John Irving - The Fourth Hand

When the massage therapists left, Wallingford was limp. He could barely manage to walk to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth before falling into bed. He saw that he’d left his unfinished beer on the night table, where it would stink in the morning, but he was too tired to get up. He lay as if rubberized. In the morning, he awoke in the exact same position in which he’d fallen asleep—on his stomach with both arms at his sides, like a soldier, and with the right side of his face pressed into the pillow, looking at his left shoulder.

Not until Wallingford got up to answer the door—it was just his breakfast—did he realize that he couldn’t move his head. His neck felt locked; he looked permanently to the left. That he could face only left would present him with a problem at the podium, where he soon had to make his opening remarks to the conference. And before that he had to eat his breakfast while facing his left shoulder. Compounding the difficulty of brushing his teeth with his right (and only) hand, the complimentary toothbrush was a trifle short—given the degree to which he faced left.

At least his luggage was back from its journey to the Philippines, which was a good thing because the laundry service called to apologize for “misplacing” his only other clothes.

“Not losing, merely misplacing!” shouted a man on the verge of hysteria. “Solly!”

When Wallingford opened his garment bag, which he managed by looking over his left shoulder, he discovered that the bag and all his clothes smelled strongly of urine. He called the airline to complain.

“Were you just in the Philippines?” the official for the airline asked.

“No, but my bag was,” Wallingford replied.

“Oh, that explains it!” the official cried happily. “Those drug-sniffing dogs that they have there—sometimes they piss on the suitcases!” Naturally this sounded to Patrick like “piff on the sweet cheeses,” but he got the idea. Filipino dogs had urinated on his clothes!

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” the airline official told him. “It just happens. The dogs have to go, I guess.”

Stupefied, Wallingford searched his clothes for a shirt and a pair of pants that were, relatively speaking, not permeated with dog piss. He reluctantly sent the rest of his clothes to the hotel laundry service, admonishing the man on the phone not to lose these clothes—they were his last.

“Others not losing!” the man shouted. “Merely misplacing!” (This time he didn’t even say “Solly!”)

Given how he knew he smelled, Patrick was not pleased to share a taxi to the conference with Evelyn Arbuthnot—especially as he was forced, by the crick in his neck, to ride in the taxi with his face turned rudely away from her.

“I don’t blame you for being angry with me, but isn’t it rather childish not to look at me?” she asked. She kept sniffing all around, as if she suspected there were a dog in the cab.

Wallingford told her everything: the two-lemon massage (“the two-woman mauling,” he called it); his one-way neck; the dog-peeing episode.

“I could listen to your stories for hours,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. He didn’t need to see her to know she was being facetious.

Then came his speech, which he delivered standing sideways at the podium, looking down his left arm at his stump, which was more visible to him than the hard-to-read pages. With his left side to the audience, Patrick’s amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the Japanese press to describe Wallingford as “milking his missing hand.” (In the Western media, his missing hand was often referred to as his “no-hand” or his “nonhand.”) More generous Japanese journalists attending Patrick’s opening remarks—his male hosts, for the most part—called his left-facing oratorical method “provocative” and “incredibly cool.”

The speech itself was a flop with the highly accomplished women who were the conference’s participants. They had not come to Tokyo to talk about “The Future of Women” and then hear recycled master-of-ceremonies jokes from a man.

“Was that what you were writing on the plane yesterday? Or trying to write, I should say,” Evelyn Arbuthnot remarked. “Jesus, we should have had room service together. If the subject of your speech had come up, I might have spared you that embarrassment.”

As before, Wallingford was rendered speechless in her company. The hall in which he’d spoken was made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray. That was roughly how Evelyn Arbuthnot struck Patrick, too—“made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray.”

The other women shunned him afterward; Wallingford knew that it wasn’t only the dog pee.

Even his German colleague in the world of television journalism, the beautiful Barbara Frei, wouldn’t speak to him. Most journalists meeting Wallingford for the first time would at least offer him some commiseration about the lion business, but the aloof Ms. Frei made it clear that she didn’t want to meet him. Only the Danish novelist, Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen, seemed to look at Patrick with a flicker of pity in her darting green eyes. She was pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there’d recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her—possibly her lover or her husband.

Wallingford attempted to approach Ms. Jensen, but Ms. Arbuthnot cut him off. “I saw her first,” Evelyn told Patrick, making a beeline for Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen.

This damaged Wallingford’s failing self-confidence further. Was that what Ms. Arbuthnot had meant by being disappointed in herself for being attracted to him? Was Evelyn Arbuthnot a lesbian?

Not all that eager to meet anyone while smelling wretchedly of dog piss, Wallingford returned to the hotel to await his clean clothes. He left his two-man television crew to film whatever was interesting in the rest of the speeches that first day, including a panel discussion on rape.

When Patrick got back to his hotel room, the hotel management had sent him flowers—in further apology for “misplacing” his clothes—and there were two massage therapists, two different women, waiting for him. The hotel had also sent him a complimentary massage. “Solly about the crick in your neck,” one of the new women told Patrick.

This sounded something like “click in your knack,” but Wallingford understood what she’d meant. He was doomed to have another two-woman mauling. But these two women managed to cure the crick in his neck, and while they were still engaged in turning him to jelly, the hotel laundry service returned his clean clothes— all his clothes. Perhaps this marked a turn for the better in his Japanese experience, Patrick imagined.

Given the loss of his left hand in India, even though it had happened five years before—given that Filipino dogs had pissed on his clothes, and that he’d needed a second massage to correct the damage done by the first; given that he’d not known Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian, and given his dreadfully insensitive speech; given that he knew nothing about Japan, and arguably even less about the future of women, which he never, not even now, thought about—Wallingford should have been wise enough not to imagine that his Japanese experience was about to take a turn for the better.

Anyone meeting Patrick Wallingford in Japan would have known in an instant that he was precisely the kind of penis-brain who would casually put his hand too close to a lion’s cage. (And if the lion had had an accent, Wallingford would have mocked it.) In retrospect, Patrick himself would rank his time in Japan as an even lower point in his life than the hand-eating episode in India. To be fair, Wallingford wasn’t the only man who missed the panel discussion on rape. The English economist, whose name (Jane Brown) Patrick had thought was boring, turned out to be anything but. She threw a fit at the rape panel and insisted that no men should be present for the discussion, declaring that for women to discuss rape honestly with one another was tantamount to being naked. That much the cameraman and the sound technician for the twenty-four-hour international channel managed to get on film before the English economist, to make her point, began to take off her clothes. Thereupon the cameraman, who was Japanese, respectfully stopped filming.