I Am Charlotte Simmons (84 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“I think I'm owed a little report,” said Laurie. “That's my consulting fee.”
Laurie had put on some pounds, which made her cheeks and her chin, where it settled into the turtleneck of her sweater, look full. Somehow this
made her prettier than Charlotte had ever seen her. She was happiness personified.
Blushing terribly, Agony Personified said, “There's really nothing to report.”
“Really nothing?” said Laurie. “You know what”—her eyes seemed to brighten to about three hundred watts, and her smile became two weeks and three days wide—“I don't
believe
you!”
Charlotte was speechless with panic. Mrs. Thoms had said something to her when they were both in the kitchen! Was Laurie now one of Death's instruments—Laurie, who had always been her friend through the worst of times?
She spoke fearfully. “I don't—there just
isn't
anything …”
In a singsong voice Laurie said, “I don't bel
ieve
you, Charlotte … and I
know
you, Charlotte. This is your old friend
Laurie,
Charlotte … You can't be gaming
me
, Charlotte …”
“Gaming me”—
college slang
.
Paranoia had a gun at her temple, but she wouldn't just lie outright to Laurie. “Practically nothing,” she said with a dreadful tremor in her voice.
“What's with you tonight, Charlotte? You are
not happy
. What's going on?”
Just then everybody returned from the kitchen. Before she got up to return to her seat, Laurie said, “You and I have got to have a talk. Seriously.”
Seriously.
“Call me tomorrow,” said Laurie, “or I'll call you. You and I've got to sit down and talk about life. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Charlotte. She nodded yes several times, dourly, as Laurie turned to walk away.
“Now—who'd like some coffee?” said Momma. “Miss Pennington—how about it?”
 
 
Part of Charlotte intended to call Miss Pennington and Laurie—she owed them that much, at least—but another, franker part of her, stiffened by fear, knew she wouldn't. Laurie called Charlotte several times, and she put her off with this excuse and that, and a lifeless, moping voice, until she gave up. Day by day her guilt concerning Miss Pennington accumulated. Many evenings she vowed to call her in the morning, but in the morning she would inevitably put it off until later. That evening she would go to bed early to get away from the sidewise looks Momma and Daddy and even Buddy had begun giving her. She knew she would be lucky to get two hours' sleep
all night, but lying in bed immobile was better than being stared at or talked to.
So the next morning she borrowed Momma's old parka with a hood and drove to Sparta … to kill time. She was strolling past the Pine Café when a good-looking boy in a waist-length trucker's jacket came out.
Ohmygod—
“Well, I'll be switched! The Dupont girl!”
Caught flat-footed, Charlotte said, “Hello, Channing.”
“How is old Dupont?” he said.
“It's fine.” Not a trace of emotion. “What's up with you?”
“Well, hell,” said Channing. “Ain't any jobs around here. After New Year's, me and Matt and Dave's going down to Charlotte and join the Marines. You know, I kinda hoped I'd run into you sometime. I always felt real bad about what we did over't your house. You must've hated me.”
Charlotte pulled the hood away from her face. “I didn't hate you, Channing. I never hated you. I think of you a lot.”
“You're blowing smoke up—”
“No, I always liked you, and you knew it.”
Channing broke into a big smile. He reminded her of Hoyt. “In 'at case … I say let's get it on, gal!” He motioned toward the café.
Charlotte shook her head no. “That was a long time ago, Channing. I just wanted you to know.” With that, she pulled the hood up over her head and hurried away.
One morning she was making one of her fifteen-foot excursions from the living room to her bedroom when Momma put her arm around her and said, “Charlotte, now I'm your momma, and you're my good girl, and far's I'm concerned, that's the way it'll always be, no matter where you are and how old you are or anything else. And right now your momma wants you to tell her what's wrong. No matter what it is, if you'll just let it out, it won't be as bad as it was. That much I can guarantee you.”
Yes! Tell Momma—now—everything—and get it over with! Charlotte was on the verge—but how could she form the words and make them pass her lips—“Momma, I lost my virginity”—actually Momma, I didn't exactly
lose
it, I let a frat boy get me dead drunk because I wanted to be “one of the crowd”—and then I let him grind his genitals against mine on a public dance floor, because, you have to understand,
everybody
was doing it, and then I let him grope and feel and explore practically my whole body on a public elevator because I
did
want him to
want
me—you can understand that feeling, can't you, Momma?—and then we got to the room—oh, that's
right. I didn't mention that we were staying in the same room, did I, with two beds, one couple in one bed and another couple in the other—I forgot to mention that, too—and it was interesting in a dirty way, because in the middle of the night I got to watch the other couple
fucking
, naked as a pair of jaybirds, and they did it the way a bull does it to a cow?—from behind?—with this really crude thrust thrust thrust?—but the drunk boy I tossed my virginity to wasn't like that—he rolled a condom down over his erection—for some reason, it reminded me of a ball-peen hammer—and then he went thrust thrust thrust rut rut rut, but it wasn't really that much like a bull and a cow, because he was facing me—and after it was done, he rolled off me without even looking at me—and then all he said afterward was that I had gotten some blood on the bedspread, and he acted pissed off at me—“pissed off”—that's the way they talk, Momma—anyway, that's about it. I haven't even laid eyes on him since then, not counting the four-hour drive back to Dupont—Oh, I didn't tell you we drove to Washington to do this? Anyway, that's about it, I guess. That's
one
reason I'm so depressed, but there's also this thing that happened with my schoolwork while I was so wrapped up with this frat boy—
Ohmygod, she wouldn't be able to complete the first sentence! Momma was an absolutist on this subject! When she said you'll feel better right away if you let it all out, she didn't have the
faintest notion
of the particular cat she was beckoning out of the bag. Momma wouldn't hear a word after “virginity,” or even “I was staying at a hotel with a boy.” Charlotte went numb with fear and guilt at the very thought.
So what she said, in fact, was, “No, Momma, it's nothing like that. I think I'm just exhausted. I hardly got any sleep the last two weeks before the break.”
Momma didn't show any signs of actually swallowing that. She just gave up asking.
On Christmas morning, Buddy and Sam, as always, got up before dawn. That was no imposition on Charlotte, since she hadn't slept all night in any event. She was in the living room with the boys, who were down on all fours wondering what was in the packages under the tree, when Momma and Daddy came in, looking half asleep. Charlotte summoned all the resources she had left and put on a pretty good impression of someone excited by Christmas morn.
It became clear that the day's major excitement was the biggest package under the tree, which had a tag on it saying that it was to Charlotte from the
whole family. They always took turns opening Christmas presents, with the youngest, Sam, going first and the oldest, Daddy, going last. This time everybody, even Sam, made sure Charlotte opened her two little presents first—and that her big one be the last present opened, even after Momma's and Daddy's last one.
All four of them, Sam, Buddy, Momma, and Daddy, waited in breathless silence as she commenced removing the wrapping paper.
“Go ahead,” said Momma, “and just rip it off. It won't matter.”
Inside a box that a set of manual lawn-mower blades had come in … was a computer with a full-size screen. Charlotte had never heard of the brand name before: Kaypro. She was surprised, and she put on a pretty good show of being deliriously surprised and moved.
“Well, I'll be switched!” she said. “I can't hardly believe what I'm looking at!” She turned toward each of the expectant faces before her, professing profound gratitude.
“We
made
it!” said Sam, and it turned out that was pretty much the case. Daddy had got hold of this old, discarded machine, and he and Sam and Buddy had cleaned and repaired it and hunted down some replacement parts—which was not an easy thing to do, since Kaypro went out of business years ago—and rebuilt it. It seemed that Daddy had included the two boys on every single part of the project, so that when Sam said, “We
made
it,” he wasn't far off the mark.
“It's because you got all A's!” said Sam. “We figured you ought to have your own computer!”
Charlotte took Sam into her arms and hugged him and then Buddy and Daddy and Momma. She would have broken down crying, but she had no tears left. Tears, no matter how sad they might be, were a sign of caring about something and therefore a sign of a functioning human being. She was admirably patient as Sam and Buddy and Daddy explained to her, with infinite Christmas delight, how it worked. Kaypro had gone under so long ago, there were no instruction manuals. They had had to learn all about it from scratch. Daddy said Sam and Buddy were much better at it than he was. He was an old dog that couldn't learn new tricks, but they took to it like a duck takes to water. And did that make them proud! She hugged them all over again and said she just didn't know how she had gotten along this far without it, and the best Christmas present of all was knowing that they had made it themselves, just as Sam said. Which was, in fact, true, since she had no idea where or if she could install it in her room and it was easy enough to use the ones in the
library. The thought of staying in her room—where Beverly could come walking in at any moment—chilled her. The very fact that she would be returning to—that place—at all seemed remote to the point of impossible.
Nevertheless, there came a day when Momma and Daddy and Buddy and Sam drove her back to the bus station in Galax. Daddy personally oversaw the placement of the computer—cushioned inside the lawn-mower blade box with all manner of rags, Styrofoam, balled-up newspapers, and an old, ratty rubber bathtub mat—into the belly of the bus.
Charlotte
wanted
to cry when she said good-bye to them, but she was parched with a fear of the unknown that went far beyond the nervousness she suffered the first time she set out from the Blue Ridge Mountains for—that place. One thing the trip home had shown her: She could never make Alleghany County home again; nor any other place either—least of all, Du—the college to which she was heading. The bus was home; and let the trip be interminable.
G
irls at Dupont quickly learned the protocol of the Dupont Memorial Library's Ryland Reading Room, where on any given night except Saturday the largest concentration of boys on the campus could be found. Long, stout, medievalish study tables filled the vast space from front to back. In the back, Gothic windows rose up God knows how high before exfoliating into ornate stone lobes and filigrees filled in with stained glass. It was perhaps the second grandest study hall in the country, after the main reading room of the Library of Congress.
Practically every boy in the Ryland Reading Room was there to study. Girls came to study and to scout for boys. The boy-scouters sat at the tables in chairs facing the entrance, the nearer an aisle the better. If a girl sat with her back to the entrance, that meant she was there solely to study. If she sat with her back to the entrance at the midpoint of one of the study tables way down there beneath the exfoliated lobes and filigrees—i.e., as far as she could get not only from the entrance but also from the aisles—it meant she would just as soon be invisible. Or so it meant to Charlotte Simmons, who occupied that particular spot at this moment.
At the entire table were only two other souls: a reedy, nerdy boy, also with his back to the entrance, busy hiding the fact that he was mining for
gold in his nose with the fingernail of his little finger, and a skanky girl facing front at the far end of the table. “Skanky” had slipped into Charlotte's vocabulary by social osmosis; and this girl was skanky. She was thin, wan, pimply, with curly black hair bobbed short but scraggly all the same, wearing a meat-gone-bad-green T-shirt that emphasized the flatness of her chest and a mannish green Dupont Windbreaker. Charlotte could tell she was a stone loner.
And Charlotte was so wrong. In no time she heard a concert of stifled giggles and the rustle of plastic bags. She cut her eyes toward the skank—
Pastel cashmere pullovers!
Three girls, one of them blond, two of them with light brown hair, had materialized at the skank's end of the table and were leaning over talking to her in the dreaded cluster whispers. One wore a lemon-meringue-yellow cashmere sweater; another, a hike-in-the-heather blue cashmere sweater; the other, an ancient-madder-pink cashmere sweater. Charlotte recognized none of them, but pastel cashmere sweaters in the Reading Room at night screamed out …
sorority girls
! So did the little bags they held in their hands. The girls were back from what sorority boy-scouters called a “candy run.”
The hike-in-the-heather-blue blonde whisper-exclaimed to the skank, “Blood-sugar run, be-atch!”
“Ohmygod—do I see Sour Patch Kids?” whisper-exclaimed the skank.
“Fill me in on that Zurbarán shit, and there's some strawberry gummies in it for you, too.”
Soon all three cashmeres were standing around the skank, and the whisper party had begun. In these Reading Room whisper parties, girls whispered entire conversations, they whispered chuckles, they popped consonants and sighed vowels until everyone within earshot wanted to cry out “Shut the fuck up!” Nothing could be any worse than these whispered conversations, which got under your hide like an unreachable itch. Charlotte put her hand up to her eyes like a blinker, to make sure
they
didn't recognize
her
.
Now the skank and her friends were chewing away on Sour Patch Kids and gummies and making a sound like cows chewing their cuds and whispergiggling over the sound they were making.
“Why don't we smack our lips a little … Dover?” (Had someone really named a daughter Dover?) “You sound like you haven't had a sugar fix in a month.”
“I haven't—not Sour Patch Kids. You know how everybody says they're junk? They are junk, but there's junk and there's thrilling junk.”
“Woooo—don't look around, but isn't that Whatisname Clements, on the lacrosse team?”
“Where?”
“You're right!”
“I told you not to look around!”
“I had to! He's the hottie with the body!”
Whisper-laughter, whisper-laughter.
“Maybe he'd like a Sour Patch Kid.”
“Or maybe he's lost. I never saw a lacrosse player in the library before. Somebody better go see if he knows where he is.”
Whisper-laughter, whisper-laughter.
Charlotte was dying to lift the hand that hid her face and look around and see if
she
had ever seen him before. After all,
she
knew her way around the lacrosse players—
And all at once she was back at the formal, down in the court during the drinks, and Harrison was making a fuss over her and calling her “our Charlotte,” and Hoyt was beaming because she was such a hit with Harrison, and she had never been so happy in her life, because she felt so pretty and cute and witty and popular, and Hoyt gave her a loving look—
O Hoyt! That look was
sincere
! You're not a good enough actor to have merely pretended to—to
love me
—
Before she knew it, the terrible flash flood had returned, her eyelids were spilling with tears, and the sting of it filled her rhinal and laryngeal cavities. She couldn't let anyone see her crying, especially not in this huge public room, and most especially not the skank and the three cashmere pullovers who were almost certainly sorority girls—
Gulping air and trying to stem the tide, she lifted her hand—just to spread the fingers in the hand beside her face—and peeked through her fingers. All four girls, the three cashmeres and the skank, were now facing the entrance. As she looked at their faces, she saw four … raccoons … black rings around their eyes … four raccoons foraging at night, not for food, but for boys—and now one of them was looking her right in the face! In her curiosity, her hand had slipped entirely from her face—and they could see her!
Just that. She didn't dare look again. The flood was raging. Any moment—
If she left the library now, she didn't have a prayer of doing well on the neuroscience exam, and if she didn't do well, an already bad situation could become a disaster. She had so much reading to do in books she could only find here—
It was only by contracting her abdominals as hard as she could that she was able to stem the wave of convulsions that were coming to take over her lungs, trachea, chin, all of her body from the solar plexus upward, in point of fact. That
could not occur
in this very public place … She stood up and shoved—just so, shoved—her books and papers into her backpack, pushed her chair back with a jolting noise she didn't mean to make—it echoed throughout the great room—and quickly walked down the aisle to the door. If they had had ray guns, those four pairs of raccoon eyes could not have bored into her back more painfully; and if she had eyes and ears in the back of her head, she couldn't have seen the sheen on those Stila-glossed lower lips more clearly, or been scalded any worse by the rising steam of their whispers.
Blind with the tears that were about to rage, Charlotte burst through the swinging doors at the entrance—jolted—padded,
collided—
“Aw, man!”—a male voice on the other side—
Gingerly, Charlotte eased one of the two doors open—and found the way blocked by a boy on his hands and knees, facing away from the doors. Books—on the floor—all over the place. Two of them had landed wide open, facedown; on one the spine had torn loose from the hard backing of the covers. Others had landed this way and that. The boy looked back over his shoulder, his face the very picture of anger—
“Ohmygod! Adam!” she said. “I didn't know anybody—I'm really sorry! It just never occurred to me!” She stood there shocked, mindlessly keeping the door ajar.
He twisted himself about into a sitting position and looked up at her warily. It seemed to register on him for the first time that it was Charlotte. He managed a smile of sorts. “Why don't you just come barging on through?” He shook his head in the manner that implied
You idiot
, but he managed to hang on to the smile … more or less.
“I swear, Adam, I had no idea anybody was there! I'm so sorry!”
“There's a window in the door, Charlotte.”
Shhhhh!
Came the sibilant chorus from inside the Reading Room. A boy's voice: “People are trying to study in here!” Another angrier: “Haul it outside and fut the shucking door!”
Charlotte let the door swing closed. Adam struggled to his feet and looked about at the books on the floor.
“Well, that's one way to run into you or you to run into me … or something …”
“I'm so sorry! I was in such a rush!”
“No, it's fine, nothing's hurt, don't worry.” By the time he got to “don't worry,” he was bending over to collect the scattered books. “I haven't seen you in forever.” Then he looked up at her. “What have you been doing with yourself? Where've you been hiding?”
Charlotte shrugged and looked down, as if at the books, because the tears had started.
“They're all about Henry the Eighth and England's break with the Church of Rome,” he said, nodding at the stack of books he now cradled in his arms.
Charlotte couldn't hold the flood back any longer.
“Charlotte! What's wrong?”
She lifted her head and, feeling the tears rattling down her face, lowered it again. “Oh nothing, just a bad day, that's all.” The first little convulsions began silently.
“I think it's more than just a bad day. Can I help?”
The full convulsions overwhelmed her. She put her head on Adam's shoulder and began sobbing.
“Let me put these down.” He placed his stack of books on the floor up against the wall. When he stood up, he put an arm about Charlotte. She nestled her head on his chest, and the convulsions came in waves.
“Hey, it's okay, shhhh,” said Adam. Students were staring at them. “Want to go downstairs? Why don't we go down to the stacks so we can talk.”
The best she could do was nod yes as her head lay on his chest, so uncontrollable were her heaving lungs.
Adam left his books where they were and led her toward the stairs ever so slowly, with his arm around her. “Oh, Adam,” she said in a weak, congested voice, “I don't mean for you to—what about your books?”
“Hah. Don't worry. Nobody'll touch them. They're all full of arcane religious history. Nobody will know what a
matrix
is in those books. Henry's break with Rome was the most important event in modern history. All of modern science flows from that. People don't get the point of all the pioneers of human biology being Englishmen and Dutchmen—
oh.”
He stopped when she put her arm around his waist and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her head fell forward now and again as the sobs rolled on and rolled on.
“It's going to be okay,” said Adam. “Just let it out, honey. I'm with you.”
Even in the watery depths of her misery the
Honey
,
I'm with you
struck her as an off-key … dorky … expression that assumed too much … And “just let it out.” What trendy, sappy theory was
that
based on? In the mountains everyone was raised to “hold it in,” on the theory that emotional disintegration is contagious … In the mountains men were strong … but at the same time she had … only Adam.
She had been back at Dupont for less than twenty-four hours and was already ravaged by a loneliness more desperate than anything she had felt as a little girl from the mountains arriving at the great Dupont for the first time five months ago. She had been living under the illusion that she had
made friends
—Bettina and Mimi. The bitter cold but utterly clear light of schadenfreude—Bettina- and Mimi-style—had proved otherwise. They were merely three girls who had found themselves thrown together in the first circle of loserdom. The Lounge Committee … They had huddled together for warmth, all the while resenting the fact that fate had cast them out among the losers, namely, one another. What Charlotte suffered from now could not be given any diagnosis so benign as homesickness. She had just
been
home, only to learn that Sparta, Alleghany County, and County Road 1709 were no longer a retreat she could return to.
There existed on this earth no home, no peaceful place where she could lay her head. After a twelve-hour bus trip, counting the two hours she had to wait at the bus station in Philadelphia for the bus to Chester and the half hour she had to wait for the local bus to the Dupont campus, Charlotte had arrived at Edgerton House, room 516, at midnight, praying to God that Beverly would not be there. God answered her prayers. Beverly was back—her half-opened luggage was on her bed where she had left it—but she was out. Charlotte unpacked, undressed, got into bed, lights out, at a frantic pace, and was lying there in the now implacable grip of insomnia when Beverly came in at about three a.m. in a drunken stupor, talking incoherently. Charlotte pretended to be asleep. She lay awake all night listening to Beverly snoring, talking, bubbling, belching, crepitating in her stuporous sleep. Charlotte got up in the dark at six a.m. It took a tremendous exertion of will. A depressed girl seeks total inertia and never wants to get up, but with Charlotte the fear of humiliation and its obverse, pity, overcame it. Above all, she
wanted to make sure she could get dressed and get out of the room while her alien roommate was still unconscious. The thought of having Beverly look her up and down, ask questions, make insidious Sarc 3 comments—or ignore her, the way she had for the first month—was more than she could bear.

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