"At that time Dill and Cleo were living in Greenwich; they'd sold their town house on Riverview Terrace and had only a two-room pied-à-terre at the Pierre, just a living room and a bedroom. In the car, after they'd left the Cowleses', he suggested they stop by the Pierre for a nightcap, he wanted her opinion of his new Bonnard. She said she would be pleased to give her opinion; and why shouldn't the idiot have one? Wasn't her husband on the board of directors at the Modern? When she'd seen the painting, he offered her a drink, and she said she'd like a brandy; she sip-sipped it, sitting opposite him across a coffee table, nothing at all happening between them, except that suddenly she was very talkative-about the horse sales in Saratoga, and a hole by-hole golf game she'd played with Doc Holden at Lyford Cay; she talked about how much money Joan Payson had won from her at bridge and how the dentist she'd used since she was a little girl had died and now she didn't know what to do with her teeth; oh, she jabbered on until it was almost two, and Dill kept looking at his watch, not only because he'd had a long day and was anxious but because he expected Cleo back on an early plane from Boston: she'd said she would see him at the Pierre before he left for the office. So eventually, while she was rattling on about root canals, he shut her up: 'Excuse me, my dear, but do you want to fuck or not?' There is something to be said for aristocrats, even the stupidest have had some kind of class bred into them; so she shrugged—'Well, yes, I suppose so'—as though a salesgirl had asked if she liked the look of a hat. Merely resigned, as it were, to that old familiar hard-sell Jewish effrontery.
"In the bedroom she asked him not to turn on the lights. She was quite firm about that-and in view of what finally transpired, one can scarcely blame her. They undressed in the dark, and she took forever-unsnapping, untying, unzipping-and said not a word except to remark on the fact that the Dillons obviously slept in the same bed, since there was only the one; and he told her yes, he was affectionate, a mama's boy who couldn't sleep unless he had something soft to cuddle against. The governor's wife was neither a cuddler nor a kisser. Kissing her, according to Dill, was like playing post office with a dead and rotting whale: she really did need a dentist. None of his tricks caught her fancy, she just lay there, inert, like a missionary being outraged by a succession of sweating Swahilis. Dill couldn't come, He felt as though he were sloshing around in some strange puddle, the whole ambience so slippery he couldn't get a proper grip, He thought maybe if he went down on her-but the moment he started to, she hauled him up by his hair: 'Nononono, for God's sake, don't do that!' Dill gave up, he rolled over, he said: 'I don't suppose you'd blow me?' She didn't bother to reply, so he said okay, all right, just jack me off and we'll call it scratch, okay? But she was already up, and she asked him please not to turn on the light, please, and she said no, he need not see her home, stay where he was, go to sleep, and while he lay there listening to her dress he reached down to finger himself, and it felt… it felt… He jumped up and snapped on the light. His whole paraphernalia had felt sticky and strange. As though it were covered with blood. As it was. So was the bed. The sheets bloodied with stains the size of Brazil. The governor's wife had just picked up her purse, had just opened the door, and Dill said: 'What the hell is this? Why did you do it?' Then he knew why, not because she told him, but because of the glance he caught as she closed the door: like Carino, the cruel maître d' at the old Elmer's—leading some blue-suit brown-shoes hunker to a table in Siberia. She had mocked him, punished him for his Jewish presumption.
"Jonesy, you're not eating?"
"It isn't doing much for my appetite. This conversation."
"I warned you it was a vile story. And we haven't come to the best part yet."
"All right. I'm ready."
"No, Jonesy. Not if it's going to make you sick."
"I'll take my chances," I said.
Mrs. Kennedy and her sister had left; the governor's wife was leaving, Soulé beaming and bobbing in her wide-hipped wake. Mrs. Matthau and Mrs. Cooper were still present but silent, their ears perked to our conversation; Mrs. Matthau was kneading a fallen yellow rose petal-her fingers stiffened as Ina resumed: "Poor Dill didn't realize the extent of his difficulties until he'd stripped the sheets off the bed and found there were no clean ones to replace them. Cleo, you see, used the Pierre's linen and kept none of her own at the hotel. It was three o'clock in the morning and he couldn't reasonably call for maid service: what would he say, how could he explain the loss of his sheets at that hour? The particular hell of it was that Cleo would be sailing in from Boston in a matter of hours, and regardless of how much Dill screwed around, he'd always been scrupulous about never giving Cleo a clue; he really loved her, and, my God, what could he say when she saw the bed? He took a cold shower and tried to think of some buddy he could call and ask to hustle over with a change of sheets. There was me, of course; he trusted me, but I was in London. And there was his old valet, Wardell. Wardell was queer for Dill and had been a slave for twenty years just for the privilege of soaping him whenever Dill took his bath; but Wardell was old and arthritic, Dill couldn't call him in Greenwich and ask him to drive all the way in to town. Then it struck him that he had a hundred chums but really no friends, not the kind you ring at three in the morning. In his own company he employed more than six thousand people, but there was not one who had ever called him anything except Mr. Dillon. I mean, the guy was feeling sorry for himself. So he poured a truly stiff Scotch and started searching in the kitchen for a box of laundry soap, but he couldn't find any, and in the end had to use a bar of Guerlain's Fleurs des Alpes. To wash the sheets. He soaked them in the tub in scalding water. Scrubbed and scrubbed. Rinsed and scrubadubdubbed. There he was, the powerful Mr. Dillon, down on his knees and flogging away like a Spanish peasant at the side of a stream.
"It was five o'clock, it was six, the sweat poured off him, he felt as if he were trapped in a sauna; he said the next day when he weighed himself he'd lost eleven pounds. Full daylight was upon him before the sheets looked credibly white. But wet. He wondered if hanging them out the window might help-or merely attract the police? At last he thought of drying them in the kitchen oven. It was only one of those little hotel stoves, but he stuffed them in and set them to bake at four hundred fifty degrees. And they baked, brother: smoked and steamed-the bastard burned his hand pulling them out. Now it was eight o'clock and there was no time left. So he decided there was nothing to do but make up the bed with the steamy soggy sheets, climb between them and say his prayers. He really was praying when he started to snore. When he woke up it was noon, and there was a note on the bureau from Cleo: 'Darling, you were sleeping so soundly and sweetly that I just tiptoed in and changed and have gone on to Greenwich. Hurry home."'