John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“No, no! It’s free! I’m giving it to you. It’s already yours,” Patrick said. “I hope it works, if you want it to.” He couldn’t tell if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sell it. At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wallingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work— to all other eyes, she was just a security guard—but when she glanced in Patrick’s direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand. Wallingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

It reminded Patrick of Doris’s and Otto Clausen’s wedding rings, shining in the flashlight’s beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she’d nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand? Or had she never looked? Did she only see them—as Wallingford now would—in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings’

reflection in the lake more everlasting?

If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not really a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock still shone in Doris Clausen’s dreams, and in her imagination.

When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wallingford was—at that moment, literally—as up in the air as Doris Clausen’s thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wallingford would long remember the date; he wouldn’t see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.

HE WOULD HAVE TIME TO HEAL. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment) first turned yellow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie’s nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick’s thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie’s love-bite) went away. Where there’d been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wallingford’s new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto’s shoulder—that bare, that unmarked.

Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son’s smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy. He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wallingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. All he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick’s present contract. Hadn’t it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

Yes, it had. (She’d said, “Ask for three years—no, make that five.”) But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. “I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat,” was all she said.

“I see,” Wallingford replied. “Then I suppose I might as well keep the anchor job.”

“But are you sure you want the job, Pat?”

He believed that Mary wasn’t being cautious just because Wharton and Sabina were there in her office. (The moon-faced CEO and the bitter Sabina sat listening with seeming indifference, not saying a word.) What Wallingford understood about Mary was that she didn’t really know what he wanted, and this made her nervous.

“It depends,” Patrick replied. “It’s hard to imagine trading an anchor chair for field assignments, even if I get to pick my own assignments. You know what they say:

‘Been there, done that.’ It’s hard to look forward to going backward. I guess you’d have to make me an offer, so I have a better idea of what you have in mind.”

Mary looked at him, smiling brightly. “How was Wisconsin?” she asked. Wharton, whose frozen blandness would begin to blend in with the furniture if he didn’t say something (or at least twitch) in the next thirty seconds, coughed minimally into his cupped palm. The unbelievable blankness of his expression called to mind the vacuity of a masked executioner; even Wharton’s cough was underexpressed.

Sabina, whom Wallingford could barely remember sleeping with—now that he thought of it, she’d whimpered in her sleep like a dog having a dream—cleared her throat as if she’d swallowed a pubic hair.

“Wisconsin was fine.”

Wallingford spoke as neutrally as possible, but Mary correctly deduced that nothing had been decided between him and Doris Clausen. He couldn’t have waited to tell her if he and Mrs. Clausen were really a couple. Just as, the second Mary knew she was pregnant, she wouldn’t wait to tell him. And they both knew it had been necessary to enact this standoff in the presence of Wharton and Sabina, who both knew it, too. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been advisable for Patrick Wallingford and Mary Shanahan to be alone together.

“Boy, is it ever frosty around here!” was what Angie told Wallingford, when she got him alone in the makeup chair.

“Is it ever !” Patrick admitted. He was glad to see the good-hearted girl, who’d left his apartment the cleanest it had been since the day he moved in.

“So… are ya gonna tell me about Wisconsin or what?” Angie asked.

“It’s too soon to say,” Wallingford confessed. “I’ve got my fingers crossed,” he added—an unfortunate choice of words because he was reminded of Mrs. Clausen’s fertility charm.

“My fingers are crossed for ya, too,” Angie said. She had stopped flirting with him, but she was no less sincere and no less friendly.

Wallingford would throw away his digital alarm clock and replace it with a new one, because whenever he looked at the old one he would remember Angie’s piece of gum stuck there—as well as the near-death gyrations that had caused her gum to be expectorated with such force. He didn’t want to lie in bed thinking about Angie unless Doris Clausen said no.

For now, Doris was being vague. Wallingford had to acknowledge that it was hard to know what to make of the photographs she sent him, although her accompanying comments, if not cryptic, struck him as more mischievous than romantic.

She hadn’t sent him a copy of every picture on the roll; missing, Patrick saw, were two he’d taken himself. Her purple bathing suit on the clothesline, alongside his swimming trunks—he’d taken two shots in case she wanted to keep one of the photos for herself. She had kept them both.

The first two photos Mrs. Clausen sent were unsurprising, beginning with that one of Wallingford wading in the shallow water near the lakeshore with little Otto naked in his arms. The second picture was the one that Patrick took of Doris and Otto junior on the sundeck of the main cabin. It was Wallingford’s first night at the cottage on the lake, and nothing had happened yet between him and Mrs. Clausen. As if she weren’t even thinking that anything might happen between them, her expression was totally relaxed, free of any expectation. The only surprise was the third photograph, which Wallingford didn’t know Doris had taken; it was the one of him sleeping in the rocking chair with his son. Patrick did not know how to interpret Mrs. Clausen’s remarks in the note that accompanied the photographs—especially how matter-of-factly she reported that she’d taken two shots of little Otto asleep in his father’s arms and had kept one for herself. The tone of her note, which Wallingford had at first found mischievous, was also ambiguous. Doris had written: On the evidence of the enclosed, you have the potential to be a good father.