The Fourth Hand (4 page)

Le Bristol was on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, surrounded by elegant shopping of the kind not even an adventuress could afford. Once they were there, she and her daughter didn’t dare go anywhere or do anything. The extravagance of the hotel itself was more than they could handle. They felt underdressed in the lobby and in the bar, where they sat mesmerized by the people who were clearly more at ease about simply being in Le Bristol than they were. Yet they wouldn’t admit it had been a bad idea to come—at least not their first night. There was quite a nice, modestly priced bistro very near them, on one of the smal er streets, but it was a rainy, dark evening and they wanted to go to bed early—they were yielding to jet lag.

They planned on an early dinner at the hotel and would let the real Paris begin for them the next day, but the hotel restaurant was very popular. A table wouldn’t be available for them until after nine o’clock, when they hoped to be fast asleep.

They’d come al this way to make recompense for how they’d both been unjustly injured, or so they believed; in truth, they were victims of the dissatisfactions of the flesh, in which their own myriad discontents had played a principal part. Unearned or deserved, Le Bristol was to be their reward. Now they were forced to retreat to their suite, relegated to room service.

There was nothing inelegant about room service at Le Bristol—it was simply not a night in Paris of the kind they had

imagined.

Both

mother

and

daughter,

uncharacteristical y, tried to make the best of it.

“I never dreamed I’d spend my first night in Paris in a hotel room with my
mother

!” the daughter exclaimed; she tried to laugh about it.

“At least I won’t get you pregnant,” her mother remarked.

They both tried to laugh about that, too.

Wal ingford’s old thesis adviser began the litany of the disappointing men in her life. The daughter had heard some of the list before, but she was developing a list of her own, albeit thus far vastly shorter than her mother’s. They drank two halfbottles of wine from the mini-bar before the red Bordeaux they’d ordered with their dinner was delivered, and they drank that, too. Then they cal ed room service and asked for a second bottle.

The wine loosened their 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 effect on women that a drunken, jet-lagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter felt their arms ache. They were actual y reaching out to him as he fel .

Patrick Wal ingford initiated nothing, yet he inspired sexual unrest and unnatural longing—even as he was caught in the act of feeding a lion his left hand. He was a magnet to women of al ages and types; even lying unconscious, he was a danger to the female sex.

As often happens in families, the daughter said aloud what the mother had also observed but was keeping to herself.

“Look at the lionesses,” the daughter said. Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wal ingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too.

The Former Midfielder

T
HE BOSTON TEAMwas headed by Dr. Nicholas M.

Zajac, a hand surgeon with Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates—the leading center for hand care in Massachusetts. Dr. Zajac was also an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Harvard. It was his idea to initiate a search for potential hand donors and recipients on the Internet (www.needahand.com).

Dr. Zajac was a half-generation older than Patrick Wal ingford. That both Deerfield and Amherst were al -

boys’ institutions when he’d attended them is insufficient explanation for the single-sex attitude that accompanied his presence as strongly as his bad choice in aftershave.

No one from his Deerfield days, or from his four years at Amherst, remembered him. He’d played varsity lacrosse, in both prep school and col ege—he was actual y a starter—

but not even his coaches remembered him. It is exceedingly rare to remain that anonymous on athletic teams; yet Nick Zajac had spent his youth and young manhood in an uncannily unmemorable but successful pursuit of excel ence, with no friends and not one sexual experience. In medical school, another med student, with whom the future Dr. Zajac shared a female cadaver, would forever remember him for his outraged shock at the sight of the body. “That she was long dead wasn’t the problem,” the lab partner would recal . “What got to Nick was that the cadaver was a woman, clearly his first.”

Another first would be Zajac’s wife. He was one of those overgrateful men who married the first woman who had sex with him. Both he and his wife would regret it.

The female cadaver had something to do with Dr. Zajac’s decision to specialize in hands. According to the former lab partner, the cadaver’s hands were the only parts of her that Zajac could stand to examine.

Clearly we need to know more about Dr. Zajac. His thinness was compulsive; he couldn’t be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird-watcher, a seed-eater—a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches—the doctor was preternatural y drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars.

Mostly they were sports stars, injured athletes, such as the Boston Red Sox pitcher with a torn anterior radio-ulnar ligament on his throwing hand. The pitcher was later traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for two infielders who never panned out and a designated hitter whose principal talent was hitting his wife. Zajac operated on the designated hitter, too. In attempting to lock herself in the car, the slugger’s wife had shut the car door on his hand—the most extensive damage occurring to the second proximal phalanx and the third metacarpal.

A surprising number of sports-star injuries happened away from the field or the court or the ice—like that goalie for the Boston Bruins, since retired, who slashed his superficial transverse ligament, left hand, by gripping a wineglass too tightly against his wedding ring. And there was that frequently penalized linebacker for the New England Patriots who severed a digital artery and some digital nerves by trying to open an oyster with a Swiss Army knife.

They were risk-taking jocks—an accident-prone bunch—

but they were famous. For a time, Dr. Zajac worshiped them; their signed photographs, radiating physical superiority, looked down from his office wal s.

Yet even the on-the-job injuries to sports stars were often unnecessary, including a center for the Boston Celtics who attempted a backward slam dunk after the time on the shot clock had expired. He simply lost control of the bal and made a mess of his palmar fascia against the rim.

Never mind—Dr. Zajac loved them al . And not only the athletes. Rock singers seemed prone to hotel-room injuries of two kinds. Foremost was what Zajac categorized as

“room-service outrage”; this led to stab wounds, scalding coffee and tea injuries, and a host of unplanned confrontations with inanimate objects. A close second to these were the innumerable mishaps in wet bathrooms, to which not only rock stars but also movie stars were inclined.

Movie stars had accidents in restaurants, too, mostly upon leaving them. From a hand surgeon’s point of view, striking a photographer was preferable to striking a photographer’s camera. For the hand’s sake, any expression of hostility toward something made of metal, glass, wood, stone, or plastic was a mistake. Yet, among the famous, violence toward
things
was the leading source of the injuries the doctor saw.

When Dr. Zajac reviewed the docile visages of his renowned patients, it was with the realization that their success and seeming contentment were only public masks.

Al this may have preoccupied Zajac, but the doctor’s col eagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates were preoccupied with
him.
While they never cal ed Dr. Zajac a star-fucker to his face, they knew what he was and felt superior to him—if only in this regard. As a surgeon, he was the best of them, and they knew this, too; it bothered them.

If, at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates, they refrained from comment on Zajac’s fame-fucking, they did permit themselves to admonish their superstar col eague for his thinness. It was commonly believed that Zajac’s marriage had failed because he’d grown thinner than his wife, yet no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had been able to persuade Dr.

Zajac to feed himself to save his marriage; they were not likely to have any success at convincing him to fatten himself up now that he was divorced. It was principal y his love of birds that drove Zajac’s neighbors nuts. For reasons that were incomprehensible even to the area’s ornithologists, Dr. Zajac was convinced that the abundance of dogshit in Greater Boston had a deleterious effect on the city’s bird life.

There was a picture of Zajac that al his col eagues savored, although only one of them had seen the actual image. On a Sunday morning in his snow-covered yard on Brattle Street, the renowned hand surgeon—in knee-high boots, his red flannel bathrobe, and a preposterous New England Patriots ski hat, a brown paper bag in one hand, a child-size lacrosse stick in the other—was searching his yard for dog turds. Although Dr. Zajac didn’t own a dog, he had several inconsiderate neighbors, and Brattle Street was one of the most popular dog-walking routes in Cambridge.