At least one of Eliot’s talents had survived graduation: he was still a tireless seeker-out of obscure and wonderful bottles of wine. He was not yet such a lush that he’d abandoned his snobbishness. He went to tastings and chatted up importers and wine-store owners with a zeal that he mustered for nothing else. Once every few weeks, when he had accumulated a dozen or so bottles of which he was especially proud, Eliot would announce that they were having a dinner party. It was one such dinner party that he and Quentin were preparing for today.

They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. The venue was always Eliot and Janet’s Soho apartment, a vast prewar warren with an implausible profusion of bedrooms, a set ripe for a French farce. Josh was head chef, with Quentin assisting as apprentice chef and kitchen runner. Eliot acted as sommelier, of course. Alice’s contribution was to stop reading long enough to eat.

Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night’s dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. She also confabulated various surreal and sometimes controversial centerpieces. The theme of tonight’s party was Miscegenation, and Janet had promised—over objections aesthetic, moral, and ornithological—to deliver Leda and the Swan staged as a pair of magically animated ice sculptures. They would copulate until they melted.

As with all such evenings, the cleverness of the conceit became annoying somewhere around the middle of the afternoon before the party actually started. Quentin had found a grass skirt at an antique store, which he planned to pair with a tuxedo shirt and jacket, but the skirt was so scratchy that he gave up on it. He couldn’t think of another idea, so he spent the rest of the afternoon brooding and dodging Josh, who had spent the past week researching recipes that included violently disparate ingredients wedded together—sweet and savory, black and white, frozen and molten, Eastern and Western—and was now frantically slamming oven and cabinet doors and making him taste things and sniping at him over the pastry island. Alice arrived at five thirty, and Quentin and Josh both dodged her as well. By the time the party started everybody was drunk and starving and irritable.