“This is serious, Elizabeth.”
“Well, why tell me about it?” she said. “It’s always something. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. Go tell a professor, if it bothers you so much.”
“I can’t,” Timothy said. “I’ve already been caught.”
Elizabeth looked over at him.
“I was just walking past his desk, after it was over. He said, ‘Emerson, I’d like to have a word with you,’ and I knew, right then. I knew what he would say. It felt as if my stomach had dropped out.”
“What will happen?” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll be expelled.”
“Well, maybe not.”
“Of course I will. Those guys are tough as nails. And you know something? I knew that answer I cheated on. I didn’t have a shadow of a doubt about it. I wrote it down, and I turned to my left, and I read off the other guy’s answer just as cool as you please. It was like I forgot where I was, suddenly. I forgot the customs of the country. I just wanted to see if Joe Barrett knew the answer too.”
“Maybe if you told them that,” Elizabeth said.
“Not a chance. It wouldn’t help.” He kicked at the hose. “Come on, will you? It’s getting to be lunchtime.”
“The grass is drying up. If I don’t—”
“Look,” said Timothy. “I’ve been walking around by myself ever since this happened. Can’t you just drop everything and come with me?”
“Oh well. All right. Let me go and tell your mother.”
“Call from my place. Don’t go back in, she already knows something is wrong. Oh Lord, this is going to kill her.”
“I doubt it,” said Elizabeth.
But she didn’t go back in, even so.
Timothy’s apartment was downtown, in a dingy building with a wrought-iron elevator. All the way up to his floor, with the cables creaking and jerking above them, Timothy stood in the corner staring at his shoes. His face reflected the bluish light, giving him a pale, sweaty look. His silence was heavy and brooding. But once they entered his apartment, where tall windows let the sun in, he seemed to change. “Well now,” he said. “What shall we eat?” And he went off to the little Pullman kitchen while Elizabeth settled herself on the couch. His apartment had a smothered look. It was curtained, carpeted, and upholstered until there were no sharp corners left, and in the evenings carefully arranged lamps threw soft, closed circles on the tabletops. Elizabeth felt out of place in it. She shucked off her moccasins and curled her legs beneath her, but everything she looked at was so padded and textured that she couldn’t keep her eyes on it long. Finally she closed them, and tipped her head back against the couch.
“Here,” said Timothy. “Corned beef on rye. That all right? Cold beer.”
“Well, thanks,” said Elizabeth, sitting up. She took the plate and peered between the slices of bread. “Corned beef is what we had two weeks ago. Is this the selfsame can?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you get food-poisoning from canned corned beef?”
But Timothy, in a chair opposite her with his sandwich halfway to his mouth, stared into space.
“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, I thought I should say something about—”
“You are going to turn into a very objectionable old lady, Elizabeth. You know that. The opinionated kind. ‘I like this, I don’t like that,’ every other sentence — it’s fine now, but wait a while. See how it sits on people when you’ve lost your looks and you’re croaking it out.”