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The other women shunned him afterward; Wallingford knew that it wasn't only the dog pee.
Even his German colleague in the world of television journalism, the beautiful Barbara Frei, wouldn't speak to him. Most journalists meeting Wallingford for the first time would at least offer him some commiseration about the lion business, but the aloof Ms. Frei made it clear that she didn't want to meet him.
Only the Danish novelist, Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen, seemed to look at Patrick with a flicker of pity in her darting green eyes. She was pretty in a kind of bereft or disturbed way, as if there'd recently been a suicide or a murder of someone close to her--possibly her lover or her husband.
Wallingford attempted to approach Ms. Jensen, but Ms. Arbuthnot cut him off. "I saw her first," Evelyn told Patrick, making a beeline for Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen.
This damaged Wallingford's failing self-confidence further. Was that what Ms. Arbuthnot had meant by being disappointed in herself for being attracted to him? Was Evelyn Arbuthnot a lesbian?
Not all that eager to meet anyone while smelling wretchedly of dog piss, Wallingford returned to the hotel to await his clean clothes. He left his two-man television crew to film whatever was interesting in the rest of the speeches that first day, including a panel discussion on rape.
When Patrick got back to his hotel room, the hotel management had sent him flowers--in further apology for "misplacing" his clothes--and there were two massage therapists, two different women, waiting for him. The hotel had also sent him a complimentary massage. "Solly about the crick in your neck," one of the new women told Patrick.
This sounded something like "click in your knack," but Wallingford understood what she'd meant. He was doomed to have another two-woman mauling.
But these two women managed to cure the crick in his neck, and while they were still engaged in turning him to jelly, the hotel laundry service returned his clean clothes--all his clothes. Perhaps this marked a turn for the better in his Japanese experience, Patrick imagined.
Given the loss of his left hand in India, even though it had happened five years before--given that Filipino dogs had pissed on his clothes, and that he'd needed a second massage to correct the damage done by the first; given that he'd not known Evelyn Arbuthnot was a lesbian, and given his dreadfully insensitive speech; given that he knew nothing about Japan, and arguably even less about the future of women, which he never, not even now, thought about--Wallingford should have been wise enough not to imagine that his Japanese experience was about to take a turn for the better.
Anyone meeting Patrick Wallingford in Japan would have known in an instant that he was precisely the kind of penis-brain who would casually put his hand too close to a lion's cage. (And if the lion had had an accent, Wallingford would have mocked it.) In retrospect, Patrick himself would rank his time in Japan as an even lower point in his life than the hand-eating episode in India.
To be fair, Wallingford wasn't the only man who missed the panel discussion on rape. The English economist, whose name (Jane Brown) Patrick had thought was boring, turned out to be anything but. She threw a fit at the rape panel and insisted that no men should be present for the discussion, declaring that for women to discuss rape honestly with one another was tantamount to being naked.
That much the cameraman and the sound technician for the twenty-four-hour international channel managed to get on film before the English economist, to make her point, began to take off her clothes. Thereupon the cameraman, who was Japanese, respectfully stopped filming.
It's debatable that watching Jane Brown take off her clothes would have been all that watchable for most television viewers. To describe Ms. Brown as matronly would be a kindness--she needed only to start taking off her clothes to empty the hall of what few men were there. There were almost no men attending the "Future of Women" conference, only the two guys in Patrick Wallingford's TV crew, the Japanese journalists who were the conference's unhappy-looking hosts, and, of course, Patrick himself.
The hosts would have been offended if they'd heard about the long-distance request of the New York news editor, who wanted no more footage of the conference itself. Instead of more of the women's conference, what Dick said he now wanted was "something to contrast to it"--something to undermine it, in other words.
This was pure Dick, Wallingford thought. When the news editor asked for "related material," what he really meant was something so unrelated to the women's conference that it could make a mockery of the very idea of the future of women.
"I hear there's a child-porn industry in Tokyo," Dick told Patrick. "Child prostitutes, too. All this is relatively new, I'm told. It's just emerging--dare I say budding?"
"What about it?" Wallingford asked. He knew this was pure Dick, too. The news editor had never been interested in "The Future of Women." The Japanese hosts had wanted Wallingford--the lion-guy video had record sales in Japan--and Dick had taken advantage of the invitation to have disaster man dig up some dirt in Tokyo.
"Of course you'll have to be careful how you do it," Dick went on, warning Patrick that there would be "aspersions of racism" cast against the network if they did anything that appeared to be "slanted against the Japanese."
"You get it?" Dick had asked Wallingford over the phone. "Slanted against the Japanese ..."
Wallingford sighed. Then he suggested, as always, that there was a deeper, more complex story. The "Future of Women" conference was conducted over a four-day period, but only in the daylight hours. Nothing was scheduled at night, not even dinner parties. Patrick wondered why.
A young Japanese woman who wanted Wallingford to autograph her Mickey Mouse T-shirt seemed surprised that he hadn't guessed the reason. There were no conference-related activities in the evening because women were "supposed to" spend the nighttime at home with their families. If they'd tried to have a women's conference in Japan at night, not many women could have come.
Wasn't this interesting? Wallingford asked Dick, but the New York news editor told him to forget it. Although the young Japanese woman looked fantastic on-camera, Mickey Mouse T-shirts weren't allowed on the all-news network, which had once been involved in a dispute with the Walt Disney Company.
In the end, Wallingford was instructed to stick to individual interviews with the women who were the conference's participants. Patrick could tell that Dick was pulling out on the piece.
"Just see if one or two of these broads will open up to you," was how Dick left it.
Naturally Wallingford began by trying to arrange a one-on-one interview with Barbara Frei, the German television journalist. He approached her in the hotel bar. She seemed to be alone; the idea that she might be waiting for someone never crossed Patrick's mind. The ZDF anchor was every bit as beautiful as she appeared on the small screen, but she politely declined to be interviewed.
"I know your network, of course," Ms. Frei began tactfully. "I don't think it likely that they will give serious coverage to this conference. Do you?" Case closed. "I'm sorry about your hand, Mr. Wallingford," Barbara Frei said. "That was truly awful--I'm very sorry."
"Thank you," Patrick replied. The woman was both sincere and classy. Wallingford's twenty-four-hour international channel was not Ms. Frei's, or anyone else's, idea of serious TV journalism; compared to Barbara Frei, Patrick Wallingford wasn't serious, either, and both Ms. Frei and Mr. Wallingford knew it.
The hotel bar was full of businessmen, as hotel bars tend to be. "Look--it's the lion guy!" Wallingford heard one of them say.
