The Fourth Hand Read Free

India. That was her name—“Monika with a k , ” she’d told him. “Sound technicians can live anywhere,” she had declared. “Anywhere there’s sound.”
    “You might like to try living in New York,” Patrick had suggested. “There’s a lot of sound there, and you can drink the water.” Unthinkingly, he’d added: “German girls are very popular in New York right now.”
    “Why ‘right now’?” she’d asked.
    This was symptomatic of the trouble Patrick Wal ingford got into with women; that he said things for no reason was not unlike the way he acquiesced to the advances women made to him. There’d been no reason for saying “German girls are very popular in New York right now,” except to keep talking. It was his feeble acquiescence to women, his tacit assent to their advances, that had infuriated Wal ingford’s wife, who’d just happened to cal him in his hotel room when he was fucking Monika with a k.

    There was a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between Junagadh and New York, but Patrick pretended he didn’t know whether India was ten and a half hours ahead or behind. Al he ever said when his wife cal ed was, “What time is it there, honey?”
    “You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?” his wife asked.
    “No, Marilyn, I am not, ” he lied. Under him, the German girl held stil . Wal ingford tried to hold himself stil , too, but holding stil in the act of lovemaking is arguably more difficult for a man.
    “I just thought you’d like to know the results of your paternity test,” Marilyn said. This helped Patrick to hold stil . “Wel , it’s negative—you’re not the father. I guess you dodged that bul et, didn’t you?”
    Al Wal ingford could think of saying was: “That was improper—that they gave you the results of my blood test. It was my blood test.”
    Under him, Monika with a k went rigid; where she’d been warm, she felt cool.
    “ What blood test?” she whispered in Patrick’s ear.
    But Wal ingford was wearing a condom—the German sound technician was protected from most things, if not everything. (Patrick always wore a condom, even with his wife.)
    “Who is she this time?” Marilyn hol ered into the phone.
    “Who are you fucking at this very minute?”
    Two things were clear to Wal ingford: that his marriage could not be saved and that he didn’t want to save it. As always, with women, Patrick acquiesced. “Who is she?” his wife screamed again, but Wal ingford wouldn’t answer her.
    Instead he held the mouthpiece of the phone to the German girl’s lips. Patrick needed to move a wisp of the girl’s blond hair away from her ear before he whispered into it. “Just tel her your name.”
    “Monika . . . with a k, ” the German girl said into the phone.
    Wal ingford hung up, doubting that Marilyn would cal back
    — she didn’t. But after that, he had a lot to say to Monika with a k; they hadn’t had the best night’s sleep.
    In the morning, at the Great Ganesh, the way everything had started out seemed a little anticlimactic. The ringmaster’s repeated complaints about the Indian government were not nearly so sympathetic as the fal en trapeze artist’s description of the ten-armed goddess in whom al the aerialists believed. Were they deaf and blind in the newsroom in New York? That widow in her hospital bed had been great stuff! And Wal ingford stil wanted to tel the story of the context of the trapeze artist fal ing without a safety net. The child performers were the context, those children who’d been sold to the circus. What if the trapeze artist herself had been sold to the circus as a child? What if her late husband had been rescued from a no-future childhood, only to meet his fate—his wife fal ing into his arms from eighty feet—under the big top? That would have been interesting.
    Instead, Patrick was interviewing the repetitive ringmaster in front of the lions’
    cage—this commonplace circus image being what New York had meant