“You don't have toâ”
“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 roseâ
“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”âhe nodded toward the entrance to the slotâ“and it's right next to it?âthe 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 fearfulâglorious! glorious! âsmile, 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”âhe could feel her jaw muscles moving on his sternumâ“someday I'll know how to tell youâI'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 sleepâ”
“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 momentâfor a soulful, lingering kissâbut 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 meanâI can't let myself fall to pieces like this and expect youâ”
“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 okayâit 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 youâyou've saved my life tonightsavedâmyâlife, Adam ⦠I'll never forget thi-i-i-i-i-”âshe was sobbingâ“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 â¦
Â
Â
The clinic! Great honor! Poor, anorexic girlsâpale, bony girls with barely any mammary capacity at allâreaching out to him with their paper-pale, bony arms ⦠Before him: a pale, pale starveling with a potbelly the size of a cantaloupeâasking why? Why? Why? Simple, said the distinguished consultantâwho was himself! You're beginning to eat now, and your body is storing fat where it can draw upon it fastest, which is thereâyour belly. A beautiful girl behind himâhe couldn't see her but he knew she was beautifulâsaid in a soft, kind voice, “But that's not true, Adam ⦠Adam? â¦
Adam?
⦠Adam! ⦠Adam!”â
He woke up in the dark.
“Adam!”âsuch 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?”
“Iâdon'tâknowâwhat's happening!” The words were coming in spurts. “Pleaseâhold me! Pleaseâhold 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'tâknow ⦠Hold meâAdam.”
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 soâget 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 Godâcloser ⦠Put your legs under my legsâplease!”
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 â¦
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.
Â
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, âstraight or gay'â
gay â¦
which is spelled âstraight up the Hershey highway'âthey want everybody to wear blue jeans to show âsolidarity.' 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 youâand they'll get the fucking message!”
Vance and Julian looked at each other.
A
dam now saw his apartment, his lopsided little slot, as a sanatorium for a single patient, the girl he loved ⦠the love of his life. He wanted to proclaim his love! He literally wished he could go up on a promontory with Charlotte at his side and put one arm around her and lift the other to the heavens, saying: “Behold! Gaze upon her ineffable beauty! This is the girl I love! She ⦠is my very life!” But who was there to proclaim it to? He knew the Mutants better than anyone else, but to proclaim to this intellectual cabal, “I'm in love!”âeven the thought of all the stupid laughter and sidewise glances was more than he could bear.
At the same time, he had a deep worry, which he imagined was lodged in some posterior lobe of his brain. Jojo's plagiarism case was unresolved. Nothing seemed to be happening. The case was dormant, to all outward appearances. But he had lied to the judicial officer ⦠on the advice of Buster Roth, who was not his friend. He could be thrown out of Dupont! He couldn't imagine it. It was as unreal as the thought of death. Yet there it was! He had dug the grave himself! This unimaginable thing ⦠could happen!
Every possible moment he spent with Charlotte. He slept next to her in his little twin bed, elated by her dependence on himâshe could get no sleep at all unless he held her for a couple of hours or moreâand frustrated by the fact that sleeping next to her was a different preposition from sleeping
with her. “Different preposition” was the very word that formed in his thoughts. “Witty,” he said to himself, without the faintest tinge of amusement.
In any case, he couldn't spend
every
moment with her. This was final exam week for the first semester, and he had to ace these exams in order to be in the running for a Rhodes scholarship. At the same time he had sworn to himself to revive “The Night of the Skull Fuck” ⦠for the W
ave
in some way that would make Hoyt Thorpe realize: Vengeance is ours, saith Charlotte Simmons and Adam Gellin, and we shall be paid. On top of that, a mundane but time-consuming matter: four hours of pizza deliveries every night. He was paid by the hour for tutoring athletes. But the Athletic Department had stopped giving him assignments. He, Adam Gellin, Millennial Mutant and prince, Prince of Love in a fairy tale, had to hop in that decrepit Bitsosushi and hustle PowerPizza pies.
Charlotte had taken to lying listlessly in bed during the day. If she got up, she never wore anything but Adam's synthetic School of Hudson Bay lumberjack shirt. Obviously, she had no intention at all of leaving the apartment. One of Adam's most urgent duties was making sure she
did
pull herself together, at least long enough to get dressedâin the same clothes she arrived inâand go take her exams. She protested that she couldn't take them, because she hadn't been able to study. Adam assured her she was a genius, that she had worked so hard and brilliantly during the first half of the semester, the momentum she already had would be enough. The past was the past, it was time to put it behind her and move forward into the billionvolt future that awaited her and her unparalleled life of the mind, and so forth and so onâdreadful, dutiful mouthfuls of clichés, in short, but he could tell that his flattery and optimism were gradually beginning to work.
Inwardly, sympathy, money, and charity were battling it out with an incessantly smoldering, smoking, smitten lust for virginiticide at the hands of and the mouth, breasts, and loins of his beloved. One moment charity would be telling him he should take her to the Health Center and put her in professional hands for treatment of depression. This girl wasn't merely unhappy, he realized after the first day, she was depressed. But lust rebutted: that would
really
finish her off ⦠sinking into the theory-quacking innards of the twenty-first-century versions of the madhouseâbeing perhaps declared “clinically” depressed and sent homeâhe couldn't let that happen. What she needed was love, caring attention, encouragement, praise, visions of a radiant future ⦠and order. He needed to establish a positive routine
for her. Yes!âyou
must
take your exams. Yes!âyou
must
have a neat appearance whether you leave the apartment or not. And to himself: Yes!âthis miserable poverty-rotted slot I live in must have the appearance of order.
The first day Charlotte went out, quaking, for an examâneuroscienceâAdam inserted the eyes of a movie drill sergeant into his head and saw this place for what it was: an inexcusable rat's nest. And the bathroom ⦠in a common hall ⦠since all four apartments, meaning four boys who were little more than nodding acquaintances, used it, nobody ever found it worth his while to keep it clean. The filth, the foul odors, the grime in the crack where the tile floor met the tub, which had corroded green copper stains stretching out a foot or more from the drain, the shaved beard stubble hair accumulating in a sludge in the bottom of the basin, the virulent ring of sludge near the top of the basin, the grit on the tiles, which were the old-fashioned tiny octagonal kind, cracked here and there, the black mold that was spreading over the shower curtain, which was an ancient sheet of plastic the color of intravenous feeding tubing that drooped where three curtain-rod rings were missing, the paint blistering and peeling on the ceiling thanks to lack of ventilationâAdam had never seen all this with real eyes, Charlotte's eyes, before. Bringing
order
to this disgrace became a mission. He found a snow shovel, an old gray wood-backed scrub brush and a one-fourth-full bottle of ammonia in the cellar. He
scraped
the pox-erupted paint off the ceiling ⦠got down on all fours and
scrubbed
the mold and paint poxchips off the shower curtain, the scum from the basin, the corroded copper stains and poxchips out of the tub andâon hands and kneesâthe tile floor, nearly asphyxiating himself with the ammonia â¦
picked up
all stray garments and other detritus in his slot â¦
made
the bed with hospital corners the way his mother did â¦
swept up
the underbrush of dust balls, hair balls, mashed Band-Aids, ATM receipts, dead Snapple bottles of diluted fruit juice concoctions, black plastic caps with pocket clips from thrown-away throwaway ballpoint pens, junk-mail flyers, and magazine insert cards. It took him more than three hours.
No sooner had he put all random objects, his sneakers, the heaps of paper on his desk, his glasses cases, his medicine kit, and his Community Coffee mug, which he had to carry back and forth to the bathroom, into neat rows and piles, than Charlotte returned from the neuroscience examination. She entered the slot with a miserable look on her face. Adam waited for it to brighten when she noticed the new shining order of the place. He smiled, opened his arms wide in a comically exaggerated fashion, and said:
“Welcome to the new, brighter life
chez
Gellin!”
Charlotte rushed into his arms, threw her arms about his waist, lay her head on his chest, and burst into heartrending tears.
“Oh, Adam, I butchered it, I butchered it, I buh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh ⦠.” The convulsions came so fast, she couldn't even complete the word.
“I seriously doubtâ”
“I didn't halfway study enough! It was so horrible! Now everyone's going to give up on me! I've let everybody dow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-own ⦔ She gulped for breath. “Mr. Starling, Miss Pennington ⦠everyboh-ah-everyboh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ody ⦔
Relentless tears. Adam wondered who Miss Pennington was. “Come on! Pull yourself together! Everybody feels that way after a tough exam! I can guarantee you've done better than you think you have.”
“Ohgod, it was bad enough as it was! Mr. Starling won't even look my way anymore! He thinks I've turned into he doesn't know wha-uh-uh-uh-uh-uht ⦔
“Stop it! Stop it!”
Adam barked it out like an order, surprising even himself.
“I won't have it!”
Charlotte abruptly stopped crying and stared up at Adam with her mouth slightly open and her tearful eyes shining ⦠with respect bordering oddly on pleasure, as women sometimes do when a man claims the high ground and rebukes them.
Â
Â
The team pulled up to the CircumGlobal Lexington in a brand-new Mercedes SuperLuxe charter bus, white with stylized blue speed lines on the sides. Jojo was sitting halfway back, next to Mike. The seats were like first-class seats on a Boeing 767. The windows were tinted dark as sunglasses, so that at first he couldn't make out anything. But then he saw them. Like the other players, he never consciously admitted to himself how satisfying the sheer presence of the gawkers and the groupies was. Quite a crowd outside the entrance to the hotel ⦠He was surprised that Lexington, which he had always thought of as a Kentucky college town, was big and big-time enough for a CircumGlobal ⦠A lot of well-to-do white Necktie types he was looking at ⦠probably waiting for cabs to go out to dinner or whatever, and ⦠there they were, six, eight, maybe ten groupies ⦠white. The groupies were always white, although at least 85 percent of the stars of big-time college basketball were black. Strange business, the groupies.
Jojo rose with alacrity, or rose insofar as a man six-foot-ten could rise up in a bus. No matter what his troubles were, no matter if a freshman hot dog had taken his starting position, no matter if an athlete-hating history professor had sworn to have him expelled from Dupont, no matter whatâthe ten minutes it took them to enter some grand hotel and stand around the lobby waiting for the student managers to sort out their luggage for them and check them in at the desk were ten minutes of Heaven on Earth. He knew damned well that every member of the team, including the swimmies, got the same rush, even though nobody, including him, was ever going to be fool enough to say so out loud. For those ten minutes, they were giants bestriding the earth.
The moment they, the players, emerged from the bus, descending the steps, ducking way down to avoid hitting their heads on the doorframeâ
The onlookers held their breaths, lest these giants crack their skulls. They let out their breaths as the giants cleared the door and stood up straight, like gigantic jackknives unfolding.
The groupies pranced forward, pretty white girls whose faces, had they chosen to leave them unpainted, could have been those of the sweetest, most dedicated day-care-center volunteers. As it was, their eyes shone from way down in Night Life black occipital craters. Their eyelids bore cantilevered store-bought lashes, their lips gleamed with an astonishing range of hues, the waists of their jeans were below the tops of their hip joints, and the jeans were so tight, their belly buttons so conspicuously pierced with silver rings from which hung a short string or two of pearls ⦠that they looked like hookers. They obviously looked that way to the adult hotel guests, who had never seen such a troupe in their lives. But they weren't. They were volunteers. They were offering their bodies for nothing more than the honor of having these famous giants use the fissures in their loins and faces howsoever they chose. They were like the temple harlots in Buddhismâor was it Hinduismâor what the hell was it? The name Left-handed Shakti blipped through Jojo's brain ⦠The course had been called The History of Religion in Asia and Africa, but all Jojo could remember were the temple harlots. The idea had made him feel perversely concupiscent at the time. But in his current mood Jojo felt sorry for the groupies. Whose little girls were they? Did their parents have so much as the faintest knowledge of all this? Jojo had had enough of these volunteer hardwood harlots. Such an empty, decadent pleasure, devoid of any emotion higher than an animal's, unless you counted smug satisfaction as an emotion.
“Treyshawn!” piped up one of the groupies, a little blonde whose breasts looked like a pair of small round gym balls that could be removed or reattached at a moment's notice.
“Hey, sugar,” said Treyshawn out the side of his mouth, in a gloriously bored fashion.
“Hi, Jojo! Remember me?” Jojo took a look out the corner of his eye. Not bad, actually. A tall white girl, brunette, delicate features, great legs revealed by a skirt hiked all the way up to â¦
there
. Jojo not only didn't “remember” but also was not going to lower himself by responding. On the other hand, he
was
the second one to be solicited, preceded only by Treyshawn. So they hadn't forgotten him!âdespite the fact that he never started on the road anymore. He was just beginning to savor that little boost in status whenâ
“Vernon!”
“Vernon!”
Two of them, two juicy little groupies crying out for ⦠the man who had cost him his starting position on the team of the national champions.
As the boys went through the revolving doors and into the lobby of the CircumGlobal Lexington, it started all over again, the awe, the
ahhhs,
the unabashed gawking. They towered above the hooples in the hotel lobby. They were like an entirely new and advanced order of humanity. Buster Roth required his boys to wear jackets and ties on road trips. The white playersâMike, the swimmies, and himselfâall wore navy blazers with khaki pants, except for one of the swimmies, who wore a pair of gray flannels. But the black players were into styling, voguing. Styling and voguing this year meant three- and four-button single-breasted suits. Treyshawn wore a fivebutton, custom-made. The top button buttoned way up high. The bottom button seemed to be about six feet lower. The suit made Treyshawn look like a chimney. Coach knew what he was doing. When the team came walking into a blingy hotel lobby like the CircumGlobal's, they weren't mere giants. They were ready to ⦠rule. That much you could read in the gawking faces of all the swells staying at the hotel.