The Fourth Hand (12 page)

“Surely you couldn’t be my mother—”

“Biological y speaking, I surely could be,” Ms. Arbuthnot said. “I could have had you when I was sixteen—when I looked eighteen, by the way. How’s your math?”

“You’re fifty-something?” he asked her.

“That’s close enough,” she said. “And I can’t leave for Kyoto today. I won’t skip the last day of this pathetic but wel -

intentioned conference. If you can wait until tomorrow, I’l go to Kyoto with you for the weekend.”

“Okay,” Wal ingford agreed. He didn’t tel her that he already had two tickets on

“the bul et train.” He could ask the concierge at the hotel to change his reservations for the train and inn.

“You sure you want to do this?” Evelyn Arbuthnot asked.

She didn’t sound too sure herself.

“Yes, I’m sure. I like you,” Wal ingford told Ms. Arbuthnot.

“Even if I
am
an asshole.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself for being an asshole,” she told him. It was the closest her voice had come to a sexual purr. In terms of speed—most of al , in regard to how quickly she could change her mind—Evelyn was a kind of bul et train herself. Patrick began to have second thoughts about going anywhere with her.

It was as if she’d read his mind. “I won’t be too demanding,”

she suddenly said.

“Besides, you should have some experience with a woman my age. One day, when you’re in your seventies, women my age are going to be as young as you can get.”

Over the course of the rest of that day and night, while Wal ingford waited to take the bul et train to Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot, his hangover gradual y subsided; when he went to bed, he could taste the sake only when he yawned. The next day dawned bright and fair in the land of the rising sun—a false promise, as it turned out.

Wal ingford rode on a two-hundred-mile-an-hour train with a woman old enough to be his mother, and with about five hundred screaming schoolchildren, al girls, because—as far as Patrick and Evelyn could understand the tortuous English of the train’s conductor—it was something cal ed National Prayer Weekend for Girls and every schoolgirl in Japan was going to Kyoto, or so it seemed.

It rained the entire weekend. Kyoto was overrun with Japanese schoolgirls, praying. Wel , they must have prayed
some
of the time that they overran the city, although Patrick and Evelyn never saw them actual y do so. When they weren’t praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do.

They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs

—al for no apparent reason.

“Wretched hormones,” Evelyn said, as if she knew.

The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths—so many baths that the traditional inn where Wal ingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.

“Too many not-praying girls!” the apologetic innkeeper told Patrick and Evelyn, not that they real y cared about the lack of hot water; a tepid bath or two would do. They were fucking nonstop, al weekend long, with only occasional visits to the temples for which Kyoto (unlike Patrick Wal ingford) was justly famous. It turned out that Evelyn Arbuthnot liked to have a lot of sex. In forty-eight hours .

. . no, never mind. It would be boorish to count the number of times they did it. Suffice it to say that Wal ingford was completely worn out at the end of the weekend, and by the time he and Evelyn were riding the two-hundred-mile-anhour train back to Tokyo, Patrick’s cock was so sore that he felt like a teenager who’d wanked himself raw.

He loved what he’d seen of the wet temples. Standing inside the huge wooden shrines with the rain beating down was like being held captive in a primitive, drumlike wooden instrument with the prevailing, high-pitched yammer of rampant schoolgirls surrounding you.

Many of the girls wore their school uniforms, which lent to their presence the monotony of a military band. Some were pretty, but most were not; besides, on that particular National Prayer Weekend for Girls, which was probably not what the weekend was official y cal ed, Wal ingford had eyes only for Evelyn Arbuthnot.

He liked making love to her, no smal part of the reason being that she so clearly enjoyed herself with him. He found her body, which was by no means beautiful, nonetheless astutely purposeful. Evelyn used her body as if it were a wel designed tool. But on one of her smal breasts was a fairly large scar—not from an accident, clearly. (It was too straight and thin; it had to be a surgical scar.) “I had a lump removed,” she told Patrick, when he asked her about it.

“It must have been a pretty big lump,” he said.

“It turned out to be nothing. I’m fine,” she replied.

Only on the return trip to Tokyo had she begun to mother him a little. “What are you going to do with yourself, Patrick?” she’d asked, holding his one hand.

“Do with myself?”

“You’re a mess,” she told him. He saw in her face the genuineness of her concern for him.

“I’m a mess,” he repeated to Evelyn.

“Yes, you are, and you know it,” she told him. “Your career is unsatisfying, but what’s more important is you don’t have a
life.
You might as wel be lost at sea, dear.” (The “dear”

was something new and unappealing.)

Patrick began to babble about Dr. Zajac and the prospect of having handtransplant surgery—of actual y, after these five long years, getting back a left hand.

“That’s not what I mean,” Evelyn interrupted him. “Who cares about your left hand? It’s been five years! You can do without it. You can always find someone to help you slice a tomato, or you can just do without the tomato. You’re not a goodlooking joke
because of
your missing hand. It’s partly because of your job, but, chiefly, it’s because of how you live your
life
!”

“Oh,” Wal ingford said. He tried to take his hand out of her motherly grasp, but Ms. Arbuthnot wouldn’t let him; after al , she had two hands and she firmly held his one hand between them.

“Listen to me, Patrick,” Evelyn said. “It’s great that Dr.

Sayzac wants to give you a new left hand—”

“Dr.
Zajac,
” Wal ingford corrected her petulantly.

“Dr. Zajac, then,” Ms. Arbuthnot continued. “I don’t mean to take anything away from the courage involved in subjecting yourself to such a risky experiment—”

“It would be only the
second
such surgery
ever,
” Patrick, again petulantly, informed her. “The first one didn’t work.”

“Yes, yes—you’ve told me,” Ms. Arbuthnot reminded him.

“But do you have the courage to change your
life
?” Then she fel asleep, her grip on his hand relaxing as she did so.

Wal ingford probably could have pul ed his hand away without waking her, but he didn’t want to risk it.

Evelyn would be flying to San Francisco; Wal ingford was on his way back to New York. There was another women-related conference in San Francisco, she’d told him.

He hadn’t asked her what her “message” was, nor would he ever finish one of her books. The only one he tried to read would be disappointing to him. Evelyn Arbuthnot was more interesting as a person than she was as a writer. Like many smart, motivated people who’ve had busy and informed lives, she didn’t write especial y wel .

In bed, where personal history is most unselfconsciously forthcoming, Ms. Arbuthnot had told Patrick that she’d been married twice—the first time when she was very young.

She’d divorced her first husband; her second, the one she’d truly loved, had died. She was a widow with grown children and several young grandchildren. Her children and grandchildren, she’d told Wal ingford, were her life; her writing and traveling were only her message. But in what little Wal ingford managed to read of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s writing, her “message”

eluded him. Yet whenever he thought of her, he had to admit that she’d taught him quite a lot about himself.

On the bul et train, just before their arrival in Tokyo, some Japanese schoolgirls and their accompanying teacher recognized him. They seemed to be gathering their courage to send one of the girls the length of the passenger car to ask the lion guy for his autograph. Patrick hoped not

—giving the girls his signature would require extricating his right hand from Evelyn’s sleeping fingers. Final y none of the schoolgirls could summon the courage to approach him; their teacher came down the aisle of the bul et train instead. She was wearing a uniform that closely resembled those of her young charges, and although she was young herself, she conveyed both the severity and formality of a much older woman when she spoke to him. She was also exceedingly polite; she made such an effort to keep her voice low and soft, so as not to wake Evelyn, that Wal ingford had to lean a little into the aisle in order to hear her above the clatter of the speeding train.

“The girls wanted me to tel you that they think you’re very handsome, and that you must be very brave,” she told Patrick. “I have something to say to you, too,”

she whispered. “When I first saw you, with the lion, I regret that I didn’t think you would be such a
nice
man. But seeing you as you are—you know, just traveling and talking with your mother—I now realize that you are a
very
nice man.”

“Thank you,” Wal ingford whispered back, although her misunderstanding pained him, and when the young teacher had returned to her seat, Evelyn gave his hand a squeeze

—just to let him know she’d been awake. When Wal ingford looked at her, her eyes were open wide and she was smiling at him.

Less than a year later, when he heard of her death—“The breast cancer returned,”

one of her daughters told Wal ingford when he cal ed to give Evelyn’s children and grandchildren his condolences—

Patrick would remember her smile on the bul et train. The lump, which Evelyn had told him was nothing, had been something after al . Given how long a scar it had been, maybe she’d already known that.

There was something entirely too fragile about Patrick Wal ingford. Women—his ex-wife, Marilyn, excepted—were always trying to spare him things, although that hardly had been Evelyn Arbuthnot’s style.

Wal ingford would remember, too, that he could have asked the Japanese schoolteacher what the official name for National Prayer Weekend for Girls was, but he hadn’t.

Incredibly, especial y for a journalist, he’d spent six days in Japan and learned absolutely nothing about the country.

Like the young schoolteacher, the Japanese he’d met had been extremely civilized and courteous, including the Japanese newspapermen who’d been Wal ingford’s hosts

—they’d been a lot more respectful and wel mannered than most of the journalists Patrick worked with in New York. But he’d asked them nothing; he’d been too consumed studying himself. Al he’d half-learned was how to mock their accents, which he imitated incorrectly.

Fault Marilyn, Wal ingford’s ex-wife, al you want. She was right about at least one thing—Patrick was permanently a boy. Yet he was capable of growing up, or so he hoped.

There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person’s life. Patrick Wal ingford’s defining experience was
not
losing his left hand, nor was it adjusting to life without that hand. The experience that truly changed him was a largely squandered trip to Japan.

“Tel us about Japan, Pat. How was it?” those fast-talking women in the New York newsroom would ask him in their ever-flirtatious, always-baiting voices. (They’d already learned from Dick how Wal ingford had heard “cunt” when Dick had said

“runt.”)

But when Wal ingford was asked about Japan, he would duck the question. “Japan is a novel,” Patrick would say, and leave it at that.

He already believed that the trip to Japan had made him sincerely want to change his life. He would risk everything to change it. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he believed he had the wil power to try. To his credit, the first moment he was alone with Mary whatever-her-name-was in the newsroom, Wal ingford said, “I’m very sorry, Mary. I am truly, deeply sorry for what I said, for upsetting you so—”

She interrupted him. “It wasn’t what you said that upset me

—it’s my
marriage.
It’s not working out very wel , and I’m pregnant.”

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said again.

Cal ing Dr. Zajac and confirming that he wanted to undergo the transplant surgery had been relatively easy.

The next time Patrick had a minute alone with Mary, he made a blunder of the wel -intentioned kind. “When are you expecting, Mary?” (She wasn’t showing yet.)

“I lost the baby!” Mary blurted out; she burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick repeated.

“It’s my second miscarriage,” the miserable young woman told him. She sobbed against his chest, wetting his shirt.

When some of those savvy New York newsroom women saw them, they shot one another their most knowing glances. But they were wrong—that is, they were wrong this time. Wal ingford
was
trying to change.

“I
should
have gone to Japan with you,” Mary whatever-her-name-was whispered in Patrick’s ear.

“No, Mary—no, no,” Wal ingford said. “You should
not
have gone to Japan with me, and I was wrong to propose it.” But the young woman cried al the harder. In the company of crying women, Patrick Wal ingford did what many men do