The Fourth Hand

apple, Madox tells Almasy that it’s called “the vascular sizood.”

Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen with the heartfelt conviction that she would have liked the incident as much as he did, but she had her doubts about it.

“It was called something different in the movie,” Doris told him.

“It was?”

He hadn’t seen the film in how long? He rented the video and watched it immediately. But when he got to that scene, he couldn’t quite catch what that part of a woman’s neck was called. Mrs. Clausen had been right, however; it was not called “the vascular sizood.”

Wallingford rewound the video and watched the scene again. Almasy and Madox are saying good-bye. (Madox is going home, to kill himself.) Almasy says, “There is no God.” Adding: “But I hope someone looks after you.”

Madox seems to remember something and points to his own throat. “In case you’re still wondering—this is called the suprasternal notch.” Patrick caught the line the second time. Did that part of a woman’s neck have two names? And when he’d watched the film again, and after he’d finished reading the novel, Wallingford would declare to Mrs. Clausen how much he loved the part where Katharine says to Almasy, “I want you to ravish me.”

“In the book, you mean,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“In the book and in the movie,” Patrick replied.

“It wasn’t in the movie,” Doris told him. (He’d just watched it—he felt certain that the line was there!) “You just thought you heard that line because of how much you liked it.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“It’s a guy thing to like,” she said. “I never believed she would say it to him.”

Had Patrick believed so wholeheartedly in Katharine saying “I want you to ravish me” that, in his easily manipulated memory, he’d simply inserted the line into the film? Or had Doris found the line so unbelievable that she’d blanked it out of the movie? And what did it matter whether the line was or wasn’t in the film? The point was that Patrick liked it and Mrs. Clausen did not.

Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He’d tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared.

Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news—they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed.

But Doris Clausen must have sensed his disheartenment and taken pity on him. She sent him two more photographs from their time together at the cottage on the lake. He’d been hoping that she would send him the one of their bathing suits sideby-side on the clothesline. How happy he was to have that picture! He taped it to the mirror in his office dressing room. (Let Mary Shanahan make some catty remark about that ! Just let her try.)

It was the second photo that shocked him. He’d still been asleep when Mrs. Clausen had taken it, a self- portrait, with the camera held crookedly in her hand. No matter—you could see well enough what was going on. Doris was ripping the wrapper off the second condom with her teeth. She was smiling at the camera, as if Wallingford were the camera and he already knew how she was going to put the condom on his penis.

Patrick didn’t stick that photograph on his office dressing-room mirror; he kept it in his apartment, on his bedside table, next to the telephone, so that he could look at it when Mrs. Clausen called him or when he called her.

Late one night, after he’d gone to bed but had not yet fallen asleep, the phone rang and Wallingford turned on the light on his night table so that he could look at her picture when he spoke to her. But it wasn’t Doris.

“Hey, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Angie’s brother Vito said. “I hope I’m interruptin’ somethin’…” (Vito called often, always with nothing to say.) When Wallingford hung up, he did so with a decided sadness that was not quite nostalgia. In the at-home hours of his life, since he’d come back to New York from Wisconsin, he not only missed Doris Clausen; he missed that wild, gumchewing night with Angie, too. At these times, he even occasionally missed Mary Shanahan—the old Mary, before she acquired the certitude of a last name and the uncomfortable authority she now held over him.

Patrick turned out the light. As he drifted into sleep, he tried to think forgivingly of Mary. The past litany of her most positive features returned to him: her flawless skin, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, her perfect little teeth. And, Wallingford assumed—since Mary was still hoping she was pregnant—her commitment to no prescription drugs. She’d been a bitch to him at times, but people are not only what they seem to be. After all, he had dumped her. There were women who would have been more bitter about it than Mary was. Speak of the devil! The phone rang and it was Mary Shanahan; she was crying into the phone. She’d got her period. It had come a month and a half late—late enough to have given her hope that she was pregnant—but her period had arrived just the same.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Wallingford said, and he genuinely was sorry—for her. For himself, he felt unearned jubilation; he’d dodged another bullet.

“Imagine you, of all people—shooting blanks!” Mary told him, between sobs. “I’ll give you another chance, Pat. We’ve got to try it again, as soon as I’m ovulating.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” he repeated. “I’m not your man. Blanks or no blanks, I’ve had my chance.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’m saying no. We’re not having sex again, not for any reason.”

Mary called him a number of colorful names before she hung up. But Mary’s disappointment in him did not interfere with Patrick’s sleep; on the contrary, he had the best night’s sleep since he’d drifted off in Mrs. Clausen’s arms and awakened to the feeling of her teeth unrolling a condom on his penis. Wallingford was still sound asleep when Mrs. Clausen called. It may have been an hour earlier in Green Bay, but little Otto routinely woke up his mother a couple of hours before Wallingford was awake.

“Mary isn’t pregnant. She just got her period,” Patrick announced.

“She’s going to ask you to do it again. That’s what I would do,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“She already asked. I already said no.”

“Good,” Doris told him.

“I’m looking at your picture,” Wallingford said.

“I can guess which one,” she replied.

Little Otto was talking baby-talk somewhere near the phone. Wallingford didn’t say anything for a moment— just imagining the two of them was enough. Then he asked her, “What are you wearing? Have you got any clothes on?”

“I’ve got two tickets to a Monday-night game, if you want to go,” was her answer.

“I want to go.”

“It’s Monday Night Football, the Seahawks and the Packers at Lambeau Field.”

Mrs. Clausen spoke with a reverence that was wasted on Wallingford. “Mike Holmgren’s coming home. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Me neither!” Patrick replied. He didn’t know who Mike Holmgren was. He would have to do a little research.

“It’s November first. Are you sure you’re free?”

“I’ll be free!” he promised. Wallingford was trying to sound joyful while, in truth, he was heartbroken that he would have to wait until November to see her. It was only the middle of September! “Maybe you could come to New York before then?” he asked.

“No. I want to see you at the game,” she told him. “I can’t explain.”

“You don’t have to explain!” Patrick quickly replied.

“I’m glad you like the picture,” was the way she changed the subject.

“I love it! I love what you did to me.”

“Okay. I’ll see you before too long,” was the way Mrs. Clausen closed the conversation—she didn’t even say good-bye.