“Come on—take the shuttle up here,” Zajac was telling him. “I’ll see you in the morning, just to put your mind at ease.”
“At what time?” Wallingford asked.
“Ten o’clock,” Zajac told him. “Stay at the Charles—it’s in Cambridge, on Bennett Street, near Harvard Square. They have a great gym, and a pool.”
Wallingford acquiesced. “Okay. I’ll see if I can get a reservation.”
“I’ll get you a reservation,” Zajac said. “They know me, and Irma has a membership at their health club.” Irma, Wallingford deduced, must be the wife—she of the less-than-golden tongue.
“Thank you,” was all that Wallingford could say. In the background, he could hear the happy shrieks of Dr. Zajac’s son, the growls and romping of the savagesounding dog, the bouncing of the hard, heavy ball.
“Not on my stomach!” Irma shouted. Patrick heard that, too. Not what on her stomach? Wallingford had no way of knowing that Irma was pregnant, much less that she was expecting twins; while she wasn’t due until mid-September, she was already as big around as the largest of the songbirds’ cages. Obviously, she didn’t want a child or a dog jumping on her stomach.
Patrick said good night to the gang in the newsroom; he’d never been the last of the evening-news people to leave. Nor would he be tonight, for there was Mary waiting for him by the elevators. What she’d overheard of his telephone conversation had misled her. Her face was bathed in tears.
“Who is she?” Mary asked him.
“Who’s who ?” Wallingford said.
“She must be married, if you’re seeing her on a Saturday morning.”
“Mary, please—”
“Whose weekend are you afraid of ruining?” she asked. “Isn’t that how you put it?”
“Mary, I’m going to Boston to see my hand surgeon.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone.”
“Take me with you,” Mary said. “If you’re alone, why not take me? How much time can you spend with your hand surgeon, anyway? You can spend the rest of the weekend with me!”
He took a chance, a big one, and told her the truth. “Mary, I can’t take you. I don’t want you to have my baby because I already have a baby, and I don’t get to see enough of him. I don’t want another baby that I don’t get to see enough of.”
“Oh,” she said, as if he’d hit her. “I see. That was clarifying. You’re not always clear, Pat. I appreciate you being so clear.”
“I’m sorry, Mary.”
“It’s the Clausen kid, isn’t it? I mean he’s actually yours. Is that it, Pat?”
“Yes,” Patrick replied. “But it’s not news, Mary. Please, let’s not make it news.”
He could see she was angry. The air-conditioning was cool, even cold, but Mary was suddenly colder. “Who do you think I am?” she growled. “What do you take me for?”
“One of us,” was all Wallingford could say.
As the elevator door closed, he could see her pacing; her arms were folded across her small, shapely breasts. She wore a summery, tan-colored skirt and a peachcolored cardigan, buttoned at her throat but otherwise open down the front—“an anti-air-conditioning sweater,” he’d heard one of the newsroom women call such cardigans. Mary wore the sweater over a white silk T-shirt. She had a long neck, a nice figure, smooth skin, and Patrick especially liked her mouth, which had a way of making him question his principle of not sleeping with her. At La Guardia, he was put on standby for the first available shuttle to Boston; there was a seat for him on the second flight. It was growing dark as his plane landed at Logan, and there was a little fog or light haze over Boston Harbor. Patrick would think about this later, recalling that his flight landed in Boston about the same time John F. Kennedy, Jr., was trying to land his plane at the airport in Martha’s Vineyard, not very far away. Or else young Kennedy was trying to see Martha’s Vineyard through that same indeterminate light, in something similar to that haze.
Wallingford checked into the Charles before ten and went immediately to the indoor swimming pool, where he spent a restorative half hour by himself. He would have stayed longer, but they closed the pool at ten-thirty. Wallingford—with his one hand—enjoyed floating and treading water. In keeping with his personality, he was a good floater.
He’d planned to get dressed and walk around Harvard Square after his swim. Summer school was in session; there would be students to look at, to remind him of his misspent youth. He could probably find a place to have a decent dinner with a good bottle of wine. In one of the bookstores on the square, he might spot something more gripping to read than the book he’d brought with him, which was a biography of Byron the size of a cinder block. But even in the taxi from the airport, Wallingford had felt the oppressive heat getting to him; and when he went back to his room from the pool, he took off his wet bathing suit and lay down naked on the bed and closed his eyes for a minute or two. He must have been tired. When he woke up almost an hour later, the air-conditioning had chilled him. He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. All he wanted was a beer and a hamburger—he no longer felt like going out.
True to himself, he would not turn on a television on the weekend. Given that the only alternative was the Byron biography, Patrick’s resistance to the TV was all the more remarkable. But Wallingford fell asleep so quickly—Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet’s feckless father was still alive—that the biography caused him no pain at all.
In the morning, he ate breakfast in the casual restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel. The dining room irritated him without his knowing why. It wasn’t the children. Maybe there were too many grown-ups who seemed bothered by the very presence of children.
The previous night and this morning, while Wallingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV’s not-the-news images. JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing; it appeared that he had flown into the ocean. But there was nothing to see—hence what was shown on television, again and again, was that image of young Kennedy at his father’s funeral procession. There was John junior, a three-year-old boy in shorts saluting his father’s passing casket—exactly as his mother, whispering in the little boy’s ear, had instructed him to do only seconds before. What Wallingford would later consider was that this image might stand as the representative moment of our country’s most golden century, which has also died, although we are still marketing it.
His breakfast finished, Patrick sat at his table, trying to finish his coffee without returning the relentless stare of a middle-aged woman across the room. But she now made her way toward him. Her path was deliberate; while she pretended to be only passing by, Wallingford knew she was going to say something to him. He could always tell. Often he could guess what the women were going to say, but not this time.
Her face had been pretty once. She wore no makeup, and her undyed brown hair was turning gray. In the crow’s-feet at the corners of her dark-brown eyes there was something sad and tired that reminded Patrick of Mrs. Clausen grown older.
“Scum… despicable swine… how do you sleep at night?” the woman asked him in a harsh whisper; her teeth were clenched, her lips parted no wider than was necessary for her to spit out her words.
“Pardon me?” said Patrick Wallingford.
“It didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” she asked. “Those poor families… the bodies not even recovered. But that doesn’t stop you, does it? You thrive on other people’s misfortune. You ought to call yourself the death network—no, the grief channel! Because you do more than invade people’s privacy—you steal their grief! You make their private grief public before they even have a chance to grieve!”
Wallingford wrongly assumed that she was speaking generically of his TV
newscasts past. He looked away from the woman’s entrenched stare, but among his fellow breakfast-eaters, he saw that no assistance would be forthcoming; from their unanimously hostile expressions, they ap
peared to share the demented woman’s view.
“I try to report what’s happened with sympathy,” Patrick began, but the nearviolent woman cut him off.
“Sympathy!” she cried. “If you had an ounce of sympathy for those poor people, you’d leave them alone!”
Since the woman was clearly deranged, what could Wallingford do? He pinned his bill to the table with the stump of his left forearm, quickly adding a tip and his room number before signing his name. The woman watched him coldly. Patrick stood up from the table. As he nodded good-bye to the woman and started to leave the restaurant, he was aware of the children gaping at his missing hand. An angry-looking sous-chef, all in white, stood glaring at Wallingford from behind a counter. “Hyena,” the sous-chef said.
“Jackal!” cried an elderly man at an adjacent table.
The woman, Patrick’s first attacker, said to his back: “Vulture… carrion feeder . .
.”
Wallingford kept walking, but he could sense that the woman was following him; she accompanied him to the elevators, where he pushed the button and waited. He could hear her breathing, but he didn’t look at her. When the elevator door opened, he stepped inside and allowed the door to close behind his back. Until he pushed the button for his floor and turned to face her, he didn’t know that the woman was not there; he was surprised to find himself alone.
It must be Cambridge, Patrick thought—all those Harvard and M.I.T. intellectuals who loathed the crassness of the media. He brushed his teeth, right-handed, of course. He was ever-conscious of how he’d been learning to brush his teeth with his left hand when it had just up and died. Still clueless about the breaking news, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and took a taxi to Dr. Zajac’s office. It was deeply disconcerting to Patrick that Dr. Zajac—specifically, his face—smelled of sex. This evidence of a private life was not what Wallingford wanted to know about his hand surgeon, even while Zajac was reassuring him that there was nothing wrong with the sensations he was experiencing in the stump of his left forearm.
It turned out there was a word for the feeling that small, unseen insects were crawling over or under his skin. “Formication,” Dr. Zajac said. Naturally Wallingford misheard him. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“It means ‘tactile hallucination.’ Formication, ” the doctor repeated, “with an m. ”
“Oh.”
“Think of nerves as having long memories,” Zajac told him. “What’s triggering those nerves isn’t your missing hand. I mentioned your love life because you once mentioned it. As for stress, I can only imagine what a week you have ahead of you. I don’t envy you the next few days. You know what I mean.”
Wallingford didn’t know what Dr. Zajac meant. What did the doctor imagine of the week Wallingford had ahead of him? But Zajac had always struck Wallingford as a little crazy. Maybe everyone in Cambridge was crazy, Patrick considered.
“It’s true, I’m a little unhappy in the love-life department,” Wallingford confessed, but there he paused—he had no memory of discussing his love life with Zajac. (Had the painkillers been more potent than he’d thought at the time?) Wallingford was further confused by trying to decide what was different about Dr. Zajac’s office. After all, that office was sacred ground; yet it had seemed a very different place when Mrs. Clausen was having her way with him in the exact chair in which he now sat, scanning the surrounding walls.
Of course! The photographs of Zajac’s famous patients—they were gone! In their place were children’s drawings. One child’s drawings, actually—they were all Rudy’s. Castles in heaven, Patrick would have guessed, and there were several of a large, sinking ship; doubtless the young artist had seen Titanic. (Both Rudy and Dr. Zajac had seen the movie twice, although Zajac had made Rudy shut his eyes during the sex scene in the car.)
As for the model in the series of photos of an increasingly pregnant young woman
… well, not surprisingly, Wallingford felt drawn to her coarse sexuality. She must have been Irma, the self-described Mrs. Zajac, who’d spoken to Patrick on the phone. Wallingford learned that Irma was expecting twins only when he inquired about the empty picture frames that were hanging from the walls in half a dozen places, always in twos.
“They’re for the twins, after they’re born,” Zajac told Patrick proudly. No one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates envied Zajac having twins, although that moron Mengerink opined that twins were what Zajac deserved for fucking Irma twice as much as Mengerink believed was “normal.”
Schatzman had no opinion of the upcoming birth of Dr. Zajac’s twins, because Schatzman was more than retired—Schatzman had died. And Gingeleskie (the living one) had shifted his envy of Zajac to a more virulent envy of a younger colleague, someone Dr. Zajac had brought into the surgical association. Nathan Blaustein had been Zajac’s best student in clinical surgery at Harvard. Dr. Zajac didn’t envy young Blaustein at all. Zajac simply recognized Blaustein as his technical superior—“a physical genius.”
When a ten-year-old in New Hampshire had lopped off his thumb in a snow blower, Dr. Zajac had insisted that Blaustein perform the reattachment surgery. The thumb was a mess, and it had been unevenly frozen. The boy’s father had needed almost an hour to find the severed thumb in the snow; then the family had to drive two hours to Boston. But the surgery had been a success. Zajac was already lobbying his colleagues to have Blaustein’s name added to the office nameplate and letterhead—a request that caused Mengerink to seethe with resentment, and no doubt made Schatzman and Gingeleskie (the dead one) roll in their graves.
As for Dr. Zajac’s ambitions in hand-transplant surgery, Blaustein was now in charge of such procedures. (There would soon be many procedures of that kind, Zajac had predicted.) While Zajac said he would be happy to be part of the team, he believed young Blaustein should head the operation because Blaustein was now the best surgeon among them. No envy or resentment there. Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac was a happy, relaxed man. Ever since Wallingford had lost Otto Clausen’s hand, Zajac had contented himself with his inventions of prosthetic devices, which he designed and assembled on his kitchen table while listening to his songbirds. Patrick Wallingford was the perfect guinea pig for Zajac’s inventions, because he was willing to model any new prosthesis on his evening newscast—even though he chose not to wear a prosthesis himself. The publicity had been good for the doctor. A prosthesis of his invention—it was predictably called “The Zajac”—was now manufactured in Germany and Japan. (The German model was marginally more expensive, but both were marketed worldwide.) The success of “The Zajac” had permitted Dr. Zajac to reduce his surgical practice to half-time. He still taught at the medical school, but he could devote more of himself to his inventions, and to Rudy and Irma and (soon) the twins.
“You should have children,” Zajac was telling Patrick Wallingford, as the doctor turned out the lights in his office and the two men awkwardly bumped into each other in the dark. “Children change your life.”
Wallingford hesitantly mentioned how much he wanted to construct a relationship with Otto junior. Did Dr. Zajac have any advice about the best way to connect with a young child, especially a child one saw infrequently?
“Reading aloud,” Dr. Zajac replied. “There’s nothing like it. Begin with Stuart Little, then try Charlotte’s Web. ”
“I remember those books!” Patrick cried. “I loved Stuart Little, and I can remember my mother weeping when she read me Charlotte’s Web. ”
“People who read Charlotte’s Web without weeping should be lobotomized,” Zajac responded. “But how old is little Otto?”
“Eight months,” Wallingford answered.
“Oh, no, he’s just started to crawl,” Dr. Zajac said. “Wait until he’s six or seven—I mean years . By the time he’s eight or nine, he’ll be reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web to himself, but he’ll be old enough to listen to those stories when he’s younger.”
“Six or sev
en,” Patrick repeated. How could he wait that long to establish a relationship with Otto junior?
After Zajac locked his office, he and Patrick rode the elevator down to the ground floor. The doctor offered to drive his patient back to the Charles Hotel since it was on his way home, and Wallingford gladly accepted. It was on the car radio that the famous TV journalist finally learned of Kennedy’s missing plane. By now it was mostly old news to everyone but Wallingford. JFK, Jr., was, together with his wife and sister-in-law, lost at sea, presumed dead. Young Kennedy, a relatively new pilot, had been flying the plane. There was mention of the haze over Martha’s Vineyard the previous night. Luggage tags had been found; later would come the luggage, then the debris from the plane itself.
“I guess it would be better if the bodies were found,” Zajac remarked. “I mean better than the speculation if they’re never found.”
It was the speculation that Wallingford foresaw, regardless of finding or not finding the bodies. There would be at least a week of it. The coming week was the week Patrick had almost chosen for his vacation; now he wished he had chosen it. (He’d decided to ask for a week in the fall instead, preferably when the Green Bay Packers had a home game at Lambeau Field.)
Wallingford went back to the Charles like a man condemned. He knew what the news, which was not the news, would be all the next week; it was everything that was most hateful in Patrick’s profession, and he would be part of it. The grief channel, the woman at breakfast had said, but the deliberate stimulation of public mourning was hardly unique to the network where Wallingford worked. The overattention to death had become as commonplace on television as the coverage of bad weather; death and bad weather were what TV did best. Whether they found the bodies or not, or regardless of how long it might take to find them—with or without what countless journalists would call “closure”—there would be no closure. Not until every Kennedy moment in recent history had been relived. Nor was the invasion of the Kennedy family’s privacy the ugliest aspect of it. From Patrick’s point of view, the principal evil was that it wasn’t news—it was recycled melodrama.
The Fourth Hand Page 17