Noah's Compass (19 page)

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.

Noah’s Compass: A Novel

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 mag-nified 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 l
eg.
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.”

“Well? And I did! I promise!”

“You didn’t say a word about a husband.”

“Yes, I realize that,” she said. “But when you and I met, there wasn’t any reason to tell you about my husband. We were discussing a job application. And then you were so … just so nice to me, so interested in my work and asking me questions. My husband isn’t interested at all. He never asks me questions. My husband is sort of negative, if you want the honest truth.”

Each time she said “my husband,” it struck Liam like a physical blow. He felt himself actually wincing.

“He has this sad-sack kind of attitude that drags me down,” she said. She swiped at her nose again and then opened her purse and started digging through it, eventually coming up with a tissue. “He’s very pessimistic, very broody. He’s not good for my mental health. I see that now. And then when you came along … Well, I think I was looking for someone and I didn’t even know it! Isn’t it amazing how that works?”

Liam didn’t trust himself to answer.

Eunice lifted her glasses slightly and blotted her lids with the tissue. Her lenses were so fogged that he wondered how she could see through them.

(Ordinarily, this would have made him smile. Now it caused his chest to hurt.) He said, “All right, through some unfortunate oversight you didn’t tell me you were married. But how about what you did tell me? Do you really live at home with your parents?”

“No.”

“No! Where, then?”

She folded her tissue into a square. “In an apartment at the St. Paul Arms,” she said.

“An apartment with your husband.”

“Yes.”

“So every night, you’ve gone home to your husband after you’ve left me.”

She raised her eyes to Liam’s. “He’s usually not there, though,” she said. “Lots of times he spends the night at the lab. We barely see each other, I promise.”

“Still, you told me this whole long story about moving back home with your parents. You invented it. And I believed it! So your father didn’t have a stroke?”

“Of course he had a stroke! You think I would make something like that up?”

“I really have no idea,” he said.

“He had a very serious stroke, and he’s still recovering. But I’m not living there; I just go over to help out.”

“And when you come to my place, you tell your husband you’re with your parents.”

“Right.”

“And you tell your parents you’re with your husband.”

She nodded.

“It’s like that bigamist movie,” Liam said. “Didn’t Alec Guinness play a bigamist, once?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She wrinkled her eyebrows, struck by a new thought. “Maybe what I’ll tell Mom is, you’re someone from work I had coffee with once and you must have somehow gotten the wrong idea.”

Liam decided to pretend he hadn’t heard this. He said, “How about last Saturday, when you went on that all-day retreat with Cope Development? Was there really a retreat?”

“Yes, there was a retreat! They have four retreats a year! Why would I tell you they did if they didn’t?”

“And the speech troubles? The therapist who lisps? That was just a fiendishly creative lie to keep me from meeting your parents?”

“No, it was not a lie!” she said indignantly. “There is a speech therapist. She does lisp. I’m not … devious, Liam!”

“You’re not devious,” he repeated slowly.

“Not in the way you’re thinking. Not concocting stories out of whole cloth. It was only that I felt so attracted to you, right off, and I thought about what it would be like to start over with the right person, do it right this time, but I knew you wouldn’t give me a second glance if you found out I was married. You said as much, right at the start. You as much as told me you wouldn’t. You said you didn’t believe in divorce.”

“I did?”

“You said you thought marriage should be permanent. You said divorce was a sin.”

All at once he was the one at fault, somehow. He said, “How could I have said that? I’m divorced myself.”

“Well, I’m only quoting what you told me. So what was I to do—announce that I was married?”

“You could have. Yes.”

“And lose my one last chance at happiness?”

He pressed his fingers to his temples. He said, “I can’t possibly have said divorce was a sin, Eunice. You must have misunderstood. But I do take marriage seriously. Even though mine didn’t work out, I always tried to behave … honorably. And now I find I’ve been seeing another man’s wife! Can you imagine how that makes me feel? It’s what happened when I was a boy—an outsider coming along and wrecking my parents’ marriage. How could I justify doing the same thing myself?”