The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  All of this was roiling inside of her—mostly, she knew, because yet again she’d been made to feel stupid—but before she could get on the highway and break the speed limit getting back to the office and then bury herself pleasantly in work, she noticed a highly familiar Toyota 4Runner sitting alone in the gray expanse of that sports-bar parking lot.

  Preston was sitting at the bar. The tables in there were lit with dramatic spotlights, and the rest of the light came from the televisions that blinked at you epileptically from all angles. Seen from across the room, he looked skinnier than usual, and paler; his hair was stringy as it hung behind his ears, though in fairness nobody looked healthy in the glow from a TV. He had a plate of food in front of him, which was encouraging, and what appeared to be a Coke in a pint glass. He was fixated on a screen. Helene had to rest her hand on his shoulder, a sharp angle under his flannel shirt, before he turned.

  “Hello.” His eyes flicked back to the screen, which was showing a soccer game. Helene sat on the stool beside him and put down her bag.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “This is pretty impressive,” he said. “Did you have me followed?” He smiled in that vague way she’d never been able to understand, as though he were saving the joke to tell someone later, and it was this, combined with the fact that after his initial glance at her he hadn’t looked away from the screen, that reminded her of exactly how pissed off she was.

  “I had a very interesting meeting today,” she said.

  “I didn’t steal the guy’s money.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, as though he had already heard the entire tape.

  “Two thousand dollars?” she said. “Two thousand dollars from an illiterate man?”

  “I thought you didn’t like to use that word.”

  “Goddamn it, Preston. Look at me.”

  He turned and fixed his big green eyes on her. “He gave it to me,” he said very calmly.

  “For you to gamble? On jai alai?”

  “Do I get a chance to tell my side of the story?”

  She glanced at her watch. “You’ve got two minutes.”

  “He was desperate,” he said. “He was thinking of asking some guy in his neighborhood for a loan, not the sort of guy you want to owe anything to. I explained to him how these things work, how he could end up very hurt if he didn’t pay it back right away, and how he’d end up paying a lot more than he needed to. He said the other thing he might do is go to one of those car lots and take one of their jacked-up financing options—and, Mom, I know. It’s what he should have done. But he asked me if I knew of anything else.”

  “And you thought, Oh yeah, there’s that underground gambling I’m involved with.”

  Preston shook his head and turned back to the screen. “Let’s just get this over with,” he said.

  “Get what over with?”

  “The firing. The sacking. I get it.”

  Helene tried to catch her son’s eye. His profile was so delicate; she was once again amazed at the sorts of places she had gone to collect him in his short life—a disgusting squat in Burlington, Vermont; a dingy detox in LA; that apartment in Evanston with six dissertation-prolonging roommates and apparently not a single sponge; and this, an amateur jai alai center, where her delicate boy, she could now see, was certainly being hustled.

  “Listen,” she said. “I’m in a tough spot.”

  “I understand.”

  “Even if you meant well, Preston, it looks like nepotism if I don’t fire you.”

  “You don’t have to explain it.”

  “Preston, how much money have you lost?”

  He looked at her.

  “What makes you say lost?”

  “Come on.”

  “None,” he said and went back to the game.

  “How much money do you have on this game?”

  He shrugged. “I like Champions League.”

  This was a classic Preston nonanswer. Her son wasn’t so much a liar as a withholder, a half-truther who strategically released information when he knew it would get him off the hook. When he called to say he wanted to go back to school and get a degree in social policy, of all things, she’d found herself telling the most unlikely people—the fellow in the parking booth at work, the lady behind the loud chrome machine preparing her macchiato—explaining all the details of his matriculation, how his grab bag of credits would transfer, how many courses Northwestern required, how many times she found herself saying the name Northwestern, the unexpected pleasure it gave her, its proof that all her leniency—all those claims that Preston was “finding his way”—had been right and her son wasn’t a loser and she wasn’t an enabler either.

  It was true he had finished the degree, a surprise to both her and Anders, but there was a part of her, the most cynical part, that knew he’d needed money, money that his father had long ago sworn off sending him, and Preston had understood that the only way to get a regular check in the mail was to tell his parents he was doing what they’d always wished he would. It was often shocking to her, after all her years as a parent, how little she actually knew of her children.

  “All right,” she said, and she stood up. “You’re fired. And you have a week to find another place to live.”

  She wanted to walk away but lingered to see if he even turned his head, and in that hesitation, her guilt returned. She could never stay angry long enough for the anger to protect her.

  “Well, you should probably find a place too,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” She had on her best teacher face, the one she’d perfected when she was working in the Bronx in the seventies, but he didn’t notice because his eyes were still on that boring goddamn game. The score was zero to zero. He might as well stare at a green wall.

  “Dad’s not paying the mortgage,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Hasn’t in almost a year. Tommy told me. So you should probably find another place before those guys in nylon jackets come and padlock the doors or whatever it is they do.”

  Helene sat back down.

  “Tommy told you this?”

  Preston slurped the bottom of his Coke with his straw. “Yep.”

  “A year? He said it’d been a year?”

  He nodded, and for the first time since she had arrived, he seemed to actually see her. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess that’s bad timing.”

  She picked up her bag.

  “You’re still fired,” she said.

  2

  By four o’clock she was on the express to Grand Central with two tote bags of work and a new budget to review. Outside the sky was bruised, the marsh grasses and estuaries of the sound slipping past. She never understood the disdain all those commuters had for this trip. It was quiet and relatively scenic and she had a fondness for the roll call of bedroom communities the conductor rattled off at every stop (“East Norwalk! South Norwalk! Noroton Heights! Darien!”): the ritual, on this end, of entering the Great Metropolis and, on the other, of escaping its chaos for the warm envelope of home.

  It was her first lull in an anaerobic day, and, against her better judgment, she decided to check her messages. There were six—five from her ex-husband and one from Donny—each with a ripe blue dot beside it. In the first, Anders rambled for two and a half minutes about quinoa, which he’d just now discovered thanks to the good people at the Wall Street Journal, and even though there was a big red Delete button on the screen, the funny thing was she found herself leaning against the window and listening through to the end of that message and all his others. It was habit, mostly—forty years with a man who treated communication as a reward would do that to you. Though, really, the habit was formed in those last few years, when he would show up at home an hour after his train had gotten in, saying he’d left his car at the station and decided to walk, in the middle of winter, in his Italian leather bucks, the tip of his nose red and runny, and even still he’d barely touch his dinner, which admittedly tasted wei
rd, because it had been warming on low for over an hour. Of course she’d had her theories, thousands of them, about the job souring and the slog of the commute, about how their lifestyles had ballooned and stuck him with the bill, but they were just theories. She searched for clues in whatever communication he would give her, but in the end, all she really knew was his exclusion of her, and so, after he would retreat to bed early, reading article after article with his head propped on pillows, she would dump half a bottle of chardonnay in her glass and stay up long past midnight, playing computer solitaire in her robe.

  It wasn’t her proudest time, and she had come to associate its sedentariness and spiraling introspection—and mostly its powerlessness—with the end of one stage (middle age, maybe, or motherhood, or the clarity and comfort of the nuclear family) and the beginning of another. Whatever that new stage would be (a sort of pre–nursing home, postchildren second adolescence?) had yet to be fully defined, except that was also when all the trouble started, when her world went gravityless and she could feel everything down to the floorboards coming apart around her.

  Looking back, she could see that its beginning was so common as to be boring, but at the time, it was something of a wonder to receive an e-mail in the middle of the night announcing that Donald Fitzsimmons wanted to be her friend. The board had recently decided, along with the rest of the world, that the key to fund-raising was in social media, so on her lunch break one day she had clicked through a series of blue boxes, entered her life statistics, uploaded a headshot from the staff page, and thought nothing more of it. Within an hour she was inundated with requests from Tommy’s childhood friends, names she hadn’t heard in years, many of whom had ultrasounds as their profile pics, it seemed, to advertise their induction into the phase of life she was just leaving. It was pleasant, she supposed, to click through all those photos and glimpse all those lives, but otherwise the whole thing felt to her like a grand party that had started long before she had arrived, one with its own language and demands, and there was nothing worse than arriving late to a party whose jokes you didn’t understand. But at the lowest hour of her night, after five full rounds of solitaire and about as many goblets of wine, the intrusion of a real old friend, one that announced in the subject line of the e-mail that he wanted to be her friend, made all the noise of that grand party suddenly feel as intimate as a whisper.

  And so whisper they did. What started as a friendly note—So how’s the smartest girl I know?—became a kind of furious banter. Her solitaire time was now spent firing off notes and refreshing her browser, and soon the conversation leaked over into IM chats at work, endless meandering typing, so that as long as she was near a screen she never felt alone because there he was, in that bottom right corner, waiting to respond. When the confessional stuff started, all those long, long e-mails about their desires and the boredom of their real lives, about the winter light in Londonderry and the way that the row of rusted container cranes out her window at work looked to her like a family of sleeping swans, she knew it was only a matter of time before they decided to meet.

  They chose a hotel in Portsmouth. It was fall, and though they had never discussed it, she assumed they had picked a spot on the New England coast because it was where they remembered each other. Though how she had remembered him was smaller. It was true that in his photos he had looked hulking and bearded (so much so that Sophie had dubbed him the real-world incarnation of Fred Flintstone), but those photos had been taken with the peewee hockey squad he coached, its players all smaller than whatever trophy it was they were hoisting over their heads, so she figured it was a trick of proportion until the moment he stepped out of his car in Portsmouth.

  According to a frayed patchwork of sources—old friends, alumni newsletters, and a recent scouring of the Internet—Donny Fitzsimmons had lived two distinct lives in the many years since she had seen him. The first was as the manager and eventual co-owner of his cousin’s heating-oil business in Nashua, a mom-and-pop outfit that, according to a local article, Donny had built into a regional powerhouse with a fleet of trucks roaring across southern New Hampshire and a series of AM radio ads that sang his name between the innings of Red Sox games.

  Donny’s second life, though, was a little less clear. It began after a spectacular lawsuit filed by his cousin, the business co-owner, for carrying on with his cousin’s wife what, according to some salacious rumors at their college reunion, amounted to an extended covert fuckfest. Whether it was true or not, he surrendered his half of the business, moved up the road to Londonderry, got sober, and became a peewee hockey coach. That new life, as far as Helene could tell, had held stable for a solid decade and despite her obvious concerns about his moral character, she was the most puzzled about why, even after his rebirth, after he had become wildly successful as a consultant for the natural-gas industry, he still had never married. It was a question that, at her most cynical, left her with a much sadder impression of his life, one of take-out cartons and porn subscriptions and an eHarmony profile he kept at the urging of his sister.

  When she first saw him, he had his hands in the pockets of his slacks, a tall wall of a guy, bellied, wearing an orangey cable-knit that could pass for either a yacht owner’s or a chowder spokesman’s (a color that didn’t do much to silence Sophie’s voice in her head bellowing, Wiiillllma!). He was as handsome as she’d remembered, handsomer even, with the infuriating pixie dust of male wrinkles and a natural easiness he seemed to have grown into. He didn’t have to try so hard to make people like him; in fact, in the way of all gentle giants, he didn’t have to try at all. He hugged her and he smelled just-out-of-the-shower clean, and all the stiffness she’d projected onto their transition from the online world to the real one fell away.

  They walked politely from shop to shop and chatted politely and had a polite dinner in a restaurant overlooking the harbor. It occurred to her, as he was pulling out her chair, that she had skated through life without ever going on a formal date, and what was thrilling about finding herself on one wasn’t all the coded communication or the evaluative dance but rather the sense that there was another person inside of her that suddenly seemed available. Most of being young, she had always thought, was playing a game of elimination with an army of different selves until you settled on one, usually by circumstance. But what made her grin, sitting across a starched white tablecloth from a man who seemed to actually listen to her, was the feeling that all those other selves weren’t dead. They were still alive—multitudes of them, waiting inside her.

  On the drive up to Portsmouth, once she had admitted to herself what she was doing, there were only two ways she could think of it. One was as a simple transgression: she could embrace the act as a pure expression of the heart. To this, she thought of the Stevie Nicks song, one of her favorites, imagined a willowy woman in scarves at a microphone, surrounded by men, her fist in her hair, telling the world not to blame her but to blame her wild heart. Sure, the song was a little corny, but it was tempting to frame infidelity as more honest, not less, even if, deep down, it seemed to her like a pretty sure recipe for dying alone. The other way to think of it was to use microlevels of justification, to tell herself at each stage—every time she refreshed her in-box, every private feeling divulged—that she was still completely aboveboard and if, say, her husband were to find out, he would probably be fine with it. And even though she sang along to Stevie Nicks at the top of her lungs all the way to Portsmouth, Helene was definitely in the second category, which was why she had refused to remove her wedding ring even when they were in bed and why she had closed the blackout curtains and had wanted to pull the blankets up over their heads and stay in that quilted cocoon until Sunday morning.

  Also, she refused to have sex. This, you might imagine, would be the hallmark of a terrible mistress, and you would be right. The whole time she could think only of Anders, not so much the recent man but the one she had married, and less about how much it would hurt him than about how simply confused he would
be, how little any of it would square with what he thought he knew of his wife. She spent most of the weekend apologizing and crying while she felt Donny’s big arms around her and she listened to him repeat, in his consummately considerate way, that it was all right, he understood, it was all pretty complicated.

  On the way back she figured that would settle it, that would drive away Donny and solve her problem. But when she made it home, invigorated and ready to cook them a big dinner, it seemed Anders had not moved from the sofa and, although he’d left a queue of dishes for her on the counter, hadn’t seemed to notice she was gone. So she dropped her sack of groceries on the counter, the baguette vertical, popped two Lean Cuisines in the microwave, and, without bothering to ask him about his weekend, headed back upstairs to her computer.

  Which was when things got serious. All the flirting and teasing and poetic earnestness gave way to explicit plans. Whereas before she had avoided mentioning Anders to Donny at all, now he was named and all of the inner workings of her marriage were dumped into Facebook messages, which Donny seemed to patiently tolerate as she concocted the grand scheme for her escape. No matter how complex her variations, it was a plan that amounted to packing a bag and getting in the car and driving north to what was, she assumed, Donny’s very nice fairway-side condominium. It was a plan that involved leaving Anders, finally, to his goddamn paper and his goddamn dishes and seeing how long it took him to even notice.