Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

Author:Anne Tyler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780307273338
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-25T06:00:00+00:00

8

Damian came back from his cousin’s wedding with his arm in a cast. He said there’d been a little “contretemps.” Liam was so surprised by his wording that he gave Damian a second look. Was there more to him, perhaps, than met the eye? But Damian sat slouched in his usual C shape on the daybed in the den, his good arm tossed carelessly across Kitty’s shoulders, long ropes of greasy black hair concealing most of his face. They were listening to a song with very explicit lyrics. All Liam had to hear was a single line and he felt himself growing rigid with embarrassment. In addition, this was, after all, an actual bed they were sitting on, and an unmade bed at that. Liam said, “Wouldn’t you two be more comfortable in the living room?” But they just gaped at him, and rightly so; there was no couch in the living room. He’d been noticing that, of late. People couldn’t sit close together there.

Liam and Eunice couldn’t sit close together either. They had to occupy separate chairs and smile across at each other like fools.

Although sometimes, as often as possible, Liam would venture to perch on the arm of whichever chair Eunice was inhabiting. He would bring her, say, a Diet Coke and then as if by accident, while talking about nothing much, he would settle on the chair arm and rest one hand on her shoulder. She had soft plump shoulders that exactly, satisfyingly filled the hollows of his palms. Sometimes he would bend to breathe in the scent of her shampoo; sometimes, even, he would bend lower and they would kiss, although it was an inconvenient angle for kissing. She had to crane upward to meet his lips, and if he wasn’t careful, he could nick a cheekbone on the sharp-edged frame of her glasses.

He didn’t see her nearly as much as he would have liked. She showed up at his apartment at odd hours during the day, and then she came over most evenings, but in the evenings Kitty was usually around and they had to be more circumspect. (What had Liam been thinking, letting Kitty stay with him? Except, of course, that he’d had no way of predicting the turn that his life would take.)

They couldn’t go to Eunice’s place, because right now she didn’t have a place. She was living with her parents. Her father had suffered a stroke in March and she had moved in to help out. Reading between the lines, Liam guessed that this was less of a sacrifice than it seemed. She didn’t earn much of a salary at Cope, and she was clearly not the home-making type. Besides which, there was something of the only child in her character—an air of perennial daughterliness, an excessive concern for her parents’ good opinion of her. Liam cataloged this trait as he did her others, with scientific interest, without passing judgment. They were still in that stage where the loved one’s weaknesses, even, seemed endearing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.