The Fourth Hand (19 page)

Then, at seven months, when Patrick felt an unfamiliar twinge in his new wrist—one especial y strong kick from the unborn child—he tried to conceal his pain. Natural y Doris saw him wince; he couldn’t hide anything from her.

“What is it?” she asked. She instinctively moved the hand to her heart—to her
breast,
was what registered with Wal ingford. He recal ed, as if it were yesterday, how she had held his stump there while she’d mounted him.

“It was just a twinge,” Patrick replied.

“Cal Zajac,” Mrs. Clausen demanded. “Don’t fool around.”

But there was nothing wrong. Dr. Zajac seemed miffed at the apparently easy success of the hand transplant. There’d been an early problem with the thumb and index finger, which Wal ingford could not get his muscles to move on command. But that was because he’d been without a hand and wrist for five years—his muscles had to relearn a few things.

There’d been no crises for Zajac to avert; the hand’s progress had been as relentless as Mrs. Clausen’s plans for the hand. Perhaps the true cause of Dr. Zajac’s disappointment was that the hand seemed more like
her
triumph than his. The principal news was that the donor’s triumph than his. The principal news was that the donor’s widow was pregnant, and that she stil maintained a relationship with her late husband’s hand. And the labels for Wal ingford were never “the transplant guy” or “transplant man”—he was stil and would remain “the lion guy” and

“disaster man.”

And then, in September 1998, there was a successful hand-and-forearm transplant in Lyon, France. Clint Hal am, a New Zealander living in Australia, was the recipient.

Zajac seemed miffed about that, too. He had reason to be.

Hal am had lied. He’d told his doctors that he lost his hand in an industrial accident on a building site, but it turned out that his hand had been severed by a circular saw in a New Zealand prison, where he’d been serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for fraud. (Dr. Zajac, of course, thought that giving a new hand to an ex-convict was a decision only a medical ethicist could have made.)

For now, Clint Hal am was taking more than thirty pil s a day and showing no signs of rejection. In Wal ingford’s case, eight months after his attachment surgery, he was stil popping more than thirty pil s a day, and if he dropped his pocket change, he couldn’t pick it up with Otto’s hand. More encouraging to the Boston team was the fact that his left hand, despite the absence of sensation at the extremities, was almost as strong as his right; at least Patrick could turn a doorknob enough to open the door. Doris had told him that Otto had been fairly strong. (From lifting al those cases of beer, no doubt.)

Occasional y Mrs. Clausen and Wal ingford would sleep together—without sex, even without nakedness. Doris would just sleep beside him—at his left side, natural y.

Patrick didn’t sleep wel , to a large degree because he was comfortable sleeping only on his back. The hand ached when he lay on his side or his stomach; not even Dr. Zajac could tel him why. Maybe it had something to do with a reduced blood supply to the hand, but the muscles and tendons and nerves were obviously getting a good supply of blood.

“I would never say you were home free,” Zajac told Wal ingford, “but that hand is looking more and more like a keeper to me.”

It was hard to understand Zajac’s newfound casualness, let alone his love of Irma’s vernacular. Mrs. Clausen and her fetus had usurped Dr. Zajac’s three minutes in the limelight, but Zajac seemed relatively undepressed. (That a criminal was Wal ingford’s only competition in hand-transplant surgery made Zajac more pissed-off than depressed.) And, as a result of Irma’s cooking, he’d actual y put on a little weight; healthy food, in decent quantities, stil adds up. The hand surgeon had given in to his appetites. He was famished because he was getting laid every day.

That Irma and her former employer were now happily married was no business of Wal ingford’s, but it was al the talk at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink,
Zajac

& Associates. And if the best surgeon among them was looking less and less like a feral dog, his once-undernourished son, Rudy, had also gained a few pounds.

Even to the envious souls who stood at the periphery of Dr.

Zajac’s life and cravenly mocked him, the little boy whose father loved him now struck nearly everyone as happy and normal.

No less surprising, Dr. Mengerink confessed to Zajac that he’d had an affair with the vengeful Hildred, Dr. Zajac’s now-overweight first wife. Hildred was seething about Irma, although Zajac had increased her alimony—the cost to Hildred was straightforward: she would accept dual, which was to say
equal,
custody of Rudy. Instead of becoming overwrought at Dr. Mengerink’s startling confession, Dr.

Zajac was a portrait of sensitivity and compassion. “With Hildred? You poor man

. . .” was al Zajac had said, putting his arm around Mengerink’s stooped shoulders.

“It’s a wonder what a little nooky wil do for you,” the surviving Gingeleskie brother remarked enviously.

Had the shit-eating dog also turned a corner? In a way, she had. Medea was
almost
a good dog; she stil experienced what Irma cal ed “lapses,” but dogshit and its effects no longer dominated Dr. Zajac’s life. Dog-turd lacrosse had become just a game. And while the doctor had tried a glass of red wine every day for the sake of his heart, his heart was in good hands with Irma and Rudy. (Zajac’s growing fondness for red Bordeaux quite exceeded the parsimonious al otment that was deemed to be good for his ticker.)

The unexplained ache in Patrick Wal ingford’s new left hand continued to be of little concern to Dr. Zajac. But one night when Patrick was lying chastely in bed with Doris Clausen, she asked him, “What do you mean by an ‘ache,’ exactly?

What kind of ache is it?”

“It’s a kind of straining, only my fingers are barely moving, and it hurts in the tips of the fingers, where I stil have no feeling. It’s weird.”

“It hurts where you have no feeling?” Doris asked.

“So it seems,” Patrick explained.

“I know what’s wrong,” Mrs. Clausen said. Just because she wanted to lie next to his left hand, she should not have imposed the wrong side of the bed on Otto.

“On Otto?” Wal ingford asked.

Otto had always slept at her left side, Doris explained. How this wrong-side-of-thebed business had affected Patrick’s new hand, he would soon see. With Mrs. Clausen asleep beside him, at his
right
side, something that seemed utterly natural happened. He turned to her, and—as if ingrained in her, even in her sleep—she turned to him, her head nestling in the crook of his right arm, her breath against his throat.

He didn’t dare swal ow, lest he wake her. His left hand twitched, but there was no ache now. Wal ingford lay stil , waiting to see what his new hand would do next. He would remember later that the hand, entirely of its own accord, went under the hem of Doris Clausen’s nightie—the unfeeling fingers moving up her thighs. At their touch, Mrs.

Clausen’s legs drew apart; her hips opened; her pubic hair brushed against the palm of Patrick’s new left hand, as if lifted by an unfelt breeze.

Wal ingford knew where his fingers went, although he couldn’t feel them. The change in Doris’s breathing was apparent. He couldn’t help himself—he kissed her forehead, nuzzled her hair. Then she seized his probing hand and brought his fingers to her lips. He held his breath in anticipation of the pain, but there was none. With her other hand, she took hold of his penis; then she abruptly let it go. Wrong penis! The spel was broken. Mrs. Clausen was wide awake. They could both smel the fingers of Otto’s remarkable left hand—it rested on the pil ow, touching their faces.

“Is the ache gone?” Doris asked him.

“Yes,” Patrick answered. He meant only that it was gone from the
hand.
“But there’s another ache, a
new
one . . .” he started to say.

“I can’t help you with that one,” Mrs. Clausen declared. But when she turned her back to him, she gently held his left hand against her big bel y. “If you want to touch yourself—

you know, while you hold me—maybe I can help you a
little.

”

Tears of love and gratitude sprang to Patrick’s eyes.

What decorum was cal ed for here? It seemed to Wal ingford that it would be most proper if he could finish masturbating before he felt the baby kick, but Mrs. Clausen held his left hand tightly to her stomach—
not
to her breast

—and before Patrick could come, which he managed with uncommon quickness, the unborn child kicked twice. The second time elicited that exact same twinge of pain he’d felt before, a pain sharp enough to make him flinch. This time Doris didn’t notice, or else she confused it with the sudden shudder with which he came. Best of al , Wal ingford would think later, Mrs. Clausen had then rewarded him with that special voice of hers, which he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Ache al gone?” she’d asked. The hand, again of its own accord, slipped from her giant bel y to her swol en breast, where she let it stay.

“Yes, thank you,” Patrick whispered, and fel into a dream.

There was a smel he at first failed to recognize because it was so unfamiliar to him; it’s not a smel one experiences in New York or Boston. Pine needles! he suddenly realized.

There was the sound of water, but not the ocean and not from a tap. It was water lapping against the bow of a boat—

or maybe slapping against a dock—but whatever water it was, it was music to the hand, which moved as softly as water itself over the enlarged contour of Mrs. Clausen’s breast. The twinge (even his memory of the twinge) was gone, and in its aftermath floated the best night’s sleep Wal ingford would ever have, but for the disquieting thought, when he woke up, that the dream had seemed not quite his.

It was also not as close to his cobalt-blue-capsule experience as he would have liked. To begin with, there’d been no sex in the dream, nor had Wal ingford felt the heat of the sun in the planks of the dock, or the dock itself through what seemed to be a towel; instead there’d been only a far-off sense that there was a dock somewhere else.

That night he didn’t hear the camera shutter in his sleep.

You could have taken Patrick Wal ingford’s photograph a thousand times that night. He would never have known.

Rejection and Success

I
T WAS ALL RIGHTwith Wal ingford when Doris talked about wanting her child to know his or her father’s hand.

What this meant to Patrick was that he could expect to go on seeing her. He loved her with slimmer and slimmer hope of her reciprocation, which was disquietingly unlike the way she loved the hand. She would hold it to her bel y, against the unborn child’s persistent kicks, and while she could occasional y feel Wal ingford flinch in pain, she had ceased to find his twinges alarming.

“It’s not real y your hand,” Mrs. Clausen reminded Patrick, not that he needed reminding. “Imagine what it must be like for Otto—to feel a child he’s never going to see. Of course it hurts him!”

But wasn’t it Wal ingford’s pain? In his former life, with Marilyn, Patrick might have responded sarcastical y. (“Now that you put it that way, I’m not worried about the pain.”) But with Doris . . . wel , al he could do was adore her.

Moreover, there was strong support for Mrs. Clausen’s argument. The new hand didn’t look like Patrick’s—it never would. Otto’s left hand was not that much bigger, but we do a lot of looking at our hands—it’s hard to get used to someone else’s. There were times when Wal ingford would stare at the hand intently, as if he expected it to speak; nor could he resist smel ing the hand—it did not have his smel .

He knew that from the way Mrs. Clausen closed her eyes, when
she
smel ed the hand, it smel ed like Otto.

There were welcome distractions. During his long recovery and rehabilitation, Patrick’s career, which had been grounded in the Boston newsroom so that he could be close to Dr. Zajac and the Boston team, began to flourish.

(Maybe

“flourish” is too strong a word; let’s just say that the network al owed him to branch out a bit.)

The twenty-four-hour international channel created a weekend-anchor slot for him fol owing the evening news; this Saturday-night sidebar to the regular news show was telecast from Boston. While the producers stil gave Wal ingford al the stories about bizarre casualties, they permitted him to introduce and summarize these stories with a dignity that was surprising and newfound—both in Wallingford
and
in the al -news network. No one in Boston or New York—not Patrick, not even Dick—could explain it.

Patrick Wal ingford acted on-camera as if Otto Clausen’s hand were truly his own, conveying a sympathy previously absent from the calamity channel and his own reporting. It was as if he knew he’d got more than a hand from Otto Clausen. Of course, among serious reporters—meaning those journalists who reported the hard news in depth and in context—the very idea of a sidebar to what passed for the news on the disaster network was laughable. In the
real
news, there were refugee children whose mothers and aunts had been raped in front of them, although neither the women nor the children would usual y admit to this. In the real news, the fathers and uncles of these refugee children had been murdered, although there was scant admitting to this, either. There were also stories of doctors and nurses being shot—deliberately, so that the refugee children would be without medical care. But tales of such wil ful evil in foreign countries were not reported in depth on the socal ed international channel, nor would Patrick Wal ingford ever get a field assignment to report them.