The Fourth Hand

Wallingford was a news anchor in hiding; he was deliberately making himself unavailable at the moment the story of Kennedy's missing plane was unfolding. What would management make of a journalist who wasn't dying to report this story? In fact, Wallingford was shrinking from it--he was a reporter who was putting off doing his job! (No sensible news network would have hesitated to fire him.)

And what else was Patrick Wallingford putting off? Wasn't he also hiding from what Evelyn Arbuthnot had disparagingly called his life?

When would he finally get it? Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love. Upon meeting Mrs. Clausen, Patrick could never have envisioned a future with her; upon falling in love with her, he couldn't imagine the future without her.

It was not sex that Wallingford wanted from Sarah Williams, although he tenderly touched her drooping breasts with his one hand. Sarah didn't want to have sex with Wallingford, either. She might have wanted to mother him, possibly because her daughters lived far away and had children of their own. More likely, Sarah Williams realized that Patrick Wallingford was in need of mothering, and--in addition to feeling guilty for having publicly abused him--she was feeling guilty for how little time she spent with her grandchildren.

There was also the problem that Sarah was pregnant, and that she believed she could not endure again the fear of one of her own children's mortality; nor did she want her grown daughters to know she was having sex.

She told Wallingford that she was an associate professor of English at Smith. She definitely sounded like an English teacher when she read aloud to Patrick in a clear, animated voice, first from Stuart Little and then from Charlotte's Web, "because that is the order in which they were written."

Sarah lay on her left side with her head on Patrick's pillow. The light on the night table was the only one on in the darkened room; although it was midday, they kept all the curtains closed.

Professor Williams read Stuart Little past lunchtime. They weren't hungry. Wallingford lay naked beside her, his chest in constant contact with her back, his thighs touching her buttocks, his right hand holding one, and then the other, of her breasts. Pressed between them, where they were both aware of it, was the stump of Patrick's left forearm. He could feel it against his bare stomach; she could feel it against the base of her spine.

The ending of Stuart Little, Wallingford thought, might be more gratifying to adults than to children--children have higher expectations of endings.

Still it was "a youthful ending," Sarah said, "full of the optimism of young adults."

She sounded like an English teacher, all right. Patrick would have described the ending of Stuart Little as a kind of second beginning. One has the sense that a new adventure is waiting for Stuart as he again sets forth on his travels.

"It's a boy's book," Sarah said.

Mice might enjoy it, too, Patrick guessed.

They were mutually disinclined to have sex; yet if one of them had been determined to make love, they would have. But Wallingford preferred to be read to, like a little boy, and Sarah Williams was feeling more motherly (at the moment) than sexual. Furthermore, how many naked adults--strangers in a darkened hotel room in the middle of the day--were reading E. B. White aloud? Even Wallingford would have admitted to a fondness for the uniqueness of the situation. It was surely more unique than having sex.

"Please don't stop," Wallingford told Ms. Williams, in the same way he might have spoken to someone who was making love to him. "Please keep reading. If you start Charlotte's Web, I'll finish it. I'll read the ending to you."

Sarah had shifted slightly in the bed, so that Patrick's penis now brushed the backs of her thighs; the stump of his left forearm grazed her buttocks. It might have crossed her mind to consider which was which, notwi

thstanding the size factor, but that thought would have led them both into an altogether more ordinary experience.

When the phone call came from Mary, it interrupted that scene in Charlotte's Web when Charlotte (the spider) is preparing Wilbur (the pig) for her imminent death.

"After all, what's a life, anyway?" Charlotte asks. "We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies."

Just then the phone rang. Wallingford increased his grip on one of Sarah's breasts. Sarah indicated her irritation with the call by picking up the receiver and asking sharply, "Who is it?"

"Who is this? Just who are you?" Mary cried into the phone. She spoke loudly enough for Patrick to hear her--he groaned.

"Tell her you're my mother," Wallingford whispered in Sarah's ear. (He was briefly ashamed to remember that the last time he'd used this line, his mother was still alive.)

"I'm Patrick Wallingford's mother, dear," Sarah Williams said into the phone. "Who are you?" The familiar "dear" made Wallingford think of Evelyn Arbuthnot again.

Mary hung up.

Ms. Williams went on reading from the penultimate chapter of Charlotte's Web, which concludes, "No one was with her when she died."

Sobbing, Sarah handed the book to Patrick. He'd promised to read her the last chapter, about Wilbur the pig, "And so Wilbur came home to his beloved manure pile ..." the story of which Wallingford reported without emotion, as if it were the news. (It was better than the news, but that was another story.)

When Patrick finished, they dozed until it was dark outside; only half awake, Wallingford turned off the light on the night table so that it was dark inside the hotel room, too. He lay still. Sarah Williams was holding him, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades. The firm but soft bulge of her stomach fitted the curve at the small of his back; one of her arms encircled his waist. With her hand, she gripped his penis a little more tightly than was comfortable. Even so, he fell asleep.

Probably they would have slept through the night. On the other hand, they might have woken up just before dawn and made intense love in the semidarkness, possibly because they both knew they would never see each other again. But it hardly matters what they would have done, because the phone rang again.

This time Wallingford answered it. He knew who it was; even asleep, he'd been expecting the call. He'd told Mary the story of how and when his mother had died. Patrick was surprised how long it had taken Mary to remember it.

"She's dead. Your mother's dead! You told me yourself! She died when you were in college!"