by John Irving
"You don't need to apologize," Patrick replied. "In general, I agree with you. It's just that I didn't understand the context. I didn't come to Boston because JFK, Jr.'s plane was missing. I didn't even know about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand." He instinctively lifted his stump, which he still spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he'd pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.
She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pulling him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he'd been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman's lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.
"Please listen to me," the woman said. She pulled his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the small bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.
"Okay," Wallingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater. Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?
"I was married twice, the first time when I was very young," the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. "I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actually loved them both."
Christ! Wallingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot's story? "I'm sorry," Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn't want to be interrupted.
"I have two daughters, from my first marriage," the woman went on. "Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid all the time."
It sounded like a true story. (Wallingford couldn't help judging the start of any story this way.)
"But they survived," the woman said, as if most children didn't. "They're both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kills me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don't sleep."
Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swell of her abdomen.
"Now I'm pregnant," the woman told him; his forearm didn't respond. "I'm fifty-one! I'm not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion--my doctor recommended it. But I called the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it."
"Have you talked to your daughters?" Wallingford asked. Her lion's grip on his arm was there again.
"They'd try to convince me to have the baby," the woman replied, with renewed intensity. "They'd offer to raise the child with their children. But it would still be mine. I couldn't stop myself from loving it, I couldn't help but be involved. Yet I simply can't stand the fear. The mortality of children ... it's more than I can bear."
"It's your choice," Patrick reminded her. "Whatever decision you make, I'm sure it will be the right one." The woman didn't look so sure.
Wallingford wondered who the unborn child's father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.
"The father doesn't know," she said. "I don't see him anymore. He was just a colleague."
Patrick had never heard the word "colleague" used so dismissively.
"I don't want my daughters to know I'm pregnant because I don't want them to know I have sex," the woman confessed. "That's also why I can't make up my mind. I don't think you should have an abortion because you're trying to keep the fact that you've had sex a secret. That's not a good enough reason."
"Who's to say what's a 'good enough' reason if it's your reason? It's your choice," Wallingford repeated. "It's not a decision anyone else can or should make for you."
"That's not hugely comforting," the woman told him. "I was all set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don't understand what you triggered."
Wallingford had known from the beginning that all this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman's grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.
"I don't know what got into me when I spoke to you. I've never spoken to anyone like that in my life!" the woman continued. "I shouldn't blame you, personally, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?"
"No." Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman's upper lip.
"I was glad his mother was dead ... that she didn't have to go through this. I was sorry for him, but I was glad for her that she was dead. Isn't that awful?"
"It's perfectly understandable," Wallingford replied. "You're a mother ..." His instinct just to pat her on the knee, underwater, was sincere--that is, heartfelt without being in the least sexual. But because the instinct traveled down his left arm, there was no hand to pat her knee with. Unintentionally, he jerked his stump away from her; he'd felt the invisible crawling insects again.
For a pregnant fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a pregnant grandmother of four, the woman was undaunted by Wallingford's uncontrollable gesture. She calmly reached for his handless arm again. To Patrick's surprise, he willingly put his stump back in her lap. The woman took hold of his forearm without reproach, as if she'd only momentarily misplaced a cherished possession.
"I apologize for attacking you in public," she said sincerely. "It was uncalled for. I'm simply not myself." She gripped his forearm so tightly that an impossible pain was registered in Wallingford's missing left thumb. He flinched. "Oh, God! I've hurt you!" the woman cried, letting go of his arm. "And I haven't even asked you what your doctor said!"
"I'm okay," Patrick said. "It's principally the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress."
"Your love life," the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wallingford didn't want to address it, either. "But why are you still here?" she suddenly asked.
Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she'd held him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn't he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn't he be in Hyannisport or Martha's Vineyard?
Wallingford dreaded telling her that he was stalling his inevitable return to his questionable profession ("questionable" given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he'd intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He'd considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.
"But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast." Patrick added: "It wouldn't have been undeserved."
"Oh, God!" the woman said again. "Tell me what the books are. I'll go get them for you. No one ever recognizes me."
"That's very kind of you, but--"
"Please let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!" She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.
Wallingford sheepishly told h
er the titles.
"Your doctor recommended them? Do you have children?"
"There's a little boy who's like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me," Patrick explained. "But he's too young for me to read him Stuart Little or Charlotte's Web. I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years."
"I read Charlotte's Web to my grandson only a few weeks ago," the woman told him. "I cried all over again--I cry every time."
"I don't remember the book very well, just my mother crying," Wallingford admitted.
"My name is Sarah Williams." There was an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.
Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and still. It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Williams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.
Wallingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatically pulling down the back of the suit.
When she stood, her small belly looked almost flat--it was swollen ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen's pregnancy, Wallingford guessed that Sarah Williams couldn't have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn't told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, even when she wasn't pregnant.
"I'll bring the books to your room." Sarah was wrapping herself up in a towel. "What's your room number?"
He told her, grateful for the occasion to prolong his procrastination, but while he was waiting for her to bring him the children's books, he would still have to decide whether to go back to New York that night or not until Sunday morning.
Maybe Mary wouldn't have found him yet; that would buy Patrick a little more time. He might even discover that he had the willpower to delay turning the TV on, at least until Sarah Williams came to his room. Maybe she would watch the news with him; they seemed to agree that the coverage would be unbearable. It's always better not to watch a bad newscast by yourself--let alone a Super Bowl.
Yet as soon as he was back in his hotel room, he could summon no further resistance. He took off his wet bathing suit but kept the bathrobe on, and--while noticing that the message light on his telephone was flashing--he found the remote control for the TV in the drawer, where he'd hidden it, and turned the television on.
He flipped through the channels until he found the all-news network, where he watched what he could have predicted (John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s Tribeca connection) come to life. There were the plain metal doors of the loft John junior had bought at 20 North Moore. The Kennedys' residence, which was across the street from an old warehouse, had already been turned into a shrine. JFK, Jr.'s neighbors--and probably utter strangers posing as his neighbors--had left candles and flowers; perversely, they'd also left what looked like get-well cards. While Patrick felt genuinely awful that the young couple and Mrs. Kennedy's sister had, in all likelihood, died, he detested those people groveling in their fantasy grief in Tribeca; they were what made the worst of television possible.
But as much as Wallingford hated the telecast, he also understood it. There were only two positions the media could take toward celebrities: worship them or trash them. And since mourning was the highest form of worship, the deaths of celebrities were understandably to be prized; furthermore, their deaths allowed the media to worship and trash them all at once. There was no beating it.
Wallingford turned off the TV and put the remote back in the drawer; he would be on television and a part of the spectacle soon enough. He was relieved when he called to inquire about his message light--only the hotel itself had called, to ask when he was checking out.
He told the hotel he would check out in the morning. Then he stretched out on the bed in the semidark room. (The curtains were still closed from the night before; the maids hadn't touched the room because Patrick had left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.) He lay waiting for Sarah Williams, a fellow traveler, and the wonderful books for children and world-weary adults by E. B. White.
Wallingford was a news anchor in hiding; he was deliberately making himself unavailable at the moment the story of Kennedy's missing plane was unfolding. What would management make of a journalist who wasn't dying to report this story? In fact, Wallingford was shrinking from it--he was a reporter who was putting off doing his job! (No sensible news network would have hesitated to fire him.)
And what else was Patrick Wallingford putting off? Wasn't he also hiding from what Evelyn Arbuthnot had disparagingly called his life?
When would he finally get it? Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love. Upon meeting Mrs. Clausen, Patrick could never have envisioned a future with her; upon falling in love with her, he couldn't imagine the future without her.
It was not sex that Wallingford wanted from Sarah Williams, although he tenderly touched her drooping breasts with his one hand. Sarah didn't want to have sex with Wallingford, either. She might have wanted to mother him, possibly because her daughters lived far away and had children of their own. More likely, Sarah Williams realized that Patrick Wallingford was in need of mothering, and--in addition to feeling guilty for having publicly abused him--she was feeling guilty for how little time she spent with her grandchildren.
There was also the problem that Sarah was pregnant, and that she believed she could not endure again the fear of one of her own children's mortality; nor did she want her grown daughters to know she was having sex.
She told Wallingford that she was an associate professor of English at Smith. She definitely sounded like an English teacher when she read aloud to Patrick in a clear, animated voice, first from Stuart Little and then from Charlotte's Web, "because that is the order in which they were written."
Sarah lay on her left side with her head on Patrick's pillow. The light on the night table was the only one on in the darkened room; although it was midday, they kept all the curtains closed.
Professor Williams read Stuart Little past lunchtime. They weren't hungry. Wallingford lay naked beside her, his chest in constant contact with her back, his thighs touching her buttocks, his right hand holding one, and then the other, of her breasts. Pressed between them, where they were both aware of it, was the stump of Patrick's left forearm. He could feel it against his bare stomach; she could feel it against the base of her spine.
The ending of Stuart Little, Wallingford thought, might be more gratifying to adults than to children--children have higher expectations of endings.
Still it was "a youthful ending," Sarah said, "full of the optimism of young adults."
She sounded like an English teacher, all right. Patrick would have described the ending of Stuart Little as a kind of second beginning. One has the sense that a new adventure is waiting for Stuart as he again sets forth on his travels.
"It's a boy's book," Sarah said.
Mice might enjoy it, too, Patrick guessed.
They were mutually disinclined to have sex; yet if one of them had been determined to make love, they would have. But Wallingford preferred to be read to, like a little boy, and Sarah Williams was feeling more motherly (at the moment) than sexual. Furthermore, how many naked adults--strangers in a darkened hotel room in the middle of the day--were reading E. B. White aloud? Even Wallingford would have admitted to a fondness for the uniqueness of the situation. It was surely more unique than having sex.
"Please don't stop," Wallingford told Ms. Williams, in the same way he might have spoken to someone who was making love to him. "Please keep reading. If you start Charlotte's Web, I'll finish it. I'll read the ending to you."
Sarah had shifted slightly in the bed, so that Patrick's penis now brushed the backs of her thighs; the stump of his left forearm grazed her buttocks. It might have crossed her mind to consider which was which, notwi
thstanding the size factor, but that thought would have led them both into an altogether more ordinary experience.
When the phone call came from Mary, it interrupted that scene in Charlotte's Web when Charlotte (the spider) is preparing Wilbur (the pig) for her imminent death.
"After all, what's a life, anyway?" Charlotte asks. "We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies."
Just then the phone rang. Wallingford increased his grip on one of Sarah's breasts. Sarah indicated her irritation with the call by picking up the receiver and asking sharply, "Who is it?"
"Who is this? Just who are you?" Mary cried into the phone. She spoke loudly enough for Patrick to hear her--he groaned.
"Tell her you're my mother," Wallingford whispered in Sarah's ear. (He was briefly ashamed to remember that the last time he'd used this line, his mother was still alive.)
"I'm Patrick Wallingford's mother, dear," Sarah Williams said into the phone. "Who are you?" The familiar "dear" made Wallingford think of Evelyn Arbuthnot again.
Mary hung up.
Ms. Williams went on reading from the penultimate chapter of Charlotte's Web, which concludes, "No one was with her when she died."
Sobbing, Sarah handed the book to Patrick. He'd promised to read her the last chapter, about Wilbur the pig, "And so Wilbur came home to his beloved manure pile ..." the story of which Wallingford reported without emotion, as if it were the news. (It was better than the news, but that was another story.)
When Patrick finished, they dozed until it was dark outside; only half awake, Wallingford turned off the light on the night table so that it was dark inside the hotel room, too. He lay still. Sarah Williams was holding him, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades. The firm but soft bulge of her stomach fitted the curve at the small of his back; one of her arms encircled his waist. With her hand, she gripped his penis a little more tightly than was comfortable. Even so, he fell asleep.
Probably they would have slept through the night. On the other hand, they might have woken up just before dawn and made intense love in the semidarkness, possibly because they both knew they would never see each other again. But it hardly matters what they would have done, because the phone rang again.
