Free The Fourth Hand by John Irving Page A

baby,” Mary told him; then she burst into tears. She ran after the other New York newsroom women, leaving Wal ingford alone with his thoughts, which were that it was always better to let the woman make the first pass.
    At that moment, the phone cal came from Dr. Zajac.
    Zajac’s manners, when introducing himself, were (in a word) surgical. “The first hand I get my hands on, you can have,” Dr. Zajac announced. “If you real y want it.”
    “Why wouldn’t I want it? I mean if it’s healthy . . .”

    “Of course it wil be healthy!” Zajac replied. “Would I give you an un healthy hand?”
    “When?” Patrick asked.
    “You can’t rush finding the perfect hand,” Zajac informed him.
    “I don’t think I’d be happy with a woman’s hand, or an old man’s,” Patrick thought out loud.
    “Finding the right hand is my job,” Dr. Zajac said.
    “It’s a left hand,” Wal ingford reminded him.
    “Of course it is! I mean the right donor. ”
    “Okay, but no strings attached,” Patrick said.
    “Strings?” Zajac asked, perplexed. What on earth could the reporter have meant? What possible strings could be attached to a donor hand?
    But Wal ingford was leaving for Japan, and he’d just learned he was supposed to deliver a speech on the opening day of the conference; he hadn’t written the speech, which he was thinking about but would put off doing until he was on the plane.

    Patrick didn’t give a second thought to the curiousness of his own comment—“no strings attached.” It was a typical disaster-man remark, a lion-guy reflex—just another dumb thing to say, solely for the sake of saying something. (Not unlike
    “German girls are very popular in New York right now.”) And Zajac was happy—the matter had been left in his hands, so to speak.

CHAPTER FOUR
    A Japanese Interlude
    I S THERE SOMETHINGcursed about Asia and me?
    Wal ingford 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. Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford not accustomed to writing speeches; he was not used to speaking without reading the script off the TelePrompTer. (Usual y someone else had written the script.) But maybe if he looked over the list of participants in the conference—they were al 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, spel ed the usual way, and she was, like Wal ingford, a television journalist. Unlike Wal ingford, she was more successful than she was famous.
    Barbara Frei anchored the