The Fourth Hand (27 page)

Therefore, when Wal ingford cal ed the hotel operator to ask for a wake-up cal , he also asked to be connected to Sarah’s room—he didn’t know the number. He wanted to propose a late bite to eat. Surely some place in Harvard Square would stil be serving, especial y on a Saturday night. Wal ingford wanted to convince Sarah to let him go with her to the abortion; he felt it would be better to try to persuade her over dinner.

But the operator informed him that no one named Sarah Wil iams was registered in the hotel.

“She must have just checked out,” Patrick said.

There was the indistinct sound of fingers on a computer keyboard, searching. In the new century, Wal ingford imagined, it was probably the last sound we would hear before our deaths.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the hotel operator told him. “There never
was
a Sarah Wil iams staying here.”

Wal ingford wasn’t that surprised. Later he would cal the English Department at Smith—he would be equal y unsurprised to discover that no one named Sarah Wil iams taught there. She may have sounded like an associate professor of English when she was discussing
Stuart Little,
and she may have taught at Smith, but she was not a Sarah Wil iams.

Whoever she was, the thought that Patrick had been cheating on another woman—or that there was another woman in his life, one who felt wronged—had clearly upset her. Possibly
she
was cheating on someone; probably she had been cheated on. The abortion business had sounded true, as had her fear of her children and grandchildren dying. The only hesitation he’d heard in her voice had been when she’d told him her name.

Wal ingford was upset that he had become a man to whom any decent woman would want to remain anonymous. He’d never thought of himself that way before. When he’d had two hands, Patrick had experimented with anonymity—in particular, when he was with the kind of woman to whom any man would prefer to remain anonymous. But after the lion episode, he could no more have got away with
not
being Patrick Wal ingford than he could have passed for Paul O’Neil —at least not to anyone with his or her faculties intact.

Rather than be left alone with these thoughts, Patrick made the mistake of turning on the television. A political commentator whose specialty had always struck Wal ingford as intel ectual y inflated hindsight was speculating on a sizable “what if . . .” in the tragical y abbreviated life of John

F.

Kennedy,

Jr.

The

selfseriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion, which was that JFK, Jr., would have been “better off” in every way if he’d gone against his mother’s advice and become a movie star. (Would young Kennedy not have died in a plane crash if he’d been an actor?) It was a fact that John junior’s mom hadn’t wanted him to be an actor, but the presumptuousness of the political commentator was enormous. The most egregious of his irresponsible speculations was that John junior’s smoothest, most unalterable course to the presidency lay through Los Angeles! To Patrick, the fatuousness of such Hol ywood-level theorizing was twofold: first, to declare that young K e nne d y
should have
fol owed in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps; second, to claim that JFK, Jr., had
wanted
to be president.

Preferring his other, more personal demons, Patrick turned off the TV. There in the dark, the new idea of trying to get fired greeted him as familiarly as an old friend. Yet that other new notion—that he was a man whose company a woman would accept only on the condition of anonymity—

gave Patrick the shivers. It also precipitated a third new idea: What if he stopped resisting Mary and simply slept with her? (At least Mary wouldn’t insist on protecting her anonymity.) Thus there were three new ideas glowing in the dark, distracting Patrick Wal ingford from the loneliness of a fifty-one-year-old woman who didn’t want to have an abortion but who was terrified of having a child. Of course, it was none of his business if that woman had an abortion or not; it was nobody’s business but hers.

And what if she wasn’t even pregnant? She may simply have had a smal potbel y. Maybe she liked to spend her weekends in a hotel with a stranger, just acting. Patrick knew al about acting; he was always acting.

“Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto,” Wal ingford whispered in the dark hotel room. It was what he said when he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t acting.

Trying to Get Fired

T
HERE’D BEEN NEARLYa week of rapturous mourning when Wal ingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the crash of Kennedy’s single-engine plane, would be Patrick’s last before his trip up north, although he couldn’t get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.

The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wal ingford’s interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentional y ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she’d stated that al the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had kil ed two women in his airplane.

Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them.

Wal ingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil. The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy’s “fatal decision,” as if his life and death had been a novel. “They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot.”

These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept cal ing the deceased “John-John.”

“He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome,” she cal ed it. “John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They al are.”

“ ‘They . . .’ ” was al Wal ingford managed to say.

“You know who I mean,” the critic snapped. “The men on his father’s side of the family.”

Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the “culpability” of Lauren Bessette’s bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on “that fatal Friday,” as the feminist critic cal ed it, was another reason that the smal plane had crashed. In the script meeting, Wal ingford had objected to the word-for-word content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done—it was always confusing. You can’t put everything that’s supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.

But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to—for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wal ingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic’s next agenda and Wal ingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it. Instead he said: “It’s not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was ‘testosteronedriven.’

You’re not the first person I’ve heard say that, of course, but I didn’t know him. Neither did you. What
is
clear is that we’ve talked his death to death. I think that we should summon some dignity—we should just stop. It’s time to move on.”

Wal ingford didn’t wait for the insulted woman’s response.

There was over a minute remaining in the telecast, but there was ample montage footage on file. He abruptly brought the interview to a close, as was his habit every evening, by saying, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.” Then came the ubiquitous montage footage; it hardly mattered that the presentation was a little disorderly.

Viewers of the twenty-four-hour international channel, already suffering from grief fatigue, were treated to reruns of the mourning marathon: the hand-held camera on the rol ing ship (a shot of the bodies being brought on board), a total y gratuitous shot of the St. Thomas More church, and another of a burial at sea, if not the actual burial. The last of the montage, as time expired, was of Jackie as a mom, holding John junior as a baby; her hand cupped the back of the newborn’s neck, her thumb three times the size of his tiny ear. Jackie’s hairdo was out of fashion, but the pearls were timeless and her signature smile was intact. She looks so young, Wal ingford thought. (She
was
young—it was 1961!) Patrick was having his makeup removed when Fred confronted him. Fred was an old guy—he often spoke in dated terms.

“That was a no-no, Pat,” Fred said. He didn’t wait around for Wal ingford’s reply. An anchor had to be free to have the last word. What was on the TelePrompTer was not sacrosanct. Fred must have had another bug up his ass; it hadn’t dawned on Patrick that, among his fel ow journalists, everything to do with young Kennedy’s story was sacrosanct. His not
wanting
to report that story was an indication to management that Wal ingford had lost his zest for being a journalist.

“I kinda liked what you said,” the makeup girl told Patrick. “It sorta needed sayin’.”

It was the girl he thought had a crush on him—she was back from her vacation. The scent of her chewing gum merged with her perfume; her smel and how close she was to his face reminded Wal ingford of the commingled odors and the heat of a high-school dance. He hadn’t felt so horny since the last time he’d been with Doris Clausen.

Patrick was unprepared for how the makeup girl thril ed him

—suddenly, and without reservation, he desired her. But he went home with Mary instead. They went to her place, not even bothering to have dinner first.

“Wel , this is a surprise!” Mary remarked, as she unlocked the first of her two door locks. Her smal apartment had a partial view of the East River. Wal ingford wasn’t sure, but he thought they were on East Fifty-second Street. He’d been paying attention to Mary, not to her address. He had hoped to see something with her last name on it; it would have made him feel a little better to remember her last name. But she hadn’t paused to open her mailbox, and there were no letters strewn about her apartment—not even on her messy desk.

Mary moved busily about, closing curtains, dimming lights.

There was a paisley pattern to the upholstery in the living room, which was claustrophobic and festooned with Mary’s clothes. It was one of those one-bedroom apartments with no closet space, and Mary evidently liked clothes.

In the bedroom, which was bursting with more clothes, Wal ingford noted the floral pattern of the bedspread that was a tad little-girlish for Mary. Like the rubber-tree plant, which took up too much room in the tiny kitchen, the Lava lamp on top of the squat dresser drawers had to have come from her col ege days. There were no photographs; their absence signified everything from her divorce that had remained unpacked.

Mary invited him to use the bathroom first. She cal ed to him through the closed door, so that there could be no doubt in his mind regarding the unflagging seriousness of her intentions. “I have to hand it to you, Pat—you’ve got great timing. I’m ovulating!”

He made some inarticulate response because he was smearing toothpaste on his teeth with his right index finger; of course it was her toothpaste. He’d opened her medicine cabinet in search of prescription drugs—anything with her last name on it—but there was nothing. How could a recently divorced woman who worked in New York City be drug-free?

There had always been something a little bionic about Mary; Patrick considered her skin, which was flawless, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, and her perfect little teeth. Even her niceness—if she had truly retained it, if she was stil real y nice. (Her
former
niceness, safer to say.) But no prescription drugs? Maybe, like the absent photographs, the drugs were as yet unpacked from her divorce.

Mary had opened her bed for him, the covers turned down as if by an unseen hotel maid. Later she left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar; the only other lights in the bedroom were the pink undulations of the Lava lamp, which cast moving shadows on the ceiling. Under the circumstances, it was hard for Patrick not to view the protozoan movements of the Lava lamp as indicative of Mary’s striving fertility.

She suddenly made a point of tel ing him that she’d thrown out al her medicine—“This was months ago.” Nowadays she took nothing—“Not even for cramps.” The second she conceived, she was going to lay off the booze and cigarettes.

Wal ingford scarcely had time to remind her that he was in love with someone else.

“I know. It doesn’t matter,” Mary said.

There was something so resolute about her lovemaking that Wal ingford quickly succumbed; yet the experience bore no comparison to the intoxicating way Mrs. Clausen had mounted him. He didn’t love Mary, and she loved only the life she imagined would fol ow from having his baby.