John Irving - The Fourth Hand

On TV, of course, the news was catastrophe-driven. Why wouldn’t the network assign Wallingford to the tabloid sleaze, the beneath-the-news stories? Without fail, they gave him the smirking, salacious tidbits—the marriage that lasted less than a day, including one that didn’t make it through the honeymoon; the husband who, after eight years of marriage, discovered that his wife was a man. Patrick Wallingford was the all-news network’s disaster man, the field reporter on the scene of the worst (meaning the most bizarre) accidents. He covered a collision between a tourist bus and a bicycle rickshaw in Bangkok—the two fatalities were both Thai prostitutes, riding to work in the rickshaw. Wallingford interviewed their families and their former clients; it was disquietingly hard to tell which was which, but each of the interviewees felt compelled to stare at the stump or the prosthesis at the end of the reporter’s left arm.

They always eyed the stump or the prosthesis. He hated them both—and the Internet, too. To him, the Internet chiefly served to encourage the inherent laziness of his profession—an overreliance on secondary sources and other shortcuts. Journalists had always borrowed from other journalists, but now it was too easy. His angry ex-wife, who was also a journalist, was a case in point. Marilyn prided herself in writing “profiles” of only the most literary authors and the most serious actors and actresses. (It went without saying that print journalism was superior to television.) Yet in truth, Patrick’s ex-wife prepared for her interviews with writers not by reading their books—some of which were admittedly too long—but by reading their previous interviews. Nor did Marilyn make the effort to see every film that the actors and actresses among her interviewees had been in; shamelessly, she read the reviews of their movies instead. Given his Internet prejudice, Wallingford never saw the publicity campaign on www.needahand.com; he’d never heard of Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates until Dr. Zajac called him. Zajac already knew about Patrick’s mishaps with several different prosthetic devices, not just the one in SoHo, which received a fair amount of attention: the shutting of his artificial hand in the taxi’s rear door; the cabbie blithely driving on for a block or so. The doctor also knew about the embarrassing entanglement with the seat belt on that flight to Berlin, where Wallingford was rushing to interview a deranged man who’d been arrested for detonating a dog near the Potsdamer Platz. (In an avowed protest against the new dome on the Reichstag, the fiend had attached an explosive device to the dog’s collar.)

Patrick Wallingford had become the TV journalist for stray acts of God and random nonsense. People called out to him from passing taxis—“Hey, lion guy!”

Bicycle messengers hailed him, first spitting the whistles from their mouths—“Yo, disaster man!”

Worse, Patrick had so little liking for his job that he’d lost all sympathy for the victims and their families; when he interviewed them, this lack of sympathy showed.

Therefore, in lieu of being fired—since he was injured on the job, he might have sued—Wallingford was so further marginalized that his next field assignment lacked even disaster potential. Patrick was being sent to Japan to cover a conference sponsored by a consortium of Japanese newspapers. He was surprised by the topic of the conference, too—it was called “The Future of Women,” which certainly didn’t have the sound of a disaster.

But the idea of Patrick Wallingford’s attending the conference… well, the women in the newsroom in New York were all atingle about that.

“You’ll get laid a lot, Pat,” one of the women teased him. “A lot more, I mean.”

“How could Patrick possibly get laid more ?” another of the women asked, and that set them all off again.

“I’ve heard that women in Japan are treated like shit,” one of the women remarked. “And the men go off to Bangkok and behave abominably.”

“All men behave abominably in Bangkok,” said a woman who’d been there.

“Have you been to Bangkok, Pat?” the first of the women asked. She knew perfectly well that he’d been there—he had been there with her. She was just reminding him of something that everyone in the newsroom knew.

“Have you ever been to Japan, Patrick?” one of the other women asked, when the tittering died down.

“No, never,” Wallingford replied. “I’ve never slept with a Japanese woman, either.”

They called him a pig for saying that, although most of them meant this affectionately. Then they dispersed, leaving him with Mary, one of the youngest of the New York newsroom women. (And one of the few Patrick hadn’t yet slept with.)

When Mary saw they were alone together, she touched his left forearm, very lightly, just above his missing hand. Only women ever touched him there.

“They’re just teasing, you know,” she told him. “Most of them would take off for Tokyo with you tomorrow, if you asked them.”

Patrick had thought about sleeping with Mary before, but one thing or another had always intervened. “Would you take off for Tokyo with me tomorrow, if I asked you?”

“I’m married,” Mary said.

“I know,” Patrick replied.

“I’m expecting a baby,” Mary told him; then she burst into tears. She ran after the other New York newsroom women, leaving Wallingford alone with his thoughts, which were that it was always better to let the woman make the first pass. At that moment, the phone call came from Dr. Zajac.

Zajac’s manners, when introducing himself, were (in a word) surgical. “The first hand I get my hands on, you can have,” Dr. Zajac announced. “If you really want it.”

“Why wouldn’t I want it? I mean if it’s healthy…”

“Of course it will be healthy!” Zajac replied. “Would I give you an un healthy hand?”

“When?” Patrick asked.

“You can’t rush finding the perfect hand,” Zajac informed him.

“I don’t think I’d be happy with a woman’s hand, or an old man’s,” Patrick thought out loud.

“Finding the right hand is my job,” Dr. Zajac said.

“It’s a left hand,” Wallingford reminded him.

“Of course it is! I mean the right donor. ”

“Okay, but no strings attached,” Patrick said.

“Strings?” Zajac asked, perplexed. What on earth could the reporter have meant? What possible strings could be attached to a donor hand?

But Wallingford was leaving for Japan, and he’d just learned he was supposed to deliver a speech on the opening day of the conference; he hadn’t written the speech, which he was thinking about but would put off doing until he was on the plane.

Patrick didn’t give a second thought to the curiousness of his own comment—“no strings attached.” It was a typical disaster-man remark, a lion-guy reflex—just another dumb thing to say, solely for the sake of saying something. (Not unlike

“German girls are very popular in New York right now.”)

And Zajac was happy—the matter had been left in his hands, so to speak.

IS THERE SOMETHING cursed about Asia and me? Wallingford would wonder later. First he’d lost his hand in India; and now, what about Japan? The trip to Tokyo had gone wrong even before the start, if you count Patrick’s insensitive proposition to Mary. Wallingford himself counted it as the start. He’d hit on a young woman who was newly married and pregnant, a girl whose last name he could never remember. Worse, she’d had a look about her that haunted him; it was more than an unmistakable prettiness, although Mary had that, too. Her look indicated a capacity for damage greater than gossip, a ferocity not easily held in check, a potential for some mayhem yet to be defined. Then, on the plane to Tokyo, Patrick struggled with his speech. Here he was, divorced, for good reason—and feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary—and he was supposed to address the subject of “The Future of Women,” in notoriously keep-women-in-their-place Japan.