John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Are you nice?” Mrs. Clausen was whispering to him, while her hips moved relentlessly against the downward pressure of his one hand. “Are you a good man?”

Although Patrick had been forewarned that this was what she wanted to know, he never expected she would ask him directly— no more than he’d anticipated a sexual encounter with her. Speaking strictly as an erotic experience, having sex with Doris Clausen was more charged with longing and desire than any other sexual encounter Wallingford had ever had. He wasn’t counting the wet dream induced by that cobalt-blue capsule he’d been given in Junagadh, but that extraordinary painkiller was no longer available—not even in India—and it should never be considered in the same category as actual sex.

As for actual sex, Patrick’s encounter with Otto Clausen’s widow, singular and brief though it was, put his entire weekend in Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot to shame. Having sex with Mrs. Clausen even eclipsed Wallingford’s tumultuous relationship with the tall blond sound technician who’d witnessed the lion attack in Junagadh.

That unfortunate German girl, who was back home in Hamburg, was still in therapy because of those lions, although Wallingford suspected she’d been more profoundly traumatized by fainting and then waking up in one of the meat carts than by seeing poor Patrick lose his left wrist and hand.

“Are you nice ? Are you a good man?” Doris repeated, her tears wetting Patrick’s face. Her small, strong body drew him farther and farther inside her, so that Wallingford could scarcely hear himself answer. Surely Dr. Zajac, as well as some other members of the surgical team who were presently assembling in the waiting room, must have heard Patrick’s plaintive cries.

“Yes! Yes! I am nice! I am a good man!” Wallingford wailed.

“Is that a promise?” Doris asked him in a whisper. It was that whisper again—what a killer!

Once more Wallingford answered her so loudly that Dr. Zajac and his colleagues could hear. “Yes! Yes! I promise! I do, I really do!”

The knock on the hand surgeon’s office door came a little later, after it had been quiet for a while. “Are we all right in there?” asked the head of the Boston team. At first Zajac thought they looked all right. Patrick Wallingford was dressed again and still sitting in the straight-backed chair. Mrs. Clausen, fully dressed, lay on her back on Dr. Zajac’s office rug. The fingers of her hands were clasped behind her head, and her elevated feet rested on the seat of the empty chair beside Wallingford.

“I have a bad back,” Doris explained. She didn’t, of course. It was a recommended position in several of the many books she’d read about how to get pregnant.

“Gravity,” was all she’d said in way of explanation to Patrick, as he’d smiled enchantedly at her.

They’re both crazy, thought Dr. Zajac, who could smell sex in the room. A medical ethicist might not have approved of this new development, but Zajac was a hand surgeon, and his surgical team was raring to go.

“If we’re feeling pretty comfy about this,” Zajac said—looking first at Mrs. Clausen, who looked very comfortable, and then at Patrick Wallingford, who looked stupefyingly drunk or stoned—“how about it? Do we have a green light?”

“Everything’s okay with me!” Doris Clausen said loudly, as if she were calling to someone over an expanse of water.

“Everything’s fine with me,” Patrick replied. “I guess we have a green light.”

It was the degree of sexual satisfaction in Wallingford’s expression that rang a bell with Dr. Zajac. Where had he seen that expression before? Oh, yes, he’d been in Bombay, where he’d been performing a number of exceedingly delicate hand surgeries on children in front of a selective audience of Indian pediatric surgeons. Zajac remembered one surgical procedure from there especially well—it involved a three-year-old girl who’d got her hand caught and mangled in the gears of some farm machinery.

Zajac was sitting with the Indian anesthesiologist when the little girl started to wake up. Children are always cold, often disoriented, and usually frightened when they awaken from general anesthesia. On occasion, they’re sick to their stomachs. Dr. Zajac remembered that he’d excused himself in order to miss seeing the unhappy child. He would have a look at how her hand was doing, of course, but that could be later on, when she was feeling better.

“Wait—you have to see this,” the Indian anesthesiologist told Zajac. “Just have a quick look at her.”

On the child’s innocent face was the expression of a sexually satisfied woman. Dr. Zajac was shocked. (The sad truth was that Zajac had never, personally, seen the face of a woman as sexually satisfied as that before.)

“My God, man,” Dr. Zajac said to the Indian anesthesiologist, “what did you give her?”

“Just a little something extra in her I.V.—not very much of it, either!” the anesthesiologist replied.

“But what is it? What’s it called?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” said the Indian anesthesiologist. “It’s not available in your country, and it never will be. It’s about to become unavailable here, too. The ministry of health intends to ban it.”

“I should hope so,” Dr. Zajac remarked—he abruptly left the recovery room. But the girl hadn’t been in any pain; and when Zajac examined her hand later, it was fine, and she was resting comfortably.

“How’s the pain?” he asked the child. A nurse had to translate for him.

“She says ‘everything’s okay.’ She has no pain,” the nurse interpreted. The girl went on babbling.

“What’s she saying now?” Dr. Zajac asked, and the nurse became suddenly shy or embarrassed.

“I wish they wouldn’t put that painkiller in the anesthesia,” the nurse told him. The child appeared to be relating a long story.

“What’s she telling you?” Zajac asked.

“Her dream,” the nurse answered, evasively. “She believes she’s seen her future. She’s going to be very happy and have lots of children. Too many, in my opinion.”

The little girl just smiled at him; for a three-year-old, there’d been something inappropriately seductive in her eyes.

Now, in Dr. Zajac’s Boston office, Patrick Wallingford was grinning in the same shameless fashion.

What an absolutely cuckoo coincidence! Dr. Zajac decided, as he looked at Wallingford’s sexually besotted expression.

“The tiger patient,” he’d called that little girl in Bombay, because the child had explained to her doctors and nurses that, when her hand had been caught in the farm machinery, the gears had growled at her like a tiger. Cuckoo or not, something about the way Wallingford looked gave Dr. Zajac pause. “The lion patient,” as Zajac had long thought of Patrick Wallingford, was possibly in need of more than a new left hand.

What Dr. Zajac didn’t know was that Wallingford had finally found what he needed—he’d found Doris Clausen.

AS DR. ZAJAC EXPLAINED in his first press conference following the fifteenhour operation, the patient was “at risk.” Patrick Wallingford was sleepy but in stable condition after awakening from general anesthesia. Of course the patient was taking “a combination of immunosuppressant drugs”—Zajac neglected to say how many or for how long. (He didn’t mention the steroids, either.) The hand surgeon, at the very moment national attention turned to him, was noticeably short-tempered. In the words of one colleague—that moron Mengerink, the cuckolding cretin—Zajac was also “as beady-eyed as the proverbial mad scientist.”