I Am Charlotte Simmons (13 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: I Am Charlotte Simmons
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“Hi,” said Charlotte. “I'm really sorry, Miz Downes—”
“Oh, come on,
please.
Ashley.”
“I'm really sorry. I was just at the meeting, and I tried to get to talk to you
afterward, but there were so many people.” Blushing and lowering her chin: “You said come by anytime, but I know you didn't think
this
soon. I'm really sorry.”
“Well—come on in,” said the R.A. She smiled at Charlotte the way you might smile at a lost child. “What's your name?”
Charlotte told her and, once inside the room, stood there and began expounding, in an embarrassed way, upon how valuable the meeting had been and how much she thought she had gotten out of it, all the while noticing that this was a single room and a surprisingly messy one … bed unmade, clothes strewn on the floor, including a pair of dirty thong underpants. “But there was one thing …” Now that she had come to the point, she didn't know how to put it.
“Why don't you sit down,” said the R.A. So Charlotte sat in a plain wooden chair, and Ashley Downes sat on the edge of her messy bed.
Charlotte struggled some more with her phrasing, finally saying, “But you didn't really talk about the coed dorm part. I mean you
did
, you certainly did talk about it, but there's one thing …” Words failed her again.
The R.A. now looked at her as if she were about six. She leaned forward and said quietly, “You mean … sex?”
Charlotte could feel herself nodding like a six-year-old. “Yes.”
Ashley Downes leaned forward still further, resting her forearms on her knees and intertwining her fingers. “Where are you from?”
“Sparta, North Carolina.”
“Sparta, North Carolina. How big is Sparta?”
“About nine hundred people,” said Charlotte. “It's up in the mountains.” Just why she had added this bit of geographical intelligence, she couldn't have explained, not even to herself.
Ashley Downes averted her eyes and thought for a moment, then said, “Let me put your mind at ease. Yes, this is a coed dorm, and yes, there is sexual activity in coed dorms here at Dupont. What floor are you on?”
“Five.”
“Okay. This is a coed dorm, but that doesn't mean boys are going to be running back and forth across the hall and jumping into bed with girls. Or for that matter, boys from any other part of Edgerton. In fact, if anything, it means they
won't
. There's no actual rule against it, but it's looked down upon. It's considered pathetic and dorky to be reduced to hooking up with someone from your own house. It's called dormcest.”
“Dormcest?”
“Dormcest. You know, like incest. As a matter of fact, Edgerton always has a T-shirt for everybody at the end of the year listing all sorts of funny or stupid things that have happened in the house. Last year's had a line that said DORMCEST: THREE. That's three cases out of two hundred students. That's how dorky it is.”
Now Charlotte could feel herself smiling like a six-year-old who has just stopped crying. She kept smiling and nodding and expressing profound thanks, and she really hadn't meant to take up her time on the very first night.
Charlotte stood up, and Ashley stood up and put her arm around her shoulders as she walked her to the door. “I'm sorry, tell me your name again?”
“Charlotte Simmons.”
“Well, Charlotte, I'll tell you something. This isn't Sparta, North Carolina, but I think you're gonna find it isn't Sodom and Gomorrah, either.”
 
 
By eight-thirty, back in room 516 once more, Charlotte felt as tired as she had ever been in her life. She had been up since three o'clock this morning and on edge the entire time. Watching “Jeff” and “Valerie” of Sherborn, Boston, and Mather Insurance and “Billy” and “Lizbeth” of County Road 1709, Sparta, and the next thing to unemployed, fend with the problem of breathing the same air—had been draining, excruciating. She decided to take a shower, get in bed, read for a bit, and then go to sleep.
Her heart sank. My God … take a shower? In a coed bathroom? The thought was mortifying, yet she had no choice. She changed into her pajamas, her slippers, and her Scottish plaid polyester flannel bathrobe, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, screwed up her courage, and headed down the corridor. Things were quiet, thank God. On the way she nodded tentatively at a girl and then a boy, each alone and looking as lonesome as she felt.
She entered the bathroom slowly and softly, as if stealth was of the essence. It was a large, windowless, feebly lit room with rows of weary old yellowing white basins and urinals, gray sheet-metal toilet cubicles, narrow shower stalls with old mauve-gone-russet curtains for privacy … One of the showers was running … Other than that, the place seemed to be miraculously empty. Perhaps if she hurried—into a toilet cubicle. She had been sitting down no more than fifteen seconds when she thought she heard a faint grunting sound. Then—a prodigious pig-bladdery splattering sphincterspasmed bowel explosion, followed by, in rapid succession,
plop plop plop
and a deep male voice—“Oh fuck! Splashed right up my fucking asshole!”
Filthy! The crudeness, the grossness, the vulgarity—above all the fact that there was a
boy
or a
man
in here …
egesting
… no more than three or four cubicles down the row from her!
“Shit—a—brick!” said a deep male voice in a cubicle only slightly farther away. “What the fuck you been eating, Winnie—month-old sushi?” He made a mocking vomiting sound. “You're fucking … morbid, dude. I need a gas mask.”
Sure enough, a nauseous, putrid, gaseous odor was in the air.
Charlotte lifted her legs and pressed her feet against the door, lest these
brutes
see her slippers in the space beneath the door or the walls and become aware of her presence.
“Don't be so fucking heartless,” said the first voice. “My asshole's cold. That was a fucking bull's-eye.”
The second one laughed. “You're a human disaster area, Winnie, is what you fucking are.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That was a
terrible
performance, dude!
Terrible
! You want to see a perfect, noiseless turd? I mean
perfect
? Just swing on by here before you leave. I won't flush it.”
“And you know what
you
are, Hilton? You're a pervert.”
“Don't try to talk your way out of it. You got to come by here and learn how to take a shit.”
Charlotte didn't know whether to sit here with her feet up—or run for it. But oh God, she couldn't sit here with her feet up forever. So in a frenzy she stood up, hoisted her pajama bottom and put her bathrobe back on, picked her toilet kit up off the floor, departed the cubicle, rushed to the row of basins. She had to wash her hands! She heard a toilet flush and then the clack of somebody sliding a cubicle side-bolt lock open. Then another.
“Hey! Yo! You didn't come by to see, dude.”
“You're weird. Why don't you hang it up on the wall over your bed?”
Same deepened manly voices … Charlotte lifted her eyes, and in the mirror she could see two boys—mere boys! Neither looked more than fifteen or sixteen! Babies dropping their voices a couple of octaves in a desperate desire to sound like men! Each had a can of beer in his hand.
But that was not allowed!
Both were bare from the waist up. One wore a towel around his waist, only that and flip-flops. He had such a tender coating of baby fat over his cheeks, neck, and torso, it made Charlotte think of
diapers and talcum powder. The other wore khaki shorts and boots. He was the leaner of the two but still at that mooncalf stage in which the nose looks enormous because the chin hasn't caught up with it yet. He threw his head back, lifted the can to his mouth, tilted it almost straight up, drank for what seemed like forever with his Adam's apple pumping up and down like a piston, then jackknifed his body and shook all over, as if in ecstasy, and cried out, “IT TASTES SO GOOD WHEN IT HITS YOUR LIPS!”
The baby face in the towel laughed and laughed.
They were walking straight toward Charlotte—and wound up at basins not far from hers. They clanked their cans of beer down on the narrow shelf of glass. Charlotte began drying her hands on her towel. With peripheral vision she could tell the baby-fat, baby-faced boy was looking at her.
“Hi,” he said. “Nice bathrobe.”
She ignored him.
“Seriously,” said the other, the thin one with the teenager nose. “Awesome plaid. What's your clan?”
The baby face laughed and laughed and said, “Kmart.”
Then the outsize nose laughed and laughed.
Charlotte ignored them both and picked up her toilet kit. Her face was burning. She knew it must be scarlet.
The boy with the nose said behind his hand in a mock whisper, “No capeesh. Must be a foreign student. The Scotch count as foreign students, don't they?”
Laughter, laughter, laughter.
Just before she turned to leave, Charlotte saw in the mirror a girl coming toward the basins. She was clad in a towel, too, but had somehow wrapped it around her body from just beneath her arms to just above her knees. There was no longer the sound of a shower running. The girl had a chubby, freckled face and wet, reddish hair plastered against her head and hanging down her back.
When she reached the basins, the baby-fat boy said, “Hi, there. We're looking for some friendly conversation and a little sympathy.”
The girl barely even glanced at them. She turned to the mirror and brought her forefingers to one eye and spread the lids apart as if looking for something lodged in it. Still looking straight ahead, she said, “I hope you find it.”
As of the moment Charlotte left the bathroom, the boys hadn't thought of a comeback, and the girl was ignoring them.
On the way back to the room, Charlotte realized her heart was banging away. She was appalled … Coed Bathroom had seemed like a plausible, if uninviting concept, the way the Amorys had talked about it. But
this
was what it was! The vulgarity, the
rudeness
, the
impudence
, the virtual nudity—people parading around in towels—and
drinking
—barely two hours after the resident assistant Ashley's assurances there would be no alcohol in this building, much less public drunkenness … Now Charlotte was more than appalled. She was frightened. How was she supposed to live like this?—stripped of all privacy, all modesty … Her heart kept banging away … How could this be real? This was
Dupont …
Channing, Matt, Randy Hoggart, and Dave Cosgrove at their drunkest would never be so vulgar.
Once inside her room, Charlotte quickly changed back into her denim shorts and her blouse, picked up her toilet kit and her towel, and went down to the Common Room. She remembered a powder room near the entrance. In the Common Room … quite a jolly burble of laughs and voices … the furniture massed in the center of the room had been moved, back to its original places, presumably. Plenty of boys and girls, her classmates, were sprawled on the leather couches and easy chairs or standing around them, having a merry time … making friends … Charlotte was too distraught to even imagine joining in … Suppose people saw her going into the powder room with a toilet kit and a towel? What would they think—or assume?
It was about as cramped as a powder room could be. She carefully locked the door and took a seat on the toilet, only to find that her excretory and egestive systems had shut down, totally. She got up. She would bathe as best she could manage. She took off her blouse and her bra. There she was in the mirror … a wretched, panicked little half-naked creature … She had forgotten to bring a washcloth. She wet one end of the towel in the tiny basin, tried to use the squirt-by-squirt soap dispenser on the wall to lather it, creating a mess mainly, and washed her armpits—
Someone was trying to open the door—only to find it locked—
Charlotte tried to speed up her primitive toilette. She needed to lower her shorts and panties, but the room was so small that if she bent over, her bottom pressed into the wall. So she stood up straight and tried to wriggle her clothes off straight down—
The doorknob began turning again, this time several times, in … an
accusatory way? An ostentatious groan of a sigh came from the other side of the door.
From just outside the door a girl's voice said, “Anybody in there?” Not very nicely, either.
Thoroughly frazzled, Charlotte said, “Not yet!”
The voice said, “Not
yet
?”
“I mean I'm not through yet!”
Long pause. Then the voice said, “How obvious is that?”
But she had to brush her teeth!
Had
to! … Finally she managed to squeeze some toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She began furiously brushing her teeth.

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