The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  And what the fresh air coming through the taxi window was washing from him was the nagging sense that even though he’d been the one to source the deal, and he’d been the one to fly out to KC and have steak with Jim Cranby, Athena’s cowboy-booted owner, and bring back a stack of financials packed with impressive numbers, he should have looked at Brad French and that whole table of senior vice presidents and said yes, he had, he’d changed his mind. But the reason he was even in the room, the reason that all those people, including his own boss, were letting him speak, was that he already owned this deal—it was his—and so his success and his pending promotion were already tied to its fate. It had even become how he was identified on the twenty-third floor. Because he was good at it, he knew that. For all the reasons to move to the financial center of the universe and build a career at a behemoth like Springer, none was as compelling as that. He was already a success. So if some little savings and loan in Middle America was going to lose its shirt, too bad. And though the houses seemed cheap and flimsy and enormously overpriced, it wasn’t really his job to regulate such things. Jim Cranby may have worn shiny cowboy boots and two signet rings and he may have spoken with a boot-heel drawl that Anders felt was a little put on, but there was no question he was building houses that people wanted despite the shitty economy, and in that, there was good money to be made.

  When the cab arrived at One Fifth Avenue, Helene was standing outside the building, beside its long green awning, in a patch of bright sun. Her face was serene and tilted at the sky as she smiled in her sunglasses. A doorman opened the cab door, and they followed a real estate broker inside, clicking across the tile floor of the lobby, which still smelled of fresh paint. There was something about the broker, Mr. Addelfield, that reminded Anders of his father—it could’ve been the marionette lines that came down from the corners of his mouth, making him look forever as though he were frowning, or it could have been simply the attention he paid to Helene, who was the only thing in Anders’s life his father had ever approved of, but it contributed to the rush that he felt later as they were handed floor plans across Mr. Addelfield’s desk and he could see that, at least with his expected salary bump, the building’s asking prices were all within reach. It was an astonishing prospect that provoked a squeeze of his knee from Helene with every floor plan, as it suddenly seemed as though they were being shown a diagram of their future.

  After Anders signed the bid and felt the approval in Mr. Addelfield’s handshake, they decided to blow off work, and they took a walk lengthy enough to get them pleasantly lost in their new neighborhood. They found a café on the warm side of a quiet street and shared a bottle of champagne with their late lunch. Despite trying several times in later years, Anders was never able to find that café again, its canary-yellow facade lost in the haystack of those streets. But he could never forget that afternoon, with the light disappearing behind him and Helene wearing his suit coat, which she’d put on when she felt a chill, her slender frame swallowed in it as though she were playing dress-up in her father’s closet.

  They were exhausted when they got home to their rental on Seventy-Fourth Street and climbed the bowed stairs whose worn carpet had a sweet odor that combined with the champagne to produce in Anders a brutal headache. Though the apartment was dark and hadn’t been adequately dusted in four years, Helene had no problem pushing him through the door and onto the gritty rug, a fall that was as loud as it was jarring but that didn’t stop her from unbuckling his belt with the front door still open.

  Maybe it was prudish of him to be unable to concentrate on anything but that open door, what with his pants around his ankles and his wife’s underwear beside him, but he couldn’t. So he waited it out on the filthy rug and was unable to stop his head from smacking again and again against the floor, as though someone were trying to shake him into consciousness.

  When it was over, Helene closed the door and curled up beside him, falling asleep to the muted horns of rush hour, while Anders stared at the blank ceiling and felt his heart rumble in his head. The thing about the Athena deal, which he just couldn’t get out of his mind, wasn’t just that it was a crappy product; it was that all the people who’d bought it—families, like him and Helene—had projected their futures into empty rooms. And as outrageous as it sounded, he couldn’t help seeing their new apartment as being possible only because all those families had entered into bad loans—as the product of a deal that hurt almost everyone except the people who created it.

  Because that was the truth, wasn’t it? No one was benefiting quite as much from this as he was, and therefore, it would be hugely destructive for him to back out of it now, regardless of what everything in his better self was telling him. Were this a normal day, he’d have been getting home about now, and he would’ve poured himself an Old Charter, stood in their galley kitchen, and talked the whole thing out with Helene, who, he knew, once she’d heard all the details, would have insisted he back out. But it wasn’t a normal day, and, lying exposed on the living-room floor, he could still feel Helene’s hand squeezing his knee, the flush of pride it brought him, his baptism into the world of One Fifth Avenue. He could still see Helene opening the bedroom closets and beaming at their size, and he couldn’t remember a time she’d seemed so happy. No, it was an exceptional day, the sort of day whole careers are built around, and he had enjoyed every second of it, the sudden awareness of how quickly they had gone from being kids to being property owners and the realization that he had done it entirely on his own—college to grad school to this—without the support of his family and without bending to the edicts of his father. So why did he find himself with a knot in his chest and a pounding hangover and the feeling that his wife, deeply asleep at his side, was clinging to him with all her might?

  It wasn’t difficult to maneuver his way out from beneath her arm, pull up his pants, and go down their creaking stairwell into the sober evening air. Their block was quiet and he walked west toward York, past the single-family mansions with giant planters on their stone steps, for once not even bothering to peer into their parlors and wonder what books lined their shelves. Instead, he stared straight ahead and moved at a purposeful pace until he hit Madison, where he caught a roaring downtown bus without bothering to note its number.

  He enjoyed the view through its big window, liked looking down on the hats and shopping carts on the sidewalk as the bus crept its way down the longest swath of the island. He hopped off at a dirty corner in Astor Place and wandered down Bowery, which he’d really seen only from the window of a moving cab but whose reputation he was suddenly drawn to—an entire district of deviants and drunks, of those who, his father often reminded him, were separated from the rest of us by only four or five decisions. He headed west to Bleecker, past the boisterous mobs of NYU, past the booming bars made famous ten years earlier by all of those folk musicians, past an elderly drag queen who was tap-dancing to a Dixieland tune playing from a radio at her feet. He was carried along through the smells of falafel and pizza, his jacket slung over his shoulder, enjoying the very casualness of the night air.

  He was twenty-eight, soon to be a senior associate at Springer Financial, a man by any calculation, and yet it suddenly terrified him to look at the wall of midtown, which began with One Fifth Avenue, right on the other side of Washington Square, and extended like an impenetrable forest northward from there. This was where he was headed and yet there was a part of him, a growing part of him, that no longer wanted anything to do with it. And it wasn’t just Jim Cranby and his cowboy boots, which he’d propped up on the table, right on the white tablecloth, at the end of their meal; or the soy farmers it was easy to see he’d underpaid for their land; or the fact that the land itself would be bulldozed and paved and dredged to make artificial lakes—none of which, he knew, was any of his business. And it wasn’t even Brad French, who, after he’d looked at the financials from KC, had called Anders into his office and closed the door and said that he had really hit it with this one, that i
t wasn’t about chasing the small stuff anymore but about creating new models that opened the door to a slew of other deals like it, and so the SVPs wanted him in their meeting to get his input on this and a bunch of other prospects they were already calling Athenas. No, what terrified him, looking north at those high avenue walls, was the sudden certainty that, right or wrong, his decisions were no longer his to make.

  He hoofed it back uptown, determined to put a halt to both the deal and the apartment, which would have been unthinkable even a day ago. But now just the thought of unburdening himself, of leaving the whole mess behind, had him running up their rental’s steps, convinced of how little any of these concerns would matter once they had settled into a life far from the glassed-in cubes of midtown. When he burst in, Helene was curled on the sofa, rubbing her eyes with a confused squint. He’d woken her up. The apartment was dark except for the soundless flashes from a television in the other room. There was a bottle of wine open on the table next to a plate for him that she’d wrapped in foil. She saw him in the door and smiled.

  “Where were you?”

  “Just walking,” he said, but that sounded more evasive than he’d intended. “Downtown.”

  She looked at him a moment, waiting for more. “Why?”

  Anders wanted to tell her then about the Athena deal, about the way it was structured and about the farmers and about what the land had looked like when he’d driven through it—one brown arid expanse, not a leaf around, that would be rolled with sod and plumbed with sprinkler systems and staked with adolescent trees. He wanted to tell her about the shoddiness of those homes, how in the model you could feel the wind in the closets but that Jim Cranby had rapped his knuckles on a hollow-sounding wall and assured him the homes would pass inspection, which they would, and they would also be filled with families who would spend their lives working to pay the loans off. He wanted to tell her all of it, how he was able to persuade an entire table of bosses to follow him when the truth was that most mornings he felt ridiculous in his suit, like an actor. There was a private part of him that was waiting for this phase of his life to end, this moneymaking, debt-dissolving, self-negating, morally correct phase, so he could get on with the business of actually being himself. He wanted to tell her that he’d read in the paper there was a shortage of fire-tower lookouts in the parks out west and in a moment of whimsy he’d written a letter to the Parks Department in Colorado and that he’d actually heard back—it didn’t pay much but families were allowed, even encouraged, and wouldn’t that be something, the two of them at the top of a mountain in Colorado?

  But looking at her, sitting in the dim light that came through the window, he couldn’t. And it wasn’t because she wouldn’t understand, because she would, and it wasn’t because he couldn’t bring himself to deprive her of the happiness he’d seen earlier that day. That was too simple. The real truth was that he liked the way he felt when Helene looked at him, the authority she seemed to think he had, and the confidence. He liked the way she saw him in the world. And because there was a part of him that was still a kid in a dishwashing apron, a part of him that was still in awe of the fact that she was his, and because every time she smiled at him, he felt as though he were being showered in light, he couldn’t bear to watch her redefine her image of him. Not now; not today.

  “Anders?” she said. Her face had softened with concern. “What’s going on?”

  He looked out the window then, at the lights of the city, crisp and pure as sodium bulbs. “The apartment,” he said. “They took another offer.”

  By the time Jim Cranby sold the last of his five hundred units, Anders had been moved to an office with a door. And while he’d never admitted to the lie, soon Helene was pregnant and talking about a house with a yard; soon she knew all sorts of surprising things about school districts. So despite his fervent belief they were not Connecticut people, despite his distaste for the best-of-both-worlds rationalizing so many of those people did, he found himself riding the train north on Saturdays and nodding along with Helene as she marveled at the charm of all those old houses.

  The house they chose was more than charming; it was, as the agent described it, historic. The floorboards were milled by hand and as old as the nation itself. Though the rooms were dim and cozy, the master bedroom had been renovated with higher ceilings and a pair of walk-in closets, so that while the outside retained a tight box of Protestant restraint, the inside had racks for all four seasons of shoes. As the three of them toured the rooms, Helene repeated each of the agent’s selling points to Anders as though he weren’t standing right there and hearing them himself, and when they were left alone in the bedroom to confer, she launched into a cartwheel before he could say a thing.

  After they closed, a graphite-sketched weekday in January, the agent dropped them off at their new home, which was dark and echoey and empty, and they tiptoed through the rooms in silence. By then, the Athena deal had become the model for thirty others just like it—it was a wild, unprecedented success—and Springer had beaten the charge into an industry that a year before had been left for dead. Walking through those rooms in the dying winter light, rooms that were nothing but dust and shadow and Helene and Anders’s own projections—of children and holidays, of a nest of warmth and safety—it occurred to him how stupid he’d been to doubt this. All his life he’d been resisting what was expected of him, a habit of reaction followed by a battery of justification. But what was in front of him, in this case his pregnant wife and their empty Georgian colonial, was all that he could ever want.

  His sons were born and his father died, replacing the battles of the past with a steady march of paychecks and workweeks, of predawn mornings and pitch-black evenings and stacks of shirts in cardboard boxes. It was a rush to get to the train and a rush to get home; a rush to get into a market and a rush to get out; there were risks in everything, gains and losses in a day’s transactions in sums that no man could recoup in his entire working life. There were good days and bad, good hours and bad, a responsibility to shareholders and to senior management, to investors and his own family, a ticking clock of quarterly earnings and an expectation from everyone, especially himself, that he would plunge headlong into the roiling seas of the global economy and come back each time a winner.

  He’d taken an interest in the credit market, avoiding the junk and the trends and focusing on dusty old bonds that no one ever noticed. It was a quiet market, a string quartet in the midst of the blaring boom boxes of leveraged buyouts, and its stability seemed a failure when everyone around him was getting filthy rich. He created no overnight billionaires and no overnight bankruptcies, and only the codgers on the board who had survived the Depression respected him. Brad French, however, barked at him to get out of the little girls’ room, to go big or go home, so he did that too, engineering the buyout of an outfit called Renfro-Pacific, an undervalued paper company that was transitioning from typewriters and shredders to “business solutions,” the burgeoning world of financial software that would later be conquered by Bloomberg. And though the deal was a windfall for Springer and again made Anders a darling, it also gave him a belly of stress weight and a susceptibility to relentless bloody noses. He made a habit of riding home in the bar car and mauling a can of beer nuts and then falling asleep before dinner. He spent his weekends battling weeds and doing violence to a hedge of English laurel, working himself into a heap of grassy sweat and then collapsing on the sofa with an aggravated back. At night, he could barely sleep and found solace in bags of chips fried in hydrogenated oils until, when he was thirty-seven, his heart stopped working.

  It happened on the train, in the morning. Mention you have tingling in the shoulder and the whole silver beast is halted and you’re yanked out and thrown onto a stretcher at the East Norwalk station, your undershirt cut open and a paramedic counting and a train full of bovine stares. It could happen to you, he later wished he had shouted, any goddamn one of you! But the fact was that it hadn’t, at least then; it had hap
pened to him, a man with two boys under ten, a man with so much of his life left.

  What happened next wasn’t due to the fact that they rushed him to the hospital and shot his veins full of dye, or that they found four plugged arteries, or that they needed to saw through his sternum and open him like a steer, leaving a long glossy seam from his clavicle to his navel. And it wasn’t because of the three softest faces in the world waiting for him when he opened his eyes, or the lectures on diet and lifestyle he received from every cardiologist in the county, or the new lease on life that seemed to come standard with a prescription for beta-blockers and the nitroglycerine pill he was to wear on a medic-alert chain around his neck for the rest of his life. All of those things fell under the codified umbrella of near-death experience; all of those things, on the spectrum of trauma, were totally normal.

  No, what caused him to buy a new station car and fall in love with new age music—regardless of his kids’ moaning, regardless of his wife’s ribbing, discs and discs of Yanni and George Winston, of Enya and the smooth sax of later Van Morrison, some merely the sounds of creeks and wind and trees that, if he closed his eyes, could transport him back to the porch of the Longfellow Inn—what sent him west on a two-week trail ride, a group of men on horses with guides that was transformative and life-affirming, regardless of its many similarities to the Billy Crystal comedy that came out a few years later; what made him come home and announce to Helene that they were moving to Alaska and living off the land, that the kids would adapt and she would get used to it, that it was the only option he could come up with that would keep him alive—to which she had told him to calm down and poured him a drink and reminded him gently of the quality schools in their district and the community the kids already had and how quickly twelve years would go by—what prompted all of that was returning to work a week after the staples in his chest were removed and finding it exactly the same.