John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“But he broke up with his wife—this was after I lost Otto,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “And when he called me and asked me out, I didn’t say I would—not at first. I called my friend, just to be sure they were getting divorced and that our going out was all right with her. She said it was okay, but she didn’t mean it. It wasn’t okay with her, after the fact. And I shouldn’t have. I didn’t like him, anyway. Not in that way.”

It was all Wallingford could do not to shout, “Good!”

“So I told him I wouldn’t go out with him anymore. He took it okay, he’s still friendly, but she won’t talk to me. And she was the maid of honor at my wedding, if you can imagine that.” Wallingford could, if only on the basis of a single photograph. “Well, that’s all. I just wanted to tell you,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“I’m glad you told me,” Patrick managed to say, although “glad” didn’t come close to what he felt—a devastating jealousy in tandem with an overwhelming relief. She’d slept with an old friend—that was all! That it hadn’t worked out made Wallingford feel more than glad; he felt elated. He also felt naïve. Without being beautiful, Mrs. Clausen was one of the most sexually attractive women he’d ever met. Of course men would call her and ask her “out.” Why hadn’t he foreseen this?

He didn’t know where to start. Possibly Patrick took too much encouragement from the fact that Mrs. Clausen now gripped his hand more tightly than before; she must have been relieved that he’d been a sympathetic listener.

“I love you,” he began. He was pleased that Doris didn’t take her hand away, although he felt her grip lessen. “I want to live with you and little Otto. I want to marry you.” She was neutral now, just listening. He couldn’t tell what she thought. They didn’t look at each other, not once. They continued to stare at Otto junior sleeping. The child’s open mouth beckoned a story; therefore, Wallingford began one. It was the wrong story to begin, but he was a journalist—a fact guy, not a storyteller.

What he neglected was the very thing he deplored about his profession—he left out the context! He should have begun with Boston, with his trip to see Dr. Zajac because of the sensations of pain and crawling insects where Otto senior’s hand had been. He should have told Mrs. Clausen about meeting the woman in the Charles Hotel—how they’d read E. B. White to each other, naked, but they’d not had sex; how he’d been thinking of Mrs. Clausen the whole time. Really, he had !

All that was part of the context of how he’d acquiesced to Mary Shanahan’s desire to have his baby. And while it might have gone better with Doris Clausen if Patrick had begun with Boston, it would have been better yet if he’d begun with Japan—how he’d first asked Mary, then a young married woman who was pregnant, to come to Tokyo with him; how he’d felt guilty about that, and for so long had resisted her; how he’d tried so hard to be “just a friend.”

Because wasn’t it part of the context, too, that he’d finally slept with Mary Shanahan with no strings attached? Meaning wasn’t he being “just a friend” to give her what she said she wanted? Just a baby, nothing more. That Mary wanted his apartment, too, or maybe she wanted to move in with him; that she also wanted his job, and she knew all along that she was about to become his boss… well, shit, that was a surprise! But how could Patrick have predicted it? Surely if any woman could sympathize with another woman wanting to have Patrick Wallingford’s baby, wasn’t it reasonable for Patrick to think that Doris Clausen would be the one? No, it wasn’t reasonable! And how could she sympathize, given the half-assed manner in which Wallingford told the story? He’d just plunged in. He was artless, in the worst sense of the word—meaning oafish and crude. He began with what amounted to a confession: “I don’t really think of this as an illustration of why I might have trouble maintaining a monogamous relationship, but it is a little disturbing.”

What a way to begin a proposal! Was it any wonder that Doris withdrew her hand from his and turned to look at him? Wallingford, who sensed from his misguided prologue that he was already in trouble, couldn’t look at her while he talked. He stared instead at their sleeping child, as if the innocence of Otto junior might serve to shield Mrs. Clausen from all that was sexually incorrigible and morally reprehensible in his relationship with Mary Shanahan.

Mrs. Clausen was appalled. She wasn’t, for once, even looking at her son; she couldn’t take her eyes off Wallingford’s handsome profile as he clumsily recounted the details of his shameful behavior. He was babbling now, out of nervousness, in part, but also because he feared that the impression he was making on Doris was the opposite of what he’d intended.

What had he been thinking? What an absolute mess it would be if Mary Shanahan was pregnant with his child!

Still in a confessional mode, he lifted the towel to show Mrs. Clausen the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment; he also showed her the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. She’d already noticed how his back was scratched. And the love-bite on his left shoulder—she’d noticed that, too.

“Oh, that wasn’t Mary,” Wallingford confessed.

This was not the best thing he could have said.

“Who else have you been seeing?” Doris asked.

This wasn’t going as he’d hoped. But how much more trouble could Patrick get into by telling Mrs. Clausen about Angie? Surely Angie’s was a simpler story.

“I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night,” Wallingford began. “I was just horny.”

What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!) He told Doris about the phone calls from various members of Angie’s distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused—she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (All the gum-chewing didn’t help.) “Angie is a good-hearted girl,”

Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mentally disabled. “No, no!” Wallingford protested. “Angie is neither underage nor mentally disabled, she’s just… well…”

“A bimbo?” asked Mrs. Clausen.

“No, no! Not exactly,” Patrick protested loyally.

“Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with—that is, if I accepted you,” Doris speculated. “And since you didn’t know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason not to sleep with her.”

“Yes, maybe,” Wallingford replied weakly.

“Well, that’s not so bad,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean.” He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away—she stared at Otto junior, who was still blissfully asleep. “I have more trouble understanding Mary,” Doris added. “I don’t know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she is pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean.”

“Yes, it does,” Patrick agreed. Again he thought: What was I thinking? Wasn’t this also a context he had overlooked?

“I can understand what Mary was up to,” Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn’t turn away. “Who wouldn’t want your baby?” She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. “You’re like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your effect. It’s not that you’re dangerous because you’re handsome—you’re dangerous because you don’t know how handsome you are!