The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  They were naked, but Wallingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he’d lost the heart to “fuck some more,” as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown—there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.

  “You’ll get used to the noise,” Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wallingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her small, soft belly, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months’ time.

  “You’ve got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat,” she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.

  He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he’d underestimated about her. Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted—the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that really what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if all he really wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?

  “Poor penis,” Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. “It must be tired,” she went on. “Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin.”

  “We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for both our plans.” She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.

  “Smart boy, Pat. And you’re basically a good guy, too—no matter what anybody else says.”

  “It would appear that I’m perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool,” was all Wallingford said in reply.

  He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wallingford said oncamera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

  When it was evident that Wallingford wasn’t up to having sex again, Mary said they might as well go to work a little early. “I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer,” was how she expressed it. “I have a few ideas,” she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown. Her timing was almost magical. Patrick listened to her talk about “closure,” about

  “wrapping up the Kennedy thing.” She’d already written the script, he realized. Almost as an afterthought—they’d cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom—Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. “If I were you, Pat,” she confided, “I wouldn’t worry about Fred. I wouldn’t give him a second thought.”

  At first, Wallingford believed that the newsroom women were all abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they all knew. But Fred had been fired—that was the reason for the women’s mercurial chatter. Wallingford was not surprised that Mary wasn’t shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women’s room.)

  Patrick was surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wallingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton’s innocuousness struck Patrick as potentially dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people—even Fred, even Patrick Wallingford. But Wharton’s only reference to Wallingford’s small rebellion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred’s subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word “unfortunate.” Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.

  Wallingford couldn’t quite tell what it meant—why had they sent only one producer to talk to him? But the choice was predictable; they’d used her before when it struck them that Wallingford needed a pep talk, or some other form of instruction.

  Her name was Sabina. She had worked her way up; years ago, she’d been one of the newsroom women. Patrick had slept with her, but only once—when she was much younger and still married to her first husband.

  “I suppose there’s an interim replacement for Fred. A new dick, so to speak? A new news editor…” Wallingford speculated.

  “I wouldn’t call the appointment an interim replacement, if I were you,” Sabina cautioned him. (Her vocabulary, like Mary’s, was big on “if I were you,” Patrick noticed.) “I would say that the appointment has been a long time coming, and that there’s nothing in the least ‘interim’ about it.”

  “Is it you, Sabina?” Wallingford asked. (Was it Wharton? he was thinking.)

  “No, it’s Shanahan.” There was just a hint of bitterness in Sabina’s voice.

  “Shanahan?” The name didn’t ring a bell with Wallingford.

  “Mary, to you,” Sabina told him.

  So that was her name! He didn’t even remember it now. Mary Shanahan! He should have known.

  “Good luck, Pat. I’ll see you at the script meeting,” was all Sabina said. She left him alone with his thoughts, but he wasn’t alone for long. When Wallingford arrived at the meeting, the newsroom women were already there; they were as alert and jumpy as small, nervous dogs. One of them pushed a memo across the table to Patrick; the paper fairly flew out of her hands. At first glance, he thought it was a press release of the news he already knew, but he soon saw that—in addition to her duties as the new news editor—Mary Shanahan had been made a producer of the show. That must have been why Sabina had so little to say at their earlier meeting. Sabina was a producer, too, only now it seemed she was not as important a producer as she’d been before Mary was made one. As for Wharton, the moon-faced CEO never said anything at the script meetings. Wharton was one of those guys who made all his remarks from the vantage point of hindsight—his comments were strictly after the fact. He came to the script meetings only to learn who was responsible for everything Patrick Wallingford said on-camera. This made it impossible to know how important, or not, Wharton was.

  First they reviewed the selected montage footage on file. There was not one image that wasn’t already part of the public consciousness. The most shameless shot, with which the montage concluded by freezing to a still, was a stolen image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. The image wasn’t entirely clear, but she seemed to be caught in the act of trying to block the camera’s view of her son. The boy was shooting baskets, maybe in the driveway of the Schlossberg summer home in Sagaponack. The cameraman had used a telephoto lens—you could tell by the outof-focus branches (probably privet) in the foreground of the frame. (Someone must have snaked a camera through a hedge.) The boy was either oblivious or pretending to be oblivious to the camera.

  Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was caught in profile. She was still elegant and dignified, but either sleeplessness or the tragedy had made her face more gaunt. Her appearance refuted the comforting notion that one grew accustomed to grief.

  “Why are we using this?” Patrick asked. “Aren’t we ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed?”

  “It just needs some voice-over, Pat,” Mary Shanahan said.

  “How about this, Mary? How about I say, ‘We’re New Yorkers. We have the good reputation of offering anonymity to the famous. Lately, however, that reputation is undeserved.’ How about that ?” Wallingford asked.

  No one answered him. Mary’s ice-blue eyes were as sparkling as her smile. The newsroom women were twitching with excitement; if they had all started biting one another, Patrick wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Or this,
” Wallingford went on. “How about I say this ? ‘By all accounts, from those who knew him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was a modest young man, a decent guy. Some comparable modesty and decency from us would be refreshing.’ ”

  There was a pause that would have been polite, were it not for the newsroom women’s exaggerated sighs.

  “I’ve written a little something,” Mary said almost shyly. The script was already there, on the TelePrompTer; she must have written it the previous day, or the day before that.

  “There seem to be certain days, even weeks,” the script read, “when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger.”

  “Bullshit!” Patrick said. “The role isn’t ‘unwelcome’—we relish it!”

  Mary sat smiling demurely while the TelePrompTer kept rolling: “We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers, but this has been one of those weeks.” A scripted pause followed.

  “I like it,” one of the newsroom women said. They’d had a meeting before this meeting, Wallingford knew. (There was always a meeting before the meeting.) They had no doubt agreed which of them would say, “I like it.”

  Then another of the newsroom women touched Patrick’s left forearm, in the usual place. “I like it because it doesn’t make you sound as if you’re apologizing, not exactly, for what you said last night,” she told him. Her hand rested on his forearm a little longer than was natural or necessary.

  “By the way, the ratings for last night were terrific,” Wharton said. Patrick knew that he’d better not look at Wharton, whose round face was a bland dot across the table.

  “You were great last night, Pat,” Mary added.

  Her remark was so well timed that this had to have been rehearsed at the meeting before the meeting, too, because there was not one titter among the newsroom women; they were as straight-faced as a jury that’s made its decision. Wharton, of course, was the only one at the script meeting who didn’t know that Patrick Wallingford had gone home with Mary Shanahan the previous night, nor would Wharton have cared.

  Mary gave Patrick an appropriate amount of time to respond—they all did. Everyone was quiet and respectful. Then, when Mary saw that no response would be forthcoming, she said, “Well, if everything’s perfectly clear…”

  Wallingford was already on his way to makeup. Thinking back, there was now only one conversation he didn’t regret having with Mary. The second time they’d had sex, with the dawn breaking, he’d told her about his sudden and unaccountable lust for the makeup girl. Mary had been full of condemnation.

  “You don’t mean Angie, do you, Pat?”

  He’d not known the makeup girl’s name. “The one who chews gum—”

  “That’s Angie !” Mary had cried. “That girl is a mess !”

  “Well, she turns me on. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s the gum.”

  “Maybe you’re just horny, Pat.”

  “Maybe.”

  That hadn’t been the end of it. They’d been walking crosstown, to the coffee shop on Madison, when Mary had blurted out, apropos of nothing, “Angie! Jesus, Pat—the girl’s a joke ! She still lives with her parents. Her father’s a transit cop or something. In Queens. She’s from Queens !”

  “Who cares where she’s from?” Patrick had asked.

  In retrospect, he found it curious that Mary wanted his baby, wanted his apartment, wanted to advise him on the most advantageous way to get fired; all things considered, she truly seemed (to a carefully calculated degree) to want to be his friend. She even wanted things to work out for him in Wisconsin—meaning that she’d manifested no jealousy of Mrs. Clausen that Wallingford could detect. Yet Mary was borderline apoplectic that a makeup girl had given him a hard-on. Why?

  He sat in the makeup chair, contemplating the arousal factor, as Angie went to work on his crow’s-feet and (today, especially) the dark circles under his eyes.

  “Ya didn’t get much sleep last night, huh?” the girl asked him between snaps. She’d changed her gum; last night she’d given off a minty smell—tonight she was chewing something fruity.

  “Sadly, no. Another sleepless night,” Patrick replied.

  “Why can’cha sleep?” Angie asked.

  Wallingford frowned; he was thinking. How far should he go?

  “Unscrunch your forehead. Relax, relax!” Angie told him. She was patting the flesh-colored powder on his forehead with her soft little brush. “That’s betta,” she said. “So why can’cha sleep? Aren’t ya gonna tell me?”

  Oh, what the hell! Patrick thought. If Mrs. Clausen turned him down, all this would be only the rest of his life. So what if he’d just got his new boss pregnant? He’d already decided, sometime during the script meeting, not to trade apartments with her. And if Doris said yes, this would be his last night as a free man. Surely some of us are familiar with the fact that sexual anarchy can precede a commitment to the monogamous life. This was the old Patrick Wallingford—his licentiousness reasserting itself.

  “I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about you,” Wallingford confessed. The makeup girl had just spread her hand, her thumb and index finger smoothing what she called the “smile lines” at the corners of his mouth. He could feel her fingers stop on his skin as if her hand had died there. Her jaw dropped; her mouth hung open, midsnap.

  Angie wore a snug, short-sleeved sweater the color of orange sherbet. On a chain around her neck was a thick signet ring, obviously a man’s, which was heavy enough to separate her breasts. Even her breasts stopped moving while she held her breath; everything had stopped.

  Finally she breathed again—one long exhalation, redolent of the chewing gum. Patrick could see his face in the mirror, but not hers. He looked at the tensed muscles in her neck; a strand or two of her jet-black hair hung down. The shoulder straps of her bra showed through her orange sweater, which had ridden up above the waistband of her tight black skirt. She had olive-colored skin, and dark, downylooking hair on her arms. Angie was only twenty-something. Wallingford had hardly been shocked to hear that she still lived with her parents. Lots of New York working girls did. To have your own apartment was too expensive, and parents were generally more reliable than multiple roommates.

  Patrick was beginning to believe that Angie would never respond, and her soft fingers were once again working the rouge into his skin. At last Angie took a deep breath and held it, as if she were thinking of what to say; then she released another long, fruity breath. She started chewing her gum again, rapidly—her breaths were short and sweet. Wallingford was uncomfortably aware that she was scrutinizing his face for more than blemishes and wrinkles.

  “Are ya askin’ me out or somethin’?” Angie whispered to him. She kept glancing at the open doorway of the makeup room, where she was alone with Patrick. The woman who did hair had taken the elevator down to street level; she was standing on the sidewalk somewhere, smoking a cigarette.

  “Think of it this way, Angie,” Wallingford whispered to the agitated, breathy girl.

  “This is definitely a case of sexual harassment, if you play your cards right.”

  Patrick was pleased with himself for imagining a way to get fired that Mary Shanahan had not thought of, but Angie didn’t know he was serious; the makeup girl wrongly believed he was just fooling around. And as Wallingford had correctly guessed, she had a crush on him.

  “Ha!” Angie said, flashing him a frisky smile. He could see the color of her gum for the first time—it was purple. (Grape, or some synthetic variation thereof.) She had her tweezers out and seemed to be staring at a spot between his eyes. As she bent more closely over him, he breathed her in—her perfume, her hair, the gum. She smelled wonderful, in a kind of department-store way.

  In the mirror, he could see the fingers of his right hand; he spread them as purposefully on the narrow strip of flesh between the waistband of her skirt and her high-riding sweater as he might have touched the keyboard of a piano before he started to play. At that moment he had a shameless sense of himse
lf as a semiretired maestro, long out of practice, who’d not lost his touch. There wasn’t a lawyer in New York who wouldn’t happily represent her case. Wallingford only hoped she wouldn’t gouge his face with the tweezers. Instead, as he touched her warm skin, Angie arched her back in such a way that she was pressing—no, make that snuggling—against his hand. With the tweezers, she gently plucked an errant eyebrow-hair from the bridge of his nose. Then she kissed him on the lips with her mouth a little open; he could taste her gum. He meant to say something along the lines of “Angie, for Christ’s sake, you should sue me!” But he couldn’t take his one hand off her. Instinctively, his fingers slipped under her sweater; they slid up her spine, all the way to the back strap of her bra. “I love the gum,” he told her, his old self easily finding the right words. She kissed him again, this time parting his lips, then his teeth, with her forceful tongue.

  Patrick was briefly taken aback when Angie inserted her slick wad of gum into his mouth; for an alarming moment, he imagined that he’d bitten off her tongue. It simply wasn’t the sort of foreplay he was used to—he hadn’t gone out with a lot of gum-chewers. Her bare back squirmed against his hand; her breasts in her soft sweater brushed his chest.

  It was one of the newsroom women who cleared her throat in the doorway. This was almost exactly what Wallingford had wanted; he’d hoped that Mary Shanahan might have seen him kissing and feeling up Angie, but he had no doubt that the incident would be reported to Mary before he went on-camera. “You’ve got five minutes, Pat,” the newsroom woman told him.

  Angie, who’d left him with her gum, was still pulling her sweater down when the woman who did hair returned from her sidewalk smoke. She was a heavy black woman who smelled like cinnamon-raisin toast, and she always made a point of feigning exasperation when there was nothing Patrick’s hair needed. Sometimes she squirted a little hair spray on him, or rubbed him with a dab of gel; this time she just patted him on the top of his head and left the room again.

  “Ya sure ya know whatcha gettin’ into?” Angie asked. “I gotta complicated sorta life,” she warned him. “I’m a handful of problems, if ya know what I mean.”