The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  This was pure Dick, Wallingford thought. When the news editor asked for “related material,” what he really meant was something so un related to the women’s conference that it could make a mockery of the very idea of the future of women.

  “I hear there’s a child-porn industry in Tokyo,” Dick told Patrick. “Child prostitutes, too. All this is relatively new, I’m told. It’s just emerging—dare I say budding ?”

  “What about it?” Wallingford asked. He knew this was pure Dick, too. The news editor had never been interested in “The Future of Women.” The Japanese hosts had wanted Wallingford—the lion-guy video had record sales in Japan—and Dick had taken advantage of the invitation to have disaster man dig up some dirt in Tokyo.

  “Of course you’ll have to be careful how you do it,” Dick went on, warning Patrick that there would be “aspersions of racism” cast against the network if they did anything that appeared to be “slanted against the Japanese.”

  “You get it?” Dick had asked Wallingford over the phone. “Slanted against the Japanese…”

  Wallingford sighed. Then he suggested, as always, that there was a deeper, more complex story. The “Future of Women” conference was conducted over a four-day period, but only in the daylight hours. Nothing was scheduled at night, not even dinner parties. Patrick wondered why.

  A young Japanese woman who wanted Wallingford to autograph her Mickey Mouse T-shirt seemed surprised that he hadn’t guessed the reason. There were no conference-related activities in the evening because women were “supposed to”

  spend the nighttime at home with their families. If they’d tried to have a women’s conference in Japan at night, not many women could have come. Wasn’t this interesting? Wallingford asked Dick, but the New York news editor told him to forget it. Although the young Japanese woman looked fantastic oncamera, Mickey Mouse T-shirts weren’t allowed on the all-news network, which had once been involved in a dispute with the Walt Disney Company. In the end, Wallingford was instructed to stick to individual interviews with the women who were the conference’s participants. Patrick could tell that Dick was pulling out on the piece.

  “Just see if one or two of these broads will open up to you,” was how Dick left it. Naturally Wallingford began by trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Barbara Frei, the German television journalist. He approached her in the hotel bar. She seemed to be alone; the idea that she might be waiting for someone never crossed Patrick’s mind. The ZDF anchor was every bit as beautiful as she appeared on the small screen, but she politely declined to be interviewed.

  “I know your network, of course,” Ms. Frei began tactfully. “I don’t think it likely that they will give serious coverage to this conference. Do you?” Case closed.

  “I’m sorry about your hand, Mr. Wallingford,” Barbara Frei said. “That was truly awful—I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Patrick replied. The woman was both sincere and classy. Wallingford’s twenty-four-hour international channel was not Ms. Frei’s, or anyone else’s, idea of serious TV journalism; compared to Barbara Frei, Patrick Wallingford wasn’t serious, either, and both Ms. Frei and Mr. Wallingford knew it.

  The hotel bar was full of businessmen, as hotel bars tend to be. “Look—it’s the lion guy!” Wallingford heard one of them say.

  “Disaster man!” another businessman called out.

  “Won’t you have a drink?” Barbara Frei asked Patrick pityingly.

  “Well… all right.” An immense and unfamiliar depression was weighing on him, and as soon as his beer arrived, there also arrived at the bar the man whom Ms. Frei had been waiting for—her husband.

  Wallingford knew him. He was Peter Frei, a well-respected journalist at ZDF, although Peter Frei did cultural programs and his wife did what they called hard news.

  “Peter’s a little tired,” Ms. Frei said, affectionately rubbing her husband’s shoulders and the back of his neck. “He’s been training for a trip to Mount Everest.”

  “For a piece you’re doing, I suppose,” Patrick said enviously.

  “Yes, but I have to climb a bit of the mountain to do it properly.”

  “You’re going to climb Mount Everest?” Wallingford asked Peter Frei. He was an extremely fit-looking man—they were a very attractive couple.

  “Oh, everyone climbs a bit of Everest now,” Mr. Frei replied modestly. “That’s what’s wrong with it—the place has been overrun by amateurs like me!” His beautiful wife laughed fondly and went on rubbing her husband’s neck and shoulders. Wallingford, who was barely able to drink his beer, found them as likable a couple as any he’d known.

  When they said good-bye, Barbara Frei touched Patrick’s left forearm in the usual place. “You might try interviewing that woman from Ghana,” she suggested helpfully. “She’s awfully nice and smart, and she’s got more to say than I have. I mean she’s more of a person with a cause than I am.” (This meant, Wallingford knew, that the woman from Ghana would talk to anyone.)

  “That’s a good idea—thank you.”

  “Sorry about the hand,” Peter Frei told Patrick. “That’s a terrible thing. I think half the world remembers where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.”

  “Yes,” Wallingford answered. He’d had only one beer, but he would scarcely remember leaving the hotel bar; he went off full of self-disgust, looking for the African woman as if she were a lifeboat and he a drowning man. He was. It was an unkind irony that the starvation expert from Ghana was extremely fat. Wallingford worried that Dick would exploit her obesity in an unpredictable way. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was dressed in something resembling a tent made of samples from patchwork quilts. But the woman had a degree from Oxford, and another from Yale; she’d won a Nobel Prize in something to do with world nutrition, which she said was “merely a matter of intelligent Third World crises anticipation… any fool with half a brain and a whole conscience could do what I do.”

  But as much as Wallingford admired the big woman from Ghana, they didn’t like her in New York. “Too fat,” Dick told Patrick. “Black people will think we’re making fun of her.”

  “But we didn’t make her fat!” Patrick protested. “The point is, she’s smart —she’s actually got something to say !”

  “You can find someone else with something to say, can’t you? Jesus Christ, find someone smart who’s normal -looking!” But as Wallingford would discover at the

  “Future of Women” conference in Tokyo, this was exceedingly hard to do—taking into account that, by “normal-looking,” Dick no doubt meant not fat, not black, and not Japanese.

  Patrick took one look at the Chinese geneticist, who had an elevated, hairy mole in the middle of her forehead; he wouldn’t bother trying to interview her. He could already hear what that dick Dick in New York would say about her. “Talk about making fun of people—Jesus Christ! We might as well bomb a Chinese embassy in some asshole country and try calling it an accident or something!”

  So Patrick talked to the Korean doctor of infectious diseases, who he thought was kind of cute. But she turned out to be camera-shy, which took the form of her staring obsessively at his stump. Nor could she name a single infectious disease without stuttering; the mere mention of a disease seemed to grip her in terror. As for the Russian film director—“No one has seen her movies,” the news editor in New York told Wallingford—Ludmilla (we’ll leave it at that) was as ugly as a toad. Also, as Patrick would discover at two o’clock one morning when she came to his hotel room, she wanted to defect. She didn’t mean to Japan. She wanted Wallingford to smuggle her into New York. In what ? Wallingford would wonder. In his garment bag, now permanently reeking of Filipino dog piss? Surely a Russian defector was news, even in New York. So what if no one had seen her movies? “She wants to go to Sundance,” Patrick told Dick. “For Christ’s sake, Dick, she wants to defect ! That’s a story!” (No sensible news network would turn down a story on a Russian defector.)

 
But Dick was unimpressed. “We just did five minutes on a Cuban defector, Pat.”

  “You mean that no-good baseball player?” Wallingford asked.

  “He’s a halfway-decent shortstop, and the guy can hit,” Dick said, and that was that.

  Then came the rejection from the green-eyed Danish novelist; she turned out to be a touchy writer who refused to be interviewed by someone who hadn’t read her books. Who did she think she was, anyway? Wallingford didn’t have the time to read her books! At least he’d guessed right about how to pronounce her name—it was “bode eel, ” accent on the eel.

  Those too-numerous Japanese women in the arts were eager to talk to him, and they were fond, when they talked to him, of sympathetically touching his left forearm a little above where he’d lost his hand. But the news editor in New York was “sick of the arts.” Dick further claimed that the Japanese women would give the television audience the false impression that the only participants in this conference were Japanese.

  “Since when do we worry that we’re giving our viewers a false impression?”

  Patrick plucked up the courage to ask.

  “Listen, Pat,” Dick said, “that runt poet with the facial tattoo would even put off other poets.”

  Wallingford had already been in Japan too long. He was so used to the people’s mispronunciation of his mother tongue that he now misheard his news editor, too. He simply didn’t hear “runt poet”; he heard “cunt poet” instead.

  “No, you listen, Dick,” Wallingford retorted, with an uncharacteristic display of something less than his usually sweet-dispositioned self. “I’m not a woman, but even I take offense at that word.”

  “What word?” Dick asked. “Tattoo?”

  “You know what word!” Patrick shouted. “Cunt!”

  “I said ‘runt,’ not ‘cunt,’ Pat,” the news editor informed Wallingford. “I guess you just hear what you think about all the time.”

  Patrick had no recourse. He had to interview Jane Brown, the English economist who’d threatened to undress, or he had to talk to Evelyn Arbuthnot, the presumed lesbian who loathed him and was ashamed that, if only for a moment, she’d been attracted to him.

  The English economist was a dingbat of a distinctly English kind. It didn’t matter—Americans are suckers for an English accent. Jane Brown screeched like an unattended tea kettle, not about world economy but on the subject of threatening to take off her clothes in front of men. “I know from experience that the men will never allow me to finish undressing,” Ms. Brown told Patrick Wallingford on-camera, in that overenunciated manner of a character actress of a certain age and background on the English stage. “I never even get down to my undergarments before the men have fled the room—it happens every time! Men are very reliable. By that I mean only that they can be counted on to flee from me!”

  Dick in New York loved it. He said that the Jane Brown interview “contrasted nicely” with the earlier footage of her throwing a fit about rape on the first day of the conference. The twenty-four-hour international channel had its story. The

  “Future of Women” conference in Tokyo had been covered—better to say, it had been covered in the all-news network’s way, which was to marginalize more than Patrick Wallingford; it was also to marginalize the news. A women’s conference in Japan had been reduced to a story about a matronly and histrionic Englishwoman threatening to take off her clothes at a panel discussion on rape—in Tokyo, of all places.

  “Well, wasn’t that cute?” Evelyn Arbuthnot would say, when she saw the minuteand-a-half story on the TV in her hotel room. She was still in Tokyo—it was the closing day of the conference. Wallingford’s cheap-shot channel hadn’t even waited for the conference to be over.

  Patrick was still in bed when Ms. Arbuthnot called him. “Solly,” was all Wallingford could manage to say. “I’m not the news editor; I’m just a field reporter.”

  “You were just following orders—is that what you mean?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked him.

  Evelyn Arbuthnot was much too tough for Patrick Wallingford, especially because Wallingford had not recovered from a night on the town with his Japanese hosts. He thought even his soul must smell like sake. Nor could Patrick remember which of his favorite Japanese newspapermen had given him tickets for two on the highspeed train to and from Kyoto—“the bullet train,” either Yoshi or Fumi had called it. A visit to a traditional inn in Kyoto could be very restorative, they’d told him; he remembered that. “But better go before the weekend.” Regrettably, Wallingford would forget that part of their advice.

  Ah, Kyoto—city of temples, city of prayer. Someplace more meditative than Tokyo would do Wallingford a world of good. It was high time he did a little meditating, he explained to Evelyn Arbuthnot, who continued to berate him about the fiasco of the coverage given to the women’s conference by his “lousy not -thenews network.”

  “I know, I know…” Patrick kept repeating. (What else could he say?)

  “And now you’re going to Kyoto? To do what? Pray? Just what will you pray for?” she asked him. “The most publicly humiliating demise imaginable of your disaster-and-comedy-news network—that’s what I pray for!”

  “I’m still hopeful that something nice might happen to me in this country,”

  Wallingford replied with as much dignity as he could summon, which wasn’t much.

  There was a thoughtful pause on Evelyn Arbuthnot’s end of the phone. Patrick guessed that she was giving new consideration to an old idea.

  “You want something nice to happen to you in Japan?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked.

  “Well… you can take me to Kyoto with you. I’ll show you something nice. ”

  He was Patrick Wallingford, after all. He acquiesced. He did what women wanted; he generally did what he was told. But he’d thought Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian! Patrick was confused.

  “Uh… I thought… I mean from your remark to me about that Danish novelist, I took it to mean that… well, that you were gay, Ms. Arbuthnot.”

  “That’s a trick I play all the time,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d fallen for it.”

  “Oh,” Wallingford said.

  “I am not gay, but I’m old enough to be your mother. If you want to think about that and get back to me, I won’t be offended.”

  “Surely you couldn’t be my mother—”

  “Biologically speaking, I surely could be,” Ms. Arbuthnot said. “I could have had you when I was sixteen—when I looked eighteen, by the way. How’s your math?”

  “You’re fifty-something?” he asked her.

  “That’s close enough,” she said. “And I can’t leave for Kyoto today. I won’t skip the last day of this pathetic but well-intentioned conference. If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll go to Kyoto with you for the weekend.”

  “Okay,” Wallingford agreed. He didn’t tell her that he already had two tickets on

  “the bullet train.” He could ask the concierge at the hotel to change his reservations for the train and inn.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Evelyn Arbuthnot asked. She didn’t sound too sure herself.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I like you,” Wallingford told Ms. Arbuthnot. “Even if I am an asshole.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself for being an asshole,” she told him. It was the closest her voice had come to a sexual purr. In terms of speed—most of all, in regard to how quickly she could change her mind—Evelyn was a kind of bullet train herself. Patrick began to have second thoughts about going anywhere with her.

  It was as if she’d read his mind. “I won’t be too demanding,” she suddenly said.

  “Besides, you should have some experience with a woman my age. One day, when you’re in your seventies, women my age are going to be as young as you can get.”

  Over the course of the rest of that day and night, while Wallingford waited to take the bullet train to Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot, his hangover gradually subsided; when he went to bed, he could taste the sake only w
hen he yawned. The next day dawned bright and fair in the land of the rising sun—a false promise, as it turned out. Wallingford rode on a two-hundred-mile-an-hour train with a woman old enough to be his mother, and with about five hundred screaming schoolchildren, all girls, because—as far as Patrick and Evelyn could understand the tortuous English of the train’s conductor—it was something called National Prayer Weekend for Girls and every schoolgirl in Japan was going to Kyoto, or so it seemed.

  It rained the entire weekend. Kyoto was overrun with Japanese schoolgirls, praying. Well, they must have prayed some of the time that they overran the city, although Patrick and Evelyn never saw them actually do so. When they weren’t praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs—all for no apparent reason.

  “Wretched hormones,” Evelyn said, as if she knew.

  The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths—so many baths that the traditional inn where Wallingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.

  “Too many not-praying girls!” the apologetic innkeeper told Patrick and Evelyn, not that they really cared about the lack of hot water; a tepid bath or two would do. They were fucking nonstop, all weekend long, with only occasional visits to the temples for which Kyoto (unlike Patrick Wallingford) was justly famous. It turned out that Evelyn Arbuthnot liked to have a lot of sex. In forty-eight hours .

  . . no, never mind. It would be boorish to count the number of times they did it. Suffice it to say that Wallingford was completely worn out at the end of the weekend, and by the time he and Evelyn were riding the two-hundred-mile-anhour train back to Tokyo, Patrick’s cock was so sore that he felt like a teenager who’d wanked himself raw.

  He loved what he’d seen of the wet temples. Standing inside the huge wooden shrines with the rain beating down was like being held captive in a primitive, drumlike wooden instrument with the prevailing, high-pitched yammer of rampant schoolgirls surrounding you.