The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER TEN Trying to Get Fired

THERE’D BEEN NEARLY a week of rapturous mourning when Wallingford tried and failed to ready himself for an impromptu weekend in Wisconsin with Mrs. Clausen and Otto junior at the cottage on the lake. The Friday-evening telecast, one week after the crash of Kennedy’s single-engine plane, would be Patrick’s last before his trip up north, although he couldn’t get a flight from New York with a connection to Green Bay until Saturday morning. There was no good way to get to Green Bay.

The Thursday-evening telecast was bad enough. Already they were running out of things to say, an obvious indication of which was Wallingford’s interview with a widely disregarded feminist critic. (Even Evelyn Arbuthnot had intentionally ignored her.) The critic had written a book about the Kennedy family, in which she’d stated that all the men were misogynists. It was no surprise to her that a young Kennedy male had killed two women in his airplane.

Patrick asked to have the interview omitted, but Fred believed that the woman spoke for a lot of women. Judging from the abrasive response of the New York newsroom women, the feminist critic did not speak for them. Wallingford, always unfailingly polite as an interviewer, had to struggle to be barely civil. The feminist critic kept referring to young Kennedy’s “fatal decision,” as if his life and death had been a novel. “They left late, it was dark, it was hazy, they were flying over water, and John-John had limited experience as a pilot.”

These were not new points, Patrick was thinking, an unconvincing half-smile frozen on his handsome face. He also found it objectionable that the imperious woman kept calling the deceased “John-John.”

“He was a victim of his own virile thinking, the Kennedy-male syndrome,” she called it. “John-John was clearly testosterone-driven. They all are.”

“‘They…’ ” was all Wallingford managed to say.

“You know who I mean,” the critic snapped. “The men on his father’s side of the family.”

Patrick glanced at the TelePrompTer, where he recognized what were to be his next remarks; they were intended to lead his interviewee to the even more dubious assertion of the “culpability” of Lauren Bessette’s bosses at Morgan Stanley. That her bosses had made her stay late on “that fatal Friday,” as the feminist critic called it, was another reason that the small plane had crashed. In the script meeting, Wallingford had objected to the word-for-word content of one of his questions being on the prompter. That was almost never done—it was always confusing. You can’t put everything that’s supposed to be spontaneous on the TelePrompTer.

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 ‘testosteronedriven.’ 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 notthe-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.

He still had a hard-on at dawn, when a boat out on the East River tooted obscenely. (It was probably towing a garbage scow.) Patrick lay on his back in the pink-tinged bedroom, which was the color of scar tissue. His erection was holding up the bedcovers. How women seemed to sense such things, he’d never understood; he felt Mary kick the couch cushions off the bed. He held on to her hips while she sat on him, rocking away. As they moved, the daylight came striding into the room; the hideous pink began to pale.

“I’ll show you ‘testosterone-driven,’ ” Mary whispered to him, just before he came. It didn’t matter that her breath was bad—they were friends. It was just sex, as frank and familiar as a handshake. A barrier that had long existed had been lifted. Sex was a burden that had stood between them; now it was no big deal. Mary had nothing to eat in her apartment. She’d never cooked a meal or even eaten breakfast there. She would start looking for a bigger apartment, she declared, now that she was going to have a baby.

“I know I’m pregnant,” she chirped. “I can feel it.”

“Well, it’s certainly possible,” was all Patrick said.

They had a pillow fight and chased each other naked through the small apartment, until Wallingford whacked his shin against the stupid glass-topped coffee table in the paisley confusion of the living room. Then they took a shower together. Patrick burned himself on the hot-water faucet while they were soaping each other up and squirming all around, chest-to-chest.

They took a long walk to a coffee shop they both liked—it was on Madison Avenue, somewhere in the Sixties or Seventies. Because of the competing noise on the street, they had to shout at each other the whole way. They walked into the coffee shop still shouting, like people who’ve been swimming and don’t know that their ears are full of water.

“It’s a pity we don’t love each other,” Mary was saying much too loudly. “Then you wouldn’t have to go break your heart in Wisconsin, and I wouldn’t have to have your baby all by myself.”

Their fellow breakfast-eaters appeared to doubt the wisdom of this, but Wallingford foolishly agreed. He told Mary what he was rehearsing to say to Doris. Mary frowned. She worried that the part about trying to lose his job didn’t sound sincere. (As to what she truly thought about the other part—his fathering a child with her just prior to declaring his eternal love for Doris Clausen—Mary didn’t say.)

“Look,” she said. “You’ve got what, eighteen months, remaining on your contract? If they fired you now, they’d try to negotiate you down. You’d probably settle for them owing you only a year’s salary. If you’re going to be in Wisconsin, maybe you’ll need more than a year to find a new job—I mean one you like.”

It was Patrick’s turn to frown. He had exactly eighteen months remaining on his contract, but how had Mary known that?

“Furthermore,” Mary went on, “they’re going to be reluctant to fire you as long as you’re the anchor. They have to make it look as if whoever’s in the anchor chair is everybody’s first choice.”

It only now occurred to Wallingford that Mary herself might be interested in what she called the anchor chair. He’d underestimated her before. The New York newsroom women were no dummies; Patrick had sensed some resentment of Mary among them. He’d thought it was because she was the youngest, the prettiest, the smartest, and the presumed nicest—he hadn’t considered that she might also be the most ambitious.

“I see,” he said, although he didn’t quite. “Go on.”

“Well, if I were you,” Mary said, “I’d ask for a new contract. Ask for three years—no, make that five. But tell them you don’t want to be the anchor anymore. Tell them you want your pick of field assignments. Say you’ll take only the assignments you like.”

“You mean demote myself?” Wallingford asked. “This is the way to get fired?”

“Wait! Let me finish!” Everyone in earshot in the coffee shop was listening.

“What you do is you start to refuse your assignments. You just become too picky!”

“ ‘Too picky,’ ” Patrick repeated. “I see.”

“Suddenly something big happens—I mean major heartache, devastation, terror, and accompanying sorrow. Are you with me, Pat?”

He was. He was beginning to see where some of the hyperbole on the TelePrompTer came from—not all of it was Fred’s work. Wallingford had never spent time with Mary in the hard midmorning light; even the blueness in her eyes was newly clarifying.

“Go on, Mary.”

“Calamity strikes!” she said. In the coffee shop, cups were poised, or resting quietly in their saucers. “It’s big-time breaking news—you know the kind of story. We have to send you. You simply refuse to go.”

“Then they fire me?” Wallingford asked.

“Then we have to, Pat.”

He didn’t let on, but he’d already noticed when “they” had become “we.” He had underestimated her, indeed.

“You’re going to have one smart little baby, Mary,” was all he said.

“But do you see ?” she insisted. “Let’s say there’s still four or four and a half years remaining on your new contract. They fire you. They negotiate you down, but down to what ? Down to three years, maybe. They end up paying you three years’ salary and you’re home free! Well… home free in Wisconsin, anyway, if that’s really where you want to be.”

“It’s not my decision,” he reminded her.

Mary took his hand. All the while, they’d been consuming a huge breakfast; the fascinated patrons of the coffee shop had been watching them eat and eat throughout their eager shouting.

“I wish you all the luck in the world with Mrs. Clausen,” Mary told him earnestly.

“She’d be a fool not to take you.”

Wallingford perceived the disingenuousness of this, but he refrained from comment. He thought that an early-afternoon movie might help, although the matter of which film they should see would prove defeating. Patrick suggested Arlington Road. He knew that Mary liked Jeff Bridges. But political thrillers made her too tense.

“Eyes Wide Shut?” Wallingford proposed. He detected an atypical vacancy in her expression. “Kubrick’s last—”

“He just died, right?”

“That’s right.”

“All the eulogizing has made me suspicious,” Mary said.

A smart girl, all right. But Patrick nonetheless believed he might tempt her to see the film. “It’s with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

“It ruins it for me that they’re married,” Mary said.

The lull in their conversation was so sudden, everyone who was in a position to stare at them in the coffee shop was doing so. This was partly because they knew he was Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, with some pretty blonde, but it was even more because there had passed between them such a frenzy of words, which had now abruptly ceased. It was like watching two people fuck; all of a sudden, seemingly without orgasm, they’d simply stopped.

“Let’s not go to a movie, Pat. Let’s go to your place. I’ve never seen it. Let’s just go there and fuck some more.”

This was surely better raw material than any would-be writer in the coffee shop could have hoped to hear. “Okay, Mary,” Wallingford said.

He believed she was oblivious to the scrutiny they were under. People who were not used to being out in public with Patrick Wallingford were unaccustomed to the fact that, especially in New York, everyone recognized disaster man. But when Patrick was paying the bill, he observed Mary confidently meeting the stares of the coffee shop’s patrons, and out on the sidewalk she took his arm and told him: “A little episode like that does wonders for the ratings, Pat.”

It was no surprise to him that she liked his apartment better than her own. “All this for you alone?” she asked.

“It’s just a one-bedroom, like yours,” Wallingford protested. But while this was strictly true, Patrick’s apartment in the East Eighties had a kitchen big enough to have a table in it, and the living room could be a living-dining room, if he ever wanted to use it that way. Best of all, from Mary’s point of view, was that his apartment’s one bedroom was spacious and L-shaped; a baby’s crib and paraphernalia could fit in the short end of the L.

“The baby could go there,” as Mary put it, pointing to the nook from the vantage of the bed, “and I’d still have a little privacy.”

“You’d like to trade your apartment for mine—is that it, Mary?”

“Well… if you’re going to be in Wisconsin most of the time. Come on, Pat, it sounds like all you’ll really need to have in New York is a pied-à-terre. My place would be perfect for you!”

They were naked, but Wallingford rested his head on her flat, almost boyish stomach with more resignation than sexual enthusiasm; he’d lost the heart to “fuck some more,” as Mary had so engagingly put it in the coffee shop. He was trying not to imagine himself in her noisy apartment on East Fifty-something. He hated midtown—there was always such a racket there. By comparison, the Eighties amounted to a neighborhood.

“You’ll get used to the noise,” Mary told him, rubbing his neck and shoulders soothingly. She was reading his mind, smart girl that she was. Wallingford wrapped his arms around her hips; he kissed her small, soft belly, trying to envision the changes in her body in six, then seven, then eight months’ time.

“You’ve got to admit that your place would be better for the baby, Pat,” she said. Her tongue darted in and out of his ear.

He had no capacity for long-range scheming; he could only admire Mary for everything he’d underestimated about her. Possibly he could learn from her. Maybe then he could get what he wanted—the imagined life with Mrs. Clausen and little Otto. Or was that really what he wanted? A sudden crisis of confidence, the lack thereof, overcame him. What if all he really wanted was to get out of television and out of New York?

“Poor penis,” Mary was saying consolingly. She was holding it fondly, but it was unresponsive. “It must be tired,” she went on. “Maybe it should rest up. It should probably save itself for Wisconsin.”

“We better both hope that it works out for me in Wisconsin, Mary. I mean for both our plans.” She kissed his penis lightly, almost indifferently, in the manner that so many New Yorkers might kiss the cheek of a mere acquaintance or a not-so-close friend.

“Smart boy, Pat. And you’re basically a good guy, too—no matter what anybody else says.”

“It would appear that I’m perceived to be swimming near the top of the gene pool,” was all Wallingford said in reply.

He was trying to imagine the TelePrompTer for the Friday-evening telecast, anticipating what Fred might already have contributed to it. He tried to imagine what Mary would add to the script, too, because what Patrick Wallingford said oncamera was written by many unseen hands, and Patrick now understood that Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

When it was evident that Wallingford wasn’t up to having sex again, Mary said they might as well go to work a little early. “I know you like to have some input in regard to what goes on the TelePrompTer,” was how she expressed it. “I have a few ideas,” she added, but not until they were in the taxi heading downtown. Her timing was almost magical. Patrick listened to her talk about “closure,” about

“wrapping up the Kennedy thing.” She’d already written the script, he realized. Almost as an afterthought—they’d cleared security and were taking the elevator up to the newsroom—Mary touched his left forearm, a little above his missing hand and wrist, in that sympathetic manner to which so many women seemed addicted. “If I were you, Pat,” she confided, “I wouldn’t worry about Fred. I wouldn’t give him a second thought.”

At first, Wallingford believed that the newsroom women were all abuzz because he and Mary had come in together; doubtless at least one of them had seen them leave together the previous night, too. Now they all knew. But Fred had been fired—that was the reason for the women’s mercurial chatter. Wallingford was not surprised that Mary wasn’t shocked at the news. (With the briefest of smiles, she ducked into a women’s room.)

Patrick was surprised to be greeted by only one producer and one CEO. The latter was a moon-faced young man named Wharton who always looked as if he were suppressing the urge to vomit. Was Wharton more important than Wallingford had thought? Had he underestimated Wharton, too? Suddenly Wharton’s innocuousness struck Patrick as potentially dangerous. The young man had a blank, insipid quality that could have concealed a latent authority to fire people—even Fred, even Patrick Wallingford. But Wharton’s only reference to Wallingford’s small rebellion on the Thursday-evening telecast and to Fred’s subsequently being fired was to utter (twice) the word “unfortunate.” Then he left Patrick alone with the producer.

Wallingford couldn’t quite tell what it meant—why had they sent only one producer to talk to him? But the choice was predictable; they’d used her before when it struck them that Wallingford needed a pep talk, or some other form of instruction.

Her name was Sabina. She had worked her way up; years ago, she’d been one of the newsroom women. Patrick had slept with her, but only once—when she was much younger and still married to her first husband.

“I suppose there’s an interim replacement for Fred. A new dick, so to speak? A new news editor…” Wallingford speculated.

“I wouldn’t call the appointment an interim replacement, if I were you,” Sabina cautioned him. (Her vocabulary, like Mary’s, was big on “if I were you,” Patrick noticed.) “I would say that the appointment has been a long time coming, and that there’s nothing in the least ‘interim’ about it.”

“Is it you, Sabina?” Wallingford asked. (Was it Wharton? he was thinking.)

“No, it’s Shanahan.” There was just a hint of bitterness in Sabina’s voice.

“Shanahan?” The name didn’t ring a bell with Wallingford.

“Mary, to you,” Sabina told him.

So that was her name! He didn’t even remember it now. Mary Shanahan! He should have known.

“Good luck, Pat. I’ll see you at the script meeting,” was all Sabina said. She left him alone with his thoughts, but he wasn’t alone for long. When Wallingford arrived at the meeting, the newsroom women were already there; they were as alert and jumpy as small, nervous dogs. One of them pushed a memo across the table to Patrick; the paper fairly flew out of her hands. At first glance, he thought it was a press release of the news he already knew, but he soon saw that—in addition to her duties as the new news editor—Mary Shanahan had been made a producer of the show. That must have been why Sabina had so little to say at their earlier meeting. Sabina was a producer, too, only now it seemed she was not as important a producer as she’d been before Mary was made one. As for Wharton, the moon-faced CEO never said anything at the script meetings. Wharton was one of those guys who made all his remarks from the vantage point of hindsight—his comments were strictly after the fact. He came to the script meetings only to learn who was responsible for everything Patrick Wallingford said on-camera. This made it impossible to know how important, or not, Wharton was.

First they reviewed the selected montage footage on file. There was not one image that wasn’t already part of the public consciousness. The most shameless shot, with which the montage concluded by freezing to a still, was a stolen image of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. The image wasn’t entirely clear, but she seemed to be caught in the act of trying to block the camera’s view of her son. The boy was shooting baskets, maybe in the driveway of the Schlossberg summer home in Sagaponack. The cameraman had used a telephoto lens—you could tell by the outof-focus branches (probably privet) in the foreground of the frame. (Someone must have snaked a camera through a hedge.) The boy was either oblivious or pretending to be oblivious to the camera.

Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was caught in profile. She was still elegant and dignified, but either sleeplessness or the tragedy had made her face more gaunt. Her appearance refuted the comforting notion that one grew accustomed to grief.

“Why are we using this?” Patrick asked. “Aren’t we ashamed, or at least a little embarrassed?”

“It just needs some voice-over, Pat,” Mary Shanahan said.

“How about this, Mary? How about I say, ‘We’re New Yorkers. We have the good reputation of offering anonymity to the famous. Lately, however, that reputation is undeserved.’ How about that ?” Wallingford asked.

No one answered him. Mary’s ice-blue eyes were as sparkling as her smile. The newsroom women were twitching with excitement; if they had all started biting one another, Patrick wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Or this,” Wallingford went on. “How about I say this ? ‘By all accounts, from those who knew him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was a modest young man, a decent guy. Some comparable modesty and decency from us would be refreshing.’ ”

There was a pause that would have been polite, were it not for the newsroom women’s exaggerated sighs.

“I’ve written a little something,” Mary said almost shyly. The script was already there, on the TelePrompTer; she must have written it the previous day, or the day before that.

“There seem to be certain days, even weeks,” the script read, “when we are cast in the unwelcome role of the terrible messenger.”

“Bullshit!” Patrick said. “The role isn’t ‘unwelcome’—we relish it!”

Mary sat smiling demurely while the TelePrompTer kept rolling: “We would rather be comforting friends than terrible messengers, but this has been one of those weeks.” A scripted pause followed.

“I like it,” one of the newsroom women said. They’d had a meeting before this meeting, Wallingford knew. (There was always a meeting before the meeting.) They had no doubt agreed which of them would say, “I like it.”

Then another of the newsroom women touched Patrick’s left forearm, in the usual place. “I like it because it doesn’t make you sound as if you’re apologizing, not exactly, for what you said last night,” she told him. Her hand rested on his forearm a little longer than was natural or necessary.

“By the way, the ratings for last night were terrific,” Wharton said. Patrick knew that he’d better not look at Wharton, whose round face was a bland dot across the table.

“You were great last night, Pat,” Mary added.

Her remark was so well timed that this had to have been rehearsed at the meeting before the meeting, too, because there was not one titter among the newsroom women; they were as straight-faced as a jury that’s made its decision. Wharton, of course, was the only one at the script meeting who didn’t know that Patrick Wallingford had gone home with Mary Shanahan the previous night, nor would Wharton have cared.

Mary gave Patrick an appropriate amount of time to respond—they all did. Everyone was quiet and respectful. Then, when Mary saw that no response would be forthcoming, she said, “Well, if everything’s perfectly clear…”

Wallingford was already on his way to makeup. Thinking back, there was now only one conversation he didn’t regret having with Mary. The second time they’d had sex, with the dawn breaking, he’d told her about his sudden and unaccountable lust for the makeup girl. Mary had been full of condemnation.

“You don’t mean Angie, do you, Pat?”

He’d not known the makeup girl’s name. “The one who chews gum—”

“That’s Angie !” Mary had cried. “That girl is a mess !”

“Well, she turns me on. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s the gum.”

“Maybe you’re just horny, Pat.”

“Maybe.”

That hadn’t been the end of it. They’d been walking crosstown, to the coffee shop on Madison, when Mary had blurted out, apropos of nothing, “Angie! Jesus, Pat—the girl’s a joke ! She still lives with her parents. Her father’s a transit cop or something. In Queens. She’s from Queens !”

“Who cares where she’s from?” Patrick had asked.

In retrospect, he found it curious that Mary wanted his baby, wanted his apartment, wanted to advise him on the most advantageous way to get fired; all things considered, she truly seemed (to a carefully calculated degree) to want to be his friend. She even wanted things to work out for him in Wisconsin—meaning that she’d manifested no jealousy of Mrs. Clausen that Wallingford could detect. Yet Mary was borderline apoplectic that a makeup girl had given him a hard-on. Why?

He sat in the makeup chair, contemplating the arousal factor, as Angie went to work on his crow’s-feet and (today, especially) the dark circles under his eyes.

“Ya didn’t get much sleep last night, huh?” the girl asked him between snaps. She’d changed her gum; last night she’d given off a minty smell—tonight she was chewing something fruity.

“Sadly, no. Another sleepless night,” Patrick replied.

“Why can’cha sleep?” Angie asked.

Wallingford frowned; he was thinking. How far should he go?

“Unscrunch your forehead. Relax, relax!” Angie told him. She was patting the flesh-colored powder on his forehead with her soft little brush. “That’s betta,” she said. “So why can’cha sleep? Aren’t ya gonna tell me?”

Oh, what the hell! Patrick thought. If Mrs. Clausen turned him down, all this would be only the rest of his life. So what if he’d just got his new boss pregnant? He’d already decided, sometime during the script meeting, not to trade apartments with her. And if Doris said yes, this would be his last night as a free man. Surely some of us are familiar with the fact that sexual anarchy can precede a commitment to the monogamous life. This was the old Patrick Wallingford—his licentiousness reasserting itself.

“I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about you,” Wallingford confessed. The makeup girl had just spread her hand, her thumb and index finger smoothing what she called the “smile lines” at the corners of his mouth. He could feel her fingers stop on his skin as if her hand had died there. Her jaw dropped; her mouth hung open, midsnap.

Angie wore a snug, short-sleeved sweater the color of orange sherbet. On a chain around her neck was a thick signet ring, obviously a man’s, which was heavy enough to separate her breasts. Even her breasts stopped moving while she held her breath; everything had stopped.

Finally she breathed again—one long exhalation, redolent of the chewing gum. Patrick could see his face in the mirror, but not hers. He looked at the tensed muscles in her neck; a strand or two of her jet-black hair hung down. The shoulder straps of her bra showed through her orange sweater, which had ridden up above the waistband of her tight black skirt. She had olive-colored skin, and dark, downylooking hair on her arms. Angie was only twenty-something. Wallingford had hardly been shocked to hear that she still lived with her parents. Lots of New York working girls did. To have your own apartment was too expensive, and parents were generally more reliable than multiple roommates.

Patrick was beginning to believe that Angie would never respond, and her soft fingers were once again working the rouge into his skin. At last Angie took a deep breath and held it, as if she were thinking of what to say; then she released another long, fruity breath. She started chewing her gum again, rapidly—her breaths were short and sweet. Wallingford was uncomfortably aware that she was scrutinizing his face for more than blemishes and wrinkles.

“Are ya askin’ me out or somethin’?” Angie whispered to him. She kept glancing at the open doorway of the makeup room, where she was alone with Patrick. The woman who did hair had taken the elevator down to street level; she was standing on the sidewalk somewhere, smoking a cigarette.

“Think of it this way, Angie,” Wallingford whispered to the agitated, breathy girl.

“This is definitely a case of sexual harassment, if you play your cards right.”

Patrick was pleased with himself for imagining a way to get fired that Mary Shanahan had not thought of, but Angie didn’t know he was serious; the makeup girl wrongly believed he was just fooling around. And as Wallingford had correctly guessed, she had a crush on him.

“Ha!” Angie said, flashing him a frisky smile. He could see the color of her gum for the first time—it was purple. (Grape, or some synthetic variation thereof.) She had her tweezers out and seemed to be staring at a spot between his eyes. As she bent more closely over him, he breathed her in—her perfume, her hair, the gum. She smelled wonderful, in a kind of department-store way.

In the mirror, he could see the fingers of his right hand; he spread them as purposefully on the narrow strip of flesh between the waistband of her skirt and her high-riding sweater as he might have touched the keyboard of a piano before he started to play. At that moment he had a shameless sense of himself as a semiretired maestro, long out of practice, who’d not lost his touch. There wasn’t a lawyer in New York who wouldn’t happily represent her case. Wallingford only hoped she wouldn’t gouge his face with the tweezers. Instead, as he touched her warm skin, Angie arched her back in such a way that she was pressing—no, make that snuggling—against his hand. With the tweezers, she gently plucked an errant eyebrow-hair from the bridge of his nose. Then she kissed him on the lips with her mouth a little open; he could taste her gum. 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 “tonight’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 fineboned 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.

“Yes, it is,” Patrick whispered back. The makeup girl was writhing on top of him, the luxurious mass of her jet-black hair entirely covering her face. All Wallingford could see was one of Angie’s ears, but he deduced (from the smell) that her new gum was of a raspberry or strawberry persuasion.

“Not a word from you, not even ‘Congratulations,’ ” Mary went on. “Well, I can live with that, but not that awful girl. You must want to humiliate me. Is that it, Pat?”

“Am I the awful girl?” Angie asked. She was beginning to pant. She was also emitting a low growling sound from the back of her throat; maybe it was caused by the gum.

“Yes, you are,” Patrick replied, with some difficulty—the girl’s hair kept getting in his mouth.

“What’s Ms. Shanahan care about me for?” Angie asked; she sounded out of breath. Shades of Crystal Pitney? Wallingford hoped not.

“I slept with Mary last night. Maybe I got her pregnant,” Patrick said. “She wanted me to.”

“That kinda explains it,” said the makeup girl.

“I know you’re there! Answer me, you asshole!” Mary wailed.

“Boy…” Angie started to say. She seemed to be trying to roll Wallingford on top of her—apparently she’d had enough of being on top.

“You should be packing for Wisconsin! You should be resting up for your trip!”

Mary shouted. One of the newsroom women was trying to calm her down. The waiter could be overheard saying something about the truffle season. Patrick recognized the waiter’s voice. The restaurant was an Italian place on West Seventeenth. “What about Wisconsin?” Mary whined. “I wanted to spend the weekend in your apartment while you were in Wisconsin, just to try it out…” She began to cry.

“What about Wisconsin?” Angie panted.

“I’m going there first thing tomorrow,” was all Wallingford said. A different voice spoke up from the answering machine; one of the newsroom women had seized Mary’s cell phone after Mary dissolved in tears. “You shit, Pat,” the woman said. Wallingford could visualize her surgically slimmed-down face. It was the woman he’d been in Bangkok with, a long time ago; her face had been fuller then. That was the end of the call.

“Ha!” Angie cried. She’d twisted the two of them into a sideways position, which Wallingford was unfamiliar with. The position was a little painful for him, but the makeup girl was gathering momentum—her growl had become a moan. When the answering machine picked up the second call, Angie dug one of her heels into the small of Patrick’s back. They were still joined sideways, the girl grunting loudly, as a woman’s voice asked mournfully, “Is my baby girl there? Oh, Angie, Angie—my dahlin’, my dahlin’! Ya gotta stop whatcha doin’, Angie. Ya breakin’ my heart!”

“Mom, for Christ’s sake…” Angie started to say, but she was gasping. Her moan had become a growl again—her growl, a roar.

She’s probably a screamer, Wallingford considered—his neighbors would think he was murdering the girl. I should be packing for Wisconsin, Patrick thought, as Angie violently heaved herself onto her back. Somehow, although they were nonetheless deeply joined, one of her legs was flung over one of his shoulders; he tried to kiss her but her knee was in the way.

Angie’s mother was weeping so rhythmically that the answering machine emitted a pre-orgasmic sound of its own. Wallingford never heard her hang up; the last of her sobs was drowned out by Angie’s screams. Not even childbirth could be this loud, Patrick wrongly supposed—not even Joan of Arc, blazing at the stake. But Angie’s screams abruptly ceased. For a second she lay as if paralyzed; then she began to thrash. Her hair whipped Wallingford’s face, her body bucked against him, her nails raked his back.

Uh-oh, a screamer and a scratcher, Wallingford thought—the younger, unmarried Crystal Pitney not forgotten. He hid his face against Angie’s throat so that she couldn’t gouge his eyes. He was frankly afraid of the next phase of her orgasm; the girl seemed to possess superhuman strength. Without a sound, not even a groan, she was strong enough to arch her back and roll him off her—first on his side, then on his back. Miraculously, they’d not once become disconnected; it was as if they never could be. They felt permanently fastened together, a new species. He could feel her heart pounding; her whole chest was vibrating but not a sound came from her, not a breath.

Then he realized she wasn’t breathing. Was she a screamer and a scratcher and a fainter ? It took all his strength to straighten his arms. He pushed her chest off him—his one hand on one breast, his stump on the other. That was when he saw she was choking on her gum— her face was blue, her dark-brown eyes showing only the whites. Wallingford gripped her lolling jaw in his hand; he drove the stump of his forearm under her ribcage, a punch without a fist. The pain was reminiscent of the days following his attachment surgery, a sickening pain that shot up his forearm to his shoulder before it traveled to his neck. But Angie exhaled sharply, expelling the gum.

The phone rang while the frightened girl lay shaking on his chest, wracked with sobs, sucking huge gulps of air. “I was dyin’, ” she managed to gasp. Patrick, who’d thought she was coming, said nothing while the machine answered the call.

“I was dyin’ and comin’ at the same time,” the girl added. “It was weird.”

From the answering machine, a voice spoke from the city’s grim underground; there were metallic shrieks and the lurching rumble of a subway train, over which Angie’s father, a transit policeman, made his message clear. “Angie, are ya tryin’

to kill your muthuh or what? She’s not eatin’, she’s not sleepin’, she’s not goin’ to Mass…” Another train screeched over the cop’s lament.

“Daddy,” was all Angie said to Wallingford. Her hips were moving again. As a couple, they seemed eternally joined—a minor god and goddess representing death by pleasure.

Angie was screaming again when the phone rang a fourth time. What time is it? Patrick wondered, but when he looked at his digital alarm clock, something pink was covering the time. It had a ghastly anatomical appearance, like part of a lung, but it was only Angie’s gum—definitely some sort of berry flavor. The way the light of the alarm clock shone through the substance made the gum resemble living tissue.

“God…” he said, coming, just as the makeup girl also came. Her teeth, doubtless missing the gum, sank into Wallingford’s left shoulder. Patrick could tolerate the pain—he’d known worse. But Angie was even more enthusiastic than he’d expected her to be. She was a screamer, a choker, and a biter. She was in midbite when she fainted dead away.

“Hey, cripple,” said a strange man’s voice on Patrick’s answering machine. “Hey, Mista One Hand, do ya know what? You’re gonna lose more than your hand, that’s what. You’re gonna end up with nothin’ between your legs but a fuckin’ draft. ”

Wallingford tried to wake up Angie by kissing her, but the fainted girl just smiled.

“There’s a call for you,” Patrick whispered in her ear. “You might want to take this one.”

“Hey, fuck-face,” the man in the answering machine said, “did ya know that even television personalities can just disappear ?” He must have been calling from a moving car. The radio was playing Johnny Mathis—softly, but not softly enough. Wallingford thought of the signet ring Angie wore on the chain around her neck; it would slip over a knuckle the size of his big toe. But she had already taken off the ring, and she’d dismissed its owner as “a nobody”—some guy who was

“overseas.” So who was the guy on the phone?

“Angie, I think you ought to hear this,” Patrick whispered. He gently pulled the sleeping girl into a sitting position; her hair fell forward, hiding her face, covering her pretty breasts. She smelled like a delectable concoction of fruits and flowers; her body was coated with a thin and glowing film of sweat.

“Listen to me, Mista One Hand,” the answering machine said. “I’m gonna grind up your prick in a blenda. Then I’m gonna make ya drink it!” That was the end of the charmless call.

Wallingford was packing for Wisconsin when Angie woke up.

“Boy, have I gotta pee!” the girl said.

“There was another call—not your mother. Some guy said he was going to grind up my penis in a blender.”

“That would be my brother Vittorio—Vito, for short,” Angie said. She left the door to the bathroom open while she peed. “Did he really say ‘penis’?” she called from the toilet.

“No, he actually said ‘prick,’ ” Patrick replied.

“Definitely Vito,” the makeup girl said. “He’s harmless. Vito don’t even have a job.” How did Vito’s unemployment make him harmless? “So what’s in Minnesota, anyway?” Angie asked.

“Wisconsin,” he corrected her.

“So who’s there?”

“A woman I’m going to ask to marry me,” Patrick answered. “She’ll probably say no.”

“Hey, ya gotta real problem, do ya know that?” Angie asked. She pulled him back to the bed. “Come here, ya gotta have more confidence than that. Ya gotta believe she’s gonna say yes. Otherwise, why botha?”

“I don’t think she loves me.”

“Sure she does! Ya just gotta practice,” the makeup girl said. “Go on—ya can practice on me. Go on— ask me!”

He tried; after all, he’d been rehearsing. He told her what he wanted to say to Mrs. Clausen.

“Geez… that’s terrible,” Angie said. “To begin with, ya can’t start out apologizin’ all over the place—ya gotta come right out and say, ‘I can’t live widoutcha!’ That kind of thing. Go on— say it!”

“I can’t live without you,” Wallingford announced unconvincingly.

“Geez…”

“What’s wrong?” Patrick asked.

“Ya gotta say it betta than that !”

The phone rang, the fifth call. It was Mary Shanahan again, presumably calling from the solitude of her apartment on East Fifty-something—Wallingford could almost hear the whoosh of cars passing on the FDR Drive. “I thought we were friends,” Mary began. “Is this how you treat a friend? Someone who’s having your baby…” Either her voice broke or her thought trailed away.

“She’s gotta point,” Angie said to Patrick. “Ya betta say somethin’ to her.”

Wallingford thought of shaking his head, but he was lying with his face on Angie’s breasts; he considered it rude to shake his head there.

“You can’t still be fucking that girl!” Mary cried.

“If ya don’t talk to her, I’m gonna talk to her. Someone’s gotta,” the compassionate makeup girl said.

“You talk to her, then,” Wallingford replied. He buried his face lower, in Angie’s belly; he tried to muffle his hearing there, while she picked up the phone.

“This is Angie, Ms. Shanahan,” the good-hearted girl began. “Ya shouldn’t be upset. It hasn’t been all that great here, really. A while ago, I nearly choked to death. I almost died—I’m not kiddin’.” Mary hung up. “Was that bad?” Angie asked Wallingford.

“No, that was good. That was just fine. I think you’re great,” he said truthfully.

“Ya just sayin’ that,” Angie told him. “Are ya tryin’ to get laid again or what?”

So they had sex. What else were they going to do? This time, when Angie fainted again, Wallingford thoughtfully removed her old gum from the face of his clock before setting the alarm.

Angie’s mother called once more—at least that was who Patrick assumed the caller was. Without saying a word, the woman wept on and on, almost melodiously, while Wallingford drifted in and out of sleep. He woke up before the alarm went off. He lay looking at the sleeping girl—her untrammeled goodwill was truly a thing of beauty. Patrick shut off the alarm before it sounded; he wanted to let Angie sleep. After he showered and shaved, he made a survey of his damaged body: the bruise on his shin from the glass-topped table at Mary’s, the burn from the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower. His back was scratched from Angie’s nails; on his left shoulder was a sizable blood blister, a purplish hematoma and some broken skin from her spontaneous bite. Patrick Wallingford seemed in dubious condition for offering a marriage proposal in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. He made some coffee and brought the sleeping girl a glass of cold orange juice in bed.

“Look at this place…” she was soon saying, marching naked through his apartment. “It looks like ya been havin’ sex!” She stripped the sheets and the pillowcases; she started gathering up the towels. “Ya gotta washin’ machine, don’tcha? I know ya gotta plane to catch—I’ll clean up here. What if that woman says yes? What if she comes back here with ya?”

“That’s not likely. I mean it’s not likely she’ll come back here with me, even if she does say yes.”

“Spare me ‘not likely’—she might. That’s all ya gotta know. Ya catch the plane. I’ll fix the place. I’ll rewind the answering machine before I leave. I promise.”

“You don’t have to do this,” Patrick told her.

“I wanna help!” Angie said. “I know what it’s like to have a messy life. Go on

—ya betta get outta here! Ya don’t wanna miss your plane.”

“Thank you, Angie.” He kissed her good-bye. She tasted so good, he almost didn’t go. What was wrong with sexual anarchy, anyway?

The phone rang as he was leaving. He heard Vito’s voice on the answering machine. “Hey, listen up, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Vittorio was saying. There was a mechanical whirring, a terrifying sound.

“It’s just a stupid blenda. Go on —don’t miss your plane!” Angie told him. Wallingford was closing the door as she was picking up the phone.

“Hey, Vito,” he heard Angie say. “Listen up, limp dick.” Patrick paused on the landing by the stairs; there was a brief but pointed silence. “That’s the sound your prick would make in the blenda, Vito— no sound, ’cause ya got nothin’ there!”

Wallingford’s nearest neighbor was on the landing—a sleepless-looking man from the adjacent apartment, getting ready to walk his dog. Even the dog looked sleepless as it waited, shivering slightly, at the top of the stairs.

“I’m going to Wisconsin,” Patrick said hopefully.

The man, who had a silver-gray goatee, looked dazed with general indifference and self-loathing.

“Why don’tcha get a fuckin’ magnifyin’ glass so ya can beat off?” Angie was screaming. The dog pricked up its ears. “Ya know whatcha do with a prick as small as yours, Vito?” Wallingford and his neighbor just stared at the dog. “Ya go to a pet shop. Ya buy a mouse. Ya beg it for a blow job.”

The dog, with grave solemnity, seemed to be considering all this. It was some kind of miniature schnauzer with a silver-gray beard, like its master’s.

“Have a safe trip,” Wallingford’s neighbor told him.

“Thank you,” Patrick said.

They started down the stairs together—the schnauzer sneezing twice, the neighbor saying that he thought the dog had caught an “air-conditioning cold.”

They’d reached the half-landing between floors when Angie shouted something mercifully indistinct. The girl’s heroic loyalty was enough to make Wallingford want to go back to her; she was a safer bet than Mrs. Clausen. But it was early on a summer Saturday morning; the day was brimming with hope. (Maybe not in Boston, where a woman whose name wasn’t Sarah Williams either was or was not waiting for an abortion.)

There was no traffic on the way to the airport. Patrick got to the gate before boarding began. Since he’d packed in the dark while Angie slept, he thought it wise to check the contents of his carry-on: a T-shirt, a polo shirt, a sweatshirt, two bathing suits, two pair of underwear—he wore boxers—two pairs of white athletic socks, and a shaving kit, which included his toothbrush and toothpaste and some ever-hopeful condoms. He’d also packed a paperback edition of Stuart Little, recommended for ages eight through twelve.

He had not packed Charlotte’s Web, because he doubted that Doris’s attention span could accommodate two books in one weekend; after all, Otto junior was not yet walking but he was probably crawling. There wouldn’t be much time for reading aloud.

Why Stuart Little instead of Charlotte’s Web ? one might ask. Only because Patrick Wallingford considered the ending to be more in tune with his own on-the-roadagain way of life. And maybe the melancholy of it would be persuasive to Mrs. Clausen—it was certainly more romantic than the birth of all those baby spiders. In the waiting area, the other passengers watched Wallingford unpack and repack his bag. He’d dressed that morning in a pair of jeans and running shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, and he carried a light jacket, a kind of Windbreaker, to drape over his left forearm to conceal the missing hand. But a one-handed man unpacking and repacking a bag would get anyone’s attention. By the time Patrick stopped fussing over what he was bringing to Wisconsin, everyone in the waiting area knew who he was.

They observed the lion guy holding his cell phone in his lap, pinning it against his thigh with the stump of his left forearm while he dialed the number with his one hand; then he picked up the phone and held it to his ear and mouth. When his Windbreaker slipped off the empty seat beside him, his left forearm reached to pick it up, but Wallingford thought better of it and returned the useless stump to his lap.

His fellow passengers must have been surprised. After all these years of handlessness, his left arm still thinks it has a hand! But no one ventured to retrieve the fallen Windbreaker until a sympathetic couple, traveling with a young boy, whispered something to their son. The boy, who was perhaps seven or eight, cautiously approached Patrick’s jacket; he picked it up and put it carefully on the empty seat beside Wallingford’s bag. Patrick smiled and nodded to the boy, who self-consciously hurried back to his parents.

The cell phone rang and rang in Wallingford’s ear. He had meant to call his own apartment and either speak to Angie or leave a message on his answering machine, which he hoped she would hear. He wanted to tell her how wonderful and natural she was; he’d thought of saying something that began, “In another life…” That kind of thing. But he hadn’t made that call; something about the girl’s sheer goodness made him not want to risk hearing her voice. (And what bullshit it was to call someone you’d spent only one night with “natural.”) He called Mary Shanahan instead. Her phone rang so many times that Wallingford was composing a message to leave on her answering machine when Mary picked up the receiver.

“It could only be you, you asshole,” she said.

“Mary, we’re not married—we’re not even going steady. And I’m not trading apartments with you.”

“Didn’t you have a good time with me, Pat?”

“There was a lot you didn’t tell me,” Wallingford pointed out.

“That’s just the nature of the business.”

“I see,” he said. There was that distant, hollow sound—the kind of echoing silence Wallingford associated with transoceanic calls. “I guess this wouldn’t be a good time to ask you about a new contract,” he added. “You said to ask for five years—”

“We should discuss this after your weekend in Wisconsin,” Mary replied. “Three years would be more realistic than five, I think.”

“And should I… well, how did you put it? Should I sort of phase myself out of the anchor chair—is that your suggestion?”

“If you want a new, extended contract—yes, that would be one way,” Mary told him.

“I don’t know the history of pregnant anchors,” Wallingford admitted. “Has there ever been a pregnant anchor? I suppose it could work. Is that the idea? We would watch you get bigger and bigger. Of course there would be some homey commentary, and a shot or two of you in profile. It would be best to have a brief maternity leave, to suggest that having a baby in today’s family-sensitive workplace is no big deal. Then, after what seemed no longer than a standard vacation, you’d be back on-camera, almost as svelte as before.”

That transoceanic silence followed, the hollow sound of the distance between them. It was like his marriage, as Wallingford remembered it.

“Am I understanding ‘the nature of the business’ yet?” Patrick asked. “Am I getting it right?”

“I used to love you,” Mary reminded him; then she hung up. It pleased Wallingford that at least one phase of the office politics between them was over. He would find his own way to get fired, when he felt like it; if he decided to do it Mary’s way, she would be the last to know when. And, if it turned out Mary was pregnant, he would be as responsible for the baby as she allowed him to be—he just wouldn’t be dicked around by her.

Who was he kidding? If you have a baby with someone, of course you’re going to be dicked around! And he had underestimated Mary Shanahan before. She could find a hundred ways to dick him around.

Yet Wallingford recognized what had changed in him—he was no longer acquiescing. Possibly he was the new or semi-new Patrick Wallingford, after all. Moreover, the coldness of Mary Shanahan’s tone of voice had been encouraging; he’d sensed that his prospects for getting fired were improving. On his way to the airport, Patrick had looked at the taxi driver’s newspaper, just the weather page. The forecast for northern Wisconsin was warm and fair. Even the weather boded well.

Mrs. Clausen had expressed some anxiety about the weather, because they would be flying to the lake up north in a small plane; it was some kind of seaplane, or what Doris had called a floatplane. Green Bay itself was part of Lake Michigan, but where they were going was roughly between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior—the part of Wisconsin that is near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Since Wallingford couldn’t get to Green Bay before Saturday and he had to be back in New York on Monday, Doris had determined they should take the little plane. It was too long a drive from Green Bay for such a short weekend; this way they would have two nights in the boathouse apartment at the cottage on the lake. To get to Green Bay, Patrick had previously tried two different Chicago connections and one connecting flight through Detroit; this time he’d opted for a change of planes in Cincinnati. Sitting in the waiting area, he was overcome by a moment of typically New York incomprehension. (This happened only seconds before the boarding call.) Why were so many people going to Cincinnati on a Saturday in July?

Of course Wallingford knew why he was going there—Cincinnati was simply the first leg of a journey in three parts—but what could possibly be attracting all these other people to the place? It would never have occurred to Patrick Wallingford that anyone knowing his reasons for the trip might have found Mrs. Clausen’s lasting allure the most improbable excuse of all.