The Fourth Hand

But the critic had come with a publicist, and the publicist was someone whom Fred was sucking up to--for unknown reasons. The publicist wanted Wallingford to deliver the question exactly as it was written, the point being that the demonization of Morgan Stanley was the critic's next agenda and Wallingford (with feigned innocence) was supposed to lead her into it.

Instead he said: "It's not clear to me that John F. Kennedy, Jr., was 'testosterone-driven.' You're not the first person I've heard say that, of course, but I didn't know him. Neither did you. What is clear is that we've talked his death to death. I think that we should summon some dignity--we should just stop. It's time to move on."

Wallingford didn't wait for the insulted woman's response. There was over a minute remaining in the telecast, but there was ample montage footage on file. He abruptly brought the interview to a close, as was his habit every evening, by saying, "Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto." Then came the ubiquitous montage footage; it hardly mattered that the presentation was a little disorderly.

Viewers of the twenty-four-hour international channel, already suffering from grief fatigue, were treated to reruns of the mourning marathon: the hand-held camera on the rolling ship (a shot of the bodies being brought on board), a totally gratuitous shot of the St. Thomas More church, and another of a burial at sea, if not the actual burial. The last of the montage, as time expired, was of Jackie as a mom, holding John junior as a baby; her hand cupped the back of the newborn's neck, her thumb three times the size of his tiny ear. Jackie's hairdo was out of fashion, but the pearls were timeless and her signature smile was intact.

She looks so young, Wallingford thought. (She was young--it was 1961!)

Patrick was having his makeup removed when Fred confronted him. Fred was an old guy--he often spoke in dated terms.

"That was a no-no, Pat," Fred said. He didn't wait around for Wallingford's reply.

An anchor had to be free to have the last word. What was on the TelePrompTer was not sacrosanct. Fred must have had another bug up his ass; it hadn't dawned on Patrick that, among his fellow journalists, everything to do with young Kennedy's story was sacrosanct. His not wanting to report that story was an indication to management that Wallingford had lost his zest for being a journalist.

"I kinda liked what you said," the makeup girl told Patrick. "It sorta needed sayin'."

It was the girl he thought had a crush on him--she was back from her vacation. The scent of her chewing gum merged with her perfume; her smell and how close she was to his face reminded Wallingford of the commingled odors and the heat of a high-school dance. He hadn't felt so horny since the last time he'd been with Doris Clausen.

Patrick was unprepared for how the makeup girl thrilled him--suddenly, and without reservation, he desired her. But he went home with Mary instead. They went to her place, not even bothering to have dinner first.

"Well, this is a surprise!" Mary remarked, as she unlocked the first of her two door locks. Her small apartment had a partial view of the East River. Wallingford wasn't sure, but he thought they were on East Fifty-second Street. He'd been paying attention to Mary, not to her address. He had hoped to see something with her last name on it; it would have made him feel a little better to remember her last name. But she hadn't paused to open her mailbox, and there were no letters strewn about her apartment--not even on her messy desk.

Mary moved busily about, closing curtains, dimming lights. There was a paisley pattern to the upholstery in the living room, which was claustrophobic and festooned with Mary's clothes. It was one of those one-bedroom apartments with no closet space, and Mary evidently liked clothes.

In the bedroom, which was bursting with more clothes, Wallingford noted the floral pattern of the bedspread that was a tad little-girlish for Mary. Like the rubber-tree plant, which took up too much room in the tiny kitchen, the Lava lamp on top of the squat dresser drawers had to have come from her college days. There were no photographs; their absence signified everything from her divorce that had remained unpacked.

Mary invited him to use the bathroom first. She called to him through the closed door, so that there could be no doubt in his mind regarding the unflagging seriousness of her intentions. "I have to hand it to you, Pat--you've got great timing. I'm ovulating!"

He made some inarticulate response because he was smearing toothpaste on his teeth with his right index finger; of course it was her toothpaste. He'd opened her medicine cabinet in search of prescription drugs--anything with her last name on it--but there was nothing.

How could a recently divorced woman who worked in New York City be drug-free?

There had always been something a little bionic about Mary; Patrick considered her skin, which was flawless, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, and her perfect little teeth. Even her niceness--if she had truly retained it, if she was still really nice. (Her former niceness, safer to say.) But no prescription drugs? Maybe, like the absent photographs, the drugs were as yet unpacked from her divorce.

Mary had opened her bed for him, the covers turned down as if by an unseen hotel maid. Later she left the bathroom light on, with the door ajar; the only other lights in the bedroom were the pink undulations of the Lava lamp, which cast moving shadows on the ceiling. Under the circumstances, it was hard for Patrick not to view the protozoan movements of the Lava lamp as indicative of Mary's striving fertility.

She suddenly made a point of telling him that she'd thrown out all her medicine--"This was months ago." Nowadays she took nothing--"Not even for cramps." The second she conceived, she was going to lay off the booze and cigarettes.

Wallingford scarcely had time to remind her that he was in love with someone else.

"I know. It doesn't matter," Mary said.

There was something so resolute about her lovemaking that Wallingford quickly succumbed; yet the experience bore no comparison to the intoxicating way Mrs. Clausen had mounted him. He didn't love Mary, and she loved only the life she imagined would follow from having his baby. Maybe now they could be friends.

Why Wallingford 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 small of her back. He kissed her there before she rolled over and fell asleep. She slept on her back, snoring slightly, her legs elevated by what Wallingford 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 tell Doris that he had performed "for a friend" the same service he'd "performed" for her; however, he would tactfully 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 Wallingford was clearly not a man who could make a long-distance relationship (if any relationship) work.

Should he tell 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 not-the-news network.

Oh, for his mild Thursday-evening rebellion, 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 Wallingford'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 Wallingford an unexpected boner in Mary's bed, the television audience also believed it was "time to move on." Wallingford's notion of himself and his fellow 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 Wallingford had made himself more popular than he'd ever been.