The Fourth Hand

Sometimes it was Vlad or Vlade; at other times, it was Lewis. Even when he was Lewis, his accent remained an indecipherable mixture of Long Island with something Slavic.

“Where are you from, Vlade?” Wallingford had asked him.

“It’s Lewis. Nassau County,” Vlad had replied.

Another time, Wallingford said, “So, Lewis… where were you from?”

“Nassau County. It’s Vlad, Mr. O’Neill.”

Only the doorman mistook Patrick Wallingford for Paul O’Neill, who became a right fielder for the New York Yankees in 1993. (They were both tall, dark, and handsome in that jutting-chin fashion, but that was as far as the resemblance went.)

The confused doorman had unusually unshakable beliefs; he first mistook Patrick for Paul O’Neill when O’Neill was a relatively unknown and unrecognized player for the Cincinnati Reds.

“I guess I look a little like Paul O’Neill,” Wallingford admitted to Vlad or Vlade or Lewis, “but I’m Patrick Wallingford. I’m a television journalist.”

Since Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was the night doorman, it was always dark and often late when he encountered Patrick. “Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman whispered conspiratorially. “I won’t tell anybody.”

Thus the night doorman assumed that Paul O’Neill, who played professional baseball in Ohio, was having an affair with Patrick Wallingford’s wife in New York. At least this was as close as Wallingford could come to understanding what the poor man thought.

One night when Patrick came home—this was when he had two hands, and long before his divorce—Vlad or Vlade or Lewis was watching an extra-inning ball game from Cincinnati, where the Mets were playing the Reds.

“Now look here, Lewis,” Wallingford said to the startled doorman, who kept a small black-and-white TV in the coatroom off the lobby. “There are the Reds—they’re in Cincinnati ! Yet here I am, right beside you. I’m not playing tonight, am I?”

“Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman said sympathetically. “I won’t tell anybody.”

But after he lost his hand, Patrick Wallingford was more famous than Paul O’Neill. Furthermore, it was his left hand that Patrick had lost, and Paul O’Neill bats left and throws left. As Vlad or Vlade or Lewis would know, O’Neill became the American League batting champion in 1994; he hit .359 in what was only his second season with the Yanks, and he was a great right fielder.

“They’re gonna retire Number Twenty-One one day, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman stubbornly assured Patrick Wallingford. “You can count on it.”

After Patrick’s left hand was gone, his single return visit to the apartment on East Sixty-second Street was for the purpose of collecting his clothes and books and what divorce lawyers call personal effects. Of course it was clear to everyone in the building, even to the doorman, that Wallingford was moving out.

“Don’t worry, Mr. O’Neill,” the doorman told Patrick. “The things they can do in rehab today… well, you wouldn’t believe. It’s too bad it wasn’t your right hand—you bein’ a lefty is gonna make it tough—but they’ll come up with somethin’, I know they will.”

“Thank you, Vlade,” Patrick said.

The one-handed journalist felt weak and disoriented in his old apartment. The day he moved out, Marilyn had already begun to rearrange the furniture. Wallingford kept turning to look over his shoulder to see what was behind him; it was just a couch that had been moved from somewhere else in the apartment, but to Patrick the unfamiliarly placed shape took on the characteristics of an advancing lion.

“I think the hittin’ will be less of a problem than the throw to the plate from right field,” the three-named doorman was saying. “You’ll have to choke up on the bat, shorten your swing, lay off the long ball—I don’t mean forever, just till you’re used to the new hand.”

But there was no new hand that Wallingford could get used to; the prosthetic devices defeated him. The ongoing abuse by his ex-wife would defeat Patrick, too.

“You were never sexy, not to me,” Marilyn lied. (So she was guilty of wishful thinking—so what?) “And now… well, missing a hand… you’re nothing but a helpless cripple !”

The twenty-four-hour news network didn’t give Wallingford long to prove himself as an anchor. Even on the reputed disaster channel, Patrick failed to be an anchor of note. He moved quickly from early morning to midmorning to late night, and finally to a predawn slot, where Wallingford imagined that only night workers and insomniacs ever saw him.

His television image was too repressed for a man who’d lost his left hand to the king of beasts. One wanted to see more defiance in his expression, which instead radiated an enfeebled humility, an air of wary acceptance. While he’d never been a bad man, only a bad husband, Patrick’s one-handedness came across as selfpitying, and it marked him as the silent-martyr type. While looking wounded hardly hurt Wallingford with women, now there were only other women in his life. And by the time Patrick’s divorce was settled, his producers felt they had given him adequate opportunity as an anchor to protect themselves from any later charges that they’d discriminated against the handicapped; they returned him to the less visible role of a field reporter. Worse, the one-handed journalist became the interviewer of choice for various freaks and zanies; that the twenty-four-hour international channel already had a reputation for captured acts of mauling and mutilation only underscored Patrick’s image as a man irreversibly damaged.

On TV, of course, the news was catastrophe-driven. Why wouldn’t the network assign Wallingford to the tabloid sleaze, the beneath-the-news stories? Without fail, they gave him the smirking, salacious tidbits—the marriage that lasted less than a day, including one that didn’t make it through the honeymoon; the husband who, after eight years of marriage, discovered that his wife was a man. Patrick Wallingford was the all-news network’s disaster man, the field reporter on the scene of the worst (meaning the most bizarre) accidents. He covered a collision between a tourist bus and a bicycle rickshaw in Bangkok—the two fatalities were both Thai prostitutes, riding to work in the rickshaw. Wallingford interviewed their families and their former clients; it was disquietingly hard to tell which was which, but each of the interviewees felt compelled to stare at the stump or the prosthesis at the end of the reporter’s left arm.

They always eyed the stump or the prosthesis. He hated them both—and the Internet, too. To him, the Internet chiefly served to encourage the inherent laziness of his profession—an overreliance on secondary sources and other shortcuts. Journalists had always borrowed from other journalists, but now it was too easy. His angry ex-wife, who was also a journalist, was a case in point. Marilyn prided herself in writing “profiles” of only the most literary authors and the most serious actors and actresses. (It went without saying that print journalism was superior to television.) Yet in truth, Patrick’s ex-wife prepared for her interviews with writers not by reading their books—some of which were admittedly too long—but by reading their previous interviews. Nor did Marilyn make the effort to see every film that the actors and actresses among her interviewees had been in; shamelessly, she read the reviews of their movies instead. Given his Internet prejudice, Wallingford never saw the publicity campaign on www.needahand.com; he’d never heard of Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates until Dr. Zajac called him. Zajac already knew about Patrick’s mishaps with several different prosthetic devices, not just the one in SoHo, which received a fair amount of attention: the shutting of his artificial hand in the taxi’s rear door; the cabbie blithely driving on for a block or so. The doctor also knew about the embarrassing entanglement with the seat belt on that flight to Berlin, where Wallingford was rushing to interview a deranged man who’d been arrested for detonating a dog near the Potsdamer Platz. (In an avowed protest against the new dome on the Reichstag, the fiend had attached an explosive device to the dog’s collar.)

Patrick Wallingford had become the TV journalist for stray acts of God and random nonsense. People called out to him from passing taxis—“Hey, lion guy!”

Bicycle messengers hailed him, first spitting the whistles from their mouths—“Yo, disaster man!”

Worse, Patrick had so little liking for his job that he’d lost all sympathy for the victims and their families; when he interviewed them, this lack of sympathy showed.

Therefore, in lieu of being fired—since he was injured on the job, he might have sued—Wallingford was so further marginalized that his next field assignment lacked even disaster potential. Patrick was being sent to Japan to cover a conference sponsored by a consortium of Japanese newspapers. He was surprised by the topic of the conference, too—it was called “The Future of Women,” which certainly didn’t have the sound of a disaster.

But the idea of Patrick Wallingford’s attending the conference… well, the women in the newsroom in New