The Fourth Hand

"You shit!" Mary cried. "You can't stand the thought of fucking me, can you? Jesus, Pat--do you need two hands just to get it up? What's the matter with you? Or is it me?"

It was an outburst of the kind that would put an end to their having dinner together on a weekly basis, at least for a while. On that upsetting evening, when Patrick had the taxi drop Mary at her apartment building first, she wouldn't even say good night.

Wallingford, who was understandably distracted, told the taxi driver the wrong address. By the time Patrick realized his mistake, the cabbie had left him outside his old apartment building on East Sixty-second Street, where he'd lived with Marilyn. There was nothing to do but walk half a block to Park Avenue and hail an uptown cab; he was too tired to walk the twenty-plus blocks. But naturally the confused doorman recognized him and came running out on the sidewalk before Patrick could slip away.

"Mr. Wallingford!" Vlad or Vlade or Lewis said, in surprise.

"Paul O'Neill," Patrick said, alarmed. He held out his one and only hand. "Bats left, throws left--remember?"

"Oh, Mr. Wallingford, Paul O'Neill couldn't hold a fuckin' Roman candle to you! That's a kinda firecracker," the doorman explained. "I love the new show! Your interview with the legless child ... you know, that kid who fell or was pushed into the polar-bear tank."

"I know, Vlade," Patrick said.

"It's Lewis," Vlad said. "Anyway, I just loved it! And that miserable fuckin' woman who was given the results of her sister's smear test--I don't believe it!"

"I had trouble believing that one myself," Wallingford admitted. "It's called a Pap smear."

"Your wife's with someone," the doorman noted slyly. "I mean tonight she's with someone."

"She's my ex-wife," Patrick reminded him.

"Most nights she's alone."

"It's her life," Wallingford said.

"Yeah, I know. You're just payin' for it!" the doorman replied.

"I have no complaints about how she lives her life," Patrick said. "I live uptown now, on East Eighty-third Street."

"Don't worry, Mr. Wallingford," the doorman told him. "I won't tell anybody!"

As for the missing hand, Patrick had learned to enjoy waving his stump at the television camera; he happily demonstrated his repeated failures with a variety of prosthetic devices, too.

"Look here--there are people only a little better coordinated than I am who have mastered this gizmo," Wallingford liked to begin. "The other day, I watched a guy cut his dog's toenails with one of these things. It was a frisky dog, too."

But the results were predictably the same: Patrick would spill his coffee in his lap, or he would get his prosthesis snagged in his microphone wire and pop the little mike off his lapel.

In the end he would be one-handed again, nothing artificial. "For twenty-four-hour international news, this is Patrick Wallingford. Good night, Doris," he would always sign off, waving his stump. "Good night, my little Otto."

Patrick would be a long time re-entering the dating scene. After he tried it, the pace disappointed him--it seemed either too fast or too slow. He felt out of step, so he stopped altogether. He occasionally got laid when he traveled, but now that he was an anchor, not a field reporter, he didn't travel as much as he used to. Besides, you can't call getting laid "dating;" Wallingford, typically, wouldn't have called it anything at all.

At least there was nothing comparable to the anticipation he'd felt when Mrs. Clausen would roll on her side, away from him, holding his (or was it Otto's?) hand at first against her side and then against her stomach, where the unborn child was waiting to kick him. There would be no matching that, or the taste of the back of her neck, or the smell of her hair.

Patrick Wallingford had lost his left hand twice, but he'd gained a soul. It was both loving and losing Mrs. Clausen that had given Patrick his soul. It was both his longing for her and the sheer wishing her well; it was getting back his left hand and losing it again, too. It was wanting his child to be Otto Clausen's child, almost as much as Doris had wanted this; it was loving, even unrequited, both Otto junior and the little boy's mother. And such was the size of the ache in Patrick's soul that it was visible--even on television. Not even the confused doorman could mistake him for Paul O'Neill, not anymore.

He was still the lion guy, but something in him had risen above that image of his mutilation; he was still disaster man, but he anchored the evening news with a newfound authority. He had actually mastered the look he'd first practiced in bars at the cocktail hour, when he was feeling sorry for himself. The look still said, Pity me, only now his sadness seemed approachable.

But Wallingford was unimpressed by the progress of his soul. It may have been noticeable to others, but what did that matter? He didn't have Doris Clausen, did he?

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."