“Ah.”
“And plus, my fingers are fat. Rings don’t really look good on me.”
Liam adjusted the crease on one trouser leg. He said, “So this is an… ongoing marriage. Current, I mean.”
She nodded.
“And do you have children?”
“Oh! No!” She looked shocked. “Neither of us wanted them.”
He supposed that was some slight comfort.
“Also, we haven’t been getting along too well,” she added after a moment. “Cross my heart, Liam: it’s not as if you’re breaking up this perfect couple.”
Liam resisted the urge to lash out with some cutting remark. (“What are you going to say next: ‘My husband doesn’t understand me’?”)
“We didn’t get along from the start, now that I think about it,” she said. “It was almost an arranged marriage, really. His mom and my mom played tennis together and I guess they got to talking one day and decided they ought to match up their two loser children.”
She sent Liam a glance, perhaps expecting him to interrupt and tell her, as he usually did, that she was not a loser. But he said nothing. She lowered her gaze again. She was twisting the hem of her skirt as if it were a dishrag.
“At least, we looked to them like losers,” she said. “I was thirty-two years old at the time and still not married and had never yet held a job in my chosen field. I was selling clothes in this dress shop that belonged to a friend of my mom’s, but I could tell she was about to let me go.”
Liam wondered how Eunice would have managed without her mother’s network of friends.
“And he was thirty-four and not married either and his whole world was his work. He worked at a lab down at Hopkins; he still does. Another biology major. I suppose they thought that meant we had something in common, I mean something besides being losers.”
She sent Liam another glance, but still he didn’t interrupt.
“I knew from day one it was a mistake,” she said. “Or underneath, I knew. I must have known. I looked at him as a fallback. Someone I just settled for. Maybe that’s why I didn’t change my name when we got married. He said after the wedding, he said, ‘Now you’re Mrs. Simmons.’ I said, ‘What? I’m not Mrs. Simmons!’ Besides, think about it: Eunice Simmons. It would have had that weird hiss between the two s sounds.”
They seemed to be getting off the subject, here. Liam said, “Eunice. You told me you’d had only three boyfriends in your entire life.”
“Well? And I did! I promise!”
“You didn’t say a word about a husband.”
“Yes, I realize that,” she said. “But when you and I met, there wasn’t any reason to tell you about my husband. We were discussing a job application. And then you were so… just so nice to me, so interested in my work and asking me questions. My husband isn’t interested at all. He never asks me questions. My husband is sort of negative, if you want the honest truth.”
Each time she said “my husband,” it struck Liam like a physical blow. He felt himself actually wincing.
“He has this sad-sack kind of attitude that drags me down,” she said. She swiped at her nose again and then opened her purse and started digging through it, eventually coming up with a tissue. “He’s very pessimistic, very broody. He’s not good for my mental health. I see that now. And then when you came along… Well, I think I was looking for someone and I didn’t even know it! Isn’t it amazing how that works?”
Liam didn’t trust himself to answer.
Eunice lifted her glasses slightly and blotted her lids with the tissue. Her lenses were so fogged that he wondered how she could see through them.
(Ordinarily, this would have made him smile. Now it caused his chest to hurt.)
He said, “All right, through some unfortunate oversight you didn’t tell me you were married. But how about what you did tell me? Do you really live at home with your parents?”
“No.”
“No! Where, then?”
She folded her tissue into a square. “In an apartment at the St. Paul Arms,” she said.
“An apartment with your husband.”
“Yes.”
“So every night, you’ve gone home to your husband after you’ve left me.”
She raised her eyes to Liam’s. “He’s usually not there, though,” she said. “Lots of times he spends the night at the lab. We barely see each other, I promise.”
“Still, you told me this whole long story about moving back home with your parents. You invented it. And I believed it! So your father didn’t have a stroke?”
“Of course he had a stroke! You think I would make something like that up?”
“I really have no idea,” he said.
“He had a very serious stroke, and he’s still recovering. But I’m not living there; I just go over to help out.”
“And when you come to my place, you tell your husband you’re with your parents.”
“Right.”
“And you tell your parents you’re with your husband.”
She nodded.
“It’s like that bigamist movie,” Liam said. “Didn’t Alec Guinness play a bigamist, once?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She wrinkled her eyebrows, struck by a new thought. “Maybe what I’ll tell Mom is, you’re someone from work I had coffee with once and you must have somehow gotten the wrong idea.”
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.