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She was crying again, and he reached out to her. He'd never initiated touching her breast with his stump before. Even through her parka, he could feel her breast; when she clasped his forearm tightly there, he could also feel her breathing.
"Just don't ever think I haven't lost something, too," Mrs. Clausen told him angrily.
Doris drove on to the hotel. After she'd handed Patrick the keys and had gone ahead of him into the lobby, he was left to park the car. (He decided to have someone from the hotel do it.)
Then he disposed of the photographs--he dropped them, and the envelope, in a public trash receptacle. They were quickly gone, but he'd not missed their message. Wallingford knew that Mrs. Clausen had just told him all she ever would about her obsession; showing him those photographs of the hand was the absolute end of what she had to say about it.
What had Dr. Zajac said? There was no medical reason why the hand-transplant surgery hadn't worked; Zajac couldn't explain the mystery. But it was no mystery to Patrick Wallingford, whose imagination didn't suffer the constraints of a scientific mind. The hand had finished with its business--that was all.
Interestingly, Dr. Zajac had little to say to his students at Harvard Medical School on the subject of "professional disappointment." Zajac was happy in his semiretirement with Irma and Rudy and the twins; he thought professional disappointment was as anticlimactic as professional success.
"Get your lives together," Zajac told his Harvard students. "If you've already come this far, your professions should take care of themselves." But what do medical-school students know about having lives? They haven't had time to have lives.
Wallingford went up to Doris Clausen, who was waiting for him in the lobby. They took the elevator to his hotel room without exchanging a word.
He let her use the bathroom first. For all her plans, Doris had brought nothing with her but a toothbrush, which she carried in her purse. And in her haste to get ready for bed, she forgot to show Patrick the platinum wedding rings, which were also in her purse. (She would show him the rings in the morning.)
While Mrs. Clausen was in the bathroom, Wallingford watched the late-night news--as a matter of principle, not on his old channel. One of the sports hacks had already leaked the story of Patrick's dismissal to another network; it made a good show-ender, a better-than-average kicker. "Lion Guy Gets Ax from Pretty Mary Shanahan." (That was who she would be from this time forth: "Pretty Mary.")
Mrs. Clausen had come out of the bathroom, naked, and was standing beside him.
Patrick quickly used the bathroom while Doris watched the wrap-up of the Green Bay game. She was surprised that Dorsey Levens had carried the ball twenty-four times for 104 yards, a solid performance for him in a losing cause.
When Wallingford, also naked, came out of the bathroom, Mrs. Clausen had already switched off the TV and was waiting for him in the big bed. Patrick turned out the lights and got into bed beside her. They held each other while they listened to the wind--it was blowing hard, in gusts, but they soon ceased to hear it.
"Give me your hand," Doris said. He knew which one she meant.
Wallingford began by holding Mrs. Clausen's neck in the crook of his right arm; with his right hand, he held fast to one of her breasts. She started by scissoring
the stump of his left forearm between her thighs, where he could feel the lost fingers of his fourth hand touching her.
Outside their warm hotel, the cold wind was a harbinger of the coming winter, but they heard only their own harsh breathing. Like other lovers, they were oblivious to the swirling wind, which blew on and on in the wild, uncaring Wisconsin night.
