The Fourth Hand (28 page)

Maybe now they could be friends. Why Wal ingford didn’t feel that he was submitting to his old habits is evidence of his moral confusion. To have acted upon his sudden desire for the makeup girl, to have taken
her
to bed, would have meant reverting to his licentious self. But with Mary he had merely acquiesced. If his baby was what she wanted, why not give her a baby?

It comforted him to have located the one unbionic part of her—an area of blond down, near the smal of her back. He kissed her there before she rol ed over and fel asleep. She slept on her back, snoring slightly, her legs elevated by what Wal ingford recognized were the paisley seat cushions from the living-room couch. (Like Mrs. Clausen, Mary wasn’t taking any chances with gravity.) Patrick didn’t sleep. He lay listening to the traffic on the FDR Drive while rehearsing what he would say to Doris Clausen. He wanted to marry her, to be a real father to little Otto. Patrick planned to tel Doris that he had performed “for a friend” the same service he’d “performed” for her; however, he would tactful y say, he had not enjoyed the process of making Mary pregnant. And while he would try to be a not-too-absent father to Mary’s child, he would make it very clear to Mary that he wanted to live with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior. Of course he was crazy to think such an arrangement could work.

How had he imagined that Doris could entertain the possibility? Surely he didn’t believe she would uproot herself and little Otto from Wisconsin, and Wal ingford was clearly not a man who could make a long-distance relationship (if
any
relationship) work.

Should he tel Mrs. Clausen that he was trying to get fired?

He hadn’t rehearsed that part, nor was he trying nearly hard enough. Fred’s feeble threat notwithstanding, Patrick feared that he might have become irreplaceable at the notthe-news network. Oh, for his mild Thursday-evening rebel ion, there might be a producer or two to deal with—

some spineless CEO spouting off on the subject of how

“rules of behavior apply to everyone,” or running on about Wal ingford’s “lack of appreciation for teamwork.” But they wouldn’t fire him for his deviation from the TelePrompTer, not as long as his ratings held.

In fact, as Patrick correctly anticipated—and according to the minute-by-minute ratings—upon his remarks, viewer interest had more than picked up; it had soared. Like the makeup girl, the very thought of whom gave Wal ingford an unexpected boner in Mary’s bed, the television audience also believed it was “time to move on.” Wal ingford’s notion of himself and his fel ow journalists—that “we should summon some dignity,” that “we should just stop”—had immediately struck a public nerve. Quite the contrary to getting himself fired, Patrick Wal ingford had made himself more popular than he’d ever been.

He stil had a hard-on at dawn, when a boat out on the East River tooted obscenely. (It was probably towing a garbage scow.) Patrick lay on his back in the pink-tinged bedroom, which was the color of scar tissue. His erection was holding up the bedcovers. How women seemed to sense such things, he’d never understood; he felt Mary kick the couch cushions off the bed. He held on to her hips while she sat on him, rocking away. As they moved, the daylight came striding into the room; the hideous pink began to pale.

“I’l show you ‘testosterone-driven,’ ” Mary whispered to him, just before he came. It didn’t matter that her breath was bad

—they were friends. It was just sex, as frank and familiar as a handshake. A barrier that had long existed had been lifted. Sex was a burden that had stood between them; now it was no big deal. Mary had nothing to eat in her apartment. She’d never cooked a meal or even eaten breakfast there. She would start looking for a bigger apartment, she declared, now that she was going to have a baby.

“I know I’m pregnant,” she chirped. “I can feel it.”

“Wel , it’s certainly possible,” was al Patrick said.

They had a pil ow fight and chased each other naked through the smal apartment, until Wal ingford whacked his shin against the stupid glass-topped coffee table in the paisley confusion of the living room. Then they took a shower together. Patrick burned himself on the hot-water faucet while they were soaping each other up and squirming al around, chest-to-chest.

They took a long walk to a coffee shop they both liked—it was on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the Sixties or Seventies. Because of the competing noise on the street, they had to shout at each other the whole way. They walked into the coffee shop stil shouting, like people who’ve been swimming and don’t know that their ears are ful of water.

“It’s a pity we don’t love each other,” Mary was saying much too loudly. “Then you wouldn’t have to go break your heart in Wisconsin, and I wouldn’t have to have your baby al by myself.”

Their fel ow breakfast-eaters appeared to doubt the wisdom of this, but Wal ingford foolishly agreed. He told Mary what he was rehearsing to say to Doris. Mary frowned. She worried that the part about trying to lose his job didn’t sound sincere. (As to what she truly thought about the
other
part—his fathering a child with her just prior to declaring his eternal love for Doris Clausen—Mary didn’t say.)

“Look,” she said. “You’ve got what, eighteen months, remaining on your contract? If they fired you now, they’d try to negotiate you down. You’d probably settle for them owing you only a year’s salary. If you’re going to be in Wisconsin, maybe you’l need more than a year to find a new job—I mean one you like.”

It was Patrick’s turn to frown. He had
exactly
eighteen months remaining on his contract, but how had Mary known that?

“Furthermore,” Mary went on, “they’re going to be reluctant to fire you as long as you’re the anchor. They have to make it look as if whoever’s in the anchor chair is
everybody’s
first choice.”

It only now occurred to Wal ingford that Mary herself might be interested in what she cal ed the anchor chair. He’d underestimated her before. The New York newsroom women were no dummies; Patrick had sensed some resentment of Mary among them. He’d thought it was because she was the youngest, the prettiest, the smartest, and the presumed nicest—he hadn’t considered that she might also be the most ambitious.

“I see,” he said, although he didn’t quite. “Go on.”

“Wel , if I were you,” Mary said, “I’d ask for a new contract.

Ask for three years—no, make that five. But tel them you don’t want to be the anchor anymore. Tel them you want your pick of field assignments. Say you’l take only the assignments you like.”

“You mean
demote
myself?” Wal ingford asked. “This is the way to get fired?”

“Wait! Let me finish!” Everyone in earshot in the coffee shop was listening.

“What you do is you start to refuse your assignments. You just become too picky!”

“ ‘Too picky,’ ” Patrick repeated. “I see.”

“Suddenly

something

big

happens—I

mean
major

heartache, devastation, terror, and accompanying sorrow.

Are you with me, Pat?”

He was. He was beginning to see where some of the hyperbole on the TelePrompTer came from—not al of it was Fred’s work. Wal ingford had never spent time with Mary in the hard midmorning light; even the blueness in her eyes was newly clarifying.

“Go on, Mary.”

“Calamity strikes!” she said. In the coffee shop, cups were poised, or resting quietly in their saucers. “It’s big-time breaking news—you know the kind of story. We
have
to send you. You simply refuse to go.”

“
Then
they fire me?” Wal ingford asked.

“Then we
have
to, Pat.”

He didn’t let on, but he’d already noticed when “they” had become “we.” He had underestimated her, indeed.

“You’re going to have one smart little baby, Mary,” was al he said.

“But do you
see
?” she insisted. “Let’s say there’s stil four or four and a half years remaining on your new contract.

They fire you. They negotiate you down, but down to
what
?

Down to three years, maybe. They end up paying you
three
years’ salary
and you’re home free! Wel . . . home free in Wisconsin, anyway, if that’s real y where you want to be.”

“It’s not my decision,” he reminded her.

Mary took his hand. Al the while, they’d been consuming a huge breakfast; the fascinated patrons of the coffee shop had been watching them eat and eat throughout their eager shouting.

“I wish you al the luck in the world with Mrs. Clausen,” Mary told him earnestly.

“She’d be a fool not to take you.”

Wal ingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested
Arlington Road.
He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thril ers made her too tense.

“
Eyes Wide Shut
?” Wal ingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. “Kubrick’s last—”

“He just died, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Al the eulogizing has made me suspicious,” Mary said.

A smart girl, al right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. “It’s with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

“It ruins it for me that they’re married,” Mary said.

The lul in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a position to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wal ingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; al of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they’d simply stopped.

“Let’s not go to a movie, Pat. Let’s go to your place. I’ve never seen it. Let’s just go there and fuck some more.”

This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. “Okay, Mary,”

Wal ingford said.

He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wal ingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especial y in New York,
everyone
recognized disaster man.

But when Patrick was paying the bil , he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop’s patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: “A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat.”

It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. “Al this for you alone?” she asked.

“It’s just a one-bedroom, like yours,” Wal ingford protested.

But while this was strictly true, Patrick’s apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of al , from Mary’s point of view, was that his apartment’s one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby’s crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.

“The baby could go there,” as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, “and I’d stil have a little privacy.”

“You’d like to trade your apartment for mine—is that it, Mary?”

“Wel . . . if you’re going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like al you’l real y need to have in New York is a
pied-à-terre.
My place would be
perfect
for you!”

They were naked, but Wal ingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he’d lost the heart to “fuck some more,”

as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown—there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.

“You’l get used to the noise,” Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wal ingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her smal , soft bel y, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months’ time.

“You’ve got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat,” she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.

He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he’d underestimated about her.

Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted—the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that real y what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if al he
really
wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?

“Poor penis,” Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. “It must be tired,”

she went on. “Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin.”

“We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for
both
our plans.” She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.

“Smart boy, Pat. And you’re basical y a good guy, too—no matter what anybody else says.”