Free The Fourth Hand by John Irving Page B

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 Wal ingford’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 col ar of the suit jacket. She had wonderful col arbones, which she quite justifiably liked to show. She preferred smal stud earrings
    —often emeralds or rubies—Patrick could tel ; he was knowledgeable about women’s jewelry.
    But while the prospect of meeting Barbara Frei in Tokyo gave Wal ingford 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 Ludmil a Slovaboda. (The spel ing only approximates Patrick’s phonetic guess at how one might pronounce her last name. Let’s cal her Ludmil a.) Wal ingford had never seen her films. There was a Danish novelist, a woman named Bodil e or Bodile or Bodil Jensen; her first name was spel ed three different ways in the printed material that Patrick’s Japanese hosts had sent. However her name was spel ed, Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford’s pronouncing any of their names correctly; he wouldn’t even try. The list of participants went on and on, al highly accomplished professional women—with the probable exception of an American author and self-described radical feminist whom Wal ingford 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 cal them poetesses and sculptresses, although this is how Wal ingford 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.
    Wal ingford had suffered through his share of black-tie occasions; he knew what bul shitters most masters of ceremonies were—he knew how to bul shit, 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 il egal y 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 Wal ingford had given, which was not real y 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 Wal ingford’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 real y said, “Most assuredly, sir,” but Wal ingford had misheard him. (Patrick had a childish and offensive habit of mocking foreign