The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (19 page)

“I give him twenty-five minutes,” she said when she hung up. “Now go take a shower. You smell.”

When Preston came down from his shower, fruity and floral, his hair nothing but fluff, Sophie was lotused on her mat in front of the television. “Your tip’s on the counter,” she said without looking up.

“Thanks.”

“And your mother’s on her way.”

Preston stopped on the stairs. “What?”

She stood up and bent her body in half.

“You’re homeless,” she said by way of explanation.

He went into the kitchen and took the envelope, then stopped by the door. Sophie was on her back, legs up, her body in a perfect L, the flats of her feet facing the ceiling.

“Thank you for the shower,” he said.

“Oh, don’t run away.”

“I’m working, Sophie.”

“She was so concerned on the phone.”

Preston paused. “I don’t doubt that.”

She crossed one foot over the other. “Cut her some slack,” she said. “She’s your mother. She just wants the best for you.”

Preston let himself out.

Gil had a line of customers at the register, so he just pointed to the stacks of cases by the back door, each tagged with a pink sales receipt.

“Even these?” Preston called, pointing at two wooden cases, each seared with the crest of a champagne vineyard.

“Yes, sir,” said Gil. “That’s the real stuff.”

The cases were long and awkward, the size of children’s coffins, and when he tried to lift them, he realized they each held a single, enormous bottle.

“Who’s celebrating?” said Preston.

Gil shook his head. “Everyone.”

Preston hit the road. He racked two cases of wine in two different wine cellars, brought a case of Prosecco to a hair salon on the Post Road, and was on his way to a drop-off at an address on Beachside when he decided to open the envelope from Sophie and pulled over. It was, as he had suspected, fat with cash. She had filled it with twenties, but in the back she had also included a photograph, slightly curled with age and tinted with the authentic orangey light of the late seventies. In it, Sophie and his mother were locked arm in arm, sitting at a pea-green counter with fat, bewildered babies in their laps. The ladies were beaming, their eyes alight with the ineluctable pride of new parents. On the back she had written,
Call your mother,
and then, under it, she had added,
(Or I’ll find you).

The baby in the photo was actually Tommy, not him, and, technically, Preston hadn’t left, his mother had tossed him from her home, but he understood Sophie’s point. No matter how he felt about his mother’s new life or her judgmental sighs or even her big, hairy hydro-fracking boyfriend (who, despite the fact that he happened to represent everything in the world that was evil, wasn’t actually such a bad guy), he had fucked up with Mr. Baptiste, there was no way around that, and now it was up to him, for once, to be the bigger person.

He left a message at his mother’s office, telling her he was okay, not to worry, he had found a job, and, after a moment of listening to the clacking of his emergency blinkers, he told her he was sorry.

He hung up, amazed at how simple it had been and how good it made him feel. He wanted to call her back and tell her about the wad of cash in his hand, and about how relieved Sophie had seemed to be in talking to him—how, for once, all his screwing up seemed to offer comfort to someone and how he kind of wished she had been there to see it—but the sun had crossed over into its afternoon glare and he could hear the many bottles clinking in the back, so he tapped the address of his next delivery into his phone and realized he was already there.

The trustees of his former country day school, a Vanderbilt summer home whose dormer windows, from where he sat, were peeking over its high stone wall, must have been having some sort of alumni event, which would explain the six cases of wine and the vague instructions to “deliver to the library.” He took the long, curving drive around to the front, where the estate was meant to be seen, and the grandeur of it nearly made him drive onto the lawn. It had all the trappings of a museum, down to the walled gardens and courtyards that opened onto still-green playing fields. He idled there in the drive, feeling his car shake in the otherwise serene campus, and he wondered at the pride he must have had to reject this, the arrogance, but in the same moment he remembered that even as a boy, he had sensed something rotten about the place, had had a kind of early awareness of the insidiousness of class, and that, combined with a deep disdain for tucking in his shirt, had produced in him the makings of a private-school anarchist.

His trouble began with a habit of unknotting his tie during school hours, a tiny rebellion that racked up so many demerits he was asked to re-sign the school’s hallowed honor-code book, a task that took him to the dean’s office and required his pledging an oath in front of his parents. It was a ceremony that was so offensive to him, such an affront to his self-sovereignty, that he retaliated by breaking into the school a week later and stealing the thing. This was an expellable offense that prompted wild speculation by both staff and students as to who had done it. Several years later, while home on some sort of endless boarding-school recess, he had gone into the crawl space behind his bedroom and found the book sitting there, clear as day, on top of the patio cushions.

Nonetheless, contrary to very popular belief, when the gymnasium went up in flames later that year, Preston had had nothing to do with it. Or almost nothing. It was his best friend who had done it, a small, quiet kid who seemed, at least to the faculty, to be under Preston’s influence to a near-hypnotic degree. But the truth was Preston wouldn’t have dreamed of something so violent—he was about subversion, not clumsy destruction—and perhaps his only crime in the ordeal was not believing Addy when he told him he was going to do it. Addy was the sort of kid who drew elaborate things on his arm and then said he’d had them tattooed. He was also tiny for the eighth grade, and once his braces came off, he seemed to have the sort of teeth you kept waiting for his head to grow into. For one reason or another, Addy was forever trying to impress him, so when Addy actually did it—torched the place midday while Preston and the rest of the school watched in terrible wonder—somehow everyone, including his parents, had secretly deemed him responsible. And while it wasn’t enough to get him expelled, during the unanticipated week off that followed, in which the school proclaimed that everyone should do some “soul-searching,” it was enough that his parents quietly shipped him up to St. Paul’s.

The day the school burned, he realized, was the last day he’d been here, so it was no wonder the place had accrued so much power in his imagination. At first, he had assumed its continuing influence was due to the grand injustice of it all (he could still hear the pubescent honk of his voice repeating, “I didn’t
do
anything!”), but now he understood it to be much simpler: he just hadn’t been ready to leave. This place, with its absurd rules, had sent him away, but seeing it now, he had almost no contempt for it. All he felt, other than appreciation for its beauty, was shame in the fact that he’d had to leave it.

There were a few cars, he noticed, parked in the headmaster’s lot, a private courtyard at the very front, so he pulled his car in there, rumbling over the cobblestones and barely squeaking by the chrome bumper of a vintage Mercedes. He parked at the most advantageous angle for unloading and propped up the back hatch with a ski pole. By the time he had a case in his hands, Dean Yates was staring at him from the doorway.

“Which one are you?” he said with the same broad, vague smile he’d used to tell Preston he had to re-sign the honor-code book. “Food or drink?”

“Wine,” said Preston, waiting to be recognized.

“Wine!” said Dean Yates, holding his arms out for a box. “The most important of all. Come with me.”

Though he’d been there since before Preston arrived, which was at least twenty years ago, Dean Yates had the sort of boyish face with deep-set creases that never seemed to age. Combined with the bow tie he wore every day and the rolled sleeves of his oxford shirt and the suede saddle shoes and the aforementioned inscrutable grin, he seemed the embodiment of the school’s spirit and ideals. While headmasters came and went, Dean Yates was always there, making announcements about changes in the schedule or new parking regulations, clapping from the bleachers at volleyball games, and upholding the seemingly arbitrary rules and traditions of the place with a protectiveness that was usually reserved for one’s family.

“We’re just around this corner,” he said, leading him into the library, which had been cleared except for a few tables draped in starched cloth. There were a few other faculty members in there, none of whom Preston recognized, and he was relieved Dean Yates was distracted so that he could slip out alone for the rest of the load.

The smell of institutions was remarkable. People cycled in and out, always changing, but the particular odor of cleaning agents and old wood floors and loafer leather and textbook glue and ancient chalkboards that never wiped clean and construction paper stapled to bulletin strips and the mechanical waft of Xerox toner and the sweet-and-sour scent of the lost and found—it was all identical, as though the true soul of the place actually lingered in its air. The permanence of it was comforting—not all that much time had passed—and yet, in his unwashed clothes and unshaven face, Preston felt the enormous distance between the school’s expectations and what he’d become.

When he had the whole delivery stacked neatly under a table and sorted by reds and whites, he brought the invoice to Dean Yates, who was rearranging some garlands that had been improperly draped.

“Have something for me?” he said with his back turned.

“Just need a signature.”

“I think I can give you one of those,” he said and when he turned around he paused, his head cocked slightly to the side, as if he had just now realized he hadn’t been talking to himself.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he said, for once not brandishing his smile. He walked up to him, his face still worried with something, and just before they would have collided, he stopped and pointed. “Preston,” he said, and the smile reappeared. Dean Yates held out a hand. “Welcome back.”

His ambassadorial sincerity was so finely honed that for a moment Preston forgot why he was there. It was as though he had been invited and had shown up, against all odds, to surprise them. But when he put the dean’s words in context he could feel their potential for irony, for mocking, and though Dean Yates’s face never broke from its good-naturedness, there was something about
that
that confirmed his suspicion. What Preston mostly felt, trying to squeeze Dean Yates’s surprisingly little hand, was underdressed and in need of combing his hair.

“And how are
you?
”

Dean Yates enunciated the
you
as though there had been a recent conversation among the members of the administration about the ones they had lost over the years, the worst cases, and Preston could tell, by the strained width of Dean Yates’s grin, that he had a special place in their canon. Preston tried to remember the truest piece of social psychology he had learned in school, which was that no matter how potent one’s own shame was in any social interaction—and in this town, every person he spoke with seemed to be smiling at him while simultaneously seeing the shriveled inadequacy of his heart—people were only ever thinking about themselves.

“I’m good,” he said, trying to maintain eye contact.

“You look it,” said Dean Yates, though there again was a statement that could mean anything. “I saw your mother—gosh, when was it, must have been a year ago now. She told me you’d graduated from Northwestern.” Preston nodded. “Fantastic school,” he said. “Good for you. Okay, where do I sign?”

Preston handed him the folded invoice and Dean Yates scribbled on it with a pen from his breast pocket.

“There you go,” he said and paused with that troubled expression. “Am I supposed to tip you?” And before Preston could respond, he waved his hand. “Don’t answer that. Of course I am. Follow me.”

They left the library and headed back toward the front of the building, where they wound through the entryway and into the dimmer, mahogany-paneled studies of the school’s top brass. He’d been inside Dean Yates’s office only once, a terrifying thing as a student, and that was to repledge himself to the codes of the school while his mother and father watched, and as soon as he stepped in there now he remembered why he’d been so distracted the first time. The walls behind the dean’s desk were lined with glass display cases filled with decorative eggs, ostrich-sized, with impossible gold-leaf details and the sort of minute patterns he associated with museum china. They were lit from above with pinpoint halogens that cast dramatic shadows all around the room.

“Those yours?” Preston asked while Dean Yates rummaged around in an unlocked drawer.

“Just a hobby,” he said. He stopped and looked up. “Here you go.” Dean Yates held out three crisp twenties.

“Oh,” he said. “Really?”

Dean Yates looked him directly in the eye. “Preston.” He had a commanding way of speaking, a kind of elder confidence that even now made Preston go still. “This may be kind of a weird thing to ask,” he began, his eyes falling to the desktop. For a moment it seemed as though he might sit down. “It’s all ancient history at this point, but I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t—” His eyes came back up. “Did you steal the book?”

Preston understood three things about this question. The first was that for a man like Dean Yates, the theft hadn’t been just a retaliatory prank but rather an affront to his very identity and therefore something he’d likely thought about for the last nineteen and a quarter years. The second thing was that it meant Preston’s parents had never returned the book, and for a moment he was overcome with love for them. And the last thing was that Preston could never in a million years admit he had done it.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he said.