But once again she felt powerless … against the strange little shrimpy Maddy and those huge E.T. eyes of hers. “What's the matter, the elevator's not running again?” Charlotte got away with just shaking her head no—but there were so many more of them to go. The knees ahead began pulling up to the chests one by one, as if choreographed specifically to drive Charlotte Simmons mad. And once more, Helene said, “Hey, how was your weekend?”—and Charlotte couldn't think of any way to answer
that one
with a gesture, either, and once more guilt convinced her autonomous nervous system that she
had to
respond to black girls—and she responded as brightly as she could—“Good!”
Good
came out at such a high, frantic
pitch, she prayed to God the Trolls would take it as meaning it had been such an amazing weekend, she was ecstatic—or would they divine the truth and realize it was the first flash of a flash flood of tears?—which nothing could hold back now. Sure enough, Maddy again, from the rear: “Anything wrong?”
She barely managed to get to the door, duck inside, close it—take one look about—no Beverly!—thank you, God!—and dive onto her bed and put the pillow over her head—to muffle the sound—and give way to sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs racking racking racking racking racking racking convulsive sobs sobs sobs sobs sobs with a polyester down pillow muffling her head. Far from disliking the pillow, she wished it were bigger, big enough to enclose her whole body, muffle her existence at Dupont University, where there was nothing left for her. How could she possibly face all those girls she had so proudly lorded her virginity over—had so proudly shocked with her contempt for Dupont's easy virtue—had bragged to about her ability to control guys and keep them at bay, most specifically a guy named Hoyt Thorpe? What had she done? How could she have allowed herself to do it? She was unclean, she had let herself be used in the filthiest way, she was a ratty hotel washrag, a cum dumpster. That was what Charlotte Simmons was, a filthy cum rag that had been tossed onto the floor of a hotel bathroom with the rest of the slop. Here she was, trying to hide from herself under a pillow, from her Diesel jeans, on which she had spent one fourth of her money for the semester, and her red T-shirt, which she had thought looked so cool and now seemed so juvenile and tacky … And that wasn't the end of it, was it. This was
Bettina's
T-shirt, and those were
Mimi's
dress and heels in that pathetic boat bag … and she would have to
return
those things, tomorrow at the very latest, and there was no way she could face either one of them and proceed to lie about what had taken place. They would want a minute-by-minute description of the formal—and they were not to be denied. She
might
be able to lie to Beverly, but she would become such a nervous wreck doing it, Beverly would
know
she was lying.
Hoyt …
hah
. She said the
hah
to herself with such force, it popped out of her mouth in the form of a rueful sigh. Right now, at this moment, Hoyt was probably smoking pot with Julian and Vance and some other brothers of “the best fucking fraternity at Dupont,” mellowing his way through his hangover, listening to Dave Matthews or O.A.R., mellowing mellowing mellowing the afternoon away while she lay here with a pillow around her head and the Trolls whispering and sniggering about her on the other side of the wall.
Oh … let them whisper and snigger all they want. The best she could hope for from them was that they would maintain their delusion that she considered herself too cool to talk to them. She wasn't about to confide in them and give them some inkling of what had taken place over the past twenty-four hours, the past twenty-four hours of debasement and humiliation, of floundering in muck and slime. Every time she closed her eyes, she flashed back to that fitful sleep … in which she was lying there on a hotel bed … while the rest of them were playing drinking games, talking about her, talking about her body—about her old-fashioned hillbilly
beaver—
about knocking the dust off her. That was what her losing her virginity in such a squalid way meant to them: a few chuckles about knocking the dust off a musty up-country
beaver,
a little stray that somehow had wandered down from the hills.
She took the pillow off her head and rolled over onto her back. Doing so must have raised dust from the pillow, because the sun was coming into the room in such a way that she could see the particles suspended in the air above her, stuttering and jittering every which way in the light—and she flashed back to the day Channing and the others invaded the yard for the sole purpose of humiliating her and showing the world their contempt for her fine airs … and she had lain down on the bed in her little slot of a room … watching dust particles dance in a shaft of afternoon sunlight and thinking of how impossible life would now be in Sparta—now that the whole county knew about Daddy threatening to castrate Channing if he so much as laid a finger on his perfect little girl again. And oh God the memory of how she had been revived by the sight, on television, of the most-talked-about politician in American, the governor of California, possibly the next President of the United States, giving the commencement address at this place that was to be her salvation, Dupont University, the most magnificent setting in which the great man could address the nation last spring, a Gothic tower soaring behind him, a pageant spread out before him, a field of mauve and gold robes—a rich mauve that had entered the language as “Dupont mauve”—the flags of forty-eight nations represented by the graduates, heraldic banners representing God knew how many mysteries of Christendom a thousand years ago, kept alive on the looms of the twenty-first century because they went so well with the compound arches and rib-rife vaulted ceilings, the random Chaucerian casement windowpane etchings of ancient Gothic buildings erected en masse in the 1920s. This great eminence, who had so stirred and girded her loins—her
loins
!—was known at Dupont as the ridiculous, fat-flanked cottontop stooge of a fellationic farce known as the
Night of the
Skull Fuck
, starring a drunk frat boy named Hoyt Thorpe, with Master Vance Phipps of the
Phipps
Phippses in a supporting role …
Charlotte got up—it made her dizzy—could her body still be drunk?—trying not to see what she couldn't help but see out the window, which was the highest-soaring of Dupont's many soaring tributes to the glory of God, the library tower, and went over to Beverly's side of the room—what did “Beverly's side of the room” matter any longer?—and rifled through her heap of CDs until she found the Ben Harper CD and brazenly lifted the lid of Beverly's CD player—what did “brazen” mean any longer?—and flipped to song number 3, “Another Lonely Day,” and sank back onto her own bed and listened to Ben Harper's sentimental young voice sing about how the whole thing wouldn't have worked out anyway and how all that's left is just another lonely day. She couldn't help it … she couldn't keep her face from scrunching up or the tears from bursting forth from her eyes, from her aching throat, from the deepest reaches of her lungs, her solar plexus, her convulsively contracting abdomen. She put the pillow over her head again so the Trolls couldn't hear, but not so forcefully that she herself couldn't hear the slow, sad ballad of the inevitability of loneliness. Her entire nervous system was depressed by her hangover, in any event, and it became a relief, bordering on joy—the feeling was so near the absolute limit—to give up, let all her defenses collapse, capitulate, wallow in the hopelessness of her ruined life at Dupont. On the other hand, she made sure the Trolls couldn't hear her—
Would Hoyt ever call? She knew he wouldn't. She knew he'd never speak to her again. He'd already dumped the cum rag into the slop. She could never set foot in the Saint Ray house again. Never again in the Saint Ray house … What will Bettina say about that? It was ironic. Bettina was the one who had first led her there that night, which now seemed so very long ago. What would Mimi say? No doubt they had had conflicting emotions when they learned that Charlotte Simmons was going off on a formal with a senior, a very cool senior. It didn't take much imagining … They were envious. But her ascension also gave them hope. She had seen it in their faces when the three of them met in this room and Beverly and Erica had barged in. They
wanted
to see her on that bridge, the bridge to the frat world, where sorority girls would be apprised of your presence at Dupont and cool guys would regard you as hot and hookupable and you would be invited wherever the cool and the hot and hookupable went to have their fun and display their status …
Charlotte Simmons wasn't going to be invited anywhere. She had gambled. She had let her classes slide, she had let Adam and the Mutants and her dreams of a cénacle slide … and her promise to Miss Pennington, the one and only thing she had asked of her—yes, that, too—so sure had she become that Charlotte Simmons was about to ascend from clueless public school hillbilly girl hidden up-hollow in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to the summit of female competition at the great Dupont. How foolish, how egotistical, how shallow her goal, how low her aim, how twisted her priorities—
O Hoyt! O Hoyt!
She wanted that smirk again! She wanted him to press her against the back wall of an elevator again! She wanted him to
want
her! He would
call
her any moment now—
With that one, she realized just how crazy she had become. He would never call. The very idea would make him recoil. No, he wouldn't even recoil. Recoiling presumes an emotion, and nothing about Charlotte Simmons would any longer rouse an emotion in Hoyt Thorpe.
As she lay there on her back, the flood tide rose again, and she could feel the tears spilling from the corners of her eyes and pooling inside the lids, and so she opened them—and the particles were no longer dancing in the air, or at least she could no longer see them. The light had dimmed. A cloud must have passed across the sun. She looked toward the window, and her eye hit on the library books stacked up on her desk—oh God she didn't need
this
! She had a paper due in the morning in modern drama on Susan Sauer's interpretation of the work of the performance artist Melanie Nethers—which was so convoluted and lit'ry and tortuously dull and lifeless … what little she had read of it … she would have to read every word of it from the beginning and staple every word into her brain—they were such floating little wisps of thought, those words. There was no way she could possibly concentrate on any such task. There was no sense even beginning. She'd have to get up tomorrow early and do it before class, and she knew that would never happen. There was no holding back the inevitable. What
use
was it?—what earthly use? Why struggle with the metaphysical idiocy of something Susan Sauer wrote?

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