“So this guy saves you from a drunk lacrosse player, and he doesn't even know your name?”
“He didn't then,” said Charlotte. “I guess he does now.”
She proceeded to tell him a rather boring story about how she and Mimi and Bettina had fled from the tailgate and how she felt bad because she hadn't thanked her savior. Adam tuned out at that point, and she rambled on. The gist of it seemed to be that she would feel remiss if she didn't thank him.
Adam said, “If he didn't know your name, how did you find out
his
name? How did you know how to get in touch with him?”
“I heard somebody call him Hoyt,” said Charlotte. “That's kind of an unusual name, I guess, and when I told my roommate, she said her sister, who's a senior, knew a senior named Hoyt? Hoyt Thorpe?”
Adam stopped and just stood there in the middle of Ladding Walk and stared at Charlotte with his hands on his hips and his jaws agape.
“You're
kidding.”
“You know him?”
“I've
met
him. You ⦠are â¦
kidding
me! And now he's slugged Mac
Bolka?
Ohmygod, talk about insaneâI cannot ⦠believe this!”
“Believe what?”
“I've been trying to do a story on Hoyt Thorpe! Do you know about him and the Night of the Skull Fuck?”
“WellâBeverly told me something about it ⦔
“I want to do a whole takeout on it ⦠everything, beginning to end. I mean, this involves a guy who could become President of the United States.”
Feeble as the light was, he thought he could see Charlotte's eyes grow larger. Such a rapt look. She beheld him in dawning admiration, brighter, brighter, brighter, until the ⦠glow on her face had become an aura, unmistakable even here in the gloom of Ladding Walk ⦠and now maybe he could do it. Maybe it would be all right to try it. Not enfold her in his armsâwell, no, but maybe put his arm around her waist? He tried to picture it. What the hell would that be, or supposed to be, about? He felt so amateurish ⦠a pathetic virgin â¦
What could only be the Saint Ray house was just ahead. It was the only building alive on the entire Walk. Brass lanterns by the front door ⦠lights in the upper windows, presumably bedrooms ⦠all quiet and serene compared to the random Saturday nights he had gone to open-house fraternity parties ⦠a thought that triggered a sinking feeling. He had had a uniformly miserable time at frat parties ⦠all the hearty Big Man bellowing that went on ⦠but then rational judgment, albeit wounded, returned.
Adam stopped again. They were barely twenty-five yards from the Saint Ray house front lawn. “Hey, I just got a great idea, Charlotte.” His face had
lit up with the excited smile that often comes with the
Aha!
phenomenon. “Why don't I go in there with you? You want to thank Thorpe, and I want to talk to him!”
Charlotte looked startled. For a moment she bit her upper lip with her lower teeth. “I ⦠don't think that would be a good idea ⦠I don't want him to think I came over to thank him just so a friend of mine could get a story for the
Waveâ
you know?”
“All right,” said Adam. “I won't try to interview him. I won't do that until some other time when he's not even going to think about any such connection. But in the meantime he would see me in a like ⦠you know, personal light. When I finally
do
ask him for an interview, like down the line, he won't see me as just someâ” He started to say “nerd,” but caught himself. He didn't want her to know that frat boys or jocks or anybody else thought that way about people who worked for the
Wave.
“âjust some guy from out of nowhere who wants to ask him some questions about the Night of the Skull whatever.” He wasn't entirely sure why, but he decided he should lay off the word “Fuck” while he was asking her for a favor.
“Golly, I don't know ⦔
“It'll seem completely natural, Charlotte! I'm some guy who just happened to walk you over here in the dark.” He turned his palms up and arched his eyebrows, as if to say, “What is there to object to?”
Charlotte grimaced and shook her head but didn't seem to be able to put her concern into words. “I canâthat may beâI know what you're saying?âand I really am grateful?âbut you saidâwhen you write your story you said yourself this could be a really
big
story?âand what if he's upset? I mean, I already feel so guilty because I haven't thanked him up to now, and this is two days later?”
“But he
loves
to talk about it! He's
proud
of it!” Adam could feel his
Aha!
smile morphing into the excited beseeching of a beggar, but he couldn't do anything about it. The emotion was too real. “I know that for a fact! One of his fraternity brothers told me. He loves to sit around and talk about it. The other guy, Vance something, he's the one who doesn't want to talk about it.”
Quietly: “Now you're making me feel guilty over
you.”
“It's really not a big deal, Charlotte. It'll be so ⦠easy!”
“I know,” said Charlotte. “It's not
that.
It's just ⦠I just want to thank him, and thenâyou knowâlike I just want to get it
done?
And leave ⦠with no complications? Besides, if he likes to talk about it, why don't you just call him up and ask him?”
“I told you. I did. But he doesn't know who I am. I'm sure he'll talk to someone he feels comfortable with.”
“I'm sorry, Adam.” It was almost a whisper, and she averted her eyes when she said it. “I just want to get this done, and that'll be it.” Then she looked up into his eyes and brought her raised face up to his with great earnestness and said, “Oh, Adam, I really am so grateful to you. You're
so
wonderful.”
With that, she drew closer and put her hands on his shoulders and brought her face up to his and her lips toward his lipsâand detoured at the last instant to his cheek, upon which she planted a kiss.
“Oh, Adam,” she said again, “thank you. Thank you for doing this for me. When I get back, I'll call you. Okay?”
Now she was turning away to head to the door of the Saint Ray house. A
kiss on the cheek?
But then she looked back with the sort of smile that
tells you so much.
She seemed on the verge of tears ⦠that would flow from the eyes of love ⦠Tears ⦠Tears of joy? But what exactly
were
tears of joy?
Tears for the protector? He had quite an interesting theory he was developing about how all tears, at bottom, have to do with protection. We cry at birth because we come naked into this world and we
need
protection. We cry for those we love who were desperate for protection and
didn't get it in time.
We cry with gratitude for those historic souls who
have protected
us at critical moments, with great risk to themselves. We cry for those who are voluntarily heading off into the valley of the shadow of death in order to protect us and who
will need protection
themselves as they do so. We cry for those who needed protection so very much and, with it or without it, have fought the good fight against great odds.
All
tears had to do with protection.
No
tears have to do with anything else.
The whole theory had matured nicely in these few minutesâmoments?âin the dark on Ladding Walk. Could bliss come any better than this? ⦠afloat in one of the loveliest and most prestigious university settings in the world, gazing down upon old bricks laid in a herringbone-and-diamond pattern created by the sorts of masons who no longer exist in our world, buoyant on the verge of two triumphs ⦠conquests of the heart and of the head ⦠a second major contribution-in-embryo to psychologyâwas there any greater happiness? Yes! The sublime was called Charlotte Simmons.
C
harlotte stood alone in the cavernous entry gallery of the Saint Ray house, waiting. Over there was the staircase with its massive, majestically carved and curved railing. The lumpy coats of paint made this triumph of American woodworking seem even shabbier tonight than it had in the dim light of the frat party.
The odd-looking guy who had let her inâhis ferocious pair of eyebrows had grown together above his nose, and his hips were wider than his shouldersâhad gone off to fetch Hoyt. The guy's uncool, unâSaint Ray appearance triggered a vaguely unpleasant recollection she couldn't pin down. So did the odor of the placeâfull-bodied, putrid, with a thin sweetness running through it, like a wooden floor rotting because of leaking radiators. It had in fact been marinating for many years in spilled beer.
A mere transient sensation. Mainly she was feeling guilty about the way she had treated Adam ⦠and awed by the prospect of seeing Hoyt ⦠Why hadn't she told him the truth about the jeans? Maybe because she didn't even want
herself
to know what she had done this morning ⦠gone to Ellison, the high-end clothing store, and bought a pair of Diesels.
Eighty dollars!
âand she'd had only $320 left for the entire semester. Now she was down to less than half of her entire allowanceâall so she could go “thank”
Hoyt Thorpe! Why hadn't she at least given Adam a decent kiss on the lips, a mercy kissâthe way Beverly bestowed her mercy fucks, or so she claimedâinstead of that pathetic little vesper-service peck on the cheek? Why hadn't she let him come inside to meet Hoyt? Hoyt!âa grown man, not a boy! She kept trying to figure out what it meantâbeat up the governor of California's bodyguards when they attacked himâwhat had Beverly called itâthe night of the ⦠some kind of fuck? ⦠and then utter bewilderment. The governor of California ⦠She could see his florid face and thick white hair as she watched him on television last springâthe Dupont commencement address ⦠which had given her strength, renewed her courage after Channing's raid on her house after commencement ⦠out in the
Grove,
did Adam say? Adamâ
Worse guilt. Now she knew exactly why she wouldn't let Adam come in. Hoyt would see her in the company of a
dorkâ
Adam!âwho was merely trying to bring her into what she had dreamed of, a cénacle, as Balzac had called it, a circle of intellects equipped and ready to live the life of the mind to the fullest ⦠and here she was in the ⦠First Circle of Hell, the entry gallery of the Saint Ray house.
Somewhere beyond the entry gallery, frat-boy voices exploded with laughs and mock cheers and then calmed down. Evidently some sort of game was in progress. Somewhere else, perhaps upstairs, somebody was playing a rap song with a snare-brush drumbeat and a saxophone in the background.
Hoyt appeared. He came toward her, limping. He had a bandage plastered down one side of his jaw almost to his chin. His eye on that side was black and puffy. There were stitches above the eye that closed what must have been a gash. His nose and his lower lip were swollen.
As he limped closer, he appeared quizzical, as if he had no idea who she was. But when he reached her, he smiled and said, “I must look great,” and started a laughâabruptly halting it with a wince that squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he was smiling warmly and blinking, and tears showed up in the corners of his eyes. He pointed to the side of his rib cage. “Sorta fucked up.”
So moved was she by the dreadful wounds, the awful beating he had taken for her sake, that she barely noticed the incidental bit of Fuck Patois.
He cocked his head, looked into her eyes with the smile of one who has lived ⦠and said, “So you're ⦠Charlotte. At least I know your name now.
If you wanna know the truth, I never thought I'd see you back in this house again.”
“Me neither.” Her voice was hoarse all of a sudden.
“I never even got to ask you why you ran away.”
Charlotte could feel her face turning red. “I didn't. Iâthey
pulled
me.” She almost swallowed the words, she felt so ashamed.
Hoyt started to laugh, then winced with pain again. “Don't make me do that,” he said. “It didn't look to me like anybody was pulling you. By the time you got to that door, you were practically knocking the door down. You were sprinting, is what you were doing.” Confident smile: “Like what did you think I was?”
It dawned on her that he wasn't talking about the tailgate but the night of “We've got this room.” She had no idea what to say. Her face was ablaze with embarrassment.
Hoyt delivered a philosophical-sounding sigh. “H'it don' matter none. That was then.”
H'it don' matter none?
Was he mocking her accent? She didn't know what to say to that, either. So she just blurted out, “I came to thank you. I'm so sorry about what happened to you. I feel like it was my fault.” She lifted her hand as if to raise it and caress the battered side of his face, but then she withdrew it. The sight touched her all over again. He had gone through all that for
her.
“I wasn't even there when it was over. I feel so bad about that, too. I just had to come ⦠thank you.”
“It wasn'tâ” He abandoned that sentence and pausedâfor an eternity, it seemed to her. Finally: “You don't have to thank me. I did it because I wanted to. I wanted to
kill
that asshole.”
“I hope somebody told you I called yesterday? All they said was that you couldn't come to the phone. They didn't tell me about ⦠any of this.”
“Well, it could've been worse. I twisted my knee, but it's not too bad.”
“I'm so sorry. I really am. And I'm so grateful.”
“Hey!” said Hoyt. His face brightened. “Come meet a couple of the guys.”
Another yawp of laughter, convulsive this time, and mock-cheering. Charlotte looked up at Hoyt quizzically.
“That's just a bunch of guys playing Beirut.”
“Beirut?”
With great relish he described the game and the Pantagruelian beerdrinking
it involved. “We can go watch if you want to, but first come meet a few guys.”
Limping, Hoyt led her toward a room that opened off the entry gallery. As they neared it, she could see flares of TV colors within, followed by a collective groan and some guy saying, “Ho-lee shit! Mo-ther-fucker-er!” As they reached the doorway, Hoyt put an arm around her shoulder. Charlotte considered that a bit forward, but she was immediately distracted by the sight of six, eightâhow many?âguys sprawled on the leather furniture, their faces blanched by a flare of white from a football jersey that filled the screen of a TV set on the wall.
“Gentlemen!” said Hoyt in an arch way, as if to admonish them to clean up their language, “I want you to say hello to, uh, uhh, uhhh, my friend”âhe gave her a quick glance, as if to remind himself who she wasâ“uh, Charlotte.”
Ironic applause and attaboys. They were all staring at her with big grins on their faces. Charlotte knew she must have looked bewildered, because a guy in khakis and a white T-shirt that showed off his muscles said to her in a kind way, “We're laughing at Hoyt. He has trouble remembering names.”
More laughter.
“Come on, you guys,” said Hoyt. “Charlotte doesn't want to see a bunch of assholes give a brother shit.”
Groans and laughter.
Charlotte felt Hoyt give her shoulders a squeeze. It all came back ⦠his constant
touching
that night, but she had too many conflicting emotions to make an issue of it. She also felt she was at the center of a stage.
“Just pretend they're gentlemen,” said Hoyt. “Charlotte, this is Vance.”
“Hi,” said a slim, handsome guy with an open, friendly face and tousled blond hair, sitting on the arm of a fat leather-upholstered easy chair, his arms around his knees.
“I think we met,” said Charlotte. Her voice seemed so tiny. Oh, she wasn't likely to forget
his
face. He was the one Hoyt had chased off that night because
We've got this room.
“Oh, yeahhh,” said Vance, obviously not remembering at all.
“And this is Julian ⦔ Hoyt took his arm off Charlotte's shouldersâto her considerable relief ⦠she didn't want to be presented to this room full of boys as
hisâ
and introduced her to them all, one by one. In fact, they did prove to be gentlemanly ⦠hospitable, friendly ⦠lots of welcoming smiles.
Vance insisted that she have his easy chair, and Hoyt eased himself into the chair next to it.
Charlotte couldn't imagine what she could possibly talk to any of them about, but it was a moot point, as it turned out. Everybody returned to watching the screen. The flaring light lit up everybody's face in colors. On the screen ⦠a seemingly interminable series of collisions ⦠smacks, clatters, thuds,
oooofs â¦
of football players tackling one another, ramming each other headfirst, colliding torso to torso in midair. Charlotte's pulse was rapid, but it had nothing to do with the TV screen. She was excited ⦠the only girl in a room in a fraternity house with a whole bunch of cool boys. What did she look like to them? Terribly young and immature? They were all upperclassmen. Hoyt and Vance and Julian seemed a generation older than she was. Sunk this far down into an easy chair, she became terribly conscious of how tight her jeans were on her thighs. Her legsâwere they really as great as she thought they were? Without moving her head, she glanced about to see if any of them were drawn irresistibly ⦠to taking a look. To her disappointment, none seemed to be, not even Hoyt, who seemed to be watching TV and not watching it. He looked as if he had an appointment somewhere else.
On the TV a voice said, “Wait a minute, Jack, you're not saying teams are
instructing
players to go out there and wreck the other guys' kneesâ”
The roly-poly boy called Boo said, “You ever see those old-timers' introductions before the Fiesta Bowl? Guys look like they got two-by-fours for legs.” He hopped off the arm of the couch and did a rocking, stiff-legged walk across the floor. “Fucking look like they just got a five-hour furlough from the rheumatoid arthritis ward.”
Much laughter. Even Hoyt smiled, Charlotte noticed out of the corner of her eye. But how could they find it funny? To Charlotte, what she had just seen was sickening. It filled her with alarm and pity. What was it about boys? These boys were
rich,
rich enough to pay dues, on top of everything else, just to belong to a fraternity. They were smart. They had to be, just to get into Dupont at all. But they were no different from the boys at Alleghany High. She glanced at Hoytâand Channing popped into her head. They were all crazed on the subject of manliness, and manly violence was the manliest thing of all. Seeing an athlete being crippledâit didn't drown them in pity, not for a moment. It
intrigued
them. They identified not with the victim but the assailant. Being here frightened herâand thrilled her. She was
no longer on the outside desperately denying that she wanted to be inside.
I'm Mr. Starling's rock, she thought to herself, and I only think I have free will.
She felt three pats on her knee. Without looking, she knew it was Hoytâ
three
times? She tried to translate that as affection.
Touching
her again.
Now everybody's eyes swung to the doorway. A beaming couple was peering inâa very tall, rawboned guy with a high foreheadâHarrison!âand a much shorter blond girl, the cute sort, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt.
“It's the hairy man!” said Boo. “And the Janester!”
“Hi-i,” said the girl, the Janester presumably, with an up tone and a down tone. She obviously knew them all.
Harrison was so tall that when he put his arm across the girl's shoulder, it came down at an angle.
“Hoyt,” said the girl, “what happened to your head?”
Hoyt, without a smile: “Comes from banging it on the floor every time you hear the same question.” He still didn't smile.
Recovering from a paroxysm of laughter, Boo said, “How bummed out is Hoyt, Jane?”
While Jane was saying something to Julian, Boo began singing a ditty under his breath: “CDs are a-coming, their tails are in sight ⦔ He immediately looked to Hoyt for his reaction. Hoyt just looked back at him.
For the first time, Harrison noticed Charlotte. “Yo! Hey, uh ⦠uh ⦔
“Charlotte,” said Hoyt. He still wasn't smiling.
“Have you noticed?” said Boo. “Hoyt has a way with names.”
“Everybody knows that,” said Harrison. To Charlotte: “Wuzz good?”
“I just wanted to thank Hoyt.” She sounded so tiny and weak to herself.
“Thank Hoyt?” said Harrison, genuinely puzzled. Then he seemed to get it. “Oh yeah ⦔
Everybody was looking at the screen again.