John Irving - The Fourth Hand

It’s debatable that watching Jane Brown take off her clothes would have been all that watchable for most television viewers. To describe Ms. Brown as matronly would be a kindness—she needed only to start taking off her clothes to empty the hall of what few men were there. There were almost no men attending the “Future of Women” conference, only the two guys in Patrick Wallingford’s TV crew, the Japanese journalists who were the conference’s unhappy-looking hosts, and, of course, Patrick himself.

The hosts would have been offended if they’d heard about the long-distance request of the New York news editor, who wanted no more footage of the conference itself. Instead of more of the women’s conference, what Dick said he now wanted was “something to contrast to it”—something to undermine it, in other words.

This was pure Dick, Wallingford thought. When the news editor asked for “related material,” what he really meant was something so un related to the women’s conference that it could make a mockery of the very idea of the future of women.

“I hear there’s a child-porn industry in Tokyo,” Dick told Patrick. “Child prostitutes, too. All this is relatively new, I’m told. It’s just emerging—dare I say budding ?”

“What about it?” Wallingford asked. He knew this was pure Dick, too. The news editor had never been interested in “The Future of Women.” The Japanese hosts had wanted Wallingford—the lion-guy video had record sales in Japan—and Dick had taken advantage of the invitation to have disaster man dig up some dirt in Tokyo.

“Of course you’ll have to be careful how you do it,” Dick went on, warning Patrick that there would be “aspersions of racism” cast against the network if they did anything that appeared to be “slanted against the Japanese.”

“You get it?” Dick had asked Wallingford over the phone. “ Slanted against the Japanese…”

Wallingford sighed. Then he suggested, as always, that there was a deeper, more complex story. The “Future of Women” conference was conducted over a four-day period, but only in the daylight hours. Nothing was scheduled at night, not even dinner parties. Patrick wondered why.

A young Japanese woman who wanted Wallingford to autograph her Mickey Mouse T-shirt seemed surprised that he hadn’t guessed the reason. There were no conference-related activities in the evening because women were “supposed to”

spend the nighttime at home with their families. If they’d tried to have a women’s conference in Japan at night, not many women could have come. Wasn’t this interesting? Wallingford asked Dick, but the New York news editor told him to forget it. Although the young Japanese woman looked fantastic oncamera, Mickey Mouse T-shirts weren’t allowed on the all-news network, which had once been involved in a dispute with the Walt Disney Company. In the end, Wallingford was instructed to stick to individual interviews with the women who were the conference’s participants. Patrick could tell that Dick was pulling out on the piece.

“Just see if one or two of these broads will open up to you,” was how Dick left it. Naturally Wallingford began by trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Barbara Frei, the German television journalist. He approached her in the hotel bar. She seemed to be alone; the idea that she might be waiting for someone never crossed Patrick’s mind. The ZDF anchor was every bit as beautiful as she appeared on the small screen, but she politely declined to be interviewed.

“I know your network, of course,” Ms. Frei began tactfully. “I don’t think it likely that they will give serious coverage to this conference. Do you?” Case closed.

“I’m sorry about your hand, Mr. Wallingford,” Barbara Frei said. “That was truly awful—I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you,” Patrick replied. The woman was both sincere and classy. Wallingford’s twenty-four-hour international channel was not Ms. Frei’s, or anyone else’s, idea of serious TV journalism; compared to Barbara Frei, Patrick Wallingford wasn’t serious, either, and both Ms. Frei and Mr. Wallingford knew it.

The hotel bar was full of businessmen, as hotel bars tend to be. “Look—it’s the lion guy!” Wallingford heard one of them say.

“Disaster man!” another businessman called out.

“Won’t you have a drink?” Barbara Frei asked Patrick pityingly.

“Well… all right.” An immense and unfamiliar depression was weighing on him, and as soon as his beer arrived, there also arrived at the bar the man whom Ms. Frei had been waiting for—her husband.

Wallingford knew him. He was Peter Frei, a well-respected journalist at ZDF, although Peter Frei did cultural programs and his wife did what they called hard news.

“Peter’s a little tired,” Ms. Frei said, affectionately rubbing her husband’s shoulders and the back of his neck. “He’s been training for a trip to Mount Everest.”

“For a piece you’re doing, I suppose,” Patrick said enviously.

“Yes, but I have to climb a bit of the mountain to do it properly.”

“You’re going to climb Mount Everest?” Wallingford asked Peter Frei. He was an extremely fit-looking man—they were a very attractive couple.

“Oh, everyone climbs a bit of Everest now,” Mr. Frei replied modestly. “That’s what’s wrong with it—the place has been overrun by amateurs like me!” His beautiful wife laughed fondly and went on rubbing her husband’s neck and shoulders. Wallingford, who was barely able to drink his beer, found them as likable a couple as any he’d known.

When they said good-bye, Barbara Frei touched Patrick’s left forearm in the usual place. “You might try interviewing that woman from Ghana,” she suggested helpfully. “She’s awfully nice and smart, and she’s got more to say than I have. I mean she’s more of a person with a cause than I am.” (This meant, Wallingford knew, that the woman from Ghana would talk to anyone.)

“That’s a good idea—thank you.”

“Sorry about the hand,” Peter Frei told Patrick. “That’s a terrible thing. I think half the world remembers where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.”

“Yes,” Wallingford answered. He’d had only one beer, but he would scarcely remember leaving the hotel bar; he went off full of self-disgust, looking for the African woman as if she were a lifeboat and he a drowning man. He was. It was an unkind irony that the starvation expert from Ghana was extremely fat. Wallingford worried that Dick would exploit her obesity in an unpredictable way. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was dressed in something resembling a tent made of samples from patchwork quilts. But the woman had a degree from Oxford, and another from Yale; she’d won a Nobel Prize in something to do with world nutrition, which she said was “merely a matter of intelligent Third World crises anticipation… any fool with half a brain and a whole conscience could do what I do.”

But as much as Wallingford admired the big woman from Ghana, they didn’t like her in New York. “Too fat,” Dick told Patrick. “Black people will think we’re making fun of her.”

“But we didn’t make her fat!” Patrick protested. “The point is, she’s smart —she’s actually got something to say !”

“You can find someone else with something to say, can’t you? Jesus Christ, find someone smart who’s normal -looking!” But as Wallingford would discover at the

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo, this was exceedingly hard to do—taking into account that, by “ normal -looking,” Dick no doubt meant not fat, not black, and not Japanese.

Patrick took one look at the Chinese geneticist, who had an elevated, hairy mole in the middle of her forehead; he wouldn’t bother trying to interview her. He could already hear what that dick Dick in New York would say about her. “Talk about making fun of people—Jesus Christ! We might as well bomb a Chinese embassy in some asshole country and try calling it an accident or something!”