John Irving - The Fourth Hand

Wallingford knew where his fingers went, although he couldn’t feel them. The change in Doris’s breathing was apparent. He couldn’t help himself—he kissed her forehead, nuzzled her hair. Then she seized his probing hand and brought his fingers to her lips. He held his breath in anticipation of the pain, but there was none. With her other hand, she took hold of his penis; then she abruptly let it go. Wrong penis! The spell was broken. Mrs. Clausen was wide awake. They could both smell the fingers of Otto’s remarkable left hand—it rested on the pillow, touching their faces.

“Is the ache gone?” Doris asked him.

“Yes,” Patrick answered. He meant only that it was gone from the hand. “But there’s another ache, a new one…” he started to say.

“I can’t help you with that one,” Mrs. Clausen declared. But when she turned her back to him, she gently held his left hand against her big belly. “If you want to touch yourself—you know, while you hold me—maybe I can help you a little. ”

Tears of love and gratitude sprang to Patrick’s eyes.

What decorum was called for here? It seemed to Wallingford that it would be most proper if he could finish masturbating before he felt the baby kick, but Mrs. Clausen held his left hand tightly to her stomach— not to her breast—and before Patrick could come, which he managed with uncommon quickness, the unborn child kicked twice. The second time elicited that exact same twinge of pain he’d felt before, a pain sharp enough to make him flinch. This time Doris didn’t notice, or else she confused it with the sudden shudder with which he came. Best of all, Wallingford would think later, Mrs. Clausen had then rewarded him with that special voice of hers, which he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Ache all gone?” she’d asked. The hand, again of its own accord, slipped from her giant belly to her swollen breast, where she let it stay.

“Yes, thank you,” Patrick whispered, and fell into a dream. There was a smell he at first failed to recognize because it was so unfamiliar to him; it’s not a smell one experiences in New York or Boston. Pine needles! he suddenly realized.

There was the sound of water, but not the ocean and not from a tap. It was water lapping against the bow of a boat—or maybe slapping against a dock—but whatever water it was, it was music to the hand, which moved as softly as water itself over the enlarged contour of Mrs. Clausen’s breast. The twinge (even his memory of the twinge) was gone, and in its aftermath floated the best night’s sleep Wallingford would ever have, but for the disquieting thought, when he woke up, that the dream had seemed not quite his. It was also not as close to his cobalt-blue-capsule experience as he would have liked. To begin with, there’d been no sex in the dream, nor had Wallingford felt the heat of the sun in the planks of the dock, or the dock itself through what seemed to be a towel; instead there’d been only a far-off sense that there was a dock somewhere else.

That night he didn’t hear the camera shutter in his sleep. You could have taken Patrick Wallingford’s photograph a thousand times that night. He would never have known.

IT WAS ALL RIGHT with Wallingford when Doris talked about wanting her child to know his or her father’s hand. What this meant to Patrick was that he could expect to go on seeing her. He loved her with slimmer and slimmer hope of her reciprocation, which was disquietingly unlike the way she loved the hand. She would hold it to her belly, against the unborn child’s persistent kicks, and while she could occasionally feel Wallingford flinch in pain, she had ceased to find his twinges alarming.

“It’s not really your hand,” Mrs. Clausen reminded Patrick, not that he needed reminding. “Imagine what it must be like for Otto—to feel a child he’s never going to see. Of course it hurts him!”

But wasn’t it Wallingford’s pain? In his former life, with Marilyn, Patrick might have responded sarcastically. (“Now that you put it that way, I’m not worried about the pain.”) But with Doris… well, all he could do was adore her. Moreover, there was strong support for Mrs. Clausen’s argument. The new hand didn’t look like Patrick’s—it never would. Otto’s left hand was not that much bigger, but we do a lot of looking at our hands—it’s hard to get used to someone else’s. There were times when Wallingford would stare at the hand intently, as if he expected it to speak; nor could he resist smelling the hand—it did not have his smell. He knew that from the way Mrs. Clausen closed her eyes, when she smelled the hand, it smelled like Otto.

There were welcome distractions. During his long recovery and rehabilitation, Patrick’s career, which had been grounded in the Boston newsroom so that he could be close to Dr. Zajac and the Boston team, began to flourish. (Maybe

“flourish” is too strong a word; let’s just say that the network allowed him to branch out a bit.)

The twenty-four-hour international channel created a weekend-anchor slot for him following the evening news; this Saturday-night sidebar to the regular news show was telecast from Boston. While the producers still gave Wallingford all the stories about bizarre casualties, they permitted him to introduce and summarize these stories with a dignity that was surprising and newfound—both in Wallingford and in the all-news network. No one in Boston or New York—not Patrick, not even Dick—could explain it.

Patrick Wallingford acted on-camera as if Otto Clausen’s hand were truly his own, conveying a sympathy previously absent from the calamity channel and his own reporting. It was as if he knew he’d got more than a hand from Otto Clausen. Of course, among serious reporters—meaning those journalists who reported the hard news in depth and in context—the very idea of a sidebar to what passed for the news on the disaster network was laughable. In the real news, there were refugee children whose mothers and aunts had been raped in front of them, although neither the women nor the children would usually admit to this. In the real news, the fathers and uncles of these refugee children had been murdered, although there was scant admitting to this, either. There were also stories of doctors and nurses being shot—deliberately, so that the refugee children would be without medical care. But tales of such willful evil in foreign countries were not reported in depth on the so-called international channel, nor would Patrick Wallingford ever get a field assignment to report them.

More likely, he would be expected to find improbable dignity in and sympathy for the victims of frankly stupid accidents, like his. If there was what could be called a thought behind this watered-down version of the news, the thought was as small as this: that even in what was gruesome, there was (or should be) something uplifting, provided that what was gruesome was idiotic enough.

So what if the all-news network would never send Patrick Wallingford to Yugoslavia? What was it the confused doorman’s brother had said to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis? (“Look—you have a job, don’t you?”) Well, Wallingford had a job, didn’t he?

And most Sundays he was free to fly to Green Bay. When the football season started, Mrs. Clausen was eight months pregnant; it was the first time in recent memory that she wouldn’t see a single Packer home game at Lambeau Field. Doris joked that she didn’t want to go into labor on the forty-yard line—not if it was a good game. (What she meant was that no one would have paid any attention to her.) Therefore, she and Wallingford watched the Packers on television. Absurdly, he flew to Green Bay just to watch TV.