The daughter lay sleeplessly in the bedroom, with the flickering light coming from under the door to the living room of the suite. Her mother, who had turned the volume off, could be heard crying.
The daughter dutifully went to join her mother on the living-room couch. They kept the TV sound off; holding hands, they watched the terrifying but stimulating footage again. The hungry lions were immaterial--the subject of the maiming was men.
"Why do we need them if we hate them?" the daughter tiredly asked.
"We hate them because we need them," the mother answered, her speech slurred.
There was Wallingford's stricken face. He dropped to his knees, his forearm spurting blood. His handsomeness was overwhelmed by his pain, but such was Wallingford's effect on women that a drunken, jetlagged mother and her scarcely less damaged daughter felt their arms ache. They were actually reaching out to him as he fell.
Patrick Wallingford initiated nothing, yet he inspired sexual unrest and unnatural longing--even as he was caught in the
act of feeding a lion his left hand. He was a magnet to women of all ages and types; even lying unconscious, he was a danger to the female sex.
As often happens in families, the daughter said aloud what the mother had also observed but was keeping to herself. "Look at the lionesses," the daughter said.
Not one lioness had touched his hand. There was a measure of longing in the sadness in their eyes; even after Wallingford fainted, the lionesses continued to watch him. It almost seemed that the lionesses were smitten, too.
CHAPTER TWO
The Former Midfielder
THE BOSTON TEAM was headed by Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac, a hand surgeon with Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates--the leading center for hand care in Massachusetts. Dr. Zajac was also an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Harvard. It was his idea to initiate a search for potential hand donors and recipients on the Internet (www.needahand.com).
Dr. Zajac was a half-generation older than Patrick Wallingford. That both Deerfield and Amherst were all-boys' institutions when he'd attended them is insufficient explanation for the single-sex attitude that accompanied his presence as strongly as his bad choice in aftershave.
No one from his Deerfield days, or from his four years at Amherst, remembered him. He'd played varsity lacrosse, in both prep school and college--he was actually a starter--but not even his coaches remembered him. It is exceedingly rare to remain that anonymous on athletic teams; yet Nick Zajac had spent his youth and young manhood in an uncannily unmemorable but successful pursuit of excellence, with no friends and not one sexual experience.
In medical school, another med student, with whom the future Dr. Zajac shared a female cadaver, would forever remember him for his outraged shock at the sight of the body. "That she was long dead wasn't the problem," the lab partner would recall. "What got to Nick was that the cadaver was a woman, clearly his first."
Another first would be Zajac's wife. He was one of those overgrateful men who married the first woman who had sex with him. Both he and his wife would regret it.
The female cadaver had something to do with Dr. Zajac's decision to specialize in hands. According to the former lab partner, the cadaver's hands were the only parts of her that Zajac could stand to examine.
Clearly we need to know more about Dr. Zajac. His thinness was compulsive; he couldn't be thin enough. A marathoner, a bird-watcher, a seed-eater--a habit he had acquired from his observation of finches--the doctor was preternaturally drawn to birds and to people who were famous. He became a hand surgeon to the stars.
Mostly they were sports stars, injured athletes, such as the Boston Red Sox pitcher with a torn anterior radio-ulnar ligament on his throwing hand. The pitcher was later traded to the Toronto Blue Jays for two infielders who never panned out and a designated hitter whose principal talent was hitting his wife. Zajac operated on the designated hitter, too. In attempting to lock herself in the car, the slugger's wife had shut the car door on his hand--the most extensive damage occurring to the second proximal phalanx and the third metacarpal.
A surprising number of sports-star injuries happened away from the field or the court or the ice--like that goalie for the Boston Bruins, since retired, who slashed his superficial transverse ligament, left hand, by gripping a wineglass too tightly against his wedding ring. And there was that frequently penalized linebacker for the New England Patriots who severed a digital artery and some digital nerves by trying to open an oyster with a Swiss Army knife. They were risk-taking jocks--an accident-prone bunch--but they were famous. For a time, Dr. Zajac worshiped them; their signed photographs, radiating physical superiority, looked down from his office walls.
Yet even the on-the-job injuries to sports stars were often unnecessary, including a center for the Boston Celtics who attempted a backward slam dunk after the time on the shot clock had expired. He simply lost control of the ball and made a mess of his palmar fascia against the rim.
Never mind--Dr. Zajac loved them all. And not only the athletes.
Rock singers seemed prone to hotel-room injuries of two kinds. Foremost was what Zajac categorized as "room-service outrage;" this led to stab wounds, scalding coffee and tea injuries, and a host of unplanned confrontations with inanimate objects. A close second to these were the innumerable mishaps in wet bathrooms, to which not only rock stars but also movie stars were inclined.
Movie stars had accidents in restaurants, too, mostly upon leaving them. From a hand surgeon's point of view, striking a photographer was preferable to striking a photographer's camera. For the hand's sake, any expression of hostility toward something made of metal, glass, wood, stone, or plastic was a mistake. Yet, among the famous, violence toward things was the leading source of the injuries the doctor saw.
When Dr. Zajac reviewed the docile visages of his renowned patients, it was with the realization that their success and seeming contentment were only public masks.
All this may have preoccupied Zajac, but the doctor's colleagues at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates were preoccupied with him. While they never called Dr. Zajac a star-fucker to his face, they knew what he was and felt superior to him--if only in this regard. As a surgeon, he was the best of them, and they knew this, too; it bothered them.
If, at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates, they refrained from comment on Zajac's fame-fucking, they did permit themselves to admonish their superstar colleague for his thinness. It was commonly believed that Zajac's marriage had failed because he'd grown thinner than his wife, yet no one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates had been able to persuade Dr. Zajac to feed himself to save his marriage; they were not likely to have any success at convincing him to fatten himself up now that he was divorced.
It was principally his love of birds that drove Zajac's neighbors nuts. For reasons that were incomprehensible even to the area's ornithologists, Dr. Zajac was convinced that the abundance of dogshit in Greater Boston had a deleterious effect on the city's bird life.
There was a picture of Zajac that all his colleagues savored, although only one of them had seen the actual image. On a Sunday morning in his snow-covered yard on Brattle Street, the renowned hand surgeon--in knee-high boots, his red flannel bathrobe, and a preposterous New England Patriots ski hat, a brown paper bag in one hand, a child-size lacrosse stick in the other--was searching his yard for dog turds. Although Dr. Zajac didn't own a dog, he had several inconsiderate neighbors, and Brattle Street was one of the most popular dog-walking routes in Cambridge.
The lacrosse stick had been intended for Zajac's only child, an unathletic son who visited him every third weekend. The troubled boy, disturbed by his parents' divorce, was an underweight six-year-old, an obdurate noneater--quite possibly at the urging of his mother, whose uncomplicated mission was to drive Zajac crazy.