The Fourth Hand (35 page)

“I don’t real y think of this as an il ustration of why I might have trouble maintaining a monogamous relationship, but it is a little disturbing.”

What a way to begin a proposal! Was it any wonder that Doris withdrew her hand from his and turned to look at him?

Wal ingford, who sensed from his misguided prologue that he was already in trouble, couldn’t look at her while he talked. He stared instead at their sleeping child, as if the innocence of Otto junior might serve to shield Mrs. Clausen from al that was sexual y incorrigible and moral y reprehensible in his relationship with Mary Shanahan.

Mrs. Clausen was appal ed. She wasn’t, for once, even looking at her son; she couldn’t take her eyes off Wal ingford’s handsome profile as he clumsily recounted the details of his shameful behavior. He was babbling now, out of nervousness, in part, but also because he feared that the impression he was making on Doris was the opposite of what he’d intended.

What had he been thinking? What an absolute
mess
it would be if Mary Shanahan was pregnant with his child!

Stil in a confessional mode, he lifted the towel to show Mrs.

Clausen the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment; he also showed her the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. She’d already noticed how his back was scratched. And the love-bite on his left shoulder—she’d noticed that, too.

“Oh, that wasn’t Mary,” Wal ingford confessed.

This was not the best thing he could have said.

“Who else have you been seeing?” Doris asked.

This wasn’t going as he’d hoped. But how much more trouble could Patrick get into by tel ing Mrs. Clausen about Angie? Surely Angie’s was a simpler story.

“I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night,”

Wal ingford began. “I was just horny.”

What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!) He told Doris about the phone cal s from various members of Angie’s distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused—she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (Al the gum-chewing didn’t help.) “Angie is a good-hearted girl,”

Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mental y disabled. “No, no!”

Wal ingford protested. “Angie is neither underage nor mental y disabled, she’s just . . . wel . . .”

“A bimbo?” asked Mrs. Clausen.

“No, no! Not exactly,” Patrick protested loyal y.

“Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with—that is, if I accepted you,”

Doris speculated. “And since you didn’t know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason
not
to sleep with her.”

“Yes, maybe,” Wal ingford replied weakly.

“Wel , that’s not so bad,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean.” He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away—she stared at Otto junior, who was stil blissful y asleep. “I have more trouble understanding Mary,” Doris added. “I don’t know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she
is
pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that pregnant. If she
is
pregnant, and it’s your baby, doesn’t that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean.”

“Yes, it does,” Patrick agreed. Again he thought:
What was
I thinking?
Wasn’t this also a context he had overlooked?

“I can understand what Mary was up to,” Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn’t turn away. “Who
wouldn’t
want your baby?” She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. “You’re like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your
effect.
It’s not that you’re dangerous because you’re handsome—you’re dangerous because you don’t know how handsome you are!

And you’re thoughtless.” The word stung him like a slap.

“How
could
you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You
weren’t
thinking of me! Not then.”

“But you seemed such a . . . remote possibility,” was al Wal ingford could say. He knew that what she’d said was true.

What a fool he was! He’d mistakenly believed that he could tel her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because
her
relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she’d tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn’t worked out—that was al . Alongside Mrs.

Clausen’s single misadventure, Wal ingford’s world was sexual y lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed. Doris’s disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was stil wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he’d noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he’d seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake.

(She’d put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant.)

What Wal ingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you al of it.

Patrick Wal ingford’s world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wal ingford also realized was that she had actual y taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered
everything
seriously. In al likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he’d once thought—he’d just blown it.

She sat apart from him on the smal bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at—often at this hour of the night or early morning—many times before. “I should get some sleep,” was al she said.

If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wal

—at the darker rectangle on the wal of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.

“Something used to hang on the wal . . . in the other bedroom,” he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. “What was it?”

“It was just a beer poster,” Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.

“Oh.” Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Natural y it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn’t have wanted to go on looking at it.

He extended his one hand, not letting it fal in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers.

“You used to have a metal thing in your bel y button. It was an ornament of some kind,” he ventured. “I saw it only once.”

He didn’t add that it was the time she’d mounted him in Dr.

Zajac’s office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!

She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn’t want him touching her anywhere else. “It was supposed to be a good-luck charm,” Doris explained. In the way she said

“supposed to be,”

Wal ingford could detect years of disbelief. “Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn’t work, except with you, and you probably didn’t need it.”

“So you don’t wear it anymore?”

“I’m not trying to get pregnant anymore,” she told him.

“Oh.” He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.

“I should get some sleep,” she said again.

“There was something I wanted to read to you,” he told her,

“but we can do it another time.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Wel , actual y, it’s something I want to read to little Otto—

when he’s older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to him later.”

Wal ingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he’d told her. He felt ridiculous.

“What is it?” she asked again.

“Stuart Little,”
he answered, wishing he’d never brought it up.

“Oh, the children’s book. It’s about a mouse, isn’t it?” He nodded, ashamed. “He has a special car,” she added. “He goes off looking for a bird. It’s a kind of
On the
Road
about a mouse, isn’t it?”

Wal ingford wouldn’t have put it that way, but he nodded.

That Mrs. Clausen had read
On the Road,
or at least knew of it, surprised him.

“I need to sleep,” Doris repeated. “And if I can’t sleep, I brought my own book to read.”

Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now—al the more so because he hadn’t known that it might have been possible
not
to lose her.

At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte’s Web
aloud (and naked) with Sarah Wil iams, or whatever her name was.

Out of context—possibly, in
any
context—that story would have served only to underline Wal ingford’s weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn’t have been good. Now he was just stal ing because he didn’t want to lose her. They both knew it.

“What book did
you
bring to read?” he asked.

Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other smal bags containing the baby’s things. It was the only bag she’d brought for herself, and she’d not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it. She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was
The English
Patient,
a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wal ingford hadn’t read it but he’d seen the movie.

“It was the last movie I saw with Otto before he died,” Mrs.

Clausen explained.

“We both liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read the book. But I put off reading it until now. I didn’t want to be reminded of the last movie I saw with Otto.”

Patrick Wal ingford looked down at
The English Patient.

She was reading a grownup literary novel and he’d planned to read her
Stuart Little.
How many more ways would he find to underestimate her?

That she worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers didn’t exclude her from reading literary novels, although (to his shame) Patrick had made that assumption. He remembered liking the movie of
The English Patient.
His ex-wife had said that the movie was better than the book.

That he doubted Marilyn’s judgment on just about everything was borne out when she made a comment about the novel that Wal ingford remembered reading in a review.

What she’d said about
The English
Patient
was that the movie was better because the novel was “too wel written.”

That a book could be too wel written was a concept only a critic—and Marilyn—could have.

“I haven’t read it,” was al Wal ingford said to Mrs. Clausen, who put the book back in her open bag on top of her underwear.

“It’s good,” Doris told him. “I’m reading it very slowly because I like it so much. I think I like it better than the movie, but I’m trying not to remember the movie.”

(Of course this meant that there wasn’t a scene in the film she would ever forget.) What else was there to say?

Wal ingford had to pee. Miraculously, he refrained from tel ing Mrs. Clausen this—he’d said quite enough for one night. She shined the flashlight into the hal for him, so that he didn’t have to grope in the dark to find his room.

He was too tired to light the gas lamp. He took the flashlight he found on the dresser top and made his way down the steep stairs. The moon had set; it was much darker now.

The first light of dawn couldn’t be far off. Patrick chose a tree to pee behind, although there was no one who could have seen him. By the time he finished peeing, the mosquitoes had already found him. He quickly fol owed the beam of his flashlight back to the boathouse.

Mrs. Clausen and little Otto’s room was dark when Wal ingford quietly passed their open door. He remembered her saying that she never slept with the gaslight on. The propane lamps were probably safe enough, but a lighted lamp was stil a fire—it made her too anxious to sleep.

Wal ingford left the door to his room open, too. He wanted to hear when Otto junior woke up. Maybe he would offer to watch the child so that Doris could go back to sleep. How difficult could it be to entertain a baby? Wasn’t a television audience tougher? That was as far as he thought it out.