Noah's Compass

  “Boy, could I ever use reminding,” Liam said. “Especially when it comes to names. If I’m, for instance, walking down the street with someone and another person pops up that I know, and I have to all at once make the introductions … well, I’m at a loss. Both people’s names just fly clean out of my head.”

  “Have you ever been involved in any community leadership?” Eunice asked him.

  “Pardon?”

  “Like, had to explain a project or something at a meeting?”

  The large woman reappeared just then, scuffing across the linoleum in rubber flip-flops and carrying a tray. She set down two Styrofoam cups of coffee and a piece of yellow cake wrapped in cellophane.

  “Thank you,” Liam said. He waited until she was gone before he told Eunice, “No, I don’t enjoy public speaking.”

  “I’m just trying to think what qualities we should stress on your application.”

  “Oh, well, I—”

  “You have been speaking to classes, all these years.”

  “That’s not the same, somehow.”

  “But suppose there was a meeting of people objecting to something. And you were asked to make a speech telling them why they were wrong. I’m thinking you would be good at that!”

  When she got going this way, he could understand how he had first taken her for a much younger woman. She was leaning toward him eagerly, holding on to her Styrofoam cup with both hands, oblivious to the bra strap that had slid down her left arm. (Her bra would be one of those no-nonsense white cotton items, circle-stitched, in a super-duper size. He could detect its outline through her blouse.) He shifted his gaze to his coffee. Judging from the strand of bubbles skimming the surface, he wondered if it might be instant. “I’m just not a very public person,” he said.

  “If we could point up the classroom angle … like, stress your persuasive abilities. Every teacher has persuasive abilities!”

  “You really think so,” he said noncommittally.

  Then, “Tell me, Eunice. Have you been working for Mr. Cope long?”

  “What? Oh, no. Just a few months.”

  She sat back and began unwrapping her cake. He seized his advantage. “I like your attitude toward him,” he said.

  “How do you mean, my attitude?”

  “I mean, you’re helpful but respectful. You allow him his dignity.”

  “Well, that’s not so hard.” She took a bite of her cake.

  “Not for you, obviously. You must have a knack for it.”

  She shrugged. “Want to hear something funny?” she asked when she had swallowed. “My major was biology.”

  “Biology!”

  “But I couldn’t find a job in biology. Mostly, I’ve been unemployed. My parents think I’m a failure.”

  “Well, they’re wrong,” he said. He experienced a kind of rush to his head. He had not felt this strongly in years. “Good Lord, you’re the diametrical opposite of a failure! If only you knew how you seem from outside, so efficient and discreet!”

  Eunice looked surprised.

  “At least,” he said hastily, “that’s how it struck me when I saw you in front of the Cope building.”

  She said, “Why, thank you, Liam.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I do work really hard at this job. Not everybody appreciates that.”

  “That’s because your purpose is to make it not look hard,” he said.

  “Oh, you’re right!”

  He took a sip of his coffee and grimaced. Yes, instant, beyond a doubt, and barely lukewarm besides.

  “It isn’t only names I was talking about,” he told her. “When I said I could use reminding, I mean.” He shot her a glance. “The fact is, I was hit on the head by a burglar a few weeks ago. Since then I seem to be suffering a bit of amnesia.”

  “Amnesia!” she said. “You’ve forgotten your identity?”

  “No, no, nothing so extreme as that. It’s just that I’ve forgotten the experience of being hit. I have no recollection of it.”

  He waited for her to ask, as everyone did, why he would want such a recollection, but she just made a tsking sound.

  “I guess I should be glad,” he told her. “I’m better off forgetting, right? But that’s not how I feel about it.”

  “Well, of course it’s not,” she said. “You want to know what happened.”

  “Yes, but there’s more to it than that. Even if someone could tell me what happened—even if they told me every detail—I would still feel … I don’t know …”

  “You would still feel something was missing,” Eunice said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Something you yourself have lived through, and it ought to belong to you now, not just to someone who tells you about it. But it doesn’t.”

  “That’s it exactly!”

  He was grateful to hear it put into words. He felt a sudden flood of affection for her—for the errant bra strap, even, and the headlamp look of her eyes behind her big glasses.

  “Eunice,” he said consideringly.

  She paused in the midst of licking a dab of frosting off one finger.

  “Properly speaking,” he said, “it should be ‘You-nike-ee.’ That’s the way the Greeks would have said it.”

  “ ‘You-niss’ is bad enough,” she told him. “I’ve always hated my name.”

  “Oh, it’s a fine name. It means ‘victorious.’ ”

  She set down her cake. She sat up straighter. “So …” she said, “um, tell me, is your … wife a teacher too?”

  “Wife? I’m not married. The Romans would have said ‘You-nice-ee.’ But I can understand how that wouldn’t work in English.”

  “Liam?” Eunice said. “I really meant it when I said you should apply for a job.”

  “Oh. Well, actually, since I’m sixty years old—”

  “They can’t object to that! Age discrimination’s illegal.”

  “Yes, but I meant—”

  “Is it the résumé you’re worried about? I’ll help you. I’m really good at résumés,” she said, and she gave a little laugh. “I’ve certainly had enough practice.”

  “Well, actually—”

  “We could get together and whip one up after I finish work. I could come to your house.”

  “Apartment,” he said without planning to.

  “I could come to your apartment.”

  She would walk into his den and see the patio door where the burglar had slipped through. “Hmm,” she would muse aloud. She would turn and examine Liam’s face, cocking her head appraisingly. “In my experience,” she would say, “a memory that’s associated with trauma …” Or, “A memory that’s imprinted in someone roused from deep sleep …”

  Oh, don’t be absurd. This was just a glorified secretary, working at a made-up job her mother had cadged from a friend.

  But even as he was thinking that, Liam was saying, “Well, if you’re sure you can spare the time.”

  “I have all the time in the world! I get off at five o’clock today. Here,” she said, and she reached to the floor for her purse and turned it upside down over the table. A wallet and keys and pill bottles and bits of paper fell out. She chose one of the bits of paper—a ruled sheet torn from a memo pad—and thrust it toward him. Milk, toothpaste, plant food, he read. “Write down your address,” she ordered. “Is it someplace I can find?”

  “It’s just up Charles near the Beltway.”

  “Perfect! Write your phone number too. Darn it, where’s my pen?”

  “I have a pen,” he said.

  “Hello? Hello?” she shouted.

  Liam was startled, until he realized she was calling their waitress. “Can we get our bill?” she asked when the woman appeared.

  Without speaking, the woman dug in her housecoat pocket and handed over a chit of paper that seemed as unofficial as Eunice’s memo page. Liam said, “Please, let me pay.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” Eunice said.

  “No, really, I insist.”
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  “Liam!” she barked, and she sent him a mock frown. “We’ll hear no more about this. You can buy me coffee once you land a job.”

  Liam looked up at their waitress and found her frowning at him too, but with an expression of utter contempt. He bent meekly over the memo page and wrote down his address.

  There was no way on earth that he could work for Cope Development, even if they were misguided enough to offer him a position. And it was nice of Eunice to take an interest, of course; but face it: she was really sort of … hapless. People like Eunice just never had quite figured out how to get along in the world. They might be perfectly intelligent, but they were subject to speckles and flushes; their purses resembled wastepaper baskets; they stepped on their own skirts.

  Actually, Eunice was the only person he could think of who answered to that description. But still, there was something familiar about her.

  He would phone her at Cope Development and cancel their appointment. “I can’t work there!” he would say. “I wouldn’t fit in. Thanks anyhow.”

  When he picked up the receiver, though, he realized he didn’t know her last name. Admittedly, this was not an insurmountable problem. How many Eunices were they likely to have on their payroll? But he deplored the sound of it—“May I please speak to Eunice?” So unprofessional.

  “This is Liam Pennywell calling Mr. Cope’s assistant. Eunice, I believe it was.”

  They would take him for some kind of stalker.

  He didn’t make the call.

  Though a part of him knew full well what a weak excuse that was.

  After lunch—a peanut-butter sandwich—he vacuumed his apartment and dusted all the furniture and fixed a pitcher of iced tea. He found himself talking silently to Eunice as he worked. Somehow, he progressed from “The fact is that I’m not the developer type” to “I’ve had a hard time with this amnesia issue; maybe you can understand.” He pictured her nodding sagely, matter-of-factly, as if this syndrome were old news to her. “Let’s review this for a moment, shall we?” she might say. Or, “A lot of times, when Mr. C. forgets, I’ve learned that it helps to …” To what? Liam couldn’t invent an end for that sentence.

  It dawned on him that what he wanted from her was not so much to recover the burglar incident as to make sense of his forgetting it. He wanted her to say, “Oh, yes. I’ve seen this before; it’s nothing new. Other people have these holes in their lives.”

  True, various doctors had said that already, but that was different. Why was it different? He couldn’t explain. Something lurked at the edge of his mind but he couldn’t quite grab hold of it.

  He sat down in his rocker and stayed there, empty-headed, hands loose on his thighs. Long ago when he was young he used to envision old age this way: man in a rocker, idle. He had read somewhere that old people could sit in their chairs and watch their memories roll past like movies, endlessly entertaining; but so far that hadn’t happened to him. He was beginning to think it never would.

  He was glad he hadn’t canceled Eunice’s visit.

  She showed up just before six o’clock—later than he had expected. He’d started growing a little fidgety. She was carrying a bag of fried chicken from a takeout place. “I thought we could have supper while we worked,” she said. “I hope you haven’t already fixed us something.”

  “Why … no, I haven’t,” Liam said.

  Fried chicken tended to upset his stomach, but he had to admit it smelled delicious. He took the bag from her and placed it on the table, assuming they would eat later. Eunice, however, made a beeline for his kitchen. “Plates? Silver?” she asked.

  “Oh, um, plates are in that cupboard to your left.”

  She rattled among the cabinets and drawers while Liam drew a wad of paper napkins from the takeout bag. “I brought you some materials describing the company,” she called over her shoulder. “Just so you can sound informed about where you’re applying.”

  Liam said, “Ah. The company. Well. I’ve been thinking. I’m not sure the company and I would be such a very good match.”

  “Not sure!”

  She stopped midway to the table, holding an armful of dishes and silverware.

  “I guess at heart I’m still a teacher,” he told her.

  “Oh, change is always difficult,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “But if you just gave this a try; just tried it to see how you liked it …” She set the dishes on the table and began distributing them. “Do you have any soft drinks?”

  “No, only iced tea,” Liam said. “Or, wait. I think my daughter may have left some Diet Coke.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter!” Eunice said. She sounded unduly taken aback, as if she knew everything else about him.

  “I have three, in fact,” Liam said.

  “So you’re, what? Divorced? Widowed?”

  “Both,” Liam said. “Which did you want?”

  Eunice said, “Excuse me?” She seemed to be having one of her flushes.

  “Iced tea or Diet Coke?”

  “Oh! Diet Coke, please.”

  Liam found a Diet Coke behind the milk and brought it to the table, along with the pitcher of tea for himself. “My refrigerator dispenses ice directly through the door,” he told Eunice. “Would you like some for your Coke?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll just drink from the can.”

  She was setting out pieces of chicken on a platter. There were biscuits, too, he saw, but no vegetable. He debated fixing a salad but decided against it; too time-consuming. He sat down in his usual place. Eunice took the chair to his left. She smoothed a napkin across her lap and gazed around. “This is a nice apartment,” she said.

  “Thanks. I don’t feel entirely settled yet.”

  “You’ve just moved in?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  He took a drumstick from the platter and put it on his plate. Eunice chose a wing.

  “The burglary happened the first night I was here,” he told her. “I went to sleep perfectly fine, and I woke up in the hospital.”

  “That’s terrible,” Eunice said. “Didn’t you want to move out again right away?”

  “Well, it was more a matter of … I was more concerned about remembering what had happened,” Liam said. “I felt as if I had leapt this sort of ditch. This gap of time that I had skipped completely. I hate that feeling! I hate forgetting.”

  “It’s like Mr. C.,” Eunice said.

  “Ah,” Liam said, and he grew very alert.

  “You won’t breathe a word of this, will you?”

  “No, no!”

  “What I do for Mr. C. is, like, I’m his external hard drive.”

  Liam blinked.

  “But that is not to go beyond these walls,” Eunice said. “You have to promise.”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Mrs. C. was just worried to bits, was what she told my mother.”

  “So … excuse me, you’re saying—”

  “But forget I mentioned it, okay? Let’s change the subject.”

  Liam said, “Okay …”

  “How can you be both divorced and widowed?” she asked him.

  He tried to collect his thoughts. He said, “The divorce was the second wife. The first wife died.”

  “Oh, I am so, so sorry.”

  “Well, it was long ago,” Liam said. “I never think about her anymore.”

  Eunice started picking her chicken wing apart with the very tips of her fingers, putting slivers of meat in her mouth while she kept her eyes on his. He didn’t want her to ask what Millie had died of. He could see the question forming in her mind, and so he rushed to say, “Two marriages! Sounds pretty bad, right? I’m always embarrassed to tell people.”

  “My great-grandfather had three marriages,” Eunice said.

  “Three! Well, I’d never go that far. There’s something … exaggerated about three marriages. Cartoonish. No offense to your great-grandfather.”

  “This was back in the ol
d days,” Eunice said. “His first two wives died in childbirth.”

  “Oh, then,” Liam said.

  “How did—?”

  “But!” Liam said loudly, slapping both hands on the table. “We don’t have a vegetable! What am I thinking? I’m going to make us a salad.”

  “No, really, I don’t need a salad.”

  “Let’s see,” he said, and he jumped up and went to the refrigerator. “Lettuce? Tomatoes? Hmm, the lettuce seems a bit …”

  He returned with a bag of baby carrots. “Did you know there’s a store on York Road called Greenish Grocery?” he asked as he sat back down. “I’ve driven past it. I always picture they’d have brown-edged lettuce, shriveled radishes, broccoli turning yellow … Here, help yourself.”

  Last month, as it happened, had marked the thirty-second anniversary of Millie’s death. He wouldn’t ordinarily have remembered, but he was writing the date on a check and he happened to notice. June fifth. Thirty-two years; good God. She’d been barely twenty-four when she died. If she were to see him today she would think, Who is that old man?

  “I understand these carrots aren’t really babies at all,” he told Eunice. “They’re full-sized but they’ve been whittled down by machines to make them little.”

  “That’s all right,” Eunice said, and she laid the single carrot she’d selected onto her plate. For someone so well padded, she seemed a very dainty eater. “Now, I haven’t spoken yet to Mr. McPherson,” she said.

  “McPherson. Oh. At Cope.”

  “I thought first you could write him a letter of inquiry, and then I would stop by his office and put in a word of recommendation.”

  “Well, but—” Liam began.

  He was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. Maybe he was edgier these days than he realized, because his heart gave a sudden thump. Someone called, “Poppy?”

  Kitty came staggering in with her duffel bag and a large canvas tote. She still wore her work clothes—the pink polyester tunic she always complained about. Her mascara or whatever it was had blurred so she seemed to have two black eyes. “Oh!” she said when she saw Eunice.