The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  It was hard to describe the efficiency of what followed—the hurricane of drug that entered his lungs and the brutal eruption of coughing that ensued—but by the time he’d pulled himself together, the boys had all cracked wide, knowing grins.

  “How’s the party upstairs?” Charlie asked, blowing a hit casually out of the corner of his mouth. “Real rager?”

  Anders liked Charlie. He was a smart kid. He was hilarious.

  “How’re you feeling, Anders?”

  “I feel great. Joyful. And sad. So sad. Jesus, sadder than I’ve ever felt before.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie.

  “This grass is serious,” said Anders.

  “Nah,” he said. “That’s the PCP.”

  They all nodded, somber themselves.

  “Wait, what?” Anders said. Charlie blinked at him with yellow, rheumy eyes. “We just smoked PCP?”

  Charlie shrugged. “We don’t technically know what it is. It’s more of a blend.”

  Anders wasn’t even sure exactly what PCP was, though he knew it was serious and likely addictive, which made him more distraught, seeing himself for a moment spending Christmas at the men’s shelter, waiting in line with his cafeteria tray for a processed-turkey dinner served to him, sympathetically, by Helene’s community-minded friends. “I have to get back to the party.”

  “Have at it,” said Charlie.

  Reaching the top of the deck stairs, Anders realized why he had come—it wasn’t, of course, to interact with these people, but to see Helene, to talk privately with her about the party, about his isolation, to come clean with his lie about the house and tell her about the stupid thing he’d just done. Looking through the sliding glass door, he surveyed the party, the clumps of people and their muted conversations, all men without suit coats and women in wool; searching for Helene, whom he found, standing tall and proud with a glass of red.

  He was startled by a knock on the glass and Mitchell Ashby’s face, hands cupped around his eyes, on the other side. He rumbled the door open and smacked a hand on Anders’s shoulder. “What’re you doing out here, buddy?”

  “Getting some fresh air.”

  He held Anders’s elbow and lowered his voice. “Well, I am so happy to see you,” he said. “It’s been a big year.” He sighed. “A big year. But it wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So, listen, I was actually looking for my son. He disappeared earlier and that’s cause for worry.” He grinned at Anders, who was watching Mitchell’s constricting pupils. Pupils, he suddenly realized, were remarkable.

  “He was supposed to be in his room studying. Kid failed three of his exams, three of them, so I had to make some calls to the school.” He shook his head. “Phases,” he said. “Right now he’s entering one I call ‘brain-dead.’ ”

  Anders was watching Helene over Mitchell’s shoulder. She had gathered a crowd, probably telling a joke. She told great jokes.

  “I mean, it’s a different world.” Mitchell held a lit cigar with a curled index finger, as if it were the trigger of a gun. He spit something from the tip of his tongue. “They got the Internet, and they got amphetamines, and even though it kills me that I can’t do anything about it, I tell him he has to be careful.”

  Anders heard a door click shut beneath them. Charlie had been listening the entire time.

  “Did you hear about that kid who sucked down all that ecstasy and leaped from his dorm window in a loincloth? I mean, this is real. And since I can’t be up there every waking second, when he’s home I have to lay down the law. It’s a real battle, a real battle.”

  Mitchell shook his head and stared at the deck flooring.

  “I mean, Christ—what am I talking about? You know better than anyone. After age ten, they’re all pathological liars. They’ll bankrupt us. When Samantha was at Smith, you know what they were charging? And for what? The pleasure of teaching her to hate everything I stand for?” He puffed on his cigar. “How did you get through it? Seriously, with yours. Was there a program—did they drag him into the woods or something? I mean, I look back on what you guys went through and I’m astounded.” He shook his head. “But it worked out, that’s what matters, am I right? It worked out.”

  Anders stared at him.

  “Anyway,” Mitchell said finally. “The more important question is, How are you?”

  “Excuse me,” Anders said, the words coming to him like a blessing as he stepped around Mitchell for the house.

  It was somewhere into his third stride that he thought he saw what he’d hoped he wouldn’t and what, even a few hours before, he’d thought was hugely improbable, when he’d put on his first dry-cleaned shirt in six months and slapped some spicy stuff on his neck and had a moment of panic that Helene might have a date with her. Inside, she was chatting politely with a stranger, nodding and smiling, the fingers of her right hand interlaced with the fingers of the man next to her, Anders’s mother’s emerald ring protruding from that mess of fingers like a piece of costume jewelry.

  Earlier that week, they’d had lunch in the back of a health-food store, behind aisles of puffed wheat and earth-scented vitamins, where you could sit at a thick country table and talk beneath the fluttering of Chopin for hours. It was there that Anders had first wanted to express his regret, where he’d wanted to tell her about the hours of CNBC he now watched, or about how much he looked forward to the mail, or about how he was thrilled the other morning to wake up and discover he had run out of cranberry juice, which meant he could make a trip to the store, which meant his morning had purpose. He’d wanted to tell her this, and about how terrified he was that he’d made the wrong decision, that the life he’d had before—the one that he’d rejected so vehemently; the one that he’d rushed to get out of after he’d decided it was them, his family, his children, his wife, who were making him so miserable; that it was their problem, not his, and if he could just get himself alone, away from all their demands and his absurd sense of duty, then he could be okay—that life, he’d wanted to tell her, was in fact the one for him.

  But when he asked her, out of courtesy, how she was, she lit up around a mouthful of tuna salad and told him how happy she was, how at first she didn’t think she’d ever get through it but now the divorce and the lawyers and the moving trucks and the boxes of anniversary gifts all seemed so far away, and she thought she finally got it, that Anders may have been right all along, that the divorce was what was best for both of them. He’d thought about asking her then if she’d met someone, but all of this had come at him so quickly and so unexpectedly that all he could do was force a smile, finish his old-time seltzer, and tell her how happy he was for her.

  Now it all made sense. He’d expected his wife to eventually take in an unmarried guy, just as she’d collected other wounded birds her whole life—sad divorcées and AA spiritualists and incessant complainers with fibromyalgia. He knew her well enough to realize that. But still he needed to talk to her. He needed to get it straight, the whole story—how long it’d been going on, how serious it was, if there was any chance she loved this guy. He pushed through, into the hot party.

  “Excuse me,” he found himself saying to the man’s back. It was higher than Anders’s, and meaty. No one seemed to hear him. “Excuse me,” he said again.

  In the way that familiar faces are often too close to place, he knew the man who turned around, though it took him a protracted moment to place him.

  “Donny?”

  “Holy cow,” the man said, holding out a huge hand for Anders to shake. “Look who it is.”

  “I don’t get it” was all he could manage, though it came out more hurt than he’d intended it to and sent them both into a solemn, awkward silence.

  “Anders,” said Helene. “Let’s get a refill.”

  She went to the bar, stirred some bourbon with ice, came back, handed it to him, and settled into an empty sofa. “Sit,” she said.

  Donny leaned on the arm beside her
, leaving Anders the rest of the couch. The three of them faced forward, staring at the matte screen of a television. Helene turned to him and sighed. “Go ahead and ask,” she said. “Get it out.”

  “How long?” was all Anders could think to say.

  “A few months.”

  “Months,” he said, cataloging everything he could remember—there was Emma’s horse show and OSU-Michigan and Thanksgiving, Jesus, Thanksgiving. Had Donny been there, at his dinner table, while Anders was all the way down in DC eating from a TV tray in his nephew’s suspiciously damp Georgetown apartment? Had Donny met the grandchildren? Had the grandchildren known?

  He turned to Donny. It was startling how much of Donny had settled into his belly, all that upper body now a pillow for his big team ring.

  “You live here now?”

  Donny glanced at Helene. “I’m looking for a place.”

  “Moving!” said Anders.

  “Donny was just transferred to the city.”

  “How about that. And you’re still married?”

  “I was never married.”

  “That’s right. You just sleep with married people.”

  Helene turned so her face was only a few inches from Anders’s. Whatever he’d smoked was a serious narcotic. He felt as though he were drooling down his chin. “Please,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He took a slug of his drink. “Don’t what.”

  Helene shook her head in a way that Anders knew meant she was leaving the party, and he’d be the one to stay to the very end, drinking awkwardly with her friends. She lowered her voice. “Look around you,” she said. “Do you notice the people here?”

  The rest of the room seemed somehow very far away.

  “They’re too polite to say it, Anders, but they’re wondering why you’re here.”

  “I was invited,” he said.

  Her face fell into an expression of pity.

  “Everyone’s invited.”

  Even though he suddenly knew that was absolutely true, and even though he felt his dike of composure beginning to give way to a tide of humiliation, he didn’t say anything.

  “What?” she said. “You think this is funny?”

  He shook his head, but it was too late. He was laughing and wasn’t going to be able to stop.

  She leaned in very close. “You were the one who wanted space,” she whispered. He nodded vigorously, as if to say, I know, I know, but she was already off. “I am so through with this crap, Anders, I am done. It’s not my job to babysit you anymore.” She shook her head. “Why would you come here?” she said. “You’re not welcome. These people are not your friends. I mean, you were the one who wanted out, so for God fucking sake, get out.”

  He knew it would hurt like hell tomorrow morning when he reconstructed her words as best he could in his head, listening to the exact way she’d enunciated welcome, as in, “You’re not wel-comb,” trying to figure out if what she was saying was that he had no right to be mad or that he had no right to be there at all—trying to determine if his desire to hold her squirming against his chest as he had the night her mother died was during or after their little talk—and he knew he looked like a crazy person, giggling as someone scolded him, his eyes red, his drink mostly gone, and there was nothing he could imagine that would sober him at this point, until Mitchell Ashby came through the living room dragging Charlie by his armpits across the hardwood floors, yelling angrily for an ambulance. Charlie’s face was gray, his neck slack beneath his bushy head. Within seconds some doctors had gathered and pulled him out of the room with most of the party following, and it seemed a few seconds later the living room was filled with the eerie flashes of emergency vehicles, the scratchy voices on their radios cutting through the house like the Morse code of an urgent message.

  The two other boys stood in the kitchen doorway on the opposite side of the room, watching with their mouths open. Helene got up and ran to see if she could help, and before long, as Charlie was being slid into the fat back of the ambulance, Helene had her hand on Sophie Ashby, who, with her broom-handle arms and blow-dried hair, looked to Anders more like a scarecrow than ever. After the ambulance had pulled away and the truck idling had disappeared, along with the party’s hosts, some grabbed their coats as if to leave and then milled around the foyer, suddenly uncomfortable with abandoning a house that had just been plunged into distress before their very eyes. A team of helpers had started cleaning up, making quick trips to the kitchen garbage with fists of soiled napkins and plastic cups bloodied with wine, and soon the foyer guests joined them, their own fur coats open and purses hanging off them as they cleaned and cleaned the room, until finally someone opened the stereo cabinet and politely killed the music.

  2

  To hear her tell it, and she often did, it was a miracle that Anders and Helene had ever met in college, much less fallen in love, because, as a scholarship kid besieged with scholarship duties—dish scraping and book filing and towel folding—Anders spent every moment he wasn’t wearing an apron sequestered in a bubble of academic determination. Though he liked the halo of hard work her story put over him—especially later, when they would be, say, sitting with people around a wicker table at a beach home on the Cape and he could feel the others pause to consider, for the briefest moment, how much of any of this they had honestly earned—it wasn’t completely true. Not that Helene had invented it. The facts, in her abridged version, were right. It was just that a few important details had been omitted, details he’d never discussed with Helene but that, like all unspoken things, contained the real truth—namely, that he wasn’t actually a scholarship kid, at least not in the way she’d implied, and also that he’d known who she was from the moment he’d arrived on campus.

  He first saw her perched on a high stool and wearing a name tag that was filled from edge to edge with bright block letters. As the Info Girl, her primary job was to greet visitors, most of whom had just made the unpleasant trek up to coastal Maine in the off-season, and hand them brochures with glossy collages of lobster boats and seminar rooms and the quad at the height of autumn. She smiled at just about every single person on campus, including an endless stream of lonely men—fellow students, yes, but also kitchen staff, grounds crew, assistant coaches of most major sports—who hung around the info desk with a regularity even Anders noticed, trying, it seemed, to exhaust her unusually deep wells of patience. She was polite to them and she was beautiful, elevated on her stool in the middle of the middle of campus, all of which meant Anders, who had found himself staring at her in the mayhem of registration and had told his roommate that she was “sirenic,” went well out of his way to avoid her.

  He had chosen Bowdoin, a speck of a college on the scribble of the Maine coast, because they had given him full work-study regardless of the fact that his father, a judge in Fayetteville, North Carolina, could have bought his way onto the trustees’ table during the school’s annual lobster bake. Instead, Anders had saved for even his bus ticket and had shown up on campus that first August astounded by the tall evergreens and the ancient chapel and the peninsulas that ran for miles into the Atlantic on nothing but pine needles.

  They’d placed him on a floor of hockey players, guys from Nashua, New Hampshire, and Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and Digby, Nova Scotia; guys like his roommate, who kept a tin of dip in the pocket of his shirt and whose accent was thick as a fish-stick commercial and who worked summers tarring cracks on the state highways—guys who generally seemed more in need of aid than a southern kid who’d slept on sheets that’d been ironed by a domestic employee. But he’d submitted his financial aid as an independent, no mention of parents, and his name miraculously had been on the list at the work-study meeting, so he was able to pass, on the dish line or the grounds crew, as another kid working his way through school.

  Because the truth was, he did need the money. His father, Judge Portis Hill, was a stern man who, after his first two sons had so disappointed him by becoming physicians, would tolerate only
one kind of life for his youngest, what he referred to as “a calling to the law,” which was a fancy way of saying a life exactly like his. By the time he was thirteen, Anders was so tired of hearing about the importance of American jurisprudence that he intentionally flunked the entrance exams of every major prep school in the South—one of them so spectacularly that the headmaster had called Judge Hill with concerns that his boy was retarded.

  These stunts, as his father called them, soon became the stuff of legend in Fayetteville, where the clerks in every store knew Anders’s full name, a development that forced Judge Hill to respond in the only way he knew how—by making more rules. If Anders was going to smile to his face and then turn around and humiliate his family by pretending to be a retard, then there would be no imperfect grades, no athletics, no movies, no dances, no long walks home, no locked bathroom doors, no unclean plates, no blue jeans or comic books or music of any kind. It was all an attempt, of course, to force Anders back to whatever prep school would still take him, but neither he nor his father would budge. If he hadn’t been mandated to sit on the stiff living-room furniture with his schoolwork in front of him every moment the old man was home, and if he hadn’t been banned from whittling rabbits, nice basswood figures he’d spent hours on in his room, he likely would have relented eventually and headed off to meet his fate at Woodberry Forest. But instead, he ran away.

  He didn’t get far—his friend Spencer’s room on the other side of the state highway—but after the night he spent tossing on Spencer’s chilly floor, everything changed. Judge Hill, at his wife’s urging, decided to disengage from his youngest entirely. For Anders, there was surprisingly little difference between his father engaged and his father disengaged, except that now during meals his father would reach across him for the salt and talk right over him and leave the table cluttered with dishes for Anders to bus. But that wasn’t so bad, because Anders no longer had to do anything for school, it turned out, so long as he didn’t ask his father for so much as a pencil. So when the time finally came, he applied to college without speaking a word to his parents, writing away to schools as far north as he could find and accepting an offer from one whose name they wouldn’t know how to pronounce.