Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

“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 her 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.

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?”