The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  When Tommy decided to move back to town, Anders knew it had everything to do with the boy’s mother. Amid the ongoing wreck of his parents’ late-life divorce, Tommy had taken on the role of responsible adult, mediating and communicating and, unlike his brother (who was apparently so absorbed in being unemployed that he couldn’t return a phone call), trying his damnedest to hold them together. And now that he was living in a musty Cape out in Weston, working in market research, with all those digital slides and terrible fonts, all that consumer data (he’d once shown Anders a chart demonstrating the increased heart rate of the average male when presented with a red box of acid-reflux pills as opposed to a green one and then had declared with great pride that they’d cracked it all wide open), Anders knew it was only a matter of time before Tommy gave up on consoling his parents and started to blame them.

  “What about Preston?” Tommy said. “You guys sent him away.”

  “I didn’t sue anyone, I didn’t—” Anders stopped himself. “It’s different.”

  When his boys were teenagers, Anders had learned that all intimate conversations between them would soon putter into a fog of stoicism, and so he always framed discussions within a task so every interaction would have a function—hand me that hammer, a little to the left, stack those over there—and the moments they shared would never dissolve into silence. From the edge of the roof, Tommy was looking down at him with a kind of tenderness that bordered on pity.

  “I heard you went to the party, Dad.”

  “I was invited,” he said.

  “I was happy to hear you went. I thought it was, I don’t know…brave.”

  Anders handed him a plastic sleigh to haul up to the roof.

  “Is that what your mother thinks?”

  Tommy took off his hat and rubbed the back of his head. “I just wanted to be sure you were okay.”

  “I’m great,” said Anders, unwinding a long orange extension cord. He could feel Tommy watching him.

  “I heard you saw Mom.”

  “Yep.”

  “And met her new boyfriend.”

  The way he pronounced it sounded so official.

  “I’ve known Donny a long time.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want, I just thought it was…” Tommy paused with a psychologist’s restraint. “Significant.”

  A silence settled over them, broken only by the hum of an airplane in the bright gray overhead.

  “I thought he lived in New Hampshire,” Anders said finally.

  “He moved.”

  “Where? Where is he living?”

  Unlike his brother, who had essentially made a career of it, Tommy was a terrible liar. From his son’s inability to respond, Anders understood what was going on.

  “He’s living there, isn’t he?”

  Tommy said nothing. Anders dropped the extension cord into the bin and walked to the driveway with his hands on his hips.

  “They’re living together?”

  “It’s pretty new,” said Tommy. “I don’t know how permanent it is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It wasn’t my place.”

  “They’re living in my house, Tommy,” he said and recognized as soon as he’d said it how ludicrous it was.

  “It’s Mom’s house. I mean, technically.”

  “Technically, I pay for it. Technically, my name is on the deed.”

  “It’s not your house, Dad.”

  “You know what, never mind. It’s no one’s house,” said Anders and he chucked a pinecone a disappointing distance.

  “What does that mean?”

  Anders went back to the extension cord.

  “Dad.”

  “Your mother has to move out,” he said.

  A low ceiling of New England clouds had gathered and Tommy, silhouetted against them, looked like a burglar in his rolled stocking cap.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I can’t afford it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I no longer work for that ridiculous company!”

  Tommy was very still.

  “You retired without enough money?”

  “I retired with plenty of money.”

  Tommy had inherited his mother’s patience and, like her, understood the power of a silence.

  Anders sighed. “There were unforeseen circumstances.”

  “Don’t say the economy.”

  “The economy,” he said. “And the fact that your mother wanted to keep the house.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “At the time it seemed like the right decision.”

  Tommy climbed down. He was the sort of long-lashed person who was terrible at concealing his disappointment.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “I’m handling it.”

  “She doesn’t know? When does she have to move out?”

  “I’m handling it.”

  “Actually, Dad, it’s perfectly clear you’re not handling it. It’s perfectly clear you haven’t handled a single thing.”

  Anders stared at him.

  “I just don’t get it,” said Tommy. “How can somebody who is so good with other people’s money be so very bad with his own?”

  “Look,” said Anders. “She can downsize. That was always the plan.”

  “The plan,” said Tommy, “that you never told anyone.”

  “Of course I told people.”

  “Who?” said Tommy, a question that Anders wasn’t going to dignify with an answer. His son shook his head. “I should get the kids.”

  The midday light was low enough to see the TVs of his neighbors flickering with football, and the cars that rolled by had their headlights on. He and Tommy had accomplished a lot—there was Santa and his herd on the roof and another deer made of white lights grazing on the lawn and a choir of air-blown carolers that beeped an assortment of seasonal songs. Ryan and Emma stood with their father in the driveway, the pom-poms of the kids’ hats like softballs balancing on their heads, and waited for the lights to come on. Inside, Anders flicked a power strip and watched all three faces break into smiles. When he came back out, he too was enthralled, and as the four of them stood in the glow of the front yard, he could feel he’d created a new tradition.

  He helped the kids into the car, and as Tommy started the engine, Anders knocked on his window.

  “What do you say we do Christmas Eve over here this year?”

  “Dad.”

  “You bring the kids and Lisa, we can maybe talk Preston into coming back.”

  “You know Mom has been talking about Christmas Eve since June.”

  “I didn’t know that. Is she having people over?”

  “You know her.”

  “She’s doing the whole thing? The turkey?”

  “Look, maybe we can stop by the next day.”

  Anders nodded and looked back at his new place. It suddenly seemed gaudy.

  “I want you to know I didn’t put her in this situation on purpose,” he said.

  Tommy looked in the rearview at the kids buckled and silent in their seats. “Wave bye to Grandpa.”

  “Tommy, I’m going to tell her. I promise. I just need the right moment.”

  Tommy put the car into reverse and looked up at the condo, his face blinking with the display. “This place,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It just kind of kills me.”

  * * *

  That Helene had been camped at Sophie’s side in the forty-eight hours since the party was unsurprising, considering her determined washing of every dirty wineglass in that evening’s eerie aftermath. He had watched her, in the haze of that night, spray the countertops with 409, bag what remained of the party—all the paper plates and wasted brie—into three Hefty sacks, and turn off the lights, leaving Anders alone on the leather sectional, giggling into his bourbon.

  Since then he had faced the wall of her polite voice-mail greeting. It was a recording that
had become quite familiar to him in the weeks after his retirement, when Helene had become inexplicably busy, and it turned out that while he was doing everything he could to strip his obligations to zero, she had gone back to work and asked for a promotion. After twenty years of volunteering and grant-writing and deepening opinions about the societal forces that marooned one in seven Americans in illiteracy, she had decided it was a good time to throw herself at something worthwhile. The board unanimously voted her in as director of an organization that had been bleeding money since the Clinton years, and, despite her recent illness (not to mention the nation’s near-total economic collapse), she had been told to fix it. It was an eighty-hour-a-week Sisyphean assignment that kept her in a fluorescently drab Bridgeport office till late at night, running numbers and cultivating donors and ignoring the locomotive ringtone of her cell phone.

  Anders tried her as he sat in the long train of cars that connected the dangling stoplights of the Post Road. Since Tommy had left, the sun had descended below the ceiling of clouds and now it was throwing orange light across the roofs of stopped cars. Volunteers in aprons were ringing bells outside the supermarket. It was Saturday; the parking lots were full and the trains were empty, the station wagons strapped with mummified trees. Last year, in the midst of Helene’s chemo and radiation, Anders had chosen their tree himself, an enormous Douglas fir that had towered over him in the vaulted space of their new kitchen. He decorated it alone from the perch of a metal ladder. It took him forever, and when he was finished, the result was haphazard and sparse, though Helene put on a grand display of how happy it made her. The tree was a symbol of everlasting life, she told him, inhaling the piney air of the room. Thank you, she said. This was just what I needed.

  The light turned green and the traffic began to move. His call went straight to her voice mail.

  He would have gone to the hospital where she waited with Sophie, regardless of the many lines he might have crossed by doing so, were it not for his appointment with Howard, a weekly occasion that was always disappointing, not only because it cost so much, but also because, on the scale of local high-priced therapists, Howard, Anders was well aware, ranked last. Which was why it was so easy to get a standing appointment, a move his lawyer had strongly urged, because, he said, in these kinds of cases, when there was no other woman and no clear betrayal, when you had to articulate to a judge that love, in this situation, had evaporated like ethanol in a cupped palm, it was easier for everyone involved if it looked as though you were trying.

  And so he tried. He made the appointments and he kept them, driving across town to Howard’s minimalist office, which was in the basement of his home in what Anders was certain was a converted playroom. It had been recarpeted and adorned with drapes and decorated with Danish Modern furniture that looked sleek and clever but was about as comfortable to sit on as a rock in a cave.

  It had been nearly eight months of weekly appointments, and the judge had already ruled, and neither Helene nor her team of lawyers was objecting to the decision, and things seemed settled and done, so Anders couldn’t explain, even to himself, why he continued to go. Was it simply for the process of speaking aloud the events of his week to someone he didn’t have to worry he was boring, the way he had done with Helene for so many years, expounding in his undergarments on the risks of a recent hire or the preposterous parking situation at the station as she dropped her book in bed to listen? Maybe that was enough to justify the expense. Maybe, in those terms, Howard’s ineffectiveness was worth all the money in the world.

  “So,” Howard said, shaking Anders’s hand and gesturing for him to sit. There was already an empty pause as he scribbled something urgent on a legal pad. Anders didn’t say a thing. Finally Howard looked up and met his eyes for a moment, a technique Anders was sure he had learned from a book—Let the client fill the quiet—but that only left them both tapping their knees in impassable silence.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your week.”

  “My week?” said Anders. “I don’t know, let’s see. I got the condo decorated. That was a big project, and it looks sharp. Festive, I mean. Easily the best place in the complex.”

  Howard adjusted his glasses—rimless, almost invisible lenses that were held together by fine wire stems, like pipe cleaners stripped of their fuzz. He had heavy, significant wrinkles that hung, hound-like, from his face and that betrayed his first calling as an accountant, a career that must’ve actually fit his form, unlike all of the delicate modernism he seemed to assume was required for this one.

  He nodded. “So it’s the holidays,” he said. “How’s that treating you?”

  “Fine,” said Anders. “I like the holidays.”

  “Are you feeling any pressure to start your own traditions?”

  In the thirty-some times he’d met with Howard, the therapist had never started off with this many questions and had never written down so little. They had gone whole sessions with Anders just talking about switching from oil to natural gas, a process that took him months of appointments with frustrating specialists, so that he never quite felt settled in his new place, which was otherwise perfect, he’d made known at the time, and three times greener than your average home.

  “I’d say the lights are a new tradition,” he said. “I also bought some reindeer, and a Santa for the roof. He waves.”

  Howard nodded. “And, if I may ask, have you been going out at all?”

  “Going out?”

  “Seeing people, friends?”

  “I saw my son today. What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I just assumed this week you may have been more social, less alone.”

  Anders lived alone. Anders had spent the majority of the past year alone. This solitude is what Howard mostly spoke of when he’d glance back at his pad after five or six sessions, his lids nearly closed, and expound on a theory about Anders’s crisis of the self, or his project of un-rooting, or, as Howard called it at the end of their first session, tapping his notebook with that weighty pen, having barely heard the tiniest tip of it, with a kind of gall that Anders still couldn’t forgive: self-sabotage in the face of loss. That Anders returned after that, Howard should have viewed as a miracle, especially because Anders had known Howard for quite some time, and especially because Howard’s sons, both of them muscly and dim, had supposedly paddled Preston and then beaned him with raw eggs on his first day of high school, and also especially because Howard’s wife had considered running for first selectman and was a fixture in town, beloved by so many, confidante to so many, including, he was sure, an entire satellite of people who loved Helene.

  All of this must have been on Anders’s face because Howard capped his pen, made direct eye contact, and with a sigh said, “I was there.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Ashbys’. I was there. I was there.” He dropped his head.

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I should’ve told you. I’m sorry, I—” He sighed and lifted his head again. “I thought it would be more productive if we got there without that information, but I now realize that that was the wrong choice and I apologize.”

  Howard was often apologizing during therapy.

  “You were there?”

  “Kathleen and Sophie Ashby are quite close.”

  “Right,” said Anders, remembering, then, Helene holding Sophie’s bony elbow in the eerie flash of those lights, remembering the mustard-gray of Charlie Ashby’s face.

  “So, let’s talk about that night,” said Howard.

  “I decided to go and I went,” said Anders, crossing his arms. “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. I was invited.”

  “Why wouldn’t you have been?”

  “You know why. That party was Helene’s.”

  Howard nodded. “You looked perfectly at ease.”

  “Oh, come on. I was panicking.”

  “Why?”

  “I was surrounded.”

  “Is that why you
went outside?”

  Anders froze. He could see, all of a sudden, how he must have looked standing on the porch with Mitchell and then striding into the party to find his wife with another man.

  “One of the reasons,” he said.

  Howard nodded but wrote none of it down.

  “What is it, Howard?” he said, finally. “What is it that you’re getting at? Go ahead and ask me.”

  “I just want to talk about the party. It seems important in the context of everything else we’ve discussed over the past few months.”

  “Really? Because it feels to me like you’ve made up your mind about it. And I’m tired of pussyfooting around. So go ahead, Doc, just come out and tell me what you think. Diagnose me.”

  “I don’t diagnose people,” said Howard, calmly.

  “Fine. Right. I forgot, you just lie about what you know and then sniff around for gossip.”

  “I’m not doing that, you know that. But if there’s something about that night you’d like to discuss—”

  “No, there’s nothing. It was a bad night. For everyone. I feel terrible for that kid.”

  “For Charlie? Why?”

  “Because of all the sanctimony, Howard. Because of the goddamn headshaking and astonishment, like no one in that room had ever heard of anyone going off to prep school and smoking dope, like they weren’t secretly a little thrilled it had all just unfolded right in front of them and that it wasn’t their kid.”

  “It was more than dope, from what I heard.”

  “What does it matter! He can do what he wants, far as I’m concerned. I told him that. I told him that I didn’t care if he was smoking crack or whatever the hell because—”

  Anders thought for a moment. Because why? Because nothing. Because he did care. Because he always cared, no matter how much he tried to pretend otherwise.

  “Look, don’t tell me his fine sense of judgment doesn’t run in the family; don’t tell me that.” Anders shook his head.

  When it became clear that he was done, Howard removed his glasses and rubbed his baggy eyes.

  “You saw the boy doing drugs?”

  Anders shrugged. “Yeah.”