The Fourth Hand

"This would be my baby, not your husband's, wouldn't it?"

But she'd already taken off the sweatshirt. Although she'd left her bra on, he could nonetheless see that her breasts were more special than he'd imagined. There was the glint of something in her navel; the body-piercing was also unexpected. Patrick didn't look at the ornament closely--he was afraid it might have something to do with the Green Bay Packers.

"His hand is the closest to him I can get," Mrs. Clausen said with unflagging determination. The ferocity of her will could easily have been mistaken for desire. But what worked, meaning what was irresistible, was her voice.

She held Wallingford down in the straight-backed chair. She knelt to undo his belt buckle, then she yanked down his pants. By the time Patrick leaned forward, to stop her from removing his undershorts, she'd already removed them. Before he could stand up again, or even sit up straight, she had straddled his lap; her breasts brushed his face. She moved so quickly, he'd somehow missed the moment when she'd taken off her bra.

"I don't have his hand yet!" Wallingford protested, but when had he ever said no?

"Please respect me," she begged him in a whisper. What a whisper it was!

Her small, firm buttocks were warm and smooth against his thighs, and his fleeting glimpse of the doohickey in her navel--even more than the appeal of her breasts--had instantly given Wallingford what felt like an erection on top of his erection. He was aware of her tears against his neck as her hand guided him inside her.

It was not his right hand that she clutched in hers and pulled to her breast--it was his stump. She murmured something that sounded like, "What were you going to do right now, anyway--nothing this important, right?" Then she asked him, "Don't you want to make a baby?"

"I respect you, Mrs. Clausen," he stammered, but he abandoned all hope of resisting her. It was clear to them both that he'd already given in.

"Please call me Doris," Mrs. Clausen said through her tears.

"Doris?"

"Respect me, respect me. That's all I ask." She was sobbing.

"I do, I do respect you ... Doris," Patrick said.

His one hand had instinctively found the small of her back, as if he'd slept beside her every night for years and even in the dark he could reach out and touch exactly that part of her he wanted to hold. At that moment, he could have sworn that her hair was wet--wet and cold, as if she'd just been swimming.

Of course, he would think later, she must have known she was ovulating; a woman who's been trying and trying to get pregnant surely knows. Doris Clausen must also have known that her difficulty in getting pregnant had been entirely Otto's problem.

"Are you nice?" Mrs. Clausen was whispering to him, while her hips moved relentlessly against the downward pressure of his one hand. "Are you a good man?"

Although Patrick had been forewarned that this was what she wanted to know, he never expected she would ask him directly--no more than he'd anticipated a sexual encounter with her. Speaking strictly as an erotic experience, having sex with Doris Clausen was more charged with longing and desire than any other sexual encounter Wallingford had ever had. He wasn't counting the wet dream induced by that cobalt-blue capsule he'd been given in Junagadh, but that extraordinary painkiller was no longer available--not even in India--and it should never be considered in the same category as actual sex.

As for actual sex, Patrick's encounter with Otto Clausen's widow, singular and brief though it was, put his entire weekend in Kyoto with Evelyn Arbuthnot to shame. Having sex with Mrs. Clausen even eclipsed Wallingford's tumultuous relationship with the tall blond sound technician who'd witnessed the lion attack in Junagadh.

That unfortunate German girl, who was back home in Hamburg, was still in therapy because of those lions, although Wallingford suspected she'd been more profoundly traumatized by fainting and then waking up in one of the meat carts than by seeing poor Patrick lose his left wrist and hand.

"Are you nice? Are you a good man?" Doris repeated, her tears wetting Patrick's face. Her small, strong body drew him farther and farther inside her, so that Wallingford could scarcely hear himself answer. Surely Dr. Zajac, as well as s

ome other members of the surgical team who were presently assembling in the waiting room, must have heard Patrick's plaintive cries.

"Yes! Yes! I am nice! I am a good man!" Wallingford wailed.

"Is that a promise?" Doris asked him in a whisper. It was that whisper again--what a killer!

Once more Wallingford answered her so loudly that Dr. Zajac and his colleagues could hear. "Yes! Yes! I promise! I do, I really do!"

The knock on the hand surgeon's office door came a little later, after it had been quiet for a while. "Are we all right in there?" asked the head of the Boston team.

At first Zajac thought they looked all right. Patrick Wallingford was dressed again and still sitting in the straight-backed chair. Mrs. Clausen, fully dressed, lay on her back on Dr. Zajac's office rug. The fingers of her hands were clasped behind her head, and her elevated feet rested on the seat of the empty chair beside Wallingford.

"I have a bad back," Doris explained. She didn't, of course. It was a recommended position in several of the many books she'd read about how to get pregnant. "Gravity," was all she'd said in way of explanation to Patrick, as he'd smiled enchantedly at her.

They're both crazy, thought Dr. Zajac, who could smell sex in the room. A medical ethicist might not have approved of this new development, but Zajac was a hand surgeon, and his surgical team was raring to go.

"If we're feeling pretty comfy about this," Zajac said--looking first at Mrs. Clausen, who looked very comfortable, and then at Patrick Wallingford, who looked stupefyingly drunk or stoned--"how about it? Do we have a green light?"

"Everything's okay with me!" Doris Clausen said loudly, as if she were calling to someone over an expanse of water.