Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [38]
“Timothy.”
“What.”
“Look, it’s not so bad. Find something else to do.”
“Like what, for instance,” he said.
“Well, I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not? Say something, can’t you? Give me a treatise on reincarnation, convince me I’m full of lives and can afford to throw one away. Convince my mother too, while you’re at it.”
“Well, it is a point,” Elizabeth said.
“Ha.” He took a swig from his beer can. “Women have it easy,” he said. “You can work or not, nobody minds. Men are expected to be responsible. There’s no room for variation.”
“Maybe you should make a big switch. Lumberjack? Fur-trapper? Deck-swabber?”
“I could answer one of those DRAW ME ads on the matchbooks,” Timothy said. He laughed.
“You could be a state hog inspector.”
But then he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his sandwich still untasted. “I can’t seem to picture a future any more,” he told her. “There’s nothing I hope for. No one I want to be. Yet I started out so promising, would you believe it? In grade school they thought I was a genius. No one but Andrew even knew what I was talking about. I invented weird gadgets, I played chess tournaments, I monitored Stravinsky on an oscilloscope that I rebuilt myself. Did you know that?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t even know what an oscilloscope is.”
“Why is everything you say so inconsequential? Can’t you understand when something serious is going on?”
But it was hard to take him seriously when he looked so much like the child he had been talking about. There was one of him in every classroom Elizabeth had ever sat in—chubby and too clever, pale and scowling, wearing an old man’s suit and cracking elderly jokes that made his classmates uneasy. She could picture him scuffing around the playground with his hands in his pockets while the others chose up softball teams; his name would come up by default, at the end, and he would play miserably and dodge the ball when it crossed the plate and then hit some pathetic, ticked-off foul and fling his bat in a panic and run toward first base anyway, hunched and desperate, until the hoots and curses called him back. “Oh, aren’t you glad you’re not still there?” she asked suddenly, for in spite of the traces of that child on his face he had at least grown into his suit and his friends had grown into his jokes. He had passed the age for softball and learned when not to sling long words around. But Timothy, off on some track of his own, merely blinked.
“Elizabeth,” he said. “Don’t go home this weekend. Let’s take a trip together.”
“Oh, well, no.”
“We could start off for anywhere! Drive without a plan. Stop when we felt like it.” He paused, having just then heard her answer. “What’s the matter with you? You love sudden trips. Are you worried what people might think?”
“I just—”
“I never thought you would be, somehow.” He looked down at his sandwich, and began tearing pieces out of it and dropping them on his plate. “We would have separate rooms, of course,” he said.
“No, you see—”
“If that’s what’s bothering you.”
“No.”
The sandwich had turned into a pile of shreds. “Maybe you think—we wouldn’t have to have separate rooms,” he said. “I just meant—I don’t know what you expect of me. What do you want, anyway? What am I supposed to be doing? Just tell me, can’t you? I don’t know why I should be making such a mess of saying this.”
“Oh well, that’s all right,” Elizabeth said helplessly. What she wanted to say was, “Of course I’ll come.” When would she learn not to plan ahead, when always at the last minute she felt tugged by something different? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really would like to.”
“Or take me home with you.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Why not? If you want I could stay in a hotel, I wouldn’t be bothering your family then. Would that be better?”
“You see, Matthew is coming,” Elizabeth said.
He stared at her.
“I invited him.”
“But why Matthew? Why does he always keep popping up like this?”
“I like him,” she said. And she decided she’d better go on with what she had planned to tell him earlier: “While we’re on Matthew, Timothy,