The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (25 page)

“You really want to get married to him?” he said. His voice was unexpectedly lucid.

“I don’t want to talk about this now.”

“But you love him?”

Helene thought about it.

“I do,” she said, and he nodded.

“That’s good.”

Running the washcloth along his back, she had the sudden urge to hurt him, to turn the diamond on her finger around and start in on his pink skin, to show him all the odious things that had grown inside her, the depths of resentment and fury and hatred that took root when you were promised a life and then abandoned.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his head still bowed. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“I know,” she said.

And he stayed like that while she cleaned the rest of him.

In later years, from time to time, as a customer was checking in, Anders would see him pause for a second, caught off guard by the scar on his forehead. Most would avoid the subject—it wasn’t so pronounced; more like a spot someone might try to rub away with a wet thumb—but occasionally a person would ask and he would have to come up with an easy way to explain it. He told people he had walked into a steam pipe or sometimes that it was from surgery long ago; the easiest way was to call it a birthmark and be done with it, though once he’d tried out the truth. “I was burned by the end of a cigar,” he told the young woman who had asked. She giggled at his playful answer and rolled her bag to her room.

To explain the real truth, of course, would have taken some time. Occasionally he mentioned to guests, often a few of the white-hairs sitting on the porch admiring the sunset, that he had worked at this same inn in college, a fact that never failed to please them as they stared off at the water. It was exceedingly rare, he knew, to circle back like that, to give cohesion to the unceasing march of adulthood, and he enjoyed watching them light up at the fact that someone had done it.
Here,
he seemed to say,
was where I was happiest. Here was the prime of my life. So I returned to it.

It was a nice thought, though inevitably there was a pause after he had said it, an unspoken moment when he could tell they knew it was just that—a thought. Inside his story was the enormous doughnut hole of family and marriage and work, all the things that tied you to other people, and this part, at the end, was something else.

“A gift,” an elderly guest had called it. “A time for you.” He had a full head of soft white hair that he had parted, Anders supposed, the same way for his entire life, and a cotton sweater tied around his shoulders like a cape. It was September and getting cool already and the man had come out to the porch early. It turned out he had lived in Fairfield and commuted to Morgan Stanley until his hip gave out. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how many times I dreamed of doing something like this.”

“Well,” said Anders. “It wasn’t all that planned out.” He was once again mortgaged up to his eye sockets and he spent his days fixing boiler valves and chipped baseboards, stacking wood under the back portico, and reminding Preston to fix the loose brick on the inn’s front path. It was one project after another that seemed to leave him happily exhausted and with even less time than his days riding the train had.

“No,” the man said. “I suppose not. It’s just that sometimes you feel as if you could spend all your time trying to take care of what’s in front of you and never—” He paused. “Well, clearly you understand.”

Soon the other guests made their way down from their rooms and gathered on the front porch, strangers chatting and laughing in the held-over light of summer, enjoying the glasses of wine his son had poured them, and the man got up to go to bed.

“Anyway,” he had said, putting a hand on Anders’s shoulder as he went inside and pausing to add a phrase that Anders would repeat to himself as the water went from blue to copper to black. “Seems to me you played it right,” the man said. “Seems to me you played everything exactly right.”

The people who went on to buy the house, a young couple who, Helene was relieved to find, seemed to have decent taste, lived there eight months before breaking ground on a new addition—a giant glass box that came off the back of their colonial like an unfilled tank at SeaWorld. Whenever she was in town, Helene took long, complicated detours just to avoid it. “You just can’t trust people,” she had said to Donny. “They seem perfectly nice and then they go and do something like this.” By then, retirement had started among her friends, which meant the exodus was under way, all of them yielding their homes and the property taxes that came with them to the pregnants and the junior executives and the pregnant junior executives, who, if they were anything like the couple who had bought Helene’s house, were not all that young and also unusually nervous. They called her about the clicking sound the boiler made in the basement and the precise kind of fiberglass she had used to insulate the attic and, once, about the population of ticks in the backyard, as though this, too, were something she had installed.

“I just don’t get it,” she said to Donny, looking out from the kitchen window of their town house as the ambient lights of Bridgeport shimmered across the water. “There’s
bug spray.
I told her just to get bug spray.”

Even Tommy had been priced out of the area by then, had disappeared into the sticks of Dutchess County with her only grandchildren as hostages, and Preston had finally found something approximating employment, working on a crew of two to maintain an antique New England inn (a building that, at least according to the photos his father had sent, had been gorgeously restored), so she had started to feel like the last of a breed, a maple after all the leaves had scattered. She didn’t understand why everyone was always expected to leave, why the whole thing was like one of those models of the Big Bang, a nucleus that was designed to fly apart, a whole country of people hurtling away from the place where they came from, and for what? The promise of landing someplace better, someplace permanent? This one, this affluent dot along the Metro North train, was like one of those beaches where sea tortoises drop off their eggs—no one was from here, and they stayed only as long as it took the little ones to hatch. It had stone walls and old wells and access to a sea that was always mild, and in the summer, the leaves on the trees waved at you like the bright green palms of youth itself, but, as with everything else, at some point you had to concede it was no longer yours.

The new family finished the addition the following spring. Half of the yard had been stripped to mud and needed reseeding, but the other half was an explosion of perennials that it was clear the new owners had no idea what to do with. So Helene went by on a warm June evening to explain, one by one, what they needed. She talked them through the black-eyed Susans and the Shasta daisies and the daylilies that should’ve stopped blooming a decade ago, and soon they were out along the far edge of the property where there were bellflowers that predated even her and hardwoods as old as the Puritans. From there, the house looked like a simple shape in the high, green canopy of leaves. If she had been alone, she might have allowed herself to linger, to wonder at the magnificent illusion of property, at the things we owned and the ones that owned us. But of course, she wasn’t alone. And while she would have loved to stay in the shade of those trees, planted among the roots of those hardwoods, she could see by the look on her hosts’ faces that it was time for her to go home.

Thank you to the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Truman Capote Trust, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for their generous support; to Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts and Writers Omi at Ledig House for the space and time; to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for the early encouragement and the lasting community; to Lan Samantha Chang, James Alan McPherson, Ethan Canin, Charles D’Ambrosio, Robert Boswell, Darin Strauss, and Charles Baxter: teachers, mentors, and heroes all; and to the trusted friends and brilliant readers who saw earlier drafts of this novel: Andrew Milward, Zach Falcon, and Stuart Nadler (who also helped find its title).

Thank you also to Kate Sachs, Nate and Thea Brown, Craig Eley, Alexis Stevens, Tim O’Keefe, Laurence Lowe, Megan Conway, Scott Seeley, Wayne Lavender, Merrill Feitell (for the early push), Laura van den Berg, Nina McConigley (and my whole back-office family); to Kathy Sova, Leigh Zona, Terry Nemeth, Sarah Vowell, Julia Fierro, and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop; to Andrea Walker and Laura Tisdel, whose editorial comments made this book immeasurably better; to PJ Mark, the best agent I could ever have asked for, Cecile Barendsma, and everyone at Janklow and Nesbit; and to my editor, Reagan Arthur, who has the patience of a saint and whose scalpel-sharp notes improved pretty much everything about this book.

Thanks especially to my family: Reid Thompson, John Sellers, Pam and Joe McClean, and, of course, Mom and Dad, in whose barn I drafted the first pass of this novel and whose unflinching support gave me the strength to finish it. I love you all.

Finally, to Carrie, without whom this book would never have been completed—I love you.

Ted Thompson is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship. His work has appeared in
Tin House, American Short Fiction,
and
Best New American Voices,
among other publications. He was born in Connecticut and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

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