John Irving - The Fourth Hand

And you’re thoughtless.” The word stung him like a slap. “How could you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You weren’t thinking of me! Not then.”

“But you seemed such a… remote possibility,” was all Wallingford could say. He knew that what she’d said was true.

What a fool he was! He’d mistakenly believed that he could tell her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because her relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she’d tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn’t worked out—that was all. Alongside Mrs. Clausen’s single misadventure, Wallingford’s world was sexually lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed. Doris’s disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was still wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he’d noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he’d seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake. (She’d put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant.)

What Wallingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you all of it.

Patrick Wallingford’s world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wallingford also realized was that she had actually taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered everything seriously. In all likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he’d once thought—he’d just blown it.

She sat apart from him on the small bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at—often at this hour of the night or early morning—many times before. “I should get some sleep,” was all she said.

If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wall—at the darker rectangle on the wall of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.

“Something used to hang on the wall… in the other bedroom,” he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. “What was it?”

“It was just a beer poster,” Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.

“Oh.” Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Naturally it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn’t have wanted to go on looking at it.

He extended his one hand, not letting it fall in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers. “You used to have a metal thing in your belly button. It was an ornament of some kind,” he ventured. “I saw it only once.”

He didn’t add that it was the time she’d mounted him in Dr. Zajac’s office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!

She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn’t want him touching her anywhere else. “It was supposed to be a good-luck charm,” Doris explained. In the way she said “supposed to be,”

Wallingford could detect years of disbelief. “Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn’t work, except with you, and you probably didn’t need it.”

“So you don’t wear it anymore?”

“I’m not trying to get pregnant anymore,” she told him.

“Oh.” He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.

“I should get some sleep,” she said again.

“There was something I wanted to read to you,” he told her, “but we can do it another time.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Well, actually, it’s something I want to read to little Otto—when he’s older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to him later.”

Wallingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he’d told her. He felt ridiculous.

“What is it?” she asked again.

“Stuart Little,” he answered, wishing he’d never brought it up.

“Oh, the children’s book. It’s about a mouse, isn’t it?” He nodded, ashamed. “He has a special car,” she added. “He goes off looking for a bird. It’s a kind of On the Road about a mouse, isn’t it?”

Wallingford wouldn’t have put it that way, but he nodded. That Mrs. Clausen had read On the Road, or at least knew of it, surprised him.

“I need to sleep,” Doris repeated. “And if I can’t sleep, I brought my own book to read.”

Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now—all the more so because he hadn’t known that it might have been possible not to lose her.

At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web aloud (and naked) with Sarah Williams, or whatever her name was. Out of context—possibly, in any context—that story would have served only to underline Wallingford’s weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn’t have been good. Now he was just stalling because he didn’t want to lose her. They both knew it.

“What book did you bring to read?” he asked.

Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other small bags containing the baby’s things. It was the only bag she’d brought for herself, and she’d not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it. She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was The English Patient, a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wallingford hadn’t read it but he’d seen the movie.

“It was the last movie I saw with Otto before he died,” Mrs. Clausen explained.

“We both liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read the book. But I put off reading it until now. I didn’t want to be reminded of the last movie I saw with Otto.”

Patrick Wallingford looked down at The English Patient. She was reading a grownup literary novel and he’d planned to read her Stuart Little. How many more ways would he find to underestimate her?

That she worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers didn’t exclude her from reading literary novels, although (to his shame) Patrick had made that assumption. He remembered liking the movie of The English Patient. His ex-wife had said that the movie was better than the book. That he doubted Marilyn’s judgment on just about everything was borne out when she made a comment about the novel that Wallingford remembered reading in a review. What she’d said about The English Patient was that the movie was better because the novel was “too well written.”

That a book could be too well written was a concept only a critic—and Marilyn—could have.

“I haven’t read it,” was all Wallingford said to Mrs. Clausen, who put the book back in her open bag on top of her underwear.