After hanging around on the first floor a while for decency's sake, I made my way upstairs after Henry and the stranger. I was sure nobody was watching my behavior, so why the silliness? It was my natural cowardice before beauty that made me linger; when I'm afraid, you see, I immediately remember the proprieties. God knows what was going on upstairs. The children were sitting on the floor around the hookah and on the couches in a Frankensteinian blue and green light cast by the blue and green light bulbs they had screwed into Papa Gatsby's numerous lamps. Despite the fact that the living room in Gatsby's house is exceptionally large, it was covered end to end with a layer of adolescent flesh. They looked very happy, with contented faces all around, and why not — there weren't any adults at the party.

"Edward! Edward! Come on over here!" the children sitting around the hookah called out to me. Among them were several youths who had come down by car with Henry from Connecticut, and they already knew me, especially the boy-director and his ridiculous girlfriend. The general attention of the group fell on me for a moment when they called out. Stepping over torsos and bodies and across the legs and arms of the youths, the housekeeper made his way to the hookah where the children moved closer together to make a place for him on the floor. Someone stuck the flexible tube with a pipe stem at its tip into my hand. The smoking master was the same boy in the wig and dress and black stockings.

I inhaled with pleasure. Their hashish wasn't bad, not bad at all, and after taking his drag, the housekeeper grasped the pipe stem in his hand and passed it on to the person sitting next to him in the circle. Nearby the same mocking eyes were gazing at me. She was sitting on one of our rocking chairs, and ensconced at her feet was a handsome red-haired lad, the boy-actor who had the lead role in their film, the schoolboy Faust who is tempted by Mephistopheles-Henry. The kid was the very image of sleepy insolence and was hugging one of the young legs of my stranger and stroking it. A "youthful libertine," I thought with hatred, and passing her the stem and its hose, I smiled slightly at her from down on the floor. She smiled back — not too energetically, but mysteriously from a distance, a fleeting smile…

Events hurtled on at a catastrophic pace after that, or, to continue the equine comparisons, like lathered steeds. Actually, there weren't any particular events to speak of. The housekeeper smoked the gratis hashish to the point where he lost all sense of reality, but they were all stoned without a doubt. These were wealthy children, gentlemen, and they didn't run out of hashish that night. The boy in black stockings tirelessly took out one piece after another from a little metal box. He was already chronically stoned and in a good state, sitting with his dress pushed up nearly to his armpits and his legs spread wide the same way that Jenny used to spread them while sitting, and you could easily see his quite impressive organ. He was a large boy, and from time to time I looked at his organ with dull interest. The stranger and I–I didn't know her name since no one had introduced me to her — passed little smiles back and forth, though somebody later squeezed in between us, and then somebody else's shoulder in a green tunic got in the way — it was a costume ball, remember — and I saw her, or more accurately I saw part of her dress, only through the spaces between other people's torsos and heads. Three boys were sitting at her feet now like pages at the feet of a Beautiful Lady, to which devotion she was in fact entitled.

"Our hookah crowd," as I came to think of it, continually changed form, with new faces turning up and leaving and then returning again, but its nucleus remained stable: the boy in the wig and black stockings, the boy director, the smaller of the two slaves, and me. We were only a small part of the noisy and excited sea of children-youths. Near the gigantic punch bowl of sangria (if only Jenny could have seen what a vessel of sin we made of the proper, domestic ceramic bowl she usually mixed her bread dough in) was its own group, a very active one — much more active than ours. They had, I believe, ultimately poured into their sangria all the whiskey and vodka I'd given them and added even more sugar — children, like the elderly, are fond of sugar. Later, after the party was over, Olga tried but was unable to restore that part of the floor; the sugary spots on it had apparently eaten through the parquet.

It was impossible to make out anything coherent in all that noise, smoke, and semi-darkness. The conversations all came down to something like, "Well, how do you feel, man?" "Great, man, incredible, I never felt better in my life!" "Nice hash, man!" "Yeah, great hash!" followed by pointless laughter and various observations that weren't funny to bystanders but that left us rolling on the floor. You must be stoned yourself to appreciate the pointless gaiety of people who've been smoking hashish or marijuana. "Great hash!" The well-to-do children around me spoke with the intonation and slang of the residents of the Hotel Diplomat, or at least they tried to.

The boy-director and his girlfriend had already undertaken to fulfill their primary responsibilities — they'd started shooting their film. I forgot to mention that they were supposed to shoot an «orgy» scene, a scene, that is, with Faust sunk in debauchery and consuming his life in the company of courtesans in a place (the millionaire's house?) he has been brought to by Mephistopheles-Henry to be shown the world of pleasure. My stranger was included in the «orgy» scene too, and was among the first to be filmed, with the boy playing the main hero sitting at her feet. The stranger obviously evoked in the youngsters the same timidity she did in me. Later the children put on some of Jenny's Arab music, and the two girls dressed in something like Arab costumes started twisting like snakes not far from our hookah, for which purpose we were asked to move temporarily. The girls were depicting the houris of paradise, while the boy Faust sat in a lotus position, smoked hashish, and indolently watched them with "languor in his gaze." They'll have their film, I thought, but what will I have?

The party gradually started to break down into groups in the way that all parties do — some people left or went out for a while, and other couples started quietly disappearing. I doubt they all went off to fuck in the darker recesses of that house entrusted to me, but many went off nonetheless. My stranger disappeared from the living room for a while, stayed somewhere, and then came back again. Maybe I needed to get away from that damned Oriental poison and the boy in the black stockings with whom I already shared an understanding that was not merely wordless but even motionless — a kind of thought exchange across the distance separating us by means of brain waves — but cowardliness and hashish had me pinned on my back, and I lay there without twitching. Well, what could I say to her, I thought, well what? She already knows I'm a servant — somebody's probably already told her. I had seen her and Henry and some of the other children talking about something and glancing in my direction. If only she weren't so stunning, I thought, then I honestly wouldn't be so afraid. If she were just a little worse and not so gorgeous. In short, I started having more and more of a complex about it and even found myself sitting there by the hookah immersed in melancholy thoughts about how, in comparison to them, I was already old and lonely, and that I didn't have any connection at all with that crowd of children. None whatsoever. They were separate, and I was separate.

I decided to rouse myself and stood up, casting a glance over the field of battle: the children had significantly diminished in number. Maybe they had gone downstairs, for all I knew. It was the first time I had stood up all evening, and my legs were numb and slow to obey me. It was only when I stood up that I realized how stoned I was.