The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  Doris was silent on her end of the phone.

  "You didn't like that part?" Patrick asked.

  "I'd just as soon not be reminded of your bite marks, and your other wounds," she told him.

  "Oh."

  Wallingford would keep reading The English Patient. It was merely a matter of reading the novel more carefully; yet he threw caution to the wind when he came upon Almasy saying of Katharine, "She was hungrier to change than I expected."

  This was surely true of Patrick's impression of Mrs. Clausen as a lover--she'd been voracious in ways that had astonished him. He called her immediately, forgetting that it was very late at night in New York; in Green Bay, it was only an hour earlier. Given little Otto's schedule, Doris usually went to bed early.

  She didn't sound like herself when she answered the phone. Patrick was instantly apologetic.

  "I'm sorry. You were asleep."

  "That's okay. What is it?"

  "It's a passage in The English Patient, but I can tell you what it is another time. You can call me in the morning, as early as you want. Please wake me up!" he begged her.

  "Read me the passage."

  "It's just something Almasy says about Katharine--"

  "Go on. Read it."

  He read: "'She was hungrier to change than I expected.'" Out of context, the passage suddenly struck Wallingford as pornographic, but he trusted Mrs. Clausen to remember the context.

  "Yes, I know that part," she said, without emotion. Maybe she was still half asleep.

  "Well ..." Wallingford started to say.

  "I suppose I was hungrier than you expected. Is that it?" Doris asked. (The way she said it, she might as well have asked, "Is that all?")

  "Yes," Patrick answered. He could hear her sigh.

  "Well ..." Mrs. Clausen began. Then she seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. "It really is too late to call," was her only comment.

  Which left Wallingford with nothing to say but "I'm sorry." He would have to keep reading and hoping.

  Meanwhile, Mary Shanahan summoned him to her office--not for the purpose, Patrick soon realized, of telling him that she was or wasn't pregnant. Mary had something else on her mind. While Wallingford's idea of a renegotiated contract of at least three years' duration was not to the all-news network's liking--not even if Wallingford was willing to give up the anchor chair and return to reporting from the field--the twenty-four-hour international channel was interested to know if Wallingford would accept "occasional" field assignments.

  "Do you mean that they want me to begin the process of phasing myself out of the anchor job?" Patrick asked.

  "Were you to accept, we would renegotiate your contract," Mary went on, without answering his question. "Naturally you'd get to keep your present salary." She made the issue of not offering him a raise sound like a positive thing. "I believe we're talking about a two-year contract." She wasn't exactly committing herself to it, and a two-year contract was superior to his present agreement by a scant six months.

  What a piece of work she is! Wallingford was thinking, but what he said was, "If the intention is to replace me as the anchor, why not bring me into the discussion? Why not ask me how I'd like to be replaced? Maybe gradually would be best, but maybe not. I'd at least like to know the long-range plan."

  Mary Shanahan just smiled. Patrick had to marvel at how quickly she'd adjusted to her new and undefined power. Surely she was not authorized to make decisions of this kind on her own, and she probably hadn't yet learned just how many other people were part of the decision-making process, but of course she conveyed none of this to Wallingford. At the same time, she was smart enough not to lie directly; she would never claim that there was no long-range plan, nor would she ever admit that there was one and that not even she knew what it was.

  "I know you've always wanted to do something about Germany, Pat," was what she told him, seemingly out of the blue--but nothing with Mary was out of the blue.

  Wallingford had asked to do a piece about German reunification--nine years after the fact. Among other things, he'd suggested exploring how the language for reunification--now "unification" in most of the official press--had changed. Even The New York Times had subscribed to "unification." Yet Germany, which had been one country, had been divided; then it was made one again. Why wasn't that reunification? Most Americans thought of Germany as reunified, surely.

  What were the politics of that not-so-little change in the language? And what differences of opinion among Germans remained about reunification or unification?

  But the all-news network hadn't been interested. "Who cares about Germans?" Dick had asked. Fred had felt the same way. (In the New York newsroom, they were always saying they were "sick of" something--sick of religion, sick of the arts, sick of children, sick of Germans.)

  Now here was Mary, the new news editor, holding out Germany as the dubious carrot before the reluctant donkey.

  "What about Germany?" Wallingford asked suspiciously. Naturally Mary wouldn't have raised the issue of him accepting "occasional" field assignments if the network hadn't had one such assignment already in mind. What was it?

  "Actually there are two items," Mary answered, making it sound as if two were a plus.

  But she'd called the stories "items," which forewarned Patrick. German reunification was no item--that subject was too big to be called an item. "Items" in the newsroom were trivial stories, freakish amusements of the kind Wallingford knew all too well. Otto senior blowing his brains out in a beer truck after the Super Bowl--that was an item. The lion guy himself was an item. If the network had two "items" for Patrick Wallingford to cover, Wallingford knew they would be sensationally stupid stories, or trivial in the extreme--or both.

  "What are they, Mary?" Patrick asked. He was trying not to lose his temper, because he sensed that these field assignments were not of Mary's choosing; something about her hesitancy told him that she already knew how he would respond to the proposals.

  "You'll probably think they're just silly," she said. "But they are in Germany."

  "What are they, Mary?"

  The channel had already aired a minute and a half of the first item--everyone had seen it. A forty-two-year-old American serviceman stationed in Germany had managed to kill himself while watching the solar eclipse that August. He'd been driving his car near Kaiserslautern when a witness observed him weaving from one side of the road to the other; then his car had accelerated and struck a bridge abutment, or some kind of pier. It was discovered that he'd been wearing his solar viewers--he didn't want to miss the eclipse. The lenses had been sufficiently dark to obscure everything but the partially occluded sun.

  "We already ran that item," was Wallingford's only response.

  "Well, we were thinking of a follow-up. Something more in-depth," Mary told him.

  What "follow-up" could there be to such lunacy? How "in-depth" could such an absurd incident be? Had the man had a family? If so, they would no doubt be upset. But how long an interview could Wallingford possibly sustain with the witness? And for what purpose? To what end?

  "What's the other item?"

  He'd heard about the other story, too--it had been on one of the wire services. A fifty-one-year-old German, a hunter from Bad-somewhere, had been found shot dead beside his parked car in the Black Forest. The hunter's gun was pointed out the window of his car; inside the car was the dead hunter's frantic dog. The police concluded that the dog had shot him. (Unintentionally, of course--the dog had not been charged.)

  Would they want Wallingford to interview the dog?

  They were the kind of not-the-news stories that would end up as jokes on the Internet--they were already jokes. They were also business as usual, the bizarre-as-commonplace lowlights of the twenty-four-hour international news. Even Mary Shanahan was embarrassed to have brought them up.

  "I was thinking of something about Germany, Mary," Patrick said.

  "I know," she sympathized, touching him in that fondl
y felt area of his left forearm.

  "Was there anything else, Mary?" he asked.

  "There was an item in Australia," she said hesitantly. "But I know you've never expressed any interest in going there."

  He knew the item she meant; no doubt there was a plan to follow up this pointless death, too. In this instance, a thirty-three-year-old computer technician had drunk himself to death in a drinking competition at a hotel bar in Sydney. The competition had the regrettable name of Feral Friday, and the deceased had allegedly downed four whiskeys, seventeen shots of tequila, and thirty-four beers--all in an hour and forty minutes. He died with a blood-alcohol level of 0.42.

  "I know the story," was all Wallingford said.

  Mary once more touched his arm. "I'm sorry I don't have better news for you, Pat."

  What further depressed Wallingford was that these silly items weren't even new news. They were insignificant snippets on the theme of the world being ridiculous; their punch lines had already been told.

  The twenty-four-hour international channel had a summer intern program--in lieu of a salary, college kids were promised an "authentic experience." But even for free, couldn't the interns manage to do more than collect these stories of stupid and funny deaths? Somewhere down south, a young soldier had died of injuries sustained in a three-story fall; he had been engaged in a spitting contest at the time. (A true story.) A British farmer's wife had been charged by sheep and driven off a cliff in the north of England. (Also true.)

  The all-news network had long indulged a collegiate sense of humor, which was synonymous with a collegiate sense of death. In short, no context. Life was a joke; death was the final gag. In meeting after meeting, Wallingford could imagine Wharton or Sabina saying: "Let the lion guy do it."

  As for what better news Wallingford wanted to hear from Mary Shanahan, it was simply that she wasn't pregnant. For that news, or its opposite, Wallingford understood that he would have to wait.

  He wasn't good at waiting, which in this case produced some good results. He decided to inquire about other jobs in journalism. People said that the so-called educational network (they meant PBS) was boring, but--especially when it comes to the news--boring isn't the worst thing you can be.

  The PBS affiliate for Green Bay was in Madison, Wisconsin, where the university was. Wallingford wrote to Wisconsin Public Television and told them what he had in mind--he wanted to create a news-analysis show. He proposed examining the lack of context in the news that was reported, especially on television. He said he would demonstrate that often there was more interesting news behind the news; and that the news that was reported was not necessarily the news that should have been reported.

  Wallingford wrote: "It takes time to develop a complex or complicated story; what works best on TV are stories that don't take a lot of time. Disasters are not only sensational--they happen immediately. Especially on television, immediacy works best. I mean 'best' from a marketing point of view, which is not necessarily good for the news."

  He sent his curriculum vitae and a similar proposal for a news-analysis show to the public-television stations in Milwaukee and St. Paul, as well as the two public-television stations in Chicago. But why did he focus on the Midwest, when Mrs. Clausen had said that she would live anywhere with him--if she chose to live with him at all?

  He had taped the photo of her and little Otto to the mirror in his office dressing room. When Mary Shanahan saw it, she looked closely at both the child and his mother, but more closely at Doris, and cattily observed: "Nice mustache."

  It was true that Doris Clausen had the faintest, softest down on her upper lip. Wallingford was indignant that Mary had called this super-soft place a mustache! Because of his own warped sensibilities, and his overfamiliarity with a certain kind of New Yorker, Patrick decided that Doris Clausen should not be moved too far from Wisconsin. There was something about the Midwest in her that Wallingford loved.

  If Mrs. Clausen moved to New York, one of those newsroom women would persuade her to get a wax job on her upper lip! Something that Patrick adored about Doris would be lost. Therefore, Wallingford wrote only to a very few PBS affiliates in the Midwest; he stayed as close to Green Bay as he could.

  While he was at it, he didn't stop with noncommercial television stations. The only radio he ever listened to was public radio. He loved NPR, and there were NPR stations everywhere. There were two in Green Bay and two in Madison; he sent his proposal for a news-analysis show to all four of them, in addition to NPR affiliates in Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul. (There was even an NPR station in Appleton, Wisconsin, Doris Clausen's hometown, but Patrick resisted applying for a job there.)

  As August came and went--it was now nearly gone--Wallingford had another idea. All the Big Ten universities, or most of them, had to have graduate programs in journalism. The Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern, was famous. He sent his proposal for a news-analysis course there, as well as to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

  Wallingford was on a roll about the unreported context of the news. He ranted, but effectively, on how trivializing to the real news the news that was reported had become. It was not only his subject; Patrick Wallingford was his argument's best-known example. Who better than the lion guy to address the sensationalizing of petty sorrows, while the underlying context, which was the terminal illness of the world, remained unrevealed?

  And the best way to lose a job was not to wait to be fired. Wasn't the best way to be offered another job and then quit? Wallingford was overlooking the fact that, if they fired him, they would have to renegotiate the remainder of his contract. Regardless, it surprised Mary Shanahan when Patrick popped his head--just his head--into her office and cheerfully said to her: "Okay. I accept."

  "Accept what, Pat?"

  "Two years, same salary, occasional reporting from the field--per my approval of the field assignment, of course. I accept."

  "You do?"

  "Have a nice day, Mary," Patrick told her.

  Just let them try to find a field assignment he'd accept! Wallingford not only intended to make them fire him; he fully expected to have a new job lined up and waiting for him when they pulled the fucking trigger. (And to think he'd once had no capacity for long-range scheming.)

  They didn't wait long to suggest the next field assignment. You could just see them thinking: How could the lion guy resist this one? They wanted Wallingford to go to Jerusalem. Talk about disaster-man territory! Journalists love Jerusalem--no shortage of the bizarre-as-commonplace there.

  There'd been a double car bombing. At around 5:30 P.M. Israeli time on Sunday, September 5, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing the terrorists who were transporting the bombs to their designated targets. The bombs exploded because the terrorists had set them on daylight-saving time; three weeks before, Israel had prematurely switched to standard time. The terrorists, who must have assembled the bombs in a Palestinian-controlled area, were the victims of the Palestinians refusing to accept what they called "Zionist time." The drivers of the cars carrying the bombs had changed their watches, but not the bombs, to Israeli time.

  While the all-news network found it funny that such self-serious madmen had been detonated by their own dumb mistake, Wallingford did not. The madmen may have deserved to die, but terrorism in Israel was no joke; it trivialized the gravity of the tensions in that country to call this klutzy accident news. More people would die in other car bombings, which wouldn't be funny. And once again the context of the story was missing--that is, why the Israelis had switched from daylight-saving to standard time prematurely.

  The change had been intended to accommodate the period of penitential prayers. The Selihoth (literally, pardons) are prayers for forgiveness; the prayer-poems of repentance are a continuation of the Psalms. (The suffering of Israel in the various lands of the Dispersion is their principal theme.) These prayers have been i
ncorporated into the liturgy to be recited on special occasions, and on the days preceding Rosh Hashanah; they give utterance to the feelings of the worshiper who has repented and now pleads for mercy.

  While in Israel the time of day had been changed to accommodate these prayers of atonement, the enemies of the Jews had nonetheless conspired to kill them. That was the context, which made the double car bombing more than a comedy of errors; it was not a comedy at all. In Jerusalem, this was an almost ordinary vignette, both recalling and foreshadowing a tableau of bombings. But to Mary and the all-news network, it was a tale of terrorists getting their just deserts--nothing more.

  "You must want me to turn this down. Is that it, Mary?" Patrick asked. "And if I turn down enough items like these, then you can fire me with impunity."

  "We thought it was an interesting story. Right up your alley," was all Mary would say.

  He was burning bridges faster than they could build new ones; it was an exciting but unresolved time. When he wasn't actively engaged in trying to lose his job, he was reading The English Patient and dreaming of Doris Clausen.

  Surely she would have been enchanted, as he was, by Almasy's inquiring of Madox about "the name of that hollow at the base of a woman's neck." Almasy asks: "What is it, does it have an official name?" To which Madox mutters, "Pull yourself together." Later, pointing his finger at a spot near his own Adam's apple, Madox tells Almasy that it's called "the vascular sizood."

  Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen with the heartfelt conviction that she would have liked the incident as much as he did, but she had her doubts about it.

  "It was called something different in the movie," Doris told him.

  "It was?"

  He hadn't seen the film in how long? He rented the video and watched it immediately. But when he got to that scene, he couldn't quite catch what that part of a woman's neck was called. Mrs. Clausen had been right, however; it was not called "the vascular sizood."

  Wallingford rewound the video and watched the scene again. Almasy and Madox are saying good-bye. (Madox is going home, to kill himself.) Almasy says, "There is no God." Adding: "But I hope someone looks after you."