The Fourth Hand

by John Irving

  Madox seems to remember something and points to his own throat. "In case you're still wondering--this is called the suprasternal notch." Patrick caught the line the second time. Did that part of a woman's neck have two names?

  And when he'd watched the film again, and after he'd finished reading the novel, Wallingford would declare to Mrs. Clausen how much he loved the part where Katharine says to Almasy, "I want you to ravish me."

  "In the book, you mean," Mrs. Clausen said.

  "In the book and in the movie," Patrick replied.

  "It wasn't in the movie," Doris told him. (He'd just watched it--he felt certain that the line was there!) "You just thought you heard that line because of how much you liked it."

  "You didn't like it?"

  "It's a guy thing to like," she said. "I never believed she would say it to him."

  Had Patrick believed so wholeheartedly in Katharine saying "I want you to ravish me" that, in his easily manipulated memory, he'd simply inserted the line into the film? Or had Doris found the line so unbelievable that she'd blanked it out of the movie? And what did it matter whether the line was or wasn't in the film? The point was that Patrick liked it and Mrs. Clausen did not.

  Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He'd tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared.

  Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news--they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else's love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed.

  But Doris Clausen must have sensed his disheartenment and taken pity on him. She sent him two more photographs from their time together at the cottage on the lake. He'd been hoping that she would send him the one of their bathing suits side-by-side on the clothesline. How happy he was to have that picture! He taped it to the mirror in his office dressing room. (Let Mary Shanahan make some catty remark about that! Just let her try.)

  It was the second photo that shocked him. He'd still been asleep when Mrs. Clausen had taken it, a self-portrait, with the camera held crookedly in her hand. No matter--you could see well enough what was going on. Doris was ripping the wrapper off the second condom with her teeth. She was smiling at the camera, as if Wallingford were the camera and he already knew how she was going to put the condom on his penis.

  Patrick didn't stick that photograph on his office dressing-room mirror; he kept it in his apartment, on his bedside table, next to the telephone, so that he could look at it when Mrs. Clausen called him or when he called her.

  Late one night, after he'd gone to bed but had not yet fallen asleep, the phone rang and Wallingford turned on the light on his night table so that he could look at her picture when he spoke to her. But it wasn't Doris.

  "Hey, Mista One Hand ... Mista No Prick," Angie's brother Vito said. "I hope I'm interruptin' somethin' ..." (Vito called often, always with nothing to say.)

  When Wallingford hung up, he did so with a decided sadness that was not quite nostalgia. In the at-home hours of his life, since he'd come back to New York from Wisconsin, he not only missed Doris Clausen; he missed that wild, gum-chewing night with Angie, too. At these times, he even occasionally missed Mary Shanahan--the old Mary, before she acquired the certitude of a last name and the uncomfortable authority she now held over him.

  Patrick turned out the light. As he drifted into sleep, he tried to think forgivingly of Mary. The past litany of her most positive features returned to him: her flawless skin, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, her perfect little teeth. And, Wallingford assumed--since Mary was still hoping she was pregnant--her commitment to no prescription drugs. She'd been a bitch to him at times, but people are not only what they seem to be. After all, he had dumped her. There were women who would have been more bitter about it than Mary was.

  Speak of the devil! The phone rang and it was Mary Shanahan; she was crying into the phone. She'd got her period. It had come a month and a half late--late enough to have given her hope that she was pregnant--but her period had arrived just the same.

  "I'm sorry, Mary," Wallingford said, and he genuinely was sorry--for her. For himself, he felt unearned jubilation; he'd dodged another bullet.

  "Imagine you, of all people--shooting blanks!" Mary told him, between sobs. "I'll give you another chance, Pat. We've got to try it again, as soon as I'm ovulating."

  "I'm sorry, Mary," he repeated. "I'm not your man. Blanks or no blanks, I've had my chance."

  "What?"

  "You heard me. I'm saying no. We're not having sex again, not for any reason."

  Mary called him a number of colorful names before she hung up. But Mary's disappointment in him did not interfere with Patrick's sleep; on the contrary, he had the best night's sleep since he'd drifted off in Mrs. Clausen's arms and awakened to the feeling of her teeth unrolling a condom on his penis.

  Wallingford was still sound asleep when Mrs. Clausen called. It may have been an hour earlier in Green Bay, but little Otto routinely woke up his mother a couple of hours before Wallingford was awake.

  "Mary isn't pregnant. She just got her period," Patrick announced.

  "She's going to ask you to do it again. That's what I would do," Mrs. Clausen said.

  "She already asked. I already said no."

  "Good," Doris told him.

  "I'm looking at your picture," Wallingford said.

  "I can guess which one," she replied.

  Little Otto was talking baby-talk somewhere near the phone. Wallingford didn't say anything for a moment--just imagining the two of them was enough. Then he asked her, "What are you wearing? Have you got any clothes on?"

  "I've got two tickets to a Monday-night game, if you want to go," was her answer.

  "I want to go."

  "It's Monday Night Football, the Seahawks and the Packers at Lambeau Field." Mrs. Clausen spoke with a reverence that was wasted on Wallingford. "Mike Holmgren's coming home. I wouldn't want to miss it."

  "Me neither!" Patrick replied. He didn't know who Mike Holmgren was. He would have to do a little research.

  "It's November first. Are you sure you're free?"

  "I'll be free!" he promised. Wallingford was trying to sound joyful while, in truth, he was heartbroken that he would have to wait until November to see her. It was only the middle of September! "Maybe you could come to New York before then?" he asked.

  "No. I want to see you at the game," she told him. "I can't explain."

  "You don't have to explain!" Patrick quickly replied.

  "I'm glad you like the picture," was the way she changed the subject.

  "I love it! I love what you did to me."

  "Okay. I'll see you before too long," was the way Mrs. Clausen closed the conversation--she didn't even say good-bye.

  The next morning, at the script meeting, Wallingford tried not to think that Mary Shanahan was behaving like a woman who was having a bad period, only more so, but that was his impression. Mary began the meeting by abusing one of the newsroom women. Her name was Eleanor and, for whatever reason, she'd slept with one of the summer interns; now that the boy had gone back to college, Mary accused Eleanor of robbing the cradle.

  Only Wallingford knew that, before he'd stupidly agreed to try to make Mary pregnant, Mary had propositioned the intern. He was a good-looking boy, and he was smarter than Wallingford--he'd rejected Mary's proposal. Patrick not only liked Eleanor for sleeping with the boy; he had also liked the boy, whose summer internship had not entirely lacked an authentic experience. (Eleanor was one of the oldest of the married women in the newsroom.)

  Only Wallingford knew that Mary didn't really give a damn that Eleanor had slept with the boy--she was just angry because she had her period.<
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  Suddenly the idea of taking a field assignment, any assignment, attracted Patrick. It would at least get him out of the newsroom, and out of New York. He told Mary that she would find him open to a field assignment, next time, provided that she not try to accompany him where he was being sent. (Mary had volunteered to travel with him the next time she was ovulating.)

  There was, in the near future, Wallingford informed Mary, only one day and night when he would not be available for a field assignment or to anchor the evening news. He was attending a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1, 1999--no matter what.

  Someone (probably Mary) leaked it to ABC Sports that Patrick Wallingford would be at the game that night, and ABC immediately asked the lion guy to stop by the booth during the telecast. (Why say no to a two-minute appearance before how many million viewers? Mary would say to Patrick.) Maybe disaster man could even call a play or two. Did Wallingford know, someone from ABC asked, that his hand-eating episode had sold almost as many videos as the annual NFL highlights film?

  Yes, Wallingford knew. He respectfully declined the offer to visit the ABC commentators. As he put it, he was attending the game with "a special friend;" he didn't use Doris's name. This might mean that a TV camera would be on him during the game, but so what? Patrick didn't mind waving once or twice, just to show them what they wanted to see--the no-hand, or what Mrs. Clausen called his fourth hand. Even the sports hacks wanted to see it.

  That may have been why Wallingford got a more enthusiastic response to his letters of inquiry to public-television stations than he received from public radio or the Big Ten journalism schools. All the PBS affiliates were interested in him. In general, Patrick was heartened by the collective response; he would have a job to go to, possibly even an interesting one.

  Naturally he breathed not a word of this to Mary, while he tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer him. A war wouldn't have surprised him; an E. coli bacteria outbreak would have suited Mary's mood.

  Wallingford longed to learn why Mrs. Clausen insisted on waiting to see him until a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay. He phoned her on Saturday night, October 30, although he knew he would see her the coming Monday, but Doris remained noncommittal on the subject of the game's curious importance to her. "I just get anxious when the Packers are favored," was all she said.

  Wallingford went to bed fairly early that Saturday night. Vito called once, around midnight, but Patrick quickly fell back to sleep. When the phone rang on Sunday morning--it was still dark outside--Wallingford assumed it was Vito again; he almost didn't answer. But it was Mary Shanahan, and she was all business.

  "I'll give you a choice," she told him, without bothering to say hello or so much as his name. "You can cover the scene at Kennedy, or we'll get you a plane to Boston and a helicopter will take you to Otis Air Force Base."

  "Where's that?" Wallingford asked.

  "Cape Cod. Do you know what's happened, Pat?"

  "I was asleep, Mary."

  "Well, turn on the fucking news! I'll call you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin."

  "I'm going to Green Bay, no matter what," he told her, but she'd already hung up. Not even the brevity of her call or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick's memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary's bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling--the shadows racing like sperm.

  Wallingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo. It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. There'd been no distress call from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet's rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute--"like a rock," an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

  It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation--the reports would all be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they'd told him the flight was closed, he'd screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

  One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members--not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wallingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape--the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who'd been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they'd reportedly found only a small flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there'd been no explosion.

  Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who'd collapsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She'd fallen in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wallingford that her brother had been on the plane.

  Naturally the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wallingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who'd been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wallingford because Wallingford had only one hand.

  "If there's anything the City of New York can do to help, that's what we're trying to do," Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wallingford and said: "Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster."

  An Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: "We belong to God and to God we return," he kept praying, in Arabic. Wallingford had to ask someone for a translation.

  At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network's plans. "Either you're our anchor tomorrow evening or we've got you on a Coast Guard cutter," Mary Shanahan informed him.

  "I'm in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary," Wallingford said.

  "They're going to call off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay."

  "I'm going to the football game," Wallingford told her. He looked at Wharton, who looked away; then he looked at Sabina, who stared with feigned neutrality back at him. He didn't so much as glance at Mary.

  "Then we'll fire you, Pat," Mary said.

  "Then fire me."

  He didn't even have to think about it. With or without a job at PBS or NPR, he'd made quite a lot of money; besides, they couldn't fire him without making some kind of salary settlement. Patrick didn't really need a job, at least for a couple of years.

  Wallingford looked at Mary for some response, then at Sabina.

  "Okay, if that's how it is, you're fired," Wharton announced.

  Everyone seemed surprised that it was Wharton who said it, including Wharton. Before the script meeting, they'd had another meeting, to which Patrick had not been invited. Probably they'd decided that Sabina would be the one to fire Wallingford. At least Sabina looked at Wharton with an exasperated sense of surprise. Mary Shanahan had got over how surprised she was pretty quickly.

  For once, maybe Wharton had felt something unfamiliar and exciting taking charge inside him. But everything that was eternally insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he'd ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.

  "When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me," was all Wallingford told them.

  "Please clear o
ut your office and your dressing room before you go," Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.

  They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.

  Wallingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen called. He hadn't seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.

  "Are you still coming?" she asked.

  "Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to," Patrick told her. "I just got fired."

  "That's very interesting," Mrs. Clausen commented. "Have a safe flight."

  This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn't surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wallingford had to admire her. She wasn't pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.

  "Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us," Mary began cheerfully. "Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!"

  There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wallingford of that time in his apartment when he'd been unable to get it up and she'd sympathized by saying, "Poor penis." As he'd understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

  It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn't smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he'd never been smart enough.

  And what an evening it was for news! Naturally no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach--the "body-spotters," Mary had once called them. The "death-watchers," which was Wharton's term for them, were warmly dressed.

  That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship--the pile of passengers' belongings retrieved from the Atlantic--must have been Wharton's work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especially the shoes. And of course there were children's toys; dismembered dolls and wet teddy bears were among Wharton's favorite disaster items.