The Fourth Hand

Mary shouted. One of the newsroom women was trying to calm her down. The waiter could be overheard saying something about the truffle season. Patrick recognized the waiter’s voice. The restaurant was an Italian place on West Seventeenth. “What about Wisconsin?” Mary whined. “I wanted to spend the weekend in your apartment while you were in Wisconsin, just to try it out…” She began to cry.

“What about Wisconsin?” Angie panted.

“I’m going there first thing tomorrow,” was all Wallingford said. A different voice spoke up from the answering machine; one of the newsroom women had seized Mary’s cell phone after Mary dissolved in tears. “You shit, Pat,” the woman said. Wallingford could visualize her surgically slimmed-down face. It was the woman he’d been in Bangkok with, a long time ago; her face had been fuller then. That was the end of the call.

“Ha!” Angie cried. She’d twisted the two of them into a sideways position, which Wallingford was unfamiliar with. The position was a little painful for him, but the makeup girl was gathering momentum—her growl had become a moan. When the answering machine picked up the second call, Angie dug one of her heels into the small of Patrick’s back. They were still joined sideways, the girl grunting loudly, as a woman’s voice asked mournfully, “Is my baby girl there? Oh, Angie, Angie—my dahlin’, my dahlin’! Ya gotta stop whatcha doin’, Angie. Ya breakin’ my heart!”

“Mom, for Christ’s sake…” Angie started to say, but she was gasping. Her moan had become a growl again —her growl, a roar.

She’s probably a screamer, Wallingford considered—his neighbors would think he was murdering the girl. I should be packing for Wisconsin, Patrick thought, as Angie violently heaved herself onto her back. Somehow, although they were nonetheless deeply joined, one of her legs was flung over one of his shoulders; he tried to kiss her but her knee was in the way.

Angie’s mother was weeping so rhythmically that the answering machine emitted a pre-orgasmic sound of its own. Wallingford never heard her hang up; the last of her sobs was drowned out by Angie’s screams. Not even childbirth could be this loud, Patrick wrongly supposed—not even Joan of Arc, blazing at the stake. But Angie’s screams abruptly ceased. For a second she lay as if paralyzed; then she began to thrash. Her hair whipped Wallingford’s face, her body bucked against him, her nails raked his back.

Uh-oh, a screamer and a scratcher, Wallingford thought—the younger, unmarried Crystal Pitney not forgotten. He hid his face against Angie’s throat so that she couldn’t gouge his eyes. He was frankly afraid of the next phase of her orgasm; the girl seemed to possess superhuman strength. Without a sound, not even a groan, she was strong enough to arch her back and roll him off her—first on his side, then on his back. Miraculously, they’d not once become disconnected; it was as if they never could be. They felt permanently fastened together, a new species. He could feel her heart pounding; her whole chest was vibrating but not a sound came from her, not a breath.

Then he realized she wasn’t breathing. Was she a screamer and a scratcher and a fainter ? It took all his strength to straighten his arms. He pushed her chest off him—his one hand on one breast, his stump on the other. That was when he saw she was choking on her gum— her face was blue, her dark-brown eyes showing only the whites. Wallingford gripped her lolling jaw in his hand; he drove the stump of his forearm under her ribcage, a punch without a fist. The pain was reminiscent of the days following his attachment surgery, a sickening pain that shot up his forearm to his shoulder before it traveled to his neck. But Angie exhaled sharply, expelling the gum.

The phone rang while the frightened girl lay shaking on his chest, wracked with sobs, sucking huge gulps of air. “I was dyin’, ” she managed to gasp. Patrick, who’d thought she was coming, said nothing while the machine answered the call.

“I was dyin’ and comin’ at the same time,” the girl added. “It was weird.”

From the answering machine, a voice spoke from the city’s grim underground; there were metallic shrieks and the lurching rumble of a subway train, over which Angie’s father, a transit policeman, made his message clear. “Angie, are ya tryin’

to kill your muthuh or what? She’s not eatin’, she’s not sleepin’, she’s not goin’ to Mass…” Another train screeched over the cop’s lament.

“Daddy,” was all Angie said to Wallingford. Her hips were moving again. As a couple, they seemed eternally joined—a minor god and goddess representing death by pleasure.

Angie was screaming again when the phone rang a fourth time. What time is it? Patrick wondered, but when he looked at his digital alarm clock, something pink was covering the time. It had a ghastly anatomical appearance, like part of a lung, but it was only Angie’s gum—definitely some sort of berry flavor. The way the light of the alarm clock shone through the substance made the gum resemble living tissue.

“God…” he said, coming, just as the makeup girl also came. Her teeth, doubtless missing the gum, sank into Wallingford’s left shoulder. Patrick could tolerate the pain—he’d known worse. But Angie was even more enthusiastic than he’d expected her to be. She was a screamer, a choker, and a biter. She was in midbite when she fainted dead away.

“Hey, cripple,” said a strange man’s voice on Patrick’s answering machine. “Hey, Mista One Hand, do ya know what? You’re gonna lose more than your hand, that’s what. You’re gonna end up with nothin’ between your legs but a fuckin’ draft. ”

Wallingford tried to wake up Angie by kissing her, but the fainted girl just smiled.

“There’s a call for you,” Patrick whispered in her ear. “You might want to take this one.”

“Hey, fuck-face,” the man in the answering machine said, “did ya know that even television personalities can just disappear ?” He must have been calling from a moving car. The radio was playing Johnny Mathis—softly, but not softly enough. Wallingford thought of the signet ring Angie wore on the chain around her neck; it would slip over a knuckle the size of his big toe. But she had already taken off the ring, and she’d dismissed its owner as “a nobody”—some guy who was

“overseas.” So who was the guy on the phone?

“Angie, I think you ought to hear this,” Patrick whispered. He gently pulled the sleeping girl into a sitting position; her hair fell forward, hiding her face, covering her pretty breasts. She smelled like a delectable concoction of fruits and flowers; her body was coated with a thin and glowing film of sweat.

“Listen to me, Mista One Hand,” the answering machine said. “I’m gonna grind up your prick in a blenda. Then I’m gonna make ya drink it!” That was the end of the charmless call.

Wallingford was packing for Wisconsin when Angie woke up.

“Boy, have I gotta pee!” the girl said.

“There was another call—not your mother. Some guy said he was going to grind up my penis in a blender.”

“That would be my brother Vittorio—Vito, for short,” Angie said. She left the door to the bathroom open while she peed. “Did he really say ‘penis’?” she called from the toilet.

“No, he actually said ‘prick,’ ” Patrick replied.

“Definitely Vito,” the makeup girl said. “He’s harmless. Vito don’t even have a job.” How did Vito’s unemployment make him harmless? “So what’s in Minnesota, anyway?” Angie asked.

“Wisconsin,” he corrected her.

“So who’s there?”

“A woman I’m going to ask to marry me,” Patrick answered. “She’ll probably say no.”

“Hey, ya gotta real problem, do ya know that?” Angie asked. She pulled him back to the bed. “Come here, ya gotta have more confidence than that. Ya gotta believe she’s gonna say yes. Otherwise, why botha?”

“I don’t think she loves me.”

“Sure she does! Ya just gotta practice,” the makeup girl said. “Go on—ya can practice on me. Go on— ask me!”

He tried; after all, he’d been rehearsing. He told her what he wanted to say to Mrs. Clausen.

“Geez… that’s terrible,” Angie said. “To begin with, ya can’t start out apologizin’ all over the place—ya gotta come right out and say, ‘I can’t live widoutcha!’ That kind of thing. Go on— say it!”

“I can’t live without you,” Wallingford announced unconvincingly.

“Geez…”

“What’s wrong?” Patrick asked.

“Ya gotta say it betta than that !”