The Clock Winder

3

Two weeks before Christmas there was a heavy snowfall. Timothy had a date with Elizabeth, and it took him nearly an hour to make the drive to his mother’s house. Downtown was difficult enough, but once he reached Roland Park his was the only car on the road, laying new black tracks which wavered slightly if he traveled at more than a creeping pace. He hunched over the steering wheel and squinted through a fan of cleared glass while handfuls of soft snow floated soundlessly around him. His gloves were lost, his heater was broken, and he had forgotten to have his snow tires put on. The only comfort was his radio — a news announcer telling him, over and over, that Baltimore was experiencing a heavy snowstorm and traffic conditions were hazardous. “Exercise extreme caution,” he said. His voice was friendly and concerned. Timothy carried out a token pumping of his brakes, relieved that someone else had noticed these dreamlike puffs of white.

He had begun to have spells lately of worrying that he had died, and that everyone knew it but him.

The lights of the houses along the way were circled with bluish mist. Parked cars were being buried, quickly and stealthily. “If you don’t have to drive, stay home,” the announcer said. “Keep off the roads.” Timothy had no need to drive at all, and should have been safe in his own apartment, but he felt like seeing Elizabeth. He had started taking her out two and three times a week. They went to dinner or the movies, or sometimes they stayed home and played whooping, dashing games of chess, with Elizabeth making bizarre moves and sacrificing quantities of pieces whenever she grew bored. Timothy was more scientific about it. He knew all the famous matches by heart, and could solve any chess problem the newspapers offered him. But Elizabeth had a psychological trick of swooping into his territory from some unexpected corner of the board, stunning him with the swift arc of her long arm, so that even when the invasion was harmless he was taken off guard and made some unlikely move to counter hers. Their games ended in giggles. Everything they did ended in giggles. He kept trying to get on some more serious footing with her, but every time they saw each other they went sailing off into some new piece of silliness. He caught it from her; laughter came shimmering off her like sparkles of water. His mother watched them with a puzzled, anxious smile.

The house was lit in every window, casting long yellow squares across the white lawn. He climbed out of the car and braced himself for a trip through the snow without boots, but before he took his first step Elizabeth rounded the house carrying a snow shovel. Sparks of white glinted on her cap, which seemed to be one of those fighter-pilot helmets with ear-flaps that little boys often wear. “Halt!” she said, and raised her shovel like a rifle. Then she placed herself squarely in front of the steps, set the shovel down at a slant, and started running. A narrow black line followed her magically, pausing each time she was stopped short by the creases between sidewalk squares. The rasping sound brought Timothy’s mother to an upstairs window — a silhouette against yellow lamplight. He laughed and waved at her. Then the blade of the shovel arrived at his shoe-tips and Elizabeth faced him, laughing too and out of breath. “There,” she said, and turned to lead him up the black carpet she had laid for him.

They stamped their feet on the doormat. Elizabeth had on huge rubber boots with red-rimmed soles and flapping metal clasps; he had the feeling they were once his father’s. The cuffs of her jeans were stuffed into them, and her jacket collar was turned up so that her hair, streaming from the helmet, fell half inside and half out in honey-colored tangles. Other girls could waft through his mind in chiffon, or silk, or at least ruffled shirtwaists, but not Elizabeth. Elizabeth forever wore that thick, shabby jacket, and wore it badly — hands deep in her pockets, waist hiked up in back, shoulder seams reaching halfway to her elbows and the zippered front bellying out below her chest. He thought of the way she dressed as another joke played on him by the universe. If he was going to get so tied up with her, couldn’t she have at least one romantic quality? Couldn’t she smell like flowers, or be as light on her feet as a snowflake? But she smelled of wood shavings. When she stamped her boots, gleaming drops shot out to dampen his trousers all the way to the knees.

“We still going to the party?” she asked.

“If you want to. It’s still on. But you didn’t have to clear the walk for me, it’ll only get snowed under again.”

“Oh, snow-shoveling’s my favorite job,” she said.

So she would probably have done it anyway; it wasn’t for him at all.

They stepped inside, into a blast of hot air. While Elizabeth bent to take her boots off Mrs. Emerson came down the front stairs. She kept her head perfectly level, one hand weightless on the banister. “Timothy darling, I can’t imagine why you tried driving on a night like this,” she said. She came up to him and took one of his hands between her own, which were so warm they stung him. “Mercy! Where are your gloves?” she said. “Where are your boots?”

“I must’ve lost them.”

“You’re surely not going out again. Are you? Stay here at home.”

“Well, there’s this party I want to hit.”

“Fiddlesticks,” said his mother.

She drew him into the living room, skirt swirling as she turned. If anyone looked dressed for a party tonight, it was she. Surely not Elizabeth, who had taken off her jacket to expose a shirt that seemed to have mechanic’s grease down the front. “In a minute we’ll have the fire built up,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Matthew’s out getting more wood.”

“Oh, is Matthew here?”

“He got some time off.”

“From what? Did he change out of the dead-end job?”

His mother looked uncomfortable, but only for a minute. She picked up a poker and rearranged a pile of embers. “No,” she said, “but I had him come anyway. I hated to think of him out in that shack of his. He’s going to be working over Christmas, did you ever hear of such a thing? Well, no one else there could get a paper out.”

“Are any of the others spending Christmas here?”

“Andrew is, but not for long. Just two days.” She put the poker in its stand and began pacing in front of the couch, where Elizabeth was sitting now to slide her moccasins back on. “Mary will be with her in-laws. Margaret I haven’t heard from yet. Melissa,” she said, and frowned briefly but then shook it off, “is traveling with someone to Bermuda. It worries me who, I think I have some right to know these things, but in her last letter she ignored all my questions and she doesn’t answer her telephone. Peter’s going skiing with his roommate in Vermont.” She had ticked off the names on her fingers, like a hostess planning a dinner party. Now she looked over at Timothy, one last finger waiting to be tapped. “You will be here,” she said.

“I guess so.”

She settled herself in a wing chair. At the back of the house a door slammed, a log crashed to the floor and rolled with a splintery sound. Matthew appeared in the living room doorway with an armload of firewood. “Hello, Timothy,” he said, and crossed the room to shake hands. He was trailing clumps of wet snow, and had to reach awkwardly around a stack of logs that rose to his chin. Depend on Matthew to find the hardest way to do anything. When he dumped the wood beside the fireplace, bark and dead leaves flew across the rug. More bark clung to the front of his jacket, which was a plaid logger’s shirt whose sleeves did not cover his wristbones. No sleeves covered his wristbones. He was the longest, lankiest, knobbiest man Timothy had ever known. His face was bony and sad-looking, with clear-rimmed glasses forever slipping down his narrow nose. His straight black hair had last been cut months ago, probably by himself. If any jeans could be more faded than Elizabeth’s, his were, and when he hunkered down to build the fire Timothy saw that his ankles were bare, red and damp-looking above soggy gray sneakers. “Jeepers, Matthew,” he said. “It makes me uncomfortable just looking at you.”

Matthew only smiled and went on laying logs in the fireplace. He worked so deliberately that the others fell silent. They were willing sparks not to fly, logs not to slide, kindling not to sift through the grate. That was what Matthew’s way of moving did to people. In a family full of noise and confusion and minor accidents, he was the quiet one. He touched everything as gently and awkwardly as if he had broken some precious object years ago that he would never forget; yet he had always been that way. The only fuss he caused was the irritation his family felt when they watched him hold his fork too cautiously, smooth down too kindly a rug he had just stumbled over, stack each stick of wood so meticulously with his long, bony fingers when he was laying a fire.

“Why don’t you let Elizabeth do that?” Timothy asked.

“I didn’t want her out in the snow.”

“How come? She was just now shoveling the walk.”

Matthew lowered a stick of wood that he had almost set in place. He looked over at Elizabeth.

“It’s nice out there,” she told him.

He set the stick on top of the pile. It fell off again.

“In a few days,” Mrs. Emerson said, “Elizabeth goes off to New York for her vacation. I tell her it’s a mistake, especially if the snow sticks. I want her to spend Christmas with us.”

“Bus or train?” Timothy asked Elizabeth.

“Car,” she said. “Car? You’re driving?”

“A fellow named Miggs is. I got him off a bulletin board.”

“Elizabeth is so devoted to bulletin boards,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I never even knew they existed. She finds them everywhere — laundromats, thrift shops, university buildings. She always knows who is driving where and who has lost what and who is selling their old diamonds off.”

“In this weather a train would be safer,” Matthew said.

“I prefer cars,” said Elizabeth. “They give you the feeling you can get off whenever you like.”

“But why would you want to get off?” Timothy asked.

“Oh, I wouldn’t. I just like to know I can.”

Matthew said, “Did this man Miggs show you any references?”

Timothy stopped lighting his pipe and looked at him.

“He’s only a student,” said Elizabeth. “He goes to Hopkins. On the phone he sounded very nice.”

The fire had caught. It blazed up, spitting as it reached the snowy logs, and Matthew squatted back to watch it with his hands dangling between his knees. “My, isn’t that lovely,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Isn’t this pleasant. Why would anyone want to go out on such a terrible night?”

She was cuddled between the wings of her chair, with the firelight turning her face pink and soft. Timothy imagined that a struggle was going on within her: Should she be rejoicing that he was coming by so much lately, or should she be worrying over his choice of dates? (Such a shambling sort of girl, not at all like the ones he usually went out with.) “Aren’t you going to stay longer?” Mrs. Emerson would ask, and instead of his usual evasive answer Timothy could say, “No, but I’ll be back day after tomorrow. I’m taking your handyman to the movies”—choosing the word “handyman” on purpose, gleefully watching the two different reactions tangling her smooth face. (The handyman? But he did have to come home, after all, to get her.) Whenever she saw them off at the door she would fuss over Elizabeth, offering to retie her scarf or lend her a lipstick, “something to brighten your face just a little, a touch of color is always nice although of course you’re looking very pretty as it is.” Then Timothy, in the midst of enjoying himself, would shoot a glance at Elizabeth and suddenly wonder: did she have to wear that wristwatch everywhere, with its huge luminous dial and its paint-spattered leather band? Even on a date? Even dressed up? He was split between wanting to defeat his mother’s expectations and wanting to live up to them. He would rock on his heels, blank-faced, hoping for Elizabeth and his mother to settle things without him. “Maybe next time you could borrow my curlers,” Mrs. Emerson would say. “A tidy hairdo is always nice for special occasions.” Elizabeth never seemed bothered by her. Nothing bothered Elizabeth; that was part of her charm. It was also very irritating. He sighed and looked over at her, where she sat on the couch peacefully curling the red cellophane strip from a cigarette pack. Matthew had taken the seat beside her. The two of them looked something alike, both scruffy and ragged and lost in their separate trances. “We should be going,” Timothy said.

“Oh, is it time?”

“But it wouldn’t hurt to put a dress on.”

Elizabeth shrugged and uncoiled from the couch. “All right, back in a minute,” she said, and padded out of the room in her rundown moccasins. She left behind her a silence that spread and hardened, until Mrs. Emerson came to herself and sat straighter in her chair.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “This is the first Christmas we’ll be spending without your father.”

“That’s true,” said Timothy.

“He always did love Christmas so. Just like a child.”

“I remember he did.”

Matthew said nothing at all, although he was the one who had been closest to their father. Sometimes Timothy had trouble even picturing what their father had looked like. He was a forgettable man. He had come up from nothing, from nowhere, married a Roland Park debutante and made a fortune in real estate — a line of work so beneath notice that no one had ever thought of suggesting it for his sons, least of all Mr. Emerson himself. Only strangers considered him important. “At the settlement on our house,” Timothy had once heard someone say, “things got so tangled I thought they never would straighten out. Fortunately I happen to know Billy Emerson personally. I just popped in his office and said, ‘Billy—’ “—as if Billy Emerson were a name worth dropping. That conversation had made Timothy stop and think. Was there something about his father that he had overlooked? Something he should reconsider? But his father’s only talent, after all, was for making money. Money sprang up around whatever he touched, a fact that he seemed to take for granted. He never mentioned it, at least not to his family. “Money is essential,” Mrs. Emerson said, “but not important.” Her children had no trouble understanding her.

“When you were all little,” Mrs. Emerson said now, “he used to take you to visit Santa Claus. Do you remember that? Urging you all to make lists beforehand, practically sitting in Santa’s lap himself just to overhear what you asked for. And all of you so hard-headed you never believed in Santa for an instant, not a one of you. Remember, Matthew?”

But if Matthew remembered he didn’t say so. He was slumped in one corner of the couch, examining the helmet Elizabeth had left behind. He straightened the chin-strap, tucked the ear-flaps in, pulled them out again and then held the helmet up on the tip of a finger to frown at it.

“He would have had that yard lit up like the Fourth of July, if I hadn’t begged him not to,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Always so fond of Randolph. Rudolph. The reindeer. I don’t know why. And birthdays! How he loved birthdays!” She narrowed her eyes at Timothy, who shifted his weight uneasily. “I don’t suppose you remember what day it is tomorrow,” she said.

“It’s my birthday,” said Timothy.

“It’s your birthday. Andrew’s and your birthday. Will you be spending it with us?”

“I don’t think so, Mother.”

“Andrew likes birthdays.” She pulled off a ruby ring and twisted it in the firelight. “He always sends me a dozen roses, thanking me for having him.”

“How do you know? Maybe he’s congratulating you.”

“You would be.” She shoved the ring back on. “I used to give you double birthday parties, remember that?”

“Yes,” said Timothy, and remembered Andrew, thin and frantic and overexcited, aiming a sputtery breath at his side of the cake, suffering even then from some jerkiness of mind which Timothy had feared a twin could catch like a cold.

“I sent him his presents in plenty of time,” said Mrs. Emerson. “How is school going, dear?”

For what she feared was that twins had to split a single share of intelligence between them — something she had read in a long-ago ladies’ magazine and never forgotten, even after the twins had turned out to be the brightest of her children. Timothy had spent too long assuming she was right to be able to laugh it off. “You asked me that yesterday,” he said.

“Oh, did I?”

“Do you imagine you should still be signing my report cards?”

“Timothy, dear, I was only interested.”

“That’s more than I am,” Timothy said. “I think it’s all a bore.”

“Oh, how can you say that? Medical school?”

“It’s a bore.”

“Well, it was your decision, not mine. I was never the kind of mother to interfere in her children’s lives.” “Oh, Lord.”

“Now, let’s just sit and enjoy the fire. Shall we? You’ve done a very good job with it, Matthew. I believe the last time you built a fire you left the flue shut.”

The last time Matthew had built a fire was when their father died, in June, and their mother kept insisting the house was cold. Oh, everything she said nowadays was attached to other things by long gluey strands, calling up other days, none of them good, touching off chords, opening doors. All he could do was tip his head back against his chair and sink into his own private tunnel while she pattered on.

“I’m ready,” Elizabeth said.

She had changed into a bulky wool dress that fit haphazardly, and nearly all of her hair was caught up by one flaking gilt barrette. Her nylons were wrinkled at the ankles and her squashed-looking black pumps curled at the toes. She swung her vinyl handbag like a waitress just getting off work. Mrs. Emerson looked up at her and sighed, sharply. But Matthew gave Elizabeth a happy smile, and she stood in front of him smiling back until Timothy rose abruptly and took her hand. “Come on, come on,” he said. “We’re late already.”

“Elizabeth, dear, your hair is falling down,” Mrs. Emerson said.

They had a long drive ahead — past the city limits, out on a superhighway filmed with slippery snow. Elizabeth had to keep clearing the mist off the inside of the windshield. When she wasn’t doing that she was switching radio stations — from one song to the other, in the middle of a note, which was something Timothy rarely did himself. He felt an obligation to hear songs through to the end, even if he didn’t like them. He also finished books that bored him, and had never in his life walked out on a movie. The fact that he and Elizabeth were so different, even on this small point, deepened the sense of uneasiness that had been growing in him all evening. Here they were out on a snowy road, probably driving to their deaths, and he didn’t know anything about this girl. Everything he asked her was batted back at him, or turned into a joke. “Elizabeth,” he said, “why is it we never have a serious conversation?”

“Why should we?” she asked.

“You never say anything you mean. Never talk about your family, or that place you’re from — what’s-its-name—”

“Ellington.”

“Ellington. Have you got something against it?”

“Oh, no. I liked it,” said Elizabeth, and she smiled at a lone house swaddled with blue Christmas lights. Then she began tracing spirals on her window, and just when he thought the conversation had reached a dead end she said, “I probably would be there still, if my father didn’t get so het up about reincarnation.”

“About what?”

“He doesn’t believe in reincarnation.”

“Well, who does?”

“I do,” said Elizabeth. Then she giggled and said, “This week, anyhow.”

“You couldn’t possibly,” Timothy said.

Elizabeth only sat back in her seat, tucking her hands in her sleeves for warmth.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Oh, well. It was one of those last-straw deals,” she told him. “I was enough of a thorn in his side not being religious. Reincarnation was the end.”

“What do you want to go and believe in a thing like that for?” Timothy said.

“I just think it’s a nice idea. You can stop getting so wrought up about things once you know it’s not your last chance. Besides. It gives me something to say when old ladies tell me I shall pass this way but once. ‘Oh, well, or twice, or three times …’ I tell them.”

“How far do you carry this business?” Timothy asked. “Do you think you were once a high priestess in Egypt? Do you feel we knew each other in Atlantis?” He was hoping for her to give some crackpot answer, something that would disenchant him, but it wasn’t that easy. “Who knows?” was all she said. “What would it matter, anyway?”

“You just thought this up to irk your father,” Timothy told her.

“Well, maybe so,” she said cheerfully.

“And he wouldn’t have started a fight over a little thing like that.”

“Of course he would. Besides, he didn’t like this boy I was seeing.”

“Oh,” said Timothy. “What was wrong with him?”

“He just considers me a trial. Always has. You can’t really blame him.”

“No, I mean the boy.”

“Oh. Well, nothing, to the naked eye. He was just a State College student. Then he got arrested for robbing laundromats.”

Timothy swerved to avoid an abandoned car. “You certainly know some funny people,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Did he tell you what he was doing? Did you know?”

“Oh, no, just that he was working. I wondered what at.”

“You could have guessed, if he wouldn’t say. I could have guessed. You could have been a little more curious, and maybe stopped him.”

“I would never change someone else’s affairs around,” Elizabeth said.

That kept him silent for a full five minutes; he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He concentrated on driving, which was growing more difficult. The road felt like cotton beneath his wheels. The few cars he met were barely creeping along, shapeless white igloos eerily glowing beneath a white sky. “How can you see? I can’t,” Elizabeth said, and Timothy said, “I don’t understand you. Fighting with your father! And here I thought you were Miss Easy-Going. Miss Fix-It. I wondered how your family was managing without you to patch the plaster.”

“At home I break things more than fix them,” said Elizabeth.

Then she rolled the window down with a jerk, which was unnecessary. Their breaths seemed likely to freeze in front of their faces. A new wave of mist fogged Timothy’s vision and he hunched forward, peering for the turnoff. “Can’t see a thing,” he said, but he found it, anyway — an overhead sign swinging and whipping in the wind — and turned blindly.

“I thought they had snowplows up north,” Elizabeth said.

“Well, this burglar,” said Timothy. “Are you supposed to be visiting him or anything? Waiting until he gets out?”

“Waiting for what?”

“Well, to get married, maybe.”

“He wasn’t going to be in that long, it was only laundromats.”

“The reason I’m asking all this,” Timothy said carefully, “is that you and I seem to be going out together a lot. I wanted to know if you were committed in any way.”

“Committed?”

“Not tied to this burglar or someone.”

“Why do you keep calling him a burglar?” Elizabeth said. “He was a chemistry major. We hardly even knew each other.”

Timothy gave up. “Would you like to go out to dinner tomorrow?” he asked.

“I can’t. I’m going to see Matthew’s house.”

“Matthew?” He turned to stare at her. “How did he get into this?”

“Why not? I like him.”

So this was where all the uneasiness had been going: Matthew. “Break it, can’t you?” he said.

“No,” said Elizabeth. “I want to see his house. Besides, I never turn down an invitation.”

“Do you have to keep telling me that?”

Then he slammed into the Schmidts’ driveway and cut the engine and piled out. He didn’t open the door for Elizabeth. She followed on her own, calmly swinging her handbag and shuffling up the narrow groove of cleared sidewalk. Timothy waited on the front porch with his back turned, ignoring her. She didn’t seem to notice.

It was Ian Schmidt who opened the door — a classmate of Timothy’s. He said, “Oho! We thought you weren’t coming. This is Elizabeth, isn’t it? We met one night at a play.”

“That’s right,” Elizabeth said.

He showed them into a living room papered with travel posters. Guests sat around in clumps, not yet at ease, and a small, square baby was being passed from lap to lap. “That’s Christopher Edward. Our son,” Ian said. “Today’s his six-month birthday.” He was so proud of that that he kept them standing in the doorway, fully wrapped and shedding snow-flakes, while he scooped the baby up and brought him over. “Say hello, Christopher, say hello.” The baby stared, poker-faced, at Elizabeth. She stared back. “Hmm,” she said finally, and began tugging her boots off. Lisa Schmidt appeared to show her where to put her jacket. As they passed each group of guests she stopped for introductions, and Elizabeth nodded gravely once the names were said. The profile view of her, with her chin-strap dangling and her stiff, cold hands clutching her purse, sent a sudden stab of love through Timothy that left him feeling tired and puzzled. He bent toward the baby politely and let him clutch an index finger.

The party was a small one, only five couples. Others had been kept away by the storm. People sat on floor cushions and canvas butterfly chairs, with spaces between them that seemed reserved for absent guests. There were spaces in the conversation, too. When Elizabeth had returned from a back room, stripped of her jacket and helmet, a silence had fallen. Timothy still stood in the doorway with Ian, carrying his coat draped over his arm. He ignored Elizabeth (let her manage for herself, if she was so independent) and she settled right away beside a boy with a mustache. “I rode down here with you last fall,” she said. “You gave me a ride from Philadelphia, remember?”

The boy brightened; up till now he had been glumly snapping his watchband. “Oh, Mike’s friend!” he said. “I didn’t know you with your hair up. How is Mike?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“Did you find a job all right?”

“The very first day,” Elizabeth said. “I miss Philadelphia, though.”

“Take it from me, there’s nothing to miss about Philadelphia.”

“I thought there was. I might never have left, if they hadn’t fired me.”

Timothy wanted to hear who had fired her, and for what, but now other people had pounced on the subject of Philadelphia. Conversation started darting around the room again, with Elizabeth at the center of it looking perfectly comfortable. She didn’t need Timothy at all. He went off to find a drink.

The Schmidts were serving hot mulled wine. They were on a budget. Timothy sniffed gloomily at the kettle on the kitchen stove, and then he filled two mugs. He would have preferred something stronger. He had what he thought of as the medical-student syndrome — overworking and overdrinking, alternately, studying all one night on Dexedrine and drinking all the next to rid his mind of that heavy feeling. Hot mulled wine wasn’t much good for getting drunk on. Standing by the stove he drank one of the mugs straight down, refilled it, and went back to the living room. The boy with the mustache had returned to the subject of Mike. Whoever Mike was. “If he would only put that Honda out to pasture,” he was saying. “It’s held together with paper clips. But you know Mike, he’s too soft-hearted.” Timothy handed Elizabeth a mug and passed on by.

He went to sit beside a blond girl whose turn it was to hold the baby. He was trying to think of her name; she had come to cook him dinner twice last spring. Now she had been passed on to another medical student, and probably at the next party she would come with still another. She turned the baby to face him and said, “Say hello, Chrissy, say hello.”

“He did, he did,” Timothy said. Jean, maybe. Or Betty. One of those plain names. She looked like half the girls he knew — feathered cap of hair, bright lipstick and blue eyeshadow, fine-boned figure that fit very tidily into a nurse’s uniform. The other half of the girls he knew were from Roland Park, and their hair was smoother and hung gleaming to one side and they wore their clothes with a sloping, casual elegance. But they all had one thing in common: they treated Timothy like a teddy bear. They couldn’t seem to take him seriously. Was it because of his round face, or the curling-up corners of his mouth? “Show how you play patty-cake,” the girl told Christopher. “Isn’t he adorable?” Her tone was the same for Timothy as for the baby; it wasn’t clear who she thought was adorable.

“I believe he’s throwing up,” Timothy said.

“That’s not throwing up, he’s just spitting a little milk. Tell him, Chrissy. Say, ‘Don’t you know anything about babies, fellow?’ ”

What he really wanted (and thought of whenever one of these girls showed off with a baby or a frying pan) was to get married and settle down, have two or three children. He had been planning on that all his life, even when he was in the girl-hating stage and when, much later, he had turned into a Hollywood-style bachelor with an apartment full of dim lights and soft music always waiting on the record player. Only he seemed to keep choosing the wrong girls. Even Elizabeth was wrong, and look at him: still tagging after her, still mulling her over all day and half the night until he grew weary at the thought of her. Elizabeth took him no more seriously than any of the others did. She could have, once, maybe at the beginning. He thought she had been swayed by public opinion. He imagined his family and a whole string of girls drawing her aside, one by one, to say, “You know that Timothy is a clown, of course. Always good for a laugh. Never really feels anything.” Now she was as gay and careless with him as if he were a brother. When he took her home after a date she gave him a companionable good-night kiss and slid out of his hands like water. When he said something important to her she ignored it, or dodged it, or laughed it off. Why did he keep on seeing her, anyway? She would make someone a terrible wife. She was too lackadaisical. There was something frustrating about her. Any plan involving Elizabeth was bound to fall to pieces in a stream of irrelevant side trips, senseless delays, wild goose chases. “Why don’t you get organized?” he had asked her once. “What for?” she said.

What did she care?

He finished off his wine and let Lisa Schmidt ladle him another mugful. She was passing around the room barefoot with the steaming kettle. Jean or Betty, whoever she was, untangled her beads from the baby’s fingers and said, “How’s your cute little gerbil, Timothy?”

“I got rid of him,” he said.

“Oh, why?”

“He was getting on my nerves.”

“Well, I wish you’d’ve told me. I thought he was adorable. Who’d you give him to?”

“I flushed him down the toilet.”

“Flushed — you didn’t.”

He nodded.

“You didn’t really.”

“Would I lie? Last I saw of him he was scrabbling with his little paws, trying to climb back out. Then whoosh! down he went.”

“If that’s really true,” the girl said, “and not something you just made up, I think you should be reported.”

“Probably hell on the plumbing,” said Timothy.

“You don’t deserve another animal as long as you live. I hope they blacklist you at all the pet shops.”

“Now I have ants,” he said.

“That’s all you’re worthy of.”

“They come in a glass tray, you can watch them dig tunnels. After a while it gets boring, though. And even ants are a trouble. They’re always asking for syrup, and every now and then a drop of water. You have no idea how silly it makes you look with the neighbors. ‘I’ll be out of town a few days, could you water my ants?’ ”

“That cute little roly-poly gerbil,” the girl said. “What’s the matter with you? You must like to think you’re funny. Well, you don’t hear me laughing.”

“Oh, don’t take it to heart,” Timothy said. “I gave him to one of the intern’s wives.”

She rested her chin on the baby’s head and stared across the room, slit-eyed.

“Honest I did. He’s much happier there. Got married and had a family.”

“I don’t know which to believe,” she said, “but I’d hate to see the inside of that head of yours. How could you even make up a thing like that? Scrabbling with his little hands?”

“I have a cruel streak,” Timothy said.

“Take another look. That’s no streak, it’s a yard wide.”

Then she rose to pass the baby on, as if she didn’t trust Timothy too close to him.

Elizabeth and three other people had progressed to the subject of jobs, all the odd summer jobs they had held down. Someone had worked in a funeral parlor. Someone had made hairbrushes. Elizabeth, whom he had imagined coming directly here from home, turned out to have wandered through various northern cities stuffing envelopes, proofreading textbooks, and substituting for mailmen. And been fired from every one. She had sent out a thousand empty envelopes by mistake, let horrendous errors slip by her in the textbooks, and on the mail route (her favorite job) given everybody the wrong letters, consistently. How was that possible, when he had seen her keep track of a dozen tiny wheels and screws while dismantling and reassembling the kitchen clock? He thought of her with her family, breaking more things than she fixed. None of it fitted with what he saw of her here.

He stretched out on the floor with another mug of wine and imagined a federal law ordering everybody to switch parents at a certain age. Then butter-fingered Elizabeth, her family’s cross, could come sustain his mother forever and mend all her possessions, and he could go south and live a happy thoughtless life assisting Reverend Abbott at Sunday vespers. There would be a gigantic migration of children across the country, all cutting the old tangled threads and picking up new ones when they found the right niche, free forever of other people’s notions about them. He stared up at the ceiling with a blank smile while words buzzed over his head. His damp, stockinged feet were poked under a radiator. Elizabeth was next to him, and when the ceiling started whirling he turned to watch her hands clasped around her mug. His eyes became fixed on them. He sank into the grainy texture of her skin, he thought he could taste on his tongue the sharp, scraped knuckles. Who else would have hands in such terrible shape? There must be some special meaning to them. On her left wrist was a deep, slow-healing cut, running diagonally across the radial artery. She had done that in his presence. He had seen the knife flash too far along the grain of a carving, watched blood spurt instantly across the kitchen table. “Find the pressure point. Here,” he had said, and wound a dishtowel around it and bundled her into his car. “Keep it tight. Push down harder.” He had sped her to old Dr. Felson’s office, frantically honking his horn. The dishtowel grew bright red. Elizabeth pressed beneath it with sawdust-covered fingers and watched the scenery through her side window. “What on earth?” she said once. She was looking at a man and woman struggling beside a bus stop, the man flailing his fists and the woman taking swipes at him with her pocketbook. Timothy slammed on his brakes, cursed, and speeded up again. He hadn’t known Elizabeth very well at the time. He had thought her unconcern was due to a misguided faith in medical students — people who could supposedly take charge of these things. Responsibility weighed on his head as if she had dumped it there. He was unable to tell her that for him, medicine was only so many words in a textbook; that humans were fragile, complicated networks encased in envelopes nearly as transparent as the diagrams made them out to be; that faced with blood, his stomach froze and his throat closed up and he wondered why his mother expected so much of him.

An image of his mother’s house rose up, cupped in his own hands like the Allstate insurance ad.

Now Elizabeth was trying to convince some stranger that the length of a person’s forearm was always exactly the length of his foot. “It’s a scientific fact,” she said (more earnestly than she had said anything else this evening, especially to him), and the boy said, “That’s ridiculous.” But he tried it, anyway — took off a shoe and knelt on the floor with his arm flat alongside his foot. All over the room, other people were trying it too. The place was turning into a contortionists’ convention. Timothy felt like the lone human being in a jumble of machinery, intricate wheels and gears and sprockets, all churning busily. He closed his eyes and sank away, following green fluorescent threads that criss-crossed behind his lids.

Then Elizabeth was saying, “Timothy? Wake up, it’s time to go.” When he opened his eyes everyone was smiling down on him. He struggled to his feet, shaking his head, and let someone bundle him into his coat. The other guests were leaving too. The room had a ragged, broken look as they stood around in knots saying goodbye. Elizabeth led him over to Ian and Lisa, and then through the swamp of galoshes by the door. As she was pulling on her boots she said, “You want me to drive?”

“Why? Do you think I’m not able? I’m stone cold sober.”

And he was, as soon as he hit fresh air. He stood on the sidewalk a moment, tilting his face into the falling snow while other people stepped around him and clapped him on the back and wished him good night. A headache started up and ran like a crack from one temple to the other, waking him fully. “I have never in my life let a girl drive me home,” he said.

“Oh well, all right.”

The car was buried. Timothy dragged handfuls of snow off the front windshield while Elizabeth, who seemed unable to do the simplest thing in a routine way, drew vertical and horizontal lines across the rear window until it looked like a stretch of plaid. Then, “Zzzip!” she said, and swooped off all the white squares in between and was settled in her seat by the time he had opened his door. “I had a very good time,” she told him.

“Did you?”

He started the engine, and the wheels spun a moment before getting a grip. When he turned his head to back into the street he had a glimpse of Elizabeth peacefully chewing her chin-strap, unaware of the arrows of irritation he was sending her across the dark.

The snow was worse. Although the roads had been cleared, by now they were filling up again, and the soft flakes had grown smaller and faster. He inched along, screwing his face up with the effort of finding his way. When Elizabeth reached toward the radio button he said, “Do you mind?” She settled back in her seat. She jingled a boot-clasp with her fingernail and hummed a program of her own.

Once inside the city limits he thought he could relax, but in Roland Park the roads were deep with snow and rutted so that his car kept wavering. The engine made whining, straining noises like a sewing machine. “Freen, freen,” said Elizabeth, imitating it. Ordinarily he would have answered with a sound effect of his own. That was one thing they had in common: an ability to fry like bacon, whine like mosquitos, jingle like his mother’s bracelets, always fading into giggles while anyone around them looked baffled. It wasn’t the kind of talent other people could appreciate. (“What’s this?” Elizabeth had once asked, and then given a creak and said, “A tree growing. Ever put your ear to a treetrunk?” And the two of them had collapsed against each other, laughing not at the treetrunk but at Mrs. Emerson’s bewildered face.) But now Timothy only scowled at a gust of white that slammed against the windshield. “Who was that character you were talking to so long?” he asked.

“Bart Manning, his name was.”

“How come you know him?”

“He gave me a ride here. His mother’d just died; he worried all the way down because they put the wrong color eyes on her death certificate.”

She sometimes offered him these sudden jewels, tacked to the end of dull facts. He nearly smiled, but then he rubbed the windshield with his coat sleeve and said, “Are you breaking that date with Matthew tomorrow?”

“No,” she said.

Nothing tacked to the end of that.

“Well, in that case, Elizabeth—”

“Turn toward the skid,” she told him.

But he couldn’t. The car had started sliding in a slow, dreamy semicircle, and all he seemed able to do was hang on tight to the wheel. He had the sense of watching from far away, with only a passing interest, curious as to how this would all come out. When they stopped they were at right angles to the road. The nose of the car pointed into a bank. The headlights lit tall scrubby weeds growing from dimples in the snow.

“Looks like we get to walk off the wine,” Elizabeth said.

Walk? In this weather? It was easily a mile or more. He thought of the other possibilities — sit here hoping for a police car to pass, go wake one of those sleeping houses and phone his family or an all-night service station. But he was too tired suddenly to bother framing the words out loud. And while he was looking at the houses — all of them huge and silent beneath a glowing sky, drinking in snow and giving back not so much as a gleam of lamplight — he began to feel unreal. It seemed possible he would die here. With somebody foreign, not even related to him. It seemed possible he was already dead.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “did you ever get the feeling you had just died?”

“In a skid?”

“Did you ever think you might be making all this up — everyday life, the same as usual — and meanwhile your family had your body in a coffin and your funeral all arranged?”

Elizabeth seemed to need time to think that over. He watched her closely, as closely as his mother did when she was waiting for Elizabeth to solve all her problems. “Did you?” he asked.

“Oh, well, it must be the sign of a happy nature,” Elizabeth said.

“What? A what?”

“Must be, if you think heaven is just everyday life.”

“No, you don’t—”

“And anyway, it’s not such a bad idea,” she said. “I never did think much of those streets of gold and pearly gates. Wouldn’t you like to just go on like this forever? With something always about to happen and someone new always showing up? Oh, wouldn’t that make dying all right? I prefer reincarnation myself, more chance of surprise, but there’s not all that much difference.”

Then she turned up her jacket collar and climbed out of the car. After a moment Timothy followed. He was about to poke fun at her—“Is that what you think? Is that how well you understand? Are you the one my mother is leaning on to patch her life together?” But something about the way she walked ahead of him, with her shoulders hunched against the cold and her shiny stockinged legs plowing awkwardly through the drifts, made him keep still. He caught up with her and trudged alongside, protecting her with his silence. The tight, closed line of his mouth was a gift to her; his hand, guiding her onto the curb, cradled her shoulder as gently as if she were some sad little glass figurine that he could break in an instant.

But at the first streetlight she stopped, bent to take one boot off, and handed it to him. “It’s for you,” she told him. “Wear it and we’ll be even.” He put it on. When they set off again their footsteps had a drunken, slaphappy rhythm — a shoe squashing, a boot flopping, another shoe squashing. Their shadows tilted from side to side, limping and draggled but comical, so that when Elizabeth pointed them out Timothy had to smile. Then he started laughing, and she joined in, and they walked the rest of the way strung out across the sidewalk holding hands stiff-armed, like tottering black paperdolls on a field of white.