The Fourth Hand (29 page)

“It would appear that I’m perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool,” was al Wal ingford said in reply.

He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wal ingford said oncamera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

When it was evident that Wal ingford wasn’t up to having sex again, Mary said they might as wel go to work a little early. “I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer,” was how she expressed it. “I have a few ideas,” she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown. Her timing was almost magical.

Patrick listened to her talk about “closure,” about

“wrapping up the Kennedy thing.” She’d already written the script, he realized. Almost as an afterthought—they’d cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom—Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. “If I were you, Pat,” she confided, “I wouldn’t worry about Fred. I wouldn’t give him a second thought.”

At first, Wal ingford believed that the newsroom women were al abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they al knew. But Fred had been fired—that was the reason for the women’s mercurial chatter. Wal ingford was not surprised that Mary wasn’t shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women’s room.)

Patrick
was
surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wal ingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton’s innocuousness struck Patrick as potential y dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people—even Fred, even Patrick Wal ingford. But Wharton’s only reference to Wal ingford’s smal rebel ion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred’s subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word “unfortunate.” Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.

Wal ingford couldn’t quite tel what it meant—why had they sent only one producer to talk to him? But the choice was predictable; they’d used her before when it struck them that Wal ingford needed a pep talk, or some other form of instruction.

Her name was Sabina. She had worked her way up; years ago, she’d been one of the newsroom women. Patrick had slept with her, but only once—when she was much younger and stil married to her first husband.

“I suppose there’s an interim replacement for Fred. A new dick, so to speak? A
new
news editor . . .” Wal ingford speculated.

“I wouldn’t cal the appointment an interim replacement, if I were you,” Sabina cautioned him. (Her vocabulary, like Mary’s, was big on “if I were you,” Patrick noticed.) “I would say that the appointment has been a long time coming, and that there’s nothing in the least ‘interim’ about it.”

“Is it you, Sabina?” Wal ingford asked. (Was it Wharton? he was thinking.)

“No, it’s Shanahan.” There was just a hint of bitterness in Sabina’s voice.

“Shanahan?” The name didn’t ring a bel with Wal ingford.

“Mary, to you,” Sabina told him.

S o
that
was her name! He didn’t even remember it now.

Mary Shanahan! He should have known.

“Good luck, Pat. I’l see you at the script meeting,” was al Sabina said. She left him alone with his thoughts, but he wasn’t alone for long. When Wal ingford arrived at the meeting, the newsroom women were already there; they were as alert and jumpy as smal , nervous dogs. One of them pushed a memo across the table to Patrick; the paper fairly flew out of her hands. At first glance, he thought it was a press release of the news he already knew, but he soon saw that—in addition to her duties as the new news editor

—Mary Shanahan had been made a producer of the show.

That must have been why Sabina had so little to say at their earlier meeting. Sabina was a producer, too, only now it seemed she was not as important a producer as she’d been before Mary was made one. As for Wharton, the moon-faced CEO never said anything at the script meetings. Wharton was one of those guys who made al his remarks from the vantage point of hindsight—his comments were strictly after the fact. He came to the script meetings only to learn who was responsible for everything Patrick Wal ingford said on-camera. This made it impossible to know how important, or not, Wharton was.

First they reviewed the selected montage footage on file.

There was not one image that wasn’t already part of the public consciousness. The most shameless shot, with which the montage concluded by freezing to a stil , was a stolen image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. The image wasn’t entirely clear, but she seemed to be caught in the act of trying to block the camera’s view of her son. The boy was shooting baskets, maybe in the driveway of the Schlossberg summer home in Sagaponack. The cameraman had used a telephoto lens—you could tel by the outof-focus branches (probably privet) in the foreground of the frame. (Someone must have snaked a camera through a hedge.) The boy was either oblivious or pretending to be oblivious to the camera.

Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was caught in profile. She was stil elegant and dignified, but either sleeplessness or the tragedy had made her face more gaunt. Her appearance refuted the comforting notion that one grew accustomed to grief.

“Why are we using this?” Patrick asked. “Aren’t we ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed?”

“It just needs some voice-over, Pat,” Mary Shanahan said.

“How about this, Mary? How about I say, ‘We’re New Yorkers. We have the good reputation of offering anonymity to the famous. Lately, however, that reputation is undeserved.’ How about
that
?” Wal ingford asked.

No one answered him. Mary’s ice-blue eyes were as sparkling as her smile. The newsroom women were twitching with excitement; if they had al started biting one another, Patrick wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Or this,” Wal ingford went on. “How about I say
this
? ‘By al accounts, from those who knew him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was a modest young man, a decent guy. Some comparable modesty and decency from
us
would be refreshing.’ ”

There was a pause that would have been polite, were it not for the newsroom women’s exaggerated sighs.

“I’ve written a little something,” Mary said almost shyly. The script was already there, on the TelePrompTer; she must have written it the previous day, or the day before that.

“There seem to be certain days, even weeks,” the script read, “when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger.”

“Bul shit!” Patrick said. “The role
isn’t
‘unwelcome’—we
relish
it!”

Mary sat smiling demurely while the TelePrompTer kept rol ing: “We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers, but this has been one of those weeks.” A scripted pause fol owed.

“I like it,” one of the newsroom women said. They’d had a meeting before this meeting, Wal ingford knew. (There was always a meeting before the meeting.) They had no doubt agreed which of them would say, “I like it.”

Then another of the newsroom women touched Patrick’s left forearm, in the usual place. “I like it because it doesn’t make you sound as if you’re apologizing, not exactly, for what you said last night,” she told him. Her hand rested on his forearm a little longer than was natural or necessary.

“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 wel 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 Wharton, of course, was the only one at the script meeting who didn’t know that Patrick Wal ingford 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 al did. Everyone was quiet and respectful.

Then, when Mary saw that no response would be forthcoming, she said, “Wel , if everything’s perfectly clear .

. .”

Wal ingford 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 ful 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
!”

“Wel , she turns me on. I can’t tel 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 stil 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; al things considered, she truly seemed (to a careful y 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 Wal ingford 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, especial y) 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 smel —tonight she was chewing something fruity.

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

“Why can’cha sleep?” Angie asked.

Wal ingford 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 tel me?”

Oh, what the hel ! Patrick thought. If Mrs. Clausen turned him down, al 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 Wal ingford—his licentiousness reasserting itself.

“I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about you,”

Wal ingford confessed. The makeup girl had just spread her hand, her thumb and index finger smoothing what she cal ed 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.

Final y 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. Wal ingford had hardly been shocked to hear that she stil lived with her parents. Lots of New York working girls did. To have your own apartment was too expensive, and parents were general y 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.

Wal ingford 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.