The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  “You know who I mean,” the critic snapped. “The men on his father’s side of the family.”

  Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the “culpability” of Lauren Bessette’s bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on “that fatal Friday,” as the feminist critic called it, was another reason that the small plane had crashed. In the script meeting, Wallingford had objected to the word-for-word content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done—it was always confusing. You can’t put everything that’s supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.

  But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to—for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wallingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic’s next agenda and Wallingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it. Instead he said: “It’s not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was ‘testosteronedriven.’ You’re not the first person I’ve heard say that, of course, but I didn’t know him. Neither did you. What is clear is that we’ve talked his death to death. I think that we should summon some dignity—we should just stop. It’s time to move on.”

  Wallingford didn’t wait for the insulted woman’s response. There was over a minute remaining in the telecast, but there was ample montage footage on file. He abruptly brought the interview to a close, as was his habit every evening, by saying, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.” Then came the ubiquitous montage footage; it hardly mattered that the presentation was a little disorderly. Viewers of the twenty-four-hour international channel, already suffering from grief fatigue, were treated to reruns of the mourning marathon: the hand-held camera on the rolling ship (a shot of the bodies being brought on board), a totally gratuitous shot of the St. Thomas More church, and another of a burial at sea, if not the actual burial. The last of the montage, as time expired, was of Jackie as a mom, holding John junior as a baby; her hand cupped the back of the newborn’s neck, her thumb three times the size of his tiny ear. Jackie’s hairdo was out of fashion, but the pearls were timeless and her signature smile was intact. She looks so young, Wallingford thought. (She was young—it was 1961!) Patrick was having his makeup removed when Fred confronted him. Fred was an old guy—he often spoke in dated terms.

  “That was a no-no, Pat,” Fred said. He didn’t wait around for Wallingford’s reply. An anchor had to be free to have the last word. What was on the TelePrompTer was not sacrosanct. Fred must have had another bug up his ass; it hadn’t dawned on Patrick that, among his fellow journalists, everything to do with young Kennedy’s story was sacrosanct. His not wanting to report that story was an indication to management that Wallingford had lost his zest for being a journalist.

  “I kinda liked what you said,” the makeup girl told Patrick. “It sorta needed sayin’.”

  It was the girl he thought had a crush on him—she was back from her vacation. The scent of her chewing gum merged with her perfume; her smell and how close she was to his face reminded Wallingford of the commingled odors and the heat of a high-school dance. He hadn’t felt so horny since the last time he’d been with Doris Clausen.

  Patrick was unprepared for how the makeup girl thrilled him—suddenly, and without reservation, he desired her. But he went home with Mary instead. They went to her place, not even bothering to have dinner first.

  “Well, this is a surprise!” Mary remarked, as she unlocked the first of her two door locks. Her small apartment had a partial view of the East River. Wallingford wasn’t sure, but he thought they were on East Fifty-second Street. He’d been paying attention to Mary, not to her address. He had hoped to see something with her last name on it; it would have made him feel a little better to remember her last name. But she hadn’t paused to open her mailbox, and there were no letters strewn about her apartment—not even on her messy desk.

  Mary moved busily about, closing curtains, dimming lights. There was a paisley pattern to the upholstery in the living room, which was claustrophobic and festooned with Mary’s clothes. It was one of those one-bedroom apartments with no closet space, and Mary evidently liked clothes.

  In the bedroom, which was bursting with more clothes, Wallingford noted the floral pattern of the bedspread that was a tad little-girlish for Mary. Like the rubber-tree plant, which took up too much room in the tiny kitchen, the Lava lamp on top of the squat dresser drawers had to have come from her college days. There were no photographs; their absence signified everything from her divorce that had remained unpacked.

  Mary invited him to use the bathroom first. She called to him through the closed door, so that there could be no doubt in his mind regarding the unflagging seriousness of her intentions. “I have to hand it to you, Pat—you’ve got great timing. I’m ovulating!”

  He made some inarticulate response because he was smearing toothpaste on his teeth with his right index finger; of course it was her toothpaste. He’d opened her medicine cabinet in search of prescription drugs—anything with her last name on it—but there was nothing. How could a recently divorced woman who worked in New York City be drug-free?

  There had always been something a little bionic about Mary; Patrick considered her skin, which was flawless, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, and her perfect little teeth. Even her niceness—if she had truly retained it, if she was still really nice. (Her former niceness, safer to say.) But no prescription drugs? Maybe, like the absent photographs, the drugs were as yet unpacked from her divorce.

  Mary had opened her bed for him, the covers turned down as if by an unseen hotel maid. Later she left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar; the only other lights in the bedroom were the pink undulations of the Lava lamp, which cast moving shadows on the ceiling. Under the circumstances, it was hard for Patrick not to view the protozoan movements of the Lava lamp as indicative of Mary’s striving fertility.

  She suddenly made a point of telling him that she’d thrown out all her medicine—“This was months ago.” Nowadays she took nothing—“Not even for cramps.” The second she conceived, she was going to lay off the booze and cigarettes.

  Wallingford scarcely had time to remind her that he was in love with someone else.

  “I know. It doesn’t matter,” Mary said.

  There was something so resolute about her lovemaking that Wallingford quickly succumbed; yet the experience bore no comparison to the intoxicating way Mrs. Clausen had mounted him. He didn’t love Mary, and she loved only the life she imagined would follow from having his baby. Maybe now they could be friends. Why Wallingford didn’t feel that he was submitting to his old habits is evidence of his moral confusion. To have acted upon his sudden desire for the makeup girl, to have taken her to bed, would have meant reverting to his licentious self. But with Mary he had merely acquiesced. If his baby was what she wanted, why not give her a baby?

  It comforted him to have located the one unbionic part of her—an area of blond down, near the small of her back. He kissed her there before she rolled over and fell asleep. She slept on her back, snoring slightly, her legs elevated by what Wallingford recognized were the paisley seat cushions from the living-room couch. (Like Mrs. Clausen, Mary wasn’t taking any chances with gravity.) Patrick didn’t sleep. He lay listening to the traffic on the FDR Drive while rehearsing what he would say to Doris Clausen. He wanted to marry her, to be a real father to little Otto. Patrick planned to tell Doris that he had performed “for a friend” the same service he’d “performed” for her; however, he would tactfully say, he had not enjoyed the process of making Mary pregnant. And while he would try to be a not-too-absent father to Mary’s child, he would make it very clear to Mary that he wanted to live with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior. Of course he was crazy to think such an arrangement could wor
k.

  How had he imagined that Doris could entertain the possibility? Surely he didn’t believe she would uproot herself and little Otto from Wisconsin, and Wallingford was clearly not a man who could make a long-distance relationship (if any relationship) work.

  Should he tell Mrs. Clausen that he was trying to get fired? He hadn’t rehearsed that part, nor was he trying nearly hard enough. Fred’s feeble threat notwithstanding, Patrick feared that he might have become irreplaceable at the notthe-news network. Oh, for his mild Thursday-evening rebellion, there might be a producer or two to deal with—some spineless CEO spouting off on the subject of how “rules of behavior apply to everyone,” or running on about Wallingford’s “lack of appreciation for teamwork.” But they wouldn’t fire him for his deviation from the TelePrompTer, not as long as his ratings held.

  In fact, as Patrick correctly anticipated—and according to the minute-by-minute ratings—upon his remarks, viewer interest had more than picked up; it had soared. Like the makeup girl, the very thought of whom gave Wallingford an unexpected boner in Mary’s bed, the television audience also believed it was “time to move on.” Wallingford’s notion of himself and his fellow journalists—that “we should summon some dignity,” that “we should just stop”—had immediately struck a public nerve. Quite the contrary to getting himself fired, Patrick Wallingford had made himself more popular than he’d ever been.

  He still had a hard-on at dawn, when a boat out on the East River tooted obscenely. (It was probably towing a garbage scow.) Patrick lay on his back in the pink-tinged bedroom, which was the color of scar tissue. His erection was holding up the bedcovers. How women seemed to sense such things, he’d never understood; he felt Mary kick the couch cushions off the bed. He held on to her hips while she sat on him, rocking away. As they moved, the daylight came striding into the room; the hideous pink began to pale.

  “I’ll show you ‘testosterone-driven,’ ” Mary whispered to him, just before he came. It didn’t matter that her breath was bad—they were friends. It was just sex, as frank and familiar as a handshake. A barrier that had long existed had been lifted. Sex was a burden that had stood between them; now it was no big deal. Mary had nothing to eat in her apartment. She’d never cooked a meal or even eaten breakfast there. She would start looking for a bigger apartment, she declared, now that she was going to have a baby.

  “I know I’m pregnant,” she chirped. “I can feel it.”

  “Well, it’s certainly possible,” was all Patrick said.

  They had a pillow fight and chased each other naked through the small apartment, until Wallingford whacked his shin against the stupid glass-topped coffee table in the paisley confusion of the living room. Then they took a shower together. Patrick burned himself on the hot-water faucet while they were soaping each other up and squirming all around, chest-to-chest.

  They took a long walk to a coffee shop they both liked—it was on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the Sixties or Seventies. Because of the competing noise on the street, they had to shout at each other the whole way. They walked into the coffee shop still shouting, like people who’ve been swimming and don’t know that their ears are full of water.

  “It’s a pity we don’t love each other,” Mary was saying much too loudly. “Then you wouldn’t have to go break your heart in Wisconsin, and I wouldn’t have to have your baby all by myself.”

  Their fellow breakfast-eaters appeared to doubt the wisdom of this, but Wallingford foolishly agreed. He told Mary what he was rehearsing to say to Doris. Mary frowned. She worried that the part about trying to lose his job didn’t sound sincere. (As to what she truly thought about the other part—his fathering a child with her just prior to declaring his eternal love for Doris Clausen—Mary didn’t say.)

  “Look,” she said. “You’ve got what, eighteen months, remaining on your contract? If they fired you now, they’d try to negotiate you down. You’d probably settle for them owing you only a year’s salary. If you’re going to be in Wisconsin, maybe you’ll need more than a year to find a new job—I mean one you like.”

  It was Patrick’s turn to frown. He had exactly eighteen months remaining on his contract, but how had Mary known that?

  “Furthermore,” Mary went on, “they’re going to be reluctant to fire you as long as you’re the anchor. They have to make it look as if whoever’s in the anchor chair is everybody’s first choice.”

  It only now occurred to Wallingford that Mary herself might be interested in what she called the anchor chair. He’d underestimated her before. The New York newsroom women were no dummies; Patrick had sensed some resentment of Mary among them. He’d thought it was because she was the youngest, the prettiest, the smartest, and the presumed nicest—he hadn’t considered that she might also be the most ambitious.

  “I see,” he said, although he didn’t quite. “Go on.”

  “Well, if I were you,” Mary said, “I’d ask for a new contract. Ask for three years—no, make that five. But tell them you don’t want to be the anchor anymore. Tell them you want your pick of field assignments. Say you’ll take only the assignments you like.”

  “You mean demote myself?” Wallingford asked. “This is the way to get fired?”

  “Wait! Let me finish!” Everyone in earshot in the coffee shop was listening.

  “What you do is you start to refuse your assignments. You just become too picky!”

  “ ‘Too picky,’ ” Patrick repeated. “I see.”

  “Suddenly something big happens—I mean major heartache, devastation, terror, and accompanying sorrow. Are you with me, Pat?”

  He was. He was beginning to see where some of the hyperbole on the TelePrompTer came from—not all of it was Fred’s work. Wallingford had never spent time with Mary in the hard midmorning light; even the blueness in her eyes was newly clarifying.

  “Go on, Mary.”

  “Calamity strikes!” she said. In the coffee shop, cups were poised, or resting quietly in their saucers. “It’s big-time breaking news—you know the kind of story. We have to send you. You simply refuse to go.”

  “Then they fire me?” Wallingford asked.

  “Then we have to, Pat.”

  He didn’t let on, but he’d already noticed when “they” had become “we.” He had underestimated her, indeed.

  “You’re going to have one smart little baby, Mary,” was all he said.

  “But do you see ?” she insisted. “Let’s say there’s still four or four and a half years remaining on your new contract. They fire you. They negotiate you down, but down to what ? Down to three years, maybe. They end up paying you three years’ salary and you’re home free! Well… home free in Wisconsin, anyway, if that’s really where you want to be.”

  “It’s not my decision,” he reminded her.

  Mary took his hand. All the while, they’d been consuming a huge breakfast; the fascinated patrons of the coffee shop had been watching them eat and eat throughout their eager shouting.

  “I wish you all the luck in the world with Mrs. Clausen,” Mary told him earnestly.

  “She’d be a fool not to take you.”

  Wallingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested Arlington Road. He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thrillers made her too tense.

  “Eyes Wide Shut?” Wallingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. “Kubrick’s last—”

  “He just died, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All the eulogizing has made me suspicious,” Mary said.

  A smart girl, all right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. “It’s with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

  “It ruins it for me that they’re married,” Mary said.

  The lull in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a posi
tion to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; all of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they’d simply stopped.

  “Let’s not go to a movie, Pat. Let’s go to your place. I’ve never seen it. Let’s just go there and fuck some more.”

  This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. “Okay, Mary,” Wallingford said.

  He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wallingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especially in New York, everyone recognized disaster man. But when Patrick was paying the bill, he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop’s patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: “A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat.”

  It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. “All this for you alone?” she asked.

  “It’s just a one-bedroom, like yours,” Wallingford protested. But while this was strictly true, Patrick’s apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of all, from Mary’s point of view, was that his apartment’s one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby’s crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.

  “The baby could go there,” as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, “and I’d still have a little privacy.”

  “You’d like to trade your apartment for mine—is that it, Mary?”

  “Well… if you’re going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like all you’ll really need to have in New York is a pied-à-terre. My place would be perfect for you!”