John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“The baby could go there,” as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, “and I’d still have a little privacy.”

“You’d like to trade your apartment for mine—is that it, Mary?”

“Well… if you’re going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like all you’ll really need to have in New York is a pied-à-terre. My place would be perfect for you!”

They were naked, but Wallingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he’d lost the heart to “fuck some more,” as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown—there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.

“You’ll get used to the noise,” Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wallingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her small, soft belly, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months’ time.

“You’ve got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat,” she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.

He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he’d underestimated about her. Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted—the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that really what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if all he really wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?

“Poor penis,” Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. “It must be tired,” she went on. “Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin.”

“We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for both our plans.” She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.

“Smart boy, Pat. And you’re basically a good guy, too—no matter what anybody else says.”

“It would appear that I’m perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool,” was all Wallingford said in reply.

He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wallingford said oncamera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

When it was evident that Wallingford wasn’t up to having sex again, Mary said they might as well go to work a little early. “I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer,” was how she expressed it. “I have a few ideas,” she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown. Her timing was almost magical. Patrick listened to her talk about “closure,” about

“wrapping up the Kennedy thing.” She’d already written the script, he realized. Almost as an afterthought—they’d cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom—Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. “If I were you, Pat,” she confided, “I wouldn’t worry about Fred. I wouldn’t give him a second thought.”

At first, Wallingford believed that the newsroom women were all abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they all knew. But Fred had been fired—that was the reason for the women’s mercurial chatter. Wallingford was not surprised that Mary wasn’t shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women’s room.)

Patrick was surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wallingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton’s innocuousness struck Patrick as potentially dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people—even Fred, even Patrick Wallingford. But Wharton’s only reference to Wallingford’s small rebellion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred’s subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word “unfortunate.” Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.

Wallingford couldn’t quite tell what it meant—why had they sent only one producer to talk to him? But the choice was predictable; they’d used her before when it struck them that Wallingford needed a pep talk, or some other form of instruction.

Her name was Sabina. She had worked her way up; years ago, she’d been one of the newsroom women. Patrick had slept with her, but only once—when she was much younger and still married to her first husband.

“I suppose there’s an interim replacement for Fred. A new dick, so to speak? A new news editor…” Wallingford speculated.

“I wouldn’t call the appointment an interim replacement, if I were you,” Sabina cautioned him. (Her vocabulary, like Mary’s, was big on “if I were you,” Patrick noticed.) “I would say that the appointment has been a long time coming, and that there’s nothing in the least ‘interim’ about it.”

“Is it you, Sabina?” Wallingford asked. (Was it Wharton? he was thinking.)

“No, it’s Shanahan.” There was just a hint of bitterness in Sabina’s voice.

“Shanahan?” The name didn’t ring a bell with Wallingford.

“Mary, to you,” Sabina told him.

So that was her name! He didn’t even remember it now. Mary Shanahan! He should have known.

“Good luck, Pat. I’ll see you at the script meeting,” was all Sabina said. She left him alone with his thoughts, but he wasn’t alone for long. When Wallingford arrived at the meeting, the newsroom women were already there; they were as alert and jumpy as small, nervous dogs. One of them pushed a memo across the table to Patrick; the paper fairly flew out of her hands. At first glance, he thought it was a press release of the news he already knew, but he soon saw that—in addition to her duties as the new news editor—Mary Shanahan had been made a producer of the show. That must have been why Sabina had so little to say at their earlier meeting. Sabina was a producer, too, only now it seemed she was not as important a producer as she’d been before Mary was made one. As for Wharton, the moon-faced CEO never said anything at the script meetings. Wharton was one of those guys who made all his remarks from the vantage point of hindsight—his comments were strictly after the fact. He came to the script meetings only to learn who was responsible for everything Patrick Wallingford said on-camera. This made it impossible to know how important, or not, Wharton was.

First they reviewed the selected montage footage on file. There was not one image that wasn’t already part of the public consciousness. The most shameless shot, with which the montage concluded by freezing to a still, was a stolen image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. The image wasn’t entirely clear, but she seemed to be caught in the act of trying to block the camera’s view of her son. The boy was shooting baskets, maybe in the driveway of the Schlossberg summer home in Sagaponack. The cameraman had used a telephoto lens—you could tell by the outof-focus branches (probably privet) in the foreground of the frame. (Someone must have snaked a camera through a hedge.) The boy was either oblivious or pretending to be oblivious to the camera.