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Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollandaise. Word of this has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli. Roasts lie growing cold on the room-long buffet tables. A third of the company are already asleep, mostly on the floor. It is necessary to thread one’s way among bodies to get to where anything’s happening.

What’s happening is not clear. There are the usual tight little groups out in the gardens, dealing. Not much spectacle tonight. A homosexual triangle has fizzed over into pinches and recriminations, so as to block the door to the bathroom. Young officers are outside vomiting among the zinnias. Couples are wandering. Girls abound, velvet-bowed, voile-sleeved, underfed, broad-shouldered and permed, talking in half a dozen languages, sometimes brown from the sun here, others pale as Death’s Vicar from more eastern parts of the War. Eager young chaps with patent-leather hair rush about trying to vamp the ladies, while older heads with no hair at all prefer to wait, putting out only minimal effort, eyes and mouths across the rooms, talking business in the meantime. One end of the salon is occupied by a dance band and an emaciated crooner with wavy hair and very red eyes, who is singing:

JULIA (FOX-TROT)

Ju-lia,

Would you think me pe-cul-iar,

If I should fool ya,

In-to givin’ me—just-a-little-kiss?

Jool-yaaahh,

No one else could love you tru-lier,

How I’d worship and bejewel ya,

If you’d on-ly give-me just-a-little-kiss!

Ahh Jool-yaaahhhh—

My poor heart grows un-ru-lier,

No one oolier or droolier,

Could I be longing for—

What’s more—

Ju-lia,

I would shout hallelujah,

To have my Jool-yaaahh,

In-my-arms forevermore.

Saxophony and Park Lane kind of tune, perfect for certain states of mind. Slothrop sees Hilary Bounce, clearly a victim of the hallucinogenic Hollandaise, nodded out on a great pouf with Michele, who’s been fondling his IG Farben trinket for the past two or three hours. Slothrop waves, but neither one notices him.

Dopers and drinkers struggle together without shame at the buffet and in the kitchens, ransacking the closets, licking out the bottoms of casseroles. A nude bathing party passes through on the way down the sea-steps to the beach. Our host, that Raoul, is roaming around in a ten-gallon hat, Tom Mix shirt and brace of sixguns with a Percheron horse by the bridle. The horse is leaving turds on the Bokhara rug, also on the odd supine guest. It is all out of shape, no focus to it until a sarcastic flourish from the band, and here comes the meanest customer Slothrop has seen outside of a Frankenstein movie—wearing a white zoot suit with reet pleats and a long gold keychain that swings in flashing loops as he crosses the room with a scowl for everybody, in something of a hurry but taking the time to scan faces and bodies, head going side to side, methodical, a little ominous. He stops at last in front of Slothrop, who’s putting together a Shirley Temple for himself.