She was ill advised, too, in admitting the boy to this all-girl class; he was underprepared for it. But he'd come to her office and recited Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," flubbing only the couplet "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow."
He'd said "groan" instead of "grow," and she could almost hear him groaning as he delivered the next lines.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest
Oh, my, she'd thought, knowing they were her breasts, and the rest, that he was thinking of. So she'd let him in.
When the girls in the class flirted with him, she felt the need to protect him. At first she told herself she just wanted to mother him. When she dumped him--no less ceremoniously than her pregnant daughter had been dumped by her unnamed boyfriend--the boy dropped her course and called his mother.
The boy's mother, who was on the board of trustees at another university, wrote the dean of faculty: "Isn't sleeping with one's students in the 'moral turpitude' department?" Her question had resulted in Patrick's onetime thesis adviser and lover taking a semester's leave of absence of her own.
The unplanned sabbatical, her second divorce, her daughter's not dissimilar disgrace ... well, mercy, what was Wallingford's old thesis adviser to do?
Her soon-to-be second ex-husband had reluctantly agreed not to cancel her credit cards for one more month. He would deeply regret this. She spontaneously took her out-of-school daughter to Paris, where they moved into a suite at the Hotel Le Bristol; it was far too expensive for her, but she'd received a postcard of it once and had always wanted to go there. The postcard had been from her first ex-husband--he'd stayed there with his second wife and had sent her the card just to rub it in.
Le Bristol was on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, 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 smaller 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 all 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, uncharacteristically, 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.
Wallingford'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 half-bottles 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 called 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 pill for any mother to swallow--even in Paris. That Patrick Wallingford'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 dally with ever-younger men, which eventually included a teenager, was possibly more than any daughter cared to know.
At a welcome lull 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 satellite-TV channels--in English and other languages, as well 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 called "bumpers," telling of the upcoming item--each promo in a ten-or fifteen-second installment. 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 Wallingford'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'll 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 Wallingford'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 sullen silence greeted the final swallowing 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'll 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 dutifully 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 Wallingford's stricken face. He dropped to his knees, his forearm spurting blood. His handsomeness was overwhelmed by his pain, but such was Wallingford's effect on women that a drunken, jetlagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter felt their arms ache. They were actually reaching out to him as he fell.
Patrick Wallingford 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 all 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 Wallingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too.
CHAPTER TWO
The Former Midfielder
THE BOSTON TEAM was 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 Wallingford. That both Deerfield and Amherst were all-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 college--he was actually 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 excellence, 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 recall. "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 preternaturally 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 walls.
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 ball and made a mess of his palmar fascia against the rim.
Never mind--Dr. Zajac loved them all. 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.
All this may have preoccupied Zajac, but the doctor's colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates were preoccupied with him. While they never called 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 colleague 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 principally 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 all his colleagues 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.
The lacrosse stick had been intended for Zajac's only child, an unathletic son who visited him every third weekend. The troubled boy, disturbed by his parents' divorce, was an underweight six-year-old, an obdurate noneater--quite possibly at the urging of his mother, whose uncomplicated mission was to drive Zajac crazy.
The ex-wife, whose name was Hildred, spoke dismissively on this subject. "Why should the kid eat? His father doesn't. He sees his father starving himself, so he starves himself, too!" Therefore, in the divorce settlement, Zajac was permitted to see his son only once every three weeks, and for no longer than a weekend at a time. And Massachusetts has what they call no-fault divorce! (What Wallingford called his favorite oxymoron.)
In fact, Dr. Zajac agonized over his beloved child's eating disorder and sought both medical and practical solutions to his son's condition. (Hildred would barely acknowledge that her starved-looking son had a problem.) The boy's name was Rudy; and on the weekends when he visited his father, he was often treated to the spectacle of Dr. Zajac force-feeding himself copious amounts of food, which Zajac would later vomit up in private, disciplined silence. But with or without his father's example, Rudy hardly ate at all.
One pediatric gastroenterologist called for exploratory surgery to rule out any possible diseases of the colon. Another prescribed a syrup, an indigestible sugar that worked as a diuretic. A third suggested Rudy would outgrow the problem; it was the only gastroenterological advice that both Dr. Zajac and his ex-wife
could accept.
Meanwhile, Zajac's former live-in housekeeper had quit--she could not bear to see the quantity of food that was thrown away every third Monday. Because Irma, the new live-in housekeeper, took offense at the word "housekeeper," Zajac had been careful to call her his "assistant," although the young woman's principal responsibilities were cleaning the house and doing the laundry. Maybe it was her obligatory daily retrieval of the dog turds from the yard that broke her spirit--the ignominy of the brown paper bag, her clumsiness with the child's lacrosse stick, the menial nature of the task.
Irma was a homely, sturdily built girl in her late twenties, and she'd not anticipated that working for a "medical doctor," as Irma called Zajac, would include such demeaning labor as combating the shitting habits of the Brattle Street dogs.
It further hurt her feelings that Dr. Zajac thought she was a new immigrant for whom English was a second language. English was Irma's first and only language, but the confusion came from what little Zajac could understand from overhearing her unhappy voice on the telephone.
Irma had her own phone in her bedroom off the kitchen, and she was often talking at length to her mother or to one of her sisters late at night when Zajac was raiding the refrigerator. (The scalpel-thin surgeon limited his snacks to raw carrots, which he kept in a bowl of melting ice in the fridge.)
To Zajac, it seemed that Irma was speaking a foreign language. Doubtless some interference to his hearing was caused by his constant chomping on raw carrots and the maddening trill of the caged songbirds throughout the house, but the primary reason for Zajac's mistaken assumption was that Irma was always hysterically crying when she spoke to her mother or sisters. She was recounting to them how humiliating it was to be consistently undervalued by Dr. Zajac.
Irma could cook, but the doctor rarely ate regular meals. She could sew, but Zajac assigned the repair of his office and hospital clothing to his dry-cleaning service; what chiefly remained of his other laundry were the besweated clothes he ran in. Zajac ran in the morning (sometimes in the dark) before breakfast, and he ran again (often in the dark) at the end of the day.