The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  “We already ran that item,” was Wallingford’s only response.

  “Well, we were thinking of a follow-up. Something more in-depth,” Mary told him.

  What “follow-up” could there be to such lunacy? How “in-depth” could such an absurd incident be? Had the man had a family? If so, they would no doubt be upset. But how long an interview could Wallingford possibly sustain with the witness? And for what purpose? To what end?

  “What’s the other item?”

  He’d heard about the other story, too—it had been on one of the wire services. A fifty-one-year-old German, a hunter from Bad-somewhere, had been found shot dead beside his parked car in the Black Forest. The hunter’s gun was pointed out the window of his car; inside the car was the dead hunter’s frantic dog. The police concluded that the dog had shot him. (Unintentionally, of course—the dog had not been charged.)

  Would they want Wallingford to interview the dog?

  They were the kind of not-the-news stories that would end up as jokes on the Internet—they were already jokes. They were also business as usual, the bizarre-ascommonplace lowlights of the twenty-four-hour international news. Even Mary Shanahan was embarrassed to have brought them up.

  “I was thinking of something about Germany, Mary,” Patrick said.

  “I know,” she sympathized, touching him in that fondly felt area of his left forearm.

  “Was there anything else, Mary?” he asked.

  “There was an item in Australia,” she said hesitantly. “But I know you’ve never expressed any interest in going there.”

  He knew the item she meant; no doubt there was a plan to follow up this pointless death, too. In this instance, a thirty-three-year-old computer technician had drunk himself to death in a drinking competition at a hotel bar in Sydney. The competition had the regrettable name of Feral Friday, and the deceased had allegedly downed four whiskeys, seventeen shots of tequila, and thirty-four beers—all in an hour and forty minutes. He died with a blood-alcohol level of 0.42.

  “I know the story,” was all Wallingford said.

  Mary once more touched his arm. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you, Pat.”

  What further depressed Wallingford was that these silly items weren’t even new news. They were insignificant snippets on the theme of the world being ridiculous; their punch lines had already been told.

  The twenty-four-hour international channel had a summer intern program—in lieu of a salary, college kids were promised an “authentic experience.” But even for free, couldn’t the interns manage to do more than collect these stories of stupid and funny deaths? Somewhere down south, a young soldier had died of injuries sustained in a three-story fall; he had been engaged in a spitting contest at the time. (A true story.) A British farmer’s wife had been charged by sheep and driven off a cliff in the north of England. (Also true.)

  The all-news network had long indulged a collegiate sense of humor, which was synonymous with a collegiate sense of death. In short, no context. Life was a joke; death was the final gag. In meeting after meeting, Wallingford could imagine Wharton or Sabina saying: “Let the lion guy do it.”

  As for what better news Wallingford wanted to hear from Mary Shanahan, it was simply that she wasn’t pregnant. For that news, or its opposite, Wallingford understood that he would have to wait.

  He wasn’t good at waiting, which in this case produced some good results. He decided to inquire about other jobs in journalism. People said that the so-called educational network (they meant PBS) was boring, but—especially when it comes to the news—boring isn’t the worst thing you can be.

  The PBS affiliate for Green Bay was in Madison, Wisconsin, where the university was. Wallingford wrote to Wisconsin Public Television and told them what he had in mind—he wanted to create a news-analysis show. He proposed examining the lack of context in the news that was reported, especially on television. He said he would demonstrate that often there was more interesting news behind the news; and that the news that was reported was not necessarily the news that should have been reported.

  Wallingford wrote: “It takes time to develop a complex or complicated story; what works best on TV are stories that don’t take a lot of time. Disasters are not only sensational—they happen immediately. Especially on television, immediacy works best. I mean ‘best’ from a marketing point of view, which is not necessarily good for the news.”

  He sent his curriculum vitae and a similar proposal for a news-analysis show to the public-television stations in Milwaukee and St. Paul, as well as the two publictelevision stations in Chicago. But why did he focus on the Midwest, when Mrs. Clausen had said that she would live anywhere with him— if she chose to live with him at all?

  He had taped the photo of her and little Otto to the mirror in his office dressing room. When Mary Shanahan saw it, she looked closely at both the child and his mother, but more closely at Doris, and cattily observed: “Nice mustache.”

  It was true that Doris Clausen had the faintest, softest down on her upper lip. Wallingford was indignant that Mary had called this super-soft place a mustache!

  Because of his own warped sensibilities, and his overfamiliarity with a certain kind of New Yorker, Patrick decided that Doris Clausen should not be moved too far from Wisconsin. There was something about the Midwest in her that Wallingford loved.

  If Mrs. Clausen moved to New York, one of those newsroom women would persuade her to get a wax job on her upper lip! Something that Patrick adored about Doris would be lost. Therefore, Wallingford wrote only to a very few PBS

  affiliates in the Midwest; he stayed as close to Green Bay as he could. While he was at it, he didn’t stop with noncommercial television stations. The only radio he ever listened to was public radio. He loved NPR, and there were NPR stations everywhere. There were two in Green Bay and two in Madison; he sent his proposal for a news-analysis show to all four of them, in addition to NPR

  affiliates in Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul. (There was even an NPR station in Appleton, Wisconsin, Doris Clausen’s hometown, but Patrick resisted applying for a job there.)

  As August came and went—it was now nearly gone—Wallingford had another idea. All the Big Ten universities, or most of them, had to have graduate programs in journalism. The Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern, was famous. He sent his proposal for a news-analysis course there, as well as to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

  Wallingford was on a roll about the unreported context of the news. He ranted, but effectively, on how trivializing to the real news the news that was reported had become. It was not only his subject; Patrick Wallingford was his argument’s bestknown example. Who better than the lion guy to address the sensationalizing of petty sorrows, while the underlying context, which was the terminal illness of the world, remained unrevealed?

  And the best way to lose a job was not to wait to be fired. Wasn’t the best way to be offered another job and then quit ? Wallingford was overlooking the fact that, if they fired him, they would have to renegotiate the remainder of his contract. Regardless, it surprised Mary Shanahan when Patrick popped his head— just his head—into her office and cheerfully said to her: “Okay. I accept.”

  “Accept what, Pat?”

  “Two years, same salary, occasional reporting from the field—per my approval of the field assignment, of course. I accept.”

  “You do ?”

  “Have a nice day, Mary,” Patrick told her.

  Just let them try to find a field assignment he’d accept! Wallingford not only intended to make them fire him; he fully expected to have a new job lined up and waiting for him when they pulled the fucking trigger. (And to think he’d once had no capacity for long-range scheming.)

  They didn’t wait long to suggest the next field assignment. You could just see them thinking: How could the lion guy resist this one? They wanted Wallingford to go to Jerusalem.
Talk about disaster-man territory! Journalists love Jerusalem—no shortage of the bizarre-as-commonplace there.

  There’d been a double car bombing. At around 5:30P.M. Israeli time on Sunday, September 5, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing the terrorists who were transporting the bombs to their designated targets. The bombs exploded because the terrorists had set them on daylight-saving time; three weeks before, Israel had prematurely switched to standard time. The terrorists, who must have assembled the bombs in a Palestinian-controlled area, were the victims of the Palestinians refusing to accept what they called “Zionist time.” The drivers of the cars carrying the bombs had changed their watches, but not the bombs, to Israeli time.

  While the all-news network found it funny that such self-serious madmen had been detonated by their own dumb mistake, Wallingford did not. The madmen may have deserved to die, but terrorism in Israel was no joke; it trivialized the gravity of the tensions in that country to call this klutzy accident news. More people would die in other car bombings, which wouldn’t be funny. And once again the context of the story was missing—that is, why the Israelis had switched from daylight-saving to standard time prematurely.

  The change had been intended to accommodate the period of penitential prayers. The Selihoth (literally, pardons) are prayers for forgiveness; the prayer-poems of repentance are a continuation of the Psalms. (The suffering of Israel in the various lands of the Dispersion is their principal theme.) These prayers have been incorporated into the liturgy to be recited on special occasions, and on the days preceding Rosh Hashanah; they give utterance to the feelings of the worshiper who has repented and now pleads for mercy.

  While in Israel the time of day had been changed to accommodate these prayers of atonement, the enemies of the Jews had nonetheless conspired to kill them. That was the context, which made the double car bombing more than a comedy of errors; it was not a comedy at all. In Jerusalem, this was an almost ordinary vignette, both recalling and foreshadowing a tableau of bombings. But to Mary and the all-news network, it was a tale of terrorists getting their just deserts—nothing more.

  “You must want me to turn this down. Is that it, Mary?” Patrick asked. “And if I turn down enough items like these, then you can fire me with impunity.”

  “We thought it was an interesting story. Right up your alley,” was all Mary would say.

  He was burning bridges faster than they could build new ones; it was an exciting but unresolved time. When he wasn’t actively engaged in trying to lose his job, he was reading The English Patient and dreaming of Doris Clausen. Surely she would have been enchanted, as he was, by Almásy’s inquiring of Madox about “the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.” Almásy asks: “What is it, does it have an official name?” To which Madox mutters, “Pull yourself together.” Later, pointing his finger at a spot near his own Adam’s apple, Madox tells Almásy that it’s called “the vascular sizood.”

  Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen with the heartfelt conviction that she would have liked the incident as much as he did, but she had her doubts about it.

  “It was called something different in the movie,” Doris told him.

  “It was?”

  He hadn’t seen the film in how long? He rented the video and watched it immediately. But when he got to that scene, he couldn’t quite catch what that part of a woman’s neck was called. Mrs. Clausen had been right, however; it was not called “the vascular sizood.”

  Wallingford rewound the video and watched the scene again. Almásy and Madox are saying good-bye. (Madox is going home, to kill himself.) Almásy says, “There is no God.” Adding: “But I hope someone looks after you.”

  Madox seems to remember something and points to his own throat. “In case you’re still wondering—this is called the suprasternal notch.” Patrick caught the line the second time. Did that part of a woman’s neck have two names? And when he’d watched the film again, and after he’d finished reading the novel, Wallingford would declare to Mrs. Clausen how much he loved the part where Katharine says to Almásy, “I want you to ravish me.”

  “In the book, you mean,” Mrs. Clausen said.

  “In the book and in the movie,” Patrick replied.

  “It wasn’t in the movie,” Doris told him. (He’d just watched it—he felt certain that the line was there!) “You just thought you heard that line because of how much you liked it.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “It’s a guy thing to like,” she said. “I never believed she would say it to him.”

  Had Patrick believed so wholeheartedly in Katharine saying “I want you to ravish me” that, in his easily manipulated memory, he’d simply inserted the line into the film? Or had Doris found the line so unbelievable that she’d blanked it out of the movie? And what did it matter whether the line was or wasn’t in the film? The point was that Patrick liked it and Mrs. Clausen did not.

  Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He’d tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared.

  Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news—they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed.

  But Doris Clausen must have sensed his disheartenment and taken pity on him. She sent him two more photographs from their time together at the cottage on the lake. He’d been hoping that she would send him the one of their bathing suits sideby-side on the clothesline. How happy he was to have that picture! He taped it to the mirror in his office dressing room. (Let Mary Shanahan make some catty remark about that ! Just let her try.)

  It was the second photo that shocked him. He’d still been asleep when Mrs. Clausen had taken it, a self-portrait, with the camera held crookedly in her hand. No matter—you could see well enough what was going on. Doris was ripping the wrapper off the second condom with her teeth. She was smiling at the camera, as if Wallingford were the camera and he already knew how she was going to put the condom on his penis.

  Patrick didn’t stick that photograph on his office dressing-room mirror; he kept it in his apartment, on his bedside table, next to the telephone, so that he could look at it when Mrs. Clausen called him or when he called her.

  Late one night, after he’d gone to bed but had not yet fallen asleep, the phone rang and Wallingford turned on the light on his night table so that he could look at her picture when he spoke to her. But it wasn’t Doris.

  “Hey, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Angie’s brother Vito said. “I hope I’m interruptin’ somethin’…” (Vito called often, always with nothing to say.) When Wallingford hung up, he did so with a decided sadness that was not quite nostalgia. In the at-home hours of his life, since he’d come back to New York from Wisconsin, he not only missed Doris Clausen; he missed that wild, gumchewing night with Angie, too. At these times, he even occasionally missed Mary Shanahan—the old Mary, before she acquired the certitude of a last name and the uncomfortable authority she now held over him.

  Patrick turned out the light. As he drifted into sleep, he tried to think forgivingly of Mary. The past litany of her most positive features returned to him: her flawless skin, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, her perfect little teeth. And, Wallingford assumed—since Mary was still hoping she was pregnant—her commitment to no prescription drugs. She’d been a bitch to him at times, but people are not only what they seem to be. After all, he had dumped her. There were women who would have been more bitter about it than Mary was. Speak of the devil! The phone rang and it was Mary Shanahan; she was crying into the phone. She’d got her period. It had come a month and a half late—late enough to have
given her hope that she was pregnant—but her period had arrived just the same.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” Wallingford said, and he genuinely was sorry—for her. For himself, he felt unearned jubilation; he’d dodged another bullet.

  “Imagine you, of all people—shooting blanks!” Mary told him, between sobs. “I’ll give you another chance, Pat. We’ve got to try it again, as soon as I’m ovulating.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he repeated. “I’m not your man. Blanks or no blanks, I’ve had my chance.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’m saying no. We’re not having sex again, not for any reason.”

  Mary called him a number of colorful names before she hung up. But Mary’s disappointment in him did not interfere with Patrick’s sleep; on the contrary, he had the best night’s sleep since he’d drifted off in Mrs. Clausen’s arms and awakened to the feeling of her teeth unrolling a condom on his penis. Wallingford was still sound asleep when Mrs. Clausen called. It may have been an hour earlier in Green Bay, but little Otto routinely woke up his mother a couple of hours before Wallingford was awake.

  “Mary isn’t pregnant. She just got her period,” Patrick announced.

  “She’s going to ask you to do it again. That’s what I would do,” Mrs. Clausen said.

  “She already asked. I already said no.”

  “Good,” Doris told him.

  “I’m looking at your picture,” Wallingford said.

  “I can guess which one,” she replied.

  Little Otto was talking baby-talk somewhere near the phone. Wallingford didn’t say anything for a moment—just imagining the two of them was enough. Then he asked her, “What are you wearing? Have you got any clothes on?”

  “I’ve got two tickets to a Monday-night game, if you want to go,” was her answer.

  “I want to go.”