by John Irving
His breakfast finished, Patrick sat at his table, trying to finish his coffee without returning the relentless stare of a middle-aged woman across the room. But she now made her way toward him. Her path was deliberate; while she pretended to be only passing by, Wallingford knew she was going to say something to him. He could always tell. Often he could guess what the women were going to say, but not this time.
Her face had been pretty once. She wore no makeup, and her undyed brown hair was turning gray. In the crow's-feet at the corners of her dark-brown eyes there was something sad and tired that reminded Patrick of Mrs. Clausen grown older.
"Scum ... despicable swine ... how do you sleep at night?" the woman asked him in a harsh whisper; her teeth were clenched, her lips parted no wider than was necessary for her to spit out her words.
"Pardon me?" said Patrick Wallingford.
"It didn't take you long to get here, did it?" she asked. "Those poor families ... the bodies not even recovered. But that doesn't stop you, does it? You thrive on other people's misfortune. You ought to call yourself the death network--no, the grief channel! Because you do more than invade people's privacy--you steal their grief! You make their private grief public before they even have a chance to grieve!"
Wallingford wrongly assumed that she was speaking generically of his TV newscasts past. He looked away from the woman's entrenched stare, but among his fellow breakfast-eaters, he saw that no assistance would be forthcoming; from their unanimously hostile expressions, they appeared to share the demented woman's view.
"I try to report what's happened with sympathy," Patrick began, but the near-violent woman cut him off.
"Sympathy!" she cried. "If you had an ounce of sympathy for those poor people, you'd leave them alone!"
Since the woman was clearly deranged, what could Wallingford do? He pinned his bill to the table with the stump of his left forearm, quickly adding a tip and his room number before signing his name. The woman watched him coldly. Patrick stood up from the table. As he nodded good-bye to the woman and started to leave the restaurant, he was aware of the children gaping at his missing hand.
An angry-looking sous-chef, all in white, stood glaring at Wallingford from behind a counter. "Hyena," the sous-chef said.
"Jackal!" cried an elderly man at an adjacent table.
The woman, Patrick's first attacker, said to his back: "Vulture ... carrion feeder ..."
Wallingford kept walking, but he could sense that the woman was following him; she accompanied him to the elevators, where he pushed the button and waited. He could hear her breathing, but he didn't look at her. When the elevator door opened, he stepped inside and allowed the door to close behind his back. Until he pushed the button for his floor and turned to face her, he didn't know that the woman was not there; he was surprised to find himself alone.
It must be Cambridge, Patrick thought--all those Harvard and M.I.T. intellectuals who loathed the crassness of the media. He brushed his teeth, right-handed, of course. He was ever-conscious of how he'd been learning to brush his teeth with his left hand when it had just up and died. Still clueless about the breaking news, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and took a taxi to Dr. Zajac's office.
It was deeply disconcerting to Patrick that Dr. Zajac--specifically, his face--smelled of sex. This evidence of a private life was not what Wallingford wanted to know about his hand surgeon, even while Zajac was reassuring him that there was nothing wrong with the sensations he was experiencing in the stump of his left forearm.
It turned out there was a word for the feeling that small, unseen insects were crawling over or under his skin. "Formication," Dr. Zajac said.
Naturally Wallingford misheard him. "Excuse me?" he asked.
"It means 'tactile hallucination.' Formication," the doctor repeated, "with an m."
"Oh."
"Think of nerves as having long memories," Zajac told him. "What's triggering those nerves isn't your missing hand. I mentioned your love life because you once mentioned it. As for stress, I can only imagine what a week you have ahead of you. I don't envy you the next few days. You know what I mean."
Wallingford didn't know what Dr. Zajac meant. What did the doctor imagine of the week Wallingford had ahead of him? But Zajac had always struck Wallingford as a little crazy. Maybe everyone in Cambridge was crazy, Patrick considered.
"It's true, I'm a little unhappy in the love-life department," Wallingford confessed, but there he paused--he had no memory of discussing his love life with Zajac. (Had the painkillers been more potent than he'd thought at the time?)
Wallingford was further confused by trying to decide what was different about Dr. Zajac's office. After all, that office was sacred ground; yet it had seemed a very different place when Mrs. Clausen was having her way with him in the exact chair in which he now sat, scanning the surrounding walls.
Of course! The photographs of Zajac's famous patients--they were gone! In their place were children's drawings. One child's drawings, actually--they were all Rudy's. Castles in heaven, Patrick would have guessed, and there were several of a large, sinking ship; doubtless the young artist had seen Titanic. (Both Rudy and Dr. Zajac had seen the movie twice, although Zajac had made Rudy shut his eyes during the sex scene in the car.)
As for the model in the series of photos of an increasingly pregnant young woman ... well, not surprisingly, Wallingford felt drawn to her coarse sexuality. She must have been Irma, the self-described Mrs. Zajac, who'd spoken to Patrick on the phone. Wallingford learned that Irma was expecting twins only when he inquired about the empty picture frames that were hanging from the walls in half a dozen places, always in twos.
"They're for the twins, after they're born," Zajac told Patrick proudly.
No one at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink, Zajac & Associates envied Zajac having twins, although that moron Mengerink opined that twins were what Zajac deserved for fucking Irma twice as much as Mengerink believed was "normal." Schatzman had no opinion of the upcoming birth of Dr. Zajac's twins, because Schatzman was more than retired--Schatzman had died. And Gingeleskie (the living one) had shifted his envy of Zajac to a more virulent envy of a younger colleague, someone Dr. Zajac had brought into the surgical association. Nathan Blaustein had been Zajac's best student in clinical surgery at Harvard. Dr. Zajac didn't envy young Blaustein at all. Zajac simply recognized Blaustein as his technical superior--"a physical genius."
When a ten-year-old in New Hampshire had lopped off his thumb in a snow blower, Dr. Zajac had insisted that Blaustein perform the reattachment surgery. The thumb was a mess, and it had been unevenly frozen. The boy's father had needed almost an hour to find the severed thumb in the snow; then the family had to drive two hours to Boston. But the surgery had been a success. Zajac was already lobbying his colleagues to have Blaustein's name added to the office nameplate and letterhead--a request that caused Mengerink to seethe with resentment, and no doubt made Schatzman and Gingeleskie (the dead one) roll in their graves.
As for Dr. Zajac's ambitions in hand-transplant surgery, Blaustein was now in charge of such procedures. (There would soon be many procedures of that kind, Zajac had predicted.) While Zajac said he would be happy to be part of the team, he believed young Blaustein should head the operation because Blaustein was now the best surgeon among them. No envy or resentment there. Quite unexpectedly, even to himself, Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac was a happy, relaxed man.
Ever since Wallingford had lost Otto Clausen's hand, Zajac had contented himself with his inventions of prosthetic devices, which he designed and assembled on his kitchen table while listening to his songbirds. Patrick Wallingford was the perfect guinea pig for Zajac's inventions, because he was willing to model any new prosthesis on his evening newscast--even though he chose not to wear a prosthesis himself. The publicity had been good for the doctor.
A prosthesis of his invention--it was predictably called "The Zajac"--was now manufactured in Germany and Japan. (The German model was marginally more expen
sive, but both were marketed worldwide.) The success of "The Zajac" had permitted Dr. Zajac to reduce his surgical practice to half-time. He still taught at the medical school, but he could devote more of himself to his inventions, and to Rudy and Irma and (soon) the twins.
"You should have children," Zajac was telling Patrick Wallingford, as the doctor turned out the lights in his office and the two men awkwardly bumped into each other in the dark. "Children change your life."
Wallingford hesitantly mentioned how much he wanted to construct a relationship with Otto junior. Did Dr. Zajac have any advice about the best way to connect with a young child, especially a child one saw infrequently?
"Reading aloud," Dr. Zajac replied. "There's nothing like it. Begin with Stuart Little, then try Charlotte's Web."
"I remember those books!" Patrick cried. "I loved Stuart Little, and I can remember my mother weeping when she read me Charlotte's Web."
"People who read Charlotte's Web without weeping should be lobotomized," Zajac responded. "But how old is little Otto?"
"Eight months," Wallingford answered.
"Oh, no, he's just started to crawl," Dr. Zajac said. "Wait until he's six or seven--I mean years. By the time he's eight or nine, he'll be reading Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web to himself, but he'll be old enough to listen to those stories when he's younger."
"Six or seven," Patrick repeated. How could he wait that long to establish a relationship with Otto junior?
After Zajac locked his office, he and Patrick rode the elevator down to the ground floor. The doctor offered to drive his patient back to the Charles Hotel since it was on his way home, and Wallingford gladly accepted. It was on the car radio that the famous TV journalist finally learned of Kennedy's missing plane.
By now it was mostly old news to everyone but Wallingford. JFK, Jr., was, together with his wife and sister-in-law, lost at sea, presumed dead. Young Kennedy, a relatively new pilot, had been flying the plane. There was mention of the haze over Martha's Vineyard the previous night. Luggage tags had been found; later would come the luggage, then the debris from the plane itself.
"I guess it would be better if the bodies were found," Zajac remarked. "I mean better than the speculation if they're never found."
It was the speculation that Wallingford foresaw, regardless of finding or not finding the bodies. There would be at least a week of it. The coming week was the week Patrick had almost chosen for his vacation; now he wished he had chosen it. (He'd decided to ask for a week in the fall instead, preferably when the Green Bay Packers had a home game at Lambeau Field.)
Wallingford went back to the Charles like a man condemned. He knew what the news, which was not the news, would be all the next week; it was everything that was most hateful in Patrick's profession, and he would be part of it.
The grief channel, the woman at breakfast had said, but the deliberate stimulation of public mourning was hardly unique to the network where Wallingford worked. The overattention to death had become as commonplace on television as the coverage of bad weather; death and bad weather were what TV did best.
Whether they found the bodies or not, or regardless of how long it might take to find them--with or without what countless journalists would call "closure"--there would be no closure. Not until every Kennedy moment in recent history had been relived. Nor was the invasion of the Kennedy family's privacy the ugliest aspect of it. From Patrick's point of view, the principal evil was that it wasn't news--it was recycled melodrama.
Patrick's hotel room at the Charles was as silent and cool as a crypt; he lay on the bed trying to anticipate the worst before turning on the TV. Wallingford was thinking about JFK, Jr.'s older sister, Caroline. Patrick had always admired her for remaining aloof from the press. The summer house Wallingford was renting in Bridgehampton was near Sagaponack, where Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg was spending the summer with her husband and children. She had a plain but elegant kind of beauty; although she would be under intense media scrutiny now, Patrick believed that she would manage to keep her dignity intact.
In his room at the Charles, Wallingford felt too sick to his stomach to turn the TV on. If he went back to New York, not only would he have to answer the messages on his answering machine, but his phone would never stop ringing. If he stayed in his room at the Charles, he would eventually have to watch television, even though he already knew what he would see--his fellow journalists, our self-appointed moral arbiters, looking their most earnest and sounding their most sincere.
They would already have descended on Hyannisport. There would be a hedge, that ever-predictable barrier of privet, in the background of the frame. Behind the hedge, only the upstairs windows of the brilliantly white house would be visible. (They would be dormer windows, with their curtains drawn.) Yet, somehow, the journalist standing in the foreground of the shot would manage to look as if he or she had been invited.
Naturally there would be an analysis of the small plane's disappearance from the radar screen, and some sober commentary on the pilot's presumed error. Many of Patrick's fellow journalists would not pass up the opportunity to condemn JFK, Jr.'s judgment; indeed, the judgment of all Kennedys would be questioned. The issue of "genetic restlessness" among the male members of the family would surely be raised. And much later--say, near the end of the following week--some of these same journalists would declare that the coverage had been excessive. They would then call for a halt to the process. That was always the way.
Wallingford wondered how long it would take for someone in the New York newsroom to ask Mary where he was. Or was Mary herself trying to reach him? She knew he was seeing his hand surgeon; at the time of the procedure, Zajac's name had been in the news. As he lay immobilized on the bed in the cool room, Patrick found it strange that someone from the all-news network hadn't already called him at the Charles. Maybe Mary was also out of reach.
On an impulse, Wallingford picked up the phone and dialed the number at his summer house in Bridgehampton. A hysterical-sounding woman answered the phone. It was Crystal Pitney--that was her married name. Patrick couldn't remember what Crystal's last name had been when he'd slept with her. He recalled that there was something unusual about her lovemaking, but he couldn't think what it was.
"Patrick Wallingford is not here!" Crystal shouted in lieu of the usual hello. "No one here knows where he is!"
In the background, Patrick heard the television; the familiar, self-serious droning was punctuated by occasional outbursts from the newsroom women.
"Hello?" Crystal Pitney said into the phone. Wallingford hadn't said a word. "What are you, a creep?" Crystal asked. "It's a breather--I can hear him breathing!" Mrs. Pitney announced to the other women.
That was it, Wallingford remembered. When he'd made love to her, Crystal had forewarned him that she had a rare respiratory condition. When she got out of breath and not enough oxygen went to her brain, she started seeing things and generally went a little crazy--an understatement, if there ever was one. Crystal had got out of breath in a hurry; before Wallingford knew what was happening, she'd bitten his nose and burned his back with the bedside lamp.
Patrick had never met Mr. Pitney, Crystal's husband, but he admired the man's fortitude. (By the standards of the New York newsroom women, the Pitneys had had a long marriage.)
"You pervert!" Crystal yelled. "If I could see you, I'd bite your face off!"
Patrick didn't doubt this; he hung up before Crystal got out of breath. He immediately put on his bathing suit and a bathrobe and went to the swimming pool, where no one could phone him.
The only other person in the pool besides Wallingford was a woman swimming laps. She wore a black bathing cap, which made her head resemble the head of a seal, and she was churning up the water with choppy strokes and a flutter kick. To Patrick, she manifested the mindless intensity of a windup toy. Finding it unsettling to share the swimming pool with her, Wallingford retreated to the hot tub, where he could be alone. He did not turn on the whirlpool jets,
preferring the water undisturbed. He gradually grew accustomed to the heat, but no sooner had he found a comfortable position, which was halfway between sitting and floating, than the lap-swimming woman got out of the pool, turned on the timer for the jets, and joined him in the bubbling hot tub.
She was a woman past the young side of middle age. Wallingford quickly noted her unarousing body and politely looked away.
The woman, who was disarmingly without vanity, sat up in the roiling water so that her shoulders and upper chest were above the surface; she pulled off her bathing cap and shook out her flattened hair. It was then that Patrick recognized her. She was the woman who'd called him a "carrion feeder" at breakfast--hounding him, with her burning eyes and noticeable breathing, all the way to the elevators. The woman could not now conceal her shock of recognition, which was simultaneous to his.
She was the first to speak. "This is awkward." Her voice had a softer edge than what Wallingford had heard in her attack on him at breakfast.
"I don't want to antagonize you," Patrick told the woman. "I'll just go to the swimming pool. I prefer the pool to the hot tub, anyway." He rested the heel of his right hand on the underwater ledge and pushed himself to his feet. The stump of his left forearm emerged from the water like a raw, dripping wound. It was as if some creature below the hot tub's surface had eaten his hand. The hot water had turned the scar tissue blood-red.
The woman stood up when he did. Her wet bathing suit was not flattering--her breasts drooped; her stomach protruded like a small pouch. "Please stay a minute," the woman asked. "I want to explain."
