John Irving - The Fourth Hand

So Patrick talked to the Korean doctor of infectious diseases, who he thought was kind of cute. But she turned out to be camera-shy, which took the form of her staring obsessively at his stump. Nor could she name a single infectious disease without stuttering; the mere mention of a disease seemed to grip her in terror. As for the Russian film director—“ No one has seen her movies,” the news editor in New York told Wallingford—Ludmilla (we’ll leave it at that) was as ugly as a toad. Also, as Patrick would discover at two o’clock one morning when she came to his hotel room, she wanted to defect. She didn’t mean to Japan. She wanted Wallingford to smuggle her into New York. In what ? Wallingford would wonder. In his garment bag, now permanently reeking of Filipino dog piss? Surely a Russian defector was news, even in New York. So what if no one had seen her movies? “She wants to go to Sundance,” Patrick told Dick. “For Christ’s sake, Dick, she wants to defect ! That’s a story!” (No sensible news network would turn down a story on a Russian defector.)

But Dick was unimpressed. “We just did five minutes on a Cuban defector, Pat.”

“You mean that no-good baseball player?” Wallingford asked.

“He’s a halfway-decent shortstop, and the guy can hit,” Dick said, and that was that.

Then came the rejection from the green-eyed Danish novelist; she turned out to be a touchy writer who refused to be interviewed by someone who hadn’t read her books. Who did she think she was, anyway? Wallingford didn’t have the time to read her books! At least he’d guessed right about how to pronounce her name—it was “bode eel, ” accent on the eel.

Those too-numerous Japanese women in the arts were eager to talk to him, and they were fond, when they talked to him, of sympathetically touching his left forearm a little above where he’d lost his hand. But the news editor in New York was “sick of the arts.” Dick further claimed that the Japanese women would give the television audience the false impression that the only participants in this conference were Japanese.

“Since when do we worry that we’re giving our viewers a false impression?”

Patrick plucked up the courage to ask.

“Listen, Pat,” Dick said, “that runt poet with the facial tattoo would even put off other poets.”

Wallingford had already been in Japan too long. He was so used to the people’s mispronunciation of his mother tongue that he now misheard his news editor, too. He simply didn’t hear “runt poet”; he heard “cunt poet” instead.

“No, you listen, Dick,” Wallingford retorted, with an uncharacteristic display of something less than his usually sweet-dispositioned self. “I’m not a woman, but even I take offense at that word.”

“ What word?” Dick asked. “Tattoo?”

“You know what word!” Patrick shouted. “Cunt!”

“I said ‘runt,’ not ‘cunt,’ Pat,” the news editor informed Wallingford. “I guess you just hear what you think about all the time.”

Patrick had no recourse. He had to interview Jane Brown, the English economist who’d threatened to undress, or he had to talk to Evelyn Arbuthnot, the presumed lesbian who loathed him and was ashamed that, if only for a moment, she’d been attracted to him.

The English economist was a dingbat of a distinctly English kind. It didn’t matter—Americans are suckers for an English accent. Jane Brown screeched like an unattended tea kettle, not about world economy but on the subject of threatening to take off her clothes in front of men. “I know from experience that the men will never allow me to finish undressing,” Ms. Brown told Patrick Wallingford on-camera, in that overenunciated manner of a character actress of a certain age and background on the English stage. “I never even get down to my undergarments before the men have fled the room—it happens every time! Men are very reliable. By that I mean only that they can be counted on to flee from me!”

Dick in New York loved it. He said that the Jane Brown interview “contrasted nicely” with the earlier footage of her throwing a fit about rape on the first day of the conference. The twenty-four-hour international channel had its story. The

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo had been covered—better to say, it had been covered in the all-news network’s way, which was to marginalize more than Patrick Wallingford; it was also to marginalize the news. A women’s conference in Japan had been reduced to a story about a matronly and histrionic Englishwoman threatening to take off her clothes at a panel discussion on rape—in Tokyo, of all places.

“Well, wasn’t that cute?” Evelyn Arbuthnot would say, when she saw the minuteand-a-half story on the TV in her hotel room. She was still in Tokyo—it was the closing day of the conference. Wallingford’s cheap-shot channel hadn’t even waited for the conference to be over.

Patrick was still in bed when Ms. Arbuthnot called him. “Solly,” was all Wallingford could manage to say. “I’m not the news editor; I’m just a field reporter.”

“You were just following orders—is that what you mean?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked him.

Evelyn Arbuthnot was much too tough for Patrick Wallingford, especially because Wallingford had not recovered from a night on the town with his Japanese hosts. He thought even his soul must smell like sake. Nor could Patrick remember which of his favorite Japanese newspapermen had given him tickets for two on the highspeed train to and from Kyoto—“the bullet train,” either Yoshi or Fumi had called it. A visit to a traditional inn in Kyoto could be very restorative, they’d told him; he remembered that. “But better go before the weekend.” Regrettably, Wallingford would forget that part of their advice.

Ah, Kyoto—city of temples, city of prayer. Someplace more meditative than Tokyo would do Wallingford a world of good. It was high time he did a little meditating, he explained to Evelyn Arbuthnot, who continued to berate him about the fiasco of the coverage given to the women’s conference by his “lousy not -thenews network.”

“I know, I know…” Patrick kept repeating. (What else could he say?)

“And now you’re going to Kyoto? To do what? Pray? Just what will you pray for?” she asked him. “The most publicly humiliating demise imaginable of your disaster-and-comedy-news network—that’s what I pray for!”

“I’m still hopeful that something nice might happen to me in this country,”

Wallingford replied with as much dignity as he could summon, which wasn’t much.

There was a thoughtful pause on Evelyn Arbuthnot’s end of the phone. Patrick guessed that she was giving new consideration to an old idea.

“You want something nice to happen to you in Japan?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked.

“Well… you can take me to Kyoto with you. I’ll show you something nice. ”

He was Patrick Wallingford, after all. He acquiesced. He did what women wanted; he generally did what he was told. But he’d thought Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian! Patrick was confused.

“Uh… I thought… I mean from your remark to me about that Danish novelist, I took it to mean that… well, that you were gay, Ms. Arbuthnot.”

“That’s a trick I play all the time,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d fallen for it.”

“Oh,” Wallingford said.

“I am not gay, but I’m old enough to be your mother. If you want to think about that and get back to me, I won’t be offended.”

“Surely you couldn’t be my mother—”

“Biologically speaking, I surely could be,” Ms. Arbuthnot said. “I could have had you when I was sixteen—when I looked eighteen, by the way. How’s your math?”