I Am Charlotte Simmons (53 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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A dank gloom … cigarette smoke invaded Charlotte's nose to the point where she could have sworn it was also burning her corneas.
Bettina and Mimi were making hurry-up gestures. They had spotted a guy and three girls—upperclassmen, apparently, since they actually looked twenty-one—getting up from a cocktail table not too far from the dance floor. Already Mimi and Bettina were rushing pell-mell to claim the table, jimmying their thighs between back-to-back chairs and sprinkling 'scuse me's over the cross faces of the students they jostled. Charlotte did her best to keep up. As soon as they sat down, Mimi lit up a cigarette to show that …
she belonged!
Bettina began moving her torso languidly to the reggae beat to show that …
she belonged!
Cigarette in one hand, Mimi brought her bottle of beer near her lips, looked at Charlotte, and arched her eyebrows, pantomiming, “Don't you want something to drink?” which really meant, “Don't you want to
belong?”
Charlotte shook her head no, and leaned forward with her forearms braced on the edge of the table, and looked right past Mimi at all the young bodies clumped together. Why? Belonging to—what? What was the point of this clump of humanity eagerly pressed against one another in a beaten-up place like the I.M. on a Friday night? She immediately answered her own question with another. What if I were in my room alone right now? She could
feel
it … sitting at her desk, staring out the window at the uplit library tower while loneliness
scoured
out all semblance of hope, ambition, or simple planning. Charlotte Simmons!—removed from all family, all friends, every familiar terrain, every worn and homely object … Did a single other student at Dupont feel as lonely as she had felt?
Her eyes lit upon five girls who were about to squeeze in at a table by the dance floor, just two tables away. They looked just as young as she did, all desperately grinning and laughing.
That
one—the one sitting practically
on
the dance floor—the blonde—the one with all the cleavage—the superior air she had, her chin up in the air—the very picture of
I'm hot—
oh come on, Charlotte! Be honest with yourself! You know she's hot! The girl had the kind of long, straight, silky blond hair that makes every non-blond female in the world—every one of them without exception—wring her hands over the careless, pointless, offhanded unfairness of Fate.
Bettina had noticed the new arrivals, too. She leaned close to Charlotte, gestured toward them, and said rather superciliously, “Why don't they just wear a sign around their necks saying, ‘Fuck me, I'm a freshman'?”
Charlotte laughed, but her spirits sank. Why was Charlotte Simmons here? What was this thing the three of them were involved in—herself every bit as much as Bettina and Mimi? The
hunt!
The
hunt!
The boyfriend! Necessary as breathing! What academic achievement, what soaring flight of genius, even a Nobel Prize in neuroscience, could ever be as important?
The band had broken into a soulful Bob Marley—style number. The singer was tilting his head way back, so that the microphone he held seemed to be diving right down his gullet. Half a dozen couples were grinding on the dance floor. Specimens, lab animals they were, in a neurobiological environment that triggered certain stimuli, causing them to infuse their mucous membranes with alcohol and nicotine, so overwhelming was the urge to …
belong—
For the first time in her two months at Dupont, Charlotte felt like her old self, independent, aloof—aloof from the customs other freshmen accepted as the natural order of things in college life and surrendered to without a peep. Why was it so important for these bright, rich kids—fourteen-ninety average SATs—to buy into what was primitive? This itchy, dilapidated dump as opposed to something stylish or at least slick and spick-and-span … this Caribbean music … Charlotte Simmons was above them all. They were specimens for her to study. The I.M. was a terrarium full of rich boys and girls in rags, and she was peering down into the terrarium and studying them … the male and female of the species grinding genitals … the swollen … thing, under cotton, searching for … the crevice, under cotton … the Buddha drumming, flailing everything in a nine-foot radius … the caramel singer eating more microphone … but then here was an aberration! A guy was coming onto the dance floor by himself. No, he was merely
using the dance floor as a shortcut. Thatchy hair, open button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, shirttail hanging out over his khakis, limping, but with an arrogant gait, as he strode between the grinding two-backed beasts. He turned his head. A surgical type of bandage was plastered down one side of his jaw, from his ear almost to his chin—
Hoyt.
He was heading toward her. She was acutely conscious of how frantically her heart was beating. He must have been at a table on the other side of the floor all along. How had he even found her in this smoky darkness? How long had he—
Mimi leaned across Bettina and said to Charlotte, “See who's coming? It's your lifeguard from the Saint Ray house.”
Charlotte looked up as if she hadn't noticed him before. Her face was burning. She only hoped it was too dark for Mimi to notice.
Mimi leaned across Bettina again. “What are you going to say to him?” She looked excited.
“I don't know.” Charlotte's voice was shaking.
Now he was barely six feet from her, but he didn't seem to be looking directly at her. Closer and closer—and right past her, without a glance. He was closing in on the table with all the five freshmen crammed in about it. He leaned over the blonde with the cleavage and the Hair. The girl was sitting right on the edge of the dance floor with her back to it. Hoyt tapped her on the shoulder. Charlotte—all this was happening right in her face. The blonde swung her head about with a flourish of all that silky hair. Hoyt's smug smirk dissolved into a puzzled but sincerely concerned look.
Charlotte couldn't begin to hear what he was saying to the girl. The band and the increasingly drunken roar of the place drowned out everything else. Nevertheless, a name bubbled up her brain stem: Britney Spears.
The blonde was giggling, giddy with excitement, and blushing—giddy with embarrassment, if Charlotte knew anything about it. Hoyt pulled over one of the small cocktail lounge chairs from the table beyond and sat down beside the blonde. Now Charlotte couldn't even pretend not to be looking. Hoyt was talking and smiling at the same time, and his quarry was still giggling. Hoyt was leaning in, pouring soul into her eyes with the look that says, “We're both feeling something we can't talk about yet, aren't we.”
Then he began tapping her on the outer surface of her arm, starting up near the shoulder and progressing netherward.
The way Hoyt's eyebrows were arched, it was obvious he was asking a
question. He and the girl stood up. The girl turned her head and displayed an embarrassed, somehow regretful smile at the other girls at her table. Out onto the dance floor they went, Hoyt and the blonde. They locked pelvic saddles, and he began thrusting … himself, grinding … grinding … The band was playing with a slow, hypnotic, syncopated beat. The singer kept repeating the same two lines:
“You must use your strength—
Very sen-si-tive-lee …
Yes, you must use your strength—
Very sen-si-tive-lee …”
Hoyt kept his mouth slightly open in a way that said, “That's it … that's it … Just stay in the groove … you've got it, baby … yeah, baby … and you're starting to love it …”
The girl was red in the face. Anybody could see that, even in this smoky, reeking, shrieking, beer-humid, vomit-tangy electro-night-light. But a smile of dawning naughtiness was beginning to steal across that red face, overriding all embarrassment and foreboding.
Hoyt and the blonde left the dance floor and headed through the mob toward the entrance, holding hands; he chattering, she staring straight ahead, unfocused, contemplating the immediate future.
“Ohmygod,” said Mimi, reaching across Bettina again, this time to show Charlotte the watch on her wrist. “Your lifeguard is too much. Look at that. Who is that stupid little frostitute?”
“What's a
fros
titute?” said Bettina.
“You've never heard frostitute?” said Mimi. “You know ‘frosh,' like freshman?”
“Hmm, I think so,” said Bettina, “I guess so …”
“Frosh … frostitute,” said Mimi.
Charlotte tried to be the picture of nonchalance, but it wasn't going well. She had to turn away from both girls. There was no way they wouldn't see how close she was to crying. She couldn't believe this, and yet she could, which made it worse.
Ohmygod, all the bodies … it was soooo hot … The smoke from other people's rotten lungs burned her rhinal cavities. The Buddha drummer was walloping everything he could reach with his sticks. He obviously thought he was putting on a great show.
You … bastard! Sharp intake of breath—she had never used that expletive before, not even in her thoughts. Hoyt had done this just to torment her! Comes over as if to see her and veers off to some little … slut! Never even thought that word before, either … or had she once, about Beverly … A ray of hope: if he went to all that trouble to torment me, then I must really be on his mind. Fog rolled in: or maybe he was heading for me and then saw something better, a little … frostitute … fresher fresh meat, which is all he cares about, obviously … Or maybe he never saw me at all … That was possible, wasn't it, in the darkness, in the stench, the heat, in all the Buddha noise …
Dream on, Charlotte … Look at it any way you want. He disdained me, hurt me, humiliated me … He
betrayed
me, right under my nose! In front of my friends!
The caramel-colored singer's head was still way back.
“You, mon, can bring down the house—
Very sen-si-tive-lee …
And wo-mon can bring down the house—
Very sen-si-tive-lee …”
Charlotte was conscious of the way Mimi was staring at her; Bettina, too, less obviously. They wanted to see how she took in
that.
She shrugged and tried to be insouciant. “He was a Good Samaritan. That doesn't mean he has to—”
She didn't complete the sentence. She didn't want to get caught trying to put into words what she wished he had wanted to do. She would merely reveal how hurt she felt, and she knew Mimi—damn you, Mimi—would enjoy, in her tarantula way, every second of that.
“W
elcome, O sage of Athens,” said Buster Roth. Coach was reared back in his swivel chair with his fingers interlaced behind his head and his elbows winged out on either side.”What news from Marathon?”
“From where?” said Jojo. Coach had a big friendly smile on, but Jojo detected mockery in the air.
“Marathon,” said Coach. “Twenty-six miles and change from Athens. Big battle going on, and there's this runner they got. It was in the A—uh, the time of Socrates. Old Socrates—” Coach broke off the sentence and made a gesture as if he were shooing flies. “It don't matter. I was just kidding, Jojo, just kidding … So here we are … I'm liable to get used to these mystery visits of yours. I hope you got better news than last time.”
With those few words Coach's demeanor changed. His eyes narrowed, and Jojo had the uneasy feeling that Coach looked upon him as a specimen to be studied. He gestured toward a fiberglass bergère. “Whyn'tcha have a seat?”
“I'm—” Jojo had thought out what he was going to say this time, but it was all breaking up and slipping away. He lowered himself into the chair, stared at Coach, exhaled laboriously, and finally managed to say, “It's not
about Socrates, Coach. It's not—it's not good. In fact, it's bad, Coach. I got my—I'm in a jam.”
Coach narrowed his eyes even more.
“The thing is,” said Jojo, “I'm in this American history class. Mr. Quat.”
Coach took his hands from behind his head and put them on the arms of the chair and turned his head and let his eyes climb the wall, and he cut loose with a big sibilant sigh that came out as “Shiiiiiiiit …” Then he turned back and hunched forward in the chair and uttered another noisy sigh. “Okaaaaay … let's hear it.”
So Jojo began recounting the story, all the while studying Coach's face for some nod or wink or God knows what that would indicate that he, Coach Buster Roth, monarch of the Buster Bowl and the Rotheneum, would take care of it, would protect his boy. From time to time Coach interposed a question. “
When
did you remember? Did you say
mid
night?” … and a few moments later: “Whaddaya mean, had to get him to help you?”
“Well—you know—1 needed a lotta help, it being so late and everything.”
“Whaddya mean, a lotta help? And spare me the bullshit.”
“I gave him a sort of a rough outline.”
“What's a sort of a rough outline supposed to mean, for Christ's sake?”
“I told him what it was supposed to be about.”
“You told him what it was supposed to be about.”
“Yes …”
“And that's all you told him?”
“About
all … I guess.”
“About all, you guess … Well, I'd call that one rough fucking sort of a rough fucking outline, Jojo. Wouldn't
you
?”
Coach swiveled ninety degrees in his chair and let his eyes climb the wall again. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said to the wall. Then he spun about and ran Jojo through with his eyes. He began softly. “Jojo … first you come in here and you tell me you're no dumb jock, you're fucking born-again Socrates, and you wanna take Philosophy 306 and rationalism and animism and a whole load of other shit … and now you come back here and inform me, as if no one would ever guess, that you're a … FUCKING IDIOT! A MORON! AN IMBECILE! HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU MEATHEADS, ‘WE'RE HERE TO HELP YOU BUT KINDLY DO NOT ABUSE THE SYSTEM!' WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE WORD ‘HELP' YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND!
‘HELP YOU' AIN'T THE SAME AS ‘DO IT FOR YOU,' YOU SIMPLEMINDED SHIT! SOCRATES! HOW DARE YOU COME IN HERE AND BREAK MY BALLS ABOUT SOCRATES WHILE YOU'RE HAVING A TUTOR WRITE A FUCKING TEN-PAGE PAPER FOR YOU?”
Jojo was abashed—and then he sensed that Coach was already inventing an I-told-him-so defense in case this thing blew up into something serious. But that merely made him feel hopeless on top of abashed. He was aware of sounding almost babyish as he whined and squeaked out, “But that was
before
, Coach—”
“Before my ass.”
“—before I made my turnaround, Coach! I wrote—that paper was back—”
“Turnaround.” Sarcasm dripped from the word. “THE ONLY WAY YOU NEED TO GET YOURSELF TURNED IS INSIDE OUT! I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE …”
“Coach! Please! I'm begging you! You gotta listen to me, Coach! That was before …”
Coach returned to the soft, menacing voice: “What the fuck difference do you think ‘before' makes? You think I can intercede with this guy Quat and say that was before old Jojo said, ‘By the moons of Minapoor'”—he thrust his right hand upward mock-dramatically—“‘Behold! You now see Socrates before you!' Do you by any chance remember me telling you about the
pricks
on the Dupont faculty? DO YOU?”
Jojo, six feet ten, 250 pounds, nodded as contritely as a second-grader.
“NOW do you know what I'm talking about?”
Nod, nod, nod. A first-grader.
“Somebody made a mistake with this Quat. Somebody—I know who, but it don't matter. Well, welcome to Prickdom. HE'S A FUCKING PRICK! Curtis was complaining about him. Curtis wanted to twist his head off and shit down his windpipe. You didn't hear the way he treated Curtis? You skipped that class or something?”
“I know,” said Jojo. “I was right there, Coach. I swear to God! But I wrote—uh, the paper—that was before—”
“SAY THAT ONE MORE TIME, JOJO, AND I'M GONNA SHOVE ‘BEFORE' DOWN YOUR THROAT UNTIL IT COMES OUT YOUR ASS! Your balls are on the frying pan, in case you don't know it, and ‘before' don't mean shit.” Coach dropped the look of contempt and
began to eye Jojo shrewdly. “Did you actually confess to Quat and say, ‘Yeah, the tutor wrote it for me'?”
“No-o-o …”
“You're sure? Don't fuck with me now, Jojo.”
“I'm sure, Coach.”
“Okay, and who is this tutor we're talking about?”
“Adam … Gellin, is his name.”
“And you and him, you're on good terms?”
Jojo stared off and compressed his lips … and decided, in a flood of shame, he'd better not fuck with Coach now. “No, not exactly. I could've treated him better, I guess.” The picture of Adam's face when he had paged him at midnight that night came to mind.
“Does that mean you're on
bad
terms?”
“Well … I don't know, but Coach, it don't matter. The guy don't have enough here”—Jojo tapped his sternum with his fist—“to do anything about anything anyway. You know that kinda guy, Coach. You told me about' em.”
“Yeah, well, I'm still gonna want to see him.”
Jojo's spirits edged upward for the first time in days.
Coach was calming down and thinking about ways to do something. “He just might find it instructive to know that if
you
get into deep shit over this, he will, too.”
“He already knows that, Coach. That was the first thing he thought about when I told him what Quat said. He's saying, ‘I didn't actually
write
it, Jojo,' and ‘I was just helping you polish the rough edges, right, Jojo?' Like I told you, he's not what you'd call a ballsy little guy.” Jojo smiled for the first time since they had started talking. It pleased him to think that he and Coach were two stand-up guys in a world full of weaklings.
 
 
Over the next few weeks, Charlotte didn't know what to do about Adam. She was obviously on his mind all the time now. He'd call her room, he'd go out of his way to intercept her on the campus, he'd check by the treadmills in the gym to see if she was there, he'd leave notes saying why didn't she come over and “hang” or “chill” with the Mutants, who would be getting together at such and such a place at such and such a time, and finally he had taken to doing the unheard-of at Dupont: he'd ask her out on “dates,” out to real restaurants even—and he'd pay for it!
At Dupont, nobody asked anybody out on a date unless they were already
spending most nights in each other's beds, and even then the boy would word it along the lines of “Whatcha doing tonight? Wanna chill?” Or: “Wanna go over to the I.M. and hang out for a while?” Adam had gone far beyond that. He'd come right out and asked her to a restaurant in town, like Le Chef, at a particular time … and then insisted on coming by and taking her there. Sometimes he would borrow a car from Roger, so he wouldn't have to take her on a bus through the City of God.
Charlotte could no longer kid herself that she was going out on these dates just so she could have some decent food for a change. She was also willingly dropping by from time to time to hang out, to chill, with him and the Mutants. No—she literally did not know what to do with Adam. She didn't know whether to encourage him or not encourage him … or, since in fact she was encouraging him, going on these dates, just how far to go with him. He obviously wanted more than just dinner, talk, and looking into her eyes and holding her hand on a checkered-tablecloth tabletop at Le Chef. Oh yes, she had allowed him to do that, hadn't she … He kept trying to get her to “come by” his apartment, which she wasn't about to do, or let him come up to her room, in which case she would talk about Beverly as if Beverly were tethered to the wall in there. She
had
taken to giving him goodnight kisses, however—long mercy kisses—
Or was calling it a mercy kiss just another way of kidding herself? The truth was … she
wanted
to fall in love with Adam. If only she could! How much tidier life would be!
One night Adam took her to an event at the Phipps—it was hard to say what to call it, a concert, dance performance, or what—featuring a group called the Olfactory Workers. Charlotte had never even heard of anything like it. She guessed not many others had, either, because the Phipps was only about a quarter full. But Adam was eager to go. He didn't know exactly what it was about, but he had read a reference to the Olfactory Workers somewhere. He had such a curiosity, it was infectious.
The Olfactory Workers were six young men and four young women, all dressed in black tights—even the four sort of fat ones—black tank tops, and black vests with mandarin collars and no buttons. Six of them played musical instruments, two trumpets, a French horn, an oboe, a bassoon, and drums. Four of them were dancers who did a kind of modern dance, Charlotte guessed it was, the kind of dancing she had seen in movies, very close to gymnastics, except crazier. But strangest of all were the four big black kettles with lids, up on black metal legs, two on this side of the stage and two on
the other. The kettle lids were outfitted with nozzles and a series of levers. Two performers, one on each side, operated the braziers, spraying some sort of odor-bearing mists from the nozzles up into the air … musk, sandalwood, pine knot, cedar, tannery leather, rose, lily, lime, saltwater spume, and some that were not exactly noxious, but disturbing all the same. A system of blowers, exhaust fans, and olfactory “mops”—Charlotte took this on faith from the program … she couldn't see them, although she could hear the blowers and exhaust fans—cleared the atmosphere between numbers—or mostly, it wasn't perfect—and the odors created, or were supposed to create, a beyond rational harmony between the dancing, the brass, the woodwinds. The music was not definable, at least not by Charlotte. It would start off with what sounded like Roman Catholic chants—but always with rolling trap drums behind it—and dissolve into jazz, which would dissolve into disco music, or so Adam whispered to her, and the oboist and the bassoonist, both women, would lower their mouthpieces and sing mindlessly happy disco rhymes (Adam informed her) in soprano harmony—“It's a disco evolution … Got to risk a revolution”—and then dissolve into a high-pitched a capella as the trumpets and the French horn were drummed up into something that had no name, or at least Adam didn't know it, and the sublime geysers of sandalwood filled the air, although not all the nutmeg and cinnamon were out of the air yet—
A small matter, very small, for Charlotte was now transported! … not so much by the Olfactory Workers and their odors and music and dancing and singing as by the fact that this was something experimental, esoteric, cutting-edge (she had picked up that term in the modern drama course), one of the exciting, sophisticated things Miss Pennington had assured her awaited her on the other side of the mountain, the things that would open up her eyes to harness and to achieve great triumphs with …
As they left Phipps, Charlotte felt so transported that she voluntarily hooked her arm inside of Adam's and leaned against his shoulder. Adam, she might have known, immediately misinterpreted the source of her excitement and sought out her hand, finally got it, and leaned his head against hers just as she was attempting to disengage.
There was an absolute blaze of light as they emerged from the opera house lobby and went out onto the portico, a blaze strong enough to light up the trees in the Grove—and what if someone saw her cuddling with a … dork?

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