The Fourth Hand (37 page)

Mrs. Clausen found them sleeping in the rocker. Good mother that she was, she closely examined the evidence of Otto’s breakfast—including what remained of the baby’s formula in his bottle, her son’s strikingly spattered shirt, his peachstained hair and banana-spotted socks and shoes, and the unmistakable indication that he had puked on Patrick’s boxer shorts. Mrs. Clausen must have found everything to her liking, especial y the sight of the two of them asleep in the rocking chair, because she photographed them twice with her camera. Wal ingford didn’t wake up until Doris had already made coffee and was cooking bacon. (He remembered tel ing her that he liked bacon.) She was wearing her purple bathing suit.

Patrick imagined his swimming trunks al alone on the clothesline, a self-pitying symbol of Mrs. Clausen’s probable rejection of his proposal.

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. Wal ingford once again went wading with the baby in the shal ow 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. Al 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 Wal ingford looked at Mrs. Clausen and very careful y 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 fel asleep. Wal ingford carried the sleeping boy up the stairs to his crib. Doris said that Otto usual y took two naps during the day; it was the motion of the boat that had lul ed 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. Wal ingford 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 stil in sunlight. They sat on the towels on the dock while Wal ingford told Mrs. Clausen about the pil s 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 tel ing 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 stil shivering.

“Please say it,” Wal ingford 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, fal ing 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 smel ed 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 al he said. (It
almost
came true, he wanted to tel 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.

Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford 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 stil thinking about it,” she said, keeping her back to him. Wal ingford calculated what she’d said by counting the syl ables in her words. He thought it was what she’d said to him in the boat when he couldn’t hear her. (“I’m stil 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 Wal ingford 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 tel 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 final y 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 Wal ingford 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 al 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 Wal ingford’s one hand was closed around something.

“What have you got in your hand?” she asked.

He opened the palm of his hand and showed her the condom. Doris was bending over Otto junior, changing him.

“You better go back and get another one. You’re going to need at least two,” she said.

He took a flashlight and braved the mosquitoes again; he returned to his bedroom above the boathouse with a second condom and a cold beer.

Wal ingford lit the gas lamp in his room. While this is an easy job for two-handed people, Patrick found it chal enging. He struck the wooden match on the box, then held the lit match in his teeth while he turned on the gas.

When he took the match from his mouth and touched the flame to the lamp, it made a popping sound and flared brightly. He turned down the propane, but the light in the bedroom dimmed only a little. It was not very romantic, he thought, as he took off his clothes and got into bed naked.

Wal ingford pul ed just the top sheet over him, up to his waist; he lay on his stomach, propped on his elbows, with the two pil ows hugged to his chest. He looked out the window at the moonlight on the lake—the moon was huge.

In only two or three more nights, it would be an official ful moon, but it looked ful now. He’d left the unopened bottle of beer on the dresser top; he hoped they might share the beer later. The two condoms, in their foil wrappers, were under the pil ows. Between the racket the loons were making and a squabble that broke out among some ducks near shore, Patrick didn’t hear Doris come into his room, but when she lay down on top of him, with her bare breasts against his back, he knew she was naked.

“My bathing suit feels so
cold,
” she whispered in his ear.

“I’m going to take it off. Don’t you want to take yours off, too?”

Her voice was so much like the woman’s voice in the bluecapsule dream that Wal ingford had some difficulty answering her. By the time he managed to say

“yes,” she’d already rol ed him over onto his back and pul ed the sheet down.

“You better give me one of those things,” she said.

He was reaching behind his head and under the pil ows with his only hand, but Mrs. Clausen was quicker. She found one of the condoms and tore open the wrapper in her teeth. “Let me do it. I want to put it on you,” she told him.

“I’ve never done this.” She seemed a little puzzled by the appearance of the condom, but she didn’t hesitate to put it on him; unfortunately, she tried putting it on inside out.

“It’s rol ed a certain way,” Wal ingford said.

Doris laughed at her mistake. She not only put the condom on the right way; she was in too much of a hurry for Patrick to talk to her. Mrs. Clausen may never have put a condom on anyone before, but Wal ingford was familiar with the way that she straddled him. (Only this time he was lying on his back, not sitting up straight in a chair in Dr. Zajac’s office.)

“Let me say something to you about being faithful to me,”

Doris was saying, as she moved up and down with her hands on Patrick’s shoulders. “If you’ve got a problem with monogamy, you better say so right now—you better stop me.”

Wal ingford said nothing, nor did he do anything to stop her.

“Please don’t make anyone else pregnant,” Mrs. Clausen said, even more seriously. She bore down on him with al her weight; he lifted his hips to meet her.

“Okay,” he told her.

In the harsh light of the gas lamp, their moving shadows were cast against the wal where the darker rectangle had earlier caught Wal ingford’s attention—that empty place where Otto senior’s beer poster had been. It was as if their coupling were a ghost portrait, their future together stil undecided.

When they finished making love, they drank the beer, draining the bottle in a matter of seconds. Then they went naked for a night swim, with Wal ingford taking just one towel for the two of them and Mrs. Clausen carrying the flashlight. They walked single-file to the end of the boathouse dock, but this time Doris asked Patrick to climb down the ladder into the lake ahead of her. He’d no sooner entered the water than she told him to swim back to her, under the narrow dock.

“Just fol ow the flashlight,” she instructed him. She shined the light through the planks in the dock, il uminating one of the support posts that disappeared into the dark water. The post was bigger around than Wal ingford’s thigh. Several inches above the waterline, just under the planks of the dock and alongside a horizontal two-by-four, something gold caught Patrick’s eye. He swam closer until he was looking straight up at it. He had to keep treading water to see it. A tenpenny nail had been driven into the post; two gold wedding bands were looped on the nail, which had been hammered over, into a bent position, with its head driven into the post. Patrick realized that Mrs. Clausen would have needed to tread water while she pounded in the nail, and then attached the rings, and then bent the nail over with her hammer. It hadn’t been an easy job, even for a good swimmer who was fairly strong and two-handed.