The Fourth Hand Read online

  Someone had got her clean, more feminine clothes, free of Green Bay logos. She'd washed her hair and put on a little lipstick. She looked especially small and demure in the TV lights, and she'd not let the makeup girl touch the circles under her eyes; it was as if she knew that what was fleeting about her beauty was also the only permanent thing about it. She was pretty in a kind of damaged way.

  "If Otto's hand survives," Mrs. Clausen began, in her soft but strangely arresting voice--as if her late husband's hand, not Patrick Wallingford, were the principal patient--"I guess I will feel a little better, one day. You know, just being assured that a part of him is where I can see him ... touch him ..." Her voice trailed away. She'd already stolen the press conference from Dr. Zajac and the medical ethicist, and she was not done--she was just getting started.

  The journalists crowded around her. Doris Clausen's sadness was spilling into homes and hotel rooms and airport bars around the world. She seemed not to hear all the questions the reporters were asking her. Later Dr. Zajac and Patrick Wallingford would realize that Mrs. Clausen had been following her own script--with no TelePrompTer, either.

  "If I only knew ..." She trailed away again; undoubtedly the pause was deliberate.

  "If you only knew what?" one of the journalists cried.

  "If I'm pregnant," Mrs. Clausen answered. Even Dr. Zajac held his breath, waiting for her next words. "Otto and I were trying to have a baby. So maybe I'm pregnant, or maybe I'm not. I just don't know."

  Every man at the press conference must have had a hard-on, even the medical ethicist. (Only Zajac was confused as to his erection's source--he thought it was Irma's lingering influence.) Every man in the aforementioned homes and hotel rooms and airport bars around the world was feeling the effects of Doris Clausen's arousing tone of voice. As surely as water loves to lap a dock, as surely as pine trees sprout new needles at the tips of their branches, Mrs. Clausen's voice was at that moment giving a hard-on to every heterosexual male transfixed by the news.

  The next day, as Patrick Wallingford lay in his hospital bed beside the enormous, foreign-looking bandage, which was almost all he could see of his new left hand, he watched Mrs. Clausen on the all-news network (his own channel of employment) while the actual Mrs. Clausen sat possessively at his bedside.

  Doris was riveted by what she could see of Otto's index, middle, and ring fingers--only their tips--and the tip of her late husband's thumb. The pinky of Patrick's new left hand was lost in all the gauze. Under the bandage was a brace that immobilized Wallingford's new wrist. The bandage was so extensive that you couldn't tell where Otto's hand and wrist, and part of his forearm, had been attached.

  The coverage of the hand transplant on the all-news network, which was repeated hourly, began with an edited version of the lion episode in Junagadh. The snatching and eating took only about fifteen seconds in this version, which should have forewarned Wallingford that he would also be assigned a lesser role in the footage to come.

  He'd foolishly hoped that the surgery itself would be so fascinating that the television audience would soon think of him as "the transplant guy," or even "transplant man," and that these revised or repaired versions of himself would replace "the lion guy" and "disaster man" as the new but enduring labels of his life. In the footage, there were some grisly goings-on of an unclear but surgical nature at the Boston hospital, and a shot of Patrick's gurney disappearing down a corridor; yet the gurney and Wallingford were soon lost from view because they were surrounded by seventeen frantic-looking doctors and nurses and anesthesiologists--the Boston team.

  Then there was a clip of Dr. Zajac speaking tersely to the press. Naturally Zajac's "at risk" comment was taken out of context, which made it appear that the patient was already in the gravest trouble, and the part about the combination of immunosuppressant drugs sounded blatantly evasive, which it was. While those drugs have improved the success rate of organ transplants, an arm is composed of several different tissues--meaning different degrees of rejection reactions are possible. Hence the steroids, which (together with the immunosuppressant drugs) Wallingford would be required to take every day for the rest of his life, or for as long as he had Otto's hand.

  There was a shot of Otto's abandoned beer truck in the snowy parking lot in Green Bay, but Mrs. Clausen never flinched at Patrick's bedside; she kept herself focused on Otto's three fingertips and the tip of his thumb. Moreover, Doris was as close to her husband's former hand as she could get; if Wallingford had had any feeling in those fingertips and the tip of that thumb, he would have felt the widow breathing on them.

  Those fingers were numb. That they would remain numb for months would become a matter of some concern to Wallingford, although Dr. Zajac was dismissive of his fears. It would be almost eight months before the hand could distinguish between hot and cold--a sign that the nerves were regenerating--and close to a year before Patrick felt confident enough in his grip on a steering wheel to drive a car. (It would also be close to a year, and only after hours of physical therapy, before he would be able to tie his own shoes.)

  But from a journalistic point of view, it was there, in his hospital bed, that Patrick Wallingford saw the writing on the wall--his full recovery, or lack thereof, would never be the main story.

  The medical ethicist spoke for longer, on-camera, than the twenty-four-hour international channel had given Dr. Zajac. "In cases like these," the ethicist intoned, "candor like Mrs. Clausen's is rare, and her ongoing connection to the donor hand is invaluable."

  In what "cases like these"? Zajac must have been thinking, while he fumed off-camera. This was only the second hand transplant ever, and the first one had been a failure!

  While the ethicist was still speaking, Wallingford saw the cameras move in on Mrs. Clausen. Patrick felt a flood of desire and longing for her. He feared he would never attain her again; he foresaw that she wouldn't encourage it. He watched her shift the entire press conference from his hand transplant to her late husband's hand itself, and then to the baby she hoped she carried inside her. There was even a close-up of Mrs. Clausen's hands holding her flat stomach. She had spread the palm of her right hand on her belly; her left hand, already without a wedding ring, overlapped her right.

  As a journalist, Patrick Wallingford knew in an instant what had happened: Doris Clausen, and the child she and Otto had wanted, had usurped Patrick's story. Wallingford was aware that such a substitution happened sometimes in his irresponsible profession--not that television journalism is the only irresponsible profession.

  But Wallingford didn't really care, and this surprised him. Let her usurp me, Patrick thought, simultaneously realizing that he was in love with Doris Clausen. (There's no telling what the all-news network, or a medical ethicist, might have made of that.)

  But a part of the improbability of Wallingford falling in love with Mrs. Clausen was his recognition of the unlikelihood of her ever loving him. It had previously been Patrick's experience that women were easily smitten with him, at least initially; it had also been his experience that women got over him easily, too.

  His ex-wife had likened him to the flu. "When you were with me, Patrick, every hour I thought I was going to die," Marilyn told him. "But when you were gone, it was as if you'd never existed."

  "Thanks," said Wallingford, whose feelings, until now, had never been as easily hurt as most women assumed.

  What affected him about Doris Clausen was that her unusual determination had a sexual component; what she wanted was brightly marked, at every phase, with unconcealed sexual overtones. What began in the slight alterations in her tone of voice was continued in the intensity of her small, compact body, which was wound as tightly as a spring, coiled for sex.

  Her mouth was soft-looking, her lips perfectly parted; and in the general tiredness around her eyes, there was a seductive acceptance of the world as it was. Mrs. Clausen would never ask you to change who you were--maybe only your habits. She expected no miracles. What you saw in her was what you go
t, a loyalty that knew no bounds. And it appeared that she would never get over Otto--she'd been smitten for life.

  Doris had used Patrick Wallingford for the one job Otto couldn't finish; that she'd somehow chosen him for the job gave Patrick the slimmest hope that she would one day fall in love with him.

  The first time Wallingford even slightly wiggled Otto Clausen's fingers, Doris cried. The nurses had been told to speak sternly to Mrs. Clausen if she tried to kiss the fingertips. It made Patrick happy, in a bitter kind of way, when some of her kisses managed to get through.

  And long after the bandages came off, he remembered the first time he felt her tears on the back of that hand; it was about five months after the surgery. Wallingford had successfully passed the most vulnerable period, which was said to be from the end of the first week to the end of the first three months. The feeling of her tears made him weep. (By then he'd regained an astonishing twenty-two centimeters of nerve regeneration, from the place of attachment to the beginnings of the palm.)

  Albeit very gradually, his need for the various painkillers went away, but he remembered the dream he'd often had, shortly after the painkillers had kicked in. Someone was taking his photograph. Occasionally, even when Wallingford had stopped using any painkillers, the sound of a camera's shutter (in his sleep) was very real. The flash seemed far away and incomplete, like heat lightning--not the real thing--but the sound of the shutter was so clear that he almost woke up.

  While it was the nature of the painkillers that Wallingford wouldn't remember for how long he'd taken them--maybe four or five months?--it was also the nature of the dream that he had no recollection of ever seeing the photographs that were being taken or the photographer. And there were times he didn't think it was a dream, or he wasn't sure.

  In six months, more concretely, he could actually feel Doris Clausen's face when she pressed it into his left palm. Mrs. Clausen never touched his other hand, nor did he once try to touch her with it. She'd made her feelings for him plain. When he so much as said her name a certain way, she blushed and shook her head. She would not discuss the one time they'd had sex. She'd had to do it--that was all she would say. ("It was the only way.")

  Yet for Patrick there endured the hope, however scant, that she might one day consider doing it again--notwithstanding that she was pregnant, and she revered her pregnancy the way women who've waited a long time to get pregnant do. Nor was there any doubt in Mrs. Clausen's mind that this would be an only child.

  Her most inviting tone of voice, which Doris Clausen could call upon when she wanted to, and which had the effect of sunlight after rain--the power to open flowers--was only a memory now; yet Wallingford believed he could wait. He hugged that memory like a pillow in his sleep, not unlike the way he was doomed to remember that blue-capsule dream.

  Patrick Wallingford had never loved a woman so unselfishly. It was enough for him that Mrs. Clausen loved his left hand. She loved to put it on her swollen abdomen, to let the hand feel the fetus move.

  Wallingford hadn't noticed when Mrs. Clausen stopped wearing the ornament in her navel; he'd not seen it since their moment of mutual abandonment in Dr. Zajac's office. Perhaps the body-piercing had been Otto's idea, or the doohickey itself had been a gift from him (hence she was loath to wear it now). Or else the unidentified metal object had become uncomfortable in the course of Mrs. Clausen's pregnancy.

  Then, at seven months, when Patrick felt an unfamiliar twinge in his new wrist--one especially strong kick from the unborn child--he tried to conceal his pain. Naturally 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 Wallingford. He recalled, as if it were yesterday, how she had held his stump there while she'd mounted him.

  "It was just a twinge," Patrick replied.

  "Call 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 Wallingford 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 widow was pregnant, and that she still maintained a relationship with her late husband's hand. And the labels for Wallingford were never "the transplant guy" or "transplant man"--he was still 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 Hallam, a New Zealander living in Australia, was the recipient. Zajac seemed miffed about that, too. He had reason to be. Hallam 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 Hallam was taking more than thirty pills a day and showing no signs of rejection. In Wallingford's case, eight months after his attachment surgery, he was still popping more than thirty pills 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 all those cases of beer, no doubt.)

  Occasionally Mrs. Clausen and Wallingford would sleep together--without sex, even without nakedness. Doris would just sleep beside him--at his left side, naturally. Patrick didn't sleep well, 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 tell 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 Wallingford, "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 Wallingford's only competition in hand-transplant surgery made Zajac more pissed-off than depressed.) And, as a result of Irma's cooking, he'd actually put on a little weight; healthy food, in decent quantities, still 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 Wallingford's, but it was all 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 all Zajac had said, putting his arm around Mengerink's stooped shoulders. />
  "It's a wonder what a little nooky will 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 still experienced what Irma called "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 allotment that was deemed to be good for his ticker.)

  The unexplained ache in Patrick Wallingford'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 still 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?" Wallingford asked.

  Otto had always slept at her left side, Doris explained. How this wrong-side-of-the-bed 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 swallow, lest he wake her.