John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Animal experiments have shown that rejection reactions rarely occur before seven days, and ninety percent of the reactions occur in the first three months,”

which meant that Patrick’s rejection reaction was out of sync with the animals’. But Wallingford wasn’t offended by the statement. He wholeheartedly wished Matthew David Scott well. Of course he might have felt more affinity for the world’s very first hand transplant, because it, like his, had failed. That one was performed in Ecuador in 1964; in two weeks, the recipient rejected the donor’s hand. “At the time, only crude anti-rejection therapy was available,” the Times pointed out. (In ’64, we didn’t have the immunosuppressant drugs that are in standard use in heart, liver, and kidney transplants today.) Once out of the hospital, Patrick Wallingford moved quickly back to New York, where his career blossomed. He was made the anchor for the evening news; his popularity soared. He’d once been a faintly mocking commentator on the kind of calamity that had befallen him; he’d heretofore behaved as if there were less sympathy for the bizarre death, the bizarre loss, the bizarre grief, simply because they were bizarre. He knew now that the bizarre was commonplace, hence not bizarre at all. It was all death, all loss, all grief—no matter how stupid. Somehow, as an anchor, he conveyed this, and thereby made people feel cautiously better about what was indisputably bad.

But what Wallingford could do in front of a TV camera, he could not duplicate in what we call real life. This was most obvious with Mary whatever-her-namewas—Patrick utterly failed to make her feel even a little bit good. She’d gone through an acrimonious divorce without realizing that there was rarely any other kind. She was still childless. And while she’d become the smartest of the New York newsroom women, with whom Wallingford now worked again, Mary was not as nice as she’d once been. There was something edgy about her behavior; in her eyes, where Wallingford had formerly spotted only candor and an acute vulnerability, there was evidence of irritability, impatience, and cunning. These were all qualities that the other New York newsroom women had in spades. It saddened Wallingford to see Mary descending to their level—or growing up, as those other women would doubtless say.

Still Wallingford wanted to befriend her—that was truly all he wanted to do. To that end, he had dinner with her once a week. But she always drank too much and, when Mary drank, their dinner conversation turned to that topic between them which Wallingford vigilantly tried to avoid—namely, why he wouldn’t sleep with her.

“Am I that unattractive to you?” she would usually begin.

“You’re not unattractive to me, Mary. You’re a very good-looking girl.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Please, Mary—”

“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Mary would say. “Just a weekend away somewhere—just one night, for Christ’s sake! Just try it! You might even be interested in more than one night.”

“Mary, please —”

“Jesus, Pat—you used to fuck any one! How do you think it makes me feel… that you won’t fuck me ?”

“Mary, I want to be your friend. A good one.”

“Okay, I’ll be blunt—you’ve forced me,” Mary told him. “I want you to make me pregnant. I want a baby. You’d produce a good-looking baby. Pat, I want your sperm. Is that okay? I want your seed. ”

We can imagine that Wallingford was a little reluctant to act on this proposition. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what Mary meant; he just wasn’t sure that he wanted to go through all that again. Yet, in one sense, Mary was right: Wallingford would produce a good-looking kid. He already had.

Patrick was tempted to tell Mary the truth: that he’d made a baby, and that he loved his baby very much; that he loved Doris Clausen, the beer-truck driver’s widow, too. But as seemingly nice as Mary was, she still worked in the New York newsroom, didn’t she? She was a journalist, wasn’t she? Wallingford would have been crazy to tell her the truth.

“What about a sperm bank?” Patrick asked Mary one night. “I would be willing to consider making a contribution to a sperm bank, if you really have your heart set on having my child.”

“You shit!” Mary cried. “You can’t stand the thought of fucking me, can you? Jesus, Pat—do you need two hands just to get it up? What’s the matter with you? Or is it me ?”

It was an outburst of the kind that would put an end to their having dinner together on a weekly basis, at least for a while. On that upsetting evening, when Patrick had the taxi drop Mary at her apartment building first, she wouldn’t even say good night.

Wallingford, who was understandably distracted, told the taxi driver the wrong address. By the time Patrick realized his mistake, the cabbie had left him outside his old apartment building on East Sixty-second Street, where he’d lived with Marilyn. There was nothing to do but walk half a block to Park Avenue and hail an uptown cab; he was too tired to walk the twenty-plus blocks. But naturally the confused doorman recognized him and came running out on the sidewalk before Patrick could slip away.

“Mr. Wallingford!” Vlad or Vlade or Lewis said, in surprise.

“Paul O’Neill,” Patrick said, alarmed. He held out his one and only hand. “Bats left, throws left—remember?”

“Oh, Mr. Wallingford, Paul O’Neill couldn’t hold a fuckin’ Roman candle to you!

That’s a kinda firecracker,” the doorman explained. “I love the new show! Your interview with the legless child… you know, that kid who fell or was pushed into the polar-bear tank.”

“I know, Vlade,” Patrick said.

“It’s Lewis,” Vlad said. “Anyway, I just loved it! And that miserable fuckin’

woman who was given the results of her sister’s smear test—I don’t believe it!”

“I had trouble believing that one myself,” Wallingford admitted. “It’s called a Pap smear.”

“Your wife’s with someone,” the doorman noted slyly. “I mean tonight she’s with someone.”

“She’s my ex -wife,” Patrick reminded him.

“Most nights she’s alone.”

“It’s her life,” Wallingford said.

“Yeah, I know. You’re just payin’ for it!” the doorman replied.

“I have no complaints about how she lives her life,” Patrick said. “I live uptown now, on East Eighty-third Street.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Wallingford,” the doorman told him. “I won’t tell anybody!”

As for the missing hand, Patrick had learned to enjoy waving his stump at the television camera; he happily demonstrated his repeated failures with a variety of prosthetic devices, too.

“Look here—there are people only a little better coordinated than I am who have mastered this gizmo,” Wallingford liked to begin. “The other day, I watched a guy cut his dog’s toenails with one of these things. It was a frisky dog, too.”

But the results were predictably the same: Patrick would spill his coffee in his lap, or he would get his prosthesis snagged in his microphone wire and pop the little mike off his lapel.

In the end he would be one-handed again, nothing artificial. “For twenty-four-hour international news, this is Patrick Wallingford. Good night, Doris,” he would always sign off, waving his stump. “Good night, my little Otto.”

Patrick would be a long time re-entering the dating scene. After he tried it, the pace disappointed him—it seemed either too fast or too slow. He felt out of step, so he stopped altogether. He occasionally got laid when he traveled, but now that he was an anchor, not a field reporter, he didn’t travel as much as he used to. Besides, you can’t call getting laid “dating”; Wallingford, typically, wouldn’t have called it anything at all.