The Fourth Hand (10 page)

Patrick thought she was kidding. “Don’t worry—I’l keep my knees tight together. Or I’l try wearing
two
towels.”

“It’s not you, it’s me—it’s my fault,” Evelyn said. “I’m just disappointed in myself for being attracted to you.” Then she said, “Sol y,” and hung up the phone. At least housekeeping, in lieu of the robe, sent him a complimentary toothbrush and a smal tube of toothpaste.

There’s not a lot of trouble you can get into in Tokyo when you’re wearing just a towel; yet Wal ingford would find a way. Not having much of an appetite, he cal ed something listed in the hotel directory asMASSAGE THERAPY

instead of room service. Big mistake.

“Two women,” said the voice answering for the massage therapist. It was a man’s voice, and to Patrick it sounded like he said, “Two lemons”; yet he thought he’d understood what the man had said.

“No, no—not ‘two women,’ just one man. I’m a man, alone,”

Wal ingford explained.

“Two lemons,” the man on the phone confidently replied.

“Whatever,” Wal ingford answered. “Is it shiatsu?”

“It’s two lemons or nothing,” the man said more aggressively.

“Okay, okay,” Patrick conceded. He opened a beer from the mini-bar while he waited in his towel. Before long, two women came to his door. One of them carried the table with the hole cut in one end of it for Wal ingford’s face; it resembled an execution device, and the woman who carried it had hands that Dr. Zajac would have said resembled the hands of a famous tight end. The other woman carried some pil ows and towels—she had forearms like Popeye’s.

“Hi,” Wal ingford said.

They looked at him warily, their eyes on his towel.

“Shiatsu?” Patrick asked them.

“There are two of us,” one of the women told him.

“Yes, there certainly are,” Wal ingford said, but he didn’t know why. Was it to make the massage go faster? Maybe it was to double the cost of the massage. When his face was in the hole, he stared at the bare feet of the woman who was grinding her elbow into his neck; the other woman was grinding her elbow (or was it her knee?) into his spine, in the area of his lower back. Patrick gathered his courage and asked the women outright: “Why are there two of you?”

To Wal ingford’s surprise, the muscular massage therapists giggled like little girls.

“So we won’t get raped,” one of the women said.

“Two lemons, no lape,” Wal ingford heard the other woman say. Their thumbs and their elbows, or their knees, were getting to him now—the women were digging pretty deep—

but what real y offended Wal ingford was the concept that someone could be so moral y reprehensible as to
rape
a massage therapist. (Patrick’s experiences with women had al been of a fairly limited kind: the women had wanted him.) When the massage therapists left, Wal ingford was limp.

He could barely manage to walk to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth before fal ing into bed. He saw that he’d left his unfinished beer on the night table, where it would stink in the morning, but he was too tired to get up. He lay as if rubberized. In the morning, he awoke in the exact same position in which he’d fal en asleep—on his stomach with both arms at his sides, like a soldier, and with the right side of his face pressed into the pil ow, looking at his left shoulder.

Not until Wal ingford got up to answer the door—it was just his breakfast—did he realize that he couldn’t move his head. His neck felt locked; he looked permanently to the left. That he could face only left would present him with a problem at the podium, where he soon had to make his opening remarks to the conference. And before that he had to eat his breakfast while facing his left shoulder.

Compounding the difficulty of brushing his teeth with his right (and only) hand, the complimentary toothbrush was a trifle short—given the degree to which he faced left.

At least his luggage was back from its journey to the Philippines, which was a good thing because the laundry service cal ed to apologize for “misplacing” his only other clothes.

“Not losing, merely misplacing!” shouted a man on the verge of hysteria. “Sol y!”

When Wal ingford opened his garment bag, which he managed by looking over his left shoulder, he discovered that the bag and al his clothes smel ed strongly of urine. He cal ed the airline to complain.

“Were you just in the Philippines?” the official for the airline asked.

“No, but my
bag
was,” Wal ingford replied.

“Oh, that explains it!” the official cried happily. “Those drug-sniffing dogs that they have there—sometimes they piss on the suitcases!” Natural y this sounded to Patrick like “piff on the sweet cheeses,” but he got the idea. Filipino dogs had urinated on his clothes!

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” the airline official told him. “It just happens. The dogs have to go, I guess.”

Stupefied, Wal ingford searched his clothes for a shirt and a pair of pants that were, relatively speaking, not permeated with dog piss. He reluctantly sent the rest of his clothes to the hotel laundry service, admonishing the man on the phone not to lose
these
clothes—they were his last.

“Others
not
losing!” the man shouted. “Merely misplacing!”

(This time he didn’t even say “Sol y!”)

Given how he knew he smel ed, Patrick was not pleased to share a taxi to the conference with Evelyn Arbuthnot—

especial y as he was forced, by the crick in his neck, to ride in the taxi with his face turned rudely away from her.

“I don’t blame you for being angry with me, but isn’t it rather childish not to look at me?” she asked. She kept sniffing al around, as if she suspected there were a dog in the cab.

Wal ingford told her everything: the two-lemon massage (“the two-woman mauling,” he cal ed it); his one-way neck; the dog-peeing episode.

“I could listen to your stories for hours,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. He didn’t need to see her to know she was being facetious.

Then came his speech, which he delivered standing sideways at the podium, looking down his left arm at his stump, which was more visible to him than the hard-to-read pages. With his left side to the audience, Patrick’s amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the Japanese press to describe Wal ingford as “milking his missing hand.” (In the Western media, his missing hand was often referred to as his “no-hand” or his “nonhand.”) More generous Japanese journalists attending Patrick’s opening remarks—his male hosts, for the most part—

cal ed his left-facing oratorical method “provocative” and

“incredibly cool.”

The speech itself was a flop with the highly accomplished women who were the conference’s participants. They had not come to Tokyo to talk about “The Future of Women” and then hear recycled master-of-ceremonies jokes from a man.

“Was that what you were writing on the plane yesterday? Or
trying
to write, I should say,” Evelyn Arbuthnot remarked.

“Jesus, we
should
have had room service together. If the subject of your speech had come up, I might have spared you that embarrassment.”

As before, Wal ingford was rendered speechless in her company. The hal in which he’d spoken was made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray. That was roughly how Evelyn Arbuthnot struck Patrick, too—“made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray.”

The other women shunned him afterward; Wal ingford knew that it wasn’t only the dog pee.

Even his German col eague in the world of television journalism, the beautiful Barbara Frei, wouldn’t speak to him. Most journalists meeting Wal ingford for the first time would at least offer him some commiseration about the lion business, but the aloof Ms. Frei made it clear that she didn’t want to meet him. Only the Danish novelist, Bodil e or Bodile or Bodil Jensen, seemed to look at Patrick with a flicker of pity in her darting green eyes. She was pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there’d recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her—possibly her lover or her husband.

Wal ingford attempted to approach Ms. Jensen, but Ms.

Arbuthnot cut him off. “I saw her first,” Evelyn told Patrick, making a beeline for Bodil e or Bodile or Bodil Jensen.

This damaged Wal ingford’s failing self-confidence further.

Was that what Ms. Arbuthnot had meant by being disappointed in herself for being attracted to him? Was Evelyn Arbuthnot a lesbian?

Not al that eager to meet anyone while smel ing wretchedly of dog piss, Wal ingford returned to the hotel to await his clean clothes. He left his two-man television crew to film whatever was interesting in the rest of the speeches that first day, including a panel discussion on rape.

When Patrick got back to his hotel room, the hotel management had sent him flowers—in further apology for

“misplacing” his clothes—and there were two massage therapists, two
different
women, waiting for him. The hotel had also sent him a complimentary massage. “Sol y about the crick in your neck,” one of the new women told Patrick.

This sounded something like “click in your knack,” but Wal ingford understood what she’d meant. He was doomed to have another two-woman mauling. But these two women managed to cure the crick in his neck, and while they were stil engaged in turning him to jel y, the hotel laundry service returned his clean clothes—
all
his clothes. Perhaps this marked a turn for the better in his Japanese experience, Patrick imagined.

Given the loss of his left hand in India, even though it had happened five years before—given that Filipino dogs had pissed on his clothes, and that he’d needed a second massage to correct the damage done by the first; given that he’d not known Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian, and given his dreadful y insensitive speech; given that he knew nothing about Japan, and arguably even less about the future of women, which he never, not even now, thought about—Wal ingford should have been wise enough not to imagine that his Japanese experience was about to take a turn for the
better.

Anyone meeting Patrick Wal ingford in Japan would have known in an instant that he was precisely the kind of penis-brain who would casual y put his hand too close to a lion’s cage. (And if the lion had had an accent, Wal ingford would have mocked it.) In retrospect, Patrick himself would rank his time in Japan as an even lower point in his life than the hand-eating episode in India. To be fair, Wal ingford wasn’t the only man who missed the panel discussion on rape.

The English economist, whose name (Jane Brown) Patrick had thought was boring, turned out to be anything but. She threw a fit at the rape panel and insisted that no men should be present for the discussion, declaring that for women to discuss rape honestly with one another was tantamount to being naked. That much the cameraman and the sound technician for the twenty-four-hour international channel managed to get on film before the English economist, to make her point, began to take off her clothes. Thereupon the cameraman, who was Japanese, respectful y stopped filming.

It’s debatable that watching Jane Brown take off her clothes would have been al that watchable for most television viewers. To describe Ms. Brown as matronly would be a kindness—she needed only to
start
taking off her clothes to empty the hal of what few men were there. There were almost no men attending the “Future of Women”

conference, only the two guys in Patrick Wal ingford’s TV

crew, the Japanese journalists who were the conference’s unhappy-looking hosts, and, of course, Patrick himself.

The hosts would have been offended if they’d heard about the long-distance request of the New York news editor, who wanted no more footage of the conference itself. Instead of more of the women’s conference, what Dick said he now wanted was “something to contrast to it”—something to undermine it, in other words.

This was pure Dick, Wal ingford thought. When the news editor asked for “related material,” what he real y meant was something so
un
related to the women’s conference that it could make a mockery of the very idea of the future of women.

“I hear there’s a child-porn industry in Tokyo,” Dick told Patrick. “Child prostitutes, too. Al this is relatively new, I’m told. It’s just emerging—dare I say
budding
?”

“What about it?” Wal ingford asked. He knew this was pure Dick, too. The news editor had never been interested in

“The Future of Women.” The Japanese hosts had wanted Wal ingford—the lion-guy video had record sales in Japan

—and Dick had taken advantage of the invitation to have disaster man dig up some dirt in Tokyo.

“Of course you’l have to be careful how you do it,” Dick went on, warning Patrick that there would be “aspersions of racism” cast against the network if they did anything that appeared to be “slanted against the Japanese.”

“You get it?” Dick had asked Wal ingford over the phone.

“
Slanted
against the Japanese . . .”

Wal ingford sighed. Then he suggested, as always, that there was a deeper, more complex story. The “Future of Women” conference was conducted over a four-day period, but only in the daylight hours. Nothing was scheduled at night, not even dinner parties. Patrick wondered why.