The Fourth Hand

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, all 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 Wallingford 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 still pulling her sweater down when the woman who did hair returned from her sidewalk smoke. She was a heavy black woman who smelled 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 calls to make, for starters."

"I don't want to cause you any trouble, Angie."

The girl was searching through her purse--for phone numbers, Wallingford 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 calls."

"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 Wallingford, 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, Wallingford 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 all she said. Patrick took no small amount of pleasure in depositing the slippery purple wad in her hand.

"Good evening," he began the Friday telecast, more formally than usual. "Good evening" wasn't on the prompter, but Wallingford wanted to sound as insincerely somber as possible. After all, 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 fell 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 still, 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 Wallingford 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 finally 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 Wallingford'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, Wallingford was looking more irreplaceable than ever.

Naturally, 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. Wallingford also made a point of not leaving with Angie until a small 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 Wallingford, 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, Wallingford 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 Wallingford's apartment--Angie a little unsteadily. The excited girl gave him her gum again. The slippery exchange followed 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 Wallingford 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, metallic 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 Wallingford'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 calls, which were broadcast on his answering machine throughout the night. He was in favor of killing the volume, but Angie insisted on monitoring the calls; 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 call 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 "to

night's specials"--before Mary uttered a word. Wallingford could imagine her hunched over her cell phone, as if it were something she intended to eat. One of her fine-boned hands would be cupping her ear--the other, her mouth. A strand of her blond hair would have fallen across her face, possibly concealing one of her sapphire-blue eyes. Of course the newsroom women would know she was calling 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.