Hoyt talked to her continually now and left Gloria to I.P. He called her Babe and stroked her shoulders and her arms a lot. The room was very noisy now…squalls of laughter, a roaring surf of conversation, the yells of young men drunk on the rising sap of youth, like Bacchus…like Bacchus—hah!—Hoyt poured her some more wine—it wasn’t that you couldn’t actually tell—but after vodka…whew…what was wine? And once you understood that guys like the Saint Rays were the Bacchuses of modern times—but Bacchus Bacchus Bacchus sack us crackers—this whole working it out in terms of Bacchus was making her dizzy. What did she really know about Bacchus—other than that—had the D.J. turned up the volume or was it her? The music seemed so loud now…a song by James Matthews playing his guitar.

“I’ve been alone before,

So it’s all right…

I’ve learned to know the score,

So it’s all right…”

It made her laugh out loud.

“Wuz funny, babe?” said Hoyt.

“The—” Charlotte stopped and started laughing again. The truth was, she couldn’t remember whuh wuz funny, dude.

Her spirits slipped for an instant, but she couldn’t think of that now—

The Caribbean colonels were bringing dessert in big bowls glazed in swirls of many colors with big, big silver spoons, and you took however much you wanted. It was a frozen chocolate mousse with frozen strawberries on top. She meant to take just a little bit, but the spoons were so big and so long—the handle was like a lever, and the shovel part got stuck in the frozen mousse and—oops—she catapulted a glob of it up in the air, and the instant seemed stretched out forever as the glob descended, descended, descended and fell into her lap, on her dress, right in the middle, up close to the top of her thighs, since the dress didn’t fall much below there anyway. She was appalled. A frozen brown chocolate glob right there, right near her crotch—it was horrible!

“Here, use this!” It was Gloria, who was leaning toward her in front of Hoyt. She held up a glass tumbler, which seemed to be full of soda water, and lowered a wad of her napkin into it.

“Let me get it off with this!” Hoyt had a spoon and was heading right down there—

“No, Hoyt!” Charlotte said, giggling, and pushed his hand back.

“Then you do it,” he said, handing her the spoon.

Mortifying. She was spooning a messy glob right out of her…crotch…

More chiming of the glasses at the center table, quickly picked up by Saint Rays at every table and even some of the dates until there was a mad crystal uproar—accompanied by banging on the table—thank God! She could complete this shameful business of swabbing the stain on her dress while they were all absorbed in banging their glasses in paroxysms of drunken laughter and—smash!—somebody at that table over there had rapped his wineglass so hard it shattered and—smash!—another one, over there—and smash! smash! smash! smash! glasses were shattering all around—smash!—I.P. was laughing convulsively, and then he held the blade end of his dinner knife and swung the heavy handle like a club at a big balloon-shaped wineglass—smash!—he hit it so hard that Gloria and everybody else in the vicinity, including Charlotte, ducked from the flying shards, and he said, “Oh shit—I didn’t mean to—yo! You wanna see something fucking incredible?”

With his forefinger and thumb he lifted up the base and the stem of the glass, which remained intact.

“Didn’t—fucking—move!” His eyes panned around the entire table to show everyone this physical marvel…and the fact that he was such a high-spirited rake.

The little Caribbean colonels were suddenly everywhere—also a fortyish man with a paunch, shirt and tie, and no jacket—and Vance was on his feet, standing tallest and waving his upstretched arms back and forth over his head like a football referee signaling “no good” or “out of bounds,” and finally the uproar subsided to ripples of drunken laughter here and there.

Vance assumed his official presidential pose. “I’ve just had a conversation with a distinguished gentleman from the Hyatt Ambassador Hotel whom I reminded of the words of Saint Raymond himself, which, translated from the Latin, mean, ‘Fucking put it on the bill.’”

Laughter, applause, whistles. Julian started yelling, “Saint Ray! Saint Ray! Saint Ray!” hoping to get a chant going. A couple of guys joined in, but it fizzled.

Vance remained standing. “Gentlemen…let me recall our all-too-eloquent toast to the ladies, which I would gladly repeat…if modesty and the impatience of Saint Ray’s resident crystacidal maniac, I.P., did not prevent me.”

Gales of laughter, clapping, whistling, unintelligible shouts. By this stage of the evening, the brothers were drunk enough to believe that Vance’s verbose buffoonery actually gave the brotherhood an aura of elegance. I.P. was in Seventh Heaven. He kept beaming at Gloria and then around the room and back at Gloria, honestly believing that Vance was paying him a great compliment as a rake among rakes of coolness and social wattage.

“But now,” Vance continued, “it is time for me to propose a toast to you.” He paused. The ensuing silence, in a roomful of drunks in an advanced stage of wreckage, was a tribute to the periphrastic performance he was putting on. Charlotte wondered if anybody in the room other than herself knew the adjective “periphrastic.” She doubted it. A smile of superiority stole over her face. And the coolest guy in all of Dupont, who has fallen in love with me, is massaging my back, and everyone in this room can see that.

“Ladies,” Vance was saying, “you happen to be in a roomful of men who this year have turned Saint Ray into a brotherhood as awesome and…and…and tight”—“tight” came off a bit lamely, since “awesome” meant the same thing, but everybody was still with him—“as Cy’s Lamborghini.” He smiled approvingly at Cyrus Brooks, whose daddy had given him the most expensive sports roadster in the world, a Lamborghini Leopardo, then added, “Or at least after Tully’s has repaired it for the we’re-not-fucking-countingth time, and before Cy takes it out again and eats the transmission because he’s still wondering what the fuck this manual shift shit is.”

Laughter, catcalls at Cy’s expense. Vance continued smiling at the young Lamborghini owner. “No, I mean it, you guys have been fucking amazing. This is my fourth year as a Saint Ray, and this frat gets more solid by the year. The house of the Lip-locked Saint”—burst of laughter—the guys found that extremely funny-elegant—“has never been so completely one for all and all for one before. It’s been the biggest honor of my life, being president of Saint Ray, and I want to thank you, and I want you to know I love you guys—hey, wait a minute, ‘All for one and all on one’…that’s the fucking Hell’s Angels’ motto!”

Vance had just barely pulled himself out of the pool of bathos as he was going under for the third time.

“Come to think of it, we’ve got a Hell’s Angel. We’ve got a guy who makes national political big shots piss in their pants.” He was looking at Hoyt. Charlotte had to twist her neck and look up to see Hoyt’s expression. He had a small and rather cold smile on his face. He stopped massaging her back.

Vance lifted a champagne glass halfway up and declaimed, “Gentlemen, to you, the brothers of Saint Ray.” He raised the glass up high, then extended it toward his brethren and panned about to all six tables. “You’ve made me proud, you’ve made yourselves and every single one of us proud, you’ve…uh…you’ve”—uh-oh, he was running into tricolon trouble again—“you’re…the shit! To…us!”—whereupon he tilted his head back and propelled the whole glassful down his gullet.

More pandemonium. The Saint Rays rose to their feet again. On top of the shouts, cries, and clapping came ooo-ahs and ferocious foot-stomping, which would have rocked the floor had they been in a building fifty years older. The floor here in the atrium court was a synthetic country tile set in concrete.