Julian looked at her as if he couldn’t understand what had come over her, and she laughed some more. For an instant she entertained the thought that maybe he really was mystified by this new “front-busting.” That was one of Julian’s favorite words, front-busting. It flew through her mind herky-jerky as a dove, and that only made her laugh some more. So-o-o-o vaaaaiiin! She began laughing so hard she had to lean over and put her hands on her knees and ride it out.

Hoyt came over and said, “Hey, wuz up, babe?”

“Wellll,” said Charlotte with a big sigh before catching her breath, “Julian’s so-o-oh vaaaain!” The very word vain threw her into another doubled-over paroxysm of laughter.

Hoyt said, “If you say so, babe,” and put his arm around her and pulled her tight against his side.

Charlotte decided that the new Charlotte Simmons was a big hit.

Presently, after much imploring by the little Caribbean army colonels, the roaring crowd headed for the part of their section that was beneath the lobby floor. There dinner awaited.

There were six round tables with about ten chairs at each one. One table was in the center, and the other five were clustered about it in more or less a circle, but you would have thought there were twice that many if you judged by the noise. As long as they were out in the open court, some of the racket dissipated in the thirty stories of empty air above it. In here, however, there was a ceiling, and even though it must have been twelve feet high, the Saint Rays were by now so drunk—and excited—they had reached that stage at which everything sounded funnier if shouted or cried out or yodeled with a manly, sex-obsessed red laugh, and the shouts, cries, and yodels hit the ceiling and bounced back until all was uproar. They sure looked better, the guys did, in their tuxedos and clean white shirts and all—even I.P., who had a date. She had beautiful dark hair. Charlotte couldn’t see her face from here. The black tux made his hips look not so gigantic. He made many jesting gestures for his date’s benefit, one of them being a funny snakelike thing he could make his huge, grown-together eyebrows do. Charlotte suddenly felt sentimental about I.P. He took such abuse from his fraternity brothers, it was nice to see him really happy, with a pretty girl at his side. Charlotte was happy herself and had enough goodwill to go around.

Once the boys took their seats and went to work on the lobster or some appetizer, the noise level dropped ever so slightly, just enough for Hoyt, sitting next to her, to shout across the table and introduce her to everyone. Out of the corner of her eye she saw I.P. come to a chair a few seats beyond Hoyt. She was disappointed to realize that aside from Hoyt, she didn’t know a soul—because she was feeling social, more so than at any time in her life. She recognized a couple of the guys, whom she always saw playing quarters or Beirut in the entry gallery outside the library at the Saint Ray house. One was sitting right next to her, a lanky guy with thatchy hair, like a thatched roof, good-looking in a bit of a gawky way, and she could even hear in her mind’s ear the peculiar way he groaned over disappointments at those stupid beer games and his ironic cheers and the clapping he did when someone on his team “scored” by arcing a Ping-Pong ball into a cup of beer, but she didn’t know him and didn’t even catch his name.

The last person Hoyt introduced her to was I.P.’s date, who was sitting on Hoyt’s other side. “Charlotte?—this is Gloria.”

This Gloria turned her head toward Charlotte, and—ohmygod, it was her, the girl she had caught Julian holding hands with. She didn’t seem to recognize Charlotte, but Charlotte sure recognized her. She stared at her as if saying hello, but actually trying to find some fatal flaw. She tried and tried and finally had to face facts. Yeah, her mouth was a little wide—but her upper lip had a curve like a bow, as in a bow and arrow, and her bottom lip was full. Her face had the sort of dark-lady cast that promises forbidden love. Her eyes were so over–made up they looked like a pair of black craters with big gleaming white orbs at the bottom, but Charlotte had to face facts: it was a look guys probably went crazy over. Her hair was a lush, silky, shimmering black, and the little black dress—“little” didn’t begin to describe it. It plunged so low in the front that when the girl was leaning over the way she was at this moment…

The eyeballs of the two Beirut players seemed to be popping out of their heads in multiples, the way they did in animated cartoons.

Just then an odd chiming sound began at the center table. The guys and a couple of the girls were tapping silverware against their big balloon-shaped wineglasses, so far empty. Then it spread to every table until all the guys, even Hoyt, and of course I.P., were banging away for all they were worth, and laughter erupted and mock cheers and whistles and more laughter, until the entire room was filled to bursting with the sheer animal exuberance of young manhood, accompanied by a confused storm of rhythmless pings from what sounded like half the wineglasses in the world being used by a demented mob as a glockenspiel.

Then there arose a cry from out of these young male gullets, indecipherable at first but then in unison:

“Sexy—prexy!”

“Sexy—prexy!”

“Sexy—prexy!”

“Sexy—prexy!”

And then a tall, slender figure rose up at the center table, looking perfect—perfect—in a tuxedo and a crisp, high-wing-collared, stiff-bosomed white shirt that looked like they had been made for him (in fact, both had). A tumultuous applause broke out, clapping such as Charlotte had heard only once before—for Charlotte Simmons at graduation last spring—and cheering laughter, whistles of the sort in which the boys put two fingers in their mouths and shot amazing piping rockets of sound into the already bursting air.

It was Vance, looking absolutely patrician…tall, straight as a column. His blond hair, instead of flopping all over the place, was combed back. It was parted in the middle, but his hair was so full, the part was like a tiny roadway down in the bottom of a canyon. He looked like a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald that Charlotte had seen on the cover of a paperback of This Side of Paradise.

She had never dreamed he could look so handsome, the very image of dignity, yet glamorous at the same time. Ahhh…so he was the sexy prexy, the president of Saint Ray.

With only a slight smile on his face, a calm smile, a confident smile, Vance raised his glass of champagne to the level of his chin, and in a voice stronger than any she had ever heard him speak, he said, “Gentlemen!” He paused. He raised his chin slightly. There wasn’t a sound in the room, aside from some sort of steam jet back in the kitchen. He was practically looking down his nose as he ran his eyes over every Saint Ray at every table. Somehow his presence made the whole bunch of them seem like golden youth, frisky young men in formal dress black tuxedos, white dress shirts, and black bow ties, with golden sunburst medals of Saint Raymond’s cross pinned to their breast pockets and tiny ribbons in their lapels—frisky young men on the very brink of a bacchanal, but at this moment cognizant of the roles Destiny would call upon them to play someday.

Then he raised his glass from the level of his chin to the level of his lips and, tilting his chin up even slightly higher, said, “To the ladies!”

Hoyt, I.P., the two Beirut players, Oliver the oboist—every Saint Ray in the room—rose up. They lifted their glasses to their lips and as if with a single voice boomed back, “THE LADIES!” and in a single choreographed motion tilted the champagne glasses way up and drained them down their gullets.

Then they all sat down laughing and cheering, half of them also lavishing physical attention upon “the ladies.” Charlotte spotted Julian slipping his hand beneath Nicole’s hair at the base of her neck and lifting her head toward him as if he intended to devour her face. He did kiss her briefly on the lips. Heady, who must have been pretty far gone, made a foolish grinning face and then plunged his head into his date’s lap. The girl didn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed. She settled for looking at everybody at the table and arching her eyebrows and shrugging as if to say, “What do you do with a guy like this?”