Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

“There’s no place to sit in the living room.”

  “There are two very comfortable armchairs.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” she said.

  Her fingertips were delicate points of warmth against his skin. She dropped her hands to his belt and undid his buckle.

  “We should sit down,” Liam said. He moved to one side of her.

  “We should lie down,” Eunice told him.

  He started toward the living room, still holding the glass of water, but when she followed him he slowed to a stop and let her press herself to his back and hug him once again. He felt confused by the combination of her tight embrace and his loosened waistband. His shirttails had worked themselves free of their own accord, and he thought how good it would feel to be free of all his clothes. He wanted to put the water glass someplace but he didn’t want to separate from her long enough to do that.

  Then the front door burst open and someone caroled, “Knock knock!”

  In walked Barbara, lugging a blue vinyl suitcase.

  Liam jerked away from Eunice and clutched his shirtfront together with his free hand.

  Barbara said, “Oh, excuse me,” but not in a particularly apologetic tone. She seemed amused, more than anything. She set down the suitcase to push back a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead.

  Liam said, “What are you doing here?”

  “You did leave your door unlocked,” Barbara pointed out.

  “That doesn’t mean you should walk on in!”

  “Well, I said, ‘Knock knock.’ Didn’t I?” Barbara asked Eunice. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Liam said, “This is … a friend of mine, Eunice Dunstead. She was just helping me with my résumé.”

  “I’m Barbara,” Barbara told Eunice.

  Eunice said, “I have to go.” Her cheeks were splotched with patches of red. She snatched up her purse from the rocking chair and rushed toward the door. Barbara moved aside to let her pass, gazing after her thoughtfully. Liam seized her moment of inattention to put down the water glass and buckle his belt.

  “Sorry,” Barbara told him once the door had slammed shut.

  “Honestly, Barbara.”

  “I’m sorry!”

  “What are you here for?” he asked.

  “I brought Kitty’s beach things.”

  “Beach?”

  Casually, as if his mind were on something else, he let a hand drift to his shirtfront again and he felt for each button and buttoned it. Barbara tilted her head to watch.

  “She’s spending a few days in Ocean City with Damian’s aunt and uncle,” she said. “Didn’t she clear this with you?”

  “Um …”

  “Liam, are you not keeping track of Kitty’s comings and goings? Because if that’s the case, she shouldn’t be in your care.”

  “I’m keeping track! I just forgot,” he said.

  “Really.”

  Eunice would be traveling farther away every second, in tears and no doubt despairing of him, reflecting on how cowardly he was and how unchivalrous and disloyal. But Barbara, for once, seemed in no hurry to leave. She went over to the rocking chair and sat down, plucking at her T-shirt where it was clinging to her stomach. Her outfit today was singularly unattractive. The T-shirt was stretched and smudged with grass stains, and her loose khaki shorts revealed her wide white thighs, pressed even wider against the chair seat.

  As if she guessed what he was thinking, she said, “I look a mess. I’ve been cleaning.”

  He said nothing. He sat in the armchair furthest from her, perching on the very edge of it to suggest that he had things to do.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me about this Eunice person. How long have you known her?”

  “What’s it to you?” Liam demanded.

  It felt so good to speak this way—to say what he wanted, for once, without worrying about Barbara’s opinion of him—that he did it again. “What’s it to you, Barbara? What business is it of yours?”

  Barbara rocked back in her chair and said, “My, my!”

  “I don’t ask you about Howie, do I?”

  “Who?”

  “Howie the Hound Dog. Howie the Food Phobe.”

  “Are you referring to Howard Neal?”

  “Right,” Liam said, risking it.

  “Goodness, Liam, where’d you dig him up from?”

  He scowled at her.

  “Gosh, I haven’t thought of Howard in …” She shook her head, looking amused again. “Well. So Miss Eunice is off-limits. Fine. Forget I asked.”

  Liam said, “You and I are divorced, after all. I do have a private life.”

  “You’re always going on about your private life,” Barbara said, “but have you ever considered this, Liam: You’re the only Baltimorean I know who leaves his front door unlocked. Even though you’ve had a burglary! You leave it completely unlocked, but then any time someone walks in you complain that they’re intruding. ‘Tut-tut!’ you say. ‘I’m veddy, veddy private and special. I vant to be alone!’”—this last uttered in a bad Greta Garbo accent. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Here’s solitary sad old Liam, only God help anybody who tries to step in and get close.”

  “Well, maybe if they knocked first—”

  “And I suppose this poor Eunice person is just like all the rest of us,” Barbara said. “All those benighted females who broke their hearts over you. She imagines she’ll be the one who finally warms you up.”

  “Barbara! She is not poor! She is not ‘this poor Eunice person’! Jesus, Barbara! What gives you the right?”

  Barbara looked startled. She said, “Well, pardon me.”

  “Isn’t it time for you to leave?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Okay.” She rose to her feet. “I only meant—”

  “I don’t care what you meant. Just leave.”

  “All right, Liam, I’m leaving. Have Kitty call me, please, will you?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Already he was feeling sheepish about his outburst, but he refused to apologize. He stood up and followed Barbara to the door. “Goodbye,” he told her.

  “Bye, Liam.”

  He didn’t see her out to the parking lot.

  He thought of Eunice: how staunch she had been and how forthright. She had not said, “Pleased to meet you,” when she and Barbara were introduced. She had not stuck around and made small talk. “I have to go,” she had said, and she had gone. While he himself, longing though he was to run after her, had cravenly sat down with Barbara and held a meaningless conversation. He was so concerned about appearances, about what Barbara thought of him, that he had failed to show the most basic human kindness.

  The fact was that Eunice was a much better person than he was.

  Everyone knew the St. Paul Arms. It was a shabby gray apartment building a couple of blocks from the Hopkins campus, home to graduate students and instructors and lower-level university staff. From his old place, Liam could have walked there in a matter of minutes. Even from his new place it was not that much of a drive, but this afternoon it seemed to take forever. Every stoplight changed to red just before he reached it; every car ahead of him was trying to make a left turn in the face of oncoming traffic. Liam chafed all over with frustration. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for an elderly pedestrian to inch, inch through a crosswalk.

  It had not been all that long, really, since Eunice had rushed out his door. He had hopes originally of waylaying her in front of her building, intercepting her before she got inside. As the minutes passed, though, he saw that this was unrealistic. All right: he would just stride on into her apartment and state his case. If the husband happened to be there, fine. It wouldn’t change a thing.

  The car radio was playing a Chopin étude that tinkled on endlessly, going nowhere. He switched it off.

  There weren’t any parking spots in front of her building and so he turned into a side street and parked there. Then he walked back up St. Paul and pulled open
the heavy wooden door of the St. Paul Arms.

  Drat, an intercom. A locked glass inner door blocking his way and one of those damn fool intercom arrangements where you had to locate a resident’s special code and punch it in. He searched for Dunstead, realizing to his dismay that he’d forgotten what the husband’s last name was; but he was in luck: Dunstead/Simmons, he found. Oh, yes: the hiss between the two s sounds. He stabbed in the code.

  First he heard a dial tone and then Eunice’s overloud “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” he said.

  No response.

  “It’s Liam,” he tried again.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to come up.”

  In the silence that followed, he frowned down at the collection of footprinted takeout menus that paved the vestibule floor. Finally, a buzzer sounded. He seized the handle of the glass door as if it were about to vanish.

  She lived in 4B, the list in the vestibule had said. The elevator looked unreliable and he decided to take the stairs. Evidently a lot of other people had made the same choice; the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars. Above the second floor, the marble gave way to threadbare plum-colored carpet. Now he regretted spurning the elevator, because he was growing short of breath. He didn’t want to arrive puffing and panting.

  Probably the husband was a jogger or something. For sure he was younger and fitter.

  On the fourth floor, one door was open and Eunice stood there waiting—a good sign, he thought. But when he reached her, he found her expression set in stone, and she didn’t step back to let him in. “What do you want?” she said again.

  “Are you by yourself?”

  An infinitesimal adjustment to the angle of her head meant yes, he surmised.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “Don’t bother; I already know I’m only a ‘friend.’”

  “I apologize for that,” he said. He glanced around. The hall was empty, but people could be listening from behind their doors, and she was making no effort to keep her voice down. “Could I come in?” he asked.

  She hesitated and then stepped back, just a grudging few inches. He sidled past her to find himself in a long, narrow corridor with dark floorboards, a braided oval rug, and a claw-footed drop-leaf table littered with junk mail.

  “I am extremely sorry,” he told her.

  She lifted her chin. From the spiked and separated look of her lashes, he could tell she must have been crying, but her face was composed.

  He said, “Please say you forgive me. I hated to let you walk out like that.”

  “Well, get used to it,” she said. “You can’t have things both ways, Liam. You can’t ask me to stay with my husband and then not let me walk out on you.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Please, do you think we could sit somewhere?”

  She released an exasperated puff of a breath, but then she turned to lead him down the corridor.

  If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that her living room belonged to an old lady. It was over-furnished with piecrust tables, satin-striped love seats, bowlegged needlepoint chairs, and faded little rugs. Her mother’s doing, he supposed. Or both mothers’ doing—the two women rendezvousing here with their truckloads of family detritus, arranging everything just so for their helpless offspring. Even the pictures on the wall looked like hand-me-downs: crackled seascapes and mountainscapes and a full-length portrait of a woman in a bell-skirted dress from the 1950s, not long enough ago to be of interest.

  He settled on one of the love seats, which was as hard as a park bench and so slippery that he had to brace his feet to keep from sliding off. He was hoping for Eunice to sit beside him, but she chose a chair instead. So much for all her complaints about his lack of couches.

  “She’s moving in with you, isn’t she,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Barbara. She’s moving in.”

  “Good grief! What a thought. No, she’s not moving in. For Lord’s sake, Eunice!”

  “I saw that suitcase! That powder-blue suitcase.”

  “That was Kitty’s suitcase,” Liam said.

  “It was an old person’s suitcase; you can’t fool me. Only an old person would have a powder-blue suitcase. It was Barbara’s. I bet she’s got a whole matching set stashed away in her attic.”

  The notion of Barbara as an “old person” brought Liam up short.

  “She’s moving in with you and picking up where she left off,” Eunice said. “Because that’s how married people are; they go on being involved for all time even if they’re divorced.”

  “Eunice, you’re not listening. Barbara was bringing Kitty her beach things; Kitty’s going to Ocean City. I can’t help what kind of suitcase she put them in! And anyhow,” he said, stopped by a thought. “What do you mean, that’s how married people are? You’re the one who’s married, might I point out.”

  Eunice sat back slightly in her chair. “Well, you’re right,” she said after a pause. “But, I don’t know. Somehow I don’t feel married. I feel like everyone’s married but me.”

  Both of them were quiet for a moment.

  “I feel like I’m always the outsider,” she said. “The ‘friend’ who’s ‘helping with the résumé.’”

  She indicated the quotation marks with two pairs of curled fingers.

  “I already told you I was sorry about that,” Liam said. “It was very wrong of me. Barbara just caught me by surprise, is what happened. I was afraid of what she might think.”

  “You were afraid because you still love her.”

  “No, no—”

  “Well, why aren’t you sweeping me off my feet, then, and carrying me away? Why aren’t you saying, ‘Barbara be damned! You’re the woman I love, and life is too short to go through it without you!”

  “Barbara be damned,” Liam said. “You’re the woman I love, and life is too short to go through it without you.”

  She stared at him.

  A key rattled in the front door, and someone called out, “Euny?”

  The man who appeared in the entranceway was lanky and fair-skinned, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt and carrying a plastic grocery bag. His blond hair was very fine and too long, overlapping his ears in an orphanish way, and his pale, thin mustache was too long too, so that you couldn’t help picturing how the individual wisps would grow unpleasantly moist whenever he ate.

  Eunice jumped up but then just stood there, awkwardly. “Norman, this is Liam,” she said. “We’re just … working on Liam’s résumé.”

  “Oh, hi,” Norman told Liam.

  Liam rose and shook Norman’s hand, which seemed to be all bones.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Norman said. “I’m going to go ahead and start dinner. Will you be eating with us, Liam?”

  Liam said, “No, I—” at the same time that Eunice said, “No, he’s—”

  “I should be getting along. Thanks anyway,” Liam said.

  “Too bad,” Norman said. “It’s tagine tonight!” and he held up his grocery bag.

  “Norman’s going through a Middle East phase right now,” Eunice told Liam. Her cheeks were flushed, and she didn’t quite meet either man’s eyes.

  “You do the cooking?” Liam asked Norman.

  “Yes, well, Eunice is not much of a hand in the kitchen. How about you, Liam? Do you cook?”

  “Not really,” Liam said. The way Norman kept using his first name made him feel he was being interviewed. He said, “I take more of a canned-soup approach.”

  “Well, I can understand that. I used to be the same way. Progresso lentil; that was our major food group, once! Just ask Eunice. But some of the people in my lab, they’re from these different countries and they’re always bringing in their native dishes. I started asking for their recipes. I do like Middle Eastern the best. It’s not just a phase,” he said with an oddly boyish glance of defiance in Eunice’s direction. “Middle Eastern really is a very s
ophisticated cuisine.”

  Demonstrating, he opened the grocery bag and stuck his head inside and drew a deep breath. “Saffron!” he said, reemerging. “Sumac! I tried to find pomegranates, but it must not be the season. I’m thinking I might use dried cranberries instead.”

  “That’s an idea,” Liam said.

  He was edging toward the front hall now. This meant getting past Norman, who stood obliviously in his path and asked, “Do you know when pomegranate season is, Liam?”

  “Um, not offhand …”

  “Pomegranates fascinate me,” Norman said. (Eunice raised her eyes to the ceiling.) “When you think about it, they’re kind of an odd choice for people to eat. They’re really nothing but seeds! Some of the Middle Easterners I know, they chew the seeds right up. You can hear the crunch. But me, I like to bite down on them just partway so I can get the juicy part off without breaking into the hulls. I don’t like that bitter taste, you know? And those rough little bitter bits that stick in your teeth. Then I spit the seeds out when no one is looking.”

  “Norman, for heaven’s sake, let him get home to his supper,” Eunice said.

  “Oh,” Norman said. “Sorry.” He switched the grocery bag to his left hand so he could shake hands again with Liam. “It was good to meet you, Liam,” he said.

  “Good to meet you,” Liam told him.

  He was conscious, as he started toward the hall, of Eunice following close behind, but he didn’t look in her direction even when they were out of Norman’s sight. At the door he said, in a loud, carrying voice, “Well, thanks for your help!”

  “Liam,” she whispered.

  He reached for the doorknob.

  “Liam, did you mean what you said?”

  “We’ll have to talk!” he told her enthusiastically.

  From the rear of the apartment he could hear the clanging of pots now, and Norman’s tuneless whistling.

  “See you soon!” he said.

  And he stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  Heading up North Charles, he drove so badly that it was a wonder he didn’t have an accident. Cars seemed to come out of nowhere; he failed to start moving again whole moments after lights turned green; his acceleration was jerky and erratic. But it wasn’t because he had anything particular on his mind. He had nothing on his mind. He was trying to keep his mind empty.