In her eyes, there would suddenly be a kind of light that hadn't been there it arrived and departed like a change of color at the day's end, as if there were no distance too great for this light to travel. You definitely wanted to have sex with him.'

He was also a classic underachiever-he wasn't as hopeless as you first thought. Later-she was a divorcée with a nearly grown daughter-she would assert: 'You could never He'd had an affair with his thesis adviser she was either a reflection of or a reason for his lack of direction as a graduate student. Would explain why, in his smile, there was an unsettling combination of grief and embarrassment. He might have been in the act of guessing whether the previous meeting was at a funeral or in a brothel, which

He wore a perpetual but dismaying smile-the look of someone who knows he's met you before but can't recall the exact occasion. 'He didn't have the confidence of someone who was going to do anything special' was how she put it. 'He was so unchallenging,' an ex-girlfriend said.Īnother young woman, who'd known him briefly in graduate school, agreed. Throughout college, no one would have predicted that fame was his destiny. While he was irrefutably good-looking, what his former girlfriends would recall as most appealing about him In high school, his success with girls notwithstanding, he was rarely a bold boy, certainly not a reckless one. Those classmates who could remember the future hand recipient from his elementary-school days would never have described him as daring. Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event-the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.Īs a schoolboy, he was a promising student, a fair-minded and likable kid, without being terribly original.

The fourth hand by john irving