The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER TWELVE Lambeau Field

HE WOULD HAVE TIME TO HEAL. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment) first turned yellow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie’s nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick’s thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie’s love-bite) went away. Where there’d been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wallingford’s new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto’s shoulder—that bare, that unmarked.

Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son’s smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy. He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wallingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. All he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick’s present contract. Hadn’t it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

Yes, it had. (She’d said, “Ask for three years—no, make that five.”) But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. “I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat,” was all she said.

“I see,” Wallingford replied. “Then I suppose I might as well keep the anchor job.”

“But are you sure you want the job, Pat?”

He believed that Mary wasn’t being cautious just because Wharton and Sabina were there in her office. (The moon-faced CEO and the bitter Sabina sat listening with seeming indifference, not saying a word.) What Wallingford understood about Mary was that she didn’t really know what he wanted, and this made her nervous.

“It depends,” Patrick replied. “It’s hard to imagine trading an anchor chair for field assignments, even if I get to pick my own assignments. You know what they say:

‘Been there, done that.’ It’s hard to look forward to going backward. I guess you’d have to make me an offer, so I have a better idea of what you have in mind.”

Mary looked at him, smiling brightly. “How was Wisconsin?” she asked. Wharton, whose frozen blandness would begin to blend in with the furniture if he didn’t say something (or at least twitch) in the next thirty seconds, coughed minimally into his cupped palm. The unbelievable blankness of his expression called to mind the vacuity of a masked executioner; even Wharton’s cough was underexpressed.

Sabina, whom Wallingford could barely remember sleeping with—now that he thought of it, she’d whimpered in her sleep like a dog having a dream—cleared her throat as if she’d swallowed a pubic hair.

“Wisconsin was fine.”

Wallingford spoke as neutrally as possible, but Mary correctly deduced that nothing had been decided between him and Doris Clausen. He couldn’t have waited to tell her if he and Mrs. Clausen were really a couple. Just as, the second Mary knew she was pregnant, she wouldn’t wait to tell him. And they both knew it had been necessary to enact this standoff in the presence of Wharton and Sabina, who both knew it, too. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have been advisable for Patrick Wallingford and Mary Shanahan to be alone together.

“Boy, is it ever frosty around here!” was what Angie told Wallingford, when she got him alone in the makeup chair.

“Is it ever !” Patrick admitted. He was glad to see the good-hearted girl, who’d left his apartment the cleanest it had been since the day he moved in.

“So… are ya gonna tell me about Wisconsin or what?” Angie asked.

“It’s too soon to say,” Wallingford confessed. “I’ve got my fingers crossed,” he added—an unfortunate choice of words because he was reminded of Mrs. Clausen’s fertility charm.

“My fingers are crossed for ya, too,” Angie said. She had stopped flirting with him, but she was no less sincere and no less friendly.

Wallingford would throw away his digital alarm clock and replace it with a new one, because whenever he looked at the old one he would remember Angie’s piece of gum stuck there—as well as the near-death gyrations that had caused her gum to be expectorated with such force. He didn’t want to lie in bed thinking about Angie unless Doris Clausen said no.

For now, Doris was being vague. Wallingford had to acknowledge that it was hard to know what to make of the photographs she sent him, although her accompanying comments, if not cryptic, struck him as more mischievous than romantic.

She hadn’t sent him a copy of every picture on the roll; missing, Patrick saw, were two he’d taken himself. Her purple bathing suit on the clothesline, alongside his swimming trunks—he’d taken two shots in case she wanted to keep one of the photos for herself. She had kept them both.

The first two photos Mrs. Clausen sent were unsurprising, beginning with that one of Wallingford wading in the shallow water near the lakeshore with little Otto naked in his arms. The second picture was the one that Patrick took of Doris and Otto junior on the sundeck of the main cabin. It was Wallingford’s first night at the cottage on the lake, and nothing had happened yet between him and Mrs. Clausen. As if she weren’t even thinking that anything might happen between them, her expression was totally relaxed, free of any expectation. The only surprise was the third photograph, which Wallingford didn’t know Doris had taken; it was the one of him sleeping in the rocking chair with his son. Patrick did not know how to interpret Mrs. Clausen’s remarks in the note that accompanied the photographs—especially how matter-of-factly she reported that she’d taken two shots of little Otto asleep in his father’s arms and had kept one for herself. The tone of her note, which Wallingford had at first found mischievous, was also ambiguous. Doris had written: On the evidence of the enclosed, you have the potential to be a good father.

Only the potential ? Patrick’s feelings were hurt. Nevertheless, he read The English Patient in the fervent hope he would find a passage to bring to her attention—maybe one she had marked, one they both liked.

When Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen to thank her for the photographs, he thought he might have found such a passage. “I loved that part about the ‘list of wounds,’ especially when she stabs him with the fork. Do you remember that?

‘The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.’ ”

Doris was silent on her end of the phone.

“You didn’t like that part?” Patrick asked.

“I’d just as soon not be reminded of your bite marks, and your other wounds,” she told him.

“Oh.”

Wallingford would keep reading The English Patient. It was merely a matter of reading the novel more carefully; yet he threw caution to the wind when he came upon Almásy saying of Katharine, “She was hungrier to change than I expected.”

This was surely true of Patrick’s impression of Mrs. Clausen as a lover—she’d been voracious in ways that had astonished him. He called her immediately, forgetting that it was very late at night in New York; in Green Bay, it was only an hour earlier. Given little Otto’s schedule, Doris usually went to bed early. She didn’t sound like herself when she answered the phone. Patrick was instantly apologetic.

“I’m sorry. You were asleep.”

“That’s okay. What is it?”

“It’s a passage in The English Patient, but I can tell you what it is another time. You can call me in the morning, as early as you want. Please wake me up!” he begged her.

“Read me the passage.”

“It’s just something Almásy says about Katharine—”

“Go on. Read it.”

He read: “ ‘She was hungrier to change than I expected.’ ” Out of context, the passage suddenly struck Wallingford as pornographic, but he trusted Mrs. Clausen to remember the context.

“Yes, I know that part,” she said, without emotion. Maybe she was still half asleep.

“Well…” Wallingford started to say.

“I suppose I was hungrier than you expected. Is that it?” Doris asked. (The way she said it, she might as well have asked, “Is that all ?”)

“Yes,” Patrick answered. He could hear her sigh.

“Well…” Mrs. Clausen began. Then she seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “It really is too late to call,” was her only comment. Which left Wallingford with nothing to say but “I’m sorry.” He would have to keep reading and hoping.

Meanwhile, Mary Shanahan summoned him to her office— not for the purpose, Patrick soon realized, of telling him that she was or wasn’t pregnant. Mary had something else on her mind. While Wallingford’s idea of a renegotiated contract of at least three years’ duration was not to the all-news network’s liking—not even if Wallingford was willing to give up the anchor chair and return to reporting from the field—the twenty-four-hour international channel was interested to know if Wallingford would accept “occasional” field assignments.

“Do you mean that they want me to begin the process of phasing myself out of the anchor job?” Patrick asked.

“Were you to accept, we would renegotiate your contract,” Mary went on, without answering his question. “Naturally you’d get to keep your present salary.” She made the issue of not offering him a raise sound like a positive thing. “I believe we’re talking about a two-year contract.” She wasn’t exactly committing herself to it, and a two-year contract was superior to his present agreement by a scant six months.

What a piece of work she is! Wallingford was thinking, but what he said was, “If the intention is to replace me as the anchor, why not bring me into the discussion? Why not ask me how I’d like to be replaced? Maybe gradually would be best, but maybe not. I’d at least like to know the long-range plan.”

Mary Shanahan just smiled. Patrick had to marvel at how quickly she’d adjusted to her new and undefined power. Surely she was not authorized to make decisions of this kind on her own, and she probably hadn’t yet learned just how many other people were part of the decision-making process, but of course she conveyed none of this to Wallingford. At the same time, she was smart enough not to lie directly; she would never claim that there was no long-range plan, nor would she ever admit that there was one and that not even she knew what it was.

“I know you’ve always wanted to do something about Germany, Pat,” was what she told him, seemingly out of the blue—but nothing with Mary was out of the blue.

Wallingford had asked to do a piece about German reunification—nine years after the fact. Among other things, he’d suggested exploring how the language for reunification—now “unification” in most of the official press—had changed. Even The New York Times had subscribed to “unification.” Yet Germany, which had been one country, had been divided; then it was made one again. Why wasn’t that re unification? Most Americans thought of Germany as re unified, surely. What were the politics of that not-so-little change in the language? And what differences of opinion among Germans remained about reunification or unification?

But the all-news network hadn’t been interested. “Who cares about Germans?”

Dick had asked. Fred had felt the same way. (In the New York newsroom, they were always saying they were “sick of” something—sick of religion, sick of the arts, sick of children, sick of Germans.)

Now here was Mary, the new news editor, holding out Germany as the dubious carrot before the reluctant donkey.

“What about Germany?” Wallingford asked suspiciously. Naturally Mary wouldn’t have raised the issue of him accepting “occasional” field assignments if the network hadn’t had one such assignment already in mind. What was it?

“Actually there are two items,” Mary answered, making it sound as if two were a plus.

But she’d called the stories “items,” which forewarned Patrick. German reunification was no item —that subject was too big to be called an item. “Items”

in the newsroom were trivial stories, freakish amusements of the kind Wallingford knew all too well. Otto senior blowing his brains out in a beer truck after the Super Bowl—that was an item. The lion guy himself was an item. If the network had two

“items” for Patrick Wallingford to cover, Wallingford knew they would be sensationally stupid stories, or trivial in the extreme—or both.

“What are they, Mary?” Patrick asked. He was trying not to lose his temper, because he sensed that these field assignments were not of Mary’s choosing; something about her hesitancy told him that she already knew how he would respond to the proposals.

“You’ll probably think they’re just silly,” she said. “But they are in Germany.”

“What are they, Mary?”

The channel had already aired a minute and a half of the first item—everyone had seen it. A forty-two-year-old German had managed to kill himself while watching the solar eclipse that August. He’d been driving his car near Kaiserslautern when a witness observed him weaving from one side of the road to the other; then his car had accelerated and struck a bridge abutment, or some kind of pier. It was discovered that he’d been wearing his solar viewers—he didn’t want to miss the eclipse. The lenses had been sufficiently dark to obscure everything but the partially occluded sun.

“We already ran that item,” was Wallingford’s only response.

“Well, we were thinking of a follow-up. Something more in-depth,” Mary told him.

What “follow-up” could there be to such lunacy? How “in-depth” could such an absurd incident be? Had the man had a family? If so, they would no doubt be upset. But how long an interview could Wallingford possibly sustain with the witness? And for what purpose? To what end?

“What’s the other item?”

He’d heard about the other story, too—it had been on one of the wire services. A fifty-one-year-old German, a hunter from Bad-somewhere, had been found shot dead beside his parked car in the Black Forest. The hunter’s gun was pointed out the window of his car; inside the car was the dead hunter’s frantic dog. The police concluded that the dog had shot him. (Unintentionally, of course—the dog had not been charged.)

Would they want Wallingford to interview the dog?

They were the kind of not-the-news stories that would end up as jokes on the Internet—they were already jokes. They were also business as usual, the bizarre-ascommonplace lowlights of the twenty-four-hour international news. Even Mary Shanahan was embarrassed to have brought them up.

“I was thinking of something about Germany, Mary,” Patrick said.

“I know,” she sympathized, touching him in that fondly felt area of his left forearm.

“Was there anything else, Mary?” he asked.

“There was an item in Australia,” she said hesitantly. “But I know you’ve never expressed any interest in going there.”

He knew the item she meant; no doubt there was a plan to follow up this pointless death, too. In this instance, a thirty-three-year-old computer technician had drunk himself to death in a drinking competition at a hotel bar in Sydney. The competition had the regrettable name of Feral Friday, and the deceased had allegedly downed four whiskeys, seventeen shots of tequila, and thirty-four beers—all in an hour and forty minutes. He died with a blood-alcohol level of 0.42.

“I know the story,” was all Wallingford said.

Mary once more touched his arm. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you, Pat.”

What further depressed Wallingford was that these silly items weren’t even new news. They were insignificant snippets on the theme of the world being ridiculous; their punch lines had already been told.

The twenty-four-hour international channel had a summer intern program—in lieu of a salary, college kids were promised an “authentic experience.” But even for free, couldn’t the interns manage to do more than collect these stories of stupid and funny deaths? Somewhere down south, a young soldier had died of injuries sustained in a three-story fall; he had been engaged in a spitting contest at the time. (A true story.) A British farmer’s wife had been charged by sheep and driven off a cliff in the north of England. (Also true.)

The all-news network had long indulged a collegiate sense of humor, which was synonymous with a collegiate sense of death. In short, no context. Life was a joke; death was the final gag. In meeting after meeting, Wallingford could imagine Wharton or Sabina saying: “Let the lion guy do it.”

As for what better news Wallingford wanted to hear from Mary Shanahan, it was simply that she wasn’t pregnant. For that news, or its opposite, Wallingford understood that he would have to wait.

He wasn’t good at waiting, which in this case produced some good results. He decided to inquire about other jobs in journalism. People said that the so-called educational network (they meant PBS) was boring, but—especially when it comes to the news—boring isn’t the worst thing you can be.

The PBS affiliate for Green Bay was in Madison, Wisconsin, where the university was. Wallingford wrote to Wisconsin Public Television and told them what he had in mind—he wanted to create a news-analysis show. He proposed examining the lack of context in the news that was reported, especially on television. He said he would demonstrate that often there was more interesting news behind the news; and that the news that was reported was not necessarily the news that should have been reported.

Wallingford wrote: “It takes time to develop a complex or complicated story; what works best on TV are stories that don’t take a lot of time. Disasters are not only sensational—they happen immediately. Especially on television, immediacy works best. I mean ‘best’ from a marketing point of view, which is not necessarily good for the news.”

He sent his curriculum vitae and a similar proposal for a news-analysis show to the public-television stations in Milwaukee and St. Paul, as well as the two publictelevision stations in Chicago. But why did he focus on the Midwest, when Mrs. Clausen had said that she would live anywhere with him— if she chose to live with him at all?

He had taped the photo of her and little Otto to the mirror in his office dressing room. When Mary Shanahan saw it, she looked closely at both the child and his mother, but more closely at Doris, and cattily observed: “Nice mustache.”

It was true that Doris Clausen had the faintest, softest down on her upper lip. Wallingford was indignant that Mary had called this super-soft place a mustache!

Because of his own warped sensibilities, and his overfamiliarity with a certain kind of New Yorker, Patrick decided that Doris Clausen should not be moved too far from Wisconsin. There was something about the Midwest in her that Wallingford loved.

If Mrs. Clausen moved to New York, one of those newsroom women would persuade her to get a wax job on her upper lip! Something that Patrick adored about Doris would be lost. Therefore, Wallingford wrote only to a very few PBS

affiliates in the Midwest; he stayed as close to Green Bay as he could. While he was at it, he didn’t stop with noncommercial television stations. The only radio he ever listened to was public radio. He loved NPR, and there were NPR stations everywhere. There were two in Green Bay and two in Madison; he sent his proposal for a news-analysis show to all four of them, in addition to NPR

affiliates in Milwaukee, Chicago, and St. Paul. (There was even an NPR station in Appleton, Wisconsin, Doris Clausen’s hometown, but Patrick resisted applying for a job there.)

As August came and went—it was now nearly gone—Wallingford had another idea. All the Big Ten universities, or most of them, had to have graduate programs in journalism. The Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern, was famous. He sent his proposal for a news-analysis course there, as well as to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Wallingford was on a roll about the unreported context of the news. He ranted, but effectively, on how trivializing to the real news the news that was reported had become. It was not only his subject; Patrick Wallingford was his argument’s bestknown example. Who better than the lion guy to address the sensationalizing of petty sorrows, while the underlying context, which was the terminal illness of the world, remained unrevealed?

And the best way to lose a job was not to wait to be fired. Wasn’t the best way to be offered another job and then quit ? Wallingford was overlooking the fact that, if they fired him, they would have to renegotiate the remainder of his contract. Regardless, it surprised Mary Shanahan when Patrick popped his head— just his head—into her office and cheerfully said to her: “Okay. I accept.”

“Accept what, Pat?”

“Two years, same salary, occasional reporting from the field—per my approval of the field assignment, of course. I accept.”

“You do ?”

“Have a nice day, Mary,” Patrick told her.

Just let them try to find a field assignment he’d accept! Wallingford not only intended to make them fire him; he fully expected to have a new job lined up and waiting for him when they pulled the fucking trigger. (And to think he’d once had no capacity for long-range scheming.)

They didn’t wait long to suggest the next field assignment. You could just see them thinking: How could the lion guy resist this one? They wanted Wallingford to go to Jerusalem. Talk about disaster-man territory! Journalists love Jerusalem—no shortage of the bizarre-as-commonplace there.

There’d been a double car bombing. At around 5:30P.M. Israeli time on Sunday, September 5, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing the terrorists who were transporting the bombs to their designated targets. The bombs exploded because the terrorists had set them on daylight-saving time; three weeks before, Israel had prematurely switched to standard time. The terrorists, who must have assembled the bombs in a Palestinian-controlled area, were the victims of the Palestinians refusing to accept what they called “Zionist time.” The drivers of the cars carrying the bombs had changed their watches, but not the bombs, to Israeli time.

While the all-news network found it funny that such self-serious madmen had been detonated by their own dumb mistake, Wallingford did not. The madmen may have deserved to die, but terrorism in Israel was no joke; it trivialized the gravity of the tensions in that country to call this klutzy accident news. More people would die in other car bombings, which wouldn’t be funny. And once again the context of the story was missing—that is, why the Israelis had switched from daylight-saving to standard time prematurely.

The change had been intended to accommodate the period of penitential prayers. The Selihoth (literally, pardons) are prayers for forgiveness; the prayer-poems of repentance are a continuation of the Psalms. (The suffering of Israel in the various lands of the Dispersion is their principal theme.) These prayers have been incorporated into the liturgy to be recited on special occasions, and on the days preceding Rosh Hashanah; they give utterance to the feelings of the worshiper who has repented and now pleads for mercy.

While in Israel the time of day had been changed to accommodate these prayers of atonement, the enemies of the Jews had nonetheless conspired to kill them. That was the context, which made the double car bombing more than a comedy of errors; it was not a comedy at all. In Jerusalem, this was an almost ordinary vignette, both recalling and foreshadowing a tableau of bombings. But to Mary and the all-news network, it was a tale of terrorists getting their just deserts—nothing more.

“You must want me to turn this down. Is that it, Mary?” Patrick asked. “And if I turn down enough items like these, then you can fire me with impunity.”

“We thought it was an interesting story. Right up your alley,” was all Mary would say.

He was burning bridges faster than they could build new ones; it was an exciting but unresolved time. When he wasn’t actively engaged in trying to lose his job, he was reading The English Patient and dreaming of Doris Clausen. Surely she would have been enchanted, as he was, by Almásy’s inquiring of Madox about “the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck.” Almásy asks: “What is it, does it have an official name?” To which Madox mutters, “Pull yourself together.” Later, pointing his finger at a spot near his own Adam’s apple, Madox tells Almásy that it’s called “the vascular sizood.”

Wallingford called Mrs. Clausen with the heartfelt conviction that she would have liked the incident as much as he did, but she had her doubts about it.

“It was called something different in the movie,” Doris told him.

“It was?”

He hadn’t seen the film in how long? He rented the video and watched it immediately. But when he got to that scene, he couldn’t quite catch what that part of a woman’s neck was called. Mrs. Clausen had been right, however; it was not called “the vascular sizood.”

Wallingford rewound the video and watched the scene again. Almásy and Madox are saying good-bye. (Madox is going home, to kill himself.) Almásy says, “There is no God.” Adding: “But I hope someone looks after you.”

Madox seems to remember something and points to his own throat. “In case you’re still wondering—this is called the suprasternal notch.” Patrick caught the line the second time. Did that part of a woman’s neck have two names? And when he’d watched the film again, and after he’d finished reading the novel, Wallingford would declare to Mrs. Clausen how much he loved the part where Katharine says to Almásy, “I want you to ravish me.”

“In the book, you mean,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“In the book and in the movie,” Patrick replied.

“It wasn’t in the movie,” Doris told him. (He’d just watched it—he felt certain that the line was there!) “You just thought you heard that line because of how much you liked it.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“It’s a guy thing to like,” she said. “I never believed she would say it to him.”

Had Patrick believed so wholeheartedly in Katharine saying “I want you to ravish me” that, in his easily manipulated memory, he’d simply inserted the line into the film? Or had Doris found the line so unbelievable that she’d blanked it out of the movie? And what did it matter whether the line was or wasn’t in the film? The point was that Patrick liked it and Mrs. Clausen did not.

Once again Wallingford felt like a fool. He’d tried to invade a book Doris Clausen had loved, and a movie that had (at least for her) some painful memories attached to it. But books, and sometimes movies, are more personal than that; they can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared.

Good novels and films are not like the news, or what passes for the news—they are more than items. They are comprised of the whole range of moods you are in when you read them or see them. You can never exactly imitate someone else’s love of a movie or a book, Patrick now believed.

But Doris Clausen must have sensed his disheartenment and taken pity on him. She sent him two more photographs from their time together at the cottage on the lake. He’d been hoping that she would send him the one of their bathing suits sideby-side on the clothesline. How happy he was to have that picture! He taped it to the mirror in his office dressing room. (Let Mary Shanahan make some catty remark about that ! Just let her try.)

It was the second photo that shocked him. He’d still been asleep when Mrs. Clausen had taken it, a self-portrait, with the camera held crookedly in her hand. No matter—you could see well enough what was going on. Doris was ripping the wrapper off the second condom with her teeth. She was smiling at the camera, as if Wallingford were the camera and he already knew how she was going to put the condom on his penis.

Patrick didn’t stick that photograph on his office dressing-room mirror; he kept it in his apartment, on his bedside table, next to the telephone, so that he could look at it when Mrs. Clausen called him or when he called her.

Late one night, after he’d gone to bed but had not yet fallen asleep, the phone rang and Wallingford turned on the light on his night table so that he could look at her picture when he spoke to her. But it wasn’t Doris.

“Hey, Mista One Hand… Mista No Prick,” Angie’s brother Vito said. “I hope I’m interruptin’ somethin’…” (Vito called often, always with nothing to say.) When Wallingford hung up, he did so with a decided sadness that was not quite nostalgia. In the at-home hours of his life, since he’d come back to New York from Wisconsin, he not only missed Doris Clausen; he missed that wild, gumchewing night with Angie, too. At these times, he even occasionally missed Mary Shanahan—the old Mary, before she acquired the certitude of a last name and the uncomfortable authority she now held over him.

Patrick turned out the light. As he drifted into sleep, he tried to think forgivingly of Mary. The past litany of her most positive features returned to him: her flawless skin, her unadulterated blondness, her sensible but sexy clothes, her perfect little teeth. And, Wallingford assumed—since Mary was still hoping she was pregnant—her commitment to no prescription drugs. She’d been a bitch to him at times, but people are not only what they seem to be. After all, he had dumped her. There were women who would have been more bitter about it than Mary was. Speak of the devil! The phone rang and it was Mary Shanahan; she was crying into the phone. She’d got her period. It had come a month and a half late—late enough to have given her hope that she was pregnant—but her period had arrived just the same.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Wallingford said, and he genuinely was sorry—for her. For himself, he felt unearned jubilation; he’d dodged another bullet.

“Imagine you, of all people—shooting blanks!” Mary told him, between sobs. “I’ll give you another chance, Pat. We’ve got to try it again, as soon as I’m ovulating.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” he repeated. “I’m not your man. Blanks or no blanks, I’ve had my chance.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I’m saying no. We’re not having sex again, not for any reason.”

Mary called him a number of colorful names before she hung up. But Mary’s disappointment in him did not interfere with Patrick’s sleep; on the contrary, he had the best night’s sleep since he’d drifted off in Mrs. Clausen’s arms and awakened to the feeling of her teeth unrolling a condom on his penis. Wallingford was still sound asleep when Mrs. Clausen called. It may have been an hour earlier in Green Bay, but little Otto routinely woke up his mother a couple of hours before Wallingford was awake.

“Mary isn’t pregnant. She just got her period,” Patrick announced.

“She’s going to ask you to do it again. That’s what I would do,” Mrs. Clausen said.

“She already asked. I already said no.”

“Good,” Doris told him.

“I’m looking at your picture,” Wallingford said.

“I can guess which one,” she replied.

Little Otto was talking baby-talk somewhere near the phone. Wallingford didn’t say anything for a moment—just imagining the two of them was enough. Then he asked her, “What are you wearing? Have you got any clothes on?”

“I’ve got two tickets to a Monday-night game, if you want to go,” was her answer.

“I want to go.”

“It’s Monday Night Football, the Seahawks and the Packers at Lambeau Field.”

Mrs. Clausen spoke with a reverence that was wasted on Wallingford. “Mike Holmgren’s coming home. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Me neither!” Patrick replied. He didn’t know who Mike Holmgren was. He would have to do a little research.

“It’s November first. Are you sure you’re free?”

“I’ll be free!” he promised. Wallingford was trying to sound joyful while, in truth, he was heartbroken that he would have to wait until November to see her. It was only the middle of September! “Maybe you could come to New York before then?” he asked.

“No. I want to see you at the game,” she told him. “I can’t explain.”

“You don’t have to explain!” Patrick quickly replied.

“I’m glad you like the picture,” was the way she changed the subject.

“I love it! I love what you did to me.”

“Okay. I’ll see you before too long,” was the way Mrs. Clausen closed the conversation—she didn’t even say good-bye.

The next morning, at the script meeting, Wallingford tried not to think that Mary Shanahan was behaving like a woman who was having a bad period, only more so, but that was his impression. Mary began the meeting by abusing one of the newsroom women. Her name was Eleanor and, for whatever reason, she’d slept with one of the summer interns; now that the boy had gone back to college, Mary accused Eleanor of robbing the cradle.

Only Wallingford knew that, before he’d stupidly agreed to try to make Mary pregnant, Mary had propositioned the intern. He was a good-looking boy, and he was smarter than Wallingford—he’d rejected Mary’s proposal. Patrick not only liked Eleanor for sleeping with the boy; he had also liked the boy, whose summer internship had not entirely lacked an authentic experience. (Eleanor was one of the oldest of the married women in the newsroom.)

Only Wallingford knew that Mary didn’t really give a damn that Eleanor had slept with the boy—she was just angry because she had her period. Suddenly the idea of taking a field assignment, any assignment, attracted Patrick. It would at least get him out of the newsroom, and out of New York. He told Mary that she would find him open to a field assignment, next time, provided that she not try to accompany him where he was being sent. (Mary had volunteered to travel with him the next time she was ovulating.)

There was, in the near future, Wallingford informed Mary, only one day and night when he would not be available for a field assignment or to anchor the evening news. He was attending a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1, 1999—no matter what.

Someone (probably Mary) leaked it to ABC Sports that Patrick Wallingford would be at the game that night, and ABC immediately asked the lion guy to stop by the booth during the telecast. (Why say no to a two-minute appearance before how many million viewers? Mary would say to Patrick.) Maybe disaster man could even call a play or two. Did Wallingford know, someone from ABC asked, that his hand-eating episode had sold almost as many videos as the annual NFL highlights film?

Yes, Wallingford knew. He respectfully declined the offer to visit the ABC commentators. As he put it, he was attending the game with “a special friend”; he didn’t use Doris’s name. This might mean that a TV camera would be on him during the game, but so what? Patrick didn’t mind waving once or twice, just to show them what they wanted to see—the no-hand, or what Mrs. Clausen called his fourth hand. Even the sports hacks wanted to see it.

That may have been why Wallingford got a more enthusiastic response to his letters of inquiry to public-television stations than he received from public radio or the Big Ten journalism schools. All the PBS affiliates were interested in him. In general, Patrick was heartened by the collective response; he would have a job to go to, possibly even an interesting one.

Naturally he breathed not a word of this to Mary, while he tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer him. A war wouldn’t have surprised him; an E. coli bacteria outbreak would have suited Mary’s mood. Wallingford longed to learn why Mrs. Clausen insisted on waiting to see him until a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay. He phoned her on Saturday night, October 30, although he knew he would see her the coming Monday, but Doris remained noncommittal on the subject of the game’s curious importance to her. “I just get anxious when the Packers are favored,” was all she said. Wallingford went to bed fairly early that Saturday night. Vito called once, around midnight, but Patrick quickly fell back to sleep. When the phone rang on Sunday morning—it was still dark outside—Wallingford assumed it was Vito again; he almost didn’t answer. But it was Mary Shanahan, and she was all business.

“I’ll give you a choice,” she told him, without bothering to say hello or so much as his name. “You can cover the scene at Kennedy, or we’ll get you a plane to Boston and a helicopter will take you to Otis Air Force Base.”

“Where’s that?” Wallingford asked.

“Cape Cod. Do you know what’s happened, Pat?”

“I was asleep, Mary.”

“Well, turn on the fucking news! I’ll call you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin.”

“I’m going to Green Bay, no matter what,” he told her, but she’d already hung up. Not even the brevity of her call or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick’s memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary’s bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling—the shadows racing like sperm. Wallingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo. It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. There’d been no distress call from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet’s rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute—“like a rock,” an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation—the reports would all be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they’d told him the flight was closed, he’d screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members—not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wallingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape—the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who’d been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they’d reportedly found only a small flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there’d been no explosion. Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who’d collapsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She’d fallen in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wallingford that her brother had been on the plane. Naturally the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wallingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who’d been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wallingford because Wallingford had only one hand.

“If there’s anything the City of New York can do to help, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wallingford and said: “Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster.”

An Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: “We belong to God and to God we return,” he kept praying, in Arabic. Wallingford had to ask someone for a translation.

At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network’s plans. “Either you’re our anchor tomorrow evening or we’ve got you on a Coast Guard cutter,” Mary Shanahan informed him.

“I’m in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary,” Wallingford said.

“They’re going to call off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay.”

“I’m going to the football game,” Wallingford told her. He looked at Wharton, who looked away; then he looked at Sabina, who stared with feigned neutrality back at him. He didn’t so much as glance at Mary.

“Then we’ll fire you, Pat,” Mary said.

“Then fire me.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. With or without a job at PBS or NPR, he’d made quite a lot of money; besides, they couldn’t fire him without making some kind of salary settlement. Patrick didn’t really need a job, at least for a couple of years.

Wallingford looked at Mary for some response, then at Sabina.

“Okay, if that’s how it is, you’re fired,” Wharton announced. Everyone seemed surprised that it was Wharton who said it, including Wharton. Before the script meeting, they’d had another meeting, to which Patrick had not been invited. Probably they’d decided that Sabina would be the one to fire Wallingford. At least Sabina looked at Wharton with an exasperated sense of surprise. Mary Shanahan had got over how surprised she was pretty quickly. For once, maybe Wharton had felt something unfamiliar and exciting taking charge inside him. But everything that was eternally insipid about him had instantly returned to his flushed face; he was again as vapid as he’d ever been. Being fired by Wharton was like being slapped by a tentative hand in the dark.

“When I get back from Wisconsin, we can work out what you owe me,” was all Wallingford told them.

“Please clear out your office and your dressing room before you go,” Mary said. This was standard procedure, but it irritated him.

They sent someone from security to help him pack up his things and to carry the boxes down to a limo. No one came to say good-bye to him, which was also standard procedure, although if Angie had been working that Sunday night, she probably would have.

Wallingford was back in his apartment when Mrs. Clausen called. He hadn’t seen his piece at the Ramada Plaza, but Doris had watched the whole story.

“Are you still coming?” she asked.

“Yes, and I can stay as long as you want me to,” Patrick told her. “I just got fired.”

“That’s very interesting,” Mrs. Clausen commented. “Have a safe flight.”

This time he had a Chicago connection, which got him into his hotel room in Green Bay in time to see the evening telecast from New York. He wasn’t surprised that Mary Shanahan was the new anchor. Once again Wallingford had to admire her. She wasn’t pregnant, but Mary had wound up with at least one of the babies she wanted.

“Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us,” Mary began cheerfully. “Good night, Patrick, wherever you are!”

There was in her voice something both perky and consoling. Her manner reminded Wallingford of that time in his apartment when he’d been unable to get it up and she’d sympathized by saying, “Poor penis.” As he’d understood only belatedly, Mary had always been part of the bigger picture.

It was a good thing he was getting out of the business. He wasn’t smart enough to be in it anymore. Maybe he’d never been smart enough.

And what an evening it was for news! Naturally no survivors had been found. The mourning for the victims on EgyptAir 990 had just begun. There was the footage of the usual calamity-driven crowd that had gathered on a gray Nantucket beach—the “body-spotters,” Mary had once called them. The “death-watchers,”

which was Wharton’s term for them, were warmly dressed.

That close-up from the deck of a Merchant Marine Academy ship—the pile of passengers’ belongings retrieved from the Atlantic—must have been Wharton’s work. After floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, train wrecks, plane crashes, school shootings, or other massacres, Wharton always chose the shots of articles of clothing, especially the shoes. And of course there were children’s toys; dismembered dolls and wet teddy bears were among Wharton’s favorite disaster items.

Fortunately for the all-news network, the first vessel to arrive at the crash site was a Merchant Marine Academy training ship with seventeen cadets aboard. These young novices at sea were great for the human-interest angle—they were about the age of college upperclassmen. There they were in the spreading pool of jet fuel with the fragments of the plane’s wreckage, plus people’s shopping bags and body parts, bobbing to the oily surface around them. All of them wore gloves as they plucked this and that from the sea. Their expressions were what Sabina termed

“priceless.”

Mary milked her end lines for all they were worth. “The big questions remain unanswered,” Ms. Shanahan said crisply. She was wearing a suit Patrick had never seen before, something navy blue. The jacket was strategically opened, as were the top two buttons of her pale-blue blouse, which closely resembled a man’s dress shirt, only silkier. This would become her signature costume, Wallingford supposed.

“Was the crash of the Egyptian jetliner an act of terrorism, a mechanical failure, or pilot error?” Mary pointedly asked.

I would have reversed the order, Patrick thought—clearly “an act of terrorism”

should have come last.

In the last shot, the camera was not on Mary but on the grieving families in the lobby of the Ramada Plaza; the camera singled out small groups among them as Mary Shanahan’s voice-over concluded, “So many people want to know.” All in all, the ratings would be good; Wallingford knew that Wharton would be happy, not that Wharton would know how to express his happiness.

When Mrs. Clausen called, Patrick had just stepped out of the shower.

“Wear something warm,” she warned him. To Wallingford’s surprise, she was calling from the lobby. There would be time for him to see little Otto in the morning, Doris said. Right now it was time to go to the game; he should hurry up and get dressed. Therefore, not knowing what to expect, he did. It seemed too soon to leave for the game, but maybe Mrs. Clausen liked to get there early. When Wallingford left his hotel room and took the elevator to the lobby to meet her, his sense of pride was only slightly hurt that not one of his colleagues in the media had tracked him down and asked him what Mary Shanahan had meant when she’d announced, to millions, “Patrick Wallingford is no longer with us.”

There’d doubtless been calls to the network already; Wallingford could only wonder how Wharton was handling it, or maybe they had put Sabina in charge. They didn’t like to say they’d fired someone—they didn’t like to admit that someone had quit, either. They usually found some bullshit way to say it, so that no one knew exactly what had happened.

Mrs. Clausen had seen the telecast. She asked Patrick: “Is that the Mary who isn’t pregnant?”

“That’s her.”

“I thought so.”

Doris was wearing her old Green Bay Packers parka, the one she’d been wearing when Wallingford first met her. Mrs. Clausen was not wearing its hood as she drove the car, but Patrick could imagine her small, pretty face peering out from it like the face of a child. And she had on jeans and running shoes, which was how she’d dressed that night when the police informed her that her husband was dead. She was probably wearing her old Packers sweatshirt, too, although Wallingford couldn’t see what was under her parka.

Mrs. Clausen was a good driver. She never once looked at Patrick—she just talked about the game. “With a couple of four-two teams, anything can happen,” she explained. “We’ve lost the last three in a row on Monday night. I don’t believe what they say. It doesn’t matter that Seattle hasn’t played a Monday-night game in seven years, or that there’s a bunch of Seahawks who’ve never played at Lambeau Field before. Their coach knows Lambeau—he knows our quarterback, too.”

The Green Bay quarterback would be Brett Favre. Wallingford had read a paper (just the sports pages) on the plane. That’s how he’d learned who Mike Holmgren was—formerly the Packers’ coach, now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The game was a homecoming for Holmgren, who’d been very popular in Green Bay.

“Favre will be trying too hard. We can count on that,” Doris told Patrick. As she spoke, the passing headlights flashed on and off her face, which remained in profile to him.

He kept staring at her—he’d never missed anyone so much. He would have liked to think she’d worn these old clothes for him, but he knew the clothes were just her game uniform. When she’d seduced him in Dr. Zajac’s office, she must have had no idea what she was wearing, and she probably had no memory of the order in which she’d taken off her clothes. Wallingford would never forget the clothes and the order.

They drove west out of downtown Green Bay, which didn’t have much of a downtown to speak of—nothing but bars and churches and a haggard-looking riverside mall. There weren’t many buildings over three stories high; and the one hill of note, which hugged the river with its ships loading and unloading—until the bay froze in December—was a huge coal stack. It was a virtual mountain of coal.

“I would not want to be Mike Holmgren, coming back here with his four-two Seattle Seahawks,” Wallingford ventured. (It was a version of something he’d read in the sports pages.)

“You sound like you’ve been reading the newspapers or watching TV,” Mrs. Clausen said. “Holmgren knows the Packers better than the Packers know themselves. And Seattle’s got a good defense. We haven’t been scoring a lot of points against good defenses this year.”

“Oh.” Wallingford decided to shut up about the game. He changed the subject.

“I’ve missed you and little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen just smiled. She knew exactly where she was going. There was a special parking sticker on her car; she was waved into a lane with no other cars in it, from which she entered a reserved area of the parking lot. They parked very near the stadium and took an elevator to the press box, where Doris didn’t even bother showing her tickets to an official-looking older man who instantly recognized her. He gave her a friendly hug and a kiss, and she said, with a nod to Wallingford, “He’s with me, Bill. Patrick, this is Bill.”

Wallingford shook the older man’s hand, expecting to be recognized, but there was no sign of recognition. It must have been the ski hat Mrs. Clausen had handed to him when they got out of the car. He’d told her that his ears never got cold, but she’d said, “Here they will. Besides, it’s not just to keep your ears warm. I want you to wear it.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to be recognized, although the hat would keep him from being spotted by an ABC cameraman—for once, Wallingford wouldn’t be on-camera. Doris had insisted on the hat to make him look as if he belonged at the game. Patrick was wearing a black topcoat over a tweed jacket over a turtleneck, and gray flannel trousers. Almost no one wore such a dressy overcoat to a Packer game.

The ski hat was Green Bay green with a yellow headband that could be pulled down over your ears; it had the unmistakable Packers’ logo, of course. It was an old hat, and it had been stretched by a head bigger than Wallingford’s. Patrick didn’t need to ask Mrs. Clausen whose hat it was. Clearly the hat had belonged to her late husband.

They passed through the press box, where Doris said hi to a few other officiallooking people before entering the bleacher-style seats, high up. It wasn’t the way most of the fans entered the stadium, but everybody seemed to know Mrs. Clausen. She was, after all, a Green Bay Packers employee. They went down the aisle toward the dazzling field. It was natural grass, 87,000 square feet of it—what they called an “athletic blue blend.” Tonight was its debut game.

“Wow,” was all Wallingford said under his breath. Although they were early, Lambeau Field was already more than half full.

The stadium is a pure bowl, with no breaks and no upper deck; there is only one deck at Lambeau, and all the outdoor seats are of the bleacher type. The stands were a primordial scene during the pregame warm-ups: the faces painted green and gold, the yellow plastic-foam things that looked like big flexible penises, and the lunatics with huge wedges of cheese for hats—the cheeseheads ! Wallingford knew he was not in New York.

Down the long, steep aisle they went. They had seats at about midstadium level on the forty-yard line; they were still on the press-box side of the field. Patrick followed Doris, past the stout knees turned sideways, to their seats. He grew aware that they were seated among people who knew them—not just Mrs. Clausen, but Wallingford, too. And it wasn’t that they knew him because he was famous, not in Otto’s hat; it was that they were expecting him. Patrick suddenly realized that he’d met more than half of the closest surrounding fans before. They were Clausens!

He recognized their faces from the countless photos tacked to the walls of the main cabin at the cottage on the lake.

The men patted his shoulders; the women touched his arm, the left one. “Hey, how ya doing?” Wallingford recognized the speaker from his crazed look in the photograph that was safety-pinned to the lining of the jewelry box. It was Donny, the eagle-killer; one side of his face was painted the color of corn, the other the toovivid green of an impossible illness.

“I missed seein’ ya on the news tonight,” a friendly woman said. Patrick remembered her from a photograph, too; she’d been one of the new mothers, in a hospital bed with her newborn child.

“I just didn’t want to miss the game,” Wallingford told her. He felt Doris squeeze his hand; until then, he’d not realized she was holding it. In front of all of them! But they knew already—long before Wallingford. She’d already told them. She had accepted him! He tried to look at her, but she’d put up the hood of her parka. It wasn’t that cold; she was just hiding her face from him. He sat down beside Mrs. Clausen, still holding her hand. His handless arm was seized by an older woman on his left. She was another Mrs. Clausen, a much larger Mrs. Clausen—the late Otto’s mother, little Otto’s grandmother, Doris’s former mother-in-law. (Probably one shouldn’t say “former,” Patrick was thinking.) He smiled at the large woman. She was as tall as he was, sitting down, and she pulled him to her by his arm so that she could kiss his cheek.

“All of us are very happy to see you,” she said. “Doris has informed us.” She smiled approvingly.

Doris might have informed me ! Wallingford was thinking, but when he looked at Doris, her face was hidden in the hood. It was only by the ferocity of her grip on his hand that he knew for certain she’d accepted him. To Patrick’s astonishment, they all had.

There was a moment of silence before the game, which Wallingford assumed was for the 217 dead on EgyptAir 990, but he hadn’t been paying attention. The moment of silence was for Walter Payton, who’d died of complications from liver disease at the age of forty-five. Payton had run for the most yards in NFL history. The temperature was forty-five degrees at kickoff. The night sky was clear. The wind was from the west at seventeen miles per hour, with gusts to thirty. Maybe it was the gusts that got to Favre. In the first half, he threw two interceptions; by the end of the game, he’d thrown four. “I told you he’d be trying too hard,” Doris would say four times, all the while hiding under her hood. During the pregame introductions, the crowd at Lambeau had cheered the Packers’

former coach, Mike Holmgren. Favre and Holmgren had embraced on the field. (Even Patrick Wallingford had noticed that Lambeau Field was located at the intersection of Mike Holmgren Way and Vince Lombardi Avenue.) Holmgren had come home prepared. In addition to the interceptions, Favre lost two fumbles. There were even some boos—a rarity at Lambeau.

“Green Bay fans don’t usually boo,” Donny Clausen said, making it clear that he didn’t boo. Donny leaned close to Patrick; his yellow-and-green face added an extra dementia to his already demented reputation as an eagle-killer. “We all want Doris to be happy,” he whispered menacingly in Wallingford’s ear, which was warm under Otto’s old hat.

“So do I,” Patrick told him.

But what if Otto had killed himself because he couldn’t make Mrs. Clausen happy? What if she’d driven him to do it, had even suggested it in some way? Was it just a case of the bridal jitters that gave Wallingford these terrible thoughts? There was no question that Doris Clausen could drive Patrick Wallingford to kill himself if he ever disappointed her.

Patrick wrapped his right arm around Doris’s small shoulders, pulling her closer to him; with his right hand, he eased the hood of her parka slightly away from her face. He meant only to kiss her cheek, but she turned and kissed him on the lips. He could feel the tears on her cold face before she hid herself in the hood again. Favre was pulled from the game, in favor of backup quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, with a little more than six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. Mrs. Clausen faced Wallingford and said, “We’re leaving. I’m not staying to watch the rookie.”

Some of the Clausens grumbled at their going, but the grumbles were goodnatured; even Donny’s crazily painted face revealed a smile. Doris led Patrick by his right hand. They climbed back up to the press box again; someone a little overfriendly let them in. He was a young-looking guy with an athletic build—sturdy enough to be one of the players, or a former player. Doris paid no attention to him, other than to point back in the young man’s direction after she and Wallingford had left him standing at the side door to the press box. They were almost at the elevator when Mrs. Clausen asked, “Did you see that guy?”

“Yes,” Patrick said. The young man was still smiling at them in his overfriendly fashion, although Mrs. Clausen had not once turned to look at him herself.

“Well, that’s the guy I shouldn’t have slept with,” Doris told Wallingford. “Now you know everything about me.”

The elevator was packed with sportswriters, mostly guys. The sports hacks always left the game a little early, to assure themselves of prime spots at the postgame press conference. Most of them knew Mrs. Clausen; although she worked principally in sales, Doris was often the one who issued the press passes. The hacks instantly made room for her. She’d pulled the hood back on her parka because it was warm and close in the elevator.

The sportswriters were spouting stats and clichés about the game. “Costly fumbles

…Holmgren has Favre’s number… Dotson getting thrown out didn’t help… only the second Green Bay loss in the last thirty-six games at Lambeau… the fewest points the Packers have scored in a game since that twenty-one-to-six loss in Dallas in ’96…”

“So what did that game matter?” Mrs. Clausen asked. “That was the year we won the Super Bowl!”

“Are you coming to the press conference, Doris?” one of the hacks asked.

“Not tonight,” she said. “I’ve got a date.”

The sportswriters ooohed and aaahed; someone whistled. With his missing hand hidden in the sleeve of his topcoat, and still wearing Otto Clausen’s hat, Patrick Wallingford felt confident that he was unrecognizable. But old Stubby Farrell, the ancient sports hack from the all-news network, recognized him.

“Hey, lion guy!” Stubby said. Wallingford nodded, at last taking off Otto’s hat.

“Did you get the ax or what?”

Suddenly it was quiet; all the sportswriters wanted to know. Mrs. Clausen squeezed his hand again, and Patrick repeated what he’d told the Clausen family.

“I just didn’t want to miss the game.”

The hacks loved the line, Stubby especially, although Wallingford wasn’t able to duck the question.

“Was it Wharton, that fuck?” Stubby Farrell asked.

“It was Mary Shanahan,” Wallingford told Stubby, thus telling them all. “She wanted my job.” Mrs. Clausen was smiling at him; she let him know that she knew what Mary had really wanted.

Wallingford was thinking that he might hear one of them (maybe Stubby) say that he was a good guy or a nice guy, or a good journalist, but all he caught of their conversation was more sports talk and the familiar nicknames that would follow him to his grave.

Then the elevator opened and the sports hacks trotted around the side of the stadium; they had to go out in the cold to get to either the home-team or the visiting-team locker rooms. Doris led Patrick out from under the stadium pillars and into the parking lot. The temperature had fallen, but the cold air felt good on Wallingford’s bare head and ears as he walked to the car holding Mrs. Clausen’s hand. The temperature might have been in the thirties, near freezing, but probably it was just the wind that made it feel that cold.

Doris turned the car radio on; from her comments, Patrick wondered why she wanted to hear the end of the game. The seven turnovers were the most by the Packers since they had committed seven against the Atlanta Falcons eleven years before. “Even Levens fumbled,” Mrs. Clausen said in disbelief. “And Freeman—what did he catch? Maybe two passes all night. He might have got all of ten yards!”

Matt Hasselbeck, the Packers’ rookie quarterback, completed his first NFL

pass—he finished 2-of-6 for 32 yards. “Wow!” shouted Mrs. Clausen, derisively.

“Holy cow!” The final score was Seattle 27, Green Bay 7.

“I had the best time,” Wallingford said. “I loved every minute of it. I love being with you.”

He took off his seat belt and lay down in the front seat beside her, resting his head in her lap. He turned his face toward the dashboard lights and cupped the palm of his right hand on her thigh. He could feel her thigh tighten when she accelerated or let up on the accelerator, and when she occasionally touched the brake. Her hand gently brushed his cheek; then she went back to holding the steering wheel with both her hands.

“I love you,” Patrick told her.

“I’m going to try to love you, too,” Mrs. Clausen said. “I’m really going to try.”

Wallingford accepted that this was the most she could say. He felt one of her tears fall on his face, but he made no reference to her crying other than to offer to drive—an offer he knew she would refuse. (Who wants to be driven by a onehanded man?)

“I can drive,” was all she said. Then she added: “We’re going to your hotel for the night. My mom and dad are staying with little Otto. You’ll see them in the morning, when you see Otto. They already know I’m going to marry you.”

The beams from passing headlights streaked through the interior of the cold car. If Mrs. Clausen had turned the heat on, it wasn’t working. She drove with the driver’s-side window cracked open, too. There was little traffic; most of the fans were staying at Lambeau Field until the bitter end.

Patrick considered sitting up and putting his seat belt back on. He wanted to see that old mountain of coal on the west side of the river again. He wasn’t sure what the coal stack signified to him—perseverance, maybe.

Wallingford also wanted to see the television sets glowing in the darkness, all along their route, on their way back downtown; surely every set was still turned on to the dying game, and would stay on for the postgame analysis, too. Yet Mrs. Clausen’s lap was warm and comforting, and Patrick found it easier to feel her occasional tears on his face than to sit up beside her and see her crying. As they were nearing the bridge, she spoke to him: “Please put your seat belt on. I don’t want to lose you.”

He sat up quickly and buckled his belt. In the dark car, he couldn’t tell if she’d stopped crying or not.

“You can shut the radio off now,” she told him. He did. They drove over the bridge in silence, the towering coal stack at first looming and then growing smaller behind them.

We never really know our future, Wallingford was thinking; nobody’s future with anyone is certain. Yet he imagined that he could envision his future with Doris Clausen. He saw it with the unlikely and offsetting brightness with which her and her late husband’s wedding rings had leapt out of the dark at him, under the boathouse dock. There was something golden in his future with Mrs. Clausen—maybe the more so because it struck him as so undeserved. He no more merited her than those two rings, with their kept and unkept promises, deserved to be nailed under a dock, only inches above the cold lake.

And for how long would he have Doris, or she him? It was fruitless to speculate—as fruitless as trying to guess how many Wisconsin winters it would take to bring the boathouse down and sink it in the unnamed lake.

“What’s the name of the lake?” he asked Doris suddenly. “Where the cottage is . .

. that lake.”

“We don’t like the name,” Mrs. Clausen told him. “We never use the name. It’s just the cottage on the lake.”

Then, as if she knew he’d been thinking about her and Otto’s rings nailed under the dock, she said: “I’ve picked out our rings. I’ll show them to you when we get to the hotel. I chose platinum this time. I’m going to wear mine on the ring finger of my right hand.” (Where the lion guy, as everyone knew, would have to wear his, too.)

“You know what they say,” Mrs. Clausen said. “ ‘Leave no regrets on the field.’ ”

Wallingford could guess the source. Even to him, the phrase smacked of football—and of a courage he heretofore had lacked. In fact, it was what the old sign said at the bottom of the stairwell at Lambeau Field, the sign above the doors that led to the Packers’ locker room.

LEAVE

NO REGRETS

ON THE FIELD

“I get it,” Patrick replied. In a men’s room at Lambeau, he’d seen a man with his beard painted yellow and green, like Donny’s face; the necessary degree of devotion was getting through to him. “I get it,” he repeated.

“No, you don’t,” Mrs. Clausen contradicted him. “Not yet, not quite.” He looked closely at her—she’d stopped crying. “Open the glove compartment,” Doris said. He hesitated; it occurred to him that Otto Clausen’s gun was in there, and that it was loaded. “Go on—open it.”

In the glove compartment was an open envelope with photographs protruding from it. He could see the holes the tacks had made in the photos—the occasional rust spot, too. Of course he knew where the photos were from before he saw what they were of. They were the photographs, a dozen or more, that Doris had once tacked to the wall on her side of the bed—those pictures she’d taken down because she couldn’t stand to see them in the boathouse anymore.

“Please look at them,” Mrs. Clausen requested.

She’d stopped the car. They were in sight of the hotel. She had just pulled over and stopped with the motor running. Downtown Green Bay was almost deserted; everyone was at home or returning home from Lambeau Field. The photographs were in no particular order, but Wallingford quickly grasped their theme. They all showed Otto Clausen’s left hand. In some, the hand was still attached to Otto. There was the beer-truck driver’s brawny arm; there was Otto’s wedding ring, too. But in some of the pictures, Mrs. Clausen had removed the ring—from what Wallingford knew was the dead man’s hand.

There were photos of Patrick Wallingford, too. Well, at least there were photos of Patrick’s new left hand—just the hand. By the varying degrees of swelling in the hand and wrist, and in the forearm area of the surgical attachment, Wallingford could tell at what stages Doris had photographed him with Otto’s hand—what she had called the third one.

So he hadn’t dreamed that he was having his picture taken in his sleep. That was why the sound of the shutter had seemed so real. And with his eyes shut, naturally the flash would have struck him as faint and distant, as incomplete as heat lightning—just the way Wallingford remembered it.

“Please throw them away,” Mrs. Clausen asked. “I’ve tried, but I can’t make myself do it. Please just get rid of them.”

“Okay,” Patrick said.

She was crying again, and he reached out to her. He’d never initiated touching her breast with his stump before. Even through her parka, he could feel her breast; when she clasped his forearm tightly there, he could also feel her breathing.

“Just don’t ever think I haven’t lost something, too,” Mrs. Clausen told him angrily.

Doris drove on to the hotel. After she’d handed Patrick the keys and had gone ahead of him into the lobby, he was left to park the car. (He decided to have someone from the hotel do it.)

Then he disposed of the photographs—he dropped them, and the envelope, in a public trash receptacle. They were quickly gone, but he’d not missed their message. Wallingford knew that Mrs. Clausen had just told him all she ever would about her obsession; showing him those photographs of the hand was the absolute end of what she had to say about it.

What had Dr. Zajac said? There was no medical reason why the hand-transplant surgery hadn’t worked; Zajac couldn’t explain the mystery. But it was no mystery to Patrick Wallingford, whose imagination didn’t suffer the constraints of a scientific mind. The hand had finished with its business—that was all. Interestingly, Dr. Zajac had little to say to his students at Harvard Medical School on the subject of “professional disappointment.” Zajac was happy in his semiretirement with Irma and Rudy and the twins; he thought professional disappointment was as anticlimactic as professional success.

“Get your lives together,” Zajac told his Harvard students. “If you’ve already come this far, your professions should take care of themselves.” But what do medicalschool students know about having lives ? They haven’t had time to have lives. Wallingford went up to Doris Clausen, who was waiting for him in the lobby. They took the elevator to his hotel room without exchanging a word. He let her use the bathroom first. For all her plans, Doris had brought nothing with her but a toothbrush, which she carried in her purse. And in her haste to get ready for bed, she forgot to show Patrick the platinum wedding rings, which were also in her purse. (She would show him the rings in the morning.)

While Mrs. Clausen was in the bathroom, Wallingford watched the late-night news—as a matter of principle, not on his old channel. One of the sports hacks had already leaked the story of Patrick’s dismissal to another network; it made a good show-ender, a better-than-average kicker. “Lion Guy Gets Ax from Pretty Mary Shanahan.” (That was who she would be from this time forth: “Pretty Mary.”) Mrs. Clausen had come out of the bathroom, naked, and was standing beside him. Patrick quickly used the bathroom while Doris watched the wrap-up of the Green Bay game. She was surprised that Dorsey Levens had carried the ball twenty-four times for 104 yards, a solid performance for him in a losing cause. When Wallingford, also naked, came out of the bathroom, Mrs. Clausen had already switched off the TV and was waiting for him in the big bed. Patrick turned out the lights and got into bed beside her. They held each other while they listened to the wind—it was blowing hard, in gusts, but they soon ceased to hear it.

“Give me your hand,” Doris said. He knew which one she meant. Wallingford began by holding Mrs. Clausen’s neck in the crook of his right arm; with his right hand, he held fast to one of her breasts. She started by scissoring the stump of his left forearm between her thighs, where he could feel the lost fingers of his fourth hand touching her.

Outside their warm hotel, the cold wind was a harbinger of the coming winter, but they heard only their own harsh breathing. Like other lovers, they were oblivious to the swirling wind, which blew on and on in the wild, uncaring Wisconsin night.