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 bedâand 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 â¦
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
loveâ
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 ⦠Thenânothing.
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?”
Silenceâbroken 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 â¦
”
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 momentâand 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 sulphuryellow 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 staggeredâsomething was seriously wrong with her vestibular systemâto 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 â¦
unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh unnhh .
. .
and could make outâwho? Gloria?âon her knees and elbows and somebody mounted on her from behind and going unngghh
unngghh
unngghh unngghh
unngghhâ
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
â¦
“Ow! Fuckingâ”
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 doorâsmelled like puke in hereâand 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 bedâJulian. 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 secondsâbut couldn't have beenâwhile 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!”
âand 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!”