Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  “Right. What’s a place of business want with caller ID?”

  “It seems to me that caller ID would be very useful in business,” Liam said. He considered for a moment. “Interesting,” he said. “If not for modern technology—caller ID and Redial—you would still be a happy man.”

  Bundy snorted. “I’d still be a blind man,” he told Liam. He accepted a menu from their waitress. Then he gave her a second look; she was young and blond and her waist narrowed in as gracefully as the stems on their water goblets. “How are you this fine evening?” he asked her.

  “I’m good, thanks,” the waitress said. “Will a third party be joining you?”

  Liam said, “Yes, she ought to be—”

  Then here Eunice was, all at once, rushing in out of breath and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I knew I’d never get away in time!”

  True to her word, she was wearing black. Or her blouse, at least, was black—plain black cotton with big white buttons like Necco wafers. Around her neck hung a rope of jawbreaker-sized red beads that gave her a sweetly clownish air, and lacy silver earrings shaped like upside-down Christmas trees dangled a good three inches below her earlobes.

  “Am I all right?” she asked Liam. He had risen as far as the booth would allow, and so had Bundy.

  Liam said, “Yes, you look very—” but already she was hurtling on. She said, “It’s Mr. C.’s fault I’m late. He told me he had to go to the restroom and of course I couldn’t go with him so I said, ‘Fine, I’ll wait out front,’ and then he never came back so I said to this man going in, not even one of ours, I don’t know who he was, I said, ‘Excuse me, if you see an elderly gentleman could you please—’ Well, not to bore you with all the details but by the time I got home I had about two minutes to make it to the restaurant and so I had to change clothes in one split second, which is why I’m wearing what I’m wearing. I mean, I know I shouldn’t be wearing—”

  “Eunice, this is my friend Bundy Braithwaite,” Liam said. “Eunice Dunstead.”

  “How you doing,” Bundy said, still half standing. He wore a distinctly startled expression, it seemed to Liam.

  Eunice said, “I wouldn’t ordinarily combine this blouse with this skirt.”

  “Won’t you have a seat?” Liam asked her.

  “My mother always tells me,” Eunice said, sitting down next to him, “she says, ‘Eunice, a person’s top half should never, ever be darker than the bottom half. It looks Mafioso,’ she says. And yet here I am—”

  “It can if the two halves share some little bit of color in common,” Bundy said.

  Eunice stopped speaking.

  “Your skirt’s got squiggles of black,” he told her.

  “Oh.”

  “Case closed.”

  Bundy was looking amused now, which Liam didn’t mind in the least. She was amusing; she was charmingly amusing, and she was letting her soft bare arm rest lightly against his own.

  “Shall we order a bottle of wine?” he asked. He had an urge to celebrate, all at once.

  But it emerged that Bundy didn’t want wine. He wanted hard liquor. “I am a man who’s been shafted,” he told Eunice after they’d placed their drink orders. “I don’t know if Liam mentioned.”

  “He did say something about that.”

  “So mere wine will just not cut it. My fiancée has dumped me flat. She claims I don’t trust her.”

  Liam hadn’t heard this part. He said, “You just now admitted you don’t trust her.”

  “I think these earrings are a little too much,” Eunice said.

  Liam looked at them. He said, “They’re fine.”

  “I can take them off, if you like.”

  “They’re fine.”

  “Are you listening to this, or not?” Bundy asked Eunice. “I’m telling how my heart was ripped out.”

  Eunice said, “Oh, excuse me.” She straightened her back and folded her hands and looked at him obediently, like a child in a classroom.

  “I come in from the gym yesterday,” Bundy began all over again, “I hear Naomi on the phone with her boyfriend. Most definitely it was her boyfriend. I could just tell, you know? By her voice. But when I mention something to that effect, she says no, it was her beautician. Right. Then she says well, okay, she only told me it was her beautician because she knew I would be jealous of anybody else. Fact is, she says, it was a guy from work. They were just discussing work. I say, ‘Oh, right.’ She says, ‘See what I mean? You don’t trust me! You don’t give me credit! You never, ever talk to me; you sit watching your dumb sports shows on TV, and then when I meet a man who will have a real conversation, you get all bent out of shape!’”

  “Maybe you’re well rid of her,” Eunice told him.

  “Say what?”

  “Why do you even care? You want to watch TV; she wants to do something else; let her do it! Let her go off with her beautician!”

  “He’s not her beautician.”

  “Let her go off with whoever! Maybe every day she’s been thinking, What are we together for? Don’t I deserve something better than this? Someone who understands me? And meanwhile, you could be with some woman who enjoys watching sports on TV.”

  “Huh,” Bundy said. He rocked back in his seat.

  Liam was trying to figure out whether this applied to him in any way. Should he, for instance, buy a television set?

  Eunice said, “But I don’t mean to interfere.”

  “No, no …” Bundy said. Then he said, “Huh,” again.

  Their waitress arrived with their drinks. She set a Scotch in front of Bundy, and he took hold of it immediately but he waited until their wine had been poured before he raised his glass to Liam and Eunice.

  “Cheers,” he said. And then, “So. Eunice. How did you meet our boy, here?”

  “Well,” Eunice said. From her declarative tone of voice, and the important way she resettled herself in her seat, it was clear that she was about to embark on a serious narrative. “One day about a month ago,” she said, “I am walking down the street with my employer. My employer is Ishmael Cope? Of Cope Development? I take notes for him at meetings and such. And we are just walking down the street when up comes Liam out of nowhere and stops to say hello to him.”

  “Liam knows Ishmael Cope?” Bundy asked.

  “Just a nodding acquaintance,” Liam told him.

  “They’d met at this charity ball for diabetes,” Eunice said.

  “Liam went to a charity ball?”

  “Yes, and so … wait, I’m telling you what happened. Liam stops to talk to him but Mr. C. is a little … like, absentminded these days but Liam is just so considerate with him, just so sweet and diplomatic and considerate—”

  “Liam?” Bundy said. “You’re talking about our boy Liam?”

  Liam was starting to feel annoyed with Bundy, and maybe Eunice was too because she said, very firmly, “Yes, Liam. I guess you don’t know him well. Liam is just this … very thoughtful kind of person, not your usual kind of person at all. He is not like any other man I’ve ever known. There’s something different about him.”

  “That I’ll agree with,” Bundy said.

  Liam wished Bundy didn’t seem to be enjoying this so much. But Eunice smiled at him, and a dimple dented her cheek as if someone had poked her gently with an index finger. “It was love at first sight,” she told him. Then she turned to Liam. “For me it was, at least.”

  Liam said, “For me too.” And he saw now that that was the truth.

  Through drinks, through soup, through their entrées (steaks for Eunice and Bundy, rockfish for Liam), Liam was mostly silent, listening to the other two and taking secret pleasure in the warmth of Eunice’s thigh pressed against his. Bundy returned to his breakup; Eunice made appropriate murmuring sounds. She tsk-tsk-ed and shook her head, and one of her Christmas-tree earrings landed on her plate with a clatter.

  It wasn’t that Liam didn’t know her shortcomings. He saw the same woman Bundy must see: plump and frizzy-h
aired and bespectacled, dumpily dressed, bizarrely jeweled, too young for him and too earnest. But all these qualities he found lovable. And he pitied poor Bundy, who would have to go home alone.

  Although he too, as it happened, went home alone that evening. (Eunice had promised to get back to the house in time to help her father to bed.) Even so, Liam left the restaurant feeling unspeakably lucky.

  As he was crossing the street to his car, he was very nearly knocked down by some halfwit driver turning without stopping, and his reaction—his thudding heart and cold sweat and flash of anger—made him realize how much, nowadays, he did not want to die, and how dearly he valued his life.

  Then he went to Eddie’s grocery store.

  He went to the Charles Street branch of Eddie’s on a Monday afternoon. He needed milk. Milk was all he got, and so he assumed he would be through the checkout line in a matter of minutes. Except, wouldn’t you know, the woman in front of him turned out to have some trouble with her account. She wanted to use her house charge but she couldn’t remember her number. “I shouldn’t have to remember my number,” she said. She had the leathery, harsh voice of a longtime smoker, and her pale dyed flippy hair and girlish A-line skirt spelled out Country Club to Liam. (He had a prejudice against country clubs.) She said, “The Roland Park Eddie’s doesn’t ask my number.”

  “I don’t know why not,” the cashier told her. “In both stores, your number is how we access your account.”

  “Access” as a verb; good God. The world was going to hell in a handbasket. But then Liam was brought up short by what the woman said next.

  She said, “Well, perhaps they do ask, but I just tell them, ‘Look it up. You know my name: Mrs. Samuel Dunstead.’”

  Liam gazed fixedly at his carton of milk while the manager was called, the computer consulted, the account number finally punched in. He watched the woman sign her receipt, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Mrs. Dunstead?”

  She was putting on her sunglasses. She turned to look at him, the glasses lowered halfway from the top of her head where they had been perched.

  “I’m Liam Pennywell,” he told her.

  She settled her glasses on her nose and continued to look at him; or at least he assumed she did. (The lenses were too dark for him to be sure.)

  “The man who’s been seeing your daughter,” he said.

  “Seeing … Eunice?”

  “Right. I happened to overhear your name and I thought I’d—”

  “Seeing, as in …?”

  “Seeing as in, um, dating,” he said.

  “That’s not possible,” she told him. “Eunice is married.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, mister,” she said, “but my daughter’s a happily married woman and she has been for quite some time.”

  Then she spun around and seized her grocery bag and stalked off.

  The cashier turned her eyes to Liam as if she were watching a tennis match, but Liam just stared her down and so eventually she reached for his milk and scanned it without any comment.

  9

  He could think of several possibilities.

  First, this might have been a different Mrs. Dunstead. (But a different Mrs. Samuel Dunstead? With a daughter named Eunice?)

  Or maybe the woman had Alzheimer’s. An unusual, reverse kind of Alzheimer’s where instead of forgetting what had happened, she remembered what had not happened.

  Or maybe she was just plain crazy. Driven frantic with worry over her daughter’s lack of a husband, she had hallucinated a husband and perhaps even, who knows, a houseful of children to boot.

  Or maybe Eunice was married.

  He drove home and put the milk in the refrigerator and folded the grocery bag neatly and stowed it in the cabinet. He sat down in the rocking chair with his hands cupping his knees. In a minute he would phone her. But not yet.

  He thought of the clues that had failed to alert him: the fact that her cell phone was the only way he could reach her; never her home phone. The fact that he always had to leave a message for her to call him back and that she alone, therefore, determined when they would talk. He thought of how she preferred to see him at his apartment or someplace out of the way where she was certain not to run into anyone she knew. How she found a dozen reasons to end their evenings early. How she was all but unavailable on weekends. How she hadn’t introduced him to her parents or to any of her friends.

  If he’d read this in some Ask Amy column, he would have thought the writer was a fool.

  But her open, guileless face! Her childlike unselfconsciousness, her wide gray eyes magnified by her enormous glasses! She seemed not merely innocent but completely untouched by life, unused. You could tell at a glance, somehow, that she’d never had a baby. And his daughters, who always claimed they could sense if a person was married—had they mentioned any warning bells when they met Eunice? No.

  But then he remembered her reluctance to go to movies with him. Always she gave some excuse: the movie might be too violent, or too depressing, or too foreign. And the few times she did go, she wouldn’t hold hands. She was chary about showing affection anywhere out in the world, in fact. In private she was so cuddly and confiding, but in public she moved subtly away from him if he ventured to drape an arm across her shoulder.

  He must have decided not to know.

  The kitchen telephone rang and he stood up and went over to look at it. DUNSTEAD E L. For a moment, he considered not answering. Then he lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.”

  “Do you hate me?” she asked.

  His heart sank.

  “So it’s true,” he said.

  “I can explain, Liam! I can explain! I was planning to explain, but it never seemed … My mother just now phoned and left this distraught-sounding message. She said, ‘Eunice, such a strange man in the grocery store; he claimed you and he were dating.’ She said, ‘You aren’t, are you? How could you be dating?’ I don’t know what I’m going to tell her. Can I come over and discuss this?”

  “What’s to discuss?” he asked. “You’re either married or you’re not.”

  Against all evidence, he noticed, he seemed to be waiting for her to say that she was not. She hadn’t actually stated in so many words that she was, after all. He still had a shred of hope. But she just asked, “Will you be home for the next little bit?”

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “I don’t care about work!” she said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  He hung up and went back to his rocking chair and sat down. He placed his hands on his knees again. He thought, What will I get up in the morning for, if I don’t have Eunice?

  This was how little time it took, evidently, to grow accustomed to being with somebody.

  She’d been planning to tell him for weeks, she said. For as long as she had known him, really. She just hadn’t found the right moment. She had never meant to deceive him. She said all this while she was still out in the entranceway. He opened his front door and she fell on his neck, her face wet with tears, circlets of damp hair plastered to her cheeks, wailing, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry! Please say you don’t hate me!”

  He disentangled himself with some difficulty and led her to one of the armchairs. She collapsed in it and buried her face and rocked back and forth, sobbing. After a few moments of standing by in silence, Liam went to sit in the other armchair. For a while he studied the only exposed part of her—her two cupped hands—and then he thought to ask, “Why is it you don’t wear a wedding ring?”

  She straightened and swiped at her nose with the back of her wrist. “I’m subject to eczema,” she said in a clogged voice.

  “Ah.”

  “And plus, my fingers are fat. Rings don’t really look good on me.”

  Liam adjusted the crease on one trouser leg. He said, “So this is an … ongoing marriage. Current, I mean.”

  She nodded.

  “And do you
have children?”

  “Oh! No!” She looked shocked. “Neither of us wanted them.”

  He supposed that was some slight comfort.

  “Also, we haven’t been getting along too well,” she added after a moment. “Cross my heart, Liam: it’s not as if you’re breaking up this perfect couple.”

  Liam resisted the urge to lash out with some cutting remark. (“What are you going to say next: ‘My husband doesn’t understand me’?”)

  “We didn’t get along from the start, now that I think about it,” she said. “It was almost an arranged marriage, really. His mom and my mom played tennis together and I guess they got to talking one day and decided they ought to match up their two loser children.”

  She sent Liam a glance, perhaps expecting him to interrupt and tell her, as he usually did, that she was not a loser. But he said nothing. She lowered her gaze again. She was twisting the hem of her skirt as if it were a dishrag.

  “At least, we looked to them like losers,” she said. “I was thirty-two years old at the time and still not married and had never yet held a job in my chosen field. I was selling clothes in this dress shop that belonged to a friend of my mom’s, but I could tell she was about to let me go.”

  Liam wondered how Eunice would have managed without her mother’s network of friends.

  “And he was thirty-four and not married either and his whole world was his work. He worked at a lab down at Hopkins; he still does. Another biology major. I suppose they thought that meant we had something in common, I mean something besides being losers.”

  She sent Liam another glance, but still he didn’t interrupt.

  “I knew from day one it was a mistake,” she said. “Or underneath, I knew. I must have known. I looked at him as a fallback. Someone I just settled for. Maybe that’s why I didn’t change my name when we got married. He said after the wedding, he said, ‘Now you’re Mrs. Simmons.’ I said, ‘What? I’m not Mrs. Simmons!’ Besides, think about it: Eunice Simmons. It would have had that weird hiss between the two s sounds.”

  They seemed to be getting off the subject, here. Liam said, “Eunice. You told me you’d had only three boyfriends in your entire life.”