“Hello, Max.”

The opiated stare of the botanist was on me heavily. We gazed at each other’s face. I have to admit I was ready to turn away in sadness, or feelings very like sadness, when I saw Max’s mouth fall open. Max’s gray tongue came out and began licking. My tie had become wound about Max’s neck. A problem? Max’s arms and his hands were bony things reaching out from blazer and shirtsleeves pushed up and bunched in linen folds around the elbows. Max’s legs showed below trouser cuffs hiked almost to the knees, well above the socks. Their thinness was alarming and unnerving, because unexpected. When had Maxwell grown so frail, so brittle and waxy? Was it the drug? He looked as if he had been tossed onto his back from a great height and broken. One black loafer—a black, tasseled loafer that appeared, from where I stood, brand-new, very nice and comfortable, obviously soft to the touch—was hanging almost off its foot. The handsome shoe dangled from my brother’s toe.

“You look like you could do with a pick-me-up,” I said to him. His mouth leaked a dry gurgle and I took this delicate noise as affirmation. Certainly Clayton and Rob would soon be setting up the bar. The problem with getting a drink around here is fighting through the crowd at the drinks table. Perhaps our blood familiarity permits styles of behavior that most of us would probably suppress in other, less intimate settings—that is, shoving, elbowing, light punching, and related aggressive gestures. It is rare, at our drinks table, that one hears the invitation “After you.” For this reason I often buddy up to Spooner, who packs his own cognac. Live and let live. Spooner was nowhere in sight and Max’s tongue was sliding farther and farther out of his mouth and Virgil was showing signs of a possible seizure in the works and Hiram was as usual chastising someone who did not deserve it, and Albert was whacking his cane on the furniture and Jeremy was sobbing. The time now was shortly after seven o’clock. The Doberman was howling and each new yelp reverberated wildly and unremittingly inside the manifold ceiling vaults above our heads, a chorus of barking. Suddenly Barry clutched his forehead and moaned loudly before collapsing backward in one more failed bid to rise up and see straight.

I said to Max, “Why don’t I fetch you a nice piña colada? A frosty piña colada will take the edge off. What do you say? I’ll get a straw so you can sip lying down. How does that sound? Piña colada?”

In fact, I was not confident that blender drinks—or straws, for that matter—would be available at our wet bar, but it was, I believed, important to make this empathic gesture toward Maxwell’s interest in, and concern for, the tropics. A small deceit but a valuable one if it could in any way make Maxwell feel happier.