Anne Tyler - Noah's Compass

As if she guessed what he was thinking, she said, “I look a mess. I’ve been cleaning.”

He said nothing. He sat in the armchair furthest from her, perching on the very edge of it to suggest that he had things to do.

“So,” she said. “Tell me about this Eunice person. How long have you known her?”

“What’s it to you?” Liam demanded.

It felt so good to speak this way-to say what he wanted, for once, without worrying about Barbara’s opinion of him-that he did it again. “What’s it to you, Barbara? What business is it of yours?”

Barbara rocked back in her chair and said, “My, my!”

“I don’t ask you about Howie, do I?”

“Who?”

“Howie the Hound Dog. Howie the Food Phobe.”

“Are you referring to Howard Neal?”

“Right,” Liam said, risking it.

“Goodness, Liam, where’d you dig him up from?”

He scowled at her.

“Gosh, I haven’t thought of Howard in…” She shook her head, looking amused again. “Well. So Miss Eunice is off-limits. Fine. Forget I asked.”

Liam said, “You and I are divorced, after all. I do have a private life.”

“You’re always going on about your private life,” Barbara said, “but have you ever considered this, Liam: You’re the only Baltimorean I know who leaves his front door unlocked. Even though you’ve had a burglary! You leave it completely unlocked, but then any time someone walks in you complain that they’re intruding. ‘Tut-tut!’ you say. ‘I’m veddy, veddy private and special. I vant to be alone!’”-this last uttered in a bad Greta Garbo accent. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Here’s solitary sad old Liam, only God help anybody who tries to step in and get close.”

“Well, maybe if they knocked first-”

“And I suppose this poor Eunice person is just like all the rest of us,” Barbara said. “All those benighted females who broke their hearts over you. She imagines she’ll be the one who finally warms you up.”

“Barbara! She is not poor! She is not ‘this poor Eunice person’! Jesus, Barbara! What gives you the right?”

Barbara looked startled. She said, “Well, pardon me.”

“Isn’t it time for you to leave?”

“Fine,” she said. “Okay.” She rose to her feet. “I only meant-”

“I don’t care what you meant. Just leave.”

“All right, Liam, I’m leaving. Have Kitty call me, please, will you?”

“Okay,” he said.

Already he was feeling sheepish about his outburst, but he refused to apologize. He stood up and followed Barbara to the door. “Goodbye,” he told her.

“Bye, Liam.”

He didn’t see her out to the parking lot.

He thought of Eunice: how staunch she had been and how forthright. She had not said, “Pleased to meet you,” when she and Barbara were introduced. She had not stuck around and made small talk. “I have to go,” she had said, and she had gone. While he himself, longing though he was to run after her, had cravenly sat down with Barbara and held a meaningless conversation. He was so concerned about appearances, about what Barbara thought of him, that he had failed to show the most basic human kindness.

The fact was that Eunice was a much better person than he was.

Everyone knew the St. Paul Arms. It was a shabby gray apartment building a couple of blocks from the Hopkins campus, home to graduate students and instructors and lower-level university staff. From his old place, Liam could have walked there in a matter of minutes. Even from his new place it was not that much of a drive, but this afternoon it seemed to take forever. Every stoplight changed to red just before he reached it; every car ahead of him was trying to make a left turn in the face of oncoming traffic. Liam chafed all over with frustration. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for an elderly pedestrian to inch, inch through a crosswalk.

It had not been all that long, really, since Eunice had rushed out his door. He had hopes originally of waylaying her in front of her building, intercepting her before she got inside. As the minutes passed, though, he saw that this was unrealistic. All right: he would just stride on into her apartment and state his case. If the husband happened to be there, fine. It wouldn’t change a thing.

The car radio was playing a Chopin étude that tinkled on endlessly, going nowhere. He switched it off.

There weren’t any parking spots in front of her building and so he turned into a side street and parked there. Then he walked back up St. Paul and pulled open the heavy wooden door of the St. Paul Arms.

Drat, an intercom. A locked glass inner door blocking his way and one of those damn fool intercom arrangements where you had to locate a resident’s special code and punch it in. He searched for Dunstead, realizing to his dismay that he’d forgotten what the husband’s last name was; but he was in luck: Dunstead/Simmons , he found. Oh, yes: the hiss between the two s sounds. He stabbed in the code.

First he heard a dial tone and then Eunice’s overloud “Yes?”

“It’s me,” he said.

No response.

“It’s Liam,” he tried again.

“What do you want?”

“I want to come up.”

In the silence that followed, he frowned down at the collection of footprinted takeout menus that paved the vestibule floor. Finally, a buzzer sounded. He seized the handle of the glass door as if it were about to vanish.

She lived in 4B, the list in the vestibule had said. The elevator looked unreliable and he decided to take the stairs. Evidently a lot of other people had made the same choice; the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars. Above the second floor, the marble gave way to threadbare plum-colored carpet. Now he regretted spurning the elevator, because he was growing short of breath. He didn’t want to arrive puffing and panting.

Probably the husband was a jogger or something. For sure he was younger and fitter.

On the fourth floor, one door was open and Eunice stood there waiting-a good sign, he thought. But when he reached her, he found her expression set in stone, and she didn’t step back to let him in. “What do you want?” she said again.

“Are you by yourself?”

An infinitesimal adjustment to the angle of her head meant yes, he surmised.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Don’t bother; I already know I’m only a ‘friend.’”

“I apologize for that,” he said. He glanced around. The hall was empty, but people could be listening from behind their doors, and she was making no effort to keep her voice down. “Could I come in?” he asked.

She hesitated and then stepped back, just a grudging few inches. He sidled past her to find himself in a long, narrow corridor with dark floorboards, a braided oval rug, and a claw-footed drop-leaf table littered with junk mail.

“I am extremely sorry,” he told her.

She lifted her chin. From the spiked and separated look of her lashes, he could tell she must have been crying, but her face was composed.

He said, “Please say you forgive me. I hated to let you walk out like that.”

“Well, get used to it,” she said. “You can’t have things both ways, Liam. You can’t ask me to stay with my husband and then not let me walk out on you.”

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Please, do you think we could sit somewhere?”

She released an exasperated puff of a breath, but then she turned to lead him down the corridor.

If he hadn’t known better, he would have said that her living room belonged to an old lady. It was over-furnished with piecrust tables, satin-striped love seats, bowlegged needlepoint chairs, and faded little rugs. Her mother’s doing, he supposed. Or both mothers’ doing-the two women rendezvousing here with their truckloads of family detritus, arranging everything just so for their helpless offspring. Even the pictures on the wall looked like hand-me-downs: crackled seascapes and mountainscapes and a full-length portrait of a woman in a bell-skirted dress from the 1950s, not long enough ago to be of interest.