Read Online The Fourth Hand by John Irving - Free Book Online Page B

bad it wasn’t your right hand—you bein’ a lefty is gonna make it tough—but they’l come up with somethin’, I know they wil .”
    “Thank you, Vlade,” Patrick said.
    The one-handed journalist felt weak and disoriented in his old apartment. The day he moved out, Marilyn had already begun to rearrange the furniture. Wal ingford kept turning to look over his shoulder to see what was behind him; it was just a couch that had been moved from somewhere else in the apartment, but to Patrick the unfamiliarly placed shape took on the characteristics of an advancing lion.
    “I think the hittin’ wil be less of a problem than the throw to the plate from right field,” the three-named doorman was saying. “You’l have to choke up on the bat, shorten your swing, lay off the long bal —I don’t mean forever, just til you’re used to the new hand.”
    But there was no new hand that Wal ingford could get used to; the prosthetic devices defeated him. The ongoing abuse by his ex-wife would defeat Patrick, too.
    “You were never sexy, not to me,” Marilyn lied. (So she was guilty of wishful thinking—so what?) “And now . . . wel , missing a hand . . . you’re nothing but a helpless cripple !”
    The twenty-four-hour news network didn’t give Wal ingford long to prove himself as an anchor. Even on the reputed disaster channel, Patrick failed to be an anchor of note. He moved quickly from early morning to midmorning to late night, and final y to a predawn slot, where Wal ingford imagined that only night workers and insomniacs ever saw him.
    His television image was too repressed for a man who’d lost his left hand to the king of beasts. One wanted to see more defiance in his expression, which instead radiated an enfeebled humility, an air of wary acceptance. While he’d never been a bad man, only a bad husband, Patrick’s onehandedness came across as selfpitying, and it marked him as the silent-martyr type. While looking wounded hardly hurt Wal ingford with women, now there were only other women in his life. And by the time Patrick’s divorce was settled, his producers felt they had given him adequate opportunity as an anchor to protect themselves from any later charges that they’d discriminated against the handicapped; they returned him to the less visible role of a field reporter.
    Worse, the one-handed journalist became the interviewer of choice for various freaks and zanies; that the twenty-four-hour international channel already had a reputation for captured acts of mauling and mutilation only underscored Patrick’s image as a man irreversibly damaged.
    On TV, of course, the news was catastrophe-driven. Why wouldn’t the network assign Wal ingford to the tabloid sleaze, the beneath-the-news stories? Without fail, they gave him the smirking, salacious tidbits—the marriage that lasted less than a day, including one that didn’t make it through the honeymoon; the husband who, after eight years of marriage, discovered that his wife was a man. Patrick Wal ingford was the al -news network’s disaster man, the field reporter on the scene of the worst (meaning the most bizarre) accidents. He covered a col ision between a tourist bus and a bicycle rickshaw in Bangkok—the two fatalities were both Thai prostitutes, riding to work in the rickshaw.
    Wal ingford interviewed their families and their former clients; it was disquietingly hard to tel which was which, but each of the interviewees felt compel ed to stare at the stump or the prosthesis at the end of the reporter’s left arm.
    They always eyed the stump or the prosthesis. He hated them both—and the Internet, too. To him, the Internet chiefly served to encourage the inherent laziness of his profession
    —an overreliance on secondary sources and other shortcuts. Journalists had always borrowed from other journalists, but now it was too easy. His angry ex-wife, who was also a journalist, was a case in point. Marilyn prided herself in writing “profiles”