Free The Fourth Hand by John Irving

of only the most literary authors and the most serious actors and actresses. (It went without saying that print journalism was superior to television.) Yet in truth, Patrick’s ex-wife prepared for her interviews with writers not by reading their books—some of which were admittedly too long—but by reading their previous interviews. Nor did Marilyn make the effort to see every film that the actors and actresses among her interviewees had been in; shamelessly, she read the reviews of their movies instead. Given his Internet prejudice, Wal ingford never saw the publicity campaign on www.needahand.com; he’d never heard of Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates until Dr. Zajac cal ed him. Zajac already knew about Patrick’s mishaps with several different prosthetic devices, not just the one in SoHo, which received a fair amount of attention: the shutting of his artificial hand in the taxi’s rear door; the cabbie blithely driving on for a block or so. The doctor also knew about the embarrassing entanglement with the seat belt on that flight to Berlin, where Wal ingford was rushing to interview a deranged man who’d been arrested for detonating a dog near the Potsdamer Platz. (In an avowed protest against the new dome on the Reichstag, the fiend had attached an explosive device to the dog’s col ar.)
    Patrick Wal ingford had become the TV journalist for stray acts of God and random nonsense. People cal ed out to him from passing taxis—“Hey, lion guy!”
    Bicycle messengers hailed him, first spitting the whistles from their mouths—“Yo, disaster man!”
    Worse, Patrick had so little liking for his job that he’d lost al sympathy for the victims and their families; when he interviewed them, this lack of sympathy showed.
    Therefore, in lieu of being fired—since he was injured on the job, he might have sued—Wal ingford was so further marginalized that his next field assignment lacked even disaster potential. Patrick was being sent to Japan to cover a conference sponsored by a consortium of Japanese newspapers. He was surprised by the topic of the conference, too—it was cal ed “The Future of Women,”
    which certainly didn’t have the sound of a disaster.

    But the idea of Patrick Wal ingford’s attending the conference . . . wel , the women in the newsroom in New York were al atingle about that.
    “You’l get laid a lot, Pat,” one of the women teased him. “A lot more, I mean.”
    “How could Patrick possibly get laid more ?” another of the women asked, and that set them al off again.
    “I’ve heard that women in Japan are treated like shit,” one of the women remarked. “And the men go off to Bangkok and behave abominably.”
    “Al men behave abominably in Bangkok,” said a woman who’d been there.
    “Have you been to Bangkok, Pat?” the first of the women asked. She knew perfectly wel that he’d been there—he had been there with her. She was just reminding him of something that everyone in the newsroom knew.
    “Have you ever been to Japan, Patrick?” one of the other women asked, when the tittering died down.
    “No, never,” Wal ingford replied. “I’ve never slept with a Japanese woman, either.”
    They cal ed him a pig for saying that, although most of them meant this affectionately. Then they dispersed, leaving him with Mary, one of the youngest of the New York newsroom women. (And one of the few Patrick hadn’t yet slept with.) When Mary saw they were alone together, she touched his left forearm, very lightly, just above his missing hand. Only women ever touched him there.
    “They’re just teasing, you know,” she told him. “Most of them would take off for Tokyo with you tomorrow, if you asked them.”
    Patrick had thought about sleeping with Mary before, but one thing or another had always intervened. “Would you take off for Tokyo with me tomorrow, if I asked you?”
    “I’m married,” Mary said.
    “I know,” Patrick replied.
    “I’m expecting a