I Am Charlotte Simmons

28. The Exquisite Dilemma

Girls 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 whisper-giggling 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.

As soon as she stood up, her head had felt like a desiccated husk. Splashing water on her face in the bathroom had done nothing to revive her. The ordinary motions of getting dressed only made her yearn more for sleep. All the while she was terribly anxious lest Beverly wake up. How morbid it all was! How desolate! To be mortified by the very possibility that your roommate might become conscious of your presence! To have no old friends, no new friends—to be afraid of the most elementary gestures toward making friends—how very hopeless was her life! Why wouldn’t God come take her away in the night?

She had made sure she was there waiting the moment the dining hall opened. Very few students had breakfast that early. The moment she finished, she put on her old quilted jacket, pulled the hood up over her head until it covered most of her face, and hurried to her two classes, medieval history and French, saying nothing in either class. From French, her face still stashed away beneath the hood, she rushed to the library, seeking refuge and anonymity. She had skipped lunch. The idea of being abroad on the campus in the middle of the day made her too anxious. In the afternoon, when the Reading Room was its quietest, she sought to concentrate on a monograph entitled “Neuroscientific exigeses of ‘self,’ ‘soul,’ ‘mind,’ and ‘ego,’” and she began trembling. She—who had been studying the illusion of free will all semester with the calm and comfort of the conceptually enlightened observer—was cornered! Here! There was nowhere to go, no new direction to consider…nothing to aim for except the Big Inertia. She took advantage of the early nightfall to scurry to the dining hall the moment it opened for dinner, at five-thirty. She bolted down some pasta and departed before other students had even begun arriving in any numbers. Briefly buoyed by carbohydrates, she had returned to the Reading Room resolved to concentrate on neuroscience truly conceptually, to keep its insidious hands off her own central nervous system and that chemical analog computer known as her own brain—and had collapsed into the arms of Adam, who called her Honey but whose bony embrace was all she had.

Adam kept his arm around Honey as they reached the basement stacks. These were stacks of the venerable sort, cliffs of metal shelves supporting rack after rack of books. The cliffs were so numerous and crunched so close together, floor to ceiling, the sensation that they were about to fall over on you would have been overwhelming if the ceiling hadn’t been so low, no more than seven and a half feet. Floor to ceiling, with no more than thirty inches between cliffs, in a windowless space so vast and so miserably lit—by trays of fever-blue fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling—that on the far side the cliffs seemed to recede into a terminal gloom choked with the dust of tens of thousands of dead books. In fact this soaring tower of academe had been retrofitted with the latest twenty-first-century HVC (heating, ventilation, and cooling) systems in an age of particulate matter phobia. Adam maintained his one-armed savior’s embrace, which forced them to squeeze together as they made their way through the narrow spaces between the cliffs.

They walked until they had traveled deep, deep into the vast space. Far from the world, they sat down in a corner where two cliffs of books met.

Charlotte had managed to contain her tears, and Adam said, “So what is it?”

“Nothing really, just a stupid thing I did. You don’t want to know…or do you already know?”

“Already know? Know what?”

“I guess not.”

“What happened, Charlotte?”

“Well, have you ever done anything that, I don’t know, was totally out of character or totally against your morals and everything you believed in and then really regretted it afterward?”

“Well…whoa…okay, yeah, I’m sure—go on…”

“Even more than that, like…done something so awful that turned into—it just shames you whenever you think about it, and you just keep thinking about it over and over?”

“Charlotte—stop beating around the bush. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Well, I had an interesting weekend just before Christmas break.” She did not say it with a smile.

“What did you do?”

She turned her head so that she was looking straight into his eyes. “Adam?” she said softly. “Don’t hate me.”

“Why would I? What are you talking about?”

Whereupon, sitting there on the floor, she poured out the whole story. She told him everything.

Afterward, Adam said nothing. He put his arm around her. She rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He put his other arm around her, too, and held her for a long time without saying a word. She felt good in his arms, bony though they were. She trusted him totally. He wasn’t going to try to turn this into an opening to slide a hand here…and there…and there…He wasn’t going to stroke her leg in the guise of comforting her. There was no guile to him. He was calming her and protecting her. He began rocking her, ever so gently—just that, rocking her like a baby. Had she not been aware that she was, in fact, on the floor deep within the stacks of a nine-million-book library, she could have nodded off into a peaceful sleep.

Finally, still holding her, Adam said, “Oh, wow…” Long pause. “That’s pretty intense, Charlotte. But that guy’s a dick! You’re so much better than he is! Frat guys are losers, Charlotte. They’re misogynists. They are the most sexist—they’re animals. They haven’t evolved. They’re afraid to climb out on this new branch of the tree of life marked hominid. A bunch of filthy shitheads—what happened was not your fault. I hope you can see that. It’s that sort of—that whole mentality the frat guys have. I’ve been around them. It’s a group mentality, and it’s dangerous because as long as you’re in their midst, they try to create an atmosphere of…of…of, you know, our way is the only cool way, and you’re a total loser if you won’t laugh at the moronic rubbish we laugh at. I can’t see you even hanging out with them. It makes no sense. They’re such wastes of time, wastes of mental capacity, wastes of everything!—and that includes the space they occupy and the air they breathe.” He made a contemptuous sound deep in his throat. “You have to dumb yourself down just being in the same room with them. Their idea of witty repartee is like…grunting out insults. They are so below you, Charlotte! You can do anything you want, be anyone you want. Look at you. You’re gorgeous, you’re smart, and most of all, you’re curious about life! You need adventure!—and I’m talking about real adventure, not fraternity formals.”

Adam’s voice rose and rose, and he became more and more fervent in his exhortations, to the point where he began gesturing for emphasis, and his glasses fell off and he tried to put them back on properly, but that interrupted the flow, the beat, of his apostrophe, so he held them in his hand. “You’re different from them. You’re a different species. I take that back—you’re not a part of any species! You’re unique! There’s nobody like you! How could you possibly lower yourself to the level of the herd? You’re—you’re Charlotte Simmons!”

I am Charlotte Simmons. Without knowing Miss Pennington, not even her name, Adam had arrived at the very same declaration, the very same argument. That didn’t encourage her in the slightest. There was nothing in her worth encouraging and never had been. The two of them, Miss Pennington and Adam, had merely managed to hit upon the same sickly sweet gob of verbiage. Charlotte was far beyond the reach of genuine praise, never mind witless flattery. The worthlessness of the depressed girl is complete and across the board. I am Charlotte Simmons—what a pathetic, what a feeble piece of self-delusion…and so forth and so on…Only the bony nest of his embrace brought any solace at all.

After You are Charlotte Simmons, she heard nothing but the light and abstract ramble of his voice, even though he talked on and on. She curled up until she was all but cradled on his lap. Her head and upper torso lay on his chest. She had found an interlude—no, not a mere interlude—but a state of being, a steady state at a blessed remove from the world, below ground, in a tubercular blue light, neither day nor night, two creatures safely hidden deep within an endless, endless metal forest of dead books no one would ever touch again.

They remained that way for what seemed like a blessed, timeless eternity, she in his arms and he bathing her nerve endings in the warm flow of his words…about…what did it matter.

Adam said, “Look”—Charlotte braced herself for “Honey,” but it didn’t come—“this is Dupont, and it’s the same Dupont you dreamed of, but you haven’t let yourself find it. There is a whole other life here. There are people here—you once used the phrase ‘life of the mind,’ and you’ve already been face to face with it. Let me tell you something. Edgar Tuttle is going to be a great figure in the not too distant future. His mind is—he has such a conceptual power—do you remember the afternoon he suddenly gave us the social history of…thecheer leader? Right in the middle of a casual conversation? I can’t remember a moment when he wasn’t worth listening to. And Roger—he makes such bad jokes—and he’s so brilliant at the same time. And Camille—don’t be fooled by her dirty mouth. She claims she’s some sort of flame-throwing lesbian. But I think she’s like Camille Paglia. She establishes some ultraradical position way out to the left of everything else, and from out there she can cut down anybody on the left or the right. Okay, she loves to go for the throat, but with her you can be sure that nobody—nobody—is going to be able to get away with the usual arrant bullshit. Charlotte, these are the sort of people who will do a country’s thinking for it.”

Edgar Tuttle…conceptual power…Camille…ultraradical…Adam’s words became a nice warm bath. Charlotte relaxed and curled up into his embrace once more…She wanted nothing more than to float and bob in perpetuity in this lukewarm current.

“I mean, just think what feminism did and how it happened. A lot of businessmen woke up one day in the twentieth century, not really that long ago, and a lot of congressmen and senators and public officials—but it’s businessmen that amuse me the most—they woke up one day and said, ‘Well, golly, I guess we have to make way for some women in our executive ranks and pay them real money—and stop treating them like women. I just don’t know how it all happened, but it’s happened and I guess we have to get used to it.’ Or right here! Dupont! Thirty-five, forty years ago there were no female undergraduates at Dupont—or Yale or Harvard or Princeton—and like overnight, the next day, they’ve all gone coed—and there was never any debate! The big business corporations never started a debate! None! Nobody—Congress, the Pennsylvania Legislature, the universities, the press—nobody debated women’s rights. It all happened because of an idea that spread because of its own intrinsic power. A handful of people with no power of their own, no money, no organization, came up with an idea that just sailed right over politics, economics, and…and…and everything else, and it caused this huge change! And that idea was, women are not a gender, a sex, except mechanically. What they are is a class, a servant class slaving away to make life easier for the master class, namely, men. That was all it took! Here was an idea so obvious—an idea so big that nobody had ever backed away far enough to see it before. But a handful of women did—Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Betty Friedan, and…and…I forgot…a few others—and the way everybody, women as well as men, looked at women changed fundamentally. You can call these women intellectuals, if you want, but they were above mere intellectuals. They were a…a…I guess the word is matrix, as in mother of it all. They created the idea, and your everyday intellectuals—they were like automobile dealers selling this new model that the manufacturers, the matrix, shipped to them. That’s what every Millennial Mutant intends to be, a matrix. We’re already at a level frat boys and all that element—”

Something about the Pennsylvania Legislature…and gender…and sex…and a servant class and the master class…and automobile dealers…debris from the waters, and every now and then a bit of it lodged in Charlotte’s brain, but mainly she just kept floating and bobbing with her eyes closed in Adam’s gentle, earnest swell of words in 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit…same as her body…perfect state of sensory deprivation. She could feel the tension draining out of her nerves, the toxins draining out of her brain…time vanishing…her body, at last perfectly relaxed, sinking into Adam’s bones bathed by the flow, the flow, the warm bouillon flow of his words…Tawny, his words were, tawny as oxtail bouillon, and warm…

So fluent—not to mention convincing—did Adam feel, it was quite a spell before it occurred to him that the girl in his arms, the beautiful girl miraculously in his arms, was no longer listening. He craned his head down in order to look directly into her face. Had she fallen asleep? Her eyes were closed and her body was at last relaxed, but she wasn’t breathing like someone asleep.

He stopped talking, even though he hadn’t gotten to the point he wanted to make about how the “intellectuals” were ignorant of what Darwin actually said. He knew she was interested in Darwin. Well, it was enough, wasn’t it, that at last she was in his arms. What a weird place for it—sitting on a concrete floor deep in the bowels of the stacks. Talk about gloomy…and yet here she was in his arms…He had dreamed about this, but not in such a weird place…What if he gave her a soft and tender kiss on the lips, sort of a consoling kiss after what she has been through?…Bad idea. For him to make a move after everything she had just told him—she might not interpret that as consoling. Besides, it was physically impossible in this position. Her head was lying on his chest. When he bent his head over to look at her, he had barely been able to see her face. To get his mouth all the way to her mouth, he’d have to rearrange her whole body, and that might bring her out of the spell she was in. He’d have to remove his glasses and put them…where? For about the three thousandth time he thought of laser corrective surgery. But what if he was that one in five thousand who rolled his eyes a sixteenth of an inch at exactly the wrong moment and the laser beam fried his eyeballs?

He stared into the biblioglutted gloom. He should be grateful enough just to be holding her in his arms…which he was, for a while. The two pressure points where his pelvic saddle rested on the concrete began to annoy him. One of his legs was going to sleep in the thigh. It was damned frustrating to have your loved one in your arms…and she’s off in…a spell, a trance, the Land of Nod, a stress coma—he had heard of such a thing. He looked at his watch. He’d been down here for more than an hour! She didn’t seem aware of where she was…

He held her some more, but it was becoming tedious…He tightened his embrace a bit…Nothing…Then he began rocking her again…Nothing…Finally he bent his head over as far as he could and said, “Charlotte…Charlotte…” For a moment…nothing—but then she lifted her head from his chest and gave him a look of weary disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I think we ought to get up from here. We’ve been sitting on this concrete floor for a long time.”

For an instant she looked annoyed on top of disappointed, but she began to get up, nonetheless. He sprang to his feet in order to experience the ineffable joy of extending his hand and helping her up. She thanked him in a distracted, perfunctory way—but then, without a word, hooked her arm inside his and leaned her head against his shoulder as they walked toward the stairway.

When they reached the grand Gothic lobby, she took her head off his shoulder but clung more tightly, if anything, to his arm.

“You feel any better?” he said. “Maybe a little better?”

“Yeah.”

Outside, the Great Yard was covered in seven or eight inches of snow, with an icy crust that looked somehow corroded where the walkway lamps washed it with wan coronas of light. A penetrating wind swept across it. In the darkness, the great stone hulks of the Gothic buildings facing out on the Yard appeared frozen in place, like ships trapped in ice.

Adam didn’t want…this…to end. He absolutely thrilled to the look she had in his arms. He ransacked his brain for some way—“I’m kind of hungry. Why don’t we stop by Mr. Rayon for a second? It’s on me.”

“No!” It was more of a startled cry than a rejection. “I just want to go to sleep.”

Her head was buried deep within the parkalike hood of her quilted jacket.

Once more she leaned her head, now deep within the hood, against his shoulder. Once more he thrilled to the pressure of her extremities against his arm. Every conceivable strategy churned in his brain—and all were stymied by the fact that she had come to him already traumatized, literally in tears, because of the sexual predations of a frat boy like Thorpe. He hated that smug bastard.

Adam began walking in the direction of Little Yard, where, feeling once more thwarted, he would no doubt be unable to come up with any comment tender enough and cool enough and Lothario enough to…to…to…

They couldn’t have gone a hundred feet before Charlotte held on to his arm tighter than ever and stopped and looked up at him, her eyes two little orbs reflecting light from deep within the recesses of the hood, and said in a little voice, “Adam—please—don’t leave me.”

Adam stood there still and speechless—petrified lest he overinterpret what he was now hearing.

“I can’t go back to my room,” she said. “I can’t stay there with my roommate. It’s like being cooped up with—I can’t do it, Adam, I can’t do it…” She was on the verge of tears. “Can I stay with you?”

“Of course.” His imagination was feverish and yet not big enough to comprehend what on earth he was hearing. Ever fearful of disappointment, he decided to assume a cavalier air. “Whatever your”—then he caught himself. It wasn’t his métier, cavalier. He would just be himself: “Whatever you want.”

Her eyes narrowed so far, the lights went out. She turned her head so far, the hood popped up in front of him like a wall. He would never understand her. But then she turned the mouth of the hood back toward him and the eyes were lit once more.

“Just anyplace to lie down, Adam. A couch, the floor, anyplace. I can’t be alone. I can’t explain it. You’re my only friend—” She began sobbing. Her voice came out in little tremulous cries: “My…on-ly…fri-end!”

She buried her face, hood and all, into the breast of his North Face jacket, racked with sobs, and he wrapped both arms about her. “Of course you can stay at my place.” She abruptly stopped crying. How brave she was. “I won’t let you be alone. You can stay there as long as you like. I have a futon. I’ll always be there for you. You can have the bed, and I’ll take the futon.”

“No—no—” She began sobbing again. “Just put me”—sobs—“where I’ll be the least trouble. I don’t”—sob—“deserve—” whereupon the “erve” in “deserve” broke up into racking sobs: “erve-erve-erve-erve.” Adam, essentially a literary intellectual, didn’t realize he was listening to the typical depressed girl who has made the appalling discovery that she is worthless.

She put her arm around his waist and her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around both her shoulders and hugged her upper body tightly against his own. It was a bit awkward, since his stride covered more ground than hers, but they walked that way out of the Great Yard for seven blocks until they reached the old town house in the City of God where Adam lived.

They spoke very little. Most of the way Charlotte continued sobbing softly, while Adam interjected his There theres , It’s all rights , and Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you, honeys. The not going to leave you, honeys did more to quiet her than anything else. Otherwise they barely spoke at all, but Adam’s brain and central nervous system were making the circuit at a furious rate.

One moment—euphoria! His fondest dream had come true just like that! Charlotte was moving in with him—and it was her idea! She wouldn’t take three steps without clinging to his body—holding his arm, putting her head on his shoulder! She beseeched him not to leave her. She did everything but say “Take me! I’m yours!” He was giddy, delirious, here in the dark from the radiant happiness soon to be his. Dupont, society, the world, the cosmos, all of existence was now compressed into two people, himself and Charlotte Simmons. It was that blissful suspension of disbelief called love.

The next moment—the Doubts. It was all too good to be true. He happens to bump into her, literally, in the library, and—bango!—all at once she’s his?—but specifically because she’s disgusted and chagrined by sex?—and suffered a trauma in losing her virginity? Where did that leave him—and his burning desire to lose his virginity to this girl, because she was as innocent as he was and wouldn’t look down on him for his lack of experience?

The next moment—she’ll be with me in my apartment all through the night, in the same room, because there is only one room, and it’s a small room and her body will be there and there’s only one real bed, and one thing leads to another in life, doesn’t it?

The next moment—but how do you get a girl into bed with you when she has come to you in flight from a frat-boy sexual predator? The next moment—

—and on it went and off it went on/off/on/off/on/off and the binary circuit burned and burned.

As they drew near Adam’s building, he began to tremble, aroused by the thought of what might possibly, miraculously, now be his…and anxious about how the dump might look to his beloved. What would she think? Place reeks from dirty, moldy clothes and shit lying around…The house itself was in a moldering old district full of brick houses with wood trim built way back in the early twentieth century as one-family residences on tiny lots. Each house was barely seven feet from the next, creating dank alleyways that never saw daylight and always felt damp. The bricks had long since turned five shades darker from grime and coal soot. The wood trim in the cornices, corbels, overhanging eaves, shutters, window frames, architraves, front doorways, and small front porches—everything was dry-rotting, warping, flaking from poor paint jobs or else too few. Generations of black wires slopped with white paint ran from top to bottom next to the gutter pipes, which had their own problems. Most of the houses, like the one Adam lived in, had long since been cut up into small apartments.

But tonight Charlotte was no sightseer. She whimpered and held on to him for dear life. The staircase up to his apartment was a steep, narrow, dingy shaft painted brown. It clattered from the aged metal strips on the leading edges of the steps. It was too cramped for them to ascend side by side; so as he led the way, Adam extended one hand behind him for Charlotte. She desperately insisted on holding on to him. The four-story climb was disorienting enough even when you did it every day. And this time Adam was dizzy with love. His hands trembled as he unlocked the three dead-bolt locks on his door. He opened it, clicked on the light—and his spirits plummeted—

—for he now saw his apartment through his loved one’s eyes. This was no “apartment”! This was a slot!—one of four created by cutting an ordinary front bedroom and rear bedroom in two. Three graduate students rented the other slots. Adam’s was ten feet wide and felt even smaller because it was beneath an eave whose slope eliminated half the ceiling and nearly all of one wall and threatened to pound your head down into your thoracic box from the moment you entered. The “kitchen” consisted of the smallest “stove,” “sink,” and “refrigerator” ever made squeezed into what had been a closet in a former, better life. The quotation marks spread like dermatitis in Adam’s brain as he thought of what must be going through the mind of the girl of his dreams. The “bed” was a mattress on a cheap, unfinished flush door from a lumber-yard, supported at the corners by cinder blocks. And the blankets, sheets, and pillow on that “bed”? A rat’s nest! And from that rat’s nest and the dust-ball-filthy floor—both strewn with dirty socks, sneakers, underwear, handkerchiefs, sweatpants, sweatshirts, sodden towels—there arose such an odor that it overwhelmed even him, he who breathed this foul air day in and day out. And the answer to his prayers couldn’t even see the worst of it yet: the bathroom…was in the hall…and the wretches in all four slots had to use it!

He glanced fearfully at her. She was looking at him with a pained expression.

He said, “I know it’s not what you—”

“Oh, Adam!” she exclaimed. “Thank…ank…ank…ank…ank”—the “thank” broke up into sobs—“…ank you…” Whereupon she threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. She began talking weirdly, her voice muffled by his North Face jacket. “I’m so tired, Adam. I feel so terrible. Please stay with me. There’s no way you can know how I feel. I can’t be alone tonight. I’ll—I can’t, Adam, I can’t…I just canh—anh-anh-anh-anh-anh’t.” She tightened her embrace of his rib cage.

A hail of thoughts blipped through the Wernicke’s area of his brain, one of which was that she no longer said caint for can’t.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said, “I’m right here with you, and I’m going to stay right here with you.”

She stopped crying, released her embrace, and stood up straight. “Adam, Adam, Adam,” she said, shaking her head in an expression of starry-eyed wonderment. “There’s just no way I can thank you—”

But there is!

“—enough. I’m so anxious and so tired.” Pause. “Could you show me where your futon is?”

“I’ll get it out, but you’re not sleeping on it. You’re my guest. You get the bed. I’m going to change the sheets and make it up for you.”

“No—”

“No no’s, Charlotte. This is my place, such as it is, and that’s the way I want it.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I do have to, because that’s the way it’s got to be.”

She acceded, lowering her eyes and nodding Yes. Then she looked up at him, her eyes big and starry; she fixed them upon his face for what seemed like a very long time. His anticipation rose rose rose rose rose—

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Adam braced for this one. Oh, the bathroom’s out in the hall. Everybody else uses it, too. He tried to speak in a cool, offhand manner: “Oh, you just go out the door”—he nodded toward the entrance to the slot—“and it’s right next to it?—the first door on your left?” He failed. It occurred to him that he sounded like Charlotte, turning declarative sentences into questions.

In fact, she seemed oblivious to the sketchiness of his voice and the geographical implication of his instructions. She was long past caring about such things.

“Uhh…you might want to lock the bathroom door while you’re in there? Just in case?”

As soon as she went out the door, he hurriedly stripped the bed, throwing the random clothes in a pile on the floor, and made it up. His brain and nervous system were once again off in a wild synaptic and dendritic scramble. Yes…but what should he do? What dare he try?

He was in the same state of confusion when she returned. When he turned toward her, she gave him a tender, almost fearful—glorious! glorious!—smile, then once more threw her arms around his rib cage and pressed one side of her face into his chest, and eagerly, eagerly, he embraced her. He took a stray shot at pressing his mons pubis against hers, but he couldn’t find it.

“Oh, Adam, Adam, Adam”—he could feel her jaw muscles moving on his sternum—“someday I’ll know how to tell you—I’ll know how to explain…Last night I prayed to God. I prayed to God to come take me away in the night. But I couldn’t sleep, and God will only come take you in your sleep. You’re a good person, Adam. I’m sure you don’t know what it is like to have so led your life that you will never sleep—”

“Shhhhh. Come on, Charlotte, don’t keep flagellating yourself. You haven’t done anything wrong! You’ve been done wrong to, that’s all.”

She released her grip around him and straightened up. But he still had his arms around her, and she was looking up at him. This was the moment—for a soulful, lingering kiss—but that wasn’t a take my lips look she was giving him. She was shaking her head.

“I’m sorry, Adam,” she said. “I didn’t mean—I can’t let myself fall to pieces like this and expect you—”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I wish I could explain it all. I’m like…desolate, Adam. You’ve pulled me back from…like an edge. Thank God it was you I hit with that door.” That made her smile…oh so wanly.

“Then I guess we both thank God,” said Adam. He figured that gave her an opening as big as the moon.

She looked up into his eyes searchingly. “I need to try to sleep.” She glanced toward the bed. “I’m so tired. But you don’t have to turn the lights off. If you want to stay up, that’s okay. It won’t make any difference.”

If you want to stay up, that’s okay—it won’t make any difference? Adam took this poorly. He abandoned his embrace. “Oh, by all means!” he said, gesturing toward the bed with his palm up, as if making a formal presentation. “Your bed awaits you.”

He said it with just a shade of irony, which she didn’t get, obviously. She immediately turned, headed for the bed, and got in without undressing. She pulled the covers way up.

Pouting a bit, Adam proceeded to slide the futon out from under the bed and prepare to turn in. The damned thing was covered in dust, which he instinctively blamed on Charlotte, who had accepted the bed after first saying she wouldn’t.

He made a point of not looking at her, but then she said, “Adam? Oh, Adam, I’ll never be able to thank you—you’ve saved my life tonight—saved—my—life, Adam…I’ll never forget thi-i-i-i-i-”—she was sobbing—“i-i-is…Oh, Adam! Don’t leave me…”

He said, “Everything’s okay, Charlotte. I’m right here. Try to sleep.” He didn’t say it as warmly, let alone as lovingly, as he might have.

He turned away, swept the dust off the damned futon, threw a couple of ratty old blankets on it, folded up his damned North Face jacket to use as a pillow, turned off the damned lights, stripped down to his T-shirt and shorts in the dark, stretched out on the damned futon, expelled a big, noisy hangdog sigh, and went to sleep…

The clinic! Great honor! Poor, anorexic girls—pale, bony girls with barely any mammary capacity at all—reaching out to him with their paper-pale, bony arms…Before him: a pale, pale starveling with a potbelly the size of a cantaloupe—asking why? Why? Why? Simple, said the distinguished consultant—who was himself! You’re beginning to eat now, and your body is storing fat where it can draw upon it fastest, which is there—your belly. A beautiful girl behind him—he couldn’t see her but he knew she was beautiful—said in a soft, kind voice, “But that’s not true, Adam…Adam?…Adam?…Adam!…Adam!”—

He woke up in the dark.

“Adam!”—such anguish in her voice. As he ascended from the hypnopompic depths and reached the surface, he realized that it was Charlotte, and she was up on the bed and he was down here on the floor, on the futon.

“Adam!”

“What is it?”

“I—don’t—know—what’s happening!” The words were coming in spurts. “Please—hold me! Please—hold me!”

What time was it? Here in the dark of the night, he had no idea. He threw back the blankets on the futon and knelt by the bed. He could feel the mattress shaking as soon as his chest touched it.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t—know…Hold me—Adam.”

She was lying on her side, facing him. That was all he could make out in the dark. He leaned forward and slipped one arm under her neck and wrapped the other around her shoulder. She was shaking like someone with a fever.

“Adam, I’m so—get in beside me. Lie next to me. Please! I’m so frightened!”

“Next to you?”

“Yes! Hold me in my skin! I’m trying to get out of my skin! Please!”

Baffled, excited, bewildered, thrilled, he got into the bed, and his knees pressed against the undersides of her thighs. She had rolled over, so that her back was to him.

She continued to shake terribly. “Hold me! I don’t know what’s happening! Oh God, please! Put your arms around me!”

So he did. His chest was pressed up against her back. He could feel the snap of her bra. His head was behind her. She kept shaking.

“Oh God—closer…Put your legs under my legs—please!”

She had curled into a fetal position. He had to lift his knees to make contact with the undersides of her thighs again. It was as if he were a chair lying on its side, and she was sitting in it.

He felt no more lust at all. She was finally in his bed, and she was a wreck. Her body was rigid.

“Hold me tighter, Adam…Keep me in my skin…Tighter…”

It was some time before the shaking stopped and her muscles relaxed and her breathing became normal, more or less. During that time, his thoughts raced. Hoyt Thorpe had done this to her. Adam reduced the guy to a coward begging for mercy in a variety of ways. One time he had him in a full nelson, which was illegal in college wrestling, and he gave him a choice of surrendering or having his neck broken. You don’t believe me, you pathetic little shit? Try a little of this…His fingers intertwined behind Hoyt Thorpe’s neck, he forced his head down down down until he screamed, begged, and whimpered for mercy.

Meanwhile, he held the girl he loved in his arms and pressed his body against hers, to keep her inside her very hide.

They stayed that way for a long time. Even after he ran out of ways to maim Hoyt Thorpe, Adam continued to think of what the frat boy had done…the barbarity of it…the evil. It was not cool for a Millennial Mutant to regard Evil as an absolute, but as he held this girl in his arms, he knew that in fact it was.

At that very moment, about 2:45 a.m., that very person, Hoyt Thorpe, was in the library with Vance and Julian. He was in his chair knocking back a can of beer, but mainly he was riding into the night on a few lines of cocaine he had sucked up into his nose through a straw. The exhilaration always made him feel more than ever like a born leader of the warrior class. It also did wonders for his imagination, he was convinced, like those French poets who smoked hashish or something, although he never could think of their names. The one sure thing was that it made him very voluble.

“…fucking Stand Up Straight for Gay Day. Straight Up the Brown Canal Day is more fucking like it…and they want everyone on campus, ‘straight or gay’—gay…which is spelled ‘straight up the Hershey highway’—they want everybody to wear blue jeans to show ‘solidarity.’ So I say, let’s show ’em some solidarity.” He extended his middle finger. “I say we all turn up at Stand Up Straight for Gay Day wearing khaki shorts. Can’t you fucking picture that?” Eyes aglitter, he looked to Vance and Julian for approval of this inspiration.

“Oh, great fucking idea,” said Julian. “You ever heard of the middle of winter? It’s about fifteen degrees out there right now.”

“But that’s the whole point!” said Hoyt. “That’s the whole point! It won’t kill you—and they’ll get the fucking message!”

Vance and Julian looked at each other.