Noah’s Compass: A Novel

by Anne Tyler

  “Oh, why do you always, always take her side against me?” Barbara demanded.

  “When have I taken her side against you?”

  “You don’t even know what happened! You just jump on in with both feet!”

  “All I said was—”

  “Do you have a grocery bag?” Kitty asked him. “I’ve got way too much stuff.”

  She made it sound as if he were somehow to blame for that. In fact he felt blamed by both of them. He went over to a kitchen cupboard and pulled out a flattened paper bag and handed it to her in silence.

  As soon as Kitty left the room, he turned to Barbara and said, “Shall we sit down?”

  “I’m really pressed for time,” Barbara said. But she followed him into the living room and settled in the rocker. He sat across from her. He laced his fingers together and smiled at her.

  “So!” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re looking well.”

  She was, Saturday clothes or no. She had that fair, clean skin that showed to best advantage without makeup, and her serenely folded hands—the nails cut sensibly short and lacking any sort of polish—struck him as restful. Reassuring. He went on smiling at her, but she had her mind elsewhere. She said, “I’m getting too old for this.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For dealing with teenage girls.”

  “Well, yes, you are a little old,” Liam said.

  This caused Barbara to give a short laugh, but he was only speaking the truth. (She’d had Kitty at age forty-five.)

  “It wasn’t so bad with Louise,” she said. “Say what you will about the born-again thing; at least it made her an easy adolescent. And Xanthe I don’t even count. Xanthe was such a good girl.”

  Thank heaven for that much, Liam thought, since Xanthe wasn’t her own. Wouldn’t he have felt guilty if Xanthe had given Barbara any trouble! But she had been so docile—a quiet, obedient three-year-old when Barbara first met her. He’d brought her along to work one morning when his child-care fell through, and the two of them had hit it off at once. Barbara hadn’t fussed over her or used that fake, high, cooing voice that other women used or expected Xanthe to rise to any particular level of enthusiasm. She seemed to understand that this child had a low-key nature. And she’d already known that about Liam. She certainly knew he was low-key.

  So why did she want more than that after they were married? Why did she prod him, and drag him to counseling, and at last, in the end, give up on him?

  Women had this element of treachery, Liam had discovered. They entered your life under false pretenses and then they changed the rules. Underneath, Barbara had turned out to be just like all the others.

  Take today, for instance. Look at her sitting in his rocking chair. Although she had started out so calm—hands folded in her lap—she grew more restless by the minute. First she picked up an issue of Philosophy Now from the floor beside her and examined the cover. Then she set it down and looked around the room, knitting her eyebrows in such a way that Liam felt himself becoming defensive. He sat up straighter. She turned her gaze on him and said, “Liam, I wonder if you might perhaps be a little bit depressed.”

  “Why on earth would you say that?” Liam asked.

  Why did she feel she had the right to say it, was what he meant. But she misread the question. She said, “Because you’re narrowing your world so. Haven’t you noticed? You’re taking up a smaller and smaller space. You don’t have a separate kitchen anymore or a fireplace or a view from your window. You seem to be … retreating.”

  Luckily, Kitty came into the room just then. She was lugging not just the grocery bag but a pillowcase stuffed with clothing—the pillowcase from Liam’s bed, which she hadn’t asked permission to take. “Here,” she told her mother, and she dropped the pillowcase in Barbara’s lap and then bent to pick up her duffel bag.

  “What is all this?” Barbara asked as she struggled to her feet. “How did you end up with so many belongings?”

  “It’s not my fault! You’re the one who sent me here!”

  “Did I tell you to bring your whole closet? Where did all this come from?”

  “I had to buy a couple of extra things,” Kitty said.

  “What? With what money?” Barbara demanded.

  Meanwhile they were limping toward the door, hampered by their burdens, yawping at each other like two blue jays. Liam saw them out with a feeling of relief. After they were gone he returned to his chair and sank into it. The silence was so deep it almost echoed. He was alone again.

  Monday morning his stitches were removed. A patch of thin gray fuzz hid the scar now. He went to the barber the following day and had his hair cut even shorter than usual, and after that the patch was nearly unnoticeable.

  On his palm, the stitches left puckers. They turned the deepest of the creases there into a sort of ruffle. He wondered if this would be permanent. He sat in his rocker staring down at his palm for minutes on end.

  He had too much time to fill; that was the truth of the matter. For a brief while, the fuss of moving in had entertained him—arranging and rearranging his books, scouring three different kitchen stores for the exact type of wall-mounted can opener he was used to in the old place. But that couldn’t last forever. And with no summer school now, no papers to grade, no ten-year-old boys in despair over the inconsistencies of i-before-e … well, face it, he was bored. He could sit and read for only so many hours. He could take only so many walks. Of course he could always listen to classical music on his clock radio, but it seemed to him that the station kept playing the same pieces, and most of the pieces sounded like the music they played at the circus. Besides: just sitting, just listening, just staring straight ahead with his hands resting on his kneecaps, was not enough to use up the day.

  Nobody called to ask how he was. Not Barbara, not his sister, not any of his daughters. Here he thought he and Kitty had gotten on so well, but he didn’t hear a word from her.

  The hospital sent him a bill for expenses not covered by his health insurance. They charged him rent for a phone in his room, and he was able to consume quite a large chunk of one morning on a protest call to Accounting.

  “Not that I wouldn’t have liked a phone in my room,” he said. “I certainly asked for one. I had no way of getting in touch with my family and letting them know where I was. Everybody was needlessly worried.”

  The woman at the other end of the line allowed a silence to develop after each one of his statements. He hoped this meant she was writing down his words, but he suspected she was not. “Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”

  Another silence. Then, “Mmhmm.”

  “Also,” he said, “this bill was for three days. For June tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. But I was unconscious on the tenth! How do they think I was able to order a phone when I was unconscious?”

  “A visitor could have ordered it,” she said after another pause.

  “I didn’t have any visitors.”

  “How do you know that, if you were unconscious?”

  This last remark came lickety-split, no pause at all, triumphantly. He sighed. He said, “I don’t think I had even made it into my room on the tenth. I think I was still in emergency. And meanwhile my family was completely in the dark, wondering what had become of me.”

  It almost seemed like the truth. He imagined relatives all over town wringing their hands and calling around and checking with the police.

  But the woman in Accounting was unimpressed. She told him they would get back to him later. Her tone of voice implied that it wasn’t going to be uppermost on anyone’s agenda.

  At nighttime he slept poorly, no doubt because he wasn’t tired. He was bothered by the faint scent of Kitty’s shampoo even though he had changed the sheets, and a neighbor’s TV was so loud that percussive thumping noises vibrated one wall. When he did finally sleep, he dreamed dreams that exhausted him—complicated narratives that he had to work to keep track of. He dreamed he was a pharmacist advising a customer about her medication
s, but while he was talking he absentmindedly, unintentionally ate every one of her pills. He dreamed he was leading a policewoman through his apartment—not the woman who had visited in real life but another one, old and crabby—and while they were in the bedroom they heard a sound from the window. “There!” Liam said. “Didn’t I tell you?” He was pleased, because in the dream there seemed to be some suspicion that he had made the intruder up. Then he woke, and for an instant he thought that the sound from the window had been real. His heart seemed to stop; he felt suddenly cold, although it was a warm night. But almost immediately, he understood that he had imagined it. The only sounds were the meep-meep of tree frogs, the neighbor’s TV, the distant rush of traffic on the Beltway. He was surprised that he’d felt such terror. Why should he be afraid? Everybody dies sometime. In fact he was almost waiting to die. But evidently his body had other ideas.

  His heartbeat returned to normal and the chill faded, and he was left with a feeling of disappointment. Wouldn’t you think that that flash of alarm could have jogged his memory?

  He had no idea when Cope Development opened for business each day, and so he drove downtown extra early—shortly after eight o’clock. A panel truck occupied the space where he’d parked the last time. He drew up directly behind it, in front of the Mission for Indigent Men. He cut the engine and rolled down his window and prepared himself for a wait.

  Within minutes, a woman approached from the other direction, hunting through a red tote as she walked. She brought forth a bunch of keys and climbed the front steps, unlocked the door, and disappeared inside. But no others followed. Maybe this woman was the office manager, or opener, or whatever the term was. The sidewalk remained empty. Liam began to feel deeply, maddeningly bored. His throat developed a hollow ache from holding back his yawns. His face grew sticky with perspiration.

  Then around nine o’clock, people started arriving—young men in suits, and women of all ages strolling in twos and threes, talking as they entered the building, laughing and nudging each other. Liam felt a pang of nostalgia for the easy camaraderie of people who worked together.

  A man in coveralls walked past Liam’s car, climbed into the parked panel truck, and drove away. Immediately afterward, as if by prearrangement, a dingy green Corolla pulled into the vacant space. A woman stepped out from the driver’s side: the rememberer. She was wearing another big, folksy skirt, or perhaps the same one, for all Liam knew, and her ringlets were wet-looking now from the heat. She circled behind her car, so close that he could hear the slogging sound of her sandals on the pavement. She opened the front passenger door, and Mr. Cope unfolded himself from his seat and stood upright. He had that old-person knack of remaining cool in sweltering weather. His hatchet face was dry and chalky; his high white collar and close-fitting suit were still crisp.

  The rememberer, on the other hand, looked rumpled and uncomfortable. Under the glaring sunlight she was not quite so young as Liam had first assumed. Nor did she seem so professional. She somehow got her purse strap entangled when she tried to close the car door, and as she was guiding Mr. Cope up the front steps she managed to trample on the hem of her own skirt. The elastic waist slid perilously low on one side; she yanked it up again and gave a quick glance around her, luckily not appearing to notice Liam in his car. Then she cupped a hand under Mr. Cope’s elbow and shepherded him into the building. The door swung shut behind them.

  It wasn’t clear to Liam what he had hoped to gain from this sighting. He started his engine and rolled up his window and drove home.

  Toward the end of June he phoned Bundy and invited him to supper on a night when Bundy’s fiancée had yoga class. He planned a real menu; it gave him something to do. He went to the supermarket for groceries, and he roasted a chicken. It was way too hot for roast chicken, but he didn’t know how to cook much of anything else. And Bundy was appreciative, since his fiancée fed him a steady diet of Lean Cuisines.

  Liam couldn’t quite explain why he and Bundy were friends. It was surely none of his doing. But from the day they’d met, at a St. Dyfrig teachers’ meeting one September, Bundy had seemed to view Liam with a mixture of fascination and … well, glee would have to be the word for it. And Liam, almost against his will, found himself playing into that view. Leading Bundy through the apartment this evening, for instance, he flung open the closet door to show off his new tie rack. “A separate little spoke for each tie! And see how it revolves for easy access.” Bundy rocked back on his heels, grinning.

  When it grew apparent that the apartment’s air conditioning couldn’t handle the heat of the oven, they moved their meal to the patio. They sat out on the tiny square of concrete in two rotting canvas butterfly chairs left behind by the previous tenant, and they ate from makeshift trays formed by several folded newspaper sections laid across their knees.

  Bundy shook his head when he heard about the intruder. He said, “Ah, man. And you’re in the county now!” But he showed less sympathy for Liam’s memory lapse. “Shoot,” he said, “that happens to me just about every weekend. No big deal about that.”

  Then he drifted into St. Dyfrig gossip—the headmaster’s latest cockamamie piece of foolishness, the latest dispute with some pigheaded parent. He knew all of Liam’s old students and could tell him what most were up to, since he was in charge of athletics for St. Dyfrig’s summer program. Brucie Winston had been caught selling drugs, which was something of a dilemma since Brucie’s parents had just single-handedly funded the new auditorium. Lewis Bent was failing his make-up math course and there was talk of holding him back next year. Liam had never much liked Brucie Winston, but Lewis was a whole other story. He tsk-ed and said, “Well, that’s a shame.” He wondered if there were something he should have done differently while Lewis was in his class.

  When they’d polished off the dessert (a pint of pistachio ice cream) and it was time for Bundy to go, Liam led him back through the apartment, carelessly leaving the patio door unlocked behind them. Even as he was telling Bundy good night he had an edgy awareness of that unlocked door at his rear. “Sure, you’re welcome; any time,” he said, almost pushing Bundy out. But it wasn’t anxiety that made him hurry back to the patio; it was a sort of magnetic pull, a half-guilty, compelling attraction. All for nothing, as it happened. No one was trying to get in.

  That night he dreamed that he woke to a sense of someone standing over his bed. He dreamed that he lay very still, curled on his side, pretending to be asleep. He could hear soft, steady breathing. He could feel a thread-thin blade of cold steel placed lightly against his bare neck. Then the blade was raised in the air to strike the fatal blow.

  Who would have guessed that a killer would make that trial move first? Like setting a cleaver against a joint of meat before lifting it to chop, Liam thought. The horror of that image caused his eyes to fly open in the dark. His heart was beating so violently that it rustled his pajamas.

  5

  There was a parking space in front of the Mission for Indigent Men, but Liam didn’t stop there. He drove on past it, past Cope Development and Curtis Plumbing Supply, and turned right at the corner and pulled in at a meter halfway up the next block. When he got out of his car he found he didn’t have any quarters—the only coins the meter accepted—but he decided to take his chances.

  He walked back to Bunker Street, turned left, and slowed until he was nearly at a standstill. Already, at not even nine a.m., the sun felt uncomfortably hot on his head and the back of his neck. He came to a halt near a hydrant and painstakingly, deliberatively rolled his shirtsleeves up, flattening each fold with great care. Two men in suits strode past. He watched after them, but they didn’t turn in at Cope Development.

  He studied the graffiti painted across the base of the hydrant: BLAST, in luminous white, with a sloppily drawn star before and after. He examined the word closely, frowning, as if he were pondering its meaning. Blast. A woman clipped by with a jingling sound of keys or maybe jewelry. She had a purposeful, confident gait. At Cope Dev
elopment, she pivoted smartly and climbed the steps and disappeared inside.

  A green Corolla approached from the other end of the block, stopped just past the mission, and backed into the parking space there.

  Liam abandoned the hydrant. He straightened and resumed walking in the direction of Cope Development.

  The assistant’s unfortunate fashion statements were becoming familiar to him. Even from a distance he recognized the too-long skirt (in some bandanna-type print of red and blue, today) that made her seem to be walking on her knees as she rounded her car, and the sleeveless blouse that rode up and exposed a bulge of bare midriff when she bent to help Ishmael Cope from the passenger seat. Liam was close enough now to hear the inconclusive clucking sound the car door made as she clumsily nudged it almost shut with one hip. He heard the pat-pat of Ishmael Cope’s crablike hands checking all his suit pockets before he took hold of the arm she offered.

  Liam sped up.

  They met in front of the Cope building. The assistant was preparing to inch the old man up the steps. Liam said, “Why! Mr. Cope!”

  The two of them turned and peered into his face, wearing almost comically similar expressions of puzzlement and concern.

  “Fancy running into you!” Liam said. “It’s Liam Pennywell. Remember?”

  Ishmael Cope said, “Um …”

  He turned to his assistant, who instantly flushed all over—a mottled, dark-red flush beginning at the deep V-neck of her blouse and rising to her round cheeks.

  “We met at the gala,” Liam said. “For juvenile diabetes; remember? We had a long conversation. You suggested I come in sometime and interview for a job.”

  From their instantaneous reaction—no longer confusion but outright shock—Liam sensed at once that he had made a mistake. Maybe Ishmael Cope didn’t have anything to do anymore with hiring employees. Well, of course he wouldn’t. Liam cursed his own stupidity. Ishmael Cope said, “A job?”

  “Why, ah, that is …”