第一次接觸《Great Gatsby》，是十多年前，偶然聽了方梓勳老師的課。他細說小說中的這一段，還特別解釋了甚麼是hors-d'oeuvre。當時驚嘆Fitzgerald的文字功力，簡簡單單的幾段文字，就把那浮世的奢華派對活生生的呈現讀者腦海。現時再讀仍然很有趣味。
On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.
By seven o'clock the orchestra has arrived--no thin five-piece affair
but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the
garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and
casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and
enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and
now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of
voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute,
spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups
change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the
same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave
here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out
of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like
Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a
burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda
Gray's understudy from the "Follies." The party has begun.
