The Fourth Hand

“By the way, the ratings for last night were terrific,” Wharton said. Patrick knew that he’d better not look at Wharton, whose round face was a bland dot across the table.

“You were great last night, Pat,” Mary added.

Her remark was so well timed that this had to have been rehearsed at the meeting before the meeting, too, because there was not one titter among the newsroom women; they were as straight-faced as a jury that’s made its decision. Wharton, of course, was the only one at the script meeting who didn’t know that Patrick Wallingford had gone home with Mary Shanahan the previous night, nor would Wharton have cared.

Mary gave Patrick an appropriate amount of time to respond—they all did. Everyone was quiet and respectful. Then, when Mary saw that no response would be forthcoming, she said, “Well, if everything’s perfectly clear…”

Wallingford was already on his way to makeup. Thinking back, there was now only one conversation he didn’t regret having with Mary. The second time they’d had sex, with the dawn breaking, he’d told her about his sudden and unaccountable lust for the makeup girl. Mary had been full of condemnation.

“You don’t mean Angie, do you, Pat?”

He’d not known the makeup girl’s name. “The one who chews gum—”

“That’s Angie !” Mary had cried. “That girl is a mess !”

“Well, she turns me on. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s the gum.”

“Maybe you’re just horny, Pat.”

“Maybe.”

That hadn’t been the end of it. They’d been walking crosstown, to the coffee shop on Madison, when Mary had blurted out, apropos of nothing, “Angie! Jesus, Pat—the girl’s a joke ! She still lives with her parents. Her father’s a transit cop or something. In Queens. She’s from Queens !”

“Who cares where she’s from?” Patrick had asked.

In retrospect, he found it curious that Mary wanted his baby, wanted his apartment, wanted to advise him on the most advantageous way to get fired; all things considered, she truly seemed (to a carefully calculated degree) to want to be his friend. She even wanted things to work out for him in Wisconsin—meaning that she’d manifested no jealousy of Mrs. Clausen that Wallingford could detect. Yet Mary was borderline apoplectic that a makeup girl had given him a hard-on. Why?

He sat in the makeup chair, contemplating the arousal factor, as Angie went to work on his crow’s-feet and (today, especially) the dark circles under his eyes.

“Ya didn’t get much sleep last night, huh?” the girl asked him between snaps. She’d changed her gum; last night she’d given off a minty smell—tonight she was chewing something fruity.

“Sadly, no. Another sleepless night,” Patrick replied.

“Why can’cha sleep?” Angie asked.

Wallingford frowned; he was thinking. How far should he go?

“Unscrunch your forehead. Relax, relax!” Angie told him. She was patting the flesh-colored powder on his forehead with her soft little brush. “That’s betta,” she said. “So why can’cha sleep? Aren’t ya gonna tell me?”

Oh, what the hell! Patrick thought. If Mrs. Clausen turned him down, all this would be only the rest of his life. So what if he’d just got his new boss pregnant? He’d already decided, sometime during the script meeting, not to trade apartments with her. And if Doris said yes, this would be his last night as a free man. Surely some of us are familiar with the fact that sexual anarchy can precede a commitment to the monogamous life. This was the old Patrick Wallingford—his licentiousness reasserting itself.

“I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about you,” Wallingford confessed. The makeup girl had just spread her hand, her thumb and index finger smoothing what she called the “smile lines” at the corners of his mouth. He could feel her fingers stop on his skin as if her hand had died there. Her jaw dropped; her mouth hung open, midsnap.

Angie wore a snug, short-sleeved sweater the color of orange sherbet. On a chain around her neck was a thick signet ring, obviously a man’s, which was heavy enough to separate her breasts. Even her breasts stopped moving while she held her breath; everything had stopped.

Finally she breathed again—one long exhalation, redolent of the chewing gum. Patrick could see his face in the mirror, but not hers. He looked at the tensed muscles in her neck; a strand or two of her jet-black hair hung down. The shoulder straps of her bra showed through her orange sweater, which had ridden up above the waistband of her tight black skirt. She had olive-colored skin, and dark, downylooking hair on her arms. Angie was only twenty-something. Wallingford had hardly been shocked to hear that she still lived with her parents. Lots of New York working girls did. To have your own apartment was too expensive, and parents were generally more reliable than multiple roommates.

Patrick was beginning to believe that Angie would never respond, and her soft fingers were once again working the rouge into his skin. At last Angie took a deep breath and held it, as if she were thinking of what to say; then she released another long, fruity breath. She started chewing her gum again, rapidly—her breaths were short and sweet. Wallingford was uncomfortably aware that she was scrutinizing his face for more than blemishes and wrinkles.

“Are ya askin’ me out or somethin’?” Angie whispered to him. She kept glancing at the open doorway of the makeup room, where she was alone with Patrick. The woman who did hair had taken the elevator down to street level; she was standing on the sidewalk somewhere, smoking a cigarette.

“Think of it this way, Angie,” Wallingford whispered to the agitated, breathy girl.

“This is definitely a case of sexual harassment, if you play your cards right.”

Patrick was pleased with himself for imagining a way to get fired that Mary Shanahan had not thought of, but Angie didn’t know he was serious; the makeup girl wrongly believed he was just fooling around. And as Wallingford had correctly guessed, she had a crush on him.

“Ha!” Angie said, flashing him a frisky smile. He could see the color of her gum for the first time—it was purple. (Grape, or some synthetic variation thereof.) She had her tweezers out and seemed to be staring at a spot between his eyes. As she bent more closely over him, he breathed her in—her perfume, her hair, the gum. She smelled wonderful, in a kind of department-store way.

In the mirror, he could see the fingers of his right hand; he spread them as purposefully on the narrow strip of flesh between the waistband of her skirt and her high-riding sweater as he might have touched the keyboard of a piano before he started to play. At that moment he had a shameless sense of himself as a semiretired maestro, long out of practice, who’d not lost his touch. There wasn’t a lawyer in New York who wouldn’t happily represent her case. Wallingford only hoped she wouldn’t gouge his face with the tweezers. Instead, as he touched her warm skin, Angie arched her back in such a way that she was pressing—no, make that snuggling—against his hand. With the tweezers, she gently plucked an errant eyebrow-hair from the bridge of his nose. Then she kissed him on the lips with her mouth a little open; he could taste her gum. He meant to say something along the lines of “Angie, for Christ’s sake, you should sue me!” But he couldn’t take his one hand off her. Instinctively, his fingers slipped under her sweater; they slid up her spine, all the way to the back strap of her bra. “I love the gum,” he told her, his old self easily finding the right words. She kissed him again, this time parting his lips, then his teeth, with her forceful tongue.

Patrick was briefly taken aback when Angie inserted her slick wad of gum into his mouth; for an alarming moment, he imagined that he’d bitten off her tongue. It simply wasn’t the sort of foreplay he was used to—he hadn’t gone out with a lot of gum-chewers. Her bare back squirmed against his hand; her breasts in her soft sweater brushed his chest.

It was one of the newsroom women who cleared her throat in the doorway. This was almost exactly what Wallingford had wanted; he’d hoped that Mary Shanahan might have seen him kissing and feeling up Angie, but he had no doubt that the incident would be reported to Mary before he went on-camera. “You’ve got five minutes, Pat,” the newsroom woman told him.

Angie, who’d left him with her gum, was still pulling her sweater down when the woman who did hair returned from her sidewalk smoke. She was a heavy black woman who smelled like cinnamon-raisin toast, and she always made a point of feigning exasperation when there was nothing Patrick’s hair needed. Sometimes she squirted a little hair spray on him, or rubbed him with a dab of gel; this time she just patted him on the top of his