The Fourth Hand

  "I suppose you think I'm crazy," Mrs. Clausen said.

  "No! Not at all! I can't imagine how you must feel--I mean beyond how sad you must be." In truth, she looked like so many emotionally drained women he'd interviewed--most recently, the sword-swallower's wife in Mexico City--that Patrick felt he'd met her before.

  Mrs. Clausen surprised him by nodding and then pointing in the general direction of his lap. "May I see it?" she asked. In the awkward pause that followed, Wallingford stopped breathing. "Your hand ... please. The one you still have."

  He held out his right hand to her, as if it had been newly transplanted. She reached out to take it but stopped herself, leaving his hand extended in a lifeless-looking way.

  "It's just a little small," she said. "Otto's is bigger."

  He took back his hand, feeling unworthy.

  "Otto cried when he saw how you lost your other hand. He actually cried!" We know, of course, that Otto had felt like throwing up; it had been Mrs. Clausen who'd cried, yet she managed to make Wallingford think that her husband's compassionate tears were a source of wonder to her still. (So much for a veteran journalist knowing when someone was lying. Wallingford was completely taken in by Mrs. Clausen's account of Otto's crying.)

  "You loved him very much. I can see that," Patrick said.

  The widow bit her lower lip and nodded fiercely, tears welling in her eyes. "We were trying to have a baby. We just kept trying and trying. I don't know why it wasn't working." She dropped her chin to her chest. She held her parka to her face and sobbed quietly into it. Although it was not as faded, the parka was the same Green Bay green as her sweatshirt, with the Packers' logo (the gold helmet with the white G) emblazoned on the back.

  "It will always be Otto's hand to me," Mrs. Clausen said with unexpected volume, pushing the parka away. For the first time, she leveled her gaze at Patrick's face; she looked as if she'd changed her mind about something. "How old are you, anyway?" she asked. Perhaps from seeing Patrick Wallingford only on television, she'd expected someone older or younger.

  "I'm thirty-four," Wallingford answered, defensively.

  "You're my age exactly," she told him. He detected the faintest trace of a smile, as if--either in spite of her grief or because of it--she were genuinely mad.

  "I won't be a nuisance--I mean after the operation," she continued. "But to see his hand ... later, to feel it ... well, that shouldn't be very much of a burden to you, should it? If you respect me, I'll respect you."

  "Certainly!" Patrick said, but he failed to see what was coming.

  "I still want to have Otto's baby."

  Wallingford still didn't get it. "Do you mean you might be pregnant?" he cried excitedly. "Why didn't you say so? That's wonderful! When will you know?"

  That same trace of an insane smile crossed her face again. Patrick hadn't noticed that she'd kicked off her running shoes. Now she unzipped her jeans; she pulled them down, together with her panties, but she hesitated before taking off her sweatshirt.

  It was additionally disarming to Patrick that he'd never seen a woman undress this way--that is, bottom first, leaving the top until last. To Wallingford, Mrs. Clausen seemed sexually inexperienced to an embarrassing degree. Then he heard her voice; something had changed in it, and not just the volume. To his surprise, he had an erection, not because Mrs. Clausen was half naked but because of her new tone of voice.

  "There's no other time," she told him. "If I'm going to have Otto's baby, I should already be pregnant. After the surgery, you'll be in no shape to do this. You'll be in the hospital, you'll be taking a zillion drugs, you'll be in pain--"

  "Mrs. Clausen!" Patrick Wallingford said. He quickly stood up--and as quickly he sat back down. Until he'd tried to stand, he hadn't realized how much of a hard-on he had; it was as obvious as what Wallingford said next.

  "This would be my baby, not your husband's, wouldn't it?"

  But she'd already taken off the sweatshirt. Although she'd left her bra on, he could nonetheless see that her breasts were more special than he'd imagined. There was the glint of something in her navel; the body-piercing was also unexpected. Patrick didn't look at the ornament closely--he was afraid it might have something to do with the Green Bay Packers.

  "His hand is the closest to him I can get," Mrs. Clausen said with unflagging determination. The ferocity of her will could easily have been mistaken for desire. But what worked, meaning what was irresistible, was her voice.

  She held Wallingford down in the straight-backed chair. She knelt to undo his belt buckle, then she yanked down his pants. By the time Patrick leaned forward, to stop her from removing his undershorts, she'd already removed them. Before he could stand up again, or even sit up straight, she had straddled his lap; her breasts brushed his face. She moved so quickly, he'd somehow missed the moment when she'd taken off her bra.

  "I don't have his hand yet!" Wallingford protested, but when had he ever said no?

  "Please respect me," she begged him in a whisper. What a whisper it was!

  Her small, firm buttocks were warm and smooth against his thighs, and his fleeting glimpse of the doohickey in her navel--even more than the appeal of her breasts--had instantly given Wallingford what felt like an erection on top of his erection. He was aware of her tears against his neck as her hand guided him inside her.

  It was not his right hand that she clutched in hers and pulled to her breast--it was his stump. She murmured something that sounded like, "What were you going to do right now, anyway--nothing this important, right?" Then she asked him, "Don't you want to make a baby?"

  "I respect you, Mrs. Clausen," he stammered, but he abandoned all hope of resisting her. It was clear to them both that he'd already given in.

  "Please call me Doris," Mrs. Clausen said through her tears.

  "Doris?"

  "Respect me, respect me. That's all I ask." She was sobbing.

  "I do, I do respect you ... Doris," Patrick said.

  His one hand had instinctively found the small of her back, as if he'd slept beside her every night for years and even in the dark he could reach out and touch exactly that part of her he wanted to hold. At that moment, he could have sworn that her hair was wet--wet and cold, as if she'd just been swimming.

  Of course, he would think later, she must have known she was ovulating; a woman who's been trying and trying to get pregnant surely knows. Doris Clausen must also have known that her difficulty in getting pregnant had been entirely Otto's problem.

  "Are you nice?" Mrs. Clausen was whispering to him, while her hips moved relentlessly against the downward pressure of his one hand. "Are you a good man?"

  Although Patrick had been forewarned that this was what she wanted to know, he never expected she would ask him directly--no more than he'd anticipated a sexual encounter with her. Speaking strictly as an erotic experience, having sex with Doris Clausen was more charged with longing and desire than any other sexual encounter Wallingford had ever had. He wasn't counting the wet dream induced by that cobalt-blue capsule he'd been given in Junagadh, but that extraordinary painkiller was no longer available--not even in India--and it should never be considered in the same category as actual sex.

  As for actual sex, Patrick's encounter with Otto Clausen's widow, singular and brief though it was, put his entire weekend in Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot to shame. Having sex with Mrs. Clausen even eclipsed Wallingford's tumultuous relationship with the tall blond sound technician who'd witnessed the lion attack in Junagadh.

  That unfortunate German girl, who was back home in Hamburg, was still in therapy because of those lions, although Wallingford suspected she'd been more profoundly traumatized by fainting and then waking up in one of the meat carts than by seeing poor Patrick lose his left wrist and hand.

  "Are you nice? Are you a good man?" Doris repeated, her tears wetting Patrick's face. Her small, strong body drew him farther and farther inside her, so that Wallingford could scarcely hear himself answer. Surely Dr. Zajac, as well as s
ome other members of the surgical team who were presently assembling in the waiting room, must have heard Patrick's plaintive cries.

  "Yes! Yes! I am nice! I am a good man!" Wallingford wailed.

  "Is that a promise?" Doris asked him in a whisper. It was that whisper again--what a killer!

  Once more Wallingford answered her so loudly that Dr. Zajac and his colleagues could hear. "Yes! Yes! I promise! I do, I really do!"

  The knock on the hand surgeon's office door came a little later, after it had been quiet for a while. "Are we all right in there?" asked the head of the Boston team.

  At first Zajac thought they looked all right. Patrick Wallingford was dressed again and still sitting in the straight-backed chair. Mrs. Clausen, fully dressed, lay on her back on Dr. Zajac's office rug. The fingers of her hands were clasped behind her head, and her elevated feet rested on the seat of the empty chair beside Wallingford.

  "I have a bad back," Doris explained. She didn't, of course. It was a recommended position in several of the many books she'd read about how to get pregnant. "Gravity," was all she'd said in way of explanation to Patrick, as he'd smiled enchantedly at her.

  They're both crazy, thought Dr. Zajac, who could smell sex in the room. A medical ethicist might not have approved of this new development, but Zajac was a hand surgeon, and his surgical team was raring to go.

  "If we're feeling pretty comfy about this," Zajac said--looking first at Mrs. Clausen, who looked very comfortable, and then at Patrick Wallingford, who looked stupefyingly drunk or stoned--"how about it? Do we have a green light?"

  "Everything's okay with me!" Doris Clausen said loudly, as if she were calling to someone over an expanse of water.

  "Everything's fine with me," Patrick replied. "I guess we have a green light."

  It was the degree of sexual satisfaction in Wallingford's expression that rang a bell with Dr. Zajac. Where had he seen that expression before? Oh, yes, he'd been in Bombay, where he'd been performing a number of exceedingly delicate hand surgeries on children in front of a selective audience of Indian pediatric surgeons. Zajac remembered one surgical procedure from there especially well--it involved a three-year-old girl who'd got her hand caught and mangled in the gears of some farm machinery.

  Zajac was sitting with the Indian anesthesiologist when the little girl started to wake up. Children are always cold, often disoriented, and usually frightened when they awaken from general anesthesia. On occasion, they're sick to their stomachs.

  Dr. Zajac remembered that he'd excused himself in order to miss seeing the unhappy child. He would have a look at how her hand was doing, of course, but that could be later on, when she was feeling better.

  "Wait--you have to see this," the Indian anesthesiologist told Zajac. "Just have a quick look at her."

  On the child's innocent face was the expression of a sexually satisfied woman. Dr. Zajac was shocked. (The sad truth was that Zajac had never, personally, seen the face of a woman as sexually satisfied as that before.)

  "My God, man," Dr. Zajac said to the Indian anesthesiologist, "what did you give her?"

  "Just a little something extra in her I.V.--not very much of it, either!" the anesthesiologist replied.

  "But what is it? What's it called?"

  "I'm not supposed to tell you," said the Indian anesthesiologist. "It's not available in your country, and it never will be. It's about to become unavailable here, too. The ministry of health intends to ban it."

  "I should hope so," Dr. Zajac remarked--he abruptly left the recovery room.

  But the girl hadn't been in any pain; and when Zajac examined her hand later, it was fine, and she was resting comfortably.

  "How's the pain?" he asked the child. A nurse had to translate for him.

  "She says 'everything's okay.' She has no pain," the nurse interpreted. The girl went on babbling.

  "What's she saying now?" Dr. Zajac asked, and the nurse became suddenly shy or embarrassed.

  "I wish they wouldn't put that painkiller in the anesthesia," the nurse told him. The child appeared to be relating a long story.

  "What's she telling you?" Zajac asked.

  "Her dream," the nurse answered, evasively. "She believes she's seen her future. She's going to be very happy and have lots of children. Too many, in my opinion."

  The little girl just smiled at him; for a three-year-old, there'd been something inappropriately seductive in her eyes.

  Now, in Dr. Zajac's Boston office, Patrick Wallingford was grinning in the same shameless fashion.

  What an absolutely cuckoo coincidence! Dr. Zajac decided, as he looked at Wallingford's sexually besotted expression.

  "The tiger patient," he'd called that little girl in Bombay, because the child had explained to her doctors and nurses that, when her hand had been caught in the farm machinery, the gears had growled at her like a tiger.

  Cuckoo or not, something about the way Wallingford looked gave Dr. Zajac pause. "The lion patient," as Zajac had long thought of Patrick Wallingford, was possibly in need of more than a new left hand.

  What Dr. Zajac didn't know was that Wallingford had finally found what he needed--he'd found Doris Clausen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Twinge

  AS DR. ZAJAC EXPLAINED in his first press conference following the fifteen-hour operation, the patient was "at risk." Patrick Wallingford was sleepy but in stable condition after awakening from general anesthesia. Of course the patient was taking "a combination of immunosuppressant drugs"--Zajac neglected to say how many or for how long. (He didn't mention the steroids, either.)

  The hand surgeon, at the very moment national attention turned to him, was noticeably short-tempered. In the words of one colleague--that moron Mengerink, the cuckolding cretin--Zajac was also "as beady-eyed as the proverbial mad scientist."

  Before the historic procedure, Dr. Zajac had been running in the predawn darkness in the gray slush along the banks of the Charles. To his dismay, a young woman had passed him in the ghostly mist as if he'd been standing still. Her taut buttocks in spandex tights, moving resolutely away from Zajac, tightened and released like the fingers of a hand making a fist and then relaxing, and then making a fist again. What a fist it was!

  It was Irma. Dr. Zajac, only hours before he would attach Otto Clausen's left hand and wrist to the waiting stump of Patrick Wallingford's left forearm, felt his heart constrict; his lungs seemed to cease expanding and he experienced a stomach cramp that was as crippling to his forward progress as being hit by, let's say, a beer truck. Zajac was doubled over in the slush when Irma came sprinting back to him.

  He was speechless with pain, gratitude, shame, adoration, lust--you name it. Irma led him back to Brattle Street as if he were a runaway child. "You're dehydrated--you need to replenish your fluids," she scolded. She'd read volumes on the subject of dehydration and the various "walls" that serious runners supposedly "hit," which they must train themselves to "run through."

  Irma was what they call "maxed out" on the vocabulary of extreme sports; the adjectives of maniacal stamina in the face of grueling tests of endurance had become her primary modifiers. ("Gnarly," for example.) Irma was no less steeped in eat-to-run theory--from conventional carbo-loading to ginseng enemas, from green tea and bananas before the run to cranberry-juice shakes after.

  "I'm gonna make you an egg-white omelet as soon as we get home," she told Dr. Zajac, whose shin splints were killing him; he hobbled beside her like a crippled racehorse. This lent nothing newly attractive to his appearance, which had already been likened (by one of his colleagues) to that of a feral dog.

  On the biggest day of his professional career, Dr. Zajac had breathlessly fallen in love with his housekeeper/assistant-turned-personal trainer. But he couldn't tell her--he couldn't talk. As Zajac gasped for breath in hopes of quieting the radiating pain in his solar plexus, he noticed that Irma was holding his hand. Her grip was strong; her fingernails were cut shorter than most men's, but she was not a nail-biter. A woman
's hands mattered a lot to Dr. Zajac. To put in ascending order of importance how he'd fallen for Irma seems crass, but here it is: her abs, her buttocks, her hands.

  "You got Rudy to eat more raw vegetables," was all the hand surgeon managed to say, between gasps.

  "It was just the peanut butter," Irma said. She easily supported half his weight. She felt she could have carried him home--she was that exhilarated. He'd complimented her; she knew he'd noticed her, at last. As if for the first time, he was really seeing who she was.

  "The next weekend Rudy is with me," Zajac choked, "perhaps you'll stay here? I'd like you to meet him."

  This invitation seemed as conclusive to Irma as his hand on her breast, which she'd only imagined. Suddenly she staggered, yet she was still bearing only half his weight; the unpredictable timing of her triumph had made her weak.

  "I like shaved carrots and a little tofu in my egg-white omelets, don't you?" she asked, as they neared the house on Brattle Street.

  There was Medea, taking a dump in the yard. Seeing them, the craven dog furtively eyed her own shit; then she sprinted away from it, as if to say, "Who can stand to be near that stuff? Not me!"

  "That dog is very dumb," Irma observed matter-of-factly. "But I love her, somewhat," she added.

  "I do, too!" Zajac croaked, his heart aching. It was the "somewhat" that sent him over the edge for Irma; he had the exact same feelings for the dog.

  The doctor was too excited to eat his egg-white omelet with shaved carrots and tofu, although he tried. Nor could he finish the tall shake Irma made him--cranberry juice, mashed banana, frozen yogurt, protein powder, and something grainy (possibly a pear). He poured half of it down the toilet, together with the uneaten omelet, before he took a shower.

  It was in the shower that Zajac noticed his hard-on. His erection had Irma's name written all over it, although there'd been nothing physical between them--discounting Irma's assistance in getting him home. Fifteen hours of surgery beckoned. This was no time for sex.

  At the postoperative press conference, even the most envious of his colleagues--the ones who secretly wanted him to fail--were disappointed on Dr. Zajac's behalf. His remarks were too trenchant; they suggested that hand-transplant surgery would one day soon be in the no-big-deal category of a tonsillectomy The journalists were bored; they couldn't wait to hear from the medical ethicist, whom all the surgeons at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates despised. And before the medical ethicist could finish, the media's attention shifted restlessly to Mrs. Clausen. Who could blame them? She was the epitome of human interest.