The Fourth Hand by John Irving

at the bar the man whom Ms. Frei had been waiting for—her husband.
    Wal ingford knew him. He was Peter Frei, a wel -respected journalist at ZDF, although Peter Frei did cultural programs and his wife did what they cal ed hard news.
    “Peter’s a little tired,” Ms. Frei said, affectionately rubbing her husband’s shoulders and the back of his neck. “He’s been training for a trip to Mount Everest.”
    “For a piece you’re doing, I suppose,” Patrick said enviously.
    “Yes, but I have to climb a bit of the mountain to do it properly.”
    “You’re going to climb Mount Everest?” Wal ingford asked Peter Frei. He was an extremely fit-looking man—they were a very attractive couple.
    “Oh, everyone climbs a bit of Everest now,” Mr. Frei replied modestly. “That’s what’s wrong with it—the place has been overrun by amateurs like me!” His beautiful wife laughed fondly and went on rubbing her husband’s neck and shoulders. Wal ingford, who was barely able to drink his beer, found them as likable a couple as any he’d known.
    When they said good-bye, Barbara Frei touched Patrick’s left forearm in the usual place. “You might try interviewing that woman from Ghana,” she suggested helpful y. “She’s awful y nice and smart, and she’s got more to say than I have. I mean she’s more of a person with a cause than I am.” (This meant, Wal ingford knew, that the woman from Ghana would talk to anyone.)
    “That’s a good idea—thank you.”
    “Sorry about the hand,” Peter Frei told Patrick. “That’s a terrible thing. I think half the world remembers where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.”
    “Yes,” Wal ingford answered. He’d had only one beer, but he would scarcely remember leaving the hotel bar; he went off ful of self-disgust, looking for the African woman as if she were a lifeboat and he a drowning man. He was. It was an unkind irony that the starvation expert from Ghana was extremely fat. Wal ingford worried that Dick would exploit her obesity in an unpredictable way. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she was dressed in something resembling a tent made of samples from patchwork quilts. But the woman had a degree from Oxford, and another from Yale; she’d won a Nobel Prize in something to do with world nutrition, which she said was
    “merely a matter of intel igent Third World crises anticipation . . . any fool with half a brain and a whole conscience could do what I do.”

    But as much as Wal ingford admired the big woman from Ghana, they didn’t like her in New York. “Too fat,” Dick told Patrick. “Black people wil think we’re making fun of her.”
    “But we didn’t make her fat!” Patrick protested. “The point is, she’s smart —she’s actual y got something to say !”
    “You can find someone else with something to say, can’t you? Jesus Christ, find someone smart who’s normal -
    looking!” But as Wal ingford would discover at the
    “Future of Women” conference in Tokyo, this was exceedingly hard to do—taking into account that, by
    “ normal -looking,” Dick no doubt meant not fat, not black, and not Japanese.
    Patrick took one look at the Chinese geneticist, who had an elevated, hairy mole in the middle of her forehead; he wouldn’t bother trying to interview her. He could already hear what that dick Dick in New York would say about her.
    “Talk about making fun of people—Jesus Christ! We might as wel bomb a Chinese embassy in some asshole country and try cal ing it an accident or something!”
    So Patrick talked to the Korean doctor of infectious diseases, who he thought was kind of cute. But she turned out to be camera-shy, which took the form of her staring obsessively at his stump. Nor could she name a single infectious disease without stuttering; the mere mention of a disease seemed to grip her in terror. As for the Russian film director—“ No one has seen her movies,” the news editor in New York told