John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“I’ll show you ‘testosterone-driven,’ ” Mary whispered to him, just before he came. It didn’t matter that her breath was bad—they were friends. It was just sex, as frank and familiar as a handshake. A barrier that had long existed had been lifted. Sex was a burden that had stood between them; now it was no big deal. Mary had nothing to eat in her apartment. She’d never cooked a meal or even eaten breakfast there. She would start looking for a bigger apartment, she declared, now that she was going to have a baby.

“I know I’m pregnant,” she chirped. “I can feel it.”

“Well, it’s certainly possible,” was all Patrick said.

They had a pillow fight and chased each other naked through the small apartment, until Wallingford whacked his shin against the stupid glass-topped coffee table in the paisley confusion of the living room. Then they took a shower together. Patrick burned himself on the hot-water faucet while they were soaping each other up and squirming all around, chest-to-chest.

They took a long walk to a coffee shop they both liked—it was on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the Sixties or Seventies. Because of the competing noise on the street, they had to shout at each other the whole way. They walked into the coffee shop still shouting, like people who’ve been swimming and don’t know that their ears are full of water.

“It’s a pity we don’t love each other,” Mary was saying much too loudly. “Then you wouldn’t have to go break your heart in Wisconsin, and I wouldn’t have to have your baby all by myself.”

Their fellow breakfast-eaters appeared to doubt the wisdom of this, but Wallingford foolishly agreed. He told Mary what he was rehearsing to say to Doris. Mary frowned. She worried that the part about trying to lose his job didn’t sound sincere. (As to what she truly thought about the other part—his fathering a child with her just prior to declaring his eternal love for Doris Clausen—Mary didn’t say.)

“Look,” she said. “You’ve got what, eighteen months, remaining on your contract? If they fired you now, they’d try to negotiate you down. You’d probably settle for them owing you only a year’s salary. If you’re going to be in Wisconsin, maybe you’ll need more than a year to find a new job—I mean one you like.”

It was Patrick’s turn to frown. He had exactly eighteen months remaining on his contract, but how had Mary known that?

“Furthermore,” Mary went on, “they’re going to be reluctant to fire you as long as you’re the anchor. They have to make it look as if whoever’s in the anchor chair is everybody’s first choice.”

It only now occurred to Wallingford that Mary herself might be interested in what she called the anchor chair. He’d underestimated her before. The New York newsroom women were no dummies; Patrick had sensed some resentment of Mary among them. He’d thought it was because she was the youngest, the prettiest, the smartest, and the presumed nicest—he hadn’t considered that she might also be the most ambitious.

“I see,” he said, although he didn’t quite. “Go on.”

“Well, if I were you,” Mary said, “I’d ask for a new contract. Ask for three years—no, make that five. But tell them you don’t want to be the anchor anymore. Tell them you want your pick of field assignments. Say you’ll take only the assignments you like.”

“You mean demote myself?” Wallingford asked. “This is the way to get fired?”

“Wait! Let me finish!” Everyone in earshot in the coffee shop was listening.

“What you do is you start to refuse your assignments. You just become too picky!”

“ ‘Too picky,’ ” Patrick repeated. “I see.”

“Suddenly something big happens—I mean major heartache, devastation, terror, and accompanying sorrow. Are you with me, Pat?”

He was. He was beginning to see where some of the hyperbole on the TelePrompTer came from—not all of it was Fred’s work. Wallingford had never spent time with Mary in the hard midmorning light; even the blueness in her eyes was newly clarifying.

“Go on, Mary.”

“Calamity strikes!” she said. In the coffee shop, cups were poised, or resting quietly in their saucers. “It’s big-time breaking news—you know the kind of story. We have to send you. You simply refuse to go.”

“ Then they fire me?” Wallingford asked.

“Then we have to, Pat.”

He didn’t let on, but he’d already noticed when “they” had become “we.” He had underestimated her, indeed.

“You’re going to have one smart little baby, Mary,” was all he said.

“But do you see ?” she insisted. “Let’s say there’s still four or four and a half years remaining on your new contract. They fire you. They negotiate you down, but down to what ? Down to three years, maybe. They end up paying you three years’ salary and you’re home free! Well… home free in Wisconsin, anyway, if that’s really where you want to be.”

“It’s not my decision,” he reminded her.

Mary took his hand. All the while, they’d been consuming a huge breakfast; the fascinated patrons of the coffee shop had been watching them eat and eat throughout their eager shouting.

“I wish you all the luck in the world with Mrs. Clausen,” Mary told him earnestly.

“She’d be a fool not to take you.”

Wallingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested Arlington Road. He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thrillers made her too tense.

“ Eyes Wide Shut ?” Wallingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. “Kubrick’s last—”

“He just died, right?”

“That’s right.”

“All the eulogizing has made me suspicious,” Mary said.

A smart girl, all right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. “It’s with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

“It ruins it for me that they’re married,” Mary said.

The lull in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a position to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; all of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they’d simply stopped.

“Let’s not go to a movie, Pat. Let’s go to your place. I’ve never seen it. Let’s just go there and fuck some more.”

This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. “Okay, Mary,” Wallingford said.

He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wallingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especially in New York, everyone recognized disaster man. But when Patrick was paying the bill, he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop’s patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: “A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat.”

It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. “All this for you alone?” she asked.

“It’s just a one-bedroom, like yours,” Wallingford protested. But while this was strictly true, Patrick’s apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of all, from Mary’s point of view, was that his apartment’s one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby’s crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.