The Fourth Hand Read online

  One night when Patrick came home--this was when he had two hands, and long before his divorce--Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was watching an extra-inning ball game from Cincinnati, where the Mets were playing the Reds.

  "Now look here, Lewis," Wallingford said to the startled doorman, who kept a small black-and-white TV in the coatroom off the lobby. "There are the Reds--they're in Cincinnati! Yet here I am, right beside you. I'm not playing tonight, am I?"

  "Don't worry, Mr. O'Neill," the doorman said sympathetically. "I won't tell anybody."

  But after he lost his hand, Patrick Wallingford was more famous than Paul O'Neill. Furthermore, it was his left hand that Patrick had lost, and Paul O'Neill bats left and throws left. As Vlad or Vlade or Lewis would know, O'Neill became the American League batting champion in 1994; he hit .359 in what was only his second season with the Yanks, and he was a great right fielder.

  "They're gonna retire Number Twenty-One one day, Mr. O'Neill," the doorman stubbornly assured Patrick Wallingford. "You can count on it."

  After Patrick's left hand was gone, his single return visit to the apartment on East Sixty-second Street was for the purpose of collecting his clothes and books and what divorce lawyers call personal effects. Of course it was clear to everyone in the building, even to the doorman, that Wallingford was moving out.

  "Don't worry, Mr. O'Neill," the doorman told Patrick. "The things they can do in rehab today ... well, you wouldn't believe. It's too bad it wasn't your right hand--you bein' a lefty is gonna make it tough--but they'll come up with somethin', I know they will."

  "Thank you, Vlade," Patrick said.

  The one-handed journalist felt weak and disoriented in his old apartment. The day he moved out, Marilyn had already begun to rearrange the furniture. Wallingford kept turning to look over his shoulder to see what was behind him; it was just a couch that had been moved from somewhere else in the apartment, but to Patrick the unfamiliarly placed shape took on the characteristics of an advancing lion.

  "I think the hittin' will be less of a problem than the throw to the plate from right field," the three-named doorman was saying. "You'll have to choke up on the bat, shorten your swing, lay off the long ball--I don't mean forever, just till you're used to the new hand."

  But there was no new hand that Wallingford could get used to; the prosthetic devices defeated him. The ongoing abuse by his ex-wife would defeat Patrick, too.

  "You were never sexy, not to me," Marilyn lied. (So she was guilty of wishful thinking--so what?) "And now ... well, missing a hand ... you're nothing but a helpless cripple!"

  The twenty-four-hour news network didn't give Wallingford long to prove himself as an anchor. Even on the reputed disaster channel, Patrick failed to be an anchor of note. He moved quickly from early morning to midmorning to late night, and finally to a predawn slot, where Wallingford imagined that only night workers and insomniacs ever saw him.

  His television image was too repressed for a man who'd lost his left hand to the king of beasts. One wanted to see more defiance in his expression, which instead radiated an enfeebled humility, an air of wary acceptance. While he'd never been a bad man, only a bad husband, Patrick's one-handedness came across as self-pitying, and it marked him as the silent-martyr type.

  While looking wounded hardly hurt Wallingford with women, now there were only other women in his life. And by the time Patrick's divorce was settled, his producers felt they had given him adequate opportunity as an anchor to protect themselves from any later charges that they'd discriminated against the handicapped; they returned him to the less visible role of a field reporter. Worse, the one-handed journalist became the interviewer of choice for various freaks and zanies; that the twenty-four-hour international channel already had a reputation for captured acts of mauling and mutilation only underscored Patrick's image as a man irreversibly damaged.

  On TV, of course, the news was catastrophe-driven. Why wouldn't the network assign Wallingford to the tabloid sleaze, the beneath-the-news stories? Without fail, they gave him the smirking, salacious tidbits--the marriage that lasted less than a day, including one that didn't make it through the honeymoon; the husband who, after eight years of marriage, discovered that his wife was a man.

  Patrick Wallingford was the all-news network's disaster man, the field reporter on the scene of the worst (meaning the most bizarre) accidents. He covered a collision between a tourist bus and a bicycle rickshaw in Bangkok--the two fatalities were both Thai prostitutes, riding to work in the rickshaw. Wallingford interviewed their families and their former clients; it was disquietingly hard to tell which was which, but each of the interviewees felt compelled to stare at the stump or the prosthesis at the end of the reporter's left arm.

  They always eyed the stump or the prosthesis. He hated them both--and the Internet, too. To him, the Internet chiefly served to encourage the inherent laziness of his profession--an overreliance on secondary sources and other shortcuts. Journalists had always borrowed from other journalists, but now it was too easy.

  His angry ex-wife, who was also a journalist, was a case in point. Marilyn prided herself in writing "profiles" of only the most literary authors and the most serious actors and actresses. (It went without saying that print journalism was superior to television.) Yet in truth, Patrick's ex-wife prepared for her interviews with writers not by reading their books--some of which were admittedly too long--but by reading their previous interviews. Nor did Marilyn make the effort to see every film that the actors and actresses among her interviewees had been in; shamelessly, she read the reviews of their movies instead.

  Given his Internet prejudice, Wallingford never saw the publicity campaign on www.needahand.com; he'd never heard of Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates until Dr. Zajac called him. Zajac already knew about Patrick's mishaps with several different prosthetic devices, not just the one in SoHo, which received a fair amount of attention: the shutting of his artificial hand in the taxi's rear door; the cabbie blithely driving on for a block or so. The doctor also knew about the embarrassing entanglement with the seat belt on that flight to Berlin, where Wallingford was rushing to interview a deranged man who'd been arrested for detonating a dog near the Potsdamer Platz. (In an avowed protest against the new dome on the Reichstag, the fiend had attached an explosive device to the dog's collar.)

  Patrick Wallingford had become the TV journalist for stray acts of God and random nonsense. People called out to him from passing taxis--"Hey, lion guy!" Bicycle messengers hailed him, first spitting the whistles from their mouths--"Yo, disaster man!"

  Worse, Patrick had so little liking for his job that he'd lost all sympathy for the victims and their families; when he interviewed them, this lack of sympathy showed.

  Therefore, in lieu of being fired--since he was injured on the job, he might have sued--Wallingford was so further marginalized that his next field assignment lacked even disaster potential. Patrick was being sent to Japan to cover a conference sponsored by a consortium of Japanese newspapers. He was surprised by the topic of the conference, too--it was called "The Future of Women," which certainly didn't have the sound of a disaster.

  But the idea of Patrick Wallingford's attending the conference ... well, the women in the newsroom in New York were all atingle about that.

  "You'll get laid a lot, Pat," one of the women teased him. "A lot more, I mean."

  "How could Patrick possibly get laid more?" another of the women asked, and that set them all off again.

  "I've heard that women in Japan are treated like shit," one of the women remarked. "And the men go off to Bangkok and behave abominably."

  "All men behave abominably in Bangkok," said a woman who'd been there.

  "Have you been to Bangkok, Pat?" the first of the women asked. She knew perfectly well that he'd been there--he had been there with her. She was just reminding him of something that everyone in the newsroom knew.

  "Have you ever been to Japan, Patrick?" one of the other women asked, when the
tittering died down.

  "No, never," Wallingford replied. "I've never slept with a Japanese woman, either."

  They called him a pig for saying that, although most of them meant this affectionately. Then they dispersed, leaving him with Mary, one of the youngest of the New York newsroom women. (And one of the few Patrick hadn't yet slept with.)

  When Mary saw they were alone together, she touched his left forearm, very lightly, just above his missing hand. Only women ever touched him there.

  "They're just teasing, you know," she told him. "Most of them would take off for Tokyo with you tomorrow, if you asked them."

  Patrick had thought about sleeping with Mary before, but one thing or another had always intervened. "Would you take off for Tokyo with me tomorrow, if I asked you?"

  "I'm married," Mary said.

  "I know," Patrick replied.

  "I'm expecting a baby," Mary told him; then she burst into tears. She ran after the other New York newsroom women, leaving Wallingford alone with his thoughts, which were that it was always better to let the woman make the first pass. At that moment, the phone call came from Dr. Zajac.

  Zajac's manners, when introducing himself, were (in a word) surgical. "The first hand I get my hands on, you can have," Dr. Zajac announced. "If you really want it."

  "Why wouldn't I want it? I mean if it's healthy ..."

  "Of course it will be healthy!" Zajac replied. "Would I give you an unhealthy hand?"

  "When?" Patrick asked.

  "You can't rush finding the perfect hand," Zajac informed him.

  "I don't think I'd be happy with a woman's hand, or an old man's," Patrick thought out loud.

  "Finding the right hand is my job," Dr. Zajac said.

  "It's a left hand," Wallingford reminded him.

  "Of course it is! I mean the right donor."

  "Okay, but no strings attached," Patrick said.

  "Strings?" Zajac asked, perplexed. What on earth could the reporter have meant? What possible strings could be attached to a donor hand?

  But Wallingford was leaving for Japan, and he'd just learned he was supposed to deliver a speech on the opening day of the conference; he hadn't written the speech, which he was thinking about but would put off doing until he was on the plane.

  Patrick didn't give a second thought to the curiousness of his own comment--"no strings attached." It was a typical disaster-man remark, a lion-guy reflex--just another dumb thing to say, solely for the sake of saying something. (Not unlike "German girls are very popular in New York right now.")

  And Zajac was happy--the matter had been left in his hands, so to speak.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Japanese Interlude

  IS THERE SOMETHING cursed about Asia and me? Wallingford would wonder later. First he'd lost his hand in India; and now, what about Japan?

  The trip to Tokyo had gone wrong even before the start, if you count Patrick's insensitive proposition to Mary. Wallingford himself counted it as the start. He'd hit on a young woman who was newly married and pregnant, a girl whose last name he could never remember. Worse, she'd had a look about her that haunted him; it was more than an unmistakable prettiness, although Mary had that, too. Her look indicated a capacity for damage greater than gossip, a ferocity not easily held in check, a potential for some mayhem yet to be defined.

  Then, on the plane to Tokyo, Patrick struggled with his speech. Here he was, divorced, for good reason--and feeling like a failed sexual predator, because of pregnant Mary--and he was supposed to address the subject of "The Future of Women," in notoriously keep-women-in-their-place Japan.

  Not only was Wallingford not accustomed to writing speeches; he was not used to speaking without reading the script off the TelePrompTer. (Usually someone else had written the script.) But maybe if he looked over the list of participants in the conference--they were all women--he might find some flattering things to say about them, and this flattery might suffice for his opening remarks.

  It was a blow to him to discover that he had no firsthand knowledge of the accomplishments of any of the women participating in the conference; alas, he knew who only one of the women was, and the most flattering thing he could think of saying about her was that he thought he'd like to sleep with her, although he'd seen her only on television.

  Patrick liked German women. Witness that braless sound technician on the TV crew in Gujarat, that blonde who'd fainted in the meat cart, the enterprising Monika with a k. But the German woman who was a participant in the Tokyo conference was a Barbara, spelled the usual way, and she was, like Wallingford, a television journalist. Unlike Wallingford, she was more successful than she was famous.

  Barbara Frei anchored the morning news for ZDF. She had a resonant, professional-sounding voice, a wary smile, and a thin-lipped mouth. She had shoulder-length dirty-blond hair, adroitly tucked behind her ears. Her face was beautiful and sleek, with high cheekbones; in Wallingford's world, it was a face made for television.

  On TV, Barbara Frei wore nothing but rather mannish suits in either black or navy blue, and she never wore a blouse or a shirt of any kind under the wide-open collar of the suit jacket. She had wonderful collarbones, which she quite justifiably liked to show. She preferred small stud earrings--often emeralds or rubies--Patrick could tell; he was knowledgeable about women's jewelry.

  But while the prospect of meeting Barbara Frei in Tokyo gave Wallingford an unrealistic sexual ambition for his time in Japan, neither she nor any of the conference's other participants could be of any help in writing his speech.

  There was a Russian film director, a woman named Ludmilla Slovaboda. (The spelling only approximates Patrick's phonetic guess at how one might pronounce her last name. Let's call her Ludmilla.) Wallingford had never seen her films.

  There was a Danish novelist, a woman named Bodille or Bodile or Bodil Jensen; her first name was spelled three different ways in the printed material that Patrick's Japanese hosts had sent. However her name was spelled, Wallingford presumed one said "bode eel"--accent on the eel--but he wasn't sure.

  There was an English economist with the boring name of Jane Brown. There was a Chinese geneticist, a Korean doctor of infectious diseases, a Dutch bacteriologist, and a woman from Ghana whose field was alternately described as "food-shortage management" or "world-hunger relief." There was no hope of Wallingford's pronouncing any of their names correctly; he wouldn't even try.

  The list of participants went on and on, all highly accomplished professional women--with the probable exception of an American author and self-described radical feminist whom Wallingford had never heard of, and a lopsided number of participants from Japan who seemed to represent the arts.

  Patrick was uncomfortable around female poets and sculptors. It was probably not correct to call them poetesses and sculptresses, although this is how Wallingford thought of them. (In Patrick's mind, most artists were frauds; they were peddling something unreal, something made up.)

  So what would his welcoming speech be? He wasn't entirely at a loss--he'd not lived in New York for nothing. Wallingford had suffered through his share of black-tie occasions; he knew what bull-shitters most masters of ceremonies were--he knew how to bullshit, too. Therefore, Patrick decided his opening remarks should be nothing more or less than the fashionable and news-savvy blather of a master of ceremonies--the insincere, self-deprecating humor of someone who appears at ease while making a joke of himself. Boy, was he wrong.

  How about this for an opening line? "I feel insecure addressing such a distinguished group as yourselves, given that my principal and, by comparison, lowly accomplishment was to illegally feed my left hand to a lion in India five years ago."

  Surely that would break the ice. It had been good for a laugh at the last speech Wallingford had given, which was not really a speech but a toast at a dinner honoring Olympic athletes at the New York Athletic Club. The women in Tokyo would prove a tougher audience.

  That the airline lost Wallingford's checked luggage,
an overstuffed garment bag, seemed to set a tone. The official for the airline told him: "Your luggage is on the way to the Philippines--back tomorrow!"

  "You already know that my bag is going to the Philippines?"

  "Most luridly, sir," the official said, or so Patrick thought; he'd really said, "Most assuredly, sir," but Wallingford had misheard him. (Patrick had a childish and offensive habit of mocking foreign accents, which was almost as unlikable as his compulsion to laugh when someone tripped or fell down.) For the sake of clarification, the airline official added: "The lost luggage on that flight from New York always goes to the Philippines."

  "'Always'?" Wallingford asked.

  "Always back tomorrow, too," the official replied.

  There then followed the ride in the helicopter from the airport to the rooftop of his Tokyo hotel. Wallingford's Japanese hosts had arranged for the chopper.

  "Ah, Tokyo at twilight--what can compare to it?" said a stern-looking woman seated next to Patrick on the helicopter. He hadn't noticed that she'd also been on the plane from New York--probably because she'd been wearing an unflattering pair of tortoiseshell glasses and Wallingford had given her no more than a passing look. (She was the American author and self-described radical feminist, of course.)

  "You're being facetious, I trust," Patrick said to her.

  "I'm always facetious, Mr. Wallingford," the woman replied. She introduced herself with a short, firm handshake. "I'm Evelyn Arbuthnot. I recognized you by your hand--the other one."

  "Did they send your luggage to the Philippines, too?" Patrick asked Ms. Arbuthnot.

  "Look at me, Mr. Wallingford," she instructed him. "I'm strictly a carry-on person. Airlines don't lose my luggage."

  Perhaps he'd underestimated Evelyn Arbuthnot's abilities; maybe he should try to find, and even read, one of her books.

  But below them was Tokyo. He could see that there were heliports on the rooftops of many hotels and office buildings, and that other helicopters were hovering to land. It was as if there were a military invasion of the huge, hazy city, which, in the twilight, was tinged by an array of improbable colors, from pink to blood-red, in the fading sunset. To Wallingford, the rooftop helipads looked like bull's-eyes; he tried to guess which bull's-eye their helicopter was aiming at.