The Fourth Hand

York were all atingle about that.

“You’ll get laid a lot, Pat,” one of the women teased him. “A lot more, I mean.”

“How could Patrick possibly get laid more ?” another of the women asked, and that set them all off again.

“I’ve heard that women in Japan are treated like shit,” one of the women remarked. “And the men go off to Bangkok and behave abominably.”

“All men behave abominably in Bangkok,” said a woman who’d been there.

“Have you been to Bangkok, Pat?” the first of the women asked. She knew perfectly well that he’d been there—he had been there with her. She was just reminding him of something that everyone in the newsroom knew.

“Have you ever been to Japan, Patrick?” one of the other women asked, when the tittering died down.

“No, never,” Wallingford replied. “I’ve never slept with a Japanese woman, either.”

They called him a pig for saying that, although most of them meant this affectionately. Then they dispersed, leaving him with Mary, one of the youngest of the New York newsroom women. (And one of the few Patrick hadn’t yet slept with.)

When Mary saw they were alone together, she touched his left forearm, very lightly, just above his missing hand. Only women ever touched him there.

“They’re just teasing, you know,” she told him. “Most of them would take off for Tokyo with you tomorrow, if you asked them.”

Patrick had thought about sleeping with Mary before, but one thing or another had always intervened. “Would you take off for Tokyo with me tomorrow, if I asked you?”

“I’m married,” Mary said.

“I know,” Patrick replied.

“I’m expecting a baby,” Mary told him; then she burst into tears. She ran after the other New York newsroom women, leaving Wallingford alone with his thoughts, which were that it was always better to let the woman make the first pass. At that moment, the phone call came from Dr. Zajac.

Zajac’s manners, when introducing himself, were (in a word) surgical. “The first hand I get my hands on, you can have,” Dr. Zajac announced. “If you really want it.”

“Why wouldn’t I want it? I mean if it’s healthy…”

“Of course it will be healthy!” Zajac replied. “Would I give you an un healthy hand?”

“When?” Patrick asked.

“You can’t rush finding the perfect hand,” Zajac informed him.

“I don’t think I’d be happy with a woman’s hand, or an old man’s,” Patrick thought out loud.

“Finding the right hand is my job,” Dr. Zajac said.

“It’s a left hand,” Wallingford reminded him.

“Of course it is! I mean the right donor. ”

“Okay, but no strings attached,” Patrick said.

“Strings?” Zajac asked, perplexed. What on earth could the reporter have meant? What possible strings could be attached to a donor hand?

But Wallingford was leaving for Japan, and he’d just learned he was supposed to deliver a speech on the opening day of the conference; he hadn’t written the speech, which he was thinking about but would put off doing until he was on the plane.

Patrick didn’t give a second thought to the curiousness of his own comment—“no strings attached.” It was a typical disaster-man remark, a lion-guy reflex—just another dumb thing to say, solely for the sake of saying something. (Not unlike

“German girls are very popular in New York right now.”)

And Zajac was happy—the matter had been left in his hands, so to speak.

CHAPTER FOUR A Japanese Interlude

IS THERE SOMETHING cursed about Asia and me? Wallingford would wonder later. First he’d lost his hand in India; and now, what about Japan? The trip to Tokyo had gone wrong even before the start, if you count Patrick’s insensitive proposition to Mary. Wallingford himself counted it as the start. He’d hit on a young woman who was newly married and pregnant, a girl whose last name he could never remember. Worse, she’d had a look about her that haunted him; it was more than an unmistakable prettiness, although Mary had that, too. Her look indicated a capacity for damage greater than gossip, a ferocity not easily held in check, a potential for some mayhem yet to be defined. Then, on the plane to Tokyo, Patrick struggled with his speech. Here he was, divorced, for good reason—and feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary—and he was supposed to address the subject of “The Future of Women,” in notoriously keep- women-in-their-place Japan.

Not only was Wallingford not accustomed to writing speeches; he was not used to speaking without reading the script off the TelePrompTer. (Usually someone else had written the script.) But maybe if he looked over the list of participants in the conference—they were all women—he might find some flattering things to say about them, and this flattery might suffice for his opening remarks. It was a blow to him to discover that he had no firsthand knowledge of the accomplishments of any of the women participating in the conference; alas, he knew who only one of the women was, and the most flattering thing he could think of saying about her was that he thought he’d like to sleep with her, although he’d seen her only on television.

Patrick liked German women. Witness that braless sound technician on the TV

crew in Gujarat, that blonde who’d fainted in the meat cart, the enterprising Monika with a k. But the German woman who was a participant in the Tokyo conference was a Barbara, spelled the usual way, and she was, like Wallingford, a television journalist. Unlike Wallingford, she was more successful than she was famous.

Barbara Frei anchored the morning news for ZDF. She had a resonant, professional-sounding voice, a wary smile, and a thin-lipped mouth. She had shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, adroitly tucked behind her ears. Her face was beautiful and sleek, with high cheekbones; in Wallingford’s world, it was a face made for television.

On TV, Barbara Frei wore nothing but rather mannish suits in either black or navy blue, and she never wore a blouse or a shirt of any kind under the wide-open collar of the suit jacket. She had wonderful collarbones, which she quite justifiably liked to show. She preferred small stud earrings—often emeralds or rubies—Patrick could tell; he was knowledgeable about women’s jewelry.

But while the prospect of meeting Barbara Frei in Tokyo gave Wallingford an unrealistic sexual ambition for his time in Japan, neither she nor any of the conference’s other participants could be of any help in writing his speech. There was a Russian film director, a woman named Ludmilla Slovaboda. (The spelling only approximates Patrick’s phonetic guess at how one might pronounce her last name. Let’s call her Ludmilla.) Wallingford had never seen her films. There was a Danish novelist, a woman named Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen; her first name was spelled three different ways in the printed material that Patrick’s Japanese hosts had sent. However her name was spelled, Wallingford presumed one said “bode eel ”— accent on the eel —but he wasn’t sure. There was an English economist with the boring name of Jane Brown. There was a Chinese geneticist, a Korean doctor of infectious diseases, a Dutch bacteriologist, and a woman from Ghana whose field was alternately described as “food-shortage management” or “world-hunger relief.” There was no hope of Wallingford’s pronouncing any of their names correctly; he wouldn’t even try. The list of participants went on and on, all highly accomplished professional women—with the probable exception of an American author and self-described radical feminist whom Wallingford had never heard of, and a lopsided number of participants from Japan who seemed to represent the arts.

Patrick was uncomfortable around female poets and sculptors. It was probably not correct to call them