Noah's Compass Read online

  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 sophisticated 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.

  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?”