Answered Prayers

  “The governor’s wife,” said Ina, nodding as she gazed with melancholy contempt at the homely beast, legal spouse of a former New York governor. “Believe it or not, but one of the most attractive guys who ever filled a pair of trousers used to get a hard-on every time he looked at that bull dyke. Sidney Dillon—” the name, pronounced by Ina, was a caressing hiss.

  To be sure. Sidney Dillon. Conglomateur, adviser to Presidents, an old flame of Kate McCloud’s. I remember once picking up a copy of what was, after the Bible and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Kate’s favorite book, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; from between the pages fell a Polaroid picture of a swimmer standing at water’s edge, a wiry well-constructed man with a hairy chest and a twinkle-grinning tough-Jew face; his bathing trunks were rolled to his knees, one hand rested sexily on a hip, and with the other he was pumping a dark fat mouth-watering dick. On the reverse side a notation, made in Kate’s boyish script, read: Sidney. Lago di Garda. En route to Venice. June, 1962.

  “Dill and I have always told each other everything. He was my lover for two years when I was just out of college and working at Harper’s Bazaar. The only thing he ever specifically asked me never to repeat was this business about the governor’s wife; I’m a bitch to tell it, and maybe I wouldn’t if it wasn’t for all these blissful bubbles risin’ in my noggin—” She lifted her champagne and peered at me through its sunny effervescence. “Gentlemen, the question is: why would an educated, dynamic, very rich and well-hung Jew go bonkers for a cretinous Protestant size forty who wears low-heeled shoes and lavender water? Especially when he’s married to Cleo Dillon, to my mind the most beautiful creature alive, always excepting the Garbo of even ten years ago (incidentally, I saw her last night at the Gunthers’, and I must say the whole setup has taken on a very weathered look, dry and drafty, like an abandoned temple, something lost in the jungles at Angkor Wat; but that’s what happens when you spend most of a life loving only yourself, and that not very much).

  “Dill’s in his sixties now; he could still have any woman he wants, yet for years he yearned after yonder porco. I’m sure he never entirely understood this ultra-perversion, the reason for it; or if he did, he never would admit it, not even to an analyst—that’s a thought! Dill at an analyst! Men like that can never be analyzed because they don’t consider any other man their equal. But as for the governor’s wife, it was simply that for Dill she was the living incorporation of everything denied him, forbidden to him as a Jew, no matter how beguiling and rich he might be: the Racquet Club, Le Jockey, the Links, White’s—all those places he would never sit down to a table of backgammon, all those golf courses where he would never sink a putt—the Everglades and the Seminole, the Maidstone, and St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s et al., the saintly little New England schools his sons would never attend. Whether he confesses to it or not, that’s why he wanted to fuck the governor’s wife, revenge himself on that smug hog-bottom, make her sweat and squeal and call him daddy. He kept his distance, though, and never hinted at any interest in the lady, but waited for the moment when the stars were in their correct constellation. It came unplanned—one night he went to a dinner party at the Cowleses’; Cleo had gone to a wedding in Boston. The governor’s wife was seated next to him at dinner; she, too, had come alone, the governor off campaigning somewhere. Dill joked, he dazzled; she sat there pig-eyed and indifferent, but she didn’t seem surprised when he rubbed his leg against hers, and when he asked if he might see her home, she nodded, not with much enthusiasm but with a decisiveness that made him feel she was ready to accept whatever he proposed.

  “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.’ ”

  The Mesdames Cooper and Matthau, having heard their fill, self-consciously prepared to depart.

  Mrs. Cooper said: “D-darling, there’s the most m-m-marvelous auction at Parke Bernet this afternoon—Gothic tapestries.”

  “What the fuck,” asked Mrs. Matthau, “would I do with a Gothic tapestry?”

  Mrs. Cooper replied: “I thought they might be amusing for picnics at the beach. You know, spread them on the sands.”

  Lady Ina, after extracting from her purse a Bulgari vanity case made of white enamel sprinkled with diamond flakes, an object remindful of snow prisms, was dusting her face with a powder puff. She started with her chin, moved to her nose, and the next thing I knew she was slapping away at the lenses of her dark glasses.

  And I said: “What are you doing, Ina?”

  She said: “Damn! damn!” and pulled off the glasses and mopped them with a napkin. A tear had slid down to dangle like sweat at the tip of a nostril—not a pretty sight; neither were her eyes—red and veined from a heap of sleepless weeping. “I’m on my way to Mexico to get a divorce.”

  One wouldn’t have thought that would make her unhappy; her husband was the stateliest bore in England, an ambitious achievement, considering some of the competition: the Earl of Derby, the Duke of Marlborough, to name but two. Certainly that was Lady Ina’s opinion; still, I could understand why she married him—he was rich, he was technically alive, he was a “good gun” and for that reason reigned in hunting circles, boredom’s Valhalla. Whereas Ina … Ina was fortyish and a multiple divorcée on the rebound from an affair with a Rothschild who had been satisfied with her as a mistress but hadn’t thought her grand enough to wed. So Ina’s friends were relieved when she returned from a shoot in Scotland engaged to Lord Coolbirth; true, the man was humorless, dull, sour as port decanted too long—but, all said and done, a lucrative catch.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ina remarked, amid more tearful trickling. “That if I’m getting a good settlement, I ought to be congratulated. I don’t deny Cool was tough to take. Like living with a suit of armor. But I did … feel safe. For the first time I felt I had a man I couldn’t possibly lose. Who else would want him? But I’ve now learned this, Jonesy, and hark me well: there’s always someone around to pick up an old husband. Always.” A crescendo of hiccups interrupted her: M. Soulé, observing from a concealed distance, pursed his lips. “I was careless. Lazy. But I just couldn’t bear any more of those wet Scottish weekends with the bullets whizzing round, so he started going alone, and after a while I began to notice that everywhere he went Elda Morris was sure to go—whether it was a grouse shoot in the Hebrides or a boar hunt in Yugoslavia. She even tagged along to Spain when Franco gave that huge hunting party last October. But I didn’t make too much of it—Elda’s a great gun, but she’s also a hard-boiled fifty-year-old virgin; I still can’t conceive of Cool wanting to get into those rusty knickers.”

  Her hand weaved toward the champagne glass, but without arriving at its destination, drooped and fell like a drunk suddenly sprawling flat on the street. “Two weeks ago,” she began, her voice slowed, her Montana accent becoming more manifest, “as Cool and I were winging to New York, I realized that he was staring at me with a, hmnnn, serpentine scowl. Ordinarily he looks like an egg. It was only nine in the morning; nevertheless, we were drinking that loathsome airplane champagne, and when we’d finished a bottle and I saw he was still looking at me in this … homicidal … way, I said: ‘What’s bugging you, Cool?’ And he said: ‘Nothing that a divorce from you wouldn’t cure.’ Imagine the wickedness of it! springing something like that on a plane!—when you’re stuck together for hours, and can’t get away, can’t shout or scream. It was doubly nasty of him because he knows I’m terrified of flying—he knew I was full of pills and booze. So now I’m on my way to Mexico.” At last her hand retrieved the glass of Cristal; she sighed, a sound despondent as spiraling autumn leaves. “My kind of woman needs a man. Not for sex. Oh, I like a good screw. But I’ve had my share; I can do without it. But I can’t live without a man. Women like me have no other focus, no other way of scheduling our lives; even if we hate him, even if he’s an iron head with a cotton heart, it’s better than this footloose routine. Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there’s such a thing as too much freedom. And I’m the wrong age now, I can’t face all that again, the long hunt, the sitting up all night at Elmer’s or Annabel’s with some fat greaser swimming in a sea of stingers. All the old gal pals asking you to their little black-tie dinners and not really wanting an extra woman and wondering where they’re going to find a ‘suitable’ extra man for an aging broad like Ina Coolbirth. As though there were any suitable extra men in New York. Or London. Or Butte, Montana, if it comes to that. They’re all queer. Or ought to be. That’s what I meant when I told Princess Margaret it was too bad she didn’t like fags because it meant she would have a very lonely old age. Fags are the only people who are kind to worldly old women; and I adore them, I always have, but I really am not ready to become a full-time fag’s moll; I’d rather go dyke.

  “No, Jonesy, that’s never been part of my repertoire, but I can see the appeal for a woman my age, someone who can’t abide loneliness, who needs comfort and admiration: some dykes can ladle it out good. There’s nothing cozier or safer than a nice little lez-nest. I remember when I saw Anita Hohnsbeen in Santa Fe. How I envied her. But I’ve always envied Anita. She was a senior at Sarah Lawrence when I was a freshman. I think everyone had a crush on Anita. She wasn’t beautiful, even pretty,
but she was so bright and nerveless and clean—her hair, her skin, she always looked like the first morning on earth. If she hadn’t had all that glue, and if that climbing Southern mother of hers had stopped pushing her, I think she would have married an archaeologist and spent a happy lifetime excavating urns in Anatolia. But why disinter Anita’s wretched history?—five husbands and one retarded child, just a waste until she’d had several hundred breakdowns and weighed ninety pounds and her doctor sent her out to Santa Fe. Did you know Santa Fe is the dyke capital of the United States? What San Francisco is to les garçons, Santa Fe is to the Daughters of Bilitis. I suppose it’s because the butchier ones like dragging up in boots and denim. There’s a delicious woman there, Megan O’Meaghan, and Anita met her and, baby, that was it. All she’d ever needed was a good pair of motherly tits to suckle. Now she and Megan live in a rambling adobe in the foothills, and Anita looks … almost as clear-eyed as she did when we were at school together. Oh, it’s a bit corny—the piñon fires, the Indian fetish dolls, Indian rugs, and the two ladies fussing in the kitchen over homemade tacos and the ‘perfect’ Margarita. But say what you will, it’s one of the pleasantest homes I’ve ever been in. Lucky Anita!”

  She lurched upward, a dolphin shattering the surface of the sea, pushed back the table (overturning a champagne glass), seized her purse, said: “Be right back”; and careened toward the mirrored door of the Côte Basque powder room.

  ALTHOUGH THE PRIEST AND THE assassin were still whispering and sipping at their table, the restaurant’s rooms had emptied, M. Soulé had retired. Only the hatcheck girl and a few waiters impatiently flicking napkins remained. Stewards were resetting the tables, sprucing the flowers for the evening visitors. It was an atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion, like a ripened, shedding rose, while all that waited outside was the failing New York afternoon.