The Fourth Hand (18 page)

“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 tal 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 al 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 col eagues—the ones who secretly wanted him to fail—were disappointed on Dr. Zajac’s behalf. His remarks were too trenchant; they suggested that handtransplant surgery would one day soon be in the no-big-deal category of a tonsil ectomy. The journalists were bored; they couldn’t wait to hear from the medical ethicist, whom al 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.

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 especial y smal 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 Wal ingford, were the principal patient—“I guess I wil 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 spil ing into homes and hotel rooms and airport bars around the world. She seemed not to hear al the questions the reporters were asking her. Later Dr. Zajac and Patrick Wal ingford would realize that Mrs. Clausen had been fol owing 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 Wal ingford lay in his hospital bed beside the enormous, foreign-looking bandage, which was almost al he could see of his new left hand, he watched Mrs.

Clausen on the al -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 al the gauze.

Under the bandage was a brace that immobilized Wal ingford’s new wrist. The bandage was so extensive that you couldn’t tel where Otto’s hand and wrist, and part of his forearm, had been attached.

The coverage of the hand transplant on the al -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 Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford 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. Natural y 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) Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford 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 Wal ingford, 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 Wal ingford saw the writing on the wal —his ful 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 offcamera. This was only the
second
hand transplant
ever,
and the first one had been a failure!

While the ethicist was stil speaking, Wal ingford 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 bel y; her left hand, already without a wedding ring, overlapped her right.

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

But Wal ingford didn’t real y care, and this surprised him.

Let her usurp me, Patrick thought, simultaneously realizing that he was in love with Doris Clausen. (There’s no tel ing what the al -news network, or a medical ethicist, might have made of that.)

But a part of the improbability of Wal ingford fal ing 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 initial y; 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 Wal ingford, 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 smal , 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 got, 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 Wal ingford 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 fal in love with him.

The first time Wal ingford 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. Wal ingford had successful y 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 gradual y, his need for the various painkil ers went away, but he remembered the dream he’d often had, shortly after the painkil ers had kicked in. Someone was taking his photograph. Occasional y, even when Wal ingford had stopped using any painkil ers, 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 painkil ers that Wal ingford 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 recol ection 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 actual y 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 al 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 cal 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 Wal ingford believed he could wait. He hugged that memory like a pil ow in his sleep, not unlike the way he was doomed to remember that blue-capsule dream.

Patrick Wal ingford 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 swol en abdomen, to let the hand feel the fetus move.

Wal ingford 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.