John Irving - The Fourth Hand

on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventually have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see—his fellow journalists, our selfappointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.

They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the brilliantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.

Naturally there would be an analysis of the small plane’s disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot’s presumed error. Many of Patrick’s fellow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.’s judgment; indeed, the judgment of all Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of “genetic restlessness” among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later—say, near the end of the following week—some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then call for a halt to the process. That was always the way. Wallingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac’s name had been in the news. As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the all-news network hadn’t already called him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach. On an impulse, Wallingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney—that was her married name. Patrick couldn’t remember what Crystal’s last name had been when he’d slept with her. He recalled that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn’t think what it was.

“Patrick Wallingford is not here!” Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hello. “No one here knows where he is!”

In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.

“Hello?” Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wallingford hadn’t said a word.

“What are you, a creep?” Crystal asked. “It’s a breather —I can hear him breathing!” Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.

That was it, Wallingford remembered. When he’d made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and generally went a little crazy—an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wallingford knew what was happening, she’d bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp. Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal’s husband, but he admired the man’s fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)

“You pervert!” Crystal yelled. “If I could see you, I’d bite your face off!”

Patrick didn’t doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.

The only other person in the pool besides Wallingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wallingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets, preferring the water undisturbed. He gradually grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.

She was a woman past the young side of middle age. Wallingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.

The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who’d called him a “carrion feeder” at breakfast—hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, all the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.

She was the first to speak. “This is awkward.” Her voice had a softer edge than what Wallingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.

“I don’t want to antagonize you,” Patrick told the woman. “I’ll just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway.” He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub’s surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.

The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering—her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a small pouch. “Please stay a minute,”

the woman asked. “I want to explain.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Patrick replied. “In general, I agree with you. It’s just that I didn’t understand the context. I didn’t come to Boston because JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing. I didn’t even know about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand.” He instinctively lifted his stump, which he still spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he’d pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.

She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pulling him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he’d been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman’s lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.

“Please listen to me,” the woman said. She pulled his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the small bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.

“Okay,” Wallingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater. Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?

“I was married twice, the first time when I was very young,” the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. “I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actually loved them both.”

Christ! Wallingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s story? “I’m sorry,” Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn’t want to be interrupted.

“I have two daughters, from my first marriage,” the woman went on. “Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid all the time.”