On the bullet train, just before their arrival in Tokyo, some Japanese schoolgirls and their accompanying teacher recognized him. They seemed to be gathering their courage to send one of the girls the length of the passenger car to ask the lion guy for his autograph. Patrick hoped not--giving the girls his signature would require extricating his right hand from Evelyn's sleeping fingers.
Finally none of the schoolgirls could summon the courage to approach him; their teacher came down the aisle of the bullet train instead. She was wearing a uniform that closely resembled those of her young charges, and although she was young herself, she conveyed both the severity and formality of a much older woman when she spoke to him. She was also exceedingly polite; she made such an effort to keep her voice low and soft, so as not to wake Evelyn, that Wallingford had to lean a little into the aisle in order to hear her above the clatter of the speeding train.
"The girls wanted me to tell you that they think you're very handsome, and that you must be very brave," she told Patrick. "I have something to say to you, too," she whispered. "When I first saw you, with the lion, I regret that I didn't think you would be such a nice man. But seeing you as you are--you know, just traveling and talking with your mother--I now realize that you are a very nice man."
"Thank you," Wallingford whispered back, although her misunderstanding pained him, and when the young teacher had returned to her seat, Evelyn gave his hand a squeeze--just to let him know she'd been awake. When Wallingford looked at her, her eyes were open wide and she was smiling at him.
Less than a year later, when he heard of her death--"The breast cancer returned," one of her daughters told Wallingford when he called to give Evelyn's children and grandchildren his condolences--Patrick would remember her smile on the bullet train. The lump, which Evelyn had told him was nothing, had been something after all. Given how long a scar it had been, maybe she'd already known that.
There was something entirely too fragile about Patrick Wallingford. Women--his ex-wife, Marilyn, excepted--were always trying to spare him things, although that hardly had been Evelyn Arbuthnot's style.
Wallingford would remember, too, that he could have asked the Japanese schoolteacher what the official name for National Prayer Weekend for Girls was, but he hadn't. Incredibly, especially for a journalist, he'd spent six days in Japan and learned absolutely nothing about the country.
Like the young schoolteacher, the Japanese he'd met had been extremely civilized and courteous, including the Japanese newspapermen who'd been Wallingford's hosts--they'd been a lot more respectful and well mannered than most of the journalists Patrick worked with in New York. But he'd asked them nothing; he'd been too consumed studying himself. All he'd half-learned was how to mock their accents, which he imitated incorrectly.
Fault Marilyn, Wallingford's ex-wife, all you want. She was right about at least one thing--Patrick was permanently a boy. Yet he was capable of growing up, or so he hoped.
There is often a defining experience that marks any significant change in the course of a person's life. Patrick Wallingford's defining experience was not losing his left hand, nor was it adjusting to life without that hand. The experience that truly changed him was a largely squandered trip to Japan.
"Tell us about Japan, Pat. How was it?" those fast-talking women in the New York newsroom would ask him in their ever-flirtatious, always-baiting voices. (They'd already learned from Dick how Wallingford had heard "cunt" when Dick had said "runt.")
But when Wallingford was asked about Japan, he would duck the question. "Japan is a novel," Patrick would say, and leave it at that.
He already believed that the trip to Japan had made him sincerely want to change his life. He would risk everything to change it. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he believed he had the willpower to try. To his credit, the first moment he was alone with Mary whatever-her-name-was in the newsroom, Wallingford said, "I'm very sorry, Mary. I am truly, deeply sorry for what I said, for upsetting you so--"
She interrupted him. "It wasn't what you said that upset me--it's my marriage. It's not working out very well, and I'm pregnant."
"I'm sorry," Patrick said again.
Calling Dr. Zajac and confirming that he wanted to undergo the transplant surgery had been relatively easy.
The next time Patrick had a minute alone with Mary, he made a blunder of the well-intentioned kind. "When are you expecting, Mary?" (She wasn't showing yet.)
"I lost the baby!" Mary blurted out; she burst into tears.
"I'm sorry," Patrick repeated.
"It's my second miscarriage," the miserable young woman told him. She sobbed against his chest, wetting his shirt. When some of those savvy New York newsroom women saw them, they shot one another their most knowing glances. But they were wrong--that is, they were wrong this time. Wallingford was trying to change.
"I should have gone to Japan with you," Mary whatever-her-name-was whispered in Patrick's ear.
"No, Mary--no, no," Wallingford said. "You should not have gone to Japan with me, and I was wrong to propose it." But the young woman cried all the harder.
In the company of crying women, Patrick Wallingford did what many men do--he thought of other things. For example, how exactly do you wait for a hand when you've been without one for five years?
His recent experience with sake notwithstanding, he was not a drinker; but he grew strangely fond of sitting alone in an unfamiliar bar--always a different bar--in the late afternoon. A kind of lassitude compelled him to play this game. As the cocktail hour came, and the place filled with people intent on becoming more and more companionable, Patrick Wallingford sat sipping a beer; his objective was to project an aura of such unapproachable sadness that no one would intrude on his solitude.
They would all recognize him, of course; possibly he would overhear a whispered "lion guy" or "disaster man," but no one would speak to him. That was the game--it was an actor's exercise in finding the right look. (Pity me, the look said. Pity me, but leave me alone.) It was a game at which he became pretty
good.
Then, one late afternoon--shortly before the cocktail hour--Wallingford went to a bar in his old New York neighborhood. It was too early for the night doorman in Patrick's former apartment building to start his shift, but Wallingford was surprised to see the doorman in the bar--all the more so because he wasn't wearing his doorman's uniform.
"Hi, Mr. O'Neill," Vlad or Vlade or Lewis greeted him. "I saw you was in Japan. They play pretty good baseball over there, don't they? I suppose it's an alternative for you, if things don't work out here."
"How are you, Lewis?" Wallingford asked.
"It's Vlade," Vlad said gloomily. "This here's my brother. We're just killin' some time before I go to work. I don't enjoy the night shift no more."