The Fourth Hand (30 page)

“Think of it this way, Angie,” Wal ingford whispered to the agitated, breathy girl.

“This is definitely a case of sexual harassment, if you play your cards right.”

Patrick was pleased with himself for imagining a way to get fired that Mary Shanahan had not thought of, but Angie didn’t know he was serious; the makeup girl wrongly believed he was just fooling around. And as Wal ingford had correctly guessed, she had a crush on him.

“Ha!” Angie said, flashing him a frisky smile. He could see the color of her gum for the first time—it was purple.

(Grape, or some synthetic variation thereof.) She had her tweezers out and seemed to be staring at a spot between his eyes. As she bent more closely over him, he breathed her in—her perfume, her hair, the gum. She smel ed wonderful, in a kind of department-store way.

In the mirror, he could see the fingers of his right hand; he spread them as purposeful y on the narrow strip of flesh between the waistband of her skirt and her high-riding sweater as he might have touched the keyboard of a piano before he started to play. At that moment he had a shameless sense of himself as a semiretired maestro, long out of practice, who’d not lost his touch. There wasn’t a lawyer in New York who wouldn’t happily represent her case. Wal ingford only hoped she wouldn’t gouge his face with the tweezers. Instead, as he touched her warm skin, Angie arched her back in such a way that she was pressing

—no, make that snuggling—against his hand. With the tweezers, she gently plucked an errant eyebrow-hair from the bridge of his nose. Then she kissed him on the lips with her mouth a little open; he could taste her gum. He meant to say something along the lines of “Angie, for Christ’s sake, you should
sue
me!” But he couldn’t take his one hand off her. Instinctively, his fingers slipped under her sweater; they slid up her spine, al the way to the back strap of her bra. “I love the gum,” he told her, his old self easily finding the right words. She kissed him again, this time parting his lips, then his teeth, with her forceful tongue.

Patrick was briefly taken aback when Angie inserted her slick wad of gum into his mouth; for an alarming moment, he imagined that he’d bitten off her tongue. It simply wasn’t the sort of foreplay he was used to—he hadn’t gone out with a lot of gum-chewers. Her bare back squirmed against his hand; her breasts in her soft sweater brushed his chest.

It was one of the newsroom women who cleared her throat in the doorway. This was almost exactly what Wal ingford had wanted; he’d hoped that Mary Shanahan might have seen him kissing and feeling up Angie, but he had no doubt that the incident would be reported to Mary before he went on-camera. “You’ve got five minutes, Pat,” the newsroom woman told him.

Angie, who’d left him with her gum, was stil pul ing her sweater down when the woman who did hair returned from her sidewalk smoke. She was a heavy black woman who smel ed like cinnamon-raisin toast, and she always made a point of feigning exasperation when there was nothing Patrick’s hair needed. Sometimes she squirted a little hair spray on him, or rubbed him with a dab of gel; this time she just patted him on the top of his head and left the room again.

“Ya sure ya know whatcha gettin’ into?” Angie asked. “I gotta complicated sorta life,” she warned him. “I’m a handful of problems, if ya know what I mean.”

“What do you mean, Angie?”

“If we’re gonna go out tonight, there’s some stuff I gotta blow off,” she said. “I gotta buncha phone cal s to make, for starters.”

“I don’t want to cause you any trouble, Angie.”

The girl was searching through her purse—for phone numbers, Wal ingford assumed. But, no, it was for more gum. “Look”—she was chewing again—“do ya wanna go out tonight or what? It’s no trouble. I just gotta start makin’

some cal s.”

“Yes, tonight,” Patrick replied.

Why not yes, why not tonight? Not only was he not married to Mrs. Clausen, but she had given him no encouragement whatsoever. He had no reason to think he ever would be married to her; he knew only that he wanted to ask. Under the

circumstances,

sexual

anarchy

was

both

understandable and commendable. (To the
old
Patrick Wal ingford, that is.)

“Ya gotta phone at your place, I guess,” Angie was saying.

“Betta gimme the numba. I won’t give it to nobody unless I hafta.”

He was writing out his phone number for her when the same newsroom woman reappeared in the doorway. She saw the piece of paper change hands. This gets better and better, Wal ingford was thinking. “Two minutes, Pat,” the observant woman told him.

Mary was waiting for him in the studio. She held out her hand to him, a tissue covering her open palm. “Lose the gum, asshole,” was al she said. Patrick took no smal amount of pleasure in depositing the slippery purple wad in her hand.

“Good evening,” he began the Friday telecast, more

“Good evening,” he began the Friday telecast, more formal y than usual. “Good evening” wasn’t on the prompter, but Wal ingford wanted to sound as insincerely somber as possible. After al , he knew the level of insincerity behind what he had to say next. “There seem to be certain days, even weeks, when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger. We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers,” he went on, “but this has been one of those weeks.”

He was aware that his words fel around him like wet clothes, as he’d intended. When the file footage began and Patrick knew he was off-camera, he looked for Mary, but she’d already left, as had Wharton. The montage dragged on and on—it had the tempo of an overlong church service.

You didn’t need to be a genius to read the ratings for this show in advance.

At last came that gratuitous image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, shielding her son from the telephoto lens; when the image froze to a stil , Patrick prepared himself for his closing remarks. There would be time to say the usual:

“Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.” Or something of equivalent length. While Wal ingford hardly felt he was being unfaithful to Mrs. Clausen, since they were not a couple, it nonetheless seemed to him some slight betrayal of his devotion—that is, if he delivered his usual blessing to her and their son. Knowing what he’d done the night before with Mary, and thinking that he knew what the night ahead of him, with Angie, held, he felt disinclined even to speak Mrs. Clausen’s name.

Furthermore, there was something else he wanted to say.

When the montage footage final y ended, he looked straight at the camera and declared, “Let’s hope that’s the end of it.” It was only one word shorter than his benediction to Doris and Otto junior, but there was no pause for a period

—not to mention the two commas. In fact, it took only three seconds to say instead of four; Patrick knew because he’d timed it.

While Wal ingford’s concluding remark didn’t save the ratings, there would be some good press for the evening news because of it. An Op-Ed piece in
The New
York
Times,
which amounted to a caustic review of the television coverage of JFK, Jr.’s death, praised Patrick for what the writer termed “three seconds of integrity in a week of sleaze.” Despite himself, Wal ingford was looking more irreplaceable than ever.

Natural y, Mary Shanahan was nowhere to be found at the conclusion of the Friday-evening telecast; also absent were Wharton and Sabina. They were no doubt having a meeting. Patrick made a public display of his physical affection for Angie during the makeup-removal process, so much so that the hairdresser left the room in disgust.

Wal ingford also made a point of not leaving with Angie until a smal but highly communicative gathering of the newsroom women were whispering together by the elevators.

But was a night with Angie truly what he wanted? How could a sexual adventure with the twenty-something makeup girl be construed as progress in the journey to better himself?

Wasn’t this plainly the
old
Patrick Wal ingford, up to his old tricks? How many times can a man repeat his sexual past before his past becomes who he is?

Yet without being able to explain the feeling, not even to himself, Wal ingford felt like a new man, and one on the right track. He was a man on a mission, on his labyrinthine way to Wisconsin—notwithstanding the present detour he was taking. And what about the detour of the night before?

Regardless, these detours were merely preparations for meeting Mrs. Clausen and winning her heart. Or so Patrick convinced himself.

He took Angie to a restaurant on Third Avenue in the Eighties. After a vinous dinner, they walked to Wal ingford’s apartment—Angie a little unsteadily. The excited girl gave him her gum again. The slippery exchange fol owed a long, tongue-thrusting kiss, only seconds after Patrick had at first unlocked and then relocked his apartment door.

The gum was a new flavor, something ultra-cool and silvery.

When Wal ingford breathed through his nose, his nostrils stung; when he breathed through his mouth, his tongue felt cold. As soon as Angie excused herself to use the bathroom, Patrick spit the gum into the palm of his one hand. Its shiny, metal ic surface quivered like a puddle of mercury. He managed to throw the gum away and wash his hand in the kitchen sink before Angie emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but one of Wal ingford’s towels, and hurled herself into his arms. A forward girl, a strenuous night ahead. Patrick would be hard-pressed to find the time to pack for Wisconsin. In addition, there were the phone cal s, which were broadcast on his answering machine throughout the night. He was in favor of kil ing the volume, but Angie insisted on monitoring the cal s; it had been in case of an emergency that she’d given Patrick’s home phone number to various members of her family in the first place. But the initial phone cal was from Patrick’s new news editor, Mary Shanahan.

He heard the background cacophony of the newsroom women, the high hilarity of their celebration—including the contrasting baritone of a waiter reciting “tonight’s specials”—before Mary uttered a word. Wal ingford could imagine her hunched over her cel phone, as if it were something she intended to eat. One of her fineboned hands would be cupping her ear—the other, her mouth. A strand of her blond hair would have fal en across her face, possibly concealing one of her sapphire-blue eyes. Of course the newsroom women would know she was cal ing him, whether she’d told them or not.

“That was a dirty trick, Pat,” Mary’s message on the answering machine began.

“It’s Ms. Shanahan!” Angie whispered in a panic, as if Mary could hear her.

“Yes, it is,” Patrick whispered back. The makeup girl was writhing on top of him, the luxurious mass of her jet-black hair entirely covering her face. Al Wal ingford could see was one of Angie’s ears, but he deduced (from the smel ) that her new gum was of a raspberry or strawberry persuasion.

“Not a word from you, not even ‘Congratulations,’ ” Mary went on. “Wel , I can live with that, but not that awful girl. You must
want
to humiliate me. Is that it, Pat?”

“Am I the awful girl?” Angie asked. She was beginning to pant. She was also emitting a low growling sound from the back of her throat; maybe it was caused by the gum.

“Yes, you are,” Patrick replied, with some difficulty—the girl’s hair kept getting in his mouth.

“What’s Ms. Shanahan care about
me
for?” Angie asked; she sounded out of breath. Shades of Crystal Pitney?

Wal ingford hoped not.

“I slept with Mary last night. Maybe I got her pregnant,”

Patrick said. “She wanted me to.”

“That kinda explains it,” said the makeup girl.

“I know you’re there! Answer me, you asshole!” Mary wailed.

“Boy . . .” Angie started to say. She seemed to be trying to rol Wal ingford on top of her—apparently she’d had enough of being on top.

“You should be packing for Wisconsin! You should be resting up for your trip!”

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 al Wal ingford said. A different voice spoke up from the answering machine; one of the newsroom women had seized Mary’s cel phone after Mary dissolved in tears. “You shit, Pat,” the woman said. Wal ingford could visualize her surgical y slimmed-down face. It was the woman he’d been in Bangkok with, a long time ago; her face had been ful er then. That was the end of the cal .

“Ha!” Angie cried. She’d twisted the two of them into a sideways position, which Wal ingford 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 cal , Angie dug one of her heels into the smal of Patrick’s back.

They were stil joined sideways, the girl grunting loudly, as a woman’s voice asked mournful y, “Is my baby girl there?