Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

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.