Noah's Compass

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.”

“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?”

“Oh, justify,” Eunice said. “All those righteous words. But this is your only life, Liam! Don’t you think you deserve to spend it with the person you love?”

Her cell phone rang-the “Hallelujah Chorus,” slightly muffled by her purse. She ignored it. She was gazing at Liam imploringly, sitting forward in her chair and clutching the square of tissue.

“You’d better answer that,” he told her.

“It’s only Mr. C.,” she said.

“Well, answer it, Eunice. You don’t want to lose your job.”

She reached into her purse, but she kept her eyes on Liam’s face. No doubt she considered him heartless for thinking of her job at such a moment. But it wasn’t really her job he was thinking of. He was just seizing the opportunity to slip out of their conversation.

Because how could he argue with her? It was his only life. Didn’t he deserve to spend it with the person he loved?

He didn’t walk her to her car. He went with her to the door, but when she raised her face for a kiss he drew back. She said, “Liam? Should I come over this evening?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

The refusal gave him a perverse sense of satisfaction. A part of him, he was interested to observe, did in fact hate her. But only a part, so when she asked, “You’re not ever going to let me come again? We’re never again going to see each other?” he said, “I just need some time to think, Eunice.”

Then he hated her all the more when he saw the look of relief that passed across her face. He felt a sudden urge to tell her that now he had thought, and they were finished. If people couldn’t trust each other, what was the point in their being together?

He kept himself in check, however, and he closed the door on her gently instead of slamming it.

He was familiar with those flashes of hatred. (He’d been married two times, after all.) He knew enough not to act on them.

But once he was resettled in his chair, he sank into a deep, bitter anger. He started with the memory of that scene with Mrs. Dunstead-so humiliating, so grimace-producing. What she must have thought! He went back over Eunice’s lies, each of which humiliated him further because he couldn’t believe he had been so willfully blind for so long. And he reflected upon the fact that in some ways she really was, as she said herself, a loser. In many ways she was a loser. She was naive and literal-minded and she couldn’t keep a job for the life of her and besides, who would have trouble finding work in biology, for Lord’s sake? She wore sandals that looked like dugouts. She was subject to blushes and rashes. Only a friendless, aging man with not enough to do would have talked himself into loving her.

Had he really been that desperate?

And then the worst of all: he had encroached upon a marriage. He wasn’t so very different from Esther Jo Baddingley, the aptly named Other Woman who had torn his family apart.

Louise’s church would probably say that he was not in the least different-that a sin was a sin, no matter what, even when it was unwitting. But Liam, of course, knew better. On that score, he was guilt-free.

Or very nearly guilt-free.

Or he should have been guilt-free.

He dropped his head into his hands.

Kitty came home from work with a paper bag full of tomatoes. She said one of the dentists lived out in Greenspring Valley and all of his tomatoes had ripened at the same time. “So can we make some kind of pasta dish for supper?” she asked Liam. “Something Italian, and Damian can come eat with us?”

“Certainly,” Liam said, not moving.

Those times when Eunice had drawn away from him as Kitty entered the room, it wasn’t for Kitty’s sake at all. She had been thinking of herself. Her reputation. She hadn’t wanted a witness.

“Hello?” Kitty said.

Then, “What are you just sitting there for?”

“No reason.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He got to his feet and went to the kitchen, followed by Kitty with her bag. “Let’s see,” he said, opening a cabinet. “Egg noodles, but just a handful. Angel-hair pasta, another handful. Well, maybe we could combine them. I do have oregano. No garlic, though. I think we’d have to have garlic for anything Italian.”

“I’ll ask Damian to bring some from his mom’s,” Kitty said.

“Okay.”

He bent to take a pot from a cupboard. It felt unusually heavy. He seemed to be moving through mud. His arms and legs weighed a ton.

Kitty started setting the tomatoes out on the counter. “Some of these look past their sell-by date,” she told him.

“All the better to make a sauce with! Easier to squash!”

His voice had a fake cheeriness to it, but Kitty didn’t seem to notice.

She went off to change out of her work clothes, and the instant she was gone, the kitchen telephone rang. DUN-STEAD E L. He began hunting for the olive oil. The telephone went on ringing. “Aren’t you going to get that?” Kitty called from the den.

“No.”

He worried she would come get it herself, but then he heard her talking to Damian on her cell phone. He could always tell when it was Damian because she spoke in such a low voice that it sounded like humming.

The kitchen phone fell silent in the middle of a ring, giving a final broken-off peep that struck him as pathetic.

He wondered if Eunice cooked supper for her husband. It stood to reason that she must, at least if the husband ever emerged from his lab, and yet Liam couldn’t picture it. He couldn’t picture her shopping for groceries, either, or vacuuming, or ironing. When he tried to, the husband materialized in the background. He was a shadowy figure in a sleeveless undershirt, muscular and sullen, something on the order of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Negative, Eunice had called the husband. What had she meant by that? Liam seemed unable to stop himself from parsing every word of the afternoon’s conversation. He’s not good for my mental health was a strike against her-one of those New Age remarks that only the young and self-centered would make. Oh, definitely he was better off without her.

Or else not.

If he had known from the very beginning that she was married, he wouldn’t be in this predicament. It would have been so easy to turn off his feelings before they got started; he did it all the time, everyone did, without even thinking about it.

(A memory came to him of Janice Elmer at St. Dyfrig, whose husband was away with the National Guard. She had asked Liam once if he liked Chinese food, and he had said, “I don’t like any food”-a reaction so emphatic that he realized it was his instinctive defense against the possibility, probably imagined, of some compromising invitation.)

Now, though, it was too late to turn off his feelings for Eunice. Now that he was so used to her.

He put the tomatoes in the pot to simmer, and he added the empty bag to his grocery bag full of newspapers, which he carried out to the recycling bin. The sun had begun to sink and the air outside was cooler than inside, with a bit of a breeze stirring the pines above the walkway. He saw someone ahead of him carrying an empty cardboard box-a heavyset man in a Hawaiian shirt. “Why, hello there!” the man said, stopping to let him catch up.

“Hi,” Liam said.

“How’s it been going?”

“Uh, fine.”

“You don’t remember me, do you. Bob Hunstler? The folks who called 911?”

“Oh! Sorry,” Liam said. He shifted his bag to one side and shook hands.

“I guess you saw where they caught your guy,” Mr. Hunstler said.

“They did?”

“It was in last Saturday’s paper. Did you miss it? Guy right here in the complex.”

“In this complex?” Liam asked. He looked around him.

“Well, not actually living here. But his mother does. Mrs. Twill? In Building D? We know the woman, by sight at least. Just as nice as she can be. It’s not her fault she’s got a dead-beat son, now, is it.”

“No, I suppose not,” Liam said.

“They caught him over in B, making off with a sound system. Seems every time he came to visit his mom, he’d just nip by someone’s apartment on the way out and pick himself up a little something to take home.”

“Is that right,” Liam said. “I haven’t heard a thing from the police.”

“Well, maybe since the fellow in B caught him red-handed, they figure there’s no need to bring in any others.”

Mr. Hunstler resumed walking, swinging the cardboard box at his side, but Liam slowed to a stop. “Good seeing you,” he called.

“Oh, weren’t you headed to the bin?”

“I’m going to check for that paper.”

Mr. Hunstler raised his arm in half of a wave and plodded on.

Back in the apartment, Liam dumped his bag upside down in a chair. Saturday, August fifth. Aha. He found the police news listed in the Maryland section. Man Nabbed in County Burglaries; that would have to be it. A paragraph barely an inch and a half long, without a photo.

The arrest of Lamont Edward Twill, 24, is expected to bring to a halt a recent rash of break-ins in Baltimore County. Mr. Twill was tackled by a resident of the Windy Pines development, where he was seen loading stolen electronic equipment into his panel truck.

A search of his Lutherville lodgings revealed a number of items reported missing from homes in the Towson and Timonium areas over the past several months.

“Your tomatoes are popping,” Kitty said, coming into the room.

“Turn them down, then.”

“What are all these papers?”

He held the Maryland section out to her. “My burglar,” he told her.

“Really?”

She took the newspaper from him and read where he pointed. “Well, what do you know,” she said. Then she handed the paper back to him and wandered off toward the stove. “I thought you were going to wait for garlic before you started cooking these,” she called a moment later.

“I’ll add it when it comes.”

“It won’t do much good at that stage.”

Liam didn’t bother answering. He was reading the news item over again. He wished they’d included a photograph. Maybe some random detail would have struck a spark in his brain. Just a glimpse of a mustache, say, or a birthmark or a scar, and he would think, Wait! Haven’t I seen that somewhere before?

The familiar strain of trying to remember what wasn’t there brought him back to Eunice-the original Eunice; Eunice as he had first fantasized her when he’d imagined that she might rescue him.

And she had rescued him, really.

He refolded the newspaper and dropped it on top of the others.

It turned out that combining egg noodles with angel-hair pasta wasn’t such a good idea. Or at least, the two should have been cooked in separate pots. The noodles still showed some resistance in the middle, while the angel hair was overdone. Liam and Kitty plowed through theirs regardless, but Damian, Liam noticed, forked up each strand of angel hair one by one and left the noodles behind. Even though Liam’s policy was never to apologize for his cooking, he did say, “Maybe the noodles should have been given a few more minutes.”

“Naw, they’re great!” Damian told him.

Liam felt touched. So did Kitty, evidently, because she reached over and gave Damian a tender pat on the wrist.

Liam averted his eyes.

Damian was very interested in the news of the arrest. He thought Liam should go inventory the stolen goods. “You might find something there that you didn’t even know you were missing,” he said.

“In that case, why bother getting it back?” Liam asked him.

“Because six months from now you might suddenly think, Hey, didn’t I used to own a what’s-it? And then you’ll be sorry you didn’t go check when you had the chance.”

“Well, it’s not as if these things are sitting on public display somewhere,” Liam said.

He wished Xanthe could hear their conversation. She’d been so sure the intruder was Damian! He remembered how she’d flounced off in a huff when she found out Damian was visiting. She hadn’t been back since, in fact. But here Damian sat, blithely unaware that anyone would dream of suspecting him. He was proposing now that Liam attend the lineup.

“Lineup? What lineup?” Liam asked him. “Why would they have a lineup? You’ve been watching too much TV.”

“They ought to at least offer to let you meet the guy. Don’t you want to see who it was? Don’t you want to, like, confront him?”

“Oh, I’m not much of a one for confrontation,” Liam said. “I would be, maybe, if I thought it would bring my memory back-”

He stopped himself, because he knew everybody felt he was making too much of the memory issue. He said, “But as far as meeting him just to see who he is… well, what’s the point? It’s not as if he singled me out. This was like those accidents you read about in the paper: an overpass collapses and a man driving underneath is instantly killed. He stayed in his lane, obeyed the lights, checked his rearview mirror, observed the speed limit, and still he was killed. These things just happen.”

“That guy didn’t just happen to hit you on the head,” Damian said.

“Actually, he did just happen to, because I just happened to be there. No sense going up to him now and asking why.”

Damian knotted his brow, clearly baffled. He might have continued arguing, but just then the kitchen telephone rang. Liam stayed seated. Kitty said, “Want me to answer that?”

“Never mind,” Liam said.

“That’s okay, I’m finished.” She stood up and went to lift the receiver. “Hello?” she said. “Hi. Sure, just a sec. It’s Eunice, Dad.”

“I’m eating,” Liam told her. And to prove it, he reached for the tomato sauce and ladled a spoonful onto his empty plate.

After a pause, Kitty said, “Eunice? Can he call you back later? Okay. Bye.”

She returned to the table and sat down. Neither she nor Damian spoke.

“I think you were right about the garlic,” Liam said. “I should have added it at the start. I can’t even taste that it’s there.”

He picked up the Parmesan cheese and sprinkled it on his sauce. Out of nowhere, a memory came to him of a spaghetti dinner he’d eaten with Eunice the week before, in a dingy little café in the mall across the street. The waitress had started out by introducing herself. “Hi,” she’d said. “I’m Debbie, and I’ll be your server tonight.” It was a practice that always made Liam roll his eyes, but Eunice seemed quite taken with it. All during their supper she had happily employed the woman’s name. “Debbie, could we have more bread?” and, “That was delicious, Debbie.” At the time, Liam had felt a bit irritated with her. Now, though, it struck him as funny. An actual bubble of laughter escaped him, and he ducked his head lower to hide it and busied himself with his meal.