The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel

by Thompson, Ted

  But he didn’t notice, because of course she continued to do the dishes, as always, and left him alone to read, as always, and the only place all her newfound rage took her was a Hampton Inn on 495, somewhere in the vicinity of Worcester. There, all of the gestures toward romance of Helene and Donny’s first failed rendezvous were replaced by a kind of determined disrobing, followed by a somewhat automatic process that was instigated by her and therefore tinged with a vengeance that made the whole thing feel about as sexy as a pelvic exam. Afterward, they ordered Domino’s pizza and ate it in bed with the warm box on their laps. She turned to him then and confessed, with a mouth full of pepperoni, that this finally seemed to have enough self-loathing and lovelessness to qualify as an affair—a joke! An admittedly unfunny-and-also-kind-of-true joke. Donny’s face went white, and though he played it off well, he still climbed out of bed and put on his T-shirt.

  This time she drove home relieved and stopped at the gourmet market for Kobe steaks and wild-caught salmon, determined to finally cook that big meal even if it meant eating it across from a husband who was about as appreciative as a totem pole. They ate the meal, which Anders even mentioned was delicious, and for the first time in perhaps a year, she went to bed at the same time he did, feeling wifely and good as she read beside him on a matching hummock of pillows. So what was it that made her get up in the middle of the night and turn on her computer? What was it that kept her there, reading the three long messages that were waiting for her about how for Donny it wasn’t just an affair, that he understood she was in a difficult spot, but for him it was never any question what he wanted—he wanted her, he had always wanted her, a woman he had loved since he was nineteen and who it was clear deserved to be treated much, much better.

  What was it then that made her write him back, even though she knew it would all start again, her dual life, what made her say to herself that she would be happy if she could somehow have both, one in person and the other on a little phone in her pocket that vibrated when it was time for some attention? And most important, what made her go on to have both, months and months of a split life, more Hampton Inns and invented conferences, more Domino’s pizza and quilt cocoons and much, much better sex, all of it coming easier, with fewer tears and a lot more Stevie Nicks? And then what was it, seemingly out of nowhere, that made her end it, just as easily as it had begun, with a Facebook message in the middle of the night saying she could no longer see him?

  Sophie told her it was because of her conscience, because she was a genuinely good person, but Helene knew the real reason, one she wouldn’t admit even to Sophie, and it had nothing to do with guilt. The real reason was that when she made it home at the end of the night and logged on, she found herself more interested in playing computer solitaire than responding to another one of Donny’s impossibly thoughtful letters. Of course, she couldn’t have known the absurdity of her timing, that she had cut it off only weeks before Anders declared his decision to divorce and that a tumor the size of a marble was growing strong in her left breast.

  Illness in its own way is embarrassing and private. At times, it felt like the most private thing she had ever experienced, so Anders’s aloofness was just what she needed. If he had been an eager puppy who read the cancer books along with her and insisted on telling her she was beautiful as she lay in the recovery room, she would certainly have pushed him away. And though this was an aspect of him that her friends had never understood (“There’s a difference,” Sophie had said, “between someone who’s depressed and someone who treats you like shit”), she knew enough about herself to understand that his distance was also the thing that made him attractive, the thing that, even when they were nineteen—and she had been, unbelievably, choosing between these same two men—had always captured her interest: his unavailability. The fact that he needed her completely and yet was so far from admitting it that he couldn’t admit it to himself. Which of course for her was a blueprint for its own kind of unfulfillment. Yet she knew enough about herself to understand the sway he still held over her.

  So when, after the rabbit hole of amputation and intravenous drugs that was her treatment, Anders had opted to stick with his original plan—which she knew he would, she wasn’t stupid—she had poured herself a glass of wine and, knowing exactly what would happen, logged back on to her Facebook account. Within six months, Donny had moved south; within eight, they shared an address.

  And Donny was great, he really was, even though he was a Republican, which wasn’t a reason not to be in love with someone. She just couldn’t figure out why she kept ending up with these individualist cowboy types. Anders’s politics, like everything else in the last year, had changed to something indiscernible—anarchy?—though he had become fixated on global warming, which was yet another system in the giant system of systems that was being unjustly exploited. And you would think Donny, with his lifelong involvement in athletics, who had preached to his players about the importance of team and who seemed to value the fraternal bonds of that group over just about anything else, might extend that thinking beyond the locker room. But when it came to making a living, it was all myth-of-the-individual stuff, just like Anders (who, inexplicably, had voted for Perot twice). Donny seemed to read only fat biographies of people like Churchill and Carnegie, seemed to hold unwavering admiration for nearly all titans of industry, who, at least in the narratives of their ghostwriters, had overcome tremendous adversity with little more than hard work to stand on the very top of the human pile. Besides their lack of cooking skills, it was the most boyish thing about these men, all of it some prolonged cowboy stage, and when she pictured them together, she couldn’t help seeing them in John Wayne hats, snapping cap guns at each other.

  But otherwise Donny was great. He had gladly moved his hideous leather sectional and sixty-inch sports screen down to the basement, along with his hockey bag and bucket of pucks, and when she returned from work one day that first week, he had filled the whole house with plants—jade and gardenia and even a miniature Meyer lemon tree—because she had been in a terrible mood when she saw all his stuff intermingled with hers and had told him, oddly, that all that leather and plastic just reminded her of death, and more and more these days what she needed was to be around living things, happy living things. Hence the plants, which he watered and she did enjoy, and hence the house, which still looked nearly identical to the way it had for the last thirty years. It was all a transition, a big monstrous transition that she knew she couldn’t have managed without him, but now that the pleasant weight of him beside her in bed had become normal, and the little green stoppers he brought her from Starbucks so she wouldn’t spill her coffee on the way to work had accumulated into a sticky pile in her glove compartment, and now that she was no longer even uncomfortable standing naked in front of him with her new breasts (which were a half a size bigger and looked terrific in a bra but were frankly gruesome when bare), she was starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, she had rushed things.

  Now, the train hissed to a stop in Grand Central, and she filed with the others onto the hot platform and up into the giant marble chamber, whose barrel-vaulted ceiling often left her standing, even in the swarm of rush hour, with her head back and her mouth open. It was painted the deep Atlantic green of the sky just before dawn, a peaceful, private time of day suspended above the frenzy. This giant space, this magnificent, manic hive, had always been connected somehow to her own living room—it was the nexus between work and home that made that life possible, a thought that suddenly caused her stomach to drop. If Preston was to be believed, which she had a sinking feeling that in this case, he was, then they had finally found the end of their thirty-some-year experiment in the suburbs. Funny how it wasn’t the divorce so much as losing the house that defined that ending for her, and funny how she wasn’t angry so much as wistful, the way you were when you could finally see the whole of something. This was how it all ended. This was where it all ended up.

  Her cab flew up Sixth Avenue,
skirting the acid trip of Times Square and turning onto Central Park South, where horses pulling tourists clopped along beside the cars and all the hotel windows were wreathed with giant green boughs. They inched through the swirl of Columbus Circle and finally onto Broadway, where she stopped the cab two blocks from the restaurant and, even though she was already late, ducked through the plastic flaps of a Korean produce stand.

  Over the past few months, she’d made a habit of slipping out of work and driving to the closest grocery store, a worn-down Pathmark whose shopping carts had mostly been stolen. There, she would search the cardboard bin in the produce section for the roundest grapefruit she could find, which was often more like a yellow cube, and bring it back to her car. She would feel its satisfying weight in her palm, hold it up to her nose and run its surface along one cheek, then the other, before plunging her thumb through the skin and taking her time peeling it, top to bottom, in one continuous spiral. She never ate the fruit—usually it went back into the bag and the bag went into the nearest garbage can—but the citrusy smell would be pleasantly under her fingernails for the rest of the day. It was admittedly peculiar behavior, and something she could explain about as well as she could her dreams, but in the past month she had probably gone through a crate of cheap ruby reds, which made the one she was holding now feel round and firm and essential. She paid for it and slipped it into her purse.

  She was twenty minutes late by the time she found the address. She had expected to find Donny waiting patiently at the bar with his Diet Coke, she had expected to apologize and kiss his cheek and chalk her lateness up to her crazy day, but she hadn’t expected that the Italian restaurant she had traveled all the way into the city for would actually be a pizza joint. Donny was sitting in the fluorescent lights at a table in the back, an orange tray in front of him with four cooling slices on two paper plates.

  “Surprise,” he said and slurped from his soda.

  As he stood and enveloped her in a hug, she felt something inside her release so that her knees nearly gave out, leaving her dangling from his neck.

  “You okay?” he said and she stood up, straightened herself.

  She took a deep breath and smiled.

  “Now I’m wonderful,” she said.

  She had skipped lunch, so she was halfway through a slice before Donny had a chance to ask her about her day.

  “Long,” she said.

  “How’d it go with the accuser?”

  “Oh.” She pictured Preston hunched over that huge bar, watching soccer. “Fine.”

  “Fine?” he said. “Problem solved?”

  “Yeah.”

  Why she was withholding it from him she wasn’t totally sure. She was already feeling terrible about tossing her son onto the street, but she knew it wasn’t as much about Preston as it was about the house and therefore about Anders, whose failures no longer surprised her as much as her instinct to protect him did.

  “Disappointed in the meal?” he said.

  She held up her paper plate, dropping crumbs across the table. “I am.”

  “We better get moving.” He took the tray to the garbage bin. “The show starts in twenty.”

  On the table in front of her, as if by magic, were two tickets to The Nutcracker.

  Donny winked from the door. “After you.”

  He took her bags and she took his arm and they walked across Broadway and up the steps to Lincoln Center, its great fountain dormant for winter. They made their way into the velvety red lobby and to the tenth row of the orchestra. Numerous balconies towered above them, the proscenium itself tall and wide enough to house a downtown apartment building. The whole complex felt out of fashion, a holdover from the sixties, yet inexplicably elegant. Donny had crammed himself into the little theater seat with his hands gripping his knees as if he were holding his whole body together. None of this—the ballet, the ladies in furs, Lincoln Center—was his thing, and she would have been just as happy to go to a Rangers game, but seeing him folded in that seat, his face already flushed, smiling mildly as the woodwinds in the pit tested their reeds like a flock of sad birds, made her reach over and run her hand along the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

  The lights went down and the music started and soon the curtain rose high into the rafters, exposing yet again that happy family on Christmas Eve surrounded by presents and celebrating before the family went to bed, and the mice appeared, and a girl watched the tree grow three times its size before her very eyes. It was classic Balanchine, unchanged in its schmaltz since its New York premiere in the fifties—same cartoony Russian costumes, same tights and tutus, and of course the same nineteenth-century grandeur in the music, music that had been appropriated for Macy’s commercials and Home Alone montages—and yet somehow she found herself, in the ambient glow of the stage lights, utterly ambushed by it. It seemed as though she felt every trill under her fingernails and heard every theme as if for the first time, so that when the snow started falling on the stage, floating in the footlights, a magical thing, and the harp came in with a children’s choir not far behind, the crash of cymbals and the swelling of strings and horns—Jesus, horns—all of it combining at once, relentless and familiar and a relic of her not-too-distant past, she found herself in tears on the floor of the New York State Theater.

  When the lights came up at the end of act 1, she was sure her face was a puffy mess, so she excused herself out of their row and into the line for the ladies’ room. She found a balled tissue in her purse and tried her best to do some damage control, and when she brought the tissue back from her face she noticed she was shaking. She was fine; it was silly, this reaction, crying at The Nutcracker. It was a children’s show! She was fine. When she made it into a stall, she closed the toilet lid and reached into her purse.

  The grapefruit was smaller than she remembered, a cool orb in her palm that she brought up to her nose and then to each cheek. Maybe it was a good thing that she had to move. Maybe she could truly start again, devote herself to her work and her garden and maybe do what the rest of her family did—worry only about themselves. Maybe then she could sit through the first act of The Nutcracker like a normal person and sleep through the night without anesthetizing herself with Benadryl and maybe, just maybe, stop feeling guilty about the fact that more and more when she thought about her family, all she felt was betrayal.

  She had been telling herself that she wasn’t angry for so long that she didn’t know what she felt anymore. She had wells of fury inside her that had no place to come out, anger they would never know, anger that she didn’t even understand. It was like poison in the groundwater; it leached out whether she wanted it there or not. And in the past year, when she was cooped up in recovery, covered in blankets and on a morphine drip, and her three men—Tommy and Preston and Anders—just stood around her, wordless, with their arms at their sides like a pack of baboons, she’d become something more like a Superfund site. In retrospect, she understood the inherent clumsiness that husbands and sons have around ill women, but it didn’t stop her from being furious that she’d reached a point in her life when none of them cared enough to need her anymore.

  The peel came off easily—a good clean spiral, no breaks—and she was steadied. There were new town houses in Black Rock down by the water. She could afford one without money from anyone, be closer to work, trade in her Audi for something sensible. Simplify. This felt right—it felt, in a term she had always loathed, age appropriate. There was no reason to hold on to the house or any of the fantasies that had come with it. Let them all go, be free of them, be free of all of them, and with them all her needless worries.

  Donny was waiting for her outside the ladies’ room with a cup of champagne.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Of course.” She kissed him.

  “What’s in your hand?”

  She looked down. She had forgotten she was still holding the fruit and the peel.

  “A grapefruit,” she said.

  “I see t
hat.”

  “You want some?”

  Donny took the grapefruit and replaced it with the champagne.

  “Cheers,” he said and held up the skinned fruit. She tapped the plastic cup to it and when she brought it down something in Donny’s eyes had turned deeply serious.

  “Are you having a good time?” he said.

  “Donny,” she said. “It’s perfect. I’m having a perfect time.”

  His face seemed to soften with relief. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Relax,” she said. “You did good.”

  There was a moment when she thought that perhaps this affirmation had been enough to take his legs out from under him or that maybe he was having a major medical event—how very Donny it would be to be so concerned about her comfort that he didn’t even notice the tingling in his shoulder—either of which would have been much less surprising than what was actually happening, which was that Donny had dropped to his knee, right there on the plush red carpet during the intermission of The Nutcracker, and was holding up a box with the single biggest diamond she had ever seen.

  3

  Anders figured he knew how it would all go down. Larry would know a guy, probably a kid Tommy’s age, a hedgie who worked from a laptop in a shed in his Darien backyard—the future, Larry would say, the sort of kid who had made a billion dollars last year in his Adidas sandals. Larry would tell Anders not to worry about it, it was just money, they could make it back in an hour; all Anders had to do was give him a number and Larry would place the order. He’d slap him on the shoulder and tell him to relax, it’s what friends were for, and toast him with his third drink of the morning.

  Larry lived in the original farmhouse on Beachside, a property that had been divvied up into an entire avenue of waterfront estates, walled-off monuments with service entrances and wrought-iron gates and hunks of modern sculpture strewn about the front lawns. His greenhouse came off the side of his home, a tall glass structure that looked like it might hold the food court of a major museum. Inside, it was something of a gymnasium of flora—all leaves and humidity, dirt and cement. He led Anders down a long row of what appeared to be pots of earth. He was barefoot, the cuffs of his Dockers rolled, and as he walked, he’d occasionally touch the beds of soil with his thumb and then smell it. “Tells me if they’re healthy,” he said. “You develop a knack for it.” He went over to the corner and ran a pitchfork through a steaming heap of compost. It was black and as he turned it, some vapor escaped. “Put your hands in there,” he said. “Go ahead. It won’t hurt you.” It was surprisingly smooth, soft, really, and gave off a rich scent of organic matter. “Cleanest thing on the planet,” Larry said. “From garbage to the espresso of soil in a couple of months.”