Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

Their waitress arrived with their drinks. She set a Scotch in front of Bundy, and he took hold of it immediately but he waited until their wine had been poured before he raised his glass to Liam and Eunice.

“Cheers,” he said. And then, “So. Eunice. How did you meet our boy, here?”

“Well,” Eunice said. From her declarative tone of voice, and the important way she resettled herself in her seat, it was clear that she was about to embark on a serious narrative. “One day about a month ago,” she said, “I am walking down the street with my employer. My employer is Ishmael Cope? Of Cope Development? I take notes for him at meetings and such. And we are just walking down the street when up comes Liam out of nowhere and stops to say hello to him.”

“Liam knows Ishmael Cope?” Bundy asked.

“Just a nodding acquaintance,” Liam told him.

“They’d met at this charity ball for diabetes,” Eunice said.

“Liam went to a charity ball?”

“Yes, and so… wait, I’m telling you what happened. Liam stops to talk to him but Mr. C. is a little… like, absentminded these days but Liam is just so considerate with him, just so sweet and diplomatic and considerate-”

“Liam?” Bundy said. “You’re talking about our boy Liam?”

Liam was starting to feel annoyed with Bundy, and maybe Eunice was too because she said, very firmly, “Yes, Liam. I guess you don’t know him well. Liam is just this… very thoughtful kind of person, not your usual kind of person at all. He is not like any other man I’ve ever known. There’s something different about him.”

“That I’ll agree with,” Bundy said.

Liam wished Bundy didn’t seem to be enjoying this so much. But Eunice smiled at him, and a dimple dented her cheek as if someone had poked her gently with an index finger. “It was love at first sight,” she told him. Then she turned to Liam. “For me it was, at least.”

Liam said, “For me too.” And he saw now that that was the truth.

Through drinks, through soup, through their entrées (steaks for Eunice and Bundy, rockfish for Liam), Liam was mostly silent, listening to the other two and taking secret pleasure in the warmth of Eunice’s thigh pressed against his. Bundy returned to his breakup; Eunice made appropriate murmuring sounds. She tsk-tsk-ed and shook her head, and one of her Christmas-tree earrings landed on her plate with a clatter.

It wasn’t that Liam didn’t know her shortcomings. He saw the same woman Bundy must see: plump and frizzy-haired and bespectacled, dumpily dressed, bizarrely jeweled, too young for him and too earnest. But all these qualities he found lovable. And he pitied poor Bundy, who would have to go home alone.

Although he too, as it happened, went home alone that evening. (Eunice had promised to get back to the house in time to help her father to bed.) Even so, Liam left the restaurant feeling unspeakably lucky.

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.

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.