John Irving - The Fourth Hand

“Is Dr. Zajac there?” Wallingford asked.

“This is Mrs. Zajac,” Irma answered. “Who wants him?”

“This is Patrick Wallingford. Dr. Zajac operated on—”

“Nicky!” Patrick heard Irma yell, although she’d partly covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand. “It’s the lion guy!”

Wallingford could identify some of the background noise: almost certainly a child, definitely a dog, and the unmistakable thudding of a ball. There was the scrape of a chair and the scrambling sound of the dog’s claws slipping on a wood floor. It must have been some kind of game. Were they trying to keep the ball away from the dog? Zajac, out of breath, finally came to the phone.

When Wallingford finished describing his symptoms, he added hopefully, “Maybe it’s just the weather.”

“The weather?” Zajac asked.

“You know—the heat wave,” Patrick explained.

“Aren’t you indoors most of the time?” Zajac asked. “Don’t they have airconditioning in New York?”

“It’s not always pain,” Wallingford went on. “Sometimes the sensation is like the start of something that doesn’t go anywhere. I mean you think the twinge or the prickle is going to lead to pain, but it doesn’t—it just stops as soon as it starts. Like something interrupted… something electrical.”

“Precisely,” Dr. Zajac told him. What did Wallingford expect? Zajac reminded him that, only five months after the attachment surgery, he’d regained twenty-two centimeters of nerve regeneration.

“I remember,” Patrick replied.

“Well, look at it this way,” Zajac said. “Those nerves still have something to say.”

“But why now ?” Wallingford asked him. “It’s been half a year since I lost it. I’ve felt something before, but nothing this specific. I actually feel like I’m touching something with my left middle finger or my left index finger, and I don’t even have a left hand !”

“What’s going on in the rest of your life?” Dr. Zajac responded. “I assume there’s some stress attached to your line of work? I don’t know how your love life is progressing, or if it’s progressing, but I remember that your love life seemed to be a matter of some concern to you—or so you said. Just remember, there are other factors affecting nerves, including nerves that have been cut off.”

“They don’t feel ‘cut off’—that’s what I mean,” Wallingford told him.

“That’s what I mean,” Zajac replied. “What you’re feeling is known medically as

‘paresthesia’—a wrong sensation, beyond perception. The nerve that used to make you feel pain or touch in your left middle finger, or in your left index finger, has been severed twice—first by a lion and then by me! That cut fiber is still sitting somewhere in the stump of your nerve bundle, accompanied by millions of other fibers coming from and going everywhere. If that neuron is stimulated at the tip of your nerve stump—by touch, by memory, by a dream —it sends the same old message it always did. The feelings that seem to come from where your left hand used to be are being registered by the same nerve fibers and pathways that used to come from your left hand. Do you get it?”

“Sort of,” Wallingford replied. (“Not really,” was what he should have said.) Patrick kept looking at his stump—the invisible ants were crawling there again. He’d forgotten to mention the sensation of crawling insects to Dr. Zajac, but the doctor didn’t give him time.

Dr. Zajac could tell that his patient wasn’t satisfied. “Look,” Zajac continued, “if you’re worried about it, fly up here. Stay in a nice hotel. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Saturday morning?” Patrick said. “I don’t want to ruin your weekend.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dr. Zajac told him. “I’ll just have to find someone to unlock the building. I’ve done that before. I have my own keys to the office.”

Wallingford wasn’t really worried about his missing hand anymore, but what else was he going to do this weekend?

“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.