I Am Charlotte Simmons (65 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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She hurried back to them. They were still talking away and didn't notice her or didn't care to notice her, whichever. She walked right up to Nicole, who seemed like a marginally easier nut than Crissy, and with a smile and bright, wide eyes said, “You have to come see this
ho
-tel! Right over there”—she pointed—“you look down on this courtyard, with
trees
and a
water
fall, and above it there's this …
space
, this empty space, and it goes all the way up to the roof, but it's all
inside the building
! Y'all oughta come
see
it!”
The blond Nicole broke off her conversation and gave Charlotte a patient look, bordering on annoyed. “You mean an atrium?”
“Oh,” said Charlotte, “I hadn't
thought a they-at
. You mean like in one of those Roman
houses
? It's sorta like they-at, but this one goes up—maybe like thirty stories? You oughta come see it!”
“I've seen about a dozen of them,” said Nicole, deadpan. “Every Hyatt has one.” Then she turned back to Crissy. “Well anyway, I figured the heels are too high, but like so what? Guys don't know how to dance anyway, and by the time these guys reach the dance floor, they'll be like
so-oh-oh
drunk …”
Charlotte was still staring at Nicole, her mouth slightly open. She felt as if she had just been kicked in the stomach. Her big architectural discovery—it had only revealed, if any further revelation was needed, what a clueless little hick she was. Nicole and Crissy were right in front of her in their perfect jeans, perfect shirts, perfect pointy-toed boots, perfect cocked hips, ignoring her corporeal existence with perfect efficiency.
Hoyt, Vance, and Julian, loaded down with luggage, were walking toward them. Thank God for that. She wouldn't be left standing here, the lone wayfarer.
Hoyt said cheerily, “Okay, gang, we got the keys. So let's go on up.” Then he looked at Charlotte. “And oh, hey, babe”—he swung his left side toward her … swung it because he must have had three bags under his left arm—“could you take yours? I feel like my fucking finger's coming off.”
And there it was, her canvas boat bag, hanging off the crooked little finger of his left hand. She took it. She was too embarrassed to say a word.
“Thanks,” said Hoyt. And then he addressed Crissy and Nicole and laughed. “I thought my fucking finger was coming off!”
And there
she
was, standing in the lobby of this … this … palace of a hotel—in sneakers, jeans, T-shirt, and cheap, puffy polyurethane-chip-filled jacket that made her look like a tiny walking hand grenade, the complete urchin from the hills, lost in the midst of all this luxury, carrying her belongings in her sole piece of luggage, a little boat bag. In a small, defeated voice she said to Hoyt, “Did you get my key, too?”
“Your key?” He looked nonplussed. Then: “Oh, sure. We got everybody's keys. Let's go.”
Crissy looked at Charlotte and gave her the dead smile. Then she said to Nicole, “She's smart. I don't know why I brought so much like … stuff.”
Not “Charlotte's” or even “Charlunnh's,” but “She's.”
Charlotte was still sifting all that for Sarc 3—and finding none, although she felt certain it must be there—when Nicole said to her, “What are you wearing tonight?”
Automatically wary, Charlotte didn't know what to say. Somehow it would come out that she borrowed the dress from Mimi. She didn't even want to show it to her, either, rolled up—balled up was more like it—in the bottom of her bag. She finally said, “Just a dress and some shoes.”
“A dress and some shoes …” said Nicole. She nodded several times in a ruminating fashion. Then she turned to Crissy and said, “That's not a bad idea.”
Both sorority girls began nodding, with eyes downcast and serious expressions, as if ruminating upon a remarkable profundity. Charlotte felt devastated. She
knew
this was classic Sarc 3.
Then Crissy said, “I hope you don't mind my asking … but what
kind
of dress?”
What did she care! Obviously she didn't. She was only interested in more material to nod at Nicole with in mock sagacity. But it didn't matter. Charlotte had no more fight left. She felt defeated and sad—sad about her own amateurishness, her shortcomings as … a girl. In that respect she had
gotten absolutely nowhere since Alleghany High. Self-disappointment, self-pity, abject capitulation to a stronger foe, and that pathetic form of inverse aggression that goes along the lines of
Now don't you feel guilty for what you have reduced me to?
—some of which she was quite conscious of—commandeered Charlotte Simmons—she who had been sent forth to do great things—not only to give herself up to an ignorant Lost Province but, with conscious inverse aggression, to exaggerate it: “What kind of dress?”
Dreh—ess?
“I don't know what kind.”
Kiii—und.
“A dress, is all.” The self-abasement gave her what she wanted: a perverse thrill. Was the word masochism? She didn't know. Up to now that had just been a concept she had picked up when Miss Pennington was telling her about what psychologists were saying way back in the early twentieth century—Freud, Adler, Krafft-Ebing, and all that.
Being on the elevator with Hoyt, who was joking about all the bags he had under both arms, lifted her spirits a bit. Her room turned out to be taken up mainly by two queen-size beds. The beds, plus two side tables, a low wooden bureau, a little commercial reproduction Louis writing table with two chairs, and a big freestanding wooden armoire—housing a gigantic television set—left very little space to walk. Hoyt came in behind her and dumped the luggage on a bed with a big sigh.
“This isn't too bad,” he said.
“Where's your room?” said Charlotte.
Blithely: “I'll be in here, too.”
“But I thought—”
“Hey, we were lucky to get any room at all, Charlotte.”
He couldn't—it couldn't be that way—but on the other hand, he had called her by her actual name for the first time on the entire trip.
“Julian and Nicole are rooming with us,” Hoyt said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
A start of panic—but then she realized that it would be better that way. It would be sort of like an encampment. Certainly nothing funny would go on with everybody in the same room. Sort of like an encampment … she kept hanging on to this word
encampment
, with its overtones of a campfire and a good, tuckered-out sleep in a sleeping bag made from rubber ponchos and blankets.
Soon Julian and Nicole arrived, and Julian dumped his armful of bags on the other bed. Same sort of sigh. “That's a shitload a luggage.
Girl stuff
,” he added, smiling at Nicole.
“Where are Vance and Crissy?” said Nicole.
“A couple of doors down the hall,” Hoyt said. Hoyt and Julian and Nicole started chatting, but Charlotte was busy checking out the room. She tried to figure out where the hotel could put the cots. The room was so crowded with stuff already.
“Ohmygod, it's five-thirty,” said Nicole.
That was another thing, now that Nicole had raised the subject. Dinner was at six-thirty. Where were they all going to change? How were they going to take showers? Four people in a small space, boys and girls, changing clothes, taking showers, fixing their hair—making sure they looked right—
Charlotte sat down on the edge of the bed where Hoyt had dumped all that luggage and crooked her forefinger around her chin and pondered the situation.
“Then I say we better get started,” said Julian. “Hey, Nicole, hand me that handle. It's in my red-and-black bag, the tennis bag.”
“
You
get it Julian,” said Nicole. “Those things are heavy.”
Julian sighed.
Hoyt said, “I'll get it.” He reached inside the bag and withdrew a huge plastic bottle, more like a jug really, with a big plastic handle. It was so heavy you could see Hoyt's forearm trembling as he handed it to Julian. A yellow label on it said ARISTOCRAT VODKA.
Then Hoyt delved into one of his bags and produced a bottle of orange juice and a stack of eight-ounce paper cups, and Julian arranged them on top of the low-slung bureau—setting up a bar, Charlotte deduced. She immediately went on alert. Five-thirty in the afternoon!
Julian set about removing the plastic seal around the mouth of the big jug of vodka, and Hoyt went to work removing the one on the bottle of orange juice. They were so
intense
about it, as if they couldn't wait another second to get at their alcohol. Charlotte tried to work it out in her mind that this was an adventure. She could hear Laurie's voice on the telephone: “College is the only time in your life when you can really
experiment
—and when you leave, everybody's memory evaporates.” That didn't make her feel a whole lot better, however.
As Charlotte sat on the bed, Julian's back was to her, but she could hear a voluble, voluminous plummet plummet plummet sound as Julian poured the first ration of vodka out of the great brimming jug into a paper cup. Then he added some orange juice, although it couldn't have been much, because all that plummeting must have meant a lot of vodka.
He handed the cup to Nicole, sitting on the other bed, who immediately
tilted it back, then rocked forward, her eyes squinted and tears forming, and let out a demonstrative half moan, half sigh: “Shit, Julian, you think you like put enough vodka in it?”
“You can handle it.”
Nicole hurried to prove him right, knocking back another gulp and then rocking forward and smiling and lifting her eyebrows way up and opening her eyes wide in a look to convey the notion that it was a little strong but hit the spot.
Julian set about pouring two more cups practically full of vodka.
Hoyt sat on the bed beside Charlotte and began stroking her back. Part of her wished he wouldn't, not in front of these two people she barely knew, but at least it
included
her. Nothing else did.
Meantime, Nicole had drunk another gulp and picked up the telephone between the two beds. By the chummy, confidential way she spoke, Charlotte could tell she had called Crissy in her room.
“Oh, we're just, you know, pre-gaming.” She cupped her hand over her mouth and lowered her voice, but Charlotte was so close she could still hear what she said: “Where's what? … Ah. You mean the tumor?” She laughed at something Crissy said. “I'll give you three guesses, and the last two are not eligible for this competition …” She laughed again. “Right …
right here
, if you know what I mean.”
Charlotte
knew what she meant. They were talking about
her
. She was a tumor, a sick condition that just wouldn't go away.
By now Hoyt had advanced from stroking her back to rubbing her shoulder with a circular motion. That was even more embarrassing; but as long as Hoyt wanted her—Hoyt, the best-looking, coolest guy in the entire fraternity—whatever the likes of Nicole and Crissy thought of her was nullified, she figured.
“What do you want?” he asked her. “Hey, relax.”
Only then did she realize how stiffly rigid her whole body was as she sat there. “Want?” she said.
“To drink.”
“Oh, nothing, thanks. Maybe some orange juice.”
“Orange juice—come on now, want me to put a little vodka in there for you?”
“No, it's really okay,” she said.
He started rubbing her shoulder again, rubbing harder yet with tender concern, and that started to feel good, and not only good but important, important
for Nicole and Julian to notice. His hands were big … and relaxing … and nice to have on her body. Her shoulder started feeling warmer, and she couldn't resist looking up at him. She loved the way he was looking down at her. The tenderness and warmth of his smile—and he was so handsome! The cleft in his chin, those flashing hazel eyes that were totally absorbed in
her
—he was asking of her something she would not be comfortable doing, but she didn't want him to stop looking at her with that impish expression, that mysteriously lascivious yet loving mien … The look on his face was her inviolable protection against the smirks, the Sarc 3 glances, and the mock ruminations of Nicole and Crissy.
“Well, just a little,” she said finally.
Hoyt reached over and took the jug of vodka off the bureau, and as if he, like Julian, couldn't control the flow, he practically filled a cup with it and added a splash of orange juice.
“Not a little orange juice—I meant a little vodka!” She added a laugh so they would think she really was entering into the spirit of things … and was
not
sitting stiffly and anxiously on the edge of the bed.
No way could she keep that laugh from sounding nervous, however. They were all watching to see what she would do with the drink. She was holding it like an as-yet-undetonated explosive. She forced herself to put it to her lips. She swallowed and made a face. Julian and Hoyt laughed, but in a way that said this was all good fun. It tasted terrible. It went down sour and burning and hit bottom, whereupon a sickly sweet aftertaste bloomed. But she could see Nicole already polishing off the rest of her cup and apparently passing it back to Julian for more. It became terribly important that Nicole not seem cooler than she was, more fun, more grown up, on a different planet when it came to sophistication. She took another sip. It didn't taste any better, but this time she didn't make a face.

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