The Fourth Hand (11 page)

A young Japanese woman who wanted Wal ingford to autograph her Mickey Mouse T-shirt seemed surprised that he hadn’t guessed the reason. There were no conference-related activities in the evening because women were

“supposed to”

spend the nighttime at home with their families. If they’d tried to have a women’s conference in Japan at night, not many women could have come. Wasn’t this interesting?

Wal ingford asked Dick, but the New York news editor told him to forget it. Although the young Japanese woman looked fantastic oncamera, Mickey Mouse T-shirts weren’t al owed on the al -news network, which had once been involved in a dispute with the Walt Disney Company. In the end, Wal ingford was instructed to stick to individual interviews with the women who were the conference’s participants. Patrick could tel that Dick was pul ing out on the piece.

“Just see if one or two of these broads wil open up to you,”

was how Dick left it. Natural y Wal ingford began by trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Barbara Frei, the German television journalist. He approached her in the hotel bar. She seemed to be alone; the idea that she might be waiting for someone never crossed Patrick’s mind. The ZDF anchor was every bit as beautiful as she appeared on the smal screen, but she politely declined to be interviewed.

“I know your network, of course,” Ms. Frei began tactful y. “I don’t think it likely that they wil give serious coverage to this conference. Do you?” Case closed.

“I’m sorry about your hand, Mr. Wal ingford,” Barbara Frei said. “That was truly awful—I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you,” Patrick replied. The woman was both sincere and classy. Wal ingford’s twenty-four-hour international channel was not Ms. Frei’s, or anyone else’s, idea of serious TV journalism; compared to Barbara Frei, Patrick Wal ingford wasn’t serious, either, and both Ms. Frei and Mr. Wal ingford knew it.

The hotel bar was ful of businessmen, as hotel bars tend to be. “Look—it’s the lion guy!” Wal ingford heard one of them say.

“Disaster man!” another businessman cal ed out.

“Won’t you have a drink?” Barbara Frei asked Patrick pityingly.

“Wel . . . al right.” An immense and unfamiliar depression was weighing on him, and as soon as his beer arrived, there also arrived at the bar the man whom Ms. Frei had been waiting for—her husband.

Wal ingford knew him. He was Peter Frei, a wel -respected journalist at ZDF, although Peter Frei did cultural programs and his wife did what they cal ed hard news.

“Peter’s a little tired,” Ms. Frei said, affectionately rubbing her husband’s shoulders and the back of his neck. “He’s been training for a trip to Mount Everest.”

“For a piece you’re doing, I suppose,” Patrick said enviously.

“Yes, but I have to climb a bit of the mountain to do it properly.”

“You’re going to climb Mount Everest?” Wal ingford asked Peter Frei. He was an extremely fit-looking man—they were a very attractive couple.

“Oh, everyone climbs a bit of Everest now,” Mr. Frei replied modestly. “That’s what’s wrong with it—the place has been overrun by amateurs like me!” His beautiful wife laughed fondly and went on rubbing her husband’s neck and shoulders. Wal ingford, who was barely able to drink his beer, found them as likable a couple as any he’d known.

When they said good-bye, Barbara Frei touched Patrick’s left forearm in the usual place. “You might try interviewing that woman from Ghana,” she suggested helpful y. “She’s awful y nice and smart, and she’s got more to say than I have. I mean she’s more of a person with a cause than I am.” (This meant, Wal ingford knew, that the woman from Ghana would talk to anyone.)

“That’s a good idea—thank you.”

“Sorry about the hand,” Peter Frei told Patrick. “That’s a terrible thing. I think half the world remembers where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.”

“Yes,” Wal ingford answered. He’d had only one beer, but he would scarcely remember leaving the hotel bar; he went off ful of self-disgust, looking for the African woman as if she were a lifeboat and he a drowning man. He was. It was an unkind irony that the starvation expert from Ghana was extremely fat. Wal ingford worried that Dick would exploit her obesity in an unpredictable way. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was dressed in something resembling a tent made of samples from patchwork quilts. But the woman had a degree from Oxford, and another from Yale; she’d won a Nobel Prize in something to do with world nutrition, which she said was

“merely a matter of intel igent Third World crises anticipation . . . any fool with half a brain and a whole conscience could do what I do.”

But as much as Wal ingford admired the big woman from Ghana, they didn’t like her in New York. “Too fat,” Dick told Patrick. “Black people wil think we’re making fun of her.”

“But
we
didn’t make her fat!” Patrick protested. “The point is, she’s
smart
—she’s actual y got something to
say
!”

“You can find someone else with something to say, can’t you? Jesus Christ, find someone smart who’s
normal
-

looking!” But as Wal ingford would discover at the

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo, this was exceedingly hard to do—taking into account that, by

“
normal
-looking,” Dick no doubt meant not fat, not black, and not Japanese.

Patrick took one look at the Chinese geneticist, who had an elevated, hairy mole in the middle of her forehead; he wouldn’t bother trying to interview her. He could already hear what that dick Dick in New York would say about her.

“Talk about making fun of people—Jesus Christ! We might as wel bomb a Chinese embassy in some asshole country and try cal ing it an
accident
or something!”

So Patrick talked to the Korean doctor of infectious diseases, who he thought was kind of cute. But she turned out to be camera-shy, which took the form of her staring obsessively at his stump. Nor could she name a single infectious disease without stuttering; the mere mention of a disease seemed to grip her in terror. As for the Russian film director—“
No one
has seen her movies,” the news editor in New York told Wal ingford—Ludmil a (we’l leave it at that) was as ugly as a toad. Also, as Patrick would discover at two o’clock one morning when she came to his hotel room, she wanted to defect. She didn’t mean to Japan. She wanted Wal ingford to smuggle her into New York. In
what
? Wal ingford would wonder. In his garment bag, now permanently reeking of Filipino dog piss? Surely a Russian defector was news, even in New York. So what if no one had seen her movies? “She wants to go to Sundance,” Patrick told Dick. “For Christ’s sake, Dick, she wants to
defect
! That’s a story!” (No sensible news network would turn down a story on a Russian defector.) But Dick was unimpressed. “We just did five minutes on a Cuban defector, Pat.”

“You mean that no-good basebal player?” Wal ingford asked.

“He’s a halfway-decent shortstop, and the guy can hit,” Dick said, and that was that.

Then came the rejection from the green-eyed Danish novelist; she turned out to be a touchy writer who refused to be interviewed by someone who hadn’t read her books.

Who did she think she was, anyway? Wal ingford didn’t have the time to read her books! At least he’d guessed right about how to pronounce her name—it was “bode
eel,
”

accent on the
eel.

Those too-numerous Japanese women in the arts were eager to talk to him, and they were fond, when they talked to him, of sympathetical y touching his left forearm a little above where he’d lost his hand. But the news editor in New York was “sick of the arts.” Dick further claimed that the Japanese women would give the television audience the false impression that the only participants in this conference were Japanese.

“Since when do we worry that we’re giving our viewers a false impression?”

Patrick plucked up the courage to ask.

“Listen, Pat,” Dick said, “that runt poet with the facial tattoo would even put off other poets.”

Wal ingford had already been in Japan too long. He was so used to the people’s mispronunciation of his mother tongue that he now misheard his news editor, too. He simply didn’t hear “runt poet”; he heard “cunt poet” instead.

“ N o ,
you
listen, Dick,” Wal ingford retorted, with an uncharacteristic display of something less than his usual y sweet-dispositioned self. “I’m not a woman, but even I take offense at that word.”

“
What
word?” Dick asked. “Tattoo?”

“You know what word!” Patrick shouted. “Cunt!”

“I said ‘runt,’ not ‘cunt,’ Pat,” the news editor informed Wal ingford. “I guess you just hear what you think about al the time.”

Patrick had no recourse. He had to interview Jane Brown, the English economist who’d threatened to undress, or he had to talk to Evelyn Arbuthnot, the presumed lesbian who loathed him and was ashamed that, if only for a moment, she’d been attracted to him.

The English economist was a dingbat of a distinctly English kind. It didn’t matter—Americans are suckers for an English accent. Jane Brown screeched like an unattended tea kettle, not about world economy but on the subject of threatening to take off her clothes in front of men. “I know from experience that the men wil never al ow me to finish undressing,” Ms. Brown told Patrick Wal ingford oncamera, in that overenunciated manner of a character actress of a certain age and background on the English stage. “I never even get down to my undergarments before the men have fled the room—it happens every time! Men are very reliable. By that I mean only that they can be counted on to flee from me!”

Dick in New York loved it. He said that the Jane Brown interview “contrasted nicely” with the earlier footage of her throwing a fit about rape on the first day of the conference.

The twenty-four-hour international channel had its story. The

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo had been covered

—better to say, it had been covered in the al -news network’s way, which was to marginalize more than Patrick Wal ingford; it was also to marginalize the news. A women’s conference in Japan had been reduced to a story about a matronly and histrionic Englishwoman threatening to take off her clothes at a panel discussion on rape—in Tokyo, of al places.

“Wel , wasn’t
that
cute?” Evelyn Arbuthnot would say, when she saw the minuteand-a-half story on the TV in her hotel room. She was stil in Tokyo—it was the closing day of the conference. Wal ingford’s cheap-shot channel hadn’t even waited for the conference to be over.

Patrick was stil in bed when Ms. Arbuthnot cal ed him.

“Sol y,” was al Wal ingford could manage to say. “I’m not the news editor; I’m just a field reporter.”

“You were just fol owing orders—is that what you mean?”

Ms. Arbuthnot asked him.

Evelyn Arbuthnot was much too tough for Patrick Wal ingford, especial y because Wal ingford had not recovered from a night on the town with his Japanese hosts. He thought even his soul must smel like sake. Nor could Patrick remember which of his favorite Japanese newspapermen had given him tickets for two on the highspeed train to and from Kyoto—“the bul et train,” either Yoshi or Fumi had cal ed it. A visit to a traditional inn in Kyoto could be very restorative, they’d told him; he remembered that. “But better go before the weekend.”

Regrettably, Wal ingford would forget that part of their advice.

Ah, Kyoto—city of temples, city of prayer. Someplace more meditative than Tokyo
would
do Wal ingford a world of good. It was high time he did a little meditating, he explained to Evelyn Arbuthnot, who continued to berate him about the fiasco of the coverage given to the women’s conference by his “lousy
not
-thenews network.”

“I know, I know . . .” Patrick kept repeating. (What else could he say?)

“And now you’re going to Kyoto? To do what?
Pray?
Just what wil you pray for?” she asked him. “The most publicly humiliating demise imaginable of your disaster-and-comedy-news network—that’s what
I
pray for!”

“I’m stil hopeful that something nice might happen to me in this country,”

Wal ingford replied with as much dignity as he could summon, which wasn’t much.

There was a thoughtful pause on Evelyn Arbuthnot’s end of the phone. Patrick guessed that she was giving new consideration to an old idea.

“You want something nice to happen to you in Japan?” Ms.

Arbuthnot asked.

“Wel . . . you can take me to Kyoto with you. I’l show you something
nice.
”

He was Patrick Wal ingford, after al . He acquiesced. He did what women wanted; he general y did what he was told.

But he’d thought Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian! Patrick was confused.

“Uh . . . I thought . . . I mean from your remark to me about that Danish novelist, I took it to mean that . . . wel , that you were
gay,
Ms. Arbuthnot.”

“That’s a trick I play al the time,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d fal en for it.”

“Oh,” Wal ingford said.

“I am not gay, but I’m old enough to be your mother. If you want to think about that and get back to me, I won’t be offended.”