I Am Charlotte Simmons

25. You Okay?

They were alone in the elevator. Hoyt didn’t even wait for the doors to close before he started kissing Charlotte, pushing her up against the back wall, caressing her breasts, pressing his body against hers from chest to groin. She kissed him back in a spirited fashion and felt cool doing it, let her body go limp against the wall, wrapped her arms around his neck, allowed him to do whatever he wanted with his hands.

In no time at all, the elevator came to a stop. It was the lobby floor. The door opened, and a yahoo of drunken frat-boy noises welled up from the courtyard below. Hoyt had Charlotte flattened against the elevator’s back wall. The fact that his lust was now on display upon the most public floor of the Hyatt Ambassador Hotel didn’t hold him back for so much as an instant. So obsessed was he by his animal quest, he kept his hands cupped about her buttocks rutrutrutrutramming his mons pubis into hers. A man and a woman in their forties or fifties started to enter the elevator. Charlotte looked right into their faces. She smiled, hoping to assure them that this was not at all what it looked like—she and Hoyt just happened to be young and alive—but the couple wheeled about and retreated into the lobby, where the adolescent ululations of drunken Dupont students enveloped them all over again. Then the door closed, and the college-boy yawp vanished. The elevator was heading up. The known world consisted of Hoyt, his head buried in her hair, his mouth kissing her neck, his groin bucking and grinding, and him going from grunt to groan and back to grunt ungh ungh ungh ungh—

They reached their floor, and Hoyt intertwined his fingers and hers and led her down the hall. His hand was so hot. He looked at her only once. It was his loving smile—but nervous this time. He didn’t say a word.

As soon as they entered the room, he threw the door latch into the locked slant so hard it was like a gunshot, and he closed some sort of metal hasp up higher on the door. Without a word, just a lot of passionate ohhhhunghs, he started kissing her again and cupping her buttocks and pulling her toward him—ohhhhhhungh—and then he entwined his legs in hers, as if otherwise she might go away, while he struggled out of his tuxedo jacket with a lot of twisting and thrashing about. His face was red, his shirt was dark in the armpits, clouds of odor rose, but his chest swelled out, and it was manly, and once he got the jacket off, inside out, he began maneuvering the entwined legs to walk her backward to the bed. She felt the edge of the bed touch the back of her dress. Hoyt reached down, lifting her dress up on one side, feeling about for her underwear, and now she could feel the bed on her bare thighs. She pushed his hand away with a sharp thrust, only to find herself falling back on the bed, with him on top of her. He said nothing, and neither did she. She was excited, a bit frightened, but more than anything else curious. What exactly would he do now? He put one thigh between her thighs, practically smothered her with the heft of his body, and began kissing her again. He kissed her lips and then stuck his big tongue waaay down her throat until she thought she was going to gag, and then he began kissing her upper chest, where the cleavage was. She was afraid he might try to move lower, but instead he began kissing her shoulder, and then he began trying to pull the dress down and off that shoulder. She gave his wrist a good whack with the heel of her free hand, and all of a sudden he was halfway on his back. She hadn’t hit him that hard—and she realized that he had rolled himself over, keeping his leg between hers, however, and was now practically ripping his black bow tie off and unbuttoning his shirt and wriggling for all he was worth, getting out of it, and then going to work on his T-shirt, which got caught upside down and inside out on his head. With a mighty thrash and jerk he tore it off his skull. Neither of them said a word. She was amazed how well defined his abdominal muscles were. In the course of all this struggling, with his shoulders sinking into the bedspread, his abdominal muscles contracted and writhed and contracted some more. Amazing! She knew he worked out at the gym, but he seemed so slothful about everything, it had always seemed to her—but he hadn’t been slothful about his abs! He was wonderful all over again!—and she couldn’t help running her fingers over his wonderful abs and lingering in the crevices between the units, which must have driven him wild, because with another ohhhhungh he rolled on top of her, flattening her entire body into the bedcovers and the mattress. He started lifting her dress up slowly and methodically, all the while kissing her mouth, her neck, her shoulder, her chest, only lower down this time, and then he returned to her neck—oh God!—it sent shivers through her body when he kissed her neck that way, and she wasn’t going to stop him quite yet as he kept edging, edging, edging the dress up her body, because she wanted his hands on her, the way they were now as the dress slipped up, up, up as high as her breasts—where they stopped—and he embraced her around the chest, awkwardly—what was this all about, these two little fists he was making under her back? He was unhooking her bra! Was this what men did?—and pulling the straps out from under her and slipping the bra and her dress up, up, over her head—the feeling as his hands slid over her areolae and her nipples—she found herself—just so!—found herself!—naked except for her white cotton panties. Time to say something—but Hoyt’s bare chest and awesome abs were coming down on her to meet hers, and she wanted this, the feel of his skin on hers, which was not all that serious because he still had on his tuxedo pants and shoes, but even through the pants she was aware of how swollen his groin was. He started moving rhythmically on top of her, and she was so physically titillated—how wet she was all of a sudden!—and she arched her back so that it would titillate her more, and she wondered what she was supposed to do in this situation—maybe lift her loins up to meet his coming down?—go in the same rhythm so they moved together in a kind of dance?—thank God he still had his pants on, but should she say something now, before he had notions of going any further—or should she wait a little longer, so as not to destroy what she had now, which was his entire life, his entire being, his entire soul—but she didn’t know about the soul, how it figured in—

He rolled off her! He sat beside her but not looking at her, his back arched, his hands reaching down to his feet—he was taking his shoes off! And now he was leaning back and unzipping his pants and leaning forward slipping them over his hips and abandoning them on the floor—and was this the point at which she should say something, just so he would be straight about the limits? Yes, it probably was, and so she started to say—but the smile!—he was straight above her now, supporting his weight with his arms, the heels of his hands pressing down on the bed on either side of her shoulders—smiling his smile of…love!—and she had her lips parted, about to say—but how could she say it at precisely this moment when his smile—and only his plaid boxer shorts remained—not that she could see—but the contour of it forcing the plaid way out—no mistaking it—and she became very conscious of her bare breasts, which she couldn’t very well clap her hands over and be Miss Modesty all of a sudden—since that would be so little-girlish. He was bringing that smile down closer and closer to her face. She thought he was going to kiss her on the mouth, but instead he kissed her neck, nuzzling away with his lips. Ohmygod! She went from being dizzy to being deliriously dizzy. His smile! His kissing her neck! She couldn’t very well—although she should—not at this moment, however—not even as he lowered his mouth and began kissing her upper chest and then stuck out his tongue and then massaged her skin with his lips. And now he was on her right breast—right on it!—doing the same things with his tongue and his lips—and then the left breast—the same thing—was this what men did? And then he moved lower, down the midline on her upper abdomen, down to her belly button, which he stuck his tongue into briefly—was this something that men did?—and down, down—until there was no more when and if about it. Now she had to speak up. Suppose he went—but surely men didn’t do that—and he didn’t. Instead his tongue veered off to the side and worked its way down the gulley from her ilial crest down to where her panties began. He put a forefinger under the elastic at the top on this side and slowly ran it across her lower belly just above the level of the mons veneris to that side, where he used the forefinger to pull the panties down over her hips and low upon her buttocks, and then he put his other forefinger under the elastic and slowly slid it back toward this side, but the latitude was much lower now, and his finger slid slowly through the hair on her mons veneris and not a shiver but a tremor ran through her—a muscle in her lower abdomen actually convulsed—and inside her—and ohmygod she felt so wet—and he pulled the panties down below the buttocks on this side—she was just flowing out—she didn’t even know that existed!—as he pulled the panties down over her thighs and knees and then all the way off her, and now she was stark-naked, and he was still kissing her lower abdomen where it was so soft and unprotected and then swirling his big old tongue around—

Hooking up. So now she’d really done it, hooked up. This maybe qualified as heavy hooking up—although not really heavy, since they were still on first base, or maybe on the way to second, even though it was heavy, it was just an experience, an experiment, and Laurie’s words sailed, verbatim, through her brain: “College is the only time in your life when you can really experiment,” even though Laurie had gone all the way…So congested down there…so sensitive…so many warm secretions—seemed like pints—now!—she couldn’t wait any longer!—she was too vulnerable—certainly he knew…but now it was time to make sure he knew the limits. She lifted her head so that she could look at him. She was staring right at the top of his head and could see his thick, thatchy hair bobbing ever so slightly as he kissed and licked and licked and kissed—only now he was running his tongue over her skin in sort of spirals that were looping lower and lower on her abdomen until—had his tongue just brushed the top of the hair on her mons?—now!—act! She summoned up her will and tried to give his head a jolt with the heels of both her hands, but lying flat like this on a soft bed, she couldn’t get the leverage she wanted and it certainly was a mild jolt, if it was a jolt at all, and he acted as if she were signaling him to slide his head down a few inches farther and his mouth and his tongue—ohmygod!

“Hoyt!” She said it sharply.

He immediately stopped and rose up, supporting himself on the bed with the full length of his arms, and he looked down at her with his most wonderful look of love, only the nervous version, which was all right because he did know the limits and he was stopping voluntarily. In fact, he slid back down the bed and completely off it. She let out her breath. But what?—he was unsnapping his shorts at the waist—

“Hoyt?”

“Yeah?”

Obviously his mind was not on what she was saying, because he was looking down and stepping out of one leg of the shorts and then the other, and—ohmygod! In her whole life she had never actually seen such a thing in such a state—although she could tell—dear Brian!—she had only seen her little brothers’ when they were smaller and her father’s once when he stepped about a foot out of the outdoor shower looking for a towel—but…that…ball-peen hammer…it looked like a heavy ball-peen hammer!…a ball-peen hammer with a translucent sheath over it, and now his knees were on the bed and he was crawling toward her on all fours—

“Hoyt!”

“Whuh.”

It wasn’t even a question! It was a grunt half turned into a word. Words didn’t register with him any longer.

On all fours—and he kept crawling. Did he actually expect her to sleep with him? Sleep with was the actual phrase that blipped through her brain, and in the next instant the absurdity hit her. Sleep with? Ball-peen hammer? She was naked. He was naked.

“Hoyt!”

“What?”

Charlotte smiled nervously and said, “I don’t know about this.” She was so hoarse all of a sudden.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I have something.” Whereupon he reached over to the bedside table and took a condom out of his wallet and held it up in the air for a moment. See?

“Uhhh…I don’t mean that. I mean I don’t know if we should do this.” Very hoarse. Couldn’t even make herself smile any longer. Hoyt’s arms had already crawled as far as the midpoint of her thighs. He already loomed over her…a hulk with a big ball-peen hammer…But he stopped. He looked as if he had been poleaxed at the base of the skull. He looked stunned…and beyond stunned, devastated.

“But I really want to make love to you.” Oh, what a pleading warble was lodged in his throat! “I’ve wanted to make love to you from the moment I first saw you.”

“But you don’t understand—”

“I understand what I felt—and what I feel!” Quite dramatic, he was. “I came up to you as soon as I saw you at our party. I knew! There were so many—but there was only you. There is only you!”

“But you don’t understand—I’ve never—I’ve never—”

“You’re a virgin?”

Charlotte lay there, her lips parted in a stuporous way and her mind racing and racing before she finally let the damning admission out: “Yeah.”

“Well, I’ll be really slow, then,” said Hoyt. A certain smile was on his face, the reassuring buck-up, won’t-hurt-a-bit smile, not just of a physician but of a healer whose devotion to her well-being—to her joyful flight through this trial—ran deeper than the very oath of Hippocrates, “First, do no harm.”

“It’s okay. Don’t be scared. I’ve wanted this for so long. It’ll feel good. I promise.”

That smile! The problem of protocol was overwhelming. What would it look like if she said no—now? What would it look like—after letting him go this far? Would it look like—was this what people do at a formal, the way Mimi said? Would he feel hurt, and after hurt, angry, and call her a teasing bitch? Did she dare become known as the teasing bitch who lets a guy get worked up, worked up, worked up, and lies there naked as a jaybird, legs parted, and then waves a finger and says no-no-no-oh? Ohmygod what would that look like—would that bury Charlotte Simmons for good? Dead in the ground at Dupont with Loser and Prude and Tease on her headstone? She, Charlotte Simmons, who could have had it all! He’s so ardent! Wants to make love—he loves me!—

:::::::A terrible undertow of the Doubts::::::But I can’t do this:::::::

—but, popping up again, her spirits said, Maybe he does love me! Maybe we’ll be a couple after this—wait’ll Mimi and Bettina—and Beverly—hear about it—I’ll be the one with experience—I’ll no longer be the one who has to hop around like a mouse when people talk about all this—

::::::trying not to look at him::::::the condom, the ball-peen hammer::::::the undertow again::::::the Doubts

::::::more time::::::can’t think spinning like this!::::::Look, Hoyt::::::just wait a second, okay?::::::::::

Before she could murmur “Look” or “Okay” or “Wait” or anything else, he thrust the ball-peen hammer right into her—and it went nowhere. He thrust again, with a grunt this time. Got nowhere. A wave of pain rose. Another thrust. Nowhere. “Ehhhhhhuhhh.” It hurt. He didn’t stop for an instant. He was as earnest as a battering ram. He thrust and broke through. She let out a yelp of pain and, more than pain, surprise, and more than pain and surprise, insult. This big thing was stuffed into her innards—her very innards!—and insult upon insult!—moving—in, out, in, out—

“Ow!” The insult, the insult!

Hoyt and the thing paused. “Are you okay?”

“Mmnnnnh,” she said, her eyes watering, wanting to say, “NO, IT’S NOT OKAY! THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS”—but he kept moving in, out, in, out to THIS HURTS, THIS HURTS. Animal grunts, animal grunts. She looked at his face, blearily, her eyes were watering so. His eyes were closed. He was sweating, groaning, biting his lower lip. She couldn’t tell him to stop, couldn’t even tell him to slow down, because…because that look of rapture on his face was what she wanted, was what she had wanted from the beginning, and what she did not want to go away. She was at this moment all that life could hold or mean for him. He was…Charlotte Simmons’s, down to the last molecule.

His pace started to quicken. Rut rut rut rut rut her body shook shook shook shook shook and bounced bounced bounced bounced bounced from his jolt jolt jolt jolt jolt his eyes tightened his face turned red and scrunched scrunched scrunched scrunched scrunched his teeth clenched clenched clenched clenched clenched from deep in his throat a grunt grunt grunt grunt grunt until finally he let out a loud, prolonged moan and slowly eased back off her, out of her, and lay there half on his side and half on top of her.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” he went, in a tone of immense satisfaction as he rolled over completely on his back. And then he said, “You okay?”

He wasn’t looking at her. His face was aimed straight up at the ceiling, and his eyes were closed. No part of his body, not even a finger or an ankle, was any longer touching her.

His eyes were still aimed at the ceiling.

Now he would hold her in his arms, curl up next to her and, in the softest, most intimate of voices, thank her, tell her it was okay, that she made him happy, that what they had just done fulfilled a great yearning of his…had brought alive for him what he had feared was an impossible dream…

Instead, he got up off the bed, went into the bathroom, and yelled out, “You need a towel?”

“No thanks,” she said in a trembling voice.

She was shaking inside. She didn’t hurt anymore, but what had happened inside her? She needed him close to her. He would return to her, tell her something wonderful had just occurred, something neither of them would ever forget, something that made any temporary pain inconsequential. He would tell her that she had been a beautiful girl when they entered this room and now she was a beautiful woman.

Hoyt came out of the bathroom and, without looking at her, immediately set about putting on his boxer shorts. As he snapped the shorts closed at the waist, he suddenly raised his head and stared at her with a puzzled frown…not at her face, however, but at her still naked loins.

“Shit, is that blood?”

Charlotte looked down and noticed that underneath her groin was a circle of blood droplets. She looked at Hoyt, but he didn’t look at her. He seemed possessed by the droplets of blood.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. “What should I do?”

“I don’t know, but if they want to make us fucking pay for it, they’ve got a big surprise coming.” He kept staring at it.

He picked his shirt up off the floor, his wad of a shirt, the one he had just wriggled out of, looked about for the T-shirt, found that on the floor at the foot of the bed—

Why was he still standing—when he should be close to her? What was he doing getting dressed? Where did he think he—they?—were going to go?

She was stark-naked and very conscious of it. She pushed herself up, swung her legs over, and sat on the edge of the bed. She felt woozy, dizzy—very dizzy now—bilious. She leaned way over to lower her head and get more blood to her brain. The contortion sort of cramped her…She brought her head back up. Hoyt, absorbed in buttoning all his buttons, pulling up his pants, and fastening his belt with the incongruously big buckle, didn’t look at her once.

She wanted to do nothing so much as lie back down on the bed, on top of her own guilty, loathsome, inexcusable blood droplets, and sink through the mattress and the floor and vanish into the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension…some dimension where no one would ever be tempted to search…She felt so horrible. She realized that her body was still very drunk. All along she had known, consciously, that she had drunk an awful lot, but only now did she admit to herself that alcohol could ever make her, Charlotte Simmons, drunk…this drunk.

So horrible, so horrible—but she couldn’t just sit there slumped naked on the edge of the bed. Her panties—a wet, crumpled little mess at the foot of the bed, but what did it matter, the filth? She put her feet through them while still sitting, but she stood up to pull them over her hips. Her head felt so heavy, there was such pain deep behind her eyes—her brains had shifted. They were piled up against the right side of her skull. She was going to pass out! She sank back to sitting position on the bed and lowered her head between her knees again. She’d just have to endure the pain. Mustn’t pass out—certainly not like this.

There was a rap on the door. “Dude, you in there? Open up, I need the room!” It was Julian.

Afraid to stand up again, Charlotte reached over and grabbed her crumpled dress and her bra from where they were mashed against the headboard. She put on the bra and unfurled the dress this way and that, searching desperately for the hem so she could slip it over her head.

To her dismay, Hoyt, who now had on shirt and pants, shoes and socks, unlatched the door, opened it, and with a grand, sweeping gesture of welcome, said, “Wuz’up, bro?” and ushered in Julian and—it wasn’t Nicole but Gloria, I.P.’s date.

The two of them flicked the briefest of glances at Charlotte but didn’t so much as nod to her. Charlotte was as mortified as she had ever been in her life. She had managed to squirm into the dress until it dropped down as far as her lap.

With a sly smile, Julian said to Hoyt, “Hope I didn’t interrupt.”

“Not at all,” said Hoyt with a casual, ambiguous laugh. “We were doing some more shots. Want some?” He was already walking toward the bureau, where he poured himself a shot of vodka and then poured another, which he held out toward Julian. Gloria stood there erectly, chin up, shoulders back, chest thrust forward, an inchoate smile on her sensual lips. Hoyt swung his arm to hand Gloria the shot and gave her a little wink, just a here’s-to-you, down-the-hatch wink, but a wink all the same. It began to register with Charlotte…Other than the “we” in “We were just doing some more shots,” Hoyt had not acknowledged her existence since Julian and Gloria arrived—not by word, not by gesture, not by so much as a roll of the eyes. She still sat on the edge of the bed, stunned by what was unfolding before her, unable to move. But then she felt tears rising in a flood, and she sprang from the bed and ran, literally ran, past the three of them, within inches of them in the narrow space between the foot of the beds and the front of the bureau—she had no choice—to reach the bathroom before she broke down completely and started sobbing in front of them. The last thing she heard before she shut the bathroom door was Julian saying, “O-kaaaaaay…”

The bathroom was a slop of sopping towels and washrags flung on the floor, over the edge of the tub, over the shower-curtain rod. Even with the door shut, she could hear Hoyt and Julian laughing about some girl—her!—no, it was some girl with glitter on her dress…and about how dumb Harrison’s toast had been and how it was a good thing he could play lacrosse because “he can’t speak on his feet for shit.” The beautiful dark lady, Gloria, was laughing and giggling along with every syllable of it.

Charlotte felt dirty and sore. She stepped out of her dress, her bra, and panties. She wet a washcloth and lathered it with soap and washed between her legs and washed some more and then washed again and repeated that and washed a few times more—no sign of blood—until she began feeling woozy. She was listing to the right. She had to do a quick little step to keep from keeling over. Her brain began to throb. She sat down, naked, on the toilet lid, shivering…and weeping…heaving convulsively but determined not to make a sound…and reveal how profoundly wounded she felt. After a while she made herself stand up. She stood before the mirror over the basin. She had to brace herself on the basin’s countertop with both arms. This time she didn’t appraise her body for a second. It was nothing but a weak, contemptible, corrupted piece of flesh. Her skin looked clammy and pale; sickly was the word. She was puffy and red about the eyes. Her entire brain felt inflamed. Her pulse was like a mallet. She saw double images of herself. Her hair was as disheveled as a dove’s nest, but she wasn’t about to go back out there and retrieve the canvas boat bag where her brush was. That would be another thing they could have a good time for themselves with—how she came out of the bathroom barefooted, looking like an automobile wreck, to fetch…her boat bag.

Well…she couldn’t stay locked up in here forever. She picked up her panties from where she had thrown them on the basin counter. Ohmygod they were disgusting…sodden to the touch, which, it occurred to her with the oddly fond lash of self-flagellation, was only appropriate for what she had now reduced herself to. She had to sit down on the toilet lid again in order to put them on without passing out. She fondly indulged the self-abnegating clamminess of them, their formerly lubricious, now merely unsanitary, wetness. She lowered her head and sniffed a few times to make her self-abnegation complete. How very foul they smelled…the sweat, the urine, the shit, the sheer filth, all the secretions that made them…slimy. Yet she wasn’t about to go back into that room without them. She snapped on the bra…and slipped the red dress over her head…No comb…Her hair was wild…mashed here…sticking out tangled there. She ran her fingers through it to push it all back at least…horrible…She gave up, gave in, left the bathroom, and reentered the bedroom barefooted to surrender herself, totally, to humiliation.

With her very first barefoot step onto the synthetic carpet, she began to feel bilious…There they were, Hoyt, Gloria, Julian, acting as if nothing had happened, still drinking their beloved “shots”…Hoyt and Gloria sitting next to each other on the low part of the bureau. Hoyt’s back was to Charlotte. He didn’t even look up…He was engrossed with Gloria…his head had the cool tilt he used when he was flirting…Oh, the dark lady had her breasts right out there first and foremost and an oh-so-sensual curl on her lips…Julian was on his back on the other bed in some sort of acrobatic or gymnastic position, with his hips and buttocks up off the bed, supported by his hands, and his feet directly up over his head. He was giggling, and then he went into a fake laugh, and then he began giggling again and kicking his feet up in the air as if he were dancing upside down. He was very drunk. Charlotte walked to within six inches of Hoyt and Gloria. Gloria flicked her a glance but immediately returned to Hoyt’s face. She was giving him a…suggestive…Dark Lady smile and holding a small paper cup with probably vodka in it, as if about to make a toast. Hoyt didn’t even look up. Gloria cocked her head back and threw the shot down her gullet. He acted as if he didn’t know Charlotte Simmons was there.

Only Julian took notice. He stopped giggling and dancing in the air and rolled forward to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. “Hey, Charlotte, are you okay? You don’t look so great.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. I think I just had too much to drink. I feel a little sick.”

“You feel like you gonna puke?” said Julian. “ ’Cause I gotta sleep in this room tonight, and it better not smell rank and shit.”

With that, he started laughing and rolled back on the bed and started kicking his feet in the air over his head again.

About to cry, Charlotte lowered her head and brought her hand up over her eyes, but she managed to swallow her sobs and lift her head. In peripheral vision she could see Hoyt looking at her. He said, “You okay?”

She started to look at him but decided not to, for fear she might start boohooing and blubbering.

“I think I just have to lie down for a second, and I’ll be okay,” she said. The “I’ll be okay” part trailed down into inaudibility, and she collapsed onto the other bed at a 45-degree angle, her back to the room.

Her fondest hope was that Hoyt would come to the rescue and at least sit on the bed and rub her back and ask Julian and Gloria to go somewhere else. She didn’t want to talk to him, for she would surely burst into tears. She just wanted him to be with her.

She wanted to curl up on the bed, but Hoyt’s red-and-black bag was in the way. She pushed it toward the foot of the bed—and saw why he had put it on the bed in the first place: to cover up the bloodstain. There they were, a few dried-out drops of blood…now just inches from where they came from in the first place, the Charlotte Simmons reproductive tract…

She curled herself up into a ball. She took a self-destructive, self-hating pleasure in wrapping her body about such a filthy, sordid memorial, a shrine not only to a little fool but also to a little fool’s illusion that men fell in love. Men didn’t fall in love, which would be surrender. They made love—made being an active, transitive verb that rhymed with raid, the marauder out for blood, laid the raider who got laid, daid as a bug I got my killing ov’ere’at the Hyatt Ambassador Ho-tel in Washington, D.C.

She discovered that even though her back was to the room and she was rolled up in a ball with her eyes closed, the angle she had collapsed in enabled her to see the others. If she parted her eyelids ever so slightly, a mere millimeter or so, her upper eye could make out Hoyt, Gloria, and Julian in a blurry outline. She went “Ooooonuh,” as if sinking into a coma. She began breathing deeply and slowly, as if asleep. Four or five minutes later…Hoyt was coming over! He was leaning over her!

He whispered ever so softly and from ever so deeply in his throat, “You okay?”

Now he was leaning over farther! She could tell from his breathing. There was something in front of her face. She didn’t dare open her lids any wider. After a couple of beats she deciphered the shape. It was his forefinger…Now there were two fingers…now three…now four…And now all four were waving back and forth in front of her face like a fan…Then—nothing.

A few seconds went by, and Charlotte could make out the shapes again. Julian and Gloria had also gotten up from their seats on the other bed. All three were near the armoire, and Hoyt was facing the other two. They spoke in low, she’s-asleep voices.

“Whattaya think?” said Julian. “Is she okay? Should we find another room?”

“Yeah, probably,” whispered Hoyt from down there low in his throat. “It looks like she’s not moving again for the rest of the night.” A pause. “I had to knock the dust off her.”

Julian’s voice: “You’re kidding! You’re shitting me?”

Silence—broken by the piping wheeze of a couple of laughs, Julian’s and Gloria’s being suppressed, contained in the lower lobes of the lungs only by the most intense and self-denying of pressures. Hoyt was whispering, “Yeah”…inaudible…“sorta, freaks”…inaudible…“fucking formal”…inaudible…“haven’t seen a hillbilly beaver like that…”

Julian’s voice: “You’re terrible, Hoyto.”

Julian’s laughter and Gloria’s came out in spurts of air through the nostrils. Charlotte thought of bullets going through a silencer. I had to knock the dust off her. Hoyt’s whisper again: “…like fucking Astroturf…”

She could see just well enough to make out Julian giving his buddy-bro a good-job jab on the arm.

“I heard Harrison has booze in his room,” said Julian. “Why don’t we go up there? I bet everyone went up there after the D.J. stopped.”

Julian and Gloria started walking toward the door, and Hoyt followed. Julian opened the door, then stopped. He motioned toward Charlotte. “So you think she’ll be okay.”

“Yeah, she’s passed out,” said Hoyt. Whereupon he clicked off the lights. He became a silhouette against the light from the hallway for a moment—and then the door slammed shut from its own hinge-spring mechanism.

Charlotte propped herself up on one elbow and looked around the room in the dark. It wasn’t completely dark. A vertical line of noxious sulphur-yellow light from the parking lot below seeped in where the white plastic wands used for closing the curtains failed to bring the two halves together truly across the ribbon of plate glass that served as a window.

Lifting her head proved to be a perilous decision. The room was spinning, and she felt nauseated. She stood up and staggered—something was seriously wrong with her vestibular system—to the bathroom, clicked on the light, which she found blinding. There was the slop of sopping towels and washrags. She knelt before the toilet bowl, hiccuped once, and then vomited. Some of it got all over the rim of the bowl, and some of it got all over the bodice of Mimi’s dress, which had hung down when she knelt. Still on her knees, she reached up and flushed the toilet, then crawled on all fours toward the bathtub. She had the distinct feeling that if she stood up, she would pass out. She fished a washrag from out of the slop on the floor by the tub and crawled back to the toilet and wiped off the rim and crawled back to the tub and retrieved another rag and a hand towel and crawled back to the toilet bowl and dipped the rag into the now more or less clean water in the bowl and tried to scrub the bodice clean and dipped the towel and washed off her face and wiped her mouth. She was all right as long as she stayed on all fours, like an animal, and didn’t have to raise her head. She crawled out of the bathroom, leaving the light on, and crawled on the carpet all the way back to the bed and crawled up on the bed on all fours and pulled the covers down and crawled under the covers, puked-on wet dress and all, and curled up on her side and sobbed herself to sleep.

She didn’t know what time it was when she halfway woke up and could hear something on the other bed…unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh… and could make out—who? Gloria?—on her knees and elbows and somebody mounted on her from behind and going unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh unngghh—and then she lost consciousness again.

It must have been about five a.m. when she hazily heard people stumbling into the room and some clumping and clunking about and some muttering, male, along the lines of “Aw shit.” Charlotte pretended to be fast asleep and kept her eyes shut tight, since from the position she was now in, she couldn’t see anything anyway without lifting her head or turning over. The odor of vomitus on her own dress was sickening.

A muffled thunk…

“Ow! Fucking—”

Hoyt’s mutter. “Fuck. What died in here?”

He got into bed with Charlotte and never budged from the outer edge of his side of the bed, and neither their skin nor their clothing touched for the rest of the time they spent together in that queen-size bed, which must have been five hours, because it was shortly past ten in the morning when Charlotte woke up to someone banging on the door—smelled like puke in here—and an angry girl shouting, truly shouting,“JULIAN, YOU FUCKING DICK, OPEN THE DOOR! I NEED MY BAG!”

This time Charlotte didn’t bother feigning sleep, and she rolled over and lifted her head to see what was happening. She was alone in the bed, and she could hear the shower running in the bathroom.

Bang bang bang bang. “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, YOU LITTLE SHIT! YOU EITHER OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR OR I’M GETTING THE HOTEL TO OPEN IT! I NEED MY BAG!”

Sunlight was pouring into the room through the gap in the curtains. In the other bed—Julian. He rolled himself over halfway and was resting on one shoulder, eyeing the door. Then his head, just his head, keeled over toward the floor.

Slowly he lifted his head and muttered in a hoarse voice, “Aw, fuck.” He closed his eyes and clamped the thumb and middle finger of his free hand on his temples and massaged them. Gloria’s head popped up on the other side of the bed. Her mouth hung open slightly, and her eyes were the very picture of alarm. Julian swung his legs out from under the covers and over the edge of the bed, sat there for a moment with his head hung way down, then stood up, emitting a profound sigh. The sigh set off a phlegmy cough that came dredging up from the deep recesses of his lungs. He trudged toward the door with a conspicuous lack of psychomotor control, squinting against the sunlight.

He opened the door just a crack and said, “Sorry, Nicole, which one’s yours?”

“I can get it myself, thank you very much.”

“No, I’ll get it for you. No problem.”

“YOU MEAN I CAN’T FUCKING COME IN AND GET MY OWN BAG?” Nicole was really screaming now. “YOU ARE SUCH A SCUMBAG, JULIAN! YOU KNOW WHERE I SLEPT LAST NIGHT? OR DO YOU EVEN GIVE A SHIT! I SLEPT ON CRISSY’S FUCKING FLOOR!”

Julian clenched his teeth and stretched his lips out very wide in a grimace. Charlotte could see all sorts of little tendons or whatever they were popping taut on the surface in his neck. Sheer feminine intuition told her what that was all about. Julian wasn’t worried about Nicole’s predicament. He was worried that her shit- and fuck-laced screams would rouse other people in the hotel and thereby Create a Scene.

“Oh, hey, wait a second,” he said.

Stiff-arming the door against invasion with one hand, he reached way down and way over with the other and picked up a sleek navy leather-trimmed nylon bag with chrome zippers. He hoisted it so Nicole could see it through the crack in the doorway.

“Isn’t this it?”

“Yes, but I need my fucking makeup case. It’s in the fucking bathroom!”

Julian froze for what seemed like thirty seconds—but couldn’t have been—while his brain churned, trying to choose between Creating a Scene and the Sordid Truth. The Sordid Truth evidently seemed the less horrible of the two, because his shoulders slumped in resignation and he opened the door all the way and admitted his date. Nicole pushed past him without so much as a glance. She was wearing the same black tube dress. It couldn’t have been more wrinkled if she had balled it up and thrown it on the floor in the back of a closet and forgotten about it for a year. Her perfect blond hair looked like a forkful of hay in a sheep trough. Her face was bleary, puffy, bereft of makeup except for a smear of last night’s mascara that had somehow reached her cheekbone. Her skin was the color of a tombstone.

Gloria now had the covers pulled up over her head. Nicole looked at the great lump and spat out the side of her mouth, “You’re such a slut, Gloria!”—and opened the door to the bathroom, magnifying the noise from the shower.

“What the fuck?” That was Hoyt’s voice from behind the shower curtain. “Oh, hey, Nicole babe, it’s you! Whyn’t you jump in here with me? I give a great soap job!”

“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.