The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER FOUR A Japanese Interlude

IS THERE SOMETHING cursed about Asia and me? Wallingford would wonder later. First he’d lost his hand in India; and now, what about Japan? The trip to Tokyo had gone wrong even before the start, if you count Patrick’s insensitive proposition to Mary. Wallingford himself counted it as the start. He’d hit on a young woman who was newly married and pregnant, a girl whose last name he could never remember. Worse, she’d had a look about her that haunted him; it was more than an unmistakable prettiness, although Mary had that, too. Her look indicated a capacity for damage greater than gossip, a ferocity not easily held in check, a potential for some mayhem yet to be defined. Then, on the plane to Tokyo, Patrick struggled with his speech. Here he was, divorced, for good reason—and feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary—and he was supposed to address the subject of “The Future of Women,” in notoriously keep-women-in-their-place Japan.

Not only was Wallingford not accustomed to writing speeches; he was not used to speaking without reading the script off the TelePrompTer. (Usually someone else had written the script.) But maybe if he looked over the list of participants in the conference—they were all women—he might find some flattering things to say about them, and this flattery might suffice for his opening remarks. It was a blow to him to discover that he had no firsthand knowledge of the accomplishments of any of the women participating in the conference; alas, he knew who only one of the women was, and the most flattering thing he could think of saying about her was that he thought he’d like to sleep with her, although he’d seen her only on television.

Patrick liked German women. Witness that braless sound technician on the TV

crew in Gujarat, that blonde who’d fainted in the meat cart, the enterprising Monika with a k. But the German woman who was a participant in the Tokyo conference was a Barbara, spelled the usual way, and she was, like Wallingford, a television journalist. Unlike Wallingford, she was more successful than she was famous.

Barbara Frei anchored the morning news for ZDF. She had a resonant, professional-sounding voice, a wary smile, and a thin-lipped mouth. She had shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, adroitly tucked behind her ears. Her face was beautiful and sleek, with high cheekbones; in Wallingford’s world, it was a face made for television.

On TV, Barbara Frei wore nothing but rather mannish suits in either black or navy blue, and she never wore a blouse or a shirt of any kind under the wide-open collar of the suit jacket. She had wonderful collarbones, which she quite justifiably liked to show. She preferred small stud earrings—often emeralds or rubies—Patrick could tell; he was knowledgeable about women’s jewelry.

But while the prospect of meeting Barbara Frei in Tokyo gave Wallingford an unrealistic sexual ambition for his time in Japan, neither she nor any of the conference’s other participants could be of any help in writing his speech. There was a Russian film director, a woman named Ludmilla Slovaboda. (The spelling only approximates Patrick’s phonetic guess at how one might pronounce her last name. Let’s call her Ludmilla.) Wallingford had never seen her films. There was a Danish novelist, a woman named Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen; her first name was spelled three different ways in the printed material that Patrick’s Japanese hosts had sent. However her name was spelled, Wallingford presumed one said “bode eel ”—accent on the eel —but he wasn’t sure. There was an English economist with the boring name of Jane Brown. There was a Chinese geneticist, a Korean doctor of infectious diseases, a Dutch bacteriologist, and a woman from Ghana whose field was alternately described as “food-shortage management” or “world-hunger relief.” There was no hope of Wallingford’s pronouncing any of their names correctly; he wouldn’t even try. The list of participants went on and on, all highly accomplished professional women—with the probable exception of an American author and self-described radical feminist whom Wallingford had never heard of, and a lopsided number of participants from Japan who seemed to represent the arts.

Patrick was uncomfortable around female poets and sculptors. It was probably not correct to call them poetesses and sculptresses, although this is how Wallingford thought of them. (In Patrick’s mind, most artists were frauds; they were peddling something unreal, something made up.)

So what would his welcoming speech be? He wasn’t entirely at a loss—he’d not lived in New York for nothing. Wallingford had suffered through his share of black-tie occasions; he knew what bullshitters most masters of ceremonies were—he knew how to bullshit, too. Therefore, Patrick decided his opening remarks should be nothing more or less than the fashionable and news-savvy blather of a master of ceremonies—the insincere, self-deprecating humor of someone who appears at ease while making a joke of himself. Boy, was he wrong. How about this for an opening line? “I feel insecure addressing such a distinguished group as yourselves, given that my principal and, by comparison, lowly accomplishment was to illegally feed my left hand to a lion in India five years ago.”

Surely that would break the ice. It had been good for a laugh at the last speech Wallingford had given, which was not really a speech but a toast at a dinner honoring Olympic athletes at the New York Athletic Club. The women in Tokyo would prove a tougher audience.

That the airline lost Wallingford’s checked luggage, an overstuffed garment bag, seemed to set a tone. The official for the airline told him: “Your luggage is on the way to the Philippines—back tomorrow!”

“You already know that my bag is going to the Philippines?”

“Most luridly, sir,” the official said, or so Patrick thought; he’d really said, “Most assuredly, sir,” but Wallingford had misheard him. (Patrick had a childish and offensive habit of mocking foreign accents, which was almost as unlikable as his compulsion to laugh when someone tripped or fell down.) For the sake of clarification, the airline official added: “The lost luggage on that flight from New York always goes to the Philippines.”

“ ‘Always’?” Wallingford asked.

“Always back tomorrow, too,” the official replied.

There then followed the ride in the helicopter from the airport to the rooftop of his Tokyo hotel. Wallingford’s Japanese hosts had arranged for the chopper.

“Ah, Tokyo at twilight—what can compare to it?” said a stern-looking woman seated next to Patrick on the helicopter. He hadn’t noticed that she’d also been on the plane from New York—probably because she’d been wearing an unflattering pair of tortoiseshell glasses and Wallingford had given her no more than a passing look. (She was the American author and self-described radical feminist, of course.)

“You’re being facetious, I trust,” Patrick said to her.

“I’m always facetious, Mr. Wallingford,” the woman replied. She introduced herself with a short, firm handshake. “I’m Evelyn Arbuthnot. I recognized you by your hand—the other one.”

“Did they send your luggage to the Philippines, too?” Patrick asked Ms. Arbuthnot.

“Look at me, Mr. Wallingford,” she instructed him. “I’m strictly a carry-on person. Airlines don’t lose my luggage.”

Perhaps he’d underestimated Evelyn Arbuthnot’s abilities; maybe he should try to find, and even read, one of her books.

But below them was Tokyo. He could see that there were heliports on the rooftops of many hotels and office buildings, and that other helicopters were hovering to land. It was as if there were a military invasion of the huge, hazy city, which, in the twilight, was tinged by an array of improbable colors, from pink to blood-red, in the fading sunset. To Wallingford, the rooftop helipads looked like bull’s-eyes; he tried to guess which bull’s-eye their helicopter was aiming at.

“Japan,” Evelyn Arbuthnot said despairingly.

“You don’t like Japan?” Patrick asked her.

“I don’t ‘like’ anyplace,” she told Wallingford, “but the man-woman thing is especially onerous here.”

“Oh,” Patrick replied.

“You haven’t been here before, have you?” she asked him. While he was still shaking his head, she told him: “You shouldn’t have come, disaster man.”

“Why did you come?” Wallingford asked her.

She was kind of growing on him with every negative word she spoke. He began to like her face, which was square with a high forehead and a broad jaw—her short gray hair sat on her head like a no-nonsense helmet. Her body was squat and sturdy-looking, and not at all revealed; she wore black jeans and a man’s untucked denim shirt, which looked soft from a lot of laundering. Judging by what Wallingford could see, which was not much, she seemed to be smallbreasted—she didn’t bother to wear a bra. She had on a sensible, if dirty, pair of running shoes, which she rested on a large gym bag that only partially fit beneath her seat; the bag had a shoulder strap and looked heavy.

Ms. Arbuthnot appeared to be a woman in her late forties or early fifties who traveled with more books than clothes. She wore no makeup and no nail polish, and no rings or other jewelry. She had small fingers and very clean, small hands, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

“Why did I come here?” she asked, repeating Patrick’s question. “I go where I’m invited, wherever it is, both because I’m not invited to many places and because I have a message. But you don’t have a message, do you, Mr. Wallingford? I can’t imagine what you would ever come to Tokyo for, least of all for a conference on

‘The Future of Women.’ Since when is ‘The Future of Women’ news ? Or the lion guy’s kind of news, anyway,” she added.

The helicopter was landing now. Wallingford, watching the enlarging bull’s-eye, was speechless.

“Why did I come here?” Patrick asked, repeating Ms. Arbuthnot’s question. He was just trying to buy a little time while he thought of an answer.

“I’ll tell you why, Mr. Wallingford.” Evelyn Arbuthnot put her small but surprisingly strong hands on his knees and gave him a good squeeze. “You came here because you knew you’d meet a lot of women —isn’t that right?”

So she was one of those people who disliked journalists, or Patrick Wallingford in particular. Wallingford was sensitive to both dislikes, which were common. He wanted to say that he had come to Tokyo because he was a fucking field reporter and he’d been given a fucking field assignment, but he held his tongue. He had that popular weakness of wanting to win over people who disliked him; as a consequence, he had numerous friends. None of them were close, and very few of them were male. (He’d slept with too many women to make close friendships with men.)

The helicopter bumped down; a door opened. A fast-moving bellman, who’d been standing on the rooftop, rushed forward with a luggage cart. There was no bag to take, except Evelyn Arbuthnot’s gym bag, which she preferred to carry herself.

“No bag? No luggage?” the eager bellman asked Wallingford, who was still thinking of how to answer Ms. Arbuthnot.

“My bag was mistakenly sent to the Philippines,” Patrick informed the bellman. He spoke unnecessarily slowly.

“Oh, no problem. Back tomorrow!” the bellman said.

“Ms. Arbuthnot,” Wallingford managed to say, a little stiffly, “I assure you that I don’t have to come to Tokyo, or this conference, to meet women. I can meet women anywhere in the world.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you can.” Evelyn Arbuthnot seemed less than pleased at the idea.

“And I’ll bet you have —everywhere, all the time. One after another.”

Bitch! Patrick decided, and he’d just been beginning to like her. He’d been feeling a lot like an asshole lately, and Ms. Arbuthnot had clearly got the better of him; yet Patrick Wallingford generally thought of himself as a nice guy. Fearing that his lost garment bag would not come back from the Philippines in time for his opening remarks at the “Future of Women” conference, Wallingford sent the clothes he’d worn on the plane to the hotel laundry service, which promised to return them overnight. Patrick hoped so. The problem then was that he had nothing to wear. He’d not anticipated that his Japanese hosts (fellow journalists, all) would keep calling him in his hotel room, inviting him for drinks and dinner.

He told them he was tired; he said he wasn’t hungry. They were polite about it, but Wallingford could tell he’d disappointed them. No doubt they couldn’t wait to see the no-hand—the other one, as Evelyn Arbuthnot had put it. Wallingford was looking distrustfully at the room-service menu when Ms. Arbuthnot called. “What are you doing for dinner?” she asked. “Or are you just doing room service?”

“Hasn’t anyone asked you out?” Patrick inquired. “They keep inviting me, but I can’t go because I sent the clothes I was wearing to the laundry service—in case my bag isn’t back from the Philippines tomorrow.”

“Nobody’s asked me out,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. “But I’m not famous—I’m not even a journalist. Nobody ever asks me out.”

Wallingford could believe this, but all he said was: “Well, I’d invite you to join me in my room, but I have nothing to wear except a towel.”

“Call housekeeping,” Evelyn Arbuthnot advised him. “Tell them you want a robe. Men don’t know how to sit in towels.” She gave him her room number and told him to call her back when he had the robe. Meanwhile she’d have a look at the room-service menu.

But when Wallingford called housekeeping, a woman’s voice said, “Solly, no lobes.” Or so Wallingford misheard. And when he called back Ms. Arbuthnot and reported what housekeeping had told him, she surprised him again.

“No lobe, no loom service.”

Patrick thought she was kidding. “Don’t worry—I’ll keep my knees tight together. Or I’ll try wearing two towels.”

“It’s not you, it’s me—it’s my fault,” Evelyn said. “I’m just disappointed in myself for being attracted to you.” Then she said, “Solly,” and hung up the phone. At least housekeeping, in lieu of the robe, sent him a complimentary toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste.

There’s not a lot of trouble you can get into in Tokyo when you’re wearing just a towel; yet Wallingford would find a way. Not having much of an appetite, he called something listed in the hotel directory asMASSAGE THERAPY instead of room service. Big mistake.

“Two women,” said the voice answering for the massage therapist. It was a man’s voice, and to Patrick it sounded like he said, “Two lemons”; yet he thought he’d understood what the man had said.

“No, no—not ‘two women,’ just one man. I’m a man, alone,” Wallingford explained.

“Two lemons,” the man on the phone confidently replied.

“Whatever,” Wallingford answered. “Is it shiatsu?”

“It’s two lemons or nothing,” the man said more aggressively.

“Okay, okay,” Patrick conceded. He opened a beer from the mini-bar while he waited in his towel. Before long, two women came to his door. One of them carried the table with the hole cut in one end of it for Wallingford’s face; it resembled an execution device, and the woman who carried it had hands that Dr. Zajac would have said resembled the hands of a famous tight end. The other woman carried some pillows and towels—she had forearms like Popeye’s.

“Hi,” Wallingford said.

They looked at him warily, their eyes on his towel.

“Shiatsu?” Patrick asked them.

“There are two of us,” one of the women told him.

“Yes, there certainly are,” Wallingford said, but he didn’t know why. Was it to make the massage go faster? Maybe it was to double the cost of the massage. When his face was in the hole, he stared at the bare feet of the woman who was grinding her elbow into his neck; the other woman was grinding her elbow (or was it her knee?) into his spine, in the area of his lower back. Patrick gathered his courage and asked the women outright: “Why are there two of you?”

To Wallingford’s surprise, the muscular massage therapists giggled like little girls.

“So we won’t get raped,” one of the women said.

“Two lemons, no lape,” Wallingford heard the other woman say. Their thumbs and their elbows, or their knees, were getting to him now—the women were digging pretty deep—but what really offended Wallingford was the concept that someone could be so morally reprehensible as to rape a massage therapist. (Patrick’s experiences with women had all been of a fairly limited kind: the women had wanted him.)

When the massage therapists left, Wallingford was limp. He could barely manage to walk to the bathroom to pee and brush his teeth before falling into bed. He saw that he’d left his unfinished beer on the night table, where it would stink in the morning, but he was too tired to get up. He lay as if rubberized. In the morning, he awoke in the exact same position in which he’d fallen asleep—on his stomach with both arms at his sides, like a soldier, and with the right side of his face pressed into the pillow, looking at his left shoulder.

Not until Wallingford got up to answer the door—it was just his breakfast—did he realize that he couldn’t move his head. His neck felt locked; he looked permanently to the left. That he could face only left would present him with a problem at the podium, where he soon had to make his opening remarks to the conference. And before that he had to eat his breakfast while facing his left shoulder. Compounding the difficulty of brushing his teeth with his right (and only) hand, the complimentary toothbrush was a trifle short—given the degree to which he faced left.

At least his luggage was back from its journey to the Philippines, which was a good thing because the laundry service called to apologize for “misplacing” his only other clothes.

“Not losing, merely misplacing!” shouted a man on the verge of hysteria. “Solly!”

When Wallingford opened his garment bag, which he managed by looking over his left shoulder, he discovered that the bag and all his clothes smelled strongly of urine. He called the airline to complain.

“Were you just in the Philippines?” the official for the airline asked.

“No, but my bag was,” Wallingford replied.

“Oh, that explains it!” the official cried happily. “Those drug-sniffing dogs that they have there—sometimes they piss on the suitcases!” Naturally this sounded to Patrick like “piff on the sweet cheeses,” but he got the idea. Filipino dogs had urinated on his clothes!

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” the airline official told him. “It just happens. The dogs have to go, I guess.”

Stupefied, Wallingford searched his clothes for a shirt and a pair of pants that were, relatively speaking, not permeated with dog piss. He reluctantly sent the rest of his clothes to the hotel laundry service, admonishing the man on the phone not to lose these clothes—they were his last.

“Others not losing!” the man shouted. “Merely misplacing!” (This time he didn’t even say “Solly!”)

Given how he knew he smelled, Patrick was not pleased to share a taxi to the conference with Evelyn Arbuthnot—especially as he was forced, by the crick in his neck, to ride in the taxi with his face turned rudely away from her.

“I don’t blame you for being angry with me, but isn’t it rather childish not to look at me?” she asked. She kept sniffing all around, as if she suspected there were a dog in the cab.

Wallingford told her everything: the two-lemon massage (“the two-woman mauling,” he called it); his one-way neck; the dog-peeing episode.

“I could listen to your stories for hours,” Ms. Arbuthnot told him. He didn’t need to see her to know she was being facetious.

Then came his speech, which he delivered standing sideways at the podium, looking down his left arm at his stump, which was more visible to him than the hard-to-read pages. With his left side to the audience, Patrick’s amputation was more apparent, prompting one wag in the Japanese press to describe Wallingford as “milking his missing hand.” (In the Western media, his missing hand was often referred to as his “no-hand” or his “nonhand.”) More generous Japanese journalists attending Patrick’s opening remarks—his male hosts, for the most part—called his left-facing oratorical method “provocative” and “incredibly cool.”

The speech itself was a flop with the highly accomplished women who were the conference’s participants. They had not come to Tokyo to talk about “The Future of Women” and then hear recycled master-of-ceremonies jokes from a man.

“Was that what you were writing on the plane yesterday? Or trying to write, I should say,” Evelyn Arbuthnot remarked. “Jesus, we should have had room service together. If the subject of your speech had come up, I might have spared you that embarrassment.”

As before, Wallingford was rendered speechless in her company. The hall in which he’d spoken was made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray. That was roughly how Evelyn Arbuthnot struck Patrick, too—“made of steel, in tones of ultramodern gray.”

The other women shunned him afterward; Wallingford knew that it wasn’t only the dog pee.

Even his German colleague in the world of television journalism, the beautiful Barbara Frei, wouldn’t speak to him. Most journalists meeting Wallingford for the first time would at least offer him some commiseration about the lion business, but the aloof Ms. Frei made it clear that she didn’t want to meet him. Only the Danish novelist, Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen, seemed to look at Patrick with a flicker of pity in her darting green eyes. She was pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there’d recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her—possibly her lover or her husband.

Wallingford attempted to approach Ms. Jensen, but Ms. Arbuthnot cut him off. “I saw her first,” Evelyn told Patrick, making a beeline for Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen.

This damaged Wallingford’s failing self-confidence further. Was that what Ms. Arbuthnot had meant by being disappointed in herself for being attracted to him? Was Evelyn Arbuthnot a lesbian?

Not all that eager to meet anyone while smelling wretchedly of dog piss, Wallingford returned to the hotel to await his clean clothes. He left his two-man television crew to film whatever was interesting in the rest of the speeches that first day, including a panel discussion on rape.

When Patrick got back to his hotel room, the hotel management had sent him flowers—in further apology for “misplacing” his clothes—and there were two massage therapists, two different women, waiting for him. The hotel had also sent him a complimentary massage. “Solly about the crick in your neck,” one of the new women told Patrick.

This sounded something like “click in your knack,” but Wallingford understood what she’d meant. He was doomed to have another two-woman mauling. But these two women managed to cure the crick in his neck, and while they were still engaged in turning him to jelly, the hotel laundry service returned his clean clothes— all his clothes. Perhaps this marked a turn for the better in his Japanese experience, Patrick imagined.

Given the loss of his left hand in India, even though it had happened five years before—given that Filipino dogs had pissed on his clothes, and that he’d needed a second massage to correct the damage done by the first; given that he’d not known Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian, and given his dreadfully insensitive speech; given that he knew nothing about Japan, and arguably even less about the future of women, which he never, not even now, thought about—Wallingford should have been wise enough not to imagine that his Japanese experience was about to take a turn for the better.

Anyone meeting Patrick Wallingford in Japan would have known in an instant that he was precisely the kind of penis-brain who would casually put his hand too close to a lion’s cage. (And if the lion had had an accent, Wallingford would have mocked it.) In retrospect, Patrick himself would rank his time in Japan as an even lower point in his life than the hand-eating episode in India. To be fair, Wallingford wasn’t the only man who missed the panel discussion on rape. The English economist, whose name (Jane Brown) Patrick had thought was boring, turned out to be anything but. She threw a fit at the rape panel and insisted that no men should be present for the discussion, declaring that for women to discuss rape honestly with one another was tantamount to being naked. That much the cameraman and the sound technician for the twenty-four-hour international channel managed to get on film before the English economist, to make her point, began to take off her clothes. Thereupon the cameraman, who was Japanese, respectfully stopped filming.

It’s debatable that watching Jane Brown take off her clothes would have been all that watchable for most television viewers. To describe Ms. Brown as matronly would be a kindness—she needed only to start taking off her clothes to empty the hall of what few men were there. There were almost no men attending the “Future of Women” conference, only the two guys in Patrick Wallingford’s TV crew, the Japanese journalists who were the conference’s unhappy-looking hosts, and, of course, Patrick himself.

The hosts would have been offended if they’d heard about the long-distance request of the New York news editor, who wanted no more footage of the conference itself. Instead of more of the women’s conference, what Dick said he now wanted was “something to contrast to it”—something to undermine it, in other words.

This was pure Dick, Wallingford thought. When the news editor asked for “related material,” what he really meant was something so un related to the women’s conference that it could make a mockery of the very idea of the future of women.

“I hear there’s a child-porn industry in Tokyo,” Dick told Patrick. “Child prostitutes, too. All this is relatively new, I’m told. It’s just emerging—dare I say budding ?”

“What about it?” Wallingford asked. He knew this was pure Dick, too. The news editor had never been interested in “The Future of Women.” The Japanese hosts had wanted Wallingford—the lion-guy video had record sales in Japan—and Dick had taken advantage of the invitation to have disaster man dig up some dirt in Tokyo.

“Of course you’ll have to be careful how you do it,” Dick went on, warning Patrick that there would be “aspersions of racism” cast against the network if they did anything that appeared to be “slanted against the Japanese.”

“You get it?” Dick had asked Wallingford over the phone. “Slanted against the Japanese…”

Wallingford sighed. Then he suggested, as always, that there was a deeper, more complex story. The “Future of Women” conference was conducted over a four-day period, but only in the daylight hours. Nothing was scheduled at night, not even dinner parties. Patrick wondered why.

A young Japanese woman who wanted Wallingford to autograph her Mickey Mouse T-shirt seemed surprised that he hadn’t guessed the reason. There were no conference-related activities in the evening because women were “supposed to”

spend the nighttime at home with their families. If they’d tried to have a women’s conference in Japan at night, not many women could have come. Wasn’t this interesting? Wallingford asked Dick, but the New York news editor told him to forget it. Although the young Japanese woman looked fantastic oncamera, Mickey Mouse T-shirts weren’t allowed on the all-news network, which had once been involved in a dispute with the Walt Disney Company. In the end, Wallingford was instructed to stick to individual interviews with the women who were the conference’s participants. Patrick could tell that Dick was pulling out on the piece.

“Just see if one or two of these broads will open up to you,” was how Dick left it. Naturally Wallingford began by trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Barbara Frei, the German television journalist. He approached her in the hotel bar. She seemed to be alone; the idea that she might be waiting for someone never crossed Patrick’s mind. The ZDF anchor was every bit as beautiful as she appeared on the small screen, but she politely declined to be interviewed.

“I know your network, of course,” Ms. Frei began tactfully. “I don’t think it likely that they will give serious coverage to this conference. Do you?” Case closed.

“I’m sorry about your hand, Mr. Wallingford,” Barbara Frei said. “That was truly awful—I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you,” Patrick replied. The woman was both sincere and classy. Wallingford’s twenty-four-hour international channel was not Ms. Frei’s, or anyone else’s, idea of serious TV journalism; compared to Barbara Frei, Patrick Wallingford wasn’t serious, either, and both Ms. Frei and Mr. Wallingford knew it.

The hotel bar was full of businessmen, as hotel bars tend to be. “Look—it’s the lion guy!” Wallingford heard one of them say.

“Disaster man!” another businessman called out.

“Won’t you have a drink?” Barbara Frei asked Patrick pityingly.

“Well… all right.” An immense and unfamiliar depression was weighing on him, and as soon as his beer arrived, there also arrived at the bar the man whom Ms. Frei had been waiting for—her husband.

Wallingford knew him. He was Peter Frei, a well-respected journalist at ZDF, although Peter Frei did cultural programs and his wife did what they called hard news.

“Peter’s a little tired,” Ms. Frei said, affectionately rubbing her husband’s shoulders and the back of his neck. “He’s been training for a trip to Mount Everest.”

“For a piece you’re doing, I suppose,” Patrick said enviously.

“Yes, but I have to climb a bit of the mountain to do it properly.”

“You’re going to climb Mount Everest?” Wallingford asked Peter Frei. He was an extremely fit-looking man—they were a very attractive couple.

“Oh, everyone climbs a bit of Everest now,” Mr. Frei replied modestly. “That’s what’s wrong with it—the place has been overrun by amateurs like me!” His beautiful wife laughed fondly and went on rubbing her husband’s neck and shoulders. Wallingford, who was barely able to drink his beer, found them as likable a couple as any he’d known.

When they said good-bye, Barbara Frei touched Patrick’s left forearm in the usual place. “You might try interviewing that woman from Ghana,” she suggested helpfully. “She’s awfully nice and smart, and she’s got more to say than I have. I mean she’s more of a person with a cause than I am.” (This meant, Wallingford knew, that the woman from Ghana would talk to anyone.)

“That’s a good idea—thank you.”

“Sorry about the hand,” Peter Frei told Patrick. “That’s a terrible thing. I think half the world remembers where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.”

“Yes,” Wallingford answered. He’d had only one beer, but he would scarcely remember leaving the hotel bar; he went off full of self-disgust, looking for the African woman as if she were a lifeboat and he a drowning man. He was. It was an unkind irony that the starvation expert from Ghana was extremely fat. Wallingford worried that Dick would exploit her obesity in an unpredictable way. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was dressed in something resembling a tent made of samples from patchwork quilts. But the woman had a degree from Oxford, and another from Yale; she’d won a Nobel Prize in something to do with world nutrition, which she said was “merely a matter of intelligent Third World crises anticipation… any fool with half a brain and a whole conscience could do what I do.”

But as much as Wallingford admired the big woman from Ghana, they didn’t like her in New York. “Too fat,” Dick told Patrick. “Black people will think we’re making fun of her.”

“But we didn’t make her fat!” Patrick protested. “The point is, she’s smart —she’s actually got something to say !”

“You can find someone else with something to say, can’t you? Jesus Christ, find someone smart who’s normal -looking!” But as Wallingford would discover at the

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo, this was exceedingly hard to do—taking into account that, by “normal-looking,” Dick no doubt meant not fat, not black, and not Japanese.

Patrick took one look at the Chinese geneticist, who had an elevated, hairy mole in the middle of her forehead; he wouldn’t bother trying to interview her. He could already hear what that dick Dick in New York would say about her. “Talk about making fun of people—Jesus Christ! We might as well bomb a Chinese embassy in some asshole country and try calling it an accident or something!”

So Patrick talked to the Korean doctor of infectious diseases, who he thought was kind of cute. But she turned out to be camera-shy, which took the form of her staring obsessively at his stump. Nor could she name a single infectious disease without stuttering; the mere mention of a disease seemed to grip her in terror. As for the Russian film director—“No one has seen her movies,” the news editor in New York told Wallingford—Ludmilla (we’ll leave it at that) was as ugly as a toad. Also, as Patrick would discover at two o’clock one morning when she came to his hotel room, she wanted to defect. She didn’t mean to Japan. She wanted Wallingford to smuggle her into New York. In what ? Wallingford would wonder. In his garment bag, now permanently reeking of Filipino dog piss? Surely a Russian defector was news, even in New York. So what if no one had seen her movies? “She wants to go to Sundance,” Patrick told Dick. “For Christ’s sake, Dick, she wants to defect ! That’s a story!” (No sensible news network would turn down a story on a Russian defector.)

But Dick was unimpressed. “We just did five minutes on a Cuban defector, Pat.”

“You mean that no-good baseball player?” Wallingford asked.

“He’s a halfway-decent shortstop, and the guy can hit,” Dick said, and that was that.

Then came the rejection from the green-eyed Danish novelist; she turned out to be a touchy writer who refused to be interviewed by someone who hadn’t read her books. Who did she think she was, anyway? Wallingford didn’t have the time to read her books! At least he’d guessed right about how to pronounce her name—it was “bode eel, ” accent on the eel.

Those too-numerous Japanese women in the arts were eager to talk to him, and they were fond, when they talked to him, of sympathetically touching his left forearm a little above where he’d lost his hand. But the news editor in New York was “sick of the arts.” Dick further claimed that the Japanese women would give the television audience the false impression that the only participants in this conference were Japanese.

“Since when do we worry that we’re giving our viewers a false impression?”

Patrick plucked up the courage to ask.

“Listen, Pat,” Dick said, “that runt poet with the facial tattoo would even put off other poets.”

Wallingford had already been in Japan too long. He was so used to the people’s mispronunciation of his mother tongue that he now misheard his news editor, too. He simply didn’t hear “runt poet”; he heard “cunt poet” instead.

“No, you listen, Dick,” Wallingford retorted, with an uncharacteristic display of something less than his usually sweet-dispositioned self. “I’m not a woman, but even I take offense at that word.”

“What word?” Dick asked. “Tattoo?”

“You know what word!” Patrick shouted. “Cunt!”

“I said ‘runt,’ not ‘cunt,’ Pat,” the news editor informed Wallingford. “I guess you just hear what you think about all the time.”

Patrick had no recourse. He had to interview Jane Brown, the English economist who’d threatened to undress, or he had to talk to Evelyn Arbuthnot, the presumed lesbian who loathed him and was ashamed that, if only for a moment, she’d been attracted to him.

The English economist was a dingbat of a distinctly English kind. It didn’t matter—Americans are suckers for an English accent. Jane Brown screeched like an unattended tea kettle, not about world economy but on the subject of threatening to take off her clothes in front of men. “I know from experience that the men will never allow me to finish undressing,” Ms. Brown told Patrick Wallingford on-camera, in that overenunciated manner of a character actress of a certain age and background on the English stage. “I never even get down to my undergarments before the men have fled the room—it happens every time! Men are very reliable. By that I mean only that they can be counted on to flee from me!”

Dick in New York loved it. He said that the Jane Brown interview “contrasted nicely” with the earlier footage of her throwing a fit about rape on the first day of the conference. The twenty-four-hour international channel had its story. The

“Future of Women” conference in Tokyo had been covered—better to say, it had been covered in the all-news network’s way, which was to marginalize more than Patrick Wallingford; it was also to marginalize the news. A women’s conference in Japan had been reduced to a story about a matronly and histrionic Englishwoman threatening to take off her clothes at a panel discussion on rape—in Tokyo, of all places.

“Well, wasn’t that cute?” Evelyn Arbuthnot would say, when she saw the minuteand-a-half story on the TV in her hotel room. She was still in Tokyo—it was the closing day of the conference. Wallingford’s cheap-shot channel hadn’t even waited for the conference to be over.

Patrick was still in bed when Ms. Arbuthnot called him. “Solly,” was all Wallingford could manage to say. “I’m not the news editor; I’m just a field reporter.”

“You were just following orders—is that what you mean?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked him.

Evelyn Arbuthnot was much too tough for Patrick Wallingford, especially because Wallingford had not recovered from a night on the town with his Japanese hosts. He thought even his soul must smell like sake. Nor could Patrick remember which of his favorite Japanese newspapermen had given him tickets for two on the highspeed train to and from Kyoto—“the bullet train,” either Yoshi or Fumi had called it. A visit to a traditional inn in Kyoto could be very restorative, they’d told him; he remembered that. “But better go before the weekend.” Regrettably, Wallingford would forget that part of their advice.

Ah, Kyoto—city of temples, city of prayer. Someplace more meditative than Tokyo would do Wallingford a world of good. It was high time he did a little meditating, he explained to Evelyn Arbuthnot, who continued to berate him about the fiasco of the coverage given to the women’s conference by his “lousy not -thenews network.”

“I know, I know…” Patrick kept repeating. (What else could he say?)

“And now you’re going to Kyoto? To do what? Pray? Just what will you pray for?” she asked him. “The most publicly humiliating demise imaginable of your disaster-and-comedy-news network—that’s what I pray for!”

“I’m still hopeful that something nice might happen to me in this country,”

Wallingford replied with as much dignity as he could summon, which wasn’t much.

There was a thoughtful pause on Evelyn Arbuthnot’s end of the phone. Patrick guessed that she was giving new consideration to an old idea.

“You want something nice to happen to you in Japan?” Ms. Arbuthnot asked.

“Well… you can take me to Kyoto with you. I’ll show you something nice. ”

He was Patrick Wallingford, after all. He acquiesced. He did what women wanted; he generally did what he was told. But he’d thought Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian! Patrick was confused.

“Uh… I thought… I mean from your remark to me about that Danish novelist, I took it to mean that… well, that you were gay, Ms. Arbuthnot.”

“That’s a trick I play all the time,” she told him. “I didn’t think you’d fallen for it.”

“Oh,” Wallingford said.

“I am not gay, but I’m old enough to be your mother. If you want to think about that and get back to me, I won’t be offended.”

“Surely you couldn’t be my mother—”

“Biologically speaking, I surely could be,” Ms. Arbuthnot said. “I could have had you when I was sixteen—when I looked eighteen, by the way. How’s your math?”

“You’re fifty-something?” he asked her.

“That’s close enough,” she said. “And I can’t leave for Kyoto today. I won’t skip the last day of this pathetic but well-intentioned conference. If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll go to Kyoto with you for the weekend.”

“Okay,” Wallingford agreed. He didn’t tell her that he already had two tickets on

“the bullet train.” He could ask the concierge at the hotel to change his reservations for the train and inn.

“You sure you want to do this?” Evelyn Arbuthnot asked. She didn’t sound too sure herself.

“Yes, I’m sure. I like you,” Wallingford told Ms. Arbuthnot. “Even if I am an asshole.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself for being an asshole,” she told him. It was the closest her voice had come to a sexual purr. In terms of speed—most of all, in regard to how quickly she could change her mind—Evelyn was a kind of bullet train herself. Patrick began to have second thoughts about going anywhere with her.

It was as if she’d read his mind. “I won’t be too demanding,” she suddenly said.

“Besides, you should have some experience with a woman my age. One day, when you’re in your seventies, women my age are going to be as young as you can get.”

Over the course of the rest of that day and night, while Wallingford waited to take the bullet train to Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot, his hangover gradually subsided; when he went to bed, he could taste the sake only when he yawned. The next day dawned bright and fair in the land of the rising sun—a false promise, as it turned out. Wallingford rode on a two-hundred-mile-an-hour train with a woman old enough to be his mother, and with about five hundred screaming schoolchildren, all girls, because—as far as Patrick and Evelyn could understand the tortuous English of the train’s conductor—it was something called National Prayer Weekend for Girls and every schoolgirl in Japan was going to Kyoto, or so it seemed.

It rained the entire weekend. Kyoto was overrun with Japanese schoolgirls, praying. Well, they must have prayed some of the time that they overran the city, although Patrick and Evelyn never saw them actually do so. When they weren’t praying, they did what schoolgirls everywhere do. They laughed, they shrieked, they burst into hysterical sobs—all for no apparent reason.

“Wretched hormones,” Evelyn said, as if she knew.

The schoolgirls also played the worst Western music imaginable, and they took a surfeit of baths—so many baths that the traditional inn where Wallingford and Evelyn Arbuthnot stayed was repeatedly running out of hot water.

“Too many not-praying girls!” the apologetic innkeeper told Patrick and Evelyn, not that they really cared about the lack of hot water; a tepid bath or two would do. They were fucking nonstop, all weekend long, with only occasional visits to the temples for which Kyoto (unlike Patrick Wallingford) was justly famous. It turned out that Evelyn Arbuthnot liked to have a lot of sex. In forty-eight hours .

. . no, never mind. It would be boorish to count the number of times they did it. Suffice it to say that Wallingford was completely worn out at the end of the weekend, and by the time he and Evelyn were riding the two-hundred-mile-anhour train back to Tokyo, Patrick’s cock was so sore that he felt like a teenager who’d wanked himself raw.

He loved what he’d seen of the wet temples. Standing inside the huge wooden shrines with the rain beating down was like being held captive in a primitive, drumlike wooden instrument with the prevailing, high-pitched yammer of rampant schoolgirls surrounding you.

Many of the girls wore their school uniforms, which lent to their presence the monotony of a military band. Some were pretty, but most were not; besides, on that particular National Prayer Weekend for Girls, which was probably not what the weekend was officially called, Wallingford had eyes only for Evelyn Arbuthnot.

He liked making love to her, no small part of the reason being that she so clearly enjoyed herself with him. He found her body, which was by no means beautiful, nonetheless astutely purposeful. Evelyn used her body as if it were a welldesigned tool. But on one of her small breasts was a fairly large scar—not from an accident, clearly. (It was too straight and thin; it had to be a surgical scar.) “I had a lump removed,” she told Patrick, when he asked her about it.

“It must have been a pretty big lump,” he said.

“It turned out to be nothing. I’m fine,” she replied.

Only on the return trip to Tokyo had she begun to mother him a little. “What are you going to do with yourself, Patrick?” she’d asked, holding his one hand.

“Do with myself?”

“You’re a mess,” she told him. He saw in her face the genuineness of her concern for him.

“I’m a mess,” he repeated to Evelyn.

“Yes, you are, and you know it,” she told him. “Your career is unsatisfying, but what’s more important is you don’t have a life. You might as well be lost at sea, dear.” (The “dear” was something new and unappealing.)

Patrick began to babble about Dr. Zajac and the prospect of having handtransplant surgery—of actually, after these five long years, getting back a left hand.

“That’s not what I mean,” Evelyn interrupted him. “Who cares about your left hand? It’s been five years! You can do without it. You can always find someone to help you slice a tomato, or you can just do without the tomato. You’re not a goodlooking joke because of your missing hand. It’s partly because of your job, but, chiefly, it’s because of how you live your life !”

“Oh,” Wallingford said. He tried to take his hand out of her motherly grasp, but Ms. Arbuthnot wouldn’t let him; after all, she had two hands and she firmly held his one hand between them.

“Listen to me, Patrick,” Evelyn said. “It’s great that Dr. Sayzac wants to give you a new left hand—”

“Dr. Zajac, ” Wallingford corrected her petulantly.

“Dr. Zajac, then,” Ms. Arbuthnot continued. “I don’t mean to take anything away from the courage involved in subjecting yourself to such a risky experiment—”

“It would be only the second such surgery ever, ” Patrick, again petulantly, informed her. “The first one didn’t work.”

“Yes, yes—you’ve told me,” Ms. Arbuthnot reminded him. “But do you have the courage to change your life ?” Then she fell asleep, her grip on his hand relaxing as she did so. Wallingford probably could have pulled his hand away without waking her, but he didn’t want to risk it.

Evelyn would be flying to San Francisco; Wallingford was on his way back to New York. There was another women-related conference in San Francisco, she’d told him.

He hadn’t asked her what her “message” was, nor would he ever finish one of her books. The only one he tried to read would be disappointing to him. Evelyn Arbuthnot was more interesting as a person than she was as a writer. Like many smart, motivated people who’ve had busy and informed lives, she didn’t write especially well.

In bed, where personal history is most unselfconsciously forthcoming, Ms. Arbuthnot had told Patrick that she’d been married twice—the first time when she was very young. She’d divorced her first husband; her second, the one she’d truly loved, had died. She was a widow with grown children and several young grandchildren. Her children and grandchildren, she’d told Wallingford, were her life; her writing and traveling were only her message. But in what little Wallingford managed to read of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s writing, her “message”

eluded him. Yet whenever he thought of her, he had to admit that she’d taught him quite a lot about himself.

On the bullet train, just before their arrival in Tokyo, some Japanese schoolgirls and their accompanying teacher recognized him. They seemed to be gathering their courage to send one of the girls the length of the passenger car to ask the lion guy for his autograph. Patrick hoped not—giving the girls his signature would require extricating his right hand from Evelyn’s sleeping fingers. Finally none of the schoolgirls could summon the courage to approach him; their teacher came down the aisle of the bullet train instead. She was wearing a uniform that closely resembled those of her young charges, and although she was young herself, she conveyed both the severity and formality of a much older woman when she spoke to him. She was also exceedingly polite; she made such an effort to keep her voice low and soft, so as not to wake Evelyn, that Wallingford had to lean a little into the aisle in order to hear her above the clatter of the speeding train.

“The girls wanted me to tell you that they think you’re very handsome, and that you must be very brave,” she told Patrick. “I have something to say to you, too,”

she whispered. “When I first saw you, with the lion, I regret that I didn’t think you would be such a nice man. But seeing you as you are—you know, just traveling and talking with your mother—I now realize that you are a very nice man.”

“Thank you,” Wallingford whispered back, although her misunderstanding pained him, and when the young teacher had returned to her seat, Evelyn gave his hand a squeeze—just to let him know she’d been awake. When Wallingford looked at her, her eyes were open wide and she was smiling at him.

Less than a year later, when he heard of her death—“The breast cancer returned,”

one of her daughters told Wallingford when he called to give Evelyn’s children and grandchildren his condolences—Patrick would remember her smile on the bullet train. The lump, which Evelyn had told him was nothing, had been something after all. Given how long a scar it had been, maybe she’d already known that.

There was something entirely too fragile about Patrick Wallingford. Women—his ex-wife, Marilyn, excepted—were always trying to spare him things, although that hardly had been Evelyn Arbuthnot’s style.

Wallingford would remember, too, that he could have asked the Japanese schoolteacher what the official name for National Prayer Weekend for Girls was, but he hadn’t. Incredibly, especially for a journalist, he’d spent six days in Japan and learned absolutely nothing about the country.

Like the young schoolteacher, the Japanese he’d met had been extremely civilized and courteous, including the Japanese newspapermen who’d been Wallingford’s hosts—they’d been a lot more respectful and well mannered than most of the journalists Patrick worked with in New York. But he’d asked them nothing; he’d been too consumed studying himself. All he’d half-learned was how to mock their accents, which he imitated incorrectly.

Fault Marilyn, Wallingford’s ex-wife, all you want. She was right about at least one thing—Patrick was permanently a boy. Yet he was capable of growing up, or so he hoped.

There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person’s life. Patrick Wallingford’s defining experience was not losing his left hand, nor was it adjusting to life without that hand. The experience that truly changed him was a largely squandered trip to Japan.

“Tell us about Japan, Pat. How was it?” those fast-talking women in the New York newsroom would ask him in their ever-flirtatious, always-baiting voices. (They’d already learned from Dick how Wallingford had heard “cunt” when Dick had said

“runt.”)

But when Wallingford was asked about Japan, he would duck the question. “Japan is a novel,” Patrick would say, and leave it at that.

He already believed that the trip to Japan had made him sincerely want to change his life. He would risk everything to change it. He knew it wouldn’t be easy, but he believed he had the willpower to try. To his credit, the first moment he was alone with Mary whatever-her-name-was in the newsroom, Wallingford said, “I’m very sorry, Mary. I am truly, deeply sorry for what I said, for upsetting you so—”

She interrupted him. “It wasn’t what you said that upset me—it’s my marriage. It’s not working out very well, and I’m pregnant.”

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said again.

Calling Dr. Zajac and confirming that he wanted to undergo the transplant surgery had been relatively easy.

The next time Patrick had a minute alone with Mary, he made a blunder of the well-intentioned kind. “When are you expecting, Mary?” (She wasn’t showing yet.)

“I lost the baby!” Mary blurted out; she burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick repeated.

“It’s my second miscarriage,” the miserable young woman told him. She sobbed against his chest, wetting his shirt. When some of those savvy New York newsroom women saw them, they shot one another their most knowing glances. But they were wrong—that is, they were wrong this time. Wallingford was trying to change.

“I should have gone to Japan with you,” Mary whatever-her-name-was whispered in Patrick’s ear.

“No, Mary—no, no,” Wallingford said. “You should not have gone to Japan with me, and I was wrong to propose it.” But the young woman cried all the harder. In the company of crying women, Patrick Wallingford did what many men do—he thought of other things. For example, how exactly do you wait for a hand when you’ve been without one for five years?

His recent experience with sake notwithstanding, he was not a drinker; but he grew strangely fond of sitting alone in an unfamiliar bar—always a different bar—in the late afternoon. A kind of lassitude compelled him to play this game. As the cocktail hour came, and the place filled with people intent on becoming more and more companionable, Patrick Wallingford sat sipping a beer; his objective was to project an aura of such unapproachable sadness that no one would intrude on his solitude.

They would all recognize him, of course; possibly he would overhear a whispered

“lion guy” or “disaster man,” but no one would speak to him. That was the game—it was an actor’s exercise in finding the right look. ( Pity me, the look said. Pity me, but leave me alone. ) It was a game at which he became pretty good. Then, one late afternoon—shortly before the cocktail hour—Wallingford went to a bar in his old New York neighborhood. It was too early for the night doorman in Patrick’s former apartment building to start his shift, but Wallingford was surprised to see the doorman in the bar—all the more so because he wasn’t wearing his doorman’s uniform.

“Hi, Mr. O’Neill,” Vlad or Vlade or Lewis greeted him. “I saw you was in Japan. They play pretty good baseball over there, don’t they? I suppose it’s an alternative for you, if things don’t work out here.”

“How are you, Lewis?” Wallingford asked.

“It’s Vlade,” Vlad said gloomily. “This here’s my brother. We’re just killin’ some time before I go to work. I don’t enjoy the night shift no more.”

Patrick nodded to the nice-looking young man standing at the bar with the depressed-looking doorman. His name was Loren or Goran, or possibly Zorbid; the brother was shy and he’d mumbled his name.

But when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis went off to the men’s room—he’d been drinking glass after glass of cranberry juice and soda—the shy brother confided to Patrick, “He doesn’t mean any harm, Mr. Wallingford. He’s just a little confused about things. He doesn’t know you’re not Paul O’Neill, even though he does know it. I honestly believed that, after the lion thing, he would finally get it. But he doesn’t. Most of the time, you’re just Paul O’Neill to him. I’m sorry. It must be a nuisance.”

“Please don’t apologize,” Patrick said. “I like your brother. If I’m Paul O’Neill to him, that’s fine. At least I’ve left Cincinnati.”

They both looked a little guilty, just sitting there at the bar, when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis returned from the men’s room. Patrick regretted that he hadn’t asked the normal brother what the confused doorman’s real name was, but the moment had passed. Now the three-named doorman was back; he looked more like his old self because he’d changed into his uniform in the men’s room.

The doorman handed his regular clothes to his brother, who put them in a backpack resting against the footrail at the bar. Patrick hadn’t seen the backpack until now, but he realized that this was part of a routine with the brothers. Probably the normal brother came back in the morning to take Vlad or Vlade or Lewis home; he looked like that kind of good brother.

Suddenly the doorman put his head down on the bar as if he wanted to go to sleep on the spot. “Hey, come on—don’t do that,” his brother said affectionately to him.

“You don’t want to do that, especially not in front of Mr. O’Neill.”

The doorman lifted his head. “I just get tired of workin’ so late, sometimes,” he said. “No more night shifts, please. No more night shifts.”

“Look—you have a job, don’t you?” the brother said, trying to cheer him up. Miraculously—that quickly!—Vlad or Vlade or Lewis broke into a grin. “Gosh, look at me,” he said. “I’m feelin’ sorry for myself while I’m sittin’ with the best right fielder I can think of, and he’s got no left hand! And he bats left and throws left, too. I’m very sorry, Mr. O’Neill. I got no business feelin’ sorry for myself in front of you. ”

Naturally Wallingford felt sorry for himself, too, but he wanted to be Paul O’Neill for a little while longer. It was the beginning of getting away from being the old Patrick Wallingford.

Here he was, disaster man, cultivating a look for the cocktail hour. The look was just an act, the lion guy knew, but the pity-me part was true.