The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (8 page)

Even though that fantasy had changed slightly every few weeks, Anders could remember it went something like this: They would live in New York, in a building with a doorman who knew their names and their favorite flavors of ice cream; they wouldn’t need to worry about money; they would have a child who would tow a red wheelbarrow through the park; they would take trips in the winter for no reason other than to go ice-skating on a real pond; they would join the PTA, help a friend get elected to office, throw dinners for charity; they’d live overseas for a few years with their children (three of them) so as not to become too regionalized; they’d learn about wine and have the newspaper delivered and spend their Saturdays at Fellini retrospectives in an art house downtown; they would run together along the Hudson and work their way up to a marathon; they would have a king-size bed; they would send their children to camp. All of these were decisions that were made back then, and in his dream, lying fully clothed with a pillow stuffed under his ear, they actually happened.

It was an
overdose. The culprit was a handful of Klonopin that didn’t mix well with whiskey, though the doctors were clear that the small plantation of cannabis the boy had inhaled over the past month hadn’t done much to help, to say nothing of that evening’s potpourri of chemicals. “Fucking
angel
dust,” Anders’s son Tommy said. “At his parents’ Christmas party.”

He was at the top of a ladder, tapping nails into the condominium fascia. “I guess they’ve got him rigged to tubes and machines,” he said, a nail bobbing between his lips. “Mom says Sophie’s a wreck.” He shook his head. “I mean, can you
imagine?
”

Tommy’s kids were inside, parked in front of a DVD. In the eight short years he’d been a father he’d taken quite easily to the high-handed tone of parental astonishment. Anders gave him a string of lights.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he said. “The kid’ll be okay.”

Tommy pulled the nail from his mouth. “Tell that to his parents.”

Anders’s condo was at the back of a gated complex whose units had been designed to resemble a New England village, with gray clapboards and white fences and lawns stiff with chemical fertilizer. In keeping with the spirit, he decorated his living room with prints of Winslow Homer watercolors, moody portraits of rowboats at sunset and women at the shoreline lifting their hems. And while most of the year his condo’s exterior was indistinguishable from his neighbors’, the Ashbys’ party had, if nothing else, reminded him it was the season of lights.

“And you know what’s fucked up?” said Tommy. “Turns out there were other people with him.”

Anders stopped untangling the strand of lights in his hands. “What do you mean, other people?”

“Kids. There was a whole group of kids over there, smoking God knows what.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mom heard it from Sophie.”

Anders went back to the lights. “And how would she know?”

“I’d say her son is a pretty good source.”

“He told her that?”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

Anders handed him a plastic reindeer. “These go on the roof.”

Tommy had agreed to make room in his day to help Anders decorate, which mostly meant he checked his watch every time Anders gave him something to hang. He took off his puffy coat and dropped it to the ground. He was tall and still lean, like a basketball player from the fifties, with a sculpted Adam’s apple and a strong beaky nose. He looked little like either of his parents, and even as a child, with his swirl of wavy hair and big wet eyes, people used to say that he seemed like he was from another era, one of trolley cars and newsies and whitewall tires.

“Mom says the Ashbys are going to sue.”

Anders nearly dropped the strand he’d finally untangled.

“Who in God’s name would they sue?”

“The school,” said Tommy. “Where do you think he got the stuff?”

“The
school
didn’t sell it to him.”

“But they also didn’t prevent it.”

“So let me get this straight—they send their child away and then blame his drug use on the fact that no one was there to watch him?”

“Dad,” he said. “You’re a parent. You understand. It’s about protecting their son.”

Anders thought of Mitchell then on his back deck, waving around the damp end of his cigar and asking if Anders could recommend a program to drag his kid into the woods. That too was about protection, as was the enormous wing they added to their house (to “give Charlie space”), as was, presumably, the kind of job Mitchell worked (chief counsel for a processed-food conglomerate). His new motor yacht might also qualify as some sort of opportunity for Charlie—marine biology of the sunburned and tipsy.

“He’s a good kid,” Anders said. “He deserves better.”

“Better than Choate?” Tommy called from the roof.

“Better than
us.
”

He could feel Tommy’s silence, could picture his rooftop headshake. “Everyone’s doing the best they can,” he said.

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.