John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“That’s not likely. I mean it’s not likely she’ll come back here with me, even if she does say yes.”

“Spare me ‘not likely’—she might. That’s all ya gotta know. Ya catch the plane. I’ll fix the place. I’ll rewind the answering machine before I leave. I promise.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Patrick told her.

“I wanna help!” Angie said. “I know what it’s like to have a messy life. Go on

—ya betta get outta here! Ya don’t wanna miss your plane.”

“Thank you, Angie.” He kissed her good-bye. She tasted so good, he almost didn’t go. What was wrong with sexual anarchy, anyway?

The phone rang as he was leaving. He heard Vito’s voice on the answering machine. “Hey, listen up, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Vittorio was saying. There was a mechanical whirring, a terrifying sound.

“It’s just a stupid blenda. Go on —don’t miss your plane!” Angie told him. Wallingford was closing the door as she was picking up the phone.

“Hey, Vito,” he heard Angie say. “Listen up, limp dick.” Patrick paused on the landing by the stairs; there was a brief but pointed silence. “That’s the sound your prick would make in the blenda, Vito— no sound, ’cause ya got nothin’ there!”

Wallingford’s nearest neighbor was on the landing—a sleepless-looking man from the adjacent apartment, getting ready to walk his dog. Even the dog looked sleepless as it waited, shivering slightly, at the top of the stairs.

“I’m going to Wisconsin,” Patrick said hopefully.

The man, who had a silver-gray goatee, looked dazed with general indifference and self-loathing.

“Why don’tcha get a fuckin’ magnifyin’ glass so ya can beat off?” Angie was screaming. The dog pricked up its ears. “Ya know whatcha do with a prick as small as yours, Vito?” Wallingford and his neighbor just stared at the dog. “Ya go to a pet shop. Ya buy a mouse. Ya beg it for a blow job.”

The dog, with grave solemnity, seemed to be considering all this. It was some kind of miniature schnauzer with a silver-gray beard, like its master’s.

“Have a safe trip,” Wallingford’s neighbor told him.

“Thank you,” Patrick said.

They started down the stairs together—the schnauzer sneezing twice, the neighbor saying that he thought the dog had caught an “air-conditioning cold.”

They’d reached the half-landing between floors when Angie shouted something mercifully indistinct. The girl’s heroic loyalty was enough to make Wallingford want to go back to her; she was a safer bet than Mrs. Clausen. But it was early on a summer Saturday morning; the day was brimming with hope. (Maybe not in Boston, where a woman whose name wasn’t Sarah Williams either was or was not waiting for an abortion.)

There was no traffic on the way to the airport. Patrick got to the gate before boarding began. Since he’d packed in the dark while Angie slept, he thought it wise to check the contents of his carry-on: a T-shirt, a polo shirt, a sweatshirt, two bathing suits, two pair of underwear—he wore boxers—two pairs of white athletic socks, and a shaving kit, which included his toothbrush and toothpaste and some ever-hopeful condoms. He’d also packed a paperback edition of Stuart Little, recommended for ages eight through twelve.

He had not packed Charlotte’s Web, because he doubted that Doris’s attention span could accommodate two books in one weekend; after all, Otto junior was not yet walking but he was probably crawling. There wouldn’t be much time for reading aloud.

Why Stuart Little instead of Charlotte’s Web ? one might ask. Only because Patrick Wallingford considered the ending to be more in tune with his own on-the-roadagain way of life. And maybe the melancholy of it would be persuasive to Mrs. Clausen—it was certainly more romantic than the birth of all those baby spiders. In the waiting area, the other passengers watched Wallingford unpack and repack his bag. He’d dressed that morning in a pair of jeans and running shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, and he carried a light jacket, a kind of Windbreaker, to drape over his left forearm to conceal the missing hand. But a one-handed man unpacking and repacking a bag would get anyone’s attention. By the time Patrick stopped fussing over what he was bringing to Wisconsin, everyone in the waiting area knew who he was.

They observed the lion guy holding his cell phone in his lap, pinning it against his thigh with the stump of his left forearm while he dialed the number with his one hand; then he picked up the phone and held it to his ear and mouth. When his Windbreaker slipped off the empty seat beside him, his left forearm reached to pick it up, but Wallingford thought better of it and returned the useless stump to his lap.

His fellow passengers must have been surprised. After all these years of handlessness, his left arm still thinks it has a hand! But no one ventured to retrieve the fallen Windbreaker until a sympathetic couple, traveling with a young boy, whispered something to their son. The boy, who was perhaps seven or eight, cautiously approached Patrick’s jacket; he picked it up and put it carefully on the empty seat beside Wallingford’s bag. Patrick smiled and nodded to the boy, who self-consciously hurried back to his parents.

The cell phone rang and rang in Wallingford’s ear. He had meant to call his own apartment and either speak to Angie or leave a message on his answering machine, which he hoped she would hear. He wanted to tell her how wonderful and natural she was; he’d thought of saying something that began, “In another life…” That kind of thing. But he hadn’t made that call; something about the girl’s sheer goodness made him not want to risk hearing her voice. (And what bullshit it was to call someone you’d spent only one night with “natural.”) He called Mary Shanahan instead. Her phone rang so many times that Wallingford was composing a message to leave on her answering machine when Mary picked up the receiver.

“It could only be you, you asshole,” she said.

“Mary, we’re not married—we’re not even going steady. And I’m not trading apartments with you.”

“Didn’t you have a good time with me, Pat?”

“There was a lot you didn’t tell me,” Wallingford pointed out.

“That’s just the nature of the business.”

“I see,” he said. There was that distant, hollow sound—the kind of echoing silence Wallingford associated with transoceanic calls. “I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to ask you about a new contract,” he added. “You said to ask for five years—”

“We should discuss this after your weekend in Wisconsin,” Mary replied. “Three years would be more realistic than five, I think.”

“And should I… well, how did you put it? Should I sort of phase myself out of the anchor chair—is that your suggestion?”

“If you want a new, extended contract—yes, that would be one way,” Mary told him.

“I don’t know the history of pregnant anchors,” Wallingford admitted. “Has there ever been a pregnant anchor? I suppose it could work. Is that the idea? We would watch you get bigger and bigger. Of course there would be some homey commentary, and a shot or two of you in profile. It would be best to have a brief maternity leave, to suggest that having a baby in today’s family-sensitive workplace is no big deal. Then, after what seemed no longer than a standard vacation, you’d be back on-camera, almost as svelte as before.”

That transoceanic silence followed, the hollow sound of the distance between them. It was like his marriage, as Wallingford remembered it.

“Am I understanding ‘the nature of the business’ yet?” Patrick asked. “Am I getting it right?”