John Irving - The Fourth Hand

They spent the day lazily, if not entirely relaxed, together. The underlying tension between them was that Doris made no mention of Patrick’s proposal. They took turns swimming off the dock and watching Otto. Wallingford once again went wading with the baby in the shallow water by the sandy beach. They took a boat ride together. Patrick sat in the bow, with little Otto in his lap, while Mrs. Clausen steered the boat—the outboard, because Doris understood it better. The outboard didn’t go as fast as the speedboat, but it wouldn’t have mattered as much to the Clausens if she’d scratched it or banged it up. They ferried their trash to a Dumpster on a dock at the far end of the lake. All the cottagers took their trash there. Whatever garbage—bottles, cans, paper trash, uneaten food, Otto’s soiled diapers—they didn’t take to the Dumpster on the dock, they would have to carry with them on the floatplane.

In the outboard with the motor running, they couldn’t hear each other talk, but Wallingford looked at Mrs. Clausen and very carefully mouthed the words: “I love you.” He knew she’d read his lips and had understood him, but he didn’t grasp what she said to him in return. It was a longer sentence than “I love you”; he sensed she was saying something serious.

On the way back from dumping the trash, Otto junior fell asleep. Wallingford carried the sleeping boy up the stairs to his crib. Doris said that Otto usually took two naps during the day; it was the motion of the boat that had lulled the child to sleep so soundly. Mrs. Clausen speculated that she would have to wake him up to feed him.

It was past late afternoon, already early evening; the sun had started sinking. Wallingford said: “Don’t wake up little Otto just yet. Come down to the dock with me, please.” They were both in their bathing suits, and Patrick made sure that they took two towels with them.

“What are we doing?” Doris asked.

“We’re going to get wet again,” he told her. “Then we’re going to sit on the dock, just for a minute.”

It bothered Mrs. Clausen that they might not hear Otto crying if he woke up from his nap, not even with the windows in the bedroom open. The windows faced out over the lake, not over the big outdoors dock, and the occasional passing motorboat made an interfering noise, but Patrick promised that he’d hear the baby. They dove off the big dock and climbed quickly up the ladder; almost immediately, the dock was enveloped in shade. The sun had dropped below the treetops on their side of the lake, but the eastern shore was still in sunlight. They sat on the towels on the dock while Wallingford told Mrs. Clausen about the pills he’d taken for pain in India, and how (in the blue-capsule dream) he’d felt the heat of the sun in the wood of the dock, even though the dock was in shade.

“Like now,” he said.

She just sat there, shivering slightly in her wet bathing suit. Patrick persisted in telling her how he had heard the woman’s voice but never seen her; how she’d had the sexiest voice in the world; how she’d said, “My bathing suit feels so cold. I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

Mrs. Clausen kept looking at him—she was still shivering.

“Please say it,” Wallingford asked.

“I don’t feel like doing this,” Doris told him.

He went on with the rest of the cobalt-blue dream—how he’d answered, “Yes.”

And the sound of the water dripping from their wet bathing suits, falling between the planks of the dock, returning to the lake. He told her how he and the unseen woman had been naked; then how he’d smelled the sunlight, which her shoulders had absorbed; and how he’d tasted the lake on his tongue, which had traced the contours of the woman’s ear.

“You had sex with her, in the dream?” Mrs. Clausen asked.

“Yes.”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “Not out here, not now. Anyway, there’s a new cottage across the lake. The Clausens told me that the guy has a telescope and spies on people.”

Patrick saw the place she meant. The cabin across the lake was a raw-looking color; the new wood stood out against the surrounding blue and green.

“I thought the dream was coming true,” was all he said. (It almost came true, he wanted to tell her.)

Mrs. Clausen stood up, taking her towel with her. She took off her wet bathing suit, covering herself with her towel in the process. She hung her suit on the line and wrapped herself more tightly in her towel. “I’m going to wake up Otto,” she said.

Wallingford took off his swim trunks and hung his suit on the line beside Doris’s. Because she’d already gone to the boathouse, he was unconcerned about covering himself with his towel. In fact, he faced the lake naked for a moment, just to force the asshole with the telescope to take a good look at him. Then Wallingford wrapped his towel around himself and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He changed into a dry bathing suit and a polo shirt. By the time he went to the other bedroom, Mrs. Clausen had changed, too; she was wearing an old tank top and some nylon running shorts. They were clothes a boy might wear in a gym, but she looked terrific.

“You know, dreams don’t have to be exactly true-to-life in order to come true,” she told him, without looking at him.

“I don’t know if I have a chance with you,” Patrick said to her. She walked up the path to the main cabin, purposely ahead of him, while he carried little Otto. “I’m still thinking about it,” she said, keeping her back to him. Wallingford calculated what she’d said by counting the syllables in her words. He thought it was what she’d said to him in the boat when he couldn’t hear her. (“I’m still thinking about it.”) So he had a chance with her, though probably a slim one. They ate a quiet dinner on the screened-in porch of the main cabin, which overlooked the darkening lake. The mosquitoes came to the surrounding screens and hummed to them. They drank the second bottle of red wine while Wallingford talked about his fledgling effort to get fired. This time he was smart enough to leave Mary Shanahan out of the story. He didn’t tell Doris that he’d first got the idea from something Mary had said, or that Mary had a fairly developed plan concerning how he might get himself fired.

He talked about leaving New York, too, but Mrs. Clausen seemed to lose patience with what he was saying. “I wouldn’t want you to quit your job because of me, ”

she told him. “If I can live with you, I can live with you anywhere. Where we live or what you do isn’t the issue.”

Patrick paced around with Otto in his arms while Doris washed the dishes.

“I just wish Mary wouldn’t have your baby,” Mrs. Clausen finally said, when they were fighting off the mosquitoes on the path back to the boathouse. He couldn’t see her face; again she was ahead of him, carrying the flashlight and a bag of baby paraphernalia while he carried Otto junior. “I can’t blame her… wanting to have your baby,” Doris added, as they were climbing the stairs to the boathouse apartment. “I just hope she doesn’t have it. Not that there’s anything you can or should do about it. Not now.”

It struck Wallingford as typical of himself that here was an essential element of his fate, which he’d unwittingly set in motion but over which he had no control; whether Mary Shanahan was pregnant or not was entirely an accident of conception.

Before leaving the main cabin—when he had used the bathroom, and after he’d brushed his teeth—he had taken a condom from his shaving kit. He’d held it in his hand all the way to the boathouse. Now, as he put Otto down on the bed that served as a changing table in the bedroom, Mrs. Clausen saw that the fist of Wallingford’s one hand was closed around something.