Noah's Compass

by Anne Tyler

  She slid the footstool over in front of Liam and settled on it, slanting her knees decorously to one side. This close, she gave off a faint scent of roses. “Show me your hands,” she commanded, and Liam held his hands out to her obediently. She took hold of them both at the base of his fingers and bent them slightly backward to flatten them. Her own fingers were chilled and dampish from her iced-tea glass. She said, “Now, first what I like to do is—oh!”

  She was staring at his left palm—the gnarly line of his scar.

  “What happened?” she asked him.

  “I had a little accident.”

  She made a clucking sound, looking dazed. “Well, this just skews everything every which way,” she said. “I never ran into such a thing before.”

  “It’s only a scar,” Liam told her. For some reason, he felt it was important to carry through with this now. “I don’t see why it would make any difference.”

  “But am I supposed to treat it like a brand-new line, or what? And how do I read what’s underneath it? I can’t tell what’s underneath it! I mean, your left hand is your whole entire past! I wonder if one of my books deals with this.”

  “If it’s my past, why do we care?” Liam asked. “We just want to know about my future.”

  “Oh, you can’t read one without the other,” Esther Jo told him. “They’re intermingled. They bounce off of each other. That’s what the amateurs fail to understand.”

  She released his hands with a dismissive little pat that gave Liam a sense of rejection, absurdly enough.

  “Let’s see if I can explain this,” she said. “You know how farmers can predict what kind of winter they’ll have by looking at the acorns and berries? Those acorns and berries are the way they are because of what has gone before—how much rainfall there’s been and et cetera, et cetera. A whole lot depends on the weather that’s already happened. And the farmers know that.”

  She gave a quick, self-confirming nod.

  “Well, just the same way, a real fortune-teller—and I’m not one to brag, but I am a real fortune-teller; I’ve just always had the gift, somehow—a real fortune-teller knows that your future depends on your past. It keeps shifting about; it’s not carved in stone. It keeps bouncing off whatever happened earlier. So, no, I can’t do a thing without seeing what’s in your left palm.”

  And she sat back on her footstool with an annoyingly smug expression and laced her fingers around her knees.

  Liam said, “Couldn’t you at least give it a try?”

  She shook her head vigorously.

  “You know what they say,” she told him. “ ‘Those who forget the past tend to regret the future.’ ”

  “What?”

  Bard said, “Aw, now, hon. Seems to me you might this once make an exception.”

  “It’s not a matter of choice,” she told him.

  He said, “At least it would help us to pass the time, look at it that way.”

  “Pass the time!” she said. She stared at him. “Have I not just told you I’m a real fortune-teller?”

  “Oh, well, real; ha-ha …”

  “Do you not know I’ve been reading people’s futures since I was seven?”

  “The boy was only wondering where to find a job, Esther Jo.”

  Liam said, “Oh, no, it’s not important.” Now he felt foolish, as if he were, in fact, a “boy” begging for crumbs of wisdom. “I was just curious,” he said. “I know it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything!” Esther Jo echoed.

  “Or, rather … of course it means something, but …”

  How had things reached such a state? But it wasn’t his fault. He honestly didn’t think he should be shouldering the blame for this. He looked across at his father, who seemed unperturbed.

  “Well, silly me, right?” Esther Jo said. “Silly me to think you-all would take it seriously.”

  She jumped up from the footstool, more spryly than you would expect from a woman her age, and stalked back to her chair and flung herself into it. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she told the ceiling.

  “Oh, princess,” Bard said mildly. “Can’t we just have a nice visit? Drink your tea.”

  “I’m not thirsty,” she said, still addressing the ceiling.

  “Come on, hon. Be nice.”

  She didn’t answer, but she picked up her glass and took a sip, finally.

  Liam said, “Well, anyhow, I should be running along. I just wanted to pop in and say hello.”

  Bard looked relieved. “We appreciate that,” he said. “Always good to see you, son.”

  He and Liam stood up, but Esther Jo stayed seated, gazing down into her glass. Liam said, “Thank you for the tea, Esther Jo.”

  “You’re welcome, I’m sure,” she murmured, still not raising her eyes.

  Bard clapped him on the shoulder and told him, “I’ll see you out.”

  Ordinarily Liam would have protested, but he allowed it this time. As they descended the porch steps, he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

  Bard said, “Oh, well,” and looked off toward the pony cart as if he had never noticed it before. Liam felt disappointed; he’d been hoping (he saw now) for his father to say something significant, give some clue about his life.

  They reached the curb, and Liam slowed and turned. He said, “By the way, I’ve been … going out with someone lately.”

  “Have you now,” Bard said, finally focusing on him.

  “I just met her this summer.”

  “Good for you, son. It’s not right being on your own.”

  “Except, now I find out she’s married.”

  There was a pause. His father looked at him with an unreadable expression.

  “When we met, I had no idea,” Liam said.

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Not a word.”

  His father sighed and then bent to pluck a weed.

  “That’s hard,” he said when he’d straightened.

  “I never would have gotten involved if I had known,” Liam told him. “There’s no way I would intentionally break up somebody’s marriage.”

  “Ah, well, you can’t always pick and choose these things,” his father said.

  “I guess the thing to do is to end it,” Liam said.

  His father gazed off toward a neighbor’s garden gnome. Eventually he said, “Now, I don’t know as I would agree with that, son. When you get to be my age, you start realizing that you’d better grab whatever happiness comes your way, in this world.”

  Liam said, “Well, if that’s your reasoning, then why not say the same to … oh, a child molester, for instance? ‘Go for it,’ you’d tell him. ‘Whatever makes you happy.’ ”

  “Liam! Good Lord above!”

  “Well? What’s the difference?”

  “There’s a ton of difference! A child molester’s ruining somebody’s life!”

  This time the pause stretched on for a very long time. Liam made no attempt to end it.

  “You are surely not saying that Esther Jo and I ruined your mother’s life,” Bard said.

  Liam didn’t answer. To be honest, he didn’t know what he was saying. This conversation wasn’t one he’d planned on having.

  “Or your life,” Bard said.

  “No, of course not,” Liam said finally.

  “So! What do you call this little thing?” Bard asked. He was looking at Liam’s car.

  “I call it a Geo Prizm,” Liam said. He took his keys from his pocket.

  “I prefer something a bit more substantial, myself,” Bard said. “Especially on the Beltway. They drive like maniacs on the Beltway! And not a cop in sight. I wish you kids would stop acting like I walked out on you or something.”

  The change of topic was so sudden that Liam almost missed it. He was about to step around to the driver’s side when he stopped short and said, “Pardon?”

  “I didn’t desert, you know. I did play fair and square. I leveled with your mother and asked h
er for a divorce. I sent her money every month as regular as clockwork, and I tried to stay in touch with you and Julia. You think I had it easy? It was hell, there, for a while. And everybody looking at me like I was the villain—some bad guy in a dime novel. I was no villain. I just couldn’t bear to go to my grave knowing I’d wasted my life. I just wanted my share of happiness. Can’t you understand how I felt?”

  Liam didn’t know how to answer that.

  “Nothing wrong with you getting a share of happiness too,” Bard said. Then he winced, as if he had embarrassed himself. He raised a hand in a kind of salute and turned and started back up the walk, and Liam got into his car.

  Damn, he’d forgotten to leave his new telephone number. Well, he could do that some other time. They seldom talked on the phone anyhow. The unspoken assumption was that the number was for dire emergencies, most likely involving Bard’s health. Of course, by now even Esther Jo—once the scandalously younger woman—was a candidate for such emergencies; but Liam could more easily imagine that it would be she making the fateful phone call one morning, notifying him that she couldn’t wake his father. And that would be the end of the grand, heroic love story that had rocked the little Pennywell household and the Sure-Tee Insurance Company.

  He stopped for a light on Northern Parkway and watched a young mother crossing in front of him with her baby in a carrier on her chest—an arrangement that always struck him as boastful. Here I am! Look at what I’ve got! The baby leaned forward like a figurehead, and perhaps to balance his weight the mother leaned backward, which gave her a cocky, strutting gait. You would think she had invented parenthood. Liam supposed that he must once have felt that way himself, although he couldn’t remember it. He did remember collecting Millie and the newborn Xanthe from the hospital and marveling at how only two of them had walked in but three of them were leaving.

  And now Xanthe was in her mid-thirties and mad at him about something.

  We live such tangled, fraught lives, he thought, but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.

  This should have depressed him, but instead it made him feel better. The light turned green and he started driving again.

  11

  Eunice said that her husband made a hobby of being miserable.

  She said he was the kind of man who took bad weather personally.

  The kind who asked, “Why me, God?” when his assistant was hit by a car.

  And he was always railing against other people’s grammatical errors.

  “He has a thing about dangling modifiers,” she told Liam. “You know what a dangling modifier is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I didn’t. Like ‘At the age of eight, my mother died.’ They drive him crazy.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Liam said. “And, ‘Walking on the beach, a shark appeared.’ ”

  “What? Last spring he kept a day-to-day tally of all the dangling modifiers in the Baltimore Sun, and at the end of a month he sent the list to the editor. But it was never published.”

  “Such a surprise,” Liam murmured.

  “So the next month I kept a tally of my own, in one of those little appointment books that come in the mail for free. Every single day I wrote either ‘Added’ or ‘Subtracted.’ ‘Added’ meant my husband had added something positive to my life that day. ‘Subtracted’ meant he’d been a negative. His ‘Added’ rating was twelve percent. Pretty pathetic! But you know what he did when I showed him? He just pointed out the mistakes in my method of computation.”

  Liam massaged his forehead with his fingertips.

  “Well, it was a month with thirty-one days in it,” Eunice said. “Anybody would have had trouble.”

  Liam made no comment.

  “He completely ignored the real issue, which was that I’m not happy with him.”

  “Yes, but still,” Liam said, “you are with him.”

  “I can leave, though, Liam! I don’t have to stay. Why don’t you ask me to leave him?”

  “Why don’t I go out in the street and ask a stranger for his billfold.”

  “What?”

  “You’re somebody else’s wife, remember? You’re already committed.”

  “I can undo the commitment! People undo them all the time. You undid yours.”

  “That was just between me and Barbara. There wasn’t any third party stealing one of us away.”

  “Look,” Eunice said. “All I have to do is go through a little spell of legal this-and-that and then you and I can be together, aboveboard. Don’t you want to marry me?”

  They were traveling in circles, Liam thought. They were like hamsters on an exercise wheel. Day after day they hashed all this out—Eunice showing up puffy-eyed at six a.m., or telephoning in an urgent whisper from Ishmael Cope’s office, or arriving straight from work already talking as Liam opened the door to her. How about if this very minute she went to live on her own? she asked. Then would it be all right for them to marry? And what sort of interval would he require? A month? Six months? A year?

  “But still,” he said, “the fact would remain that you were married when I met you.”

  “Well, what can I do about that, Liam? I can’t un-ring the bell!”

  “My point exactly.”

  “You’re impossible!”

  “The situation is impossible.”

  They argued so long sometimes that the apartment grew dark without their noticing, and they neglected to turn on the lights until Kitty walked in and said, “Oh! I didn’t know anybody was here.” Then they would hasten to greet her, using their most everyday voices.

  It was Liam’s own fault that this was dragging on. He knew that. He could have said, “Eunice, enough. We have to stop seeing each other.” But he kept procrastinating. He told himself that first they needed to talk this over. They had to get squared away. They didn’t want to leave any loose threads trailing.

  Pathetic.

  At the end of their conversations he generally had a headache, and his voice was fogged and elderly-sounding from overuse. But really there was no end to their conversations. The two of them just went on and on until they’d worn themselves out, or till Eunice broke down in tears, or till Kitty interrupted them. Nothing was ever resolved. The week crawled past, the weekend came, another week began. Everything remained the same as the day he’d found out she was married.

  What did this remind him of? The final months with Millie, he realized—their repetitive, pointless wrangling during the period just before she died. Now he could see that she must have been severely depressed, but all he knew then was that she seemed dissatisfied with every facet of their life together. She would carp and complain in a monotone, going over and over the same old things, while the baby fussed in the background and, yes, the light in the apartment slowly faded, unnoticed. “You always …” Millie said, and “You never …” and “Why can’t you ever …?” And Liam had defended himself against each charge in turn, like someone hurrying to plug this leak, that leak, with new leaks eternally springing up elsewhere. Then often he would give up and leave—just walk out, feeling bruised and damaged, and not come back until he was sure that she had gone to bed.

  Although Eunice and Millie were not the least bit similar. Eunice had more energy; she was more … defined, Liam supposed you could say. Yet somehow she gave him that same feeling that he was the person responsible. She had that same way of looking to him to straighten out her life.

  As if he were capable of straightening out anybody’s life, even his own!

  He said, “Eunice. Sweetheart. I’m trying to do the right thing, here.” But what was the right thing? Was it possible, in fact, that he was being too rigid, too moralistic, too narrow-minded? That the greater good was to make the very most of their time here on earth? Yes! Why not? And he felt a flood of joyous recklessness, which Eunice must have guessed because she sprang up and crossed the room to throw herself in his lap
and wrap her arms around his neck. Her skin was warm and fragrant, and her breasts were squashed alluringly against his chest.

  Did she sit like this in her husband’s lap?

  Her husband’s name was Norman. He drove a Prius, from the first year Priuses were manufactured. He had a twin sister, Eunice said, who was developmentally disabled.

  Liam set Eunice gently aside and stood up. “You should go,” he told her.

  Louise phoned on Friday morning and asked if he could watch Jonah. “My sitter has up and eloped,” she said, “without a word of notice.”

  “Did she marry Chicken Little?” Liam asked.

  “How do you know about Chicken Little?”

  “Oh, I have my sources.”

  “I could strangle her,” Louise told him. “Tomorrow’s Homecoming Day at our church and I promised I’d help decorate. Dougall says just take Jonah along, but that way I’d be more of a hindrance than a help.”

  “Sure, bring him here,” Liam said.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  In fact, he welcomed the diversion. It would be something to think about besides Eunice. He felt the two of them had spent this past couple of weeks in some cramped and airless basement.

  Louise was beginning to look noticeably pregnant. Thin as she was, she had no place to hide a baby, Liam supposed. She wore a short skirt and a skimpy tank top, and her collarbones stuck out so far you could almost wrap your fingers around them. Behind her, Jonah trailed listlessly with an armful of picture books. “Hi there, Jonah,” Liam said.

  “Hi.”

  “Are we going to be coloring again?”

  Jonah just gave him a look.

  “Someone got up on the wrong side of bed today,” Louise murmured.

  “Well, never mind; we’ll be fine,” Liam said. “Should I give him lunch? How long will you be gone?”

  “Just till noon or so, I hope. It depends how many others turn up. We’re in charge of decorating the Communing Room; that’s where they’re feeding the Homecomers.”