John Irving - The Fourth Hand

What did Otto care? It was a seasonably mild twenty-five degrees outside, and running the defroster had partially heated the cab of the truck. Although it would soon get cold in there, what was twenty-five degrees with light snow falling to a guy who’d downed eight or nine beers in under four hours?

Otto called his wife. He could tell he’d woken her up. She’d seen the fourth quarter; then, because she was both depressed and sick, she’d fallen back to sleep.

“I couldn’t watch the postgame stuff, either,” he admitted.

“Poor baby,” his wife said. It was what they said to console each other, but lately—given Mrs. Clausen’s as-yet-unsuccessful struggle to get pregnant—they’d been considering a new endearment. The phrase stuck like a dagger in Otto’s inebriated heart.

“It’ll happen, honey,” Otto suddenly promised her, because the dear man, even drunk and despondent, was sensitive enough to know that his wife’s principal distress was that she had the flu when she wanted morning sickness. The meaningless postgame stuff, even the Packers’ heartbreaking defeat, wasn’t what was really bothering her.

It made perfect sense that Mrs. Clausen’s regular OB-GYN had found her way into Otto’s dream; she was not only the physician whom Mrs. Clausen regularly consulted about her difficulties in getting pregnant, but she’d also told Otto and his wife that he should have himself “checked.” (She meant the sperm-count thing, as Otto unspokenly thought of it.) Both the doctor and Mrs. Clausen suspected that Otto was the problem, but his wife loved him to such a degree that she’d been afraid to find out. Otto had been afraid to find out, too—he’d not had himself “checked.”

Their complicity had drawn the Clausens even closer than they already were, but now there was something complicitous in the silences between them. Otto couldn’t stop thinking about the first time they’d made love. This was not merely romantic of him, although he was a deeply romantic man. In the Clausens’ case, that first act of lovemaking had itself been the proposal. Otto’s family had a summer cottage on a lake. There are lots of small lakes in northern Wisconsin, and the Clausens owned a quarter of the shoreline of one of them. When Mrs. Clausen first went there, the misnamed “cottage” turned out to be a cluster of cabins, with a nearby boathouse bigger than any of them. There was room for a small apartment in the unfinished space above the boats, and although there was no electricity on the property, there was a fridge (actually two) and a stove and hot-water heaters (all propane) for the main cabin. The water for the plumbing came from the lake; the Clausens didn’t drink the water, but they could take a hot bath, and there were two flush toilets. They pumped the water out of the lake by means of a gasoline engine of the kind that can run a lawn mower, and they had their own septic tank—quite a large one. (The Clausens were religious about not polluting their little lake.) One weekend when his mom and dad weren’t able to go there, Otto brought his future wife to the lake. They swam off the dock just before sunset, and their wet bathing suits leaked through the planks. It was so quiet, except for the loons, and they sat so still that the water dripping off their bathing suits sounded as if someone had not quite shut off a faucet. The sun, which had departed only minutes before, had warmed the wooden planks all day; Otto and his bride-to-be could feel its warmth when they took off their wet bathing suits. They lay down on a dry towel together. The towel smelled like the sun, and the water drying on their bodies smelled like the lake and the sun, too.

There was no “I love you,” no “Will you marry me?” In each other’s arms on the towel on the warm dock, with their skin still wet and cool, it was a moment that called for more of a commitment than that. This was the first time the future Mrs. Clausen let Otto hear her special tone of voice, and her arousing question: “What are you doing right now?” This was the first time Otto discovered he was too weak to speak. “Do you want to make a baby?” she’d asked. That was the first time they’d tried.

That had been the marriage proposal. He’d said “yes” with his hard-on, an erection with the blood of a thousand words.

After the wedding, Otto had built two separate rooms off a shared hallway above the boats in the boathouse. They were two unusually long, thin rooms—“like bowling alleys,” Mrs. Clausen had teased him—but he’d done it that way so that the occupants of both rooms could see the lakefront. One was their room—their bed took up almost its entire width and was elevated to window level to give them the optimum view. The other room had twin beds; it was for the baby. It made Otto cry to think of that unoccupied room above the gently rocking boats. The sound he had loved most at night, which was the barely heard sound of the water lapping against the boats in the boathouse and the dock where they’d first made love, now only reminded him of the emptiness of that unused room. The feeling, at the end of the day—of a wet bathing suit, and of taking it off; the smell of the sun and the lake on his wife’s wet skin—now seemed ruined by unfulfilled expectations. The Clausens had been married for more than a decade, but in the last two or three summers they’d all but stopped going to the cottage on the lake. Their life together in Green Bay had grown busier; it seemed harder and harder to get away. Or so they said. But in truth, it was even harder for them both to accept that the smell of pine trees was a thing of the past. Then the Packers had to lose to the fucking Broncos! Otto grieved. The unhappy, drunken man could scarcely remember what had started him crying in the cold, parked beer truck. Oh, yes, it had been his wife saying, “Poor baby.” Lately those words had a devastating effect on him. And when she said them in that tone of voice of hers… well, what a merciless world! What had possessed her to do that when they were not physically together, when they were only talking on the phone? Now Otto was crying and he had a hard-on. He was further frustrated that he couldn’t remember how the phone call with his wife had ended, or when. It had already been half an hour since he’d told the taxi dispatcher to have the driver look for him in the parking lot behind the bar. (“I’ll be in the beer truck—you can’t miss it.”) Otto stretched to reach the glove compartment, where he had put his cell phone—carefully, so as not to disturb the beer coasters and stickers, which he also kept there. He handed them out to the kids who surrounded him when he made his deliveries. In Otto’s neighborhood, the kids called him

“Coaster Man” or “Sticker Man,” but what they really sought were the beer posters. Otto kept the posters in the back of the truck, with the beer. He saw nothing wrong in these boys displaying beer posters in their bedrooms, years before they were old enough to drink. Otto would have been wounded to his core if anyone had accused him of leading young men down the road to alcoholism; he simply liked to make the kids happy, and he handed out the coasters and stickers and posters with the same concern for their welfare as he expressed by not driving when he was drunk.

But how had he managed to fall asleep while reaching for the glove compartment? That he was too drunk to have dreams was a blessing, or so he thought. Otto had been dreaming—he was just too drunk to know it. Also the dream was a new one, too new for him to know it was a dream.

He felt the warm, sweat-slick back of his wife’s neck in the crook of his right arm; he was kissing her, his tongue deep inside her mouth, while with his left hand—Otto was left-handed—he touched her again and again. She was very wet, her abdomen pressing upward against the heel of his hand. His fingers touched her as lightly as possible; he was trying his best to touch her barely at all. (She’d had to teach him how to do that.)