The Clock Winder (9 page)

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.