The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

“Did they send your luggage to the Philippines, too?” Patrick asked Ms. Arbuthnot.

  “Look at me, Mr. Wallingford,” she instructed him. “I’m strictly a carry-on person. Airlines don’t lose my luggage.”

  Perhaps he’d underestimated Evelyn Arbuthnot’s abilities; maybe he should try to find, and even read, one of her books.

  But below them was Tokyo. He could see that there were heliports on the rooftops of many hotels and office buildings, and that other helicopters were hovering to land. It was as if there were a military invasion of the huge, hazy city, which, in the twilight, was tinged by an array of improbable colors, from pink to blood-red, in the fading sunset. To Wallingford, the rooftop helipads looked like bull’s-eyes; he tried to guess which bull’s-eye their helicopter was aiming at.

  “Japan,” Evelyn Arbuthnot said despairingly.

  “You don’t like Japan?” Patrick asked her.

  “I don’t ‘like’ anyplace,” she told Wallingford, “but the man-woman thing is especially onerous here.”

  “Oh,” Patrick replied.

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked him. While he was still shaking his head, she told him: “You shouldn’t have come, disaster man.”

  “Why did you come?” Wallingford asked her.

  She was kind of growing on him with every negative word she spoke. He began to like her face, which was square with a high forehead and a broad jaw—her short gray hair sat on her head like a no-nonsense helmet. Her body was squat and sturdy-looking, and not at all revealed; she wore black jeans and a man’s untucked denim shirt, which looked soft from a lot of laundering. Judging by what Wallingford could see, which was not much, she seemed to be smallbreasted—she didn’t bother to wear a bra. She had on a sensible, if dirty, pair of running shoes, which she rested on a large gym bag that only partially fit beneath her seat; the bag had a shoulder strap and looked heavy.

  Ms. Arbuthnot appeared to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties who traveled with more books than clothes. She wore no makeup and no nail polish, and no rings or other jewelry. She had small fingers and very clean, small hands, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

  “Why did I come here?” she asked, repeating Patrick’s question. “I go where I’m invited, wherever it is, both because I’m not invited to many places and because I have a message. But you don’t have a message, do you, Mr. Wallingford? I can’t imagine what you would ever come to Tokyo for, least of all for a conference on

  ‘The Future of Women.’ Since when is ‘The Future of Women’ news ? Or the lion guy’s kind of news, anyway,” she added.

  The helicopter was landing now. Wallingford, watching the enlarging bull’s-eye, was speechless.

  “Why did I come here?” Patrick asked, repeating Ms. Arbuthnot’s question. He was just trying to buy a little time while he thought of an answer.

  “I’ll tell you why, Mr. Wallingford.” Evelyn Arbuthnot put her small but surprisingly strong hands on his knees and gave him a good squeeze. “You came here because you knew you’d meet a lot of women —isn’t that right?”

  So she was one of those people who disliked journalists, or Patrick Wallingford in particular. Wallingford was sensitive to both dislikes, which were common. He wanted to say that he had come to Tokyo because he was a fucking field reporter and he’d been given a fucking field assignment, but he held his tongue. He had that popular weakness of wanting to win over people who disliked him; as a consequence, he had numerous friends. None of them were close, and very few of them were male. (He’d slept with too many women to make close friendships with men.)

  The helicopter bumped down; a door opened. A fast-moving bellman, who’d been standing on the rooftop, rushed forward with a luggage cart. There was no bag to take, except Evelyn Arbuthnot’s gym bag, which she preferred to carry herself.

  “No bag? No luggage?” the eager bellman asked Wallingford, who was still thinking of how to answer Ms. Arbuthnot.

  “My bag was mistakenly sent to the Philippines,” Patrick informed the bellman. He spoke unnecessarily slowly.

  “Oh, no problem. Back tomorrow!” the bellman said.

  “Ms. Arbuthnot,” Wallingford managed to say, a little stiffly, “I assure you that I don’t have to come to Tokyo, or this conference, to meet women. I can meet women anywhere in the world.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet you can.” Evelyn Arbuthnot seemed less than pleased at the idea.

  “And I’ll bet you have —everywhere, all the time. One after another.”

  Bitch! Patrick decided, and he’d just been beginning to like her. He’d been feeling a lot like an asshole lately, and Ms. Arbuthnot had clearly got the better of him; yet Patrick Wallingford generally thought of himself as a nice guy. Fearing that his lost garment bag would not come back from the Philippines in time for his opening remarks at the “Future of Women” conference, Wallingford sent the clothes he’d worn on the plane to the hotel laundry service, which promised to return them overnight. Patrick hoped so. The problem then was that he had nothing to wear. He’d not anticipated that his Japanese hosts (fellow journalists, all) would keep calling him in his hotel room, inviting him for drinks and dinner.

  He told them he was tired; he said he wasn’t hungry. They were polite about it, but Wallingford could tell he’d disappointed them. No doubt they couldn’t wait to see the no-hand—the other one, as Evelyn Arbuthnot had put it. Wallingford was looking distrustfully at the room-service menu when Ms. Arbuthnot called. “What are you doing for dinner?” she asked. “Or are you just doing room service?”

  “Hasn’t anyone asked you out?” Patrick inquired. “They keep inviting me, but I can’t go because I sent the clothes I was wearing to the laundry service—in case my bag isn’t back from the Philippines tomorrow.”

  “Nobody’s asked me out,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. “But I’m not famous—I’m not even a journalist. Nobody ever asks me out.”

  Wallingford could believe this, but all he said was: “Well, I’d invite you to join me in my room, but I have nothing to wear except a towel.”

  “Call housekeeping,” Evelyn Arbuthnot advised him. “Tell them you want a robe. Men don’t know how to sit in towels.” She gave him her room number and told him to call her back when he had the robe. Meanwhile she’d have a look at the room-service menu.

  But when Wallingford called housekeeping, a woman’s voice said, “Solly, no lobes.” Or so Wallingford misheard. And when he called back Ms. Arbuthnot and reported what housekeeping had told him, she surprised him again.

  “No lobe, no loom service.”

  Patrick thought she was kidding. “Don’t worry—I’ll keep my knees tight together. Or I’ll try wearing two towels.”

  “It’s not you, it’s me—it’s my fault,” Evelyn said. “I’m just disappointed in myself for being attracted to you.” Then she said, “Solly,” and hung up the phone. At least housekeeping, in lieu of the robe, sent him a complimentary toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste.

  There’s not a lot of trouble you can get into in Tokyo when you’re wearing just a towel; yet Wallingford would find a way. Not having much of an appetite, he called something listed in the hotel directory asMASSAGE THERAPY instead of room service. Big mistake.

  “Two women,” said the voice answering for the massage therapist. It was a man’s voice, and to Patrick it sounded like he said, “Two lemons”; yet he thought he’d understood what the man had said.

  “No, no—not ‘two women,’ just one man. I’m a man, alone,” Wallingford explained.

  “Two lemons,” the man on the phone confidently replied.

  “Whatever,” Wallingford answered. “Is it shiatsu?”

  “It’s two lemons or nothing,” the man said more aggressively.

  “Okay, okay,” Patrick conceded. He opened a beer from the mini-bar while he waited in his towel. Before long, two women came to his door. One of them carried the table with the hole cut in one end of it for Wallingford’s f
ace; it resembled an execution device, and the woman who carried it had hands that Dr. Zajac would have said resembled the hands of a famous tight end. The other woman carried some pillows and towels—she had forearms like Popeye’s.

  “Hi,” Wallingford said.

  They looked at him warily, their eyes on his towel.

  “Shiatsu?” Patrick asked them.

  “There are two of us,” one of the women told him.

  “Yes, there certainly are,” Wallingford said, but he didn’t know why. Was it to make the massage go faster? Maybe it was to double the cost of the massage. When his face was in the hole, he stared at the bare feet of the woman who was grinding her elbow into his neck; the other woman was grinding her elbow (or was it her knee?) into his spine, in the area of his lower back. Patrick gathered his courage and asked the women outright: “Why are there two of you?”

  To Wallingford’s surprise, the muscular massage therapists giggled like little girls.

  “So we won’t get raped,” one of the women said.

  “Two lemons, no lape,” Wallingford heard the other woman say. Their thumbs and their elbows, or their knees, were getting to him now—the women were digging pretty deep—but what really offended Wallingford was the concept that someone could be so morally reprehensible as to rape a massage therapist. (Patrick’s experiences with women had all been of a fairly limited kind: the women had wanted him.)

  When the massage therapists left, Wallingford was limp. He could barely manage to walk to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth before falling into bed. He saw that he’d left his unfinished beer on the night table, where it would stink in the morning, but he was too tired to get up. He lay as if rubberized. In the morning, he awoke in the exact same position in which he’d fallen asleep—on his stomach with both arms at his sides, like a soldier, and with the right side of his face pressed into the pillow, looking at his left shoulder.

  Not until Wallingford got up to answer the door—it was just his breakfast—did he realize that he couldn’t move his head. His neck felt locked; he looked permanently to the left. That he could face only left would present him with a problem at the podium, where he soon had to make his opening remarks to the conference. And before that he had to eat his breakfast while facing his left shoulder. Compounding the difficulty of brushing his teeth with his right (and only) hand, the complimentary toothbrush was a trifle short—given the degree to which he faced left.

  At least his luggage was back from its journey to the Philippines, which was a good thing because the laundry service called to apologize for “misplacing” his only other clothes.

  “Not losing, merely misplacing!” shouted a man on the verge of hysteria. “Solly!”

  When Wallingford opened his garment bag, which he managed by looking over his left shoulder, he discovered that the bag and all his clothes smelled strongly of urine. He called the airline to complain.

  “Were you just in the Philippines?” the official for the airline asked.

  “No, but my bag was,” Wallingford replied.

  “Oh, that explains it!” the official cried happily. “Those drug-sniffing dogs that they have there—sometimes they piss on the suitcases!” Naturally this sounded to Patrick like “piff on the sweet cheeses,” but he got the idea. Filipino dogs had urinated on his clothes!

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know,” the airline official told him. “It just happens. The dogs have to go, I guess.”

  Stupefied, Wallingford searched his clothes for a shirt and a pair of pants that were, relatively speaking, not permeated with dog piss. He reluctantly sent the rest of his clothes to the hotel laundry service, admonishing the man on the phone not to lose these clothes—they were his last.

  “Others not losing!” the man shouted. “Merely misplacing!” (This time he didn’t even say “Solly!”)

  Given how he knew he smelled, Patrick was not pleased to share a taxi to the conference with Evelyn Arbuthnot—especially as he was forced, by the crick in his neck, to ride in the taxi with his face turned rudely away from her.

  “I don’t blame you for being angry with me, but isn’t it rather childish not to look at me?” she asked. She kept sniffing all around, as if she suspected there were a dog in the cab.

  Wallingford told her everything: the two-lemon massage (“the two-woman mauling,” he called it); his one-way neck; the dog-peeing episode.

  “I could listen to your stories for hours,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. He didn’t need to see her to know she was being facetious.

  Then came his speech, which he delivered standing sideways at the podium, looking down his left arm at his stump, which was more visible to him than the hard-to-read pages. With his left side to the audience, Patrick’s amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the Japanese press to describe Wallingford as “milking his missing hand.” (In the Western media, his missing hand was often referred to as his “no-hand” or his “nonhand.”) More generous Japanese journalists attending Patrick’s opening remarks—his male hosts, for the most part—called his left-facing oratorical method “provocative” and “incredibly cool.”

  The speech itself was a flop with the highly accomplished women who were the conference’s participants. They had not come to Tokyo to talk about “The Future of Women” and then hear recycled master-of-ceremonies jokes from a man.

  “Was that what you were writing on the plane yesterday? Or trying to write, I should say,” Evelyn Arbuthnot remarked. “Jesus, we should have had room service together. If the subject of your speech had come up, I might have spared you that embarrassment.”

  As before, Wallingford was rendered speechless in her company. The hall in which he’d spoken was made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray. That was roughly how Evelyn Arbuthnot struck Patrick, too—“made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray.”

  The other women shunned him afterward; Wallingford knew that it wasn’t only the dog pee.

  Even his German colleague in the world of television journalism, the beautiful Barbara Frei, wouldn’t speak to him. Most journalists meeting Wallingford for the first time would at least offer him some commiseration about the lion business, but the aloof Ms. Frei made it clear that she didn’t want to meet him. Only the Danish novelist, Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen, seemed to look at Patrick with a flicker of pity in her darting green eyes. She was pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there’d recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her—possibly her lover or her husband.

  Wallingford attempted to approach Ms. Jensen, but Ms. Arbuthnot cut him off. “I saw her first,” Evelyn told Patrick, making a beeline for Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen.

  This damaged Wallingford’s failing self-confidence further. Was that what Ms. Arbuthnot had meant by being disappointed in herself for being attracted to him? Was Evelyn Arbuthnot a lesbian?

  Not all that eager to meet anyone while smelling wretchedly of dog piss, Wallingford returned to the hotel to await his clean clothes. He left his two-man television crew to film whatever was interesting in the rest of the speeches that first day, including a panel discussion on rape.

  When Patrick got back to his hotel room, the hotel management had sent him flowers—in further apology for “misplacing” his clothes—and there were two massage therapists, two different women, waiting for him. The hotel had also sent him a complimentary massage. “Solly about the crick in your neck,” one of the new women told Patrick.

  This sounded something like “click in your knack,” but Wallingford understood what she’d meant. He was doomed to have another two-woman mauling. But these two women managed to cure the crick in his neck, and while they were still engaged in turning him to jelly, the hotel laundry service returned his clean clothes— all his clothes. Perhaps this marked a turn for the better in his Japanese experience, Patrick imagined.

  Given the loss of his left hand in India, even though it had happened five years before—given that Filipino dog
s had pissed on his clothes, and that he’d needed a second massage to correct the damage done by the first; given that he’d not known Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian, and given his dreadfully insensitive speech; given that he knew nothing about Japan, and arguably even less about the future of women, which he never, not even now, thought about—Wallingford should have been wise enough not to imagine that his Japanese experience was about to take a turn for the better.

  Anyone meeting Patrick Wallingford in Japan would have known in an instant that he was precisely the kind of penis-brain who would casually put his hand too close to a lion’s cage. (And if the lion had had an accent, Wallingford would have mocked it.) In retrospect, Patrick himself would rank his time in Japan as an even lower point in his life than the hand-eating episode in India. To be fair, Wallingford wasn’t the only man who missed the panel discussion on rape. The English economist, whose name (Jane Brown) Patrick had thought was boring, turned out to be anything but. She threw a fit at the rape panel and insisted that no men should be present for the discussion, declaring that for women to discuss rape honestly with one another was tantamount to being naked. That much the cameraman and the sound technician for the twenty-four-hour international channel managed to get on film before the English economist, to make her point, began to take off her clothes. Thereupon the cameraman, who was Japanese, respectfully stopped filming.

  It’s debatable that watching Jane Brown take off her clothes would have been all that watchable for most television viewers. To describe Ms. Brown as matronly would be a kindness—she needed only to start taking off her clothes to empty the hall of what few men were there. There were almost no men attending the “Future of Women” conference, only the two guys in Patrick Wallingford’s TV crew, the Japanese journalists who were the conference’s unhappy-looking hosts, and, of course, Patrick himself.

  The hosts would have been offended if they’d heard about the long-distance request of the New York news editor, who wanted no more footage of the conference itself. Instead of more of the women’s conference, what Dick said he now wanted was “something to contrast to it”—something to undermine it, in other words.