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JUL.2001

『THE FOURTH HAND』 第1章 ◆ (2001.7.3)

今回も、新作『THE FOURTH HAND』の第1章の続きです。

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Hey there, Irving fans. As you know, tomorrow you'll be able to buy
THE FOURTH HAND, and I'm coming at you one more time with another installment from this new novel. This email and the one that follows it, continues and finishes chapter one, The Lion Guy. You'll have to buy the book to see what happens in the other eleven chapters. I promise you, the rest is just as strange and funny and human.

In other news, look for John Irving on Good Morning America July 10 and CBS Sunday Morning July 15. Also, starting tomorrow, check out http://www.randomhouse.com/features/johnirving.

In the meantime, enjoy! For news on other great books visit me at http://www.atrandom.com Greg at Random

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From "THE FOURTH HAND" Chapter One: The Lion Guy by John Irving

Wallingford was floating above a small, dark lake. There had to have been some kind of plane, or Wallingford couldn't have been there, but in the dream he never saw or heard the plane. He was simply descending, drawing closer to the little lake, which was surrounded by dark-green trees, fir trees and pines. Lots of white pines.

There were hardly any rock outcroppings. It didn't look like Maine, where Wallingford had gone to summer camp as a child. It didn't look like Ontario, either; Patrick's parents had once rented a cottage in Georgian Bay, Lake Huron. But the lake in the dream was no place he'd ever been.

Here and there a dock protruded into the water, and sometimes a small boat was tied to the dock. Wallingford saw a boathouse, too, but it was the feeling of the dock against his bare back, the roughness of its planks through a towel, that was the first physical sensation in the dream. As with the plane, he couldn't see the towel; he could only feel something between his skin and the dock.

The sun had just gone down. Wallingford had seen no sunset, but he could tell that the heat of the sun was still warming the dock. Except for Patrick's near-perfect view of the dark lake and the darker trees, the dream was all feeling.

He felt the water, too, but never that he was in it. Instead he had the feeling that he'd just come out of the water. His body was drying off on the dock, yet he still felt chilled.

Then a woman's voice--like no other woman's voice Wallingford had ever heard, like the sexiest voice in the world--said: "My bathing suit feels so cold. I'm going to take it off. Don't you want to take yours off, too?"

From that point on, in the dream, Patrick was aware of his erection, and he heard a voice that sounded a lot like his own, saying "yes"--he wanted to take off his wet bathing suit, too.

There was additionally the soft sound of the water lapping against the dock, and dripping from the wet bathing suits between the planks, returning to the lake.

He and the woman were naked now. Her skin was at first wet and cold, and then warm against his skin; her breath was hot against his throat, and he could smell her wet hair. Moreover, the smell of sunlight had been absorbed by her taut shoulders, and there was something that tasted like the lake on Patrick's tongue, which traced the contours of the woman's ear.

Of course Wallingford was inside her, too--having never-ending sex on the dock at the lovely, dark lake. And when he woke up, eight hours later, he discovered that he'd had a wet dream; yet he still had the hugest hard-on he'd ever had.

The pain from his missing hand was gone. The pain would come back about ten hours after he'd taken the first of the cobalt-blue capsules. The two hours Patrick had to wait before he could take a second capsule were an eternity to him; in that miserable interim, all he could talk to Dr. Chothia about was the pill.

"What's in it?" Wallingford asked the mirthful Parsi.

"It was developed as a cure for impotence," Dr. Chothia told him, "but it didn't work."

"It works, all right," Wallingford argued.

"Well . . . apparently not for impotence," the Parsi repeated. "For pain, yes--but that was an accidental discovery. Please remember what I said, Mr.Wallingford. Don't ever take two."

"I'd like to take three or four," Patrick replied, but the Parsi was not his usual mirthful self on this subject.

"No, you wouldn't like to--believe me," Dr. Chothia warned him.

Swallowing only one capsule at a time, and at the proper twelve-hour intervals, Wallingford had ingested two more of the cobalt-blue painkillers while he was still in India, and Dr. Chothia had given him one more to take on the plane. Patrick had pointed out to the Parsi that the plane would be more than twelve hours in getting back to New York, but the doctor would give him nothing stronger than Tylenol with codeine for when the last of the wet-dream pills wore off.

Wallingford would have exactly the same dream four times--the last time on the flight from Frankfurt to New York. He'd taken the Tylenol with codeine on the first part of the long trip, from Bombay to Frankfurt, because (despite the pain) he'd wanted to save the best for last.

The flight attendant winked at Wallingford when she woke him up from his blue-capsule dream, just before the plane landed in New York. "If that was pain you were in, I'd like to be in pain with you," she whispered. "Nobody ever said 'yes' that many times to me!"

Although she gave Patrick her phone number, he didn't call her. Wallingford wouldn't have sex as good as the sex in the blue-capsule dream for five years. It would take Patrick longer than that to understand that the cobalt-blue capsule Dr. Chothia had given him was more than a painkiller and a sex pill--it was, more important, a prescience pill.

Yet the pill's primary benefit was that it prevented him from dreaming more than once a month about the look in the lion's eyes when the beast had taken hold of his hand. The lion's huge, wrinkled forehead; his tawny, arched eyebrows; the flies buzzing in his mane; the great cat's rectangular, blood-spattered snout, which was scarred with claw marks--these details were not as ingrained in Wallingford's memory, in the stuff of his dreams, as the lion's yellow-brown eyes, in which he'd recognized a vacant kind of sadness.
He would never forget those eyes--their dispassionate scrutiny of Patrick's face, their scholarly detachment.

Regardless of what Wallingford remembered or dreamed about, what viewers of the aptly nicknamed Disaster International network would remember and dream about was the footage of the hand-eating episode itself--every heart-stopping second of it.

The calamity channel, which was routinely ridiculed for its proclivity for bizarre deaths and stupid accidents, had created just such an accident while reporting just such a death, thereby enhancing its reputation in an unprecedented way. And this time the disaster had happened to a journalist!
(Don't think that wasn't part of the popularity of the less-than-thirty-second amputation.)

In general, adults identified with the hand, if not with the unfortunate reporter. Children tended to sympathize with the lion. Of course there were warnings concerning the children. After all, entire kindergarten classes had come unglued. Second-graders--at last learning to read with comprehension and fluency--regressed to a preliterate, strictly visual state of mind.

Parents with children in elementary school at the time will always remember the messages sent home to them, messages such as: "We strongly recommend that you do not let your children watch TV until that business with the lion guy is no longer being shown."

Patrick's former thesis adviser was traveling with her only daughter when her ex-lover's hand-consuming accident was first televised.

The daughter had managed to get pregnant in her senior year in boarding school; while not exactly an original feat, this was nonetheless unexpected at an all-girls' school. The daughter's subsequent abortion had traumatized her and resulted in a leave of absence from her studies. The distraught girl, whose charmless boyfriend had dumped her before she knew she was carrying his child, would need to repeat her senior year.

Her mother was also having a hard time. She'd still been in her thirties when she'd seduced Wallingford, who was more than ten years her junior but the best-looking boy among her graduate students. Now in her early forties, she was going through her second divorce, the arbitration of which had been made more difficult by the unwelcome revelation that she'd recently slept with another of her students-her first-ever undergraduate.

He was a beautiful boy--sadly the only boy in her ill-advised course on the metaphysical poets, which was ill advised because she should have known that such "a race of writers," as Samuel Johnson had called them when he first nicknamed them the "metaphysical poets," would mostly be of interest to young women.

She was ill advised, too, in admitting the boy to this all-girl class; he was underprepared for it. But he'd come to her office and recited Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," flubbing only the couplet "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow."

He'd said "groan" instead of "grow," and she could almost hear him groaning as he delivered the next lines.

An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest

Oh, my, she'd thought, knowing they were her breasts, and the rest, that he was thinking of. So she'd let him in.

When the girls in the class flirted with him, she felt the need to protect him. At first she told herself she just wanted to mother him. When she umped him--no less ceremoniously than her pregnant daughter had been dumped by her unnamed boyfriend--the boy dropped her course and called his mother.

The boy's mother, who was on the board of trustees at another university, wrote the dean of faculty: "Isn't sleeping with one's students in the 'moral turpitude' department?" Her question had resulted in Patrick's onetime thesis adviser and lover taking a semester's leave of absence of her own.

The unplanned sabbatical, her second divorce, her daughter's not dissimilar disgrace . . . well, mercy, what was Wallingford's old thesis adviser to do?

Her soon-to-be second ex-husband had reluctantly agreed not to cancel her credit cards for one more month. He would deeply regret this. She spontaneously took her out-of-school daughter to Paris, where they moved into a suite at the Htel Le Bristol; it was far too expensive for her, but she'd received a postcard of it once and had always wanted to go there. The postcard had been from her first ex-husband--he'd stayed there with his second wife and had sent her the card just to rub it in.

Le Bristol was on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honor・ surrounded by elegant shopping of the kind not even an adventuress could afford. Once they were there, she and her daughter didn't dare go anywhere or do anything. The extravagance of the hotel itself was more than they could handle. They felt underdressed in the lobby and in the bar, where they sat mesmerized by the people who were clearly more at ease about simply being in Le Bristol than they were. Yet they wouldn't admit it had been a bad idea to come--at least not their first night.

There was quite a nice, modestly priced bistro very near them, on one of the smaller streets, but it was a rainy, dark evening and they wanted to go to bed early--they were yielding to jet lag. They planned on an early dinner at the hotel and would let the real Paris begin for them the next day, but the hotel restaurant was very popular. A table wouldn't be available for them until after nine o'clock, when they hoped to be fast asleep.

They'd come all this way to make recompense for how they'd both been unjustly injured, or so they believed; in truth, they were victims of the dissatisfactions of the flesh, in which their own myriad discontents had played a principal part. Unearned or deserved, Le Bristol was to be their reward. Now they were forced to retreat to their suite, relegated to room service.

There was nothing inelegant about room service at Le Bristol--it was simply not a night in Paris of the kind they had imagined. Both mother and daughter, uncharacteristically, tried to make the best of it.

"I never dreamed I'd spend my first night in Paris in a hotel room with my mother!" the daughter exclaimed; she tried to laugh about it.

"At least I won't get you pregnant," her mother remarked. They both tried to laugh about that, too.

Wallingford's old thesis adviser began the litany of the disappointing men in her life. The daughter had heard some of the list before, but she was developing a list of her own, albeit thus far vastly shorter than her mother's. They drank two half-bottles of wine from the mini-bar before the red Bordeaux they'd ordered with their dinner was delivered, and they drank that, too. Then they called room service and asked for a second bottle.

The wine loosened their tongues--maybe more than was either appropriate or seemly in a mother-daughter conversation. That her wayward daughter could easily have got herself pregnant with any number of careless boys before she encountered the lout who'd done the job was a bitter pill for any mother to swallow--even in Paris. That Patrick Wallingford's former thesis adviser was an inveterate sexual aggressor grew evident, even to her daughter; that her mother's sexual taste had led her to dally with ever-younger men, which eventually included a teenager, was possibly more than any daughter cared to know.

At a welcome lull in her mother's nonstop confessions--the middle-aged admirer of the metaphysical poets was signing for the second bottle of Bordeaux while brazenly flirting with the room-service waiter--the daughter sought some relief from this unwanted intimacy by turning on the television.
As befitted a recently and stylishly renovated hotel, Le Bristol offered a multitude of satellite-TV channels--in English and other languages, as well as in French--and, as luck would have it, the inebriated mother had no sooner closed the door behind the room-service waiter than she turned to face the room, her daughter, and the TV, where she saw her ex-lover lose his left hand to a lion. Just like that!

Of course she screamed, which made her daughter scream. The second bottle of Bordeaux would have slipped out of the mother's grasp, had she not gripped the neck of the bottle tightly. (She might have been imagining that the bottle was one of her own hands, disappearing down a lion's throat.)

The hand-eating episode was over before the mother could reiterate the tortured tale of her relationship with the now-maimed television journalist.
It would be an hour until the international news channel aired the incident again, although every fifteen minutes there were what the network called "bumpers," telling of the upcoming item--each promo in a ten- or fifteen-second installment. The lions fighting over some remaining and indistinguishable tidbit in their cage; the handless arm dangling from Patrick's separated shoulder; the stunned expression on Wallingford's face shortly before he fainted; a hasty view of a braless, headphone-wearing blond woman, who appeared to be sleeping in what looked like meat.

Mother and daughter sat up a second hour to watch the whole episode again.
This time the mother remarked of the braless blonde, "I'll bet he was fucking her."

They went on like that, through the second bottle of Bordeaux. Their third watching of the complete event prompted cries of lascivious glee--as if Wallingford's punishment, as they thought of it, was what should have happened to every man they had ever known.

"Only it shouldn't have been his hand," the mother said.

"Yeah, right," the daughter replied.

But after this third viewing of the grisly event, only a sullen silence greeted the final swallowing of the body parts, and the mother found herself looking away from Patrick's face as he was about to swoon.

"The poor bastard," the daughter said under her breath. "I'm going to bed."

"I think I'll see it one more time," her mother answered.

The daughter lay sleeplessly in the bedroom, with the flickering light coming from under the door to the living room of the suite. Her mother, who had turned the volume off, could be heard crying. The daughter dutifully went to join her mother on the living-room couch.
They kept the TV sound off; holding hands, they watched the terrifying but stimulating footage again. The hungry lions were immaterial--the subject of the maiming was men.
"Why do we need them if we hate them?" the daughter tiredly asked.
"We hate them because we need them," the mother answered, her speech slurred.
There was Wallingford's stricken face. He dropped to his knees, his forearm spurting blood. His handsomeness was overwhelmed by his pain, but such was Wallingford's effect on women that a drunken, jet-lagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter felt their arms ache. They were actually reaching out to him as he fell.
Patrick Wallingford initiated nothing, yet he inspired sexual unrest and unnatural longing--even as he was caught in the act of feeding a lion his left hand. He was a magnet to women of all ages and types; even lying unconscious, he was a danger to the female sex.
As often happens in families, the daughter said aloud what the mother had also observed but was keeping to herself. "Look at the lionesses," the daughter said.
Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wallingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too.

Copyright, 2001 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

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