The Fourth Hand Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 pil for any mother to swal ow—even in Paris. That Patrick Wal ingford’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 dal y with ever-younger men, which eventual y included a teenager, was possibly more than any daughter cared to know. At a welcome lul 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 satel ite-TV
    channels—in English and other languages, as wel 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 cal ed “bumpers,” tel ing of the upcoming item—each promo in a ten-or fifteen-second instal ment. 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
    Wal ingford’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’l 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 Wal ingford’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 sul en silence greeted the final swal owing 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’l 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 dutiful y 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 Wal ingford’s stricken face. He dropped to his knees, his forearm spurting blood. His handsomeness was overwhelmed by his pain, but such was Wal ingford’s