The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  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 theDO 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, notwithstanding 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. This time Wallingford answered it. He knew who it was; even asleep, he’d been expecting the call. He’d told Mary the story of how and when his mother had died. Patrick was surprised how long it had taken Mary to remember it.

  “She’s dead. Your mother’s dead ! You told me yourself! She died when you were in college!”

  “That’s right, Mary.”

  “You’re in love with someone!” Mary was wailing. Naturally Sarah could hear her.

  “That’s right,” Wallingford answered. Patrick saw no reason to explain to Mary that it wasn’t Sarah Williams he was in love with. Mary had hit on him for too long.

  “It’s that same young woman, isn’t it?” Sarah asked. The sound of Sarah’s voice, whether or not Mary actually heard what she said, was enough to set Mary off again.

  “She sounds old enough to be your mother!” Mary shrieked.

  “Mary, please—”

  “That dick Fred is looking for you, Pat. Everyone’s looking for you! You’re not supposed to go off for a weekend without leaving a number! You’re not supposed to be unreachable ! Are you trying to get fired or what?”

  That was the first time Wallingford thought about trying to get fired; in the dark hotel room, the idea glowed as brightly as the digital alarm clock on the night table.

  “You do know what’s happened, don’t you?” Mary asked. “Or have you been fucking so much that you’ve somehow managed to miss the news?”

  “I have
not been fucking.” Patrick knew it was a provocative thing to say. After all, Mary was a journalist. That Wallingford had been fucking a woman in a hotel room all weekend was a fairly obvious conclusion to come to; like most journalists, Mary had learned to draw her own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.

  “You don’t expect me to believe you, do you?” she asked.

  “I’m beginning not to care if you believe me, Mary.”

  “That dick Fred—”

  “Please tell him I’ll be back tomorrow, Mary.”

  “You are trying to get fired, aren’t you?” Mary said. Once again, she hung up first. For the second time, Wallingford considered the idea of trying to get fired—he didn’t know why it seemed to be such a glow-in-the-dark idea.

  “You didn’t tell me you were married or something,” Sarah Williams said. He could tell she was not in the bed; he could hear her, but only dimly see her, getting dressed in the dark room.

  “I’m not married or anything,” Patrick said.

  “She’s just a particularly possessive girlfriend, I suppose.”

  “She’s not a girlfriend. We’ve never had sex. We’re not involved in that way,”

  Wallingford declared.

  “Don’t expect me to believe that,” Sarah said. (Journalists aren’t the only people who draw their own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.)

  “I’ve really enjoyed being with you,” Patrick told her, trying to change the subject; he was also being sincere. But he could hear her sigh; even in the dark, he could tell she was doubting him.

  “If I decide to have the abortion, maybe you’ll be kind enough to go with me,”

  Sarah Williams ventured. “It would mean coming back here a week from today.”

  Perhaps she meant to give him more time to think about it, but Wallingford was thinking of the likelihood of his being recognized—LION GUY ESCORTS

  UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN TO ABORTION MILL, or a headline to that effect.

  “I just hate the idea of doing it alone, but I guess it doesn’t sound like a fun date,”

  Sarah continued.

  “Of course I’ll go with you,” he told her, but she’d noticed his hesitation. “If you want me to.” He immediately hated how this sounded. Of course she wanted him to! She’d asked him, hadn’t she? “Yes, definitely, I’ll go with you,” Patrick said, but he was only making it worse.

  “No, that’s all right. You don’t even know me,” Sarah said.

  “I want to go with you,” Patrick lied, but she was over it now.

  “You didn’t tell me you were in love with someone,” she accused him.

  “It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t love me.” Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams wouldn’t believe that, either.

  She had finished dressing. He thought she was groping for the door. He turned on the light on the night table; it momentarily blinded him, but he was nonetheless aware of Sarah turning her face away from the light. She left the room without looking at him. He turned off the light and lay naked in bed, with the idea of trying to get himself fired glowing in the dark.

  Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams had been upset about more than Mary’s phone call. Sometimes it’s easiest to confide the most intimate things to a stranger—Patrick himself had done it. And hadn’t Sarah mothered him for a whole day? The least he could do was go with her to the abortion. So what if someone recognized him? Abortion was legal, and he believed it should be legal. He regretted his earlier hesitation.

  Therefore, when Wallingford called the hotel operator to ask for a wake-up call, he also asked to be connected to Sarah’s room—he didn’t know the number. He wanted to propose a late bite to eat. Surely some place in Harvard Square would still be serving, especially on a Saturday night. Wallingford wanted to convince Sarah to let him go with her to the abortion; he felt it would be better to try to persuade her over dinner.

  But the operator informed him that no one named Sarah Williams was registered in the hotel.

  “She must have just checked out,” Patrick said.

  There was the indistinct sound of fingers on a computer keyboard, searching. In the new century, Wallingford imagined, it was probably the last sound we would hear before our deaths.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the hotel operator told him. “There never was a Sarah Williams staying here.”

  Wallingford wasn’t that surprised. Later he would call the English Department at Smith—he would be equally unsurprised to discover that no one named Sarah Williams taught there. She may have sounded like an associate professor of English when she was discussing Stuart Little, and she may have taught at Smith, but she was not a Sarah Williams.

  Whoever she was, the thought that Patrick had been cheating on another woman—or that there was another woman in his life, one who felt wronged—had clearly upset her. Possibly she was cheating on someone; probably she had been cheated on. The abortion business had sounded true, as had her fear of her children and grandchildren dying. The only hesitation he’d heard in her voice had been when she’d told him her name.

  Wallingford was upset that he had become a man to whom any decent woman would want to remain anonymous. He’d never thought of himself that way before. When he’d had two hands, Patrick had experimented with anonymity—in particular, when he was with the kind of woman to whom any man would prefer to remain anonymous. But after the lion episode, he could no more have got away with not being Patrick Wallingford than he could have passed for Paul O’Neill—at least not to anyone with his or her faculties intact.

  Rather than be left alone with these thoughts, Patrick made the mistake of turning on the television. A political commentator whose specialty had always struck Wallingford as intellectually inflated hindsight was speculating on a sizable “what if…” in the tragically abbreviated life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The selfseriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion, which was that JFK, Jr., would have been “better off” in every way if he’d gone against his mother’s advice and become a movie star. (Would young Kennedy not have died in a plane crash if he’d been an actor?) It was a fact that John junior’s mom hadn’t wanted him to be an actor, but the presumptuousness of the political commentator was enormous. The most egregious of his irresponsible speculations was that John junior’s smoothest, most unalterable course to the presidency lay through Los Angeles! To Patrick, the fatuousness of such Hollywood-level theorizing was twofold: first, to declare that young Kennedy should have followed in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps; second, to claim that JFK, Jr., had wanted to be president.

  Preferring his other, more personal demons, Patrick turned off the TV. There in the dark, the new idea of trying to get fired greeted him as familiarly as an old friend. Yet that other new notion—that he was a man whose company a woman would accept only on the condition of anonymity—gave Patrick the shivers. It also precipitated a third new idea: What if he stopped resisting Mary and simply slept with her? (At least Mary wouldn’t insist on protecting her anonymity.) Thus there were three new ideas glowing in the dark, distracting Patrick Wallingford from the loneliness of a fifty-one-year-old woman who didn’t want to have an abortion but who was terrified of having a child. Of course, it was none of his business if that woman had an abortion or not; it was nobody’s business but hers.

  And what if she wasn’t even pregnant? She may simply have had a small potbelly. Maybe she liked to spend her weekends in a hotel with a stranger, just acting. Patrick knew all about acting; he was always acting.

  “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto,” Wallingford whispered in the dark hotel room. It was what he said when he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t acting.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Trying to Get Fired

  THERE’D BEEN NEARLY a week of rapturous mourning when Wallingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the cra
sh of Kennedy’s single-engine plane, would be Patrick’s last before his trip up north, although he couldn’t get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.

  The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wallingford’s interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentionally ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she’d stated that all the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had killed two women in his airplane.

  Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them. Wallingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil. The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy’s “fatal decision,” as if his life and death had been a novel. “They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot.”

  These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept calling the deceased “John-John.”

  “He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome,” she called it. “John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They all are.”

  “‘They…’ ” was all Wallingford managed to say.