The Fourth Hand

a surprise! But how could Patrick have predicted it? Surely if any woman could sympathize with another woman wanting to have Patrick Wallingford’s baby, wasn’t it reasonable for Patrick to think that Doris Clausen would be the one? No, it wasn’t reasonable! And how could she sympathize, given the half-assed manner in which Wallingford told the story? He’d just plunged in. He was artless, in the worst sense of the word—meaning oafish and crude. He began with what amounted to a confession: “I don’t really think of this as an illustration of why I might have trouble maintaining a monogamous relationship, but it is a little disturbing.”

What a way to begin a proposal! Was it any wonder that Doris withdrew her hand from his and turned to look at him? Wallingford, who sensed from his misguided prologue that he was already in trouble, couldn’t look at her while he talked. He stared instead at their sleeping child, as if the innocence of Otto junior might serve to shield Mrs. Clausen from all that was sexually incorrigible and morally reprehensible in his relationship with Mary Shanahan.

Mrs. Clausen was appalled. She wasn’t, for once, even looking at her son; she couldn’t take her eyes off Wallingford’s handsome profile as he clumsily recounted the details of his shameful behavior. He was babbling now, out of nervousness, in part, but also because he feared that the impression he was making on Doris was the opposite of what he’d intended.

What had he been thinking? What an absolute mess it would be if Mary Shanahan was pregnant with his child!

Still in a confessional mode, he lifted the towel to show Mrs. Clausen the bruise on his shin from the glass- topped table in Mary’s apartment; he also showed her the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. She’d already noticed how his back was scratched. And the love-bite on his left shoulder—she’d noticed that, too.

“Oh, that wasn’t Mary,” Wallingford confessed.

This was not the best thing he could have said.

“Who else have you been seeing?” Doris asked.

This wasn’t going as he’d hoped. But how much more trouble could Patrick get into by telling Mrs. Clausen about Angie? Surely Angie’s was a simpler story.

“I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night,” Wallingford began. “I was just horny.”

What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!) He told Doris about the phone calls from various members of Angie’s distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused—she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (All the gum-chewing didn’t help.) “Angie is a good-hearted girl,”

Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mentally disabled. “No, no!” Wallingford protested. “Angie is neither underage nor mentally disabled, she’s just… well…”

“A bimbo?” asked Mrs. Clausen.

“No, no! Not exactly,” Patrick protested loyally.

“Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with—that is, if I accepted you,” Doris speculated. “And since you didn’t know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason not to sleep with her.”

“Yes, maybe,” Wallingford replied weakly.

“Well, that’s not so bad,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean.” He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away—she stared at Otto junior, who was still blissfully asleep. “I have more trouble understanding Mary,” Doris added. “I don’t know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she is pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean.”

“Yes, it does,” Patrick agreed. Again he thought: What was I thinking? Wasn’t this also a context he had overlooked?

“I can understand what Mary was up to,” Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn’t turn away. “Who wouldn’t want your baby?” She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. “You’re like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your effect. It’s not that you’re dangerous because you’re handsome—you’re dangerous because you don’t know how handsome you are!

And you’re thoughtless.” The word stung him like a slap. “How could you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You weren’t thinking of me! Not then.”

“But you seemed such a… remote possibility,” was all Wallingford could say. He knew that what she’d said was true.

What a fool he was! He’d mistakenly believed that he could tell her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because her relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she’d tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn’t worked out—that was all. Alongside Mrs. Clausen’s single misadventure, Wallingford’s world was sexually lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed. Doris’s disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was still wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he’d noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he’d seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake. (She’d put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant.)

What Wallingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you all of it.

Patrick Wallingford’s world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wallingford also realized was that she had actually taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered everything seriously. In all likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he’d once thought—he’d just blown it.

She sat apart from him on the small bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at— often at this hour of the night or early morning—many times before. “I should get some sleep,” was all she said.

If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wall—at the darker rectangle on the wall of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.

“Something used to hang on the wall… in the other bedroom,” he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. “What was it?”

“It was just a beer poster,” Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.

“Oh.” Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Naturally it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn’t have wanted to go on looking at it.

He extended his one hand, not letting it fall in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers. “You used to have a metal thing in your belly button. It was an ornament of some kind,” he ventured. “I saw it only once.”

He didn’t add that it was the time she’d mounted him in Dr. Zajac’s office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!

She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn’t want him touching her anywhere else. “It was supposed to be a good-luck charm,” Doris explained. In the way she said “supposed to be,”

Wallingford could detect years of disbelief. “Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn’t work, except with you, and you probably didn’t need it.”

“So you don’t wear it anymore?”

“I’m not trying to get pregnant anymore,” she told him.