The Fourth Hand (41 page)

She was smiling at the camera, as if Wal ingford were the camera and he already knew how she was going to put the condom on his penis.

Patrick didn’t stick that photograph on his office dressing-room mirror; he kept it in his apartment, on his bedside table, next to the telephone, so that he could look at it when Mrs. Clausen cal ed him or when he cal ed her.

Late one night, after he’d gone to bed but had not yet fal en asleep, the phone rang and Wal ingford turned on the light on his night table so that he could look at her picture when he spoke to her. But it wasn’t Doris.

“Hey, Mista One Hand . . . Mista No Prick,” Angie’s brother Vito said. “I hope I’m interruptin’ somethin’ . . .” (Vito cal ed often, always with nothing to say.) When Wal ingford hung up, he did so with a decided sadness that was not quite nostalgia. In the at-home hours of his life, since he’d come back to New York from Wisconsin, he not only missed Doris Clausen; he missed that wild, gumchewing night with Angie, too. At these times, he even occasional y missed Mary Shanahan—the
old
Mary, before she acquired the certitude of a last name and the uncomfortable authority she now held over him.

Patrick turned out the light. As he drifted into sleep, he tried to think forgivingly of Mary. The past litany of her most positive features returned to him: her flawless skin, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, her perfect little teeth. And, Wal ingford assumed—since Mary was stil hoping she was pregnant—her commitment to no prescription drugs. She’d been a bitch to him at times, but people are not only what they seem to be. After al , he had dumped her. There were women who would have been more bitter about it than Mary was. Speak of the devil! The phone rang and it was Mary Shanahan; she was crying into the phone. She’d got her period. It had come a month and a the phone. She’d got her period. It had come a month and a half late—late enough to have given her hope that she was pregnant—but her period had arrived just the same.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Wal ingford said, and he genuinely was sorry—for her. For himself, he felt unearned jubilation; he’d dodged another bul et.

“Imagine you, of al people—shooting blanks!” Mary told him, between sobs. “I’l give you another chance, Pat.

We’ve got to try it again, as soon as I’m ovulating.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” he repeated. “I’m not your man. Blanks or no blanks, I’ve had my chance.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’m saying no. We’re not having sex again, not for any reason.”

Mary cal ed him a number of colorful names before she hung up. But Mary’s disappointment in him did not interfere with Patrick’s sleep; on the contrary, he had the best night’s sleep since he’d drifted off in Mrs. Clausen’s arms and awakened to the feeling of her teeth unrol ing a condom on his penis. Wal ingford was stil sound asleep when Mrs.

Clausen cal ed. It may have been an hour earlier in Green Bay, but little Otto routinely woke up his mother a couple of hours before Wal ingford was awake.

“Mary isn’t pregnant. She just got her period,” Patrick announced.

“She’s going to ask you to do it again. That’s what I would do,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“She already asked. I already said no.”

“Good,” Doris told him.

“I’m looking at your picture,” Wal ingford said.

“I can guess which one,” she replied.

Little Otto was talking baby-talk somewhere near the phone. Wal ingford didn’t say anything for a moment—just imagining the two of them was enough. Then he asked her,

“What are you wearing? Have you got any clothes on?”

“I’ve got two tickets to a Monday-night game, if you want to go,” was her answer.

“I want to go.”

“ It ’ s
Monday Night Football,
the Seahawks and the Packers at Lambeau Field.”

Mrs. Clausen spoke with a reverence that was wasted on Wal ingford. “Mike Holmgren’s coming home. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Me neither!” Patrick replied. He didn’t know who Mike Holmgren was. He would have to do a little research.

“It’s November first. Are you sure you’re free?”

“I’l be free!” he promised. Wal ingford was trying to sound joyful while, in truth, he was heartbroken that he would have to wait until November to see her. It was only the middle of September! “Maybe you could come to New York before then?” he asked.

“No. I want to see you at the game,” she told him. “I can’t explain.”

“You don’t have to explain!” Patrick quickly replied.

“I’m glad you like the picture,” was the way she changed the subject.

“I
love
it! I love what you did to me.”

“Okay. I’l see you before too long,” was the way Mrs.

Clausen closed the conversation—she didn’t even say good-bye.

The next morning, at the script meeting, Wal ingford tried not to think that Mary Shanahan was behaving like a woman who was having a bad period, only more so, but that was his impression. Mary began the meeting by abusing one of the newsroom women. Her name was Eleanor and, for whatever reason, she’d slept with one of the summer interns; now that the boy had gone back to col ege, Mary accused Eleanor of robbing the cradle.

Only Wal ingford knew that, before he’d stupidly agreed to try to make Mary pregnant, Mary had propositioned the intern. He was a good-looking boy, and he was smarter than Wal ingford—he’d rejected Mary’s proposal. Patrick not only liked Eleanor for sleeping with the boy; he had also liked the boy, whose summer internship had not entirely lacked an authentic experience. (Eleanor was one of the oldest of the married women in the newsroom.) Only Wal ingford knew that Mary didn’t real y give a damn that Eleanor had slept with the boy—she was just angry because she had her period. Suddenly the idea of taking a field assignment,
any
assignment, attracted Patrick. It would at least get him out of the newsroom, and out of New York. He told Mary that she would find him open to a field assignment, next time, provided that she not try to accompany him where he was being sent. (Mary had volunteered to travel with him the next time she was ovulating.)

There was, in the near future, Wal ingford informed Mary, only one day and night when he would
not
be available for a field assignment
or
to anchor the evening news. He was attending a
Monday Night Football
game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1, 1999—no matter what.

Someone (probably Mary) leaked it to ABC Sports that Patrick Wal ingford would be at the game that night, and ABC immediately asked the lion guy to stop by the booth during the telecast. (Why say no to a two-minute appearance before how many mil ion viewers? Mary would say to Patrick.) Maybe disaster man could even cal a play or two. Did Wal ingford know, someone from ABC asked, that his hand-eating episode had sold almost as many videos as the annual NFL highlights film?

Yes, Wal ingford knew. He respectful y declined the offer to visit the ABC commentators. As he put it, he was attending the game with “a special friend”; he didn’t use Doris’s name. This might mean that a TV camera would be on him during the game, but so what? Patrick didn’t mind waving once or twice, just to show them what they wanted to see—

the no-hand, or what Mrs. Clausen cal ed his fourth hand.

Even the sports hacks wanted to see it.

That may have been why Wal ingford got a more enthusiastic response to his letters of inquiry to publictelevision stations than he received from public radio or the Big Ten journalism schools.
All
the PBS affiliates were interested in him. In general, Patrick was heartened by the col ective response; he would have a job to go to, possibly even an interesting one.

Natural y he breathed not a word of this to Mary, while he tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer him. A war wouldn’t have surprised him; an
E.
coli
bacteria outbreak would have suited Mary’s mood. Wal ingford longed to learn why Mrs. Clausen insisted on waiting to see him until a
Monday Night Football
game in Green Bay. He phoned her on Saturday night, October 30, although he knew he would see her the coming Monday, but Doris remained noncommittal on the subject of the game’s curious importance to her. “I just get anxious when the Packers are favored,” was al she said. Wal ingford went to bed fairly early that Saturday night. Vito cal ed once, around midnight, but Patrick quickly fel back to sleep. When the phone rang on Sunday morning—it was stil dark outside—

Wal ingford assumed it was Vito again; he almost didn’t answer. But it was Mary Shanahan, and she was al business.

“I’l give you a choice,” she told him, without bothering to say hel o or so much as his name. “You can cover the scene at Kennedy, or we’l get you a plane to Boston and a helicopter wil take you to Otis Air Force Base.”

“Where’s that?” Wal ingford asked.

“Cape Cod. Do you know what’s happened, Pat?”

“I was asleep, Mary.”

“Wel , turn on the fucking news! I’l cal you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin.”

“I’m going to Green Bay, no matter what,” he told her, but she’d already hung up. Not even the brevity of her cal or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick’s memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary’s bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling—the shadows racing like sperm. Wal ingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo.

It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island.

There’d been no distress cal from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet’s rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute—“like a rock,” an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation—the reports would
all
be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they’d told him the flight was closed, he’d screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members—not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wal ingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape—

the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who’d been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they’d reportedly found only a smal flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there’d been no explosion.

Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who’d col apsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She’d fal en in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wal ingford that her brother had been on the plane. Natural y the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wal ingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who’d been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wal ingford because Wal ingford had only one hand.

“If there’s anything the City of New York can do to help, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wal ingford and said: “Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster.”

An Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: “We belong to God and to God we return,” he kept praying, in Arabic. Wal ingford had to ask someone for a translation.

At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network’s plans. “Either you’re our anchor tomorrow evening or we’ve got you on a Coast Guard cutter,” Mary Shanahan informed him.

“I’m in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary,”

Wal ingford said.

“They’re going to cal off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay.”

“I’m going to the footbal game,” Wal ingford told her. He looked at Wharton, who looked away; then he looked at Sabina, who stared with feigned neutrality back at him. He didn’t so much as glance at Mary.

“Then we’l fire you, Pat,” Mary said.

“Then fire me.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. With or without a job at PBS or NPR, he’d made quite a lot of money; besides, they couldn’t fire him without making some kind of salary settlement. Patrick didn’t real y
need
a job, at least for a couple of years.

Wal ingford looked at Mary for some response, then at Sabina.