Noah’s Compass: A Novel Read online

  His plan was to get to his apartment and just, oh, collapse. Stare into space a long while. He envisioned his apartment as a haven of solitude. But when he walked into his living room, he found Kitty kneeling on the carpet. She was unpacking the blue vinyl suitcase, setting stacks of clothing in a half circle around her. “I know I had more swimsuits than these,” she said, not looking up.

  He crossed the room without answering.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “How many could you possibly need?” he asked. The question was automatic, like a line assigned to him in a play—the uncomprehending-male question he knew she expected of him.

  “Well,” she said. She sat back on her heels and started ticking off her fingers. “There’s my sunbathing suit, for starters. That’s a minimum-coverage bikini with no straps to leave a tan line. And then my backup sunbathing suit, the exact same cut, to wear if the first one gets wet. Then my old-lady suit; ha! For when Damian’s aunt and uncle are with us …”

  He sank into an armchair and let her babble on until she said, again, “Hello?”

  He looked at her.

  “Did you hear what I just told you? I won’t be staying for supper.”

  “Okay.”

  He wasn’t hungry for supper himself, but when he checked his watch he found it was after six. He rose heavily and went to the kitchen alcove to fix himself whatever was easiest. In the refrigerator he found half an onion, a nearly empty carton of milk, and a saucepan containing the dregs of the tomato soup he’d heated for lunch. (“Progresso lentil; that was our major food group once,” he heard Norman say.) He definitely didn’t want soup. In the cupboard he found a box of Cheerios, already opened. He shook a cupful or so into a bowl. Then he added milk, got himself a spoon, and sat down at the table.

  Kitty was trying on a beach robe striped in hot pink and lime green. “Does this make me look like a watermelon?” she asked him.

  He forgot to answer.

  “Poppy?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  He took a spoonful of Cheerios and chewed dutifully. If Kitty said anything further, he couldn’t hear it over the crunching sound.

  He’d forgotten how he disliked cold cereal. It had something to do with the disjunction between the crispy dry bits and the cold wet milk. They didn’t meld, or something. They stayed too separate in his mouth. He took another spoonful, and he started considering pomegranates. He knew what Norman had meant about trying to eat the juicy part without biting into the seeds. The few times he’d eaten pomegranates himself, he had done the same thing, and Norman’s description brought back vividly the tart taste behind the sweetness, and the sensation of little hard pieces of seed lodging in his molars. Yes, exactly; he knew exactly.

  He could almost be Norman; he knew so exactly how Norman felt.

  Kitty said, “Is this one better?”

  She was modeling another beach robe, a short blue terrycloth affair that wouldn’t protect her nearly as well from the sun. Before he could tell her so, though, there was a knock on the door.

  Kitty called, “Come in?”

  Instead of coming in, whoever it was knocked again.

  Kitty heaved a put-upon sigh and went over to open the door. Liam took another spoonful of cereal. “Oh,” he heard her say. “Hi.” He twisted in his chair to see Eunice walk in, hugging a gray nylon duffel bag. It was a large bag but it couldn’t have been very full, because it flopped loosely over her arms, empty in the middle and bulging only slightly at either end.

  He set his spoon down and stood up. He said, “Eunice?”

  “Barbara be damned,” she told him in a hard bright voice. “Norman be damned. Everyone be damned.”

  “Eunice, no.”

  “What?”

  “No,” he said. “We can’t do it. Go away.”

  “What?”

  Kitty was staring from one of them to the other.

  “I’m sorry, but I mean it,” he told Eunice.

  He could see her start to believe him. The animation drained gradually from her face until all her features sagged. She stood motionless, flat-footed, her clunky sandals turned outward in a ducklike fashion, her arms full of withered gray nylon.

  Then she turned and left.

  Liam sat back down on his chair.

  Kitty seemed about to say something, but in the end she just gave a little shake of her shoulders, like a shiver, and tightened the sash of her beach robe.

  12

  Liam’s rocking chair, where he had so fondly imagined himself whiling away his old age, was not really all that comfortable. The slats seemed to hit his back wrong. And the smaller of the armchairs was too small, too short in the seat for his thighs. But the larger armchair was fine. He could sit in the larger armchair for days.

  And he did.

  He watched how the sun changed the color of the pines as it moved across the sky, turning the needles from black to green, sending dusty slants of light through the branches. There was a moment every afternoon when the line of shade coincided precisely with the line of the parking-lot curb out front. Liam waited for that moment. If it happened to pass without his noticing, he felt cheated.

  He told himself that the shine would soon enough have worn off, if he and Eunice had stayed together. He would have started correcting her grammar, and she would have begun to notice his age and his irritability. He would ask why she had to stomp so heavily when she walked, and she would say he never used to mind the way she walked.

  Oh, and anyhow, the world was full of people whose lives were meaningless. There were men who spent their entire careers picking up litter from city streets, or fitting the same bolt into the same bolt-hole over and over and over. There were men in prison, men in mental wards, men confined to hospital beds who could move only one little finger.

  But even so …

  He remembered an art project he had read about someplace where you wrote your deepest, darkest secrets on postcards and mailed them in to be read by the public. He thought that his own postcard would say, I am not especially unhappy, but I don’t see any particular reason to go on living.

  One morning as he was sitting there he heard a knock, and he sprang up to answer even though he knew he shouldn’t. But he opened the door to find a stranger, a lipsticked woman with wildly bushy red hair and brass earrings the size of coasters. She stood with one hip slung out, holding a can of Diet Pepsi. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Bootsie Twill. Can I come in?”

  “Well …”

  “You’re Liam, right?”

  “Well, yes …”

  “I’m Lamont’s mom. The guy they arrested?”

  “Oh,” Liam said.

  He stepped back a pace, and she walked in. She took a swig from her can and looked around the living room. “You get way more light than I do,” she said. “Which direction is this place facing?”

  “Um, north?”

  “Maybe I should lose my window treatments,” she said. She crossed the room to plunk herself down in the chair he had just vacated. She was wearing pedal pushers in a geometric red-and-yellow print, and when she set her right ankle on her left knee the hems rode up to expose gleaming, bronzed shins.

  This was not the plump little Jack-and-the-Beanstalk widow Liam had envisioned when he heard of her son’s arrest.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Twill?” he asked, settling in the rocking chair.

  “Bootsie,” she said. She took another swig of soda. “Lamont is out on bail,” she said. “He wants to have a jury trial. He’s going to plead not guilty.”

  Liam wondered how that could possibly work. But then, what did he know about such things? He tried to look sympathetic.

  “I figured I would ask you if you’d be a character witness,” she told him.

  “Character witness!”

  “Right.”

  “Mrs. Twill—”

  “Bootsie.”

  “Bootsie, your son assaulted me, did
you know that? He knocked me out with a blow to the head and he bit me in the palm.”

  “Yes, but, see, he didn’t take anything, now, did he. He did not take one thing of yours. He was probably, like, overcome with remorse when he saw what he’d done, and he left.”

  Liam rocked back in his chair and stared at her. He considered the possibility that this was all a joke—some sort of Candid Camera situation set up by, maybe, Bundy or someone.

  “Don’t you think?” she prodded him.

  “No,” he said levelly. “I think I made a noise and the neighbors heard and he got scared and ran away.”

  “Oh, why are you so judgmental?”

  He chose not to answer that.

  “Hey,” she said. “I realize you’ve got reason to be mad at him, but you don’t know his whole story. This is a good, kind, good-hearted, kindhearted boy we’re talking about. Only he’s the product of a broken home and his father was a shit-head and in school he had dyslexia which gave him low self-esteem. Plus I think he might be bipolar, or whatchamacallit, ADD. So okay, all I’m asking is a second chance for him, right? If you could tell the jury how he broke into your apartment but then had remorseful thoughts—”

  “Look. Mrs. Twill.”

  “Bootsie.”

  “I was unconscious,” Liam said. “Your son knocked me unconscious; are you hearing me? I don’t have the slightest idea what thoughts he may have had because I was out cold. I don’t even know what he looked like. I don’t even remember hearing him break in. I’ve completely lost all memory of it.”

  “Okay, fine, but it might come back to you, maybe. I mean if you were to see him. So here’s what we could do: I could take you to visit him. Or bring him to your place, if you want. Sure! Whatever’s most convenient for you; you get to call the shots, absolutely. And he could tell you how he was overcome with remorse and such, which would be interesting for you to hear; you haven’t heard his side of it. And then meanwhile you would be looking at him and you might think, Hey! Now I remember! Seeing him would, like, bring it all back to your mind, you know?”

  Liam did know. It was the sort of scenario he had fantasized when he had been so distressed about his amnesia. But at some point, he seemed to have stopped caring about that; he couldn’t say just when. If the memory of his attack were handed to him today, he would just ask, Is that it?

  Where’s the rest? Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth, my first marriage and my second marriage and the growing up of my daughters?

  Why, he’d had amnesia all along.

  “And here’s another thing,” Mrs. Twill was saying. “If you were just to look into his face, then even if it didn’t remind you, you’d understand what a nice kid he is. Just a kid! Real shy and clumsy, always nicks himself shaving. That would tell you about his character. It might even help you get over this. I mean, I know you must feel spooked these days. I bet every time a floorboard creaks, your heart beats faster, am I right?”

  She was wrong. Every time a floorboard creaked, he just cleared his throat or rattled his newspaper—covered the sound up in some way, as he had always covered suspicious sounds up even before the break-in.

  All along, it seemed, he had experienced only the most glancing relationship with his own life. He had dodged the tough issues, avoided the conflicts, gracefully skirted adventure.

  He let Mrs. Twill leave her telephone number because that was the easiest way to get rid of her, and then he showed her out.

  When he sat back down in his armchair (unpleasantly warm now from Mrs. Twill’s bony rear end), he found he had lost the thread of his thoughts. He felt restless and distracted. He wondered if he should take a walk. Or go grocery shopping, maybe? He was nearly out of orange juice. He rehearsed the preparations in his mind: make a list, collect his recyclable bags …

  He saw Mrs. Twill as she had looked when he’d opened the door—her who-cares posture, her garish lipstick, her unfamiliar, unwelcome, un-Eunice face.

  “Oh, Liam,” he heard Eunice say again. O Liam, he saw in her round schoolgirl script, for she had a habit of spelling oh without the h, which had lent her little smiley-face notes an unexpectedly poetic tone. (O I wish Mr. C. didn’t have that budget meeting tomorrow …)

  Sometimes, without his say-so, the most specific memories of Eunice would suddenly swim up. Her refusal to drive on major highways, for instance, because she feared what she called the “peer pressure” of the drivers behind her on entrance ramps. Her tendency to talk about any subject that was on her mind, regardless of her audience, so that she was perfectly capable of asking the mailman what gift she should bring to a baby shower. And the way she had of biting her lower lip when she was concentrating on something—her two small, pearly front teeth recalling the teeth of an old-fashioned bisque doll that one of his daughters had owned.

  Or the harder memories, from after he’d learned she was married. “But what about our only life?” he heard her say, and it was almost a melody, a plaintive little clear-voiced song hanging in the air of the room.

  Why was it that he had known so many sad women?

  His mother, to begin with—abandoned by her husband, perennially in poor health, no solace remaining to her but her children, as she was forever pointing out to them. “If you two left me, I don’t know how I’d bear it,” she said. And then what did Liam do? He left her. He accepted a partial scholarship to a college in the Midwest, although the University of Maryland had offered a scholarship too, and a full one at that. How could he? all her church friends asked. Thank the good Lord for Julia; daughters were always a comfort; but wouldn’t you think Liam could stay in the same geographical area, at least? When his mother was so alone, so unfortunate, such a victim of circumstance! A saint, in fact. (As she said so often: “I just seem to put myself last, even though everyone tells me I shouldn’t. I know they must be right, but I’m just made that way, I guess.”)

  Liam offered no defense. There really wasn’t any defense. He reminded himself, very sensibly, that somebody would always be saying something disapproving. No point letting it get to him.

  Funny, it used to be so simple to sum his mother up, but now that he looked back he seemed to be ambushed by complexities. He saw again the frightened look in her eyes when she was going through her last illness, and her tiny, curled hands. It struck him that life in general was heartbreaking—a word he didn’t toss off lightly.

  His girlfriends had been sad types as well, not that he had consciously chosen them for their sadness. Sooner or later, it seemed, every girl he dated ended up revealing some secret sorrow—an alcoholic father or a mentally ill mother or, at the very least, an outcast childhood.

  Well, who knows. It could be that the whole world was that way.

  Millie, though: Millie was his golden girl. She was tall and slender, with a veil of straight blond hair and a beautiful pale face. Her eyes were deep-set and startlingly light in color, the lids luminous as eggshells, and she had a floating, sashaying style of walking.

  Millie, he thought now, forgive me. I’d forgotten how much I loved you.

  His first glimpse of her had been at a friend’s apartment. She was playing the cello in an impromptu, very inept and cobbled-together string quartet, which was making her laugh. She laughed with her hair tossed back, her body loose and relaxed, her knees spread open to accommodate her instrument. This was misleading, as it turned out. Millie was not an open-kneed kind of person. She wasn’t even a cellist; she was a harpist. Liam learned later that she’d gone a few months earlier to pick up a skirt from the cleaner’s, but the cleaner had closed for lunch hour and so she’d stepped into the music store next door and bought herself a cello instead. That was Millie for you: whimsical. Fey. A sort of water maiden. Liam had fallen head over heels. He had pursued her single-mindedly until she agreed to marry him, less than six months after they met.

  Had he been too insistent? Had she harbored some misgivings? He hadn’t thought so at the time, but now
he was less sure. At the start of their marriage, he had believed she was content. (Though always, now that he looked back, rather muted, a bit remote.) It was true she was not an enjoyer. She seemed to find sex something of a trial, and she deplored the excessive notice that other people—even Liam, back then—paid to food and drink. In fact she soon became a strict vegetarian, which made her even more pallid and translucent-looking.

  But the major change dated from her pregnancy. This was an unplanned pregnancy, admittedly, but not the end of the world. They were both in agreement on that. When she started sleeping too much and grew even more disconnected from everyday life, well, it was only to be expected, wasn’t that so? But then she didn’t change back again after the baby was born.

  Or maybe she’d been that way all along, and Liam had just lacked the wisdom to perceive it.

  Like being dragged down by the ankles into a swamp, that was how his life began to feel. Millie was already submerged and he was struggling to support the weight of her.

  Of course the university psychologist was consulted, but Millie said he didn’t know what he was talking about and so that had come to nothing. And then for a brief time, her doctor had conjectured that she might be suffering from a silent form of appendicitis—some chronic, low-grade infection that would explain her constant tiredness and lack of zest. Both of them (Millie too, it saddened Liam now to recall) had been almost giddy with relief. Oh, then! Just something medical! Something curable with surgery!

  But that theory had been discounted, by and by, and she had returned to dreary hopelessness, barely slogging through the days. Often Liam would come home in the evening to find her still in her bathrobe, the baby straggly-haired and fretful, the apartment smelling of soiled diapers, the sink piled high with unwashed dishes. Oh, Lord, just go ahead and die! he’d thought more than once. Not meaning it, of course.

  Could it be that underneath, he had guessed ahead of time that she might take those pills? And had done nothing to prevent it?