The Fourth Hand by John Irving Page A

Wal ingford—Ludmil a (we’l leave it at that) was as ugly as a toad. Also, as Patrick would discover at two o’clock one morning when she came to his hotel room, she wanted to defect. She didn’t mean to Japan. She wanted Wal ingford to smuggle her into New York. In what ? Wal ingford would wonder. In his garment bag, now permanently reeking of Filipino dog piss? Surely a Russian defector was news, even in New York. So what if no one had seen her movies? “She wants to go to Sundance,” Patrick told Dick. “For Christ’s sake, Dick, she wants to defect ! That’s a story!” (No sensible news network would turn down a story on a Russian defector.) But Dick was unimpressed. “We just did five minutes on a Cuban defector, Pat.”
    “You mean that no-good basebal player?” Wal ingford asked.
    “He’s a halfway-decent shortstop, and the guy can hit,” Dick said, and that was that.
    Then came the rejection from the green-eyed Danish novelist; she turned out to be a touchy writer who refused to be interviewed by someone who hadn’t read her books.
    Who did she think she was, anyway? Wal ingford didn’t have the time to read her books! At least he’d guessed right about how to pronounce her name—it was “bode eel, ”
    accent on the eel.
    Those too-numerous Japanese women in the arts were eager to talk to him, and they were fond, when they talked to him, of sympathetical y touching his left forearm a little above where he’d lost his hand. But the news editor in New York was “sick of the arts.” Dick further claimed that the Japanese women would give the television audience the false impression that the only participants in this conference were Japanese.
    “Since when do we worry that we’re giving our viewers a false impression?”
    Patrick plucked up the courage to ask.
    “Listen, Pat,” Dick said, “that runt poet with the facial tattoo would even put off other poets.”
    Wal ingford had already been in Japan too long. He was so used to the people’s mispronunciation of his mother tongue that he now misheard his news editor, too. He simply didn’t hear “runt poet”; he heard “cunt poet” instead.
    “ N o , you listen, Dick,” Wal ingford retorted, with an uncharacteristic display of something less than his usual y sweet-dispositioned self. “I’m not a woman, but even I take offense at that word.”

    “ What word?” Dick asked. “Tattoo?”
    “You know what word!” Patrick shouted. “Cunt!”
    “I said ‘runt,’ not ‘cunt,’ Pat,” the news editor informed Wal ingford. “I guess you just hear what you think about al the time.”
    Patrick had no recourse. He had to interview Jane Brown, the English economist who’d threatened to undress, or he had to talk to Evelyn Arbuthnot, the presumed lesbian who loathed him and was ashamed that, if only for a moment, she’d been attracted to him.
    The English economist was a dingbat of a distinctly English kind. It didn’t matter—Americans are suckers for an English accent. Jane Brown screeched like an unattended tea kettle, not about world economy but on the subject of threatening to take off her clothes in front of men. “I know from experience that the men wil never al ow me to finish undressing,” Ms. Brown told Patrick Wal ingford oncamera, in that overenunciated manner of a character actress of a certain age and background on the English stage. “I never even get down to my undergarments before the men have fled the room—it happens every time! Men are very reliable. By that I mean only that they can be counted on to flee from me!”
    Dick in New York loved it. He said that the Jane Brown interview “contrasted nicely” with the earlier footage of her throwing a fit about rape on the first day of the conference.
    The twenty-four-hour international channel had its story. The
    “Future of Women” conference in Tokyo had been covered
    —better to say, it had been covered in the al -news network’s way, which was to