John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Not only was Wallingford not accustomed to writing speeches; he was not used to speaking without reading the script off the TelePrompTer. (Usually someone else had written the script.) But maybe if he looked over the list of participants in the conference—they were all women—he might find some flattering things to say about them, and this flattery might suffice for his opening remarks. It was a blow to him to discover that he had no firsthand knowledge of the accomplishments of any of the women participating in the conference; alas, he knew who only one of the women was, and the most flattering thing he could think of saying about her was that he thought he’d like to sleep with her, although he’d seen her only on television.

Patrick liked German women. Witness that braless sound technician on the TV

crew in Gujarat, that blonde who’d fainted in the meat cart, the enterprising Monika with a k. But the German woman who was a participant in the Tokyo conference was a Barbara, spelled the usual way, and she was, like Wallingford, a television journalist. Unlike Wallingford, she was more successful than she was famous.

Barbara Frei anchored the morning news for ZDF. She had a resonant, professional-sounding voice, a wary smile, and a thin-lipped mouth. She had shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, adroitly tucked behind her ears. Her face was beautiful and sleek, with high cheekbones; in Wallingford’s world, it was a face made for television.

On TV, Barbara Frei wore nothing but rather mannish suits in either black or navy blue, and she never wore a blouse or a shirt of any kind under the wide-open collar of the suit jacket. She had wonderful collarbones, which she quite justifiably liked to show. She preferred small stud earrings—often emeralds or rubies—Patrick could tell; he was knowledgeable about women’s jewelry.

But while the prospect of meeting Barbara Frei in Tokyo gave Wallingford an unrealistic sexual ambition for his time in Japan, neither she nor any of the conference’s other participants could be of any help in writing his speech. There was a Russian film director, a woman named Ludmilla Slovaboda. (The spelling only approximates Patrick’s phonetic guess at how one might pronounce her last name. Let’s call her Ludmilla.) Wallingford had never seen her films. There was a Danish novelist, a woman named Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen; her first name was spelled three different ways in the printed material that Patrick’s Japanese hosts had sent. However her name was spelled, Wallingford presumed one said “bode eel ”—accent on the eel —but he wasn’t sure. There was an English economist with the boring name of Jane Brown. There was a Chinese geneticist, a Korean doctor of infectious diseases, a Dutch bacteriologist, and a woman from Ghana whose field was alternately described as “food-shortage management” or “world-hunger relief.” There was no hope of Wallingford’s pronouncing any of their names correctly; he wouldn’t even try. The list of participants went on and on, all highly accomplished professional women—with the probable exception of an American author and self-described radical feminist whom Wallingford had never heard of, and a lopsided number of participants from Japan who seemed to represent the arts.

Patrick was uncomfortable around female poets and sculptors. It was probably not correct to call them poetesses and sculptresses, although this is how Wallingford thought of them. (In Patrick’s mind, most artists were frauds; they were peddling something unreal, something made up.)

So what would his welcoming speech be? He wasn’t entirely at a loss—he’d not lived in New York for nothing. Wallingford had suffered through his share of black-tie occasions; he knew what bullshitters most masters of ceremonies were—he knew how to bullshit, too. Therefore, Patrick decided his opening remarks should be nothing more or less than the fashionable and news-savvy blather of a master of ceremonies—the insincere, self-deprecating humor of someone who appears at ease while making a joke of himself. Boy, was he wrong. How about this for an opening line? “I feel insecure addressing such a distinguished group as yourselves, given that my principal and, by comparison, lowly accomplishment was to illegally feed my left hand to a lion in India five years ago.”

Surely that would break the ice. It had been good for a laugh at the last speech Wallingford had given, which was not really a speech but a toast at a dinner honoring Olympic athletes at the New York Athletic Club. The women in Tokyo would prove a tougher audience.

That the airline lost Wallingford’s checked luggage, an overstuffed garment bag, seemed to set a tone. The official for the airline told him: “Your luggage is on the way to the Philippines—back tomorrow!”

“You already know that my bag is going to the Philippines?”

“Most luridly, sir,” the official said, or so Patrick thought; he’d really said, “Most assuredly, sir,” but Wallingford had misheard him. (Patrick had a childish and offensive habit of mocking foreign accents, which was almost as unlikable as his compulsion to laugh when someone tripped or fell down.) For the sake of clarification, the airline official added: “The lost luggage on that flight from New York always goes to the Philippines.”

“ ‘Always’?” Wallingford asked.

“Always back tomorrow, too,” the official replied.

There then followed the ride in the helicopter from the airport to the rooftop of his Tokyo hotel. Wallingford’s Japanese hosts had arranged for the chopper.

“Ah, Tokyo at twilight—what can compare to it?” said a stern-looking woman seated next to Patrick on the helicopter. He hadn’t noticed that she’d also been on the plane from New York—probably because she’d been wearing an unflattering pair of tortoiseshell glasses and Wallingford had given her no more than a passing look. (She was the American author and self-described radical feminist, of course.)

“You’re being facetious, I trust,” Patrick said to her.

“I’m always facetious, Mr. Wallingford,” the woman replied. She introduced herself with a short, firm handshake. “I’m Evelyn Arbuthnot. I recognized you by your hand—the other one.”

“Did they send your luggage to the Philippines, too?” Patrick asked Ms. Arbuthnot.

“Look at me, Mr. Wallingford,” she instructed him. “I’m strictly a carry-on person. Airlines don’t lose my luggage.”

Perhaps he’d underestimated Evelyn Arbuthnot’s abilities; maybe he should try to find, and even read, one of her books.

But below them was Tokyo. He could see that there were heliports on the rooftops of many hotels and office buildings, and that other helicopters were hovering to land. It was as if there were a military invasion of the huge, hazy city, which, in the twilight, was tinged by an array of improbable colors, from pink to blood-red, in the fading sunset. To Wallingford, the rooftop helipads looked like bull’s-eyes; he tried to guess which bull’s-eye their helicopter was aiming at.

“Japan,” Evelyn Arbuthnot said despairingly.

“You don’t like Japan?” Patrick asked her.

“I don’t ‘like’ anyplace,” she told Wallingford, “but the man-woman thing is especially onerous here.”

“Oh,” Patrick replied.

“You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked him. While he was still shaking his head, she told him: “You shouldn’t have come, disaster man.”

“Why did you come?” Wallingford asked her.

She was kind of growing on him with every negative word she spoke. He began to like her face, which was square with a high forehead and a broad jaw—her short gray hair sat on her head like a no-nonsense helmet. Her body was squat and sturdy-looking, and not at all revealed; she wore black jeans and a man’s untucked denim shirt, which looked soft from a lot of laundering. Judging by what Wallingford could see, which was not much, she seemed to be smallbreasted—she didn’t bother to wear a bra. She had on a sensible, if dirty, pair of running shoes, which she rested on a large gym bag that only partially fit beneath her seat; the bag had a shoulder strap and looked heavy.