The Fourth Hand

CHAPTER NINE Wallingford Meets a Fellow Traveler

MEANWHILE, AN ATTRACTIVE, photogenic woman with a limp had just turned sixty. As a teenager, and all her adult life, she’d worn long skirts or dresses to conceal her withered leg. She’d been the last person in her hometown to come down with poliomyelitis; the Salk vaccine was available too late for her. For almost as long as she’d had the deformity, she’d been writing a book with this provocative title: How I Almost Missed Getting Polio. She said that the end of the century struck her as “as good a time as any” to make multiple submissions to more than a dozen publishers, but they all turned her book down.

“Bad luck or not, polio or whatever, the book isn’t very well written,” the woman with the limp and the withered leg admitted to Patrick Wallingford, on-camera. She looked terrific when she was sitting down. “It’s just that everything in my life happened because I didn’t get that damn vaccine. I got polio instead.”

Of course she quickly acquired a publisher after her interview with Wallingford, and almost overnight she had a new title: I Got Polio Instead. Someone rewrote the book for her, and someone else would make a movie of it—starring a woman who looked nothing at all like the woman with the limp and the withered leg, except that the actress was attractive and photogenic, too. That was what being on-camera with Wallingford could do for you.

Nor would Patrick miss the irony that when he’d lost his left hand the first time, the world had been watching. In those best-of-the-century moments that were positively made for television, the lion-eating-the-hand episode was always included. Yet when he’d lost his hand the second time—more to the point, when he’d lost Mrs. Clausen—the camera wasn’t on him. What mattered most to Wallingford had gone unrecorded.

The new century, at least for a while, would remember Patrick as the lion guy. But it was neither news nor history that, if Wallingford were keeping score of his life, he wouldn’t have started counting until he met Doris Clausen. So much for how the world keeps score.

In the category of transplant surgery, Patrick Wallingford would not be remembered. At the close of the century, one counts the successes, not the failures. Thus, in the field of hand-transplant surgery, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac would remain unfamous, his moment of possible greatness surpassed by what truly became the first successful hand-transplant procedure in the United States, and only the second ever. “The fireworks guy,” as Zajac crudely called Matthew David Scott, appeared to have what Dr. Zajac termed a keeper.

On April 12, 1999, less than three months after receiving a new left hand, Mr. Scott threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Phillies’ opening game in Philadelphia. Wallingford wasn’t exactly jealous. (Envious… well, maybe. But not in the way you might think.) In fact, Patrick asked Dick, his news editor, if he could interview the evident “keeper.” Wouldn’t it be fitting, Wallingford suggested, to congratulate Mr. Scott for having what he (Wallingford) had lost? But Dick, of all people, thought the idea was “tacky.” As a result, Dick was fired, though many would argue he was a news editor waiting to be fired. Any euphoria among the New York newsroom women was short-lived. The new news editor was as much of a dick as Dick had ever been; anticlimactically, his name was Fred. As Mary whatever-her-name-was would say—Mary had developed a sharper tongue in the intervening years—“If I’m going to be dicked around, I think I’d rather be Dicked than Fredded. ”

In the new century, that same international team of surgeons who performed the world’s first successful hand transplant in Lyon, France, would try again, this time attempting the world’s first double hand-and-forearm transplant. The recipient, whose name was not made public, would be a thirty-three-year-old Frenchman who’d lost both his hands in a fireworks accident (another one) in 1996, the donor a nineteen-year-old who had fallen off a bridge. But Wallingford would be interested only in the fates of the first two recipients. The first, ex-convict Clint Hallam, would have his new hand amputated by one of the surgeons who performed the transplant operation. Two months prior to the amputation, Hallam had stopped taking the medication prescribed as part of his anti-rejection treatment. He was observed wearing a leather glove to hide the hand, which he described as “hideous.” (Hallam would later deny failing to take his medication.) And he would continue his strained relationship with the law. Mr. Hallam had been seized by the French police for allegedly stealing money and an American Express card from a liver-transplant patient who’d befriended him in the hospital in Lyon. While he was eventually allowed to leave France—after he repaid some of the money—the police would issue warrants for Hallam’s arrest in Australia concerning his possible role in a fuel scam. (It seems that Zajac was right about him.)

The second, Matthew David Scott of Absecon, New Jersey, is the only successful recipient of a new hand whom Wallingford would admit to envying in an interesting way. It was never Mr. Scott’s new hand that Patrick Wallingford envied. But in the media coverage of that Phillies game, where the fireworks guy threw out the first ball, Wallingford noted that Matthew David Scott had his son with him. What Patrick envied Mr. Scott was his son. He’d had premonitions of what he would call the “fatherhood feeling” when he was still recovering from losing Otto senior’s hand. The painkillers were nothing special, but they may have been what prompted Patrick to watch his first Super Bowl. Of course he didn’t know how to watch a Super Bowl. You’re not supposed to watch a game like that alone.

He kept wanting to call Mrs. Clausen and ask her to explain what was happening in the game, but Super Bowl XXXIII was the symbolic anniversary of Otto Clausen’s accident (or suicide) in his beer truck; furthermore, the Packers weren’t playing. Therefore, Doris had told Patrick that she intended to lock herself away from sight or sound of the game. He would be on his own.

Wallingford drank a beer or two, but what people liked about watching football eluded him. To be fair, it was a bad matchup; while the Broncos won their second straight Super Bowl, and their fans were no doubt delighted, it was not a close or even a competitive game. The Atlanta Falcons had no business being in the Super Bowl in the first place. (At least that was the opinion of everyone Wallingford would later talk to in Green Bay.)

Yet, even distractedly watching the Super Bowl, Patrick for the first time could imagine going to a Packer home game at Lambeau Field with Doris and Otto junior. Or just with little Otto, maybe when the boy was a bit older. The idea had surprised him, but that was January 1999. By April of that year, when Wallingford watched Matthew David Scott and his son at the Phillies game, the thought was no longer surprising; he’d had a couple more months of missing Otto junior and the boy’s mother. Even if it was true that he’d lost Mrs. Clausen, Wallingford rightly feared that if he didn’t make an effort to see more of little Otto now—meaning the summer of ’99, when Otto junior was still only eight months old (he wasn’t quite crawling)—there would simply be no relationship to build on when the boy was older.

The one person in New York to whom Wallingford confided his fears of the missed opportunity of fatherhood was Mary. Boy, was she a bad choice for a confidante! When Patrick said that he longed to be “more like a father” to Otto junior, Mary reminded him that he could knock her up anytime he felt like it and become the father of a child living in New York.

“You don’t have to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to be a father, Pat,” Mary told him.

How she’d gone from being such a nice girl to expressing her one-note wish to have Wallingford’s seed was not a credit to the other women in the New York newsroom, or so Patrick believed. He continued to overlook the fact that men had been a far greater influence on Mary. She’d had problems with men, or at least she thought she had. (Same difference.)

Every weeknight, when he concluded his telecast, Wallingford never knew if they were watching when he said, “Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto.”

Mrs. Clausen had not once called to say she’d seen the evening news. It was July 1999. There was a heat wave in New York. It was a Friday. Most summer weekends, Wallingford went to Bridgehampton, where he’d rented a house. Except for the swimming pool—Patrick made a point of not swimming in the ocean with one hand—it was really like staying in the city. He saw all the same people at the same kinds of parties, which, in fact, was what Wallingford and a lot of other New Yorkers liked about being out there.

That weekend, friends had invited him to the Cape; he was supposed to fly to Martha’s Vineyard. But even before he felt a slight prickling where his hand had been detached—some of the twinges seemed to extend to the empty space where his left hand used to be—he’d phoned his friends and canceled the trip with some bullshit excuse.

At the time, he didn’t know how lucky he was, not to be flying to Martha’s Vineyard that Friday night. Then he remembered that he’d lent his house in Bridgehampton for the weekend. A bunch of the New York newsroom women were having a weekend-long baby shower there. Or an orgy, Patrick cynically imagined. He passingly wondered if Mary would be there. (That was the old Patrick Wallingford wondering.) But Patrick didn’t ask Mary if she was one of the women using his summer house that weekend. If he’d asked, she would have known he was free and offered to change her plans.

Wallingford was still undervaluing how sensitive and vulnerable women who have struggled to have a child were; a weekend-long baby shower for someone else would not likely have been Mary’s choice.

So he was in New York on a Friday in mid-July with no weekend plans and nowhere to go. As he sat in makeup for the Friday-evening news, he thought of calling Mrs. Clausen. He had never invited himself to Green Bay; he’d always waited to be invited. Yet both Doris and Patrick were aware that the intervals between her invitations had grown longer. (The last time he’d been in Wisconsin, there was still snow on the ground.)

What if Wallingford simply called her and said, “Hi! What are you and little Otto doing this weekend? How about I come to Green Bay?” Remarkably, without second-guessing himself, he just did it; he called her out of the blue.

“Hello,” said her voice on the answering machine. “Little Otto and I are up north for the weekend. No phone. Back Monday.”

He didn’t leave a message, but he did leave some makeup on the mouthpiece of the phone. He was so distracted by hearing Mrs. Clausen’s voice on the answering machine, and even more distracted by that half-imagined, half-dreamed image of her at the cottage on the lake, that without thinking he attempted to wipe the makeup off the mouthpiece with his left hand. He was surprised when the stump of his left forearm made contact with the phone—that was the first twinge. When he hung up, the prickling sensations continued. He kept looking at his stump, expecting to see ants, or some other small insects, crawling over the scar tissue. But there was nothing there. He knew there couldn’t be bugs under the scar tissue, yet he felt them all through the telecast.

Later Mary would remark that there’d been something listless in the delivery of his usually cheerful good-night wishes to Doris and little Otto, but Wallingford knew that they couldn’t have been watching. There was no electricity at the cottage on the lake—Mrs. Clausen had told him that. (For the most part, she seemed unwilling to talk about the place up north, and when she did talk about it, her voice was shy and hard to hear.)

The prickling sensations continued while Patrick had his makeup removed; his skin crawled. Because he was thinking about something Dr. Zajac had said to him, Wallingford was only vaguely mindful that the regular makeup girl was on vacation. He supposed she had a crush on him—he’d not yet been tempted. He thought it was the way she chewed her gum that he missed. Only now, in her absence, did he fleetingly imagine her in a new way—naked. But the supernatural twinges in his nonhand kept distracting him, as did his memory of Zajac’s blunt advice.

“Don’t mess around if you ever think you need me.” Therefore, Patrick didn’t mess around. He called Zajac at home, although he assumed that Boston’s most renowned hand surgeon would be spending his summer weekends out of town. Actually, Dr. Zajac had rented a place in Maine that summer, but only for the month of August, when he would have custody of Rudy. Medea, now more often called Pal, would eat a ton of raw clams and mussels, shells and all; but the dog had seemingly outgrown a taste for her own turds, and Rudy and Zajac played lacrosse with a lacrosse ball. The boy had even attended a lacrosse clinic in the first week of July. Rudy was with Zajac for the weekend, in Cambridge, when Wallingford called.

Irma answered the phone. “Yeah, what is it?” she said.

Wallingford contemplated the remote possibility that Dr. Zajac had an unruly teenage daughter. He knew only that Zajac had a younger child, a six-or sevenyear-old boy—like Matthew David Scott’s son. In his mind’s eye, Patrick was forever seeing that unknown little boy in a baseball jersey, his hands raised like his father’s—both of them celebrating that victory pitch in Philadelphia. (A “victory pitch” was how someone in the media had described it.)

“Yeah?” Irma said again. Was she a surly, oversexed babysitter for Zajac’s little boy? Perhaps she was the housekeeper, except she sounded too coarse to be Dr. Zajac’s housekeeper.

“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.

Wallingford checked into the Charles before ten and went immediately to the indoor swimming pool, where he spent a restorative half hour by himself. He would have stayed longer, but they closed the pool at ten-thirty. Wallingford—with his one hand—enjoyed floating and treading water. In keeping with his personality, he was a good floater.

He’d planned to get dressed and walk around Harvard Square after his swim. Summer school was in session; there would be students to look at, to remind him of his misspent youth. He could probably find a place to have a decent dinner with a good bottle of wine. In one of the bookstores on the square, he might spot something more gripping to read than the book he’d brought with him, which was a biography of Byron the size of a cinder block. But even in the taxi from the airport, Wallingford had felt the oppressive heat getting to him; and when he went back to his room from the pool, he took off his wet bathing suit and lay down naked on the bed and closed his eyes for a minute or two. He must have been tired. When he woke up almost an hour later, the air-conditioning had chilled him. He put on a bathrobe and read the room-service menu. All he wanted was a beer and a hamburger—he no longer felt like going out.

True to himself, he would not turn on a television on the weekend. Given that the only alternative was the Byron biography, Patrick’s resistance to the TV was all the more remarkable. But Wallingford fell asleep so quickly—Byron had barely been born, and the wee poet’s feckless father was still alive—that the biography caused him no pain at all.

In the morning, he ate breakfast in the casual restaurant in the downstairs of the hotel. The dining room irritated him without his knowing why. It wasn’t the children. Maybe there were too many grown-ups who seemed bothered by the very presence of children.

The previous night and this morning, while Wallingford was not watching television or even so much as glancing at a newspaper, the nation had been reliving one of TV’s not-the-news images. JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing; it appeared that he had flown into the ocean. But there was nothing to see—hence what was shown on television, again and again, was that image of young Kennedy at his father’s funeral procession. There was John junior, a three-year-old boy in shorts saluting his father’s passing casket—exactly as his mother, whispering in the little boy’s ear, had instructed him to do only seconds before. What Wallingford would later consider was that this image might stand as the representative moment of our country’s most golden century, which has also died, although we are still marketing it.

His breakfast finished, Patrick sat at his table, trying to finish his coffee without returning the relentless stare of a middle-aged woman across the room. But she now made her way toward him. Her path was deliberate; while she pretended to be only passing by, Wallingford knew she was going to say something to him. He could always tell. Often he could guess what the women were going to say, but not this time.

Her face had been pretty once. She wore no makeup, and her undyed brown hair was turning gray. In the crow’s-feet at the corners of her dark-brown eyes there was something sad and tired that reminded Patrick of Mrs. Clausen grown older.

“Scum… despicable swine… how do you sleep at night?” the woman asked him in a harsh whisper; her teeth were clenched, her lips parted no wider than was necessary for her to spit out her words.

“Pardon me?” said Patrick Wallingford.

“It didn’t take you long to get here, did it?” she asked. “Those poor families… the bodies not even recovered. But that doesn’t stop you, does it? You thrive on other people’s misfortune. You ought to call yourself the death network—no, the grief channel! Because you do more than invade people’s privacy—you steal their grief! You make their private grief public before they even have a chance to grieve!”

Wallingford wrongly assumed that she was speaking generically of his TV

newscasts past. He looked away from the woman’s entrenched stare, but among his fellow breakfast-eaters, he saw that no assistance would be forthcoming; from their unanimously hostile expressions, they appeared to share the demented woman’s view.

“I try to report what’s happened with sympathy,” Patrick began, but the nearviolent woman cut him off.

“Sympathy!” she cried. “If you had an ounce of sympathy for those poor people, you’d leave them alone!”

Since the woman was clearly deranged, what could Wallingford do? He pinned his bill to the table with the stump of his left forearm, quickly adding a tip and his room number before signing his name. The woman watched him coldly. Patrick stood up from the table. As he nodded good-bye to the woman and started to leave the restaurant, he was aware of the children gaping at his missing hand. An angry-looking sous-chef, all in white, stood glaring at Wallingford from behind a counter. “Hyena,” the sous-chef said.

“Jackal!” cried an elderly man at an adjacent table.

The woman, Patrick’s first attacker, said to his back: “Vulture… carrion feeder . .

.”

Wallingford kept walking, but he could sense that the woman was following him; she accompanied him to the elevators, where he pushed the button and waited. He could hear her breathing, but he didn’t look at her. When the elevator door opened, he stepped inside and allowed the door to close behind his back. Until he pushed the button for his floor and turned to face her, he didn’t know that the woman was not there; he was surprised to find himself alone.

It must be Cambridge, Patrick thought—all those Harvard and M.I.T. intellectuals who loathed the crassness of the media. He brushed his teeth, right-handed, of course. He was ever-conscious of how he’d been learning to brush his teeth with his left hand when it had just up and died. Still clueless about the breaking news, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and took a taxi to Dr. Zajac’s office. It was deeply disconcerting to Patrick that Dr. Zajac—specifically, his face—smelled of sex. This evidence of a private life was not what Wallingford wanted to know about his hand surgeon, even while Zajac was reassuring him that there was nothing wrong with the sensations he was experiencing in the stump of his left forearm.

It turned out there was a word for the feeling that small, unseen insects were crawling over or under his skin. “Formication,” Dr. Zajac said. Naturally Wallingford misheard him. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“It means ‘tactile hallucination.’ Formication, ” the doctor repeated, “with an m. ”

“Oh.”

“Think of nerves as having long memories,” Zajac told him. “What’s triggering those nerves isn’t your missing hand. I mentioned your love life because you once mentioned it. As for stress, I can only imagine what a week you have ahead of you. I don’t envy you the next few days. You know what I mean.”

Wallingford didn’t know what Dr. Zajac meant. What did the doctor imagine of the week Wallingford had ahead of him? But Zajac had always struck Wallingford as a little crazy. Maybe everyone in Cambridge was crazy, Patrick considered.

“It’s true, I’m a little unhappy in the love-life department,” Wallingford confessed, but there he paused—he had no memory of discussing his love life with Zajac. (Had the painkillers been more potent than he’d thought at the time?) Wallingford was further confused by trying to decide what was different about Dr. Zajac’s office. After all, that office was sacred ground; yet it had seemed a very different place when Mrs. Clausen was having her way with him in the exact chair in which he now sat, scanning the surrounding walls.

Of course! The photographs of Zajac’s famous patients—they were gone! In their place were children’s drawings. One child’s drawings, actually—they were all Rudy’s. Castles in heaven, Patrick would have guessed, and there were several of a large, sinking ship; doubtless the young artist had seen Titanic. (Both Rudy and Dr. Zajac had seen the movie twice, although Zajac had made Rudy shut his eyes during the sex scene in the car.)

As for the model in the series of photos of an increasingly pregnant young woman

… well, not surprisingly, Wallingford felt drawn to her coarse sexuality. She must have been Irma, the self-described Mrs. Zajac, who’d spoken to Patrick on the phone. Wallingford learned that Irma was expecting twins only when he inquired about the empty picture frames that were hanging from the walls in half a dozen places, always in twos.

“They’re for the twins, after they’re born,” Zajac told Patrick proudly. No one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates envied Zajac having twins, although that moron Mengerink opined that twins were what Zajac deserved for fucking Irma twice as much as Mengerink believed was “normal.”

Schatzman had no opinion of the upcoming birth of Dr. Zajac’s twins, because Schatzman was more than retired—Schatzman had died. And Gingeleskie (the living one) had shifted his envy of Zajac to a more virulent envy of a younger colleague, someone Dr. Zajac had brought into the surgical association. Nathan Blaustein had been Zajac’s best student in clinical surgery at Harvard. Dr. Zajac didn’t envy young Blaustein at all. Zajac simply recognized Blaustein as his technical superior—“a physical genius.”

When a ten-year-old in New Hampshire had lopped off his thumb in a snow blower, Dr. Zajac had insisted that Blaustein perform the reattachment surgery. The thumb was a mess, and it had been unevenly frozen. The boy’s father had needed almost an hour to find the severed thumb in the snow; then the family had to drive two hours to Boston. But the surgery had been a success. Zajac was already lobbying his colleagues to have Blaustein’s name added to the office nameplate and letterhead—a request that caused Mengerink to seethe with resentment, and no doubt made Schatzman and Gingeleskie (the dead one) roll in their graves.

As for Dr. Zajac’s ambitions in hand-transplant surgery, Blaustein was now in charge of such procedures. (There would soon be many procedures of that kind, Zajac had predicted.) While Zajac said he would be happy to be part of the team, he believed young Blaustein should head the operation because Blaustein was now the best surgeon among them. No envy or resentment there. Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac was a happy, relaxed man. Ever since Wallingford had lost Otto Clausen’s hand, Zajac had contented himself with his inventions of prosthetic devices, which he designed and assembled on his kitchen table while listening to his songbirds. Patrick Wallingford was the perfect guinea pig for Zajac’s inventions, because he was willing to model any new prosthesis on his evening newscast—even though he chose not to wear a prosthesis himself. The publicity had been good for the doctor. A prosthesis of his invention—it was predictably called “The Zajac”—was now manufactured in Germany and Japan. (The German model was marginally more expensive, but both were marketed worldwide.) The success of “The Zajac” had permitted Dr. Zajac to reduce his surgical practice to half-time. He still taught at the medical school, but he could devote more of himself to his inventions, and to Rudy and Irma and (soon) the twins.

“You should have children,” Zajac was telling Patrick Wallingford, as the doctor turned out the lights in his office and the two men awkwardly bumped into each other in the dark. “Children change your life.”

Wallingford hesitantly mentioned how much he wanted to construct a relationship with Otto junior. Did Dr. Zajac have any advice about the best way to connect with a young child, especially a child one saw infrequently?

“Reading aloud,” Dr. Zajac replied. “There’s nothing like it. Begin with Stuart Little, then try Charlotte’s Web. ”

“I remember those books!” Patrick cried. “I loved Stuart Little, and I can remember my mother weeping when she read me Charlotte’s Web. ”

“People who read Charlotte’s Web without weeping should be lobotomized,” Zajac responded. “But how old is little Otto?”

“Eight months,” Wallingford answered.

“Oh, no, he’s just started to crawl,” Dr. Zajac said. “Wait until he’s six or seven—I mean years . By the time he’s eight or nine, he’ll be reading Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web to himself, but he’ll be old enough to listen to those stories when he’s younger.”

“Six or seven,” Patrick repeated. How could he wait that long to establish a relationship with Otto junior?

After Zajac locked his office, he and Patrick rode the elevator down to the ground floor. The doctor offered to drive his patient back to the Charles Hotel since it was on his way home, and Wallingford gladly accepted. It was on the car radio that the famous TV journalist finally learned of Kennedy’s missing plane. By now it was mostly old news to everyone but Wallingford. JFK, Jr., was, together with his wife and sister-in-law, lost at sea, presumed dead. Young Kennedy, a relatively new pilot, had been flying the plane. There was mention of the haze over Martha’s Vineyard the previous night. Luggage tags had been found; later would come the luggage, then the debris from the plane itself.

“I guess it would be better if the bodies were found,” Zajac remarked. “I mean better than the speculation if they’re never found.”

It was the speculation that Wallingford foresaw, regardless of finding or not finding the bodies. There would be at least a week of it. The coming week was the week Patrick had almost chosen for his vacation; now he wished he had chosen it. (He’d decided to ask for a week in the fall instead, preferably when the Green Bay Packers had a home game at Lambeau Field.)

Wallingford went back to the Charles like a man condemned. He knew what the news, which was not the news, would be all the next week; it was everything that was most hateful in Patrick’s profession, and he would be part of it. The grief channel, the woman at breakfast had said, but the deliberate stimulation of public mourning was hardly unique to the network where Wallingford worked. The overattention to death had become as commonplace on television as the coverage of bad weather; death and bad weather were what TV did best. Whether they found the bodies or not, or regardless of how long it might take to find them—with or without what countless journalists would call “closure”—there would be no closure. Not until every Kennedy moment in recent history had been relived. Nor was the invasion of the Kennedy family’s privacy the ugliest aspect of it. From Patrick’s point of view, the principal evil was that it wasn’t news—it was recycled melodrama.

Patrick’s hotel room at the Charles was as silent and cool as a crypt; he lay on the bed trying to anticipate the worst before turning on the TV. Wallingford was thinking about JFK, Jr.’s older sister, Caroline. Patrick had always admired her for remaining aloof from the press. The summer house Wallingford was renting in Bridgehampton was near Sagaponack, where Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was spending the summer with her husband and children. She had a plain but elegant kind of beauty; although she would be under intense media scrutiny now, Patrick believed that she would manage to keep her dignity intact. In his room at the Charles, Wallingford felt too sick to his stomach to turn the TV

on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventually have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see—his fellow journalists, our selfappointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.

They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the brilliantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.

Naturally there would be an analysis of the small plane’s disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot’s presumed error. Many of Patrick’s fellow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.’s judgment; indeed, the judgment of all Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of “genetic restlessness” among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later—say, near the end of the following week—some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then call for a halt to the process. That was always the way. Wallingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac’s name had been in the news. As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the all-news network hadn’t already called him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach. On an impulse, Wallingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney—that was her married name. Patrick couldn’t remember what Crystal’s last name had been when he’d slept with her. He recalled that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn’t think what it was.

“Patrick Wallingford is not here!” Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hello. “No one here knows where he is!”

In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.

“Hello?” Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wallingford hadn’t said a word.

“What are you, a creep?” Crystal asked. “It’s a breather —I can hear him breathing!” Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.

That was it, Wallingford remembered. When he’d made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and generally went a little crazy—an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wallingford knew what was happening, she’d bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp. Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal’s husband, but he admired the man’s fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)

“You pervert!” Crystal yelled. “If I could see you, I’d bite your face off!”

Patrick didn’t doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.

The only other person in the pool besides Wallingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wallingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets, preferring the water undisturbed. He gradually grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.

She was a woman past the young side of middle age. Wallingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.

The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who’d called him a “carrion feeder” at breakfast—hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, all the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.

She was the first to speak. “This is awkward.” Her voice had a softer edge than what Wallingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.

“I don’t want to antagonize you,” Patrick told the woman. “I’ll just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway.” He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub’s surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.

The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering—her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a small pouch. “Please stay a minute,”

the woman asked. “I want to explain.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Patrick replied. “In general, I agree with you. It’s just that I didn’t understand the context. I didn’t come to Boston because JFK, Jr.’s plane was missing. I didn’t even know about his plane when you spoke to me. I came to see my doctor, because of my hand.” He instinctively lifted his stump, which he still spoke of as a hand. He quickly lowered it to his side, where it trailed in the hot tub, because he saw that, inadvertently, he’d pointed with his missing hand to her sagging breasts.

She encircled his left forearm with both her hands, pulling him into the churning hot tub with her. They sat beside each other on the underwater ledge, her hands holding him an inch or two above where he’d been dismembered. Only the lion had held him more firmly. Once again he had the sensation that the tips of his left middle and left index fingers were touching a woman’s lower abdomen, although he knew those fingers were gone.

“Please listen to me,” the woman said. She pulled his maimed arm into her lap. He felt the end of his forearm tingle as his stump brushed the small bulge of her stomach; his left elbow rested on her right thigh.

“Okay,” Wallingford said, in lieu of grabbing the back of her neck in his right hand and forcing her head underwater. Truly, short of half-drowning her in the hot tub, what else could he have done?

“I was married twice, the first time when I was very young,” the woman began; her bright, excited eyes held his attention as firmly as she held his arm. “I lost them. The first one divorced me, the second died. I actually loved them both.”

Christ! Wallingford thought. Did every woman of a certain age have a version of Evelyn Arbuthnot’s story? “I’m sorry,” Patrick said, but the way she squeezed his arm indicated that she didn’t want to be interrupted.

“I have two daughters, from my first marriage,” the woman went on. “Throughout their childhood and adolescence, I never slept. I was certain something terrible was going to happen to them, that I would lose them, or one of them. I was afraid all the time.”

It sounded like a true story. (Wallingford couldn’t help judging the start of any story this way.)

“But they survived,” the woman said, as if most children didn’t. “They’re both married now and have children of their own. I have four grandchildren. Three girls, one boy. It kills me not to see more of them than I do, but when I see them, I feel afraid for them. I start to worry again. I don’t sleep.”

Patrick felt the radiating twinges of mock pain where his left hand had been, but the woman had slightly relaxed her grip and there was an unanalyzed comfort in having his arm held so urgently in her lap, his stump pressing against the swell of her abdomen.

“Now I’m pregnant,” the woman told him; his forearm didn’t respond. “I’m fiftyone! I’m not supposed to get pregnant! I came to Boston to have an abortion—my doctor recommended it. But I called the clinic from the hotel this morning. I lied. I said my car had broken down and I had to reschedule the appointment. They told me they can see me next Saturday, a week from today. That gives me more time to think about it.”

“Have you talked to your daughters?” Wallingford asked. Her lion’s grip on his arm was there again.

“They’d try to convince me to have the baby,” the woman replied, with renewed intensity. “They’d offer to raise the child with their children. But it would still be mine. I couldn’t stop myself from loving it, I couldn’t help but be involved. Yet I simply can’t stand the fear. The mortality of children… it’s more than I can bear.”

“It’s your choice,” Patrick reminded her. “Whatever decision you make, I’m sure it will be the right one.” The woman didn’t look so sure.

Wallingford wondered who the unborn child’s father was; whether or not this thought was conveyed by the tremble in his left forearm, the woman either felt it or she read his mind.

“The father doesn’t know,” she said. “I don’t see him anymore. He was just a colleague.”

Patrick had never heard the word “colleague” used so dismissively.

“I don’t want my daughters to know I’m pregnant because I don’t want them to know I have sex,” the woman confessed. “That’s also why I can’t make up my mind. I don’t think you should have an abortion because you’re trying to keep the fact that you’ve had sex a secret. That’s not a good enough reason.”

“Who’s to say what’s a ‘good enough’ reason if it’s your reason? It’s your choice,”

Wallingford repeated. “It’s not a decision anyone else can or should make for you.”

“That’s not hugely comforting,” the woman told him. “I was all set to have the abortion until I saw you at breakfast. I don’t understand what you triggered.”

Wallingford had known from the beginning that all this would end up being his fault. He made the most tentative effort to retrieve his arm from the woman’s grasp, but she was not about to let him go that easily.

“I don’t know what got into me when I spoke to you. I’ve never spoken to anyone like that in my life!” the woman continued. “I shouldn’t blame you, personally, for what the media does, or what I think they do. I was just so upset to hear about John junior, and I was even more upset by my first reaction. When I heard about his plane being lost, do you know what I thought?”

“No.” Patrick shook his head; the hot water was making his forehead perspire, and he could see beads of sweat on the woman’s upper lip.

“I was glad his mother was dead… that she didn’t have to go through this. I was sorry for him, but I was glad for her that she was dead. Isn’t that awful?”

“It’s perfectly understandable,” Wallingford replied. “You’re a mother…” His instinct just to pat her on the knee, underwater, was sincere—that is, heartfelt without being in the least sexual. But because the instinct traveled down his left arm, there was no hand to pat her knee with. Unintentionally, he jerked his stump away from her; he’d felt the invisible crawling insects again. For a pregnant fifty-one-year-old mother of two and a pregnant grandmother of four, the woman was undaunted by Wallingford’s uncontrollable gesture. She calmly reached for his handless arm again. To Patrick’s surprise, he willingly put his stump back in her lap. The woman took hold of his forearm without reproach, as if she’d only momentarily misplaced a cherished possession.

“I apologize for attacking you in public,” she said sincerely. “It was uncalled for. I’m simply not myself.” She gripped his forearm so tightly that an impossible pain was registered in Wallingford’s missing left thumb. He flinched. “Oh, God! I’ve hurt you!” the woman cried, letting go of his arm. “And I haven’t even asked you what your doctor said!”

“I’m okay,” Patrick said. “It’s principally the nerves that were regenerated when the new hand was attached. Those nerves are acting up. My doctor thought my love life was the problem, or just stress.”

“Your love life,” the woman repeated flatly, as if that were not a subject she cared to address. Wallingford didn’t want to address it, either. “But why are you still here?” she suddenly asked.

Patrick thought she meant the hot tub. He was about to say that he was there because she’d held him there! Then he realized that she meant why hadn’t he gone back to New York. Or, if not New York, shouldn’t he be in Hyannisport or Martha’s Vineyard?

Wallingford dreaded telling her that he was stalling his inevitable return to his questionable profession (“questionable” given the Kennedy spectacle, to which he would soon be contributing); yet he admitted this to the woman, however reluctantly, and further told her that he’d intended to walk to Harvard Square to pick up a couple of books that his doctor had recommended. He’d considered that he might spend what remained of the weekend reading them.

“But I was afraid someone in Harvard Square would recognize me and say something to me along the lines of what you said to me at breakfast.” Patrick added: “It wouldn’t have been undeserved.”

“Oh, God!” the woman said again. “Tell me what the books are. I’ll go get them for you. No one ever recognizes me. ”

“That’s very kind of you, but—”

“Please let me get the books for you! It would make me feel better!” She laughed nervously, pushing her damp hair away from her forehead.

Wallingford sheepishly told her the titles.

“Your doctor recommended them? Do you have children?”

“There’s a little boy who’s like a son to me, or I want him to be more like a son to me,” Patrick explained. “But he’s too young for me to read him Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web. I just want them so that I can imagine reading them to him in a few years.”

“I read Charlotte’s Web to my grandson only a few weeks ago,” the woman told him. “I cried all over again—I cry every time.”

“I don’t remember the book very well, just my mother crying,” Wallingford admitted.

“My name is Sarah Williams.” There was an uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice when she said her name and held out her hand.

Patrick shook her hand, both their hands touching the foamy bubbles in the hot tub. At that moment, the whirlpool jets shut off and the water in the tub was instantly clear and still. It was a little startling and too obvious an omen, which elicited more nervous laughter from Sarah Williams, who stood up and stepped out of the tub.

Wallingford admired that way women have of getting out of the water in a wet bathing suit, a thumb or a finger automatically pulling down the back of the suit. When she stood, her small belly looked almost flat—it was swollen ever so slightly. From his memory of Mrs. Clausen’s pregnancy, Wallingford guessed that Sarah Williams couldn’t have been more than two, at the most three, months pregnant. If she hadn’t told him she was carrying a child, he would never have guessed. And maybe the pouch was always there, even when she wasn’t pregnant.

“I’ll bring the books to your room.” Sarah was wrapping herself up in a towel.

“What’s your room number?”

He told her, grateful for the occasion to prolong his procrastination, but while he was waiting for her to bring him the children’s books, he would still have to decide whether to go back to New York that night or not until Sunday morning. Maybe Mary wouldn’t have found him yet; that would buy Patrick a little more time. He might even discover that he had the willpower to delay turning the TV

on, at least until Sarah Williams came to his room. Maybe she would watch the news with him; they seemed to agree that the coverage would be unbearable. It’s always better not to watch a bad newscast by yourself—let alone a Super Bowl. Yet as soon as he was back in his hotel room, he could summon no further resistance. He took off his wet bathing suit but kept the bathrobe on, and—while noticing that the message light on his telephone was flashing—he found the remote control for the TV in the drawer, where he’d hidden it, and turned the television on.

He flipped through the channels until he found the all-news network, where he watched what he could have predicted (John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Tribeca connection) come to life. There were the plain metal doors of the loft John junior had bought at 20 North Moore. The Kennedys’ residence, which was across the street from an old warehouse, had already been turned into a shrine. JFK, Jr.’s neighbors—and probably utter strangers posing as his neighbors—had left candles and flowers; perversely, they’d also left what looked like get-well cards. While Patrick felt genuinely awful that the young couple and Mrs. Kennedy’s sister had, in all likelihood, died, he detested those people groveling in their fantasy grief in Tribeca; they were what made the worst of television possible. But as much as Wallingford hated the telecast, he also understood it. There were only two positions the media could take toward celebrities: worship them or trash them. And since mourning was the highest form of worship, the deaths of celebrities were understandably to be prized; furthermore, their deaths allowed the media to worship and trash them all at once. There was no beating it. Wallingford turned off the TV and put the remote back in the drawer; he would be on television and a part of the spectacle soon enough. He was relieved when he called to inquire about his message light—only the hotel itself had called, to ask when he was checking out.

He told the hotel he would check out in the morning. Then he stretched out on the bed in the semidark room. (The curtains were still closed from the night before; the maids hadn’t touched the room because Patrick had left theDO NOT

DISTURB sign on the door.) He lay waiting for Sarah Williams, a fellow traveler, and the wonderful books for children and world-weary adults by E. B. White. Wallingford was a news anchor in hiding; he was deliberately making himself unavailable at the moment the story of Kennedy’s missing plane was unfolding. What would management make of a journalist who wasn’t dying to report this story? In fact, Wallingford was shrinking from it—he was a reporter who was putting off doing his job ! (No sensible news network would have hesitated to fire him.)

And what else was Patrick Wallingford putting off? Wasn’t he also hiding from what Evelyn Arbuthnot had disparagingly called his life ? When would he finally get it? Destiny is not imaginable, except in dreams or to those in love. Upon meeting Mrs. Clausen, Patrick could never have envisioned a future with her; upon falling in love with her, he couldn’t imagine the future without her.

It was not sex that Wallingford wanted from Sarah Williams, although he tenderly touched her drooping breasts with his one hand. Sarah didn’t want to have sex with Wallingford, either. She might have wanted to mother him, possibly because her daughters lived far away and had children of their own. More likely, Sarah Williams realized that Patrick Wallingford was in need of mothering, and—in addition to feeling guilty for having publicly abused him—she was feeling guilty for how little time she spent with her grandchildren.

There was also the problem that Sarah was pregnant, and that she believed she could not endure again the fear of one of her own children’s mortality; nor did she want her grown daughters to know she was having sex.

She told Wallingford that she was an associate professor of English at Smith. She definitely sounded like an English teacher when she read aloud to Patrick in a clear, animated voice, first from Stuart Little and then from Charlotte’s Web,

“because that is the order in which they were written.”

Sarah lay on her left side with her head on Patrick’s pillow. The light on the night table was the only one on in the darkened room; although it was midday, they kept all the curtains closed.

Professor Williams read Stuart Little past lunchtime. They weren’t hungry. Wallingford lay naked beside her, his chest in constant contact with her back, his thighs touching her buttocks, his right hand holding one, and then the other, of her breasts. Pressed between them, where they were both aware of it, was the stump of Patrick’s left forearm. He could feel it against his bare stomach; she could feel it against the base of her spine.

The ending of Stuart Little, Wallingford thought, might be more gratifying to adults than to children—children have higher expectations of endings. Still it was “a youthful ending,” Sarah said, “full of the optimism of young adults.”

She sounded like an English teacher, all right. Patrick would have described the ending of Stuart Little as a kind of second beginning. One has the sense that a new adventure is waiting for Stuart as he again sets forth on his travels.

“It’s a boy’s book,” Sarah said.

Mice might enjoy it, too, Patrick guessed.

They were mutually disinclined to have sex; yet if one of them had been determined to make love, they would have. But Wallingford preferred to be read to, like a little boy, and Sarah Williams was feeling more motherly (at the moment) than sexual. Furthermore, how many naked adults—strangers in a darkened hotel room in the middle of the day—were reading E. B. White aloud? Even Wallingford would have admitted to a fondness for the uniqueness of the situation. It was surely more unique than having sex.

“Please don’t stop,” Wallingford told Ms. Williams, in the same way he might have spoken to someone who was making love to him. “Please keep reading. If you start Charlotte’s Web, I’ll finish it. I’ll read the ending to you.”

Sarah had shifted slightly in the bed, so that Patrick’s penis now brushed the backs of her thighs; the stump of his left forearm grazed her buttocks. It might have crossed her mind to consider which was which, notwithstanding the size factor, but that thought would have led them both into an altogether more ordinary experience.

When the phone call came from Mary, it interrupted that scene in Charlotte’s Web when Charlotte (the spider) is preparing Wilbur (the pig) for her imminent death.

“After all, what’s a life, anyway?” Charlotte asks. “We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies.”

Just then the phone rang. Wallingford increased his grip on one of Sarah’s breasts. Sarah indicated her irritation with the call by picking up the receiver and asking sharply, “Who is it?”

“Who is this ? Just who are you ?” Mary cried into the phone. She spoke loudly enough for Patrick to hear her—he groaned.

“Tell her you’re my mother,” Wallingford whispered in Sarah’s ear. (He was briefly ashamed to remember that the last time he’d used this line, his mother was still alive.)

“I’m Patrick Wallingford’s mother, dear,” Sarah Williams said into the phone.

“Who are you ?” The familiar “dear” made Wallingford think of Evelyn Arbuthnot again.

Mary hung up.

Ms. Williams went on reading from the penultimate chapter of Charlotte’s Web, which concludes, “No one was with her when she died.”

Sobbing, Sarah handed the book to Patrick. He’d promised to read her the last chapter, about Wilbur the pig, “And so Wilbur came home to his beloved manure pile…” the story of which Wallingford reported without emotion, as if it were the news. (It was better than the news, but that was another story.) When Patrick finished, they dozed until it was dark outside; only half awake, Wallingford turned off the light on the night table so that it was dark inside the hotel room, too. He lay still. Sarah Williams was holding him, her breasts pressing into his shoulder blades. The firm but soft bulge of her stomach fitted the curve at the small of his back; one of her arms encircled his waist. With her hand, she gripped his penis a little more tightly than was comfortable. Even so, he fell asleep.

Probably they would have slept through the night. On the other hand, they might have woken up just before dawn and made intense love in the semidarkness, possibly because they both knew they would never see each other again. But it hardly matters what they would have done, because the phone rang again. This time Wallingford answered it. He knew who it was; even asleep, he’d been expecting the call. He’d told Mary the story of how and when his mother had died. Patrick was surprised how long it had taken Mary to remember it.

“She’s dead. Your mother’s dead ! You told me yourself! She died when you were in college!”

“That’s right, Mary.”

“You’re in love with someone!” Mary was wailing. Naturally Sarah could hear her.

“That’s right,” Wallingford answered. Patrick saw no reason to explain to Mary that it wasn’t Sarah Williams he was in love with. Mary had hit on him for too long.

“It’s that same young woman, isn’t it?” Sarah asked. The sound of Sarah’s voice, whether or not Mary actually heard what she said, was enough to set Mary off again.

“She sounds old enough to be your mother!” Mary shrieked.

“Mary, please—”

“That dick Fred is looking for you, Pat. Everyone’s looking for you! You’re not supposed to go off for a weekend without leaving a number! You’re not supposed to be unreachable ! Are you trying to get fired or what?”

That was the first time Wallingford thought about trying to get fired; in the dark hotel room, the idea glowed as brightly as the digital alarm clock on the night table.

“You do know what’s happened, don’t you?” Mary asked. “Or have you been fucking so much that you’ve somehow managed to miss the news?”

“I have not been fucking.” Patrick knew it was a provocative thing to say. After all, Mary was a journalist. That Wallingford had been fucking a woman in a hotel room all weekend was a fairly obvious conclusion to come to; like most journalists, Mary had learned to draw her own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.

“You don’t expect me to believe you, do you?” she asked.

“I’m beginning not to care if you believe me, Mary.”

“That dick Fred—”

“Please tell him I’ll be back tomorrow, Mary.”

“You are trying to get fired, aren’t you?” Mary said. Once again, she hung up first. For the second time, Wallingford considered the idea of trying to get fired—he didn’t know why it seemed to be such a glow-in-the-dark idea.

“You didn’t tell me you were married or something,” Sarah Williams said. He could tell she was not in the bed; he could hear her, but only dimly see her, getting dressed in the dark room.

“I’m not married or anything,” Patrick said.

“She’s just a particularly possessive girlfriend, I suppose.”

“She’s not a girlfriend. We’ve never had sex. We’re not involved in that way,”

Wallingford declared.

“Don’t expect me to believe that,” Sarah said. (Journalists aren’t the only people who draw their own fairly obvious conclusions quickly.)

“I’ve really enjoyed being with you,” Patrick told her, trying to change the subject; he was also being sincere. But he could hear her sigh; even in the dark, he could tell she was doubting him.

“If I decide to have the abortion, maybe you’ll be kind enough to go with me,”

Sarah Williams ventured. “It would mean coming back here a week from today.”

Perhaps she meant to give him more time to think about it, but Wallingford was thinking of the likelihood of his being recognized—LION GUY ESCORTS

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN TO ABORTION MILL, or a headline to that effect.

“I just hate the idea of doing it alone, but I guess it doesn’t sound like a fun date,”

Sarah continued.

“Of course I’ll go with you,” he told her, but she’d noticed his hesitation. “If you want me to.” He immediately hated how this sounded. Of course she wanted him to! She’d asked him, hadn’t she? “Yes, definitely, I’ll go with you,” Patrick said, but he was only making it worse.

“No, that’s all right. You don’t even know me,” Sarah said.

“I want to go with you,” Patrick lied, but she was over it now.

“You didn’t tell me you were in love with someone,” she accused him.

“It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t love me.” Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams wouldn’t believe that, either.

She had finished dressing. He thought she was groping for the door. He turned on the light on the night table; it momentarily blinded him, but he was nonetheless aware of Sarah turning her face away from the light. She left the room without looking at him. He turned off the light and lay naked in bed, with the idea of trying to get himself fired glowing in the dark.

Wallingford knew that Sarah Williams had been upset about more than Mary’s phone call. Sometimes it’s easiest to confide the most intimate things to a stranger—Patrick himself had done it. And hadn’t Sarah mothered him for a whole day? The least he could do was go with her to the abortion. So what if someone recognized him? Abortion was legal, and he believed it should be legal. He regretted his earlier hesitation.

Therefore, when Wallingford called the hotel operator to ask for a wake-up call, he also asked to be connected to Sarah’s room—he didn’t know the number. He wanted to propose a late bite to eat. Surely some place in Harvard Square would still be serving, especially on a Saturday night. Wallingford wanted to convince Sarah to let him go with her to the abortion; he felt it would be better to try to persuade her over dinner.

But the operator informed him that no one named Sarah Williams was registered in the hotel.

“She must have just checked out,” Patrick said.

There was the indistinct sound of fingers on a computer keyboard, searching. In the new century, Wallingford imagined, it was probably the last sound we would hear before our deaths.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the hotel operator told him. “There never was a Sarah Williams staying here.”

Wallingford wasn’t that surprised. Later he would call the English Department at Smith—he would be equally unsurprised to discover that no one named Sarah Williams taught there. She may have sounded like an associate professor of English when she was discussing Stuart Little, and she may have taught at Smith, but she was not a Sarah Williams.

Whoever she was, the thought that Patrick had been cheating on another woman—or that there was another woman in his life, one who felt wronged—had clearly upset her. Possibly she was cheating on someone; probably she had been cheated on. The abortion business had sounded true, as had her fear of her children and grandchildren dying. The only hesitation he’d heard in her voice had been when she’d told him her name.

Wallingford was upset that he had become a man to whom any decent woman would want to remain anonymous. He’d never thought of himself that way before. When he’d had two hands, Patrick had experimented with anonymity—in particular, when he was with the kind of woman to whom any man would prefer to remain anonymous. But after the lion episode, he could no more have got away with not being Patrick Wallingford than he could have passed for Paul O’Neill—at least not to anyone with his or her faculties intact.

Rather than be left alone with these thoughts, Patrick made the mistake of turning on the television. A political commentator whose specialty had always struck Wallingford as intellectually inflated hindsight was speculating on a sizable “what if…” in the tragically abbreviated life of John F. Kennedy, Jr. The selfseriousness of the commentator was perfectly matched to the speciousness of his principal assertion, which was that JFK, Jr., would have been “better off” in every way if he’d gone against his mother’s advice and become a movie star. (Would young Kennedy not have died in a plane crash if he’d been an actor?) It was a fact that John junior’s mom hadn’t wanted him to be an actor, but the presumptuousness of the political commentator was enormous. The most egregious of his irresponsible speculations was that John junior’s smoothest, most unalterable course to the presidency lay through Los Angeles! To Patrick, the fatuousness of such Hollywood-level theorizing was twofold: first, to declare that young Kennedy should have followed in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps; second, to claim that JFK, Jr., had wanted to be president.

Preferring his other, more personal demons, Patrick turned off the TV. There in the dark, the new idea of trying to get fired greeted him as familiarly as an old friend. Yet that other new notion—that he was a man whose company a woman would accept only on the condition of anonymity—gave Patrick the shivers. It also precipitated a third new idea: What if he stopped resisting Mary and simply slept with her? (At least Mary wouldn’t insist on protecting her anonymity.) Thus there were three new ideas glowing in the dark, distracting Patrick Wallingford from the loneliness of a fifty-one-year-old woman who didn’t want to have an abortion but who was terrified of having a child. Of course, it was none of his business if that woman had an abortion or not; it was nobody’s business but hers.

And what if she wasn’t even pregnant? She may simply have had a small potbelly. Maybe she liked to spend her weekends in a hotel with a stranger, just acting. Patrick knew all about acting; he was always acting.

“Good night, Doris. Good night, my little Otto,” Wallingford whispered in the dark hotel room. It was what he said when he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t acting.