The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (15 page)

There was something disarmingly genuine about him, a trait of his Anders had forgotten. He didn’t seem to feel shame the way most people did, and in his openness, he seemed to loosen the rest of the room too. It was with Donny that Anders had had his first negotiation about masturbation (
Just keep it in the bathroom and everybody’s happy
) as well as his first honest discussion about blow jobs (
I just want to say to them it’s okay to yank a little; no good blow job’s a timid blow job!
), and now, amazingly, it seemed he was having his first conversation about another man dating his wife.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Anders, sitting down. “That’s all in the past.”

Donny watched him for a long moment. “I appreciate that,” he said. “And if it makes you feel any better, I wanted to let you know I don’t blame you for what happened last week.”

“You mean my being an idiot?”

“Believe me, if I had a dollar for every regrettable thing I’d done after I’d had a few too many…” Donny shook his head. “Sorry about the golf club. You hear someone trying to get in at that hour and, well, everything in that house seems louder than it is.”

Anders looked at him. “I guess it does, doesn’t it.”

“Old houses,” said Donny.

Anders sipped his scotch.

“Well, anyway,” Donny said.

“How is the house?”

“The house,” said Donny, nodding. “Well, this is actually something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“How long have you really been there?” said Anders.

“A couple of weeks.”

“Weeks?”

“Maybe months.”

Anders looked down, took a deep breath. His scotch was half gone. “And neither of you ever thought to say anything to me?”

“Anders.”

“Considering I was the one who was paying for it?”

“Anders,” Donny said again. “I know that’s not true.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know about the mortgage. And I don’t blame you for anything. A lot of people were screwed over the past few years and there is no shame in it—I want to make that clear—not in this economy.”

“Who told you that?”

“I think we both want the same thing.”

“Was it Tommy? Did Tommy tell you?”

“Look,” Donny said. “Nobody wants to lose the house.”

Anders tried to rattle another sip out of his scotch. He had already finished it.

“I have it taken care of,” he said.

“Look, I’m still working and things are going quite well for me right now. It doesn’t make any sense for you to be burdened with it.”

“It’s not a burden.”

Donny nodded and uncrossed his legs and put down his water. “Okay, look.” He sighed. “I’ll give you ten percent over market value.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m making you an offer.”

“Do you know how much that is?”

“To be honest,” said Donny, “I don’t. But it doesn’t really matter.”

Donny had come a long way from tarring cracks on the state highways, and it seemed he was more than happy to make a show of it. In fact, Anders now remembered, he’d somehow gone from the quaint mom-and-pop world of heating-oil delivery to working for the natural-gas industry, a move that explained his suit and his corporate lapel ribbon and the gas guzzler in the drive, not to mention the bottle of exorbitantly expensive scotch he’d brought with him and didn’t expect to drink. Donny had a lot of money, and it occurred to Anders that he had come over not to apologize, but to try and purchase what was left of his life.

“The house isn’t for sale,” he said.

“I can pay you today. Right now.”

Anders shrugged and put his glass on the table. “I’m not interested.”

Donny crossed his legs and settled into a pose that was vaguely feline. Outside, the wind had kicked up and they could hear the rattle of lights against the siding. “If I can be honest,” Donny said. “For a guy who worked so long in finance, I’m a little surprised.”

“That I’m not interested in money?”

“That you’re not interested in reason.”

“Reason,”
said Anders, more amused than anything else. “You’re appealing to reason.”

“Come on,” said Donny. “You have to admit, this situation doesn’t make sense for anyone.”

“How old are you?” Anders said all of a sudden.

Donny exhaled and a short silence fell between them.

“Same as you,” said Donny. “Why.”

“Seems like an unusual time to suddenly want a family.”

“Anders,” said Donny. His tone had changed. “This crap has to stop.”

“Let me explain something to you,” said Anders, leaning forward and pushing his glass aside. “You may think, waking up in that old house and watching all those sprinklers come on at once, that you’re doing the right and good thing in your life by playing the breadwinner. You may think that; you may even believe it. But take it from me: you’re kidding yourself. You want to come here and flaunt your money, that’s fine. But don’t come over here and tell me I’m not being
rational
when you’re more than sixty years old and you suddenly want a family.”

Donny’s eyes had glazed over in the way Anders’s sons’ used to when they were enduring one of his lectures, and, in the pause that followed, Donny’s gaze seemed to settle blankly on the coffee table.

“Look.” Anders stood up and clapped his hands together. “I appreciate the effort,” he said, heading over to the door to show him out. “It’s admirable, the honesty. But to tell you the truth, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

“Anders,” said Donny. “Helene and I are getting married.”

Anders felt the plush carpet under his feet. There was a faint shadow of soil, he now noticed, running down the front of his pants.

“You’re what?”

“In February. In Hawaii. The big island.”

“Huh.”

“I’m sorry,” said Donny. “We didn’t want you to find out this way.”

“How else would I find out?”

Donny stood up. “I should probably go.”

“No, hang on, hang on,” said Anders, heading back to the kitchen with Donny’s glass and his own. “Let’s have another drink.”

He refilled Donny’s glass from the faucet and poured himself another scotch, a little more than he’d intended, so he took a few gulps from the top in an attempt to be discreet, which made him cough and made his head feel unsteady. When he caught his breath, Donny had his coat on.

“Here,” said Anders, handing Donny his glass. The booze had left his throat feeling scraped. He touched his tumbler to Donny’s water. “To your happiness,” he said.

If he went ahead and pictured the luau of his wife’s second wedding, with its grand roast pig and oldies playing on an outdoor terrace, with its guests’ flower-print skirts and linen suits, what he imagined her friends talking about when his name came up was that they didn’t understand his decisions but that, as Helene had said so many times it had become a kind of mantra, they hoped he’d figure it out. And if he pictured the invitations and the toasts and Sophie Ashby reading from First fucking Corinthians, what made him tremble all of a sudden with the booze rising to his head was the thought of all that midlife reinterpretation, all those platitudes—about how love was long-suffering and love was not resentful and true love never ends, even if it took a couple of tries to get right.

He finished the scotch and put the glass down.

“So what’s with the ribbon?” he said, wiping his mouth.

“I’m sorry?”

He pointed at Donny’s lapel. “That.”

“We’re doing a thing.”

“A thing?”

“Instead of wedding gifts, we’re asking people to donate. Cancer research. Helene has a vision of the whole wedding wearing these.”

“That’s really nice,” said Anders and he pulled out his wallet.

“Anders. Don’t do that.”

He took out some twenties, easily a hundred dollars.

“Please,” said Donny.

“It’s a
gift,
” said Anders. “Here.” He fanned the bills in his hand. “I’m not going to beg you.” Donny didn’t move. “Going once…going twice…” Anders opened his hand, and the money fluttered to the floor. They stood for a moment, looking down at it. Eventually Donny bent over and picked it up.

When he was gone, Anders found himself alone in his kitchen, staring at the ribbon in his palm as if it were an insect. The wind was howling now, pattering the lights against the siding like hail, and it occurred to him just how gaudy his decorations actually were. They were awful, those lights. They were pathetic. He opened his door and stood on the spotlit slab of his landing, his breath coming in dramatic white puffs. It was nearing the winter solstice, the black total beyond the glare of his lawn. He walked out to the spotlight in his socks and yanked it from its cord. The relief was immediate. He did the same for the inflatables and the deer, then tossed them together in a pile. A moon appeared, bright and tiny, and across the street a night owl sounded. He popped the valve on the inflatable carolers and stomped on them in his socks, trying to get the air out, and when that wasn’t enough, he rolled on them with his whole body until they were flat. He did the same for the inflatable snowman in his globe and the hamster in a Santa suit, using his fists and his arms and his knees until he was lying in the yard, spent, exhausted, and staring up at a silver raft of stars.

There were guys
who bought Porsches, even Ferraris, and drove them to the station during the summer months, stepping out on Monday morning in shades as if to imply they had just rolled in from a weekend of entertaining girls and fighting crime. The Thing, though, was the opposite of that. It was a faded orange contraption from the 1970s, made by Volkswagen, with the angular body of a military vehicle and a leaky canvas roof that could, with a team effort, fold back to make the car a convertible—a process akin to dismantling a circus tent. Anders had first seen it parked on a front lawn across town on a warm spring day after Helene had informed him she was again pregnant; he had set out to buy her flowers, a gesture that felt right because it was good, another child, damn, a blessing, but before he made it to a florist, he came across the Thing and stopped, needing desperately to own it.

It turned out to be a steal. The guy took cash for it, an even grand, and let Anders pick it up that evening with Helene, who took one look at its Beetle-like headlights and orange body and shook her head and kissed him on the cheek in a way that he knew meant she hated it.

“C’mon, let’s take it for a spin,” he said.

“How ’bout I follow you home?”

And so he drove it, this oddball car, at daybreak and long past dusk, puttering up the road to the station, audible for several blocks, grinding the occasional gear, and making, for at least the first few years, a bit of a scene. He loved to drive up to the platform in the Thing in the same way he loved to inform people that his particular town, right here on the gold coast of Connecticut, had in fact been settled by artists, was where Fitzgerald had supposedly written the opening of
Gatsby,
where Salinger had once lived, where drugged-up Robert Stone had banged away for a National Book Award. It was quiet and affordable and
funky,
he would say, as if to imply the last word was somehow the most implausible. Funky. A place with its own sense of self. A place that valued differences. The sort of place where a guy could drive a loud, orange Euro-jeep that announced its arrival each morning to a platform of men reading newspapers meticulously folded into single-column strips.

It became his signature, so that his favorite part of the day was when he was back in the Thing with the windows down, listening to its rumble like a melody and smelling its exhaust as he followed the long, serpentine train of taillights that wound their way toward his home. In the warmer months, Helene gathered the playgroup for barbecues, a weekly reunion of commuters and stay-at-homers in the long summer dusk. They were lovely get-togethers, with charcoal and cold beer and cut-up hot dogs on Styrofoam plates, but around the fourth drink, conversations tended to split along gender lines and turn argumentative. By dark everyone would have dispersed except Mitchell and Sophie, who liked to steer the discussion to Major World Problems and force Helene and Anders to take sides, with Helene supporting Sophie no matter her position—a move that somehow forced Anders into an uneasy alliance with Mitchell, who often said
irregardless
and when he drank could be terribly mean.

“I don’t see why you guys have to get all know-it-all-y,” Helene would say in the tense moments after they had finally left. “You talk at us like we’ve never read a newspaper.”

“
I
don’t do that.”

“Oh, really? You want to remind me one more time where New Guinea is?”

“Well, it isn’t in
Africa.
”

“There.” She pointed at him. “That’s the tone.”

“Helene, please, it’s been a long week.”

“That doesn’t sound anything like an apology to me.”

“I’m sorry, okay?”

She nodded and put her head on his chest, playing absently with the hair there. “If it’s not in Africa,” she said, “where the hell is it?”

It was on one of those nights, about the time the others had begun to leave and they had run out of ice, that he received the call about his father. It was the pancreas, his brother had said as Anders stared into the empty ice bowl he was holding. When he hung up and looked out at the porch, Helene had someone’s baby in her arms and Mitchell was trying to shake a sip from a cup full of crumpled lime wedges.

The reserves were in the basement freezer, which was filled with ancient Popsicles and ice trays that required cracking one cube at a time. He went down there and took a moment, easing himself into a leaky beanbag chair and letting his head loll back. It was already dark, which meant it was much later than it seemed, and the talk on the patio had turned from the schools problem to the homeless problem, a subject that had already made the whole table hoarse. He often took a moment down here with the lights off and the faint mildew smell of the carpet—a habit that was becoming more and more frequent during these barbecues; sometimes he brought his drink with him and finished it in the dark—but he had never before been overcome by the feeling that he would have to stay here the rest of the night.

His father, in all those years, had never come to visit, and though Anders knew it was a matter of principle—a grudge he would never relinquish—what he couldn’t reconcile himself to all of a sudden was that it had never been discussed. Instead, on his terrible visits home, he would find himself sitting across from his father in his wingback chair, the screen door open and the crickets singing and their drinks gone to water, and feel the need to mortar their silence with the many pleasant details of his life. His father would listen as Anders prattled on about executive training or the apartment they might buy or the flower guy on Seventy-Third who knew Helene by name, and, though his every expression seemed shaded in judgment, his father wouldn’t say a word. It was absurd, this battle of pride, and as Anders slumped in the basement in the dark, simmering with judgment of his own, the idea for the video had come to him.

It would be, as he described the project to Helene in bed that night, a modern greeting card, a postcard come to life for his suddenly ill father. Though if he was completely honest with himself, having just settled in their house in the burbs, a colonial so finely restored the clapboards looked synthetic, he knew the video was actually an attempt to answer, through the wonders of technology, the unspoken questions he had felt in the tinkling of his father’s bourbon.

What followed was a perfect July Saturday, a lush, bright morning where the leaves shone silver in the light and even the yellow stripes on the pavement looked new. After heaving the outdated mower up and down the yard and squaring the corners of their hedge, he sat on the bed while Helene tried on six summer dresses until he found the one that most closely matched the dress in the video in his mind. Downstairs, he snapped off the cartoons, pulled his boys into clean shorts, and took them outside, where he unwrapped a Wiffle Ball set and, using gardening clogs as bases, explained to them the fundamentals of the game. They were too young for it, easily distracted, and when the videographer arrived with an entire suitcase of equipment, Preston was toddling around the front yard, taking swings at the ball in the grass as if the bat were a golf club.

The shoot took all day; even the opening frame—fade up to find Anders and Helene standing in the front yard, arm in arm behind their boys, all of them smiling before the high square facade of their home—took over ten takes because the boys weren’t looking at the camera, or the sun slid behind a cloud, or a car with a muffler problem roared past, and by the time they had been to the beach and the neighbor’s pool and had taken the Thing for a tour of town, even the videographer, whom Anders was paying handsomely by the hour, had lost patience.

“All right, Preston,” said Anders during their picnic in the park downtown. “Before you take a bite of that sandwich I need you to come over here and sit on my lap.”

The boys hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the picnic, which was supposed to have happened four hours earlier, had the labored pageantry of a chore. He pulled his younger son into his lap, and before they could get the shot set up, Preston threw his PB and J in the dirt. When Helene picked it up, she gave Anders the look that meant he had ten minutes, tops, so he took the sandwich from her, tore off the sandy part, put it back in his boy’s little hands, and commanded him to eat. Preston threw it again, launching it this time to the edge of the river, where a pair of gulls took turns mauling it. Anders knew he couldn’t let loose on a four-year-old, not the way he wanted to, so when Helene lifted Preston from his lap and announced she was taking the boys home for dinner, he let her go ahead to the car even though there were four locations left on his itinerary. He started to clean up, stacking plates and cups around the picnic table, and when he could see they had closed the car doors, he slammed his fist onto the table again and again, until his pinkie was fractured in three different places.

He couldn’t open his hand, and before he could call to Helene, he noticed the videographer was still standing there with the red Record light on. “Turn that off,” he said, but the black eye of the lens just stared, and, in the camera’s silence, he felt his own father’s gaze beaming all the way up from North Carolina. So he turned to it, held his fractured finger against his stomach, and said, “As you can see, Dad, I’ve got just about everything under control.”

The final cut arrived two weeks later, in a black plastic case like a Hollywood movie, and he gathered everybody in the living room to watch it, the curated film of their lives. He was pleased at how vibrant it was, how colorful everything looked, how even the brown swirl of his own hair seemed to glow in the light. The children were thrilled to see themselves on TV, and even Helene, who had suffered graciously through the whole ordeal, seemed taken with it, squeezing Anders’s good hand so tightly it made him flush with pride.
Look at us,
she seemed to say.
Look at what we’ve made.

But somewhere during the long splashing shots at the pool, when the loud buzzing of a plane overhead obscured the audio completely and Anders’s swimming lesson with Tommy—a shot he had insisted on, instructing the cameraman to keep it rolling until the boy could doggy-paddle on his own—felt interminable, Preston dozed off and Tommy began drawing a design in the carpet. So Anders paused it and put the boys to bed and let Helene disappear into her paperback mystery, then came back down, alone, to watch the remainder. What he couldn’t help noticing, besides the color and the sunshine and the way the breeze kept blowing out the microphone, was that at the side of almost every shot, he saw himself standing with his clipboard tucked under his arm, glancing nervously at the camera. It was the same expression, he was sure, his father had been watching for years from between the leather wings of his Chesterfield. And whenever the camera focused on him, he would turn to it and address it directly—“The water around here, Dad, is quite chilly”; “The convertible takes a while, so bear with us, but we’re experts at getting this roof down”; “This downtown, Dad, is probably about the size of Fayetteville, and look, Tommy’s school is just across the river.” And he kept repeating, as if it were scripted, as if he had forgotten that the whole production was just a way of saying
We miss you
and
Get well soon:
“Dad, I think you would really like it here.”

And he wasn’t faking. He
was
proud of his life, proud of the whole domestic spectacle, the little bubble of safety and opportunity he had created, already, for his boys. That was adulthood, wasn’t it, the creation of a world just a little better than the one you were born into? And why not show it off, why not, in an hour-and-a-half-long pageant, show your father the life that, like it or not, he had helped to build? This was why Anders had sent the tape to him, even though he had had to force himself to watch it all the way to the end, to the moment Preston had thrown the sandwich and his family had retreated and Anders had banged the table, and all of it was still in there, including his strained look of disappointment as he clutched his hand to his belly and his sad little laugh and his admission to his father that, despite the hour-and-a-half inventory he had just watched of Anders’s very good life, he had no control at all.

His mother died not long after his dad, and when Anders returned home with his older brothers to clean the place out, he found the video in a boxful of letters dating back to World War II. It was still in its black plastic case, and Anders saw, when he popped it open, that it had been stopped halfway through. Someone had watched at least part of it. And though he could picture his father propped up in his hospital bed and grinning at Preston’s misuse of a Wiffle Ball bat, he knew that there was no way his sick father had made it all the way through and then started it again from the beginning, and so the only unscripted moment, the only moment that felt to Anders like an honest reflection of his life, his father had never seen.

He finished watching the video at about the same time he finished his fourth scotch, his screen becoming a bright wash of blue. He was rewinding it to start the thing again when someone knocked on his window. He assumed it was his neighbor and was surprised it had taken her this long. He’d left just about every light from his display strewn across his lawn so that the yard had the inert quality of a massacre. He slumped down on the couch and took a pull from his glass. She tapped again, this time more insistently, as though Anders’s mess were somehow a problem that had to be solved now, in the middle of the goddamn night.

“Dude!” someone shouted. “I can
see
you.”

When Anders sat up, Charlie Ashby was at the window, his face haloed by the shaggy mushroom of his hair.

“Evening,” Charlie said through the glass. He had a camping headlamp strapped to his forehead.

Anders opened the door. Charlie was knee-deep in barberry hedges, wearing only a thin hooded sweatshirt and a strappy mountaineering backpack that sagged off his shoulders. He broke into a grin. “I had a feeling you’d be up.”