Her face took on a look of quiet horror. She headed quickly to the bathroom.

“It’s all right,” Ben called to her, hoping she wasn’t embarrassed. He certainly wasn’t. If anything, he was relieved.

“No, it’s not all right,” she said. “This is my second-favorite dress and it’s ruined.”

He heard the water running as he sat on the bed, wondering what a man was supposed to do in a situation like this. He was relieved when she called him into the bathroom. He opened the door and found her sitting on the toilet, wrapped in a towel. Her white dress was soaking in the sink, whose water had turned a faint rose color. He’d seen this before, in his mother’s bathroom when he was a teenager. It made him queasy, but he also found it somewhat endearing. Such an old-fashioned way to clean a stain.

“Can you wring it out and put it on the balcony?” she asked. Her tone was not one of embarrassment, but of frustration—a little girl’s voice.

“It won’t dry by the morning,” he said.

“Who said I was staying until the morning?”

Now it was Ben who felt embarrassed. “Well, it definitely won’t dry by the time you want to leave.”

“It’ll dry enough.”

Ben gave in and drained the water from the sink, trying to hide his squeamishness. He wrung out the dress as best he could, noticing there was still a faint pink stain. He then carried it to the balcony, where he set it across the banister. He wondered, suddenly, what it would look like if it fell. He often had these sorts of fantasies—random impulses to know simply: what if? What if he were to suddenly throw his drink in the face of the waitress? What if he were to suddenly ruffle the hair of the young boy in line at Walgreens? Without really meaning to, he nudged the dress and watched as it quietly fell the nine stories down to the sidewalk below, where a drunken couple happened to be passing. The drunken man, astonished, watched as the dress landed on the ground before him. To the amusement of his girlfriend, or wife, or whatever she was, he grabbed the dress and held it up. “It’s wet!” the man cried. The two looked up and waved to Ben, who waved back. Then, with the dress flapping behind them, they ran to the end of the block in a fit of laughter.

Ben kicked the balcony’s metal railing and then went back into the room.

“What happened?” the girl said. “You look like something happened.”

“I messed up,” he said. “The dress fell.”

“What do you mean it fell? Did you drop it?”

“Of course I didn’t drop it. It slipped off the balcony. And then some drunk people found it.”

She looked around helplessly, as if she’d just been told she had ten minutes to live. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Ben thought about the room, about what they had. “We could wrap you in a sheet and stuff you into a cab.”