The Fourth Hand (21 page)

“But you can stil come see me,
and
little Otto,” Doris assured him. “We’d enjoy a visit, from time to time. You
tried
to give Otto’s hand a life!” she cried. “You did your best. I’m proud of you, Patrick.”

This time, she paid no attention to the whopping bandage, which was so big that it looked as if there might stil be a hand under it. While it pleased Wal ingford that Mrs.

Clausen took his right hand and held it to her heart, albeit briefly,

he

was

suffering

from

the

near-certain

foreknowledge that she might not clutch this remaining hand to her bosom ever again.

“I’m proud of
you
. . . of what you’ve done,” Wal ingford told her; he began to cry.

“With your help,” she whispered, blushing. She let his hand go.

“I love you, Doris,” Patrick said.

“But you can’t,” she replied, not unkindly. “You just can’t.”

Dr. Zajac had no explanation for the suddenness of the rejection—that is, he had nothing to say beyond the strictly pathological.

Wal ingford could only guess what had happened. Had the hand felt Mrs. Clausen’s love shift from it to the child? Otto might have known that his hand would give his wife the baby they’d tried and tried to have together, but how much had his
hand
known? Probably nothing.

As it turned out, Wal ingford needed only a little time to accept the end result of the fifty-percent-probability range.

After al , he knew divorce—he’d been rejected before.

Physically
and
psychological y speaking, losing the first hand had been harder than losing Otto’s. No doubt Mrs.

Clausen had helped Wal ingford feel that Otto’s hand was never quite his. (We can only guess what a medical ethicist might have thought of that.)

Now when Wal ingford tried to dream of the cottage on the lake, nothing was there. Not the smel of the pine needles, which he’d first struggled to imagine but had since grown used to; not the lap of the water, not the cries of the loons. It used to; not the lap of the water, not the cries of the loons. It is true, as they say, that you can feel pain in an amputated limb long after the limb is gone, but this came as no surprise to Patrick Wal ingford. The fingertips of Otto’s left hand, which had touched Mrs. Clausen so lightly, had been without feeling; yet Patrick had truly felt Doris when the hand touched her. When, in his sleep, he would raise his bandaged stump to his face, Wal ingford believed he could stil smel Mrs. Clausen’s sex on his missing fingers.

“Ache al gone?” she’d asked him.

Now the ache wouldn’t leave him; it seemed as permanently a part of him as his not having a left hand.

Patrick Wal ingford was stil in the hospital on January 24, 1999, when the first
successful
hand transplant in the United States was performed in Louisvil e, Kentucky. The recipient, Matthew David Scott, was a New Jersey man who’d lost his left hand in a fireworks accident thirteen years before the attachment surgery. According to
The
New York Times,
“a donor hand suddenly became available.”

A medical ethicist cal ed the Louisvil e hand transplant “a justifiable experiment”; unremarkably, not every medical ethicist agreed. (“The hand is not essential for life,” as the
Times
put it.)

The head of the surgical team for the Louisvil e operation made the now-familiar point about the transplanted hand: that there was only “a fifty-percent probability that it wil survive a year, and after that we just real y don’t know.” He was a hand surgeon, after al ; like Dr. Zajac, of course he would talk about “it” surviving, meaning the hand.

Wal ingford’s al -news network, aware that Patrick was stil recovering

in

a

Boston

hospital,

interviewed

a

spokesperson for Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates. Zajac thought the so-cal ed spokesperson must have been Mengerink, because the statement, while correct, demonstrated a characteristic insensitivity to Wal ingford’s recent loss. The statement read:

“Animal experiments have shown that rejection reactions rarely occur before seven days, and ninety percent of the reactions occur in the first three months,”

which meant that Patrick’s rejection reaction was out of sync with the animals’. But Wal ingford wasn’t offended by the statement. He wholeheartedly wished Matthew David Scott wel . Of course he might have felt more affinity for the world’s very first hand transplant, because it, like his, had failed. That one was performed in Ecuador in 1964; in two weeks, the recipient rejected the donor’s hand. “At the time, only crude anti-rejection therapy was available,” the
Times
pointed out. (In ’64, we didn’t have the immunosuppressant drugs that are in standard use in heart, liver, and kidney transplants today.) Once out of the hospital, Patrick Wal ingford moved quickly back to New York, where his career blossomed. He was made the anchor for the evening news; his popularity soared. He’d once been a faintly mocking commentator on the kind of calamity that had befal en him; he’d heretofore behaved as if there were less sympathy for the bizarre death, the bizarre loss, the bizarre grief, simply because they were bizarre. He knew now that the bizarre was commonplace, hence not bizarre at al . It was al death, al loss, al grief—no matter how stupid. Somehow, as an anchor, he conveyed this, and thereby made people feel cautiously better about what was indisputably bad.

But what Wal ingford could do in front of a TV camera, he could not duplicate in what we cal real life. This was most obvious with Mary whatever-her-namewas—Patrick utterly failed to make her feel even a little bit good. She’d gone through an acrimonious divorce without realizing that there was rarely any other kind. She was stil childless. And while she’d become the smartest of the New York newsroom women, with whom Wal ingford now worked again, Mary was not as nice as she’d once been. There was something edgy about her behavior; in her eyes, where Wal ingford had formerly spotted only candor and an acute vulnerability, there was evidence of irritability, impatience, and cunning.

These were al qualities that the other New York newsroom women had in spades. It saddened Wal ingford to see Mary descending to their level—or growing up, as those other women would doubtless say.

Stil Wal ingford wanted to befriend her—that was truly
all
he wanted to do. To that end, he had dinner with her once a week. But she always drank too much and, when Mary drank, their dinner conversation turned to that topic between them which Wal ingford vigilantly tried to avoid—

namely, why he wouldn’t sleep with her.

“Am I
that
unattractive to you?” she would usual y begin.

“You’re
not
unattractive to me, Mary. You’re a very goodlooking girl.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Please, Mary—”

“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Mary would say. “Just a weekend away somewhere—just one night, for Christ’s sake! Just
try
it! You might even be interested in more than one night.”

“Mary,
please
—”

“Jesus, Pat—you used to fuck
any
one! How do you think it makes me feel . . . that you won’t fuck
me
?”

“Mary, I want to be your friend. A good one.”

“Okay, I’l be blunt—you’ve forced me,” Mary told him. “I want you to make me pregnant. I want a baby. You’d produce a good-looking baby. Pat, I want your
sperm.
Is that okay? I want your
seed.
”

We can imagine that Wal ingford was a little reluctant to act on this proposition. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what Mary meant; he just wasn’t sure that he wanted to go through al that again. Yet, in one sense, Mary was right: Wal ingford
would
produce a good-looking kid. He already had.

Patrick was tempted to tel Mary the truth: that he’d made a baby, and that he loved his baby very much; that he loved Doris Clausen, the beer-truck driver’s widow, too. But as seemingly nice as Mary was, she stil worked in the New York newsroom, didn’t she? She was a journalist, wasn’t she? Wal ingford would have been crazy to tel her the truth.

“What about a sperm bank?” Patrick asked Mary one night.

“I would be wil ing to consider making a contribution to a sperm bank, if you real y have your heart set on having my child.”

“You shit!” Mary cried. “You can’t stand the thought of fucking me, can you? Jesus, Pat—do you need two hands just to get it up? What’s the matter with you? Or is it
me
?”

It was an outburst of the kind that would put an end to their having dinner together on a weekly basis, at least for a while. On that upsetting evening, when Patrick had the taxi drop Mary at her apartment building first, she wouldn’t even say good night.

Wal ingford, who was understandably distracted, told the taxi driver the wrong address. By the time Patrick realized his mistake, the cabbie had left him outside his old apartment building on East Sixty-second Street, where he’d lived with Marilyn. There was nothing to do but walk half a block to Park Avenue and hail an uptown cab; he was too tired to walk the twenty-plus blocks. But natural y the confused doorman recognized him and came running out on the sidewalk before Patrick could slip away.

“Mr. Wal ingford!” Vlad or Vlade or Lewis said, in surprise.

“Paul O’Neil ,” Patrick said, alarmed. He held out his one and only hand. “Bats left, throws left—remember?”

“Oh, Mr. Wal ingford, Paul O’Neil couldn’t hold a fuckin’

Roman candle to you!

That’s a kinda firecracker,” the doorman explained. “I
love
the new show! Your interview with the legless child . . . you know, that kid who fel or was pushed into the polar-bear tank.”

“I know, Vlade,” Patrick said.

“It’s Lewis,” Vlad said. “Anyway, I just
loved
it! And that miserable fuckin’

woman who was given the results of her sister’s
smear
test

—I don’t believe it!”

“I had trouble believing that one myself,” Wal ingford admitted. “It’s cal ed a Pap smear.”

“Your wife’s with someone,” the doorman noted slyly. “I mean
tonight
she’s with someone.”

“She’s my
ex
-wife,” Patrick reminded him.

“Most nights she’s alone.”

“It’s her life,” Wal ingford said.

“Yeah, I know. You’re just payin’ for it!” the doorman replied.

“I have no complaints about how she lives her life,” Patrick said. “I live uptown now, on East Eighty-third Street.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wal ingford,” the doorman told him. “I won’t tel anybody!”

As for the missing hand, Patrick had learned to enjoy waving his stump at the television camera; he happily demonstrated his repeated failures with a variety of prosthetic devices, too.

“Look here—there are people only a little better coordinated than I am who have mastered this gizmo,”

Wal ingford liked to begin. “The other day, I watched a guy cut his dog’s toenails with one of these things. It was a frisky dog, too.”

But the results were predictably the same: Patrick would spil his coffee in his lap, or he would get his prosthesis snagged in his microphone wire and pop the little mike off his lapel.

In the end he would be one-handed again, nothing artificial.

“For twenty-four-hour international news, this is Patrick Wal ingford. Good night, Doris,” he would always sign off, waving his stump. “Good night, my little Otto.”

Patrick would be a long time re-entering the dating scene.

After he tried it, the pace disappointed him—it seemed either too fast or too slow. He felt out of step, so he stopped altogether. He occasional y got laid when he traveled, but now that he was an anchor, not a field reporter, he didn’t travel as much as he used to. Besides, you can’t cal getting laid “dating”; Wal ingford, typical y, wouldn’t have cal ed it anything at al .

At least there was nothing comparable to the anticipation he’d felt when Mrs. Clausen would rol on her side, away from him, holding his (or was it Otto’s?) hand at first against her side and then against her stomach, where the unborn child was waiting to kick him. There would be no matching that, or the taste of the back of her neck, or the smel of her hair.

Patrick Wal ingford had lost his left hand twice, but he’d gained a soul. It was both loving and losing Mrs. Clausen that had given Patrick his soul. It was both his longing for her and the sheer wishing her wel ; it was getting back his left hand and losing it again, too. It was wanting his child to be Otto Clausen’s child, almost as much as Doris had wanted this; it was loving, even unrequited, both Otto junior and the little boy’s mother. And such was the size of the ache in Patrick’s soul that it was
visible
—even on television. Not even the confused doorman could mistake him for Paul O’Neil , not anymore.

He was stil the lion guy, but something in him had risen above that image of his mutilation; he was stil disaster man, but he anchored the evening news with a newfound authority. He had actual y mastered the look he’d first practiced in bars at the cocktail hour, when he was feeling sorry for himself. The look stil said,
Pity
me,
only now his sadness seemed approachable.