John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Ms. Arbuthnot appeared to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties who traveled with more books than clothes. She wore no makeup and no nail polish, and no rings or other jewelry. She had small fingers and very clean, small hands, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

“Why did I come here?” she asked, repeating Patrick’s question. “I go where I’m invited, wherever it is, both because I’m not invited to many places and because I have a message. But you don’t have a message, do you, Mr. Wallingford? I can’t imagine what you would ever come to Tokyo for, least of all for a conference on

‘The Future of Women.’ Since when is ‘The Future of Women’ news ? Or the lion guy’s kind of news, anyway,” she added.

The helicopter was landing now. Wallingford, watching the enlarging bull’s-eye, was speechless.

“Why did I come here?” Patrick asked, repeating Ms. Arbuthnot’s question. He was just trying to buy a little time while he thought of an answer.

“I’ll tell you why, Mr. Wallingford.” Evelyn Arbuthnot put her small but surprisingly strong hands on his knees and gave him a good squeeze. “You came here because you knew you’d meet a lot of women —isn’t that right?”

So she was one of those people who disliked journalists, or Patrick Wallingford in particular. Wallingford was sensitive to both dislikes, which were common. He wanted to say that he had come to Tokyo because he was a fucking field reporter and he’d been given a fucking field assignment, but he held his tongue. He had that popular weakness of wanting to win over people who disliked him; as a consequence, he had numerous friends. None of them were close, and very few of them were male. (He’d slept with too many women to make close friendships with men.)

The helicopter bumped down; a door opened. A fast-moving bellman, who’d been standing on the rooftop, rushed forward with a luggage cart. There was no bag to take, except Evelyn Arbuthnot’s gym bag, which she preferred to carry herself.

“No bag? No luggage?” the eager bellman asked Wallingford, who was still thinking of how to answer Ms. Arbuthnot.

“My bag was mistakenly sent to the Philippines,” Patrick informed the bellman. He spoke unnecessarily slowly.

“Oh, no problem. Back tomorrow!” the bellman said.

“Ms. Arbuthnot,” Wallingford managed to say, a little stiffly, “I assure you that I don’t have to come to Tokyo, or this conference, to meet women. I can meet women anywhere in the world.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you can.” Evelyn Arbuthnot seemed less than pleased at the idea.

“And I’ll bet you have —everywhere, all the time. One after another.”

Bitch! Patrick decided, and he’d just been beginning to like her. He’d been feeling a lot like an asshole lately, and Ms. Arbuthnot had clearly got the better of him; yet Patrick Wallingford generally thought of himself as a nice guy. Fearing that his lost garment bag would not come back from the Philippines in time for his opening remarks at the “Future of Women” conference, Wallingford sent the clothes he’d worn on the plane to the hotel laundry service, which promised to return them overnight. Patrick hoped so. The problem then was that he had nothing to wear. He’d not anticipated that his Japanese hosts (fellow journalists, all) would keep calling him in his hotel room, inviting him for drinks and dinner.

He told them he was tired; he said he wasn’t hungry. They were polite about it, but Wallingford could tell he’d disappointed them. No doubt they couldn’t wait to see the no-hand—the other one, as Evelyn Arbuthnot had put it. Wallingford was looking distrustfully at the room-service menu when Ms. Arbuthnot called. “What are you doing for dinner?” she asked. “Or are you just doing room service?”

“Hasn’t anyone asked you out?” Patrick inquired. “They keep inviting me, but I can’t go because I sent the clothes I was wearing to the laundry service—in case my bag isn’t back from the Philippines tomorrow.”

“Nobody’s asked me out,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. “But I’m not famous—I’m not even a journalist. Nobody ever asks me out.”

Wallingford could believe this, but all he said was: “Well, I’d invite you to join me in my room, but I have nothing to wear except a towel.”

“Call housekeeping,” Evelyn Arbuthnot advised him. “Tell them you want a robe. Men don’t know how to sit in towels.” She gave him her room number and told him to call her back when he had the robe. Meanwhile she’d have a look at the room-service menu.

But when Wallingford called housekeeping, a woman’s voice said, “Solly, no lobes.” Or so Wallingford misheard. And when he called back Ms. Arbuthnot and reported what housekeeping had told him, she surprised him again.

“No lobe, no loom service.”

Patrick thought she was kidding. “Don’t worry—I’ll keep my knees tight together. Or I’ll try wearing two towels.”

“It’s not you, it’s me—it’s my fault,” Evelyn said. “I’m just disappointed in myself for being attracted to you.” Then she said, “Solly,” and hung up the phone. At least housekeeping, in lieu of the robe, sent him a complimentary toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste.

There’s not a lot of trouble you can get into in Tokyo when you’re wearing just a towel; yet Wallingford would find a way. Not having much of an appetite, he called something listed in the hotel directory asMASSAGE THERAPY instead of room service. Big mistake.

“Two women,” said the voice answering for the massage therapist. It was a man’s voice, and to Patrick it sounded like he said, “Two lemons”; yet he thought he’d understood what the man had said.

“No, no—not ‘two women,’ just one man. I’m a man, alone,” Wallingford explained.

“Two lemons,” the man on the phone confidently replied.

“Whatever,” Wallingford answered. “Is it shiatsu?”

“It’s two lemons or nothing,” the man said more aggressively.

“Okay, okay,” Patrick conceded. He opened a beer from the mini-bar while he waited in his towel. Before long, two women came to his door. One of them carried the table with the hole cut in one end of it for Wallingford’s face; it resembled an execution device, and the woman who carried it had hands that Dr. Zajac would have said resembled the hands of a famous tight end. The other woman carried some pillows and towels—she had forearms like Popeye’s.

“Hi,” Wallingford said.

They looked at him warily, their eyes on his towel.

“Shiatsu?” Patrick asked them.

“There are two of us,” one of the women told him.

“Yes, there certainly are,” Wallingford said, but he didn’t know why. Was it to make the massage go faster? Maybe it was to double the cost of the massage. When his face was in the hole, he stared at the bare feet of the woman who was grinding her elbow into his neck; the other woman was grinding her elbow (or was it her knee?) into his spine, in the area of his lower back. Patrick gathered his courage and asked the women outright: “Why are there two of you?”

To Wallingford’s surprise, the muscular massage therapists giggled like little girls.

“So we won’t get raped,” one of the women said.

“Two lemons, no lape,” Wallingford heard the other woman say. Their thumbs and their elbows, or their knees, were getting to him now—the women were digging pretty deep—but what really offended Wallingford was the concept that someone could be so morally reprehensible as to rape a massage therapist. (Patrick’s experiences with women had all been of a fairly limited kind: the women had wanted him.)