The Fourth Hand

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The Fourth Hand Page 27

by John Winslow Irving


  It was past late afternoon, already early evening; the sun had started sinking. Wallingford said: “Don’t wake up little Otto just yet. Come down to the dock with me, please.” They were both in their bathing suits, and Patrick made sure that they took two towels with them.

  “What are we doing?” Doris asked.

  “We’re going to get wet again,” he told her. “Then we’re going to sit on the dock, just for a minute.”

  It bothered Mrs. Clausen that they might not hear Otto crying if he woke up from his nap, not even with the windows in the bedroom open. The windows faced out over the lake, not over the big outdoors dock, and the occasional passing motorboat made an interfering noise, but Patrick promised that he’d hear the baby. They dove off the big dock and climbed quickly up the ladder; almost immediately, the dock was enveloped in shade. The sun had dropped below the treetops on their side of the lake, but the eastern shore was still in sunlight. They sat on the towels on the dock while Wallingford told Mrs. Clausen about the pills he’d taken for pain in India, and how (in the blue-capsule dream) he’d felt the heat of the sun in the wood of the dock, even though the dock was in shade.

  “Like now,” he said.

  She just sat there, shivering slightly in her wet bathing suit. Patrick persisted in telling her how he had heard the woman’s voice but never seen her; how she’d had the sexiest voice in the world; how she’d said, “My bathing suit feels so cold. I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

  Mrs. Clausen kept looking at him—she was still shivering.

  “Please say it,” Wallingford asked.

  “I don’t feel like doing this,” Doris told him.

  He went on with the rest of the cobalt-blue dream—how he’d answered, “Yes.”

  And the sound of the water dripping from their wet bathing suits, falling between the planks of the dock, returning to the lake. He told her how he and the unseen woman had been naked; then how he’d smelled the sunlight, which her shoulders had absorbed; and how he’d tasted the lake on his tongue, which had traced the contours of the woman’s ear.

  “You had sex with her, in the dream?” Mrs. Clausen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t do it,” she said. “Not out here, not now. Anyway, there’s a new cottage across the lake. The Clausens told me that the guy has a telescope and spies on people.”

  Patrick saw the place she meant. The cabin across the lake was a raw-looking color; the new wood stood out against the surrounding blue and green.

  “I thought the dream was coming true,” was all he said. (It almost came true, he wanted to tell her.)

  Mrs. Clausen stood up, taking her towel with her. She took off her wet bathing suit, covering herself with her towel in the process. She hung her suit on the line and wrapped herself more tightly in her towel. “I’m going to wake up Otto,” she said.

  Wallingford took off his swim trunks and hung his suit on the line beside Doris’s. Because she’d already gone to the boathouse, he was unconcerned about covering himself with his towel. In fact, he faced the lake naked for a moment, just to force the asshole with the telescope to take a good look at him. Then Wallingford wrapped his towel around himself and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He changed into a dry bathing suit and a polo shirt. By the time he went to the other bedroom, Mrs. Clausen had changed, too; she was wearing an old tank top and some nylon running shorts. They were clothes a boy might wear in a gym, but she looked terrific.

  “You know, dreams don’t have to be exactly true-to-life in order to come true,” she told him, without looking at him.

  “I don’t know if I have a chance with you,” Patrick said to her. She walked up the path to the main cabin, purposely ahead of him, while he carried little Otto. “I’m still thinking about it,” she said, keeping her back to him. Wallingford calculated what she’d said by counting the syllables in her words. He thought it was what she’d said to him in the boat when he couldn’t hear her. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) So he had a chance with her, though probably a slim one. They ate a quiet dinner on the screened-in porch of the main cabin, which overlooked the darkening lake. The mosquitoes came to the surrounding screens and hummed to them. They drank the second bottle of red wine while Wallingford talked about his fledgling effort to get fired. This time he was smart enough to leave Mary Shanahan out of the story. He didn’t tell Doris that he’d first got the idea from something Mary had said, or that Mary had a fairly developed plan concerning how he might get himself fired.

  He talked about leaving New York, too, but Mrs. Clausen seemed to lose patience with what he was saying. “I wouldn’t want you to quit your job because of me, ”

  she told him. “If I can live with you, I can live with you anywhere. Where we live or what you do isn’t the issue.”

  Patrick paced around with Otto in his arms while Doris washed the dishes.

  “I just wish Mary wouldn’t have your baby,” Mrs. Clausen finally said, when they were fighting off the mosquitoes on the path back to the boathouse. He couldn’t see her face; again she was ahead of him, carrying the flashlight and a bag of baby paraphernalia while he carried Otto junior. “I can’t blame her… wanting to have your baby,” Doris added, as they were climbing the stairs to the boathouse apartment. “I just hope she doesn’t have it. Not that there’s anything you can or should do about it. Not now.”

  It struck Wallingford as typical of himself that here was an essential element of his fate, which he’d unwittingly set in motion but over which he had no control; whether Mary Shanahan was pregnant or not was entirely an accident of conception.

  Before leaving the main cabin—when he had used the bathroom, and after he’d brushed his teeth—he had taken a condom from his shaving kit. He’d held it in his hand all the way to the boathouse. Now, as he put Otto down on the bed that served as a changing table in the bedroom, Mrs. Clausen saw that the fist of Wallingford’s one hand was closed around something.

  “What have you got in your hand?” she asked.

  He opened the palm of his hand and showed her the condom. Doris was bending over Otto junior, changing him. “You better go back and get another one. You’re going to need at least two,” she said.

  He took a flashlight and braved the mosquitoes again; he returned to his bedroom above the boathouse with a second condom and a cold beer.

  Wallingford lit the gas lamp in his room. While this is an easy job for two-handed people, Patrick found it challenging. He struck the wooden match on the box, then held the lit match in his teeth while he turned on the gas. When he took the match from his mouth and touched the flame to the lamp, it made a popping sound and flared brightly. He turned down the propane, but the light in the bedroom dimmed only a little. It was not very romantic, he thought, as he took off his clothes and got into bed naked.

  Wallingford pulled just the top sheet over him, up to his waist; he lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, with the two pillows hugged to his chest. He looked out the window at the moonlight on the lake—the moon was huge. In only two or three more nights, it would be an official full moon, but it looked full now. He’d left the unopened bottle of beer on the dresser top; he hoped they might share the beer later. The two condoms, in their foil wrappers, were under the pillows. Between the racket the loons were making and a squabble that broke out among some ducks near shore, Patrick didn’t hear Doris come into his room, but when she lay down on top of him, with her bare breasts against his back, he knew she was naked.

  “My bathing suit feels so cold, ” she whispered in his ear. “I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

  Her voice was so much like the woman’s voice in the blue-capsule dream that Wallingford had some difficulty answering her. By the time he managed to say

  “yes,” she’d already rolled him over onto his back and pulled the sheet down.

  “You better give me one of those things,” she said.

&nbs
p; He was reaching behind his head and under the pillows with his only hand, but Mrs. Clausen was quicker. She found one of the condoms and tore open the wrapper in her teeth. “Let me do it. I want to put it on you,” she told him. “I’ve never done this.” She seemed a little puzzled by the appearance of the condom, but she didn’t hesitate to put it on him; unfortunately, she tried putting it on inside out.

  “It’s rolled a certain way,” Wallingford said.

  Doris laughed at her mistake. She not only put the condom on the right way; she was in too much of a hurry for Patrick to talk to her. Mrs. Clausen may never have put a condom on anyone before, but Wallingford was familiar with the way that she straddled him. (Only this time he was lying on his back, not sitting up straight in a chair in Dr. Zajac’s office.)

  “Let me say something to you about being faithful to me,” Doris was saying, as she moved up and down with her hands on Patrick’s shoulders. “If you’ve got a problem with monogamy, you better say so right now—you better stop me.”

  Wallingford said nothing, nor did he do anything to stop her.

  “Please don’t make anyone else pregnant,” Mrs. Clausen said, even more seriously. She bore down on him with all her weight; he lifted his hips to meet her.

  “Okay,” he told her.

  In the harsh light of the gas lamp, their moving shadows were cast against the wall where the darker rectangle had earlier caught Wallingford’s attention—that empty place where Otto senior’s beer poster had been. It was as if their coupling were a ghost portrait, their future together still undecided.

  When they finished making love, they drank the beer, draining the bottle in a matter of seconds. Then they went naked for a night swim, with Wallingford taking just one towel for the two of them and Mrs. Clausen carrying the flashlight. They walked single-file to the end of the boathouse dock, but this time Doris asked Patrick to climb down the ladder into the lake ahead of her. He’d no sooner entered the water than she told him to swim back to her, under the narrow dock.

  “Just follow the flashlight,” she instructed him. She shined the light through the planks in the dock, illuminating one of the support posts that disappeared into the dark water. The post was bigger around than Wallingford’s thigh. Several inches above the waterline, just under the planks of the dock and alongside a horizontal two-by-four, something gold caught Patrick’s eye. He swam closer until he was looking straight up at it. He had to keep treading water to see it. A tenpenny nail had been driven into the post; two gold wedding bands were looped on the nail, which had been hammered over, into a bent position, with its head driven into the post. Patrick realized that Mrs. Clausen would have needed to tread water while she pounded in the nail, and then attached the rings, and then bent the nail over with her hammer. It hadn’t been an easy job, even for a good swimmer who was fairly strong and two-handed.

  “Are they still there? Do you see them?” Doris asked.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She once again positioned the flashlight so that the beam was cast out over the lake. He swam out from under the dock, into the beam of light, where he found her waiting for him; she was floating on her back with her breasts above the surface. Mrs. Clausen didn’t say anything. Wallingford remained silent with her. He speculated that, one winter, the ice could be especially thick; it might grind against the boathouse dock and the rings might be lost. Or a winter storm could sweep the boathouse away. Whatever, the wedding rings were where they belonged—that was what Mrs. Clausen had wanted to show him.

  Across the lake, the newly arrived Peeping Tom had the lights on in his cabin. His radio was playing; he was listening to a baseball game, but Patrick couldn’t tell which teams were playing.

  They swam back to the boathouse, with both the flashlight on the dock and the gas lamps shining from the two bedroom windows to guide them. This time Wallingford remembered to pee in the lake so that later he wouldn’t have to go in the woods, with the mosquitoes.

  They both kissed Otto junior good night, and Doris extinguished the gaslight in the boy’s room and closed his curtains. Then she turned off the lamp in the other bedroom, where she lay naked and cool from the lake, under just the top sheet, with her and Wallingford’s hair still wet and cold in the moonlight. She’d not closed their curtains on purpose; she wanted to wake up early, before the baby. Both she and Patrick fell instantly asleep in the moonlit room. That night, the moon didn’t set until almost three in the morning.

  The sunrise was a little after five on Monday, but Mrs. Clausen was up well before then. When Wallingford woke, the room was a pearl-gray or pewter color and he was aware of being aroused; it was not unlike one of the more erotic moments in the blue-capsule dream.

  Mrs. Clausen was putting the second condom on him. She had found what was, even for Wallingford, a novel way to do it—she was unrolling it on his penis with her teeth. For someone with no previous experience with condoms, she was surpassingly innovative, but Doris confessed that she had read about this method in a book.

  “Was it a novel?” Wallingford wanted to know. (Of course it was!)

  “Give me your hand,” Mrs. Clausen commanded.

  He naturally thought that she meant the right one—it was his only hand. But when he extended his right hand to her, she said, “No, the fourth one.”

  Patrick thought he’d misheard her. Surely she’d said, “No, the other one”—the nohand or the nonhand, as almost everyone called it.

  “The what?” Wallingford asked, just to be sure.

  “Give me your hand, the fourth one,” Doris said. She seized his stump and gripped it tightly between her thighs, where he could feel his missing fingers come to life.

  “There were the two you were born with,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “You lost one. Otto’s was your third. As for this one,” she said, clenching her thighs for emphasis,

  “this is the one that will never forget me. This one is mine. It’s your fourth.”

  “Oh.” Perhaps that was why he could feel it, as if it were real. They swam naked again after they made love, but this time one of them stood at the window in little Otto’s bedroom, watching the other swim. It was during Mrs. Clausen’s turn that Otto junior woke up with the sunrise.

  Then they were busy packing up; Doris did all the things that were necessary to close the cottage. She even found the time to take the last of their trash across the lake to the Dumpster on the dock. Wallingford stayed with Otto. Doris drove the boat a lot faster when the baby wasn’t with her.

  They had all their bags and the baby gear assembled on the big dock when the floatplane arrived. While the pilot and Mrs. Clausen loaded the small plane, Wallingford held Otto junior in his right arm and waved no-handed across the lake to the Peeping Tom. Every so often, they could see the sun reflected in the lens of his telescope.

  When the floatplane took off, the pilot made a point of passing low over the newcomer’s dock. The Peeping Tom was pretending that his telescope was a fishing pole and he was fishing off his dock; the silly asshole kept making imaginary casts. The tripod for the telescope stood incriminatingly in the middle of the dock, like the mounting for a crude kind of artillery. There was too much noise in the cabin for Wallingford and Mrs. Clausen to talk without shouting. But they looked at each other constantly, and at the baby, whom they passed back and forth between them. As the floatplane was descending for its landing, Patrick told her again—without a sound, just by moving his lips—“I love you.”

  Doris did not at first respond, and when she did so—also without actually saying the words, but by letting him read her lips—it was that same sentence, longer than

  “I love you,” which she had spoken before. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) Wallingford could only wait and see.

  From where the seaplane docked, they drove to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay. Otto junior fussed in his car seat while Wallingford made an effort to amuse him. Doris drove. Now that they could hear each other talk, it seemed they had
nothing to say.

  At the airport, where he kissed Mrs. Clausen good-bye, and then little Otto, Patrick felt Mrs. Clausen put something in his right front pocket. “Please don’t look at it now. Please wait until later,” she asked him. “Just think about this: my skin has grown back together, the hole has closed. I couldn’t wear that again if I wanted to. And besides, if I end up with you, I know I don’t need it. I know you don’t need it. Please give it away.”

  Wallingford knew what it was without looking at it—the fertility doohickey he’d once seen in her navel, the body ornament that had pierced her belly button. He was dying to see it.

  He didn’t have to wait long. He was thinking about the ambiguity of Mrs. Clausen’s parting words—“if I end up with you”—when the thing she’d put in his pocket set off the metal-detection device in the airport. He had to take it out of his pocket and look at it then. An airport security guard took a good look at it, too; in fact, the guard had the first long look at it.

  It was surprisingly heavy for something so small; the grayish-white, metallic color gleamed like gold. “It’s platinum,” the security guard said. She was a dark-skinned Native American woman with jet-black hair, heavyset and sad-looking. The way she handled the belly-button ornament indicated she knew something about jewelry. “This must have been expensive,” she said, handing the doohickey back to him.

  “I don’t know—I didn’t buy it,” Wallingford replied. “It’s a body-piercing item, for a woman’s navel.”

  “I know,” the security guard told him. “They usually set the metal detector off when they’re in someone’s belly button.”

  “Oh,” Patrick said. He was only beginning to grasp what the good-luck charm was. A tiny hand—a left one.

  In the body-piercing trade, it was what they called a barbell—a rod with a ball that screws on and off one end, just to keep the ornament from falling off, not unlike an earring post. But at the other end of the rod, which served the design as a slender wrist, was the most delicate, most exquisite little hand that Patrick Wallingford had ever seen. The middle finger was crossed over the index finger in that near-universal symbol of good luck. Patrick had expected a more specific fertility symbol—maybe a miniature god or something tribal. Another security guard came over to the table where Wallingford and the first security guard were standing. He was a small, lean black man with a perfectly trimmed mustache. “What is it?” he asked his colleague.

 

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