John Irving - The Fourth Hand

The phone rang while the frightened girl lay shaking on his chest, wracked with sobs, sucking huge gulps of air. “I was dyin’, ” she managed to gasp. Patrick, who’d thought she was coming, said nothing while the machine answered the call.

“I was dyin’ and comin’ at the same time,” the girl added. “It was weird.”

From the answering machine, a voice spoke from the city’s grim underground; there were metallic shrieks and the lurching rumble of a subway train, over which Angie’s father, a transit policeman, made his message clear. “Angie, are ya tryin’

to kill your muthuh or what? She’s not eatin’, she’s not sleepin’, she’s not goin’ to Mass…” Another train screeched over the cop’s lament.

“Daddy,” was all Angie said to Wallingford. Her hips were moving again. As a couple, they seemed eternally joined—a minor god and goddess representing death by pleasure.

Angie was screaming again when the phone rang a fourth time. What time is it? Patrick wondered, but when he looked at his digital alarm clock, something pink was covering the time. It had a ghastly anatomical appearance, like part of a lung, but it was only Angie’s gum—definitely some sort of berry flavor. The way the light of the alarm clock shone through the substance made the gum resemble living tissue.

“God…” he said, coming, just as the makeup girl also came. Her teeth, doubtless missing the gum, sank into Wallingford’s left shoulder. Patrick could tolerate the pain—he’d known worse. But Angie was even more enthusiastic than he’d expected her to be. She was a screamer, a choker, and a biter. She was in midbite when she fainted dead away.

“Hey, cripple,” said a strange man’s voice on Patrick’s answering machine. “Hey, Mista One Hand, do ya know what? You’re gonna lose more than your hand, that’s what. You’re gonna end up with nothin’ between your legs but a fuckin’ draft. ”

Wallingford tried to wake up Angie by kissing her, but the fainted girl just smiled.

“There’s a call for you,” Patrick whispered in her ear. “You might want to take this one.”

“Hey, fuck-face,” the man in the answering machine said, “did ya know that even television personalities can just disappear ?” He must have been calling from a moving car. The radio was playing Johnny Mathis—softly, but not softly enough. Wallingford thought of the signet ring Angie wore on the chain around her neck; it would slip over a knuckle the size of his big toe. But she had already taken off the ring, and she’d dismissed its owner as “a nobody”—some guy who was

“overseas.” So who was the guy on the phone?

“Angie, I think you ought to hear this,” Patrick whispered. He gently pulled the sleeping girl into a sitting position; her hair fell forward, hiding her face, covering her pretty breasts. She smelled like a delectable concoction of fruits and flowers; her body was coated with a thin and glowing film of sweat.

“Listen to me, Mista One Hand,” the answering machine said. “I’m gonna grind up your prick in a blenda. Then I’m gonna make ya drink it!” That was the end of the charmless call.

Wallingford was packing for Wisconsin when Angie woke up.

“Boy, have I gotta pee!” the girl said.

“There was another call—not your mother. Some guy said he was going to grind up my penis in a blender.”

“That would be my brother Vittorio—Vito, for short,” Angie said. She left the door to the bathroom open while she peed. “Did he really say ‘penis’?” she called from the toilet.

“No, he actually said ‘prick,’ ” Patrick replied.

“Definitely Vito,” the makeup girl said. “He’s harmless. Vito don’t even have a job.” How did Vito’s unemployment make him harmless? “So what’s in Minnesota, anyway?” Angie asked.

“Wisconsin,” he corrected her.

“So who’s there?”

“A woman I’m going to ask to marry me,” Patrick answered. “She’ll probably say no.”

“Hey, ya gotta real problem, do ya know that?” Angie asked. She pulled him back to the bed. “Come here, ya gotta have more confidence than that. Ya gotta believe she’s gonna say yes. Otherwise, why botha?”

“I don’t think she loves me.”

“Sure she does! Ya just gotta practice,” the makeup girl said. “Go on—ya can practice on me. Go on— ask me!”

He tried; after all, he’d been rehearsing. He told her what he wanted to say to Mrs. Clausen.

“Geez… that’s terrible,” Angie said. “To begin with, ya can’t start out apologizin’ all over the place—ya gotta come right out and say, ‘I can’t live widoutcha!’ That kind of thing. Go on— say it!”

“I can’t live without you,” Wallingford announced unconvincingly.

“Geez…”

“What’s wrong?” Patrick asked.

“Ya gotta say it betta than that !”

The phone rang, the fifth call. It was Mary Shanahan again, presumably calling from the solitude of her apartment on East Fifty-something—Wallingford could almost hear the whoosh of cars passing on the FDR Drive. “I thought we were friends,” Mary began. “Is this how you treat a friend? Someone who’s having your baby …” Either her voice broke or her thought trailed away.

“She’s gotta point,” Angie said to Patrick. “Ya betta say somethin’ to her.”

Wallingford thought of shaking his head, but he was lying with his face on Angie’s breasts; he considered it rude to shake his head there.

“You can’t still be fucking that girl!” Mary cried.

“If ya don’t talk to her, I’m gonna talk to her. Someone’s gotta,” the compassionate makeup girl said.

“You talk to her, then,” Wallingford replied. He buried his face lower, in Angie’s belly; he tried to muffle his hearing there, while she picked up the phone.

“This is Angie, Ms. Shanahan,” the good-hearted girl began. “Ya shouldn’t be upset. It hasn’t been all that great here, really. A while ago, I nearly choked to death. I almost died—I’m not kiddin’.” Mary hung up. “Was that bad?” Angie asked Wallingford.

“No, that was good. That was just fine. I think you’re great,” he said truthfully.

“Ya just sayin’ that,” Angie told him. “Are ya tryin’ to get laid again or what?”

So they had sex. What else were they going to do? This time, when Angie fainted again, Wallingford thoughtfully removed her old gum from the face of his clock before setting the alarm.

Angie’s mother called once more—at least that was who Patrick assumed the caller was. Without saying a word, the woman wept on and on, almost melodiously, while Wallingford drifted in and out of sleep. He woke up before the alarm went off. He lay looking at the sleeping girl—her untrammeled goodwill was truly a thing of beauty. Patrick shut off the alarm before it sounded; he wanted to let Angie sleep. After he showered and shaved, he made a survey of his damaged body: the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table at Mary’s, the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. His back was scratched from Angie’s nails; on his left shoulder was a sizable blood blister, a purplish hematoma and some broken skin from her spontaneous bite. Patrick Wallingford seemed in dubious condition for offering a marriage proposal in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. He made some coffee and brought the sleeping girl a glass of cold orange juice in bed.

“Look at this place…” she was soon saying, marching naked through his apartment. “It looks like ya been havin’ sex!” She stripped the sheets and the pillowcases; she started gathering up the towels. “Ya gotta washin’ machine, don’tcha? I know ya gotta plane to catch—I’ll clean up here. What if that woman says yes? What if she comes back here with ya?”