The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (2 page)

Charlie let out a laugh and went back to the thing in his hands—a mini-pumpkin, it turned out. After a moment he glanced up again. “Seriously?”

Helene had met Sophie Ashby in a prenatal fitness class, five strangers in the shallow end at the Y doing a workout so low impact, she called it “manatee hour.” When the babies came and Helene found herself with two tyrants in diapers and the demands of a career, it was Sophie who, according to Helene, kept her from losing her mind. They started a playgroup, trading off tantrum duty and daytime PBS, and by pre-K, carpool drop-off became a respite of coffee and chitchat, and on Fridays a splash of wine, with Sophie indulging in two drags of a cigarette before stubbing it out in a potted plant while the kids ran rampant and Helene savored the thirty minutes that she was responsible only for her shiraz.

By the time Charlie came along, thirteen years after his sister, Samantha, the children of the playgroup had retreated behind the closed doors of their bedrooms, and all the hand-me-downs had long ago trickled to Nicaragua. Although everything about Charlie’s birth appeared to be an accident, he was, in fact, a miracle of progesterone and planning, a little bundle of joy born to a woman of forty-four and into her circle of love-starved friends. He was passed around for babysits and his bassinet was given a space at the table during dinner parties, where he was as quiet and pleasant-smelling as a candle. When Samantha became Sam and buzzed her hair and had a bar jammed through the soft skin under her lower lip, Charlie was in the Cub Scouts with an adorable little neckerchief. And when Sam moved out to Seattle—always too poor or too busy to fly home; likely a lesbian; even more likely a vegan; her only regular communication with her family the poorly copied issues of a magazine she’d created, a jumble of cartoons and words that bled right off the page that neither Mitchell nor Sophie could make any sense of—Charlie would sit on the sofa in the living room and regale dinner guests with an impersonation of his gym teacher, his legs crossed exactly like his dad’s.

To say he was spoiled wasn’t quite right—he was simply given everything: a Gameboy he bowed his head to at the restaurant table, and sneakers with wheels embedded in the heels. And when those things failed to please him, his parents capitulated and bought him a box turtle that they knew would live forever and that he used to set loose at inopportune times so that, at least once, a dinner guest was sent shrieking from the bathroom.

“You know how to rip one of these?” he said, holding up the pumpkin. There was a Bic pen jammed into the side of it and a trough hollowed out that he’d filled with pot.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“This,” he said, “is resourceful.”

Curiously enough, the last time Anders had participated in this ritual was several years ago on a vacation he and Helene had taken with Charlie’s parents. Not four hours into their stay in a Costa Rican villa, Mitchell Ashby had produced rolling papers and a dime bag to go along with the afternoon tea. The vacation, it seemed, gave him permission to revert to the habits he’d formed in prep school, habits he’d had to give up with their firstborn. Anders had felt as helpless then, when he was asked to roll the thing and spilled most of the delicate leaves on the glass countertop, as he did now, with the contraption held in front of his face and his new friends staring at him with calm expectancy.

It was hard to describe the efficiency of what followed—the hurricane of drug that entered his lungs and the brutal eruption of coughing that ensued—but by the time he’d pulled himself together, the boys had all cracked wide, knowing grins.

“How’s the party upstairs?” Charlie asked, blowing a hit casually out of the corner of his mouth. “Real rager?”

Anders liked Charlie. He was a smart kid. He was hilarious.

“How’re you feeling, Anders?”

“I feel great. Joyful. And sad. So sad. Jesus, sadder than I’ve ever felt before.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie.

“This grass is serious,” said Anders.

“Nah,” he said. “That’s the PCP.”

They all nodded, somber themselves.

“Wait, what?” Anders said. Charlie blinked at him with yellow, rheumy eyes. “We just smoked PCP?”

Charlie shrugged. “We don’t technically know what it is. It’s more of a blend.”

Anders wasn’t even sure exactly what PCP was, though he knew it was serious and likely addictive, which made him more distraught, seeing himself for a moment spending Christmas at the men’s shelter, waiting in line with his cafeteria tray for a processed-turkey dinner served to him, sympathetically, by Helene’s community-minded friends. “I have to get back to the party.”

“Have at it,” said Charlie.

Reaching the top of the deck stairs, Anders realized why he had come—it wasn’t, of course, to interact with these people, but to see Helene, to talk privately with her about the party, about his isolation, to come clean with his lie about the house and tell her about the stupid thing he’d just done. Looking through the sliding glass door, he surveyed the party, the clumps of people and their muted conversations, all men without suit coats and women in wool; searching for Helene, whom he found, standing tall and proud with a glass of red.

He was startled by a knock on the glass and Mitchell Ashby’s face, hands cupped around his eyes, on the other side. He rumbled the door open and smacked a hand on Anders’s shoulder. “What’re you doing out here, buddy?”

“Getting some fresh air.”

He held Anders’s elbow and lowered his voice. “Well, I am so happy to see you,” he said. “It’s been a big year.” He sighed. “A big year. But it wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

“Thanks.”

“So, listen, I was actually looking for my son. He disappeared earlier and that’s cause for worry.” He grinned at Anders, who was watching Mitchell’s constricting pupils. Pupils, he suddenly realized, were remarkable.

“He was supposed to be in his room studying. Kid failed three of his exams,
three
of them, so I had to make some calls to the school.” He shook his head. “Phases,” he said. “Right now he’s entering one I call ‘brain-dead.’ ”

Anders was watching Helene over Mitchell’s shoulder. She had gathered a crowd, probably telling a joke. She told great jokes.

“I mean, it’s a different world.” Mitchell held a lit cigar with a curled index finger, as if it were the trigger of a gun. He spit something from the tip of his tongue. “They got the Internet, and they got amphetamines, and even though it kills me that I can’t do anything about it, I tell him he has to be
careful.
”

Anders heard a door click shut beneath them. Charlie had been listening the entire time.

“Did you hear about that kid who sucked down all that ecstasy and leaped from his dorm window in a loincloth? I mean, this is
real.
And since I can’t be up there every waking second, when he’s home I have to lay down the law. It’s a real battle, a real battle.”

Mitchell shook his head and stared at the deck flooring.

“I mean, Christ—what am I talking about? You know better than anyone. After age ten, they’re all pathological liars. They’ll bankrupt us. When Samantha was at Smith, you know what they were charging? And for what? The pleasure of teaching her to hate everything I stand for?” He puffed on his cigar. “How did you get through it? Seriously, with yours. Was there a program—did they drag him into the woods or something? I mean, I look back on what you guys went through and I’m astounded.” He shook his head. “But it worked out, that’s what matters, am I right? It worked out.”

Anders stared at him.

“Anyway,” Mitchell said finally. “The more important question is, How are you?”

“Excuse me,” Anders said, the words coming to him like a blessing as he stepped around Mitchell for the house.

It was somewhere into his third stride that he thought he saw what he’d hoped he wouldn’t and what, even a few hours before, he’d thought was hugely improbable, when he’d put on his first dry-cleaned shirt in six months and slapped some spicy stuff on his neck and had a moment of panic that Helene might have a date with her. Inside, she was chatting politely with a stranger, nodding and smiling, the fingers of her right hand interlaced with the fingers of the man next to her, Anders’s mother’s emerald ring protruding from that mess of fingers like a piece of costume jewelry.

Earlier that week, they’d had lunch in the back of a health-food store, behind aisles of puffed wheat and earth-scented vitamins, where you could sit at a thick country table and talk beneath the fluttering of Chopin for hours. It was there that Anders had first wanted to express his regret, where he’d wanted to tell her about the hours of CNBC he now watched, or about how much he looked forward to the mail, or about how he was thrilled the other morning to wake up and discover he had run out of cranberry juice, which meant he could make a trip to the store, which meant his morning had purpose. He’d wanted to tell her this, and about how terrified he was that he’d made the wrong decision, that the life he’d had before—the one that he’d rejected so vehemently; the one that he’d rushed to get out of after he’d decided it was them, his family, his children, his wife, who were making him so miserable; that it was
their
problem, not his, and if he could just get himself alone, away from all their demands and his absurd sense of duty, then he could be okay—
that
life, he’d wanted to tell her, was in fact the one for him.

But when he asked her, out of courtesy, how she was, she lit up around a mouthful of tuna salad and told him how happy she was, how at first she didn’t think she’d ever get through it but now the divorce and the lawyers and the moving trucks and the boxes of anniversary gifts all seemed so far away, and she thought she finally got it, that Anders may have been right all along, that the divorce was what was best for both of them. He’d thought about asking her then if she’d met someone, but all of this had come at him so quickly and so unexpectedly that all he could do was force a smile, finish his old-time seltzer, and tell her how happy he was for her.

Now it all made sense. He’d expected his wife to eventually take in an unmarried guy, just as she’d collected other wounded birds her whole life—sad divorcées and AA spiritualists and incessant complainers with fibromyalgia. He knew her well enough to realize that. But still he needed to talk to her. He needed to get it straight, the whole story—how long it’d been going on, how serious it was, if there was any chance she loved this guy. He pushed through, into the hot party.

“Excuse me,” he found himself saying to the man’s back. It was higher than Anders’s, and meaty. No one seemed to hear him. “
Excuse
me,” he said again.

In the way that familiar faces are often too close to place, he knew the man who turned around, though it took him a protracted moment to place him.

“Donny?”

“Holy cow,” the man said, holding out a huge hand for Anders to shake. “Look who it is.”

“I don’t get it” was all he could manage, though it came out more hurt than he’d intended it to and sent them both into a solemn, awkward silence.

“Anders,” said Helene. “Let’s get a refill.”

She went to the bar, stirred some bourbon with ice, came back, handed it to him, and settled into an empty sofa. “Sit,” she said.

Donny leaned on the arm beside her, leaving Anders the rest of the couch. The three of them faced forward, staring at the matte screen of a television. Helene turned to him and sighed. “Go ahead and ask,” she said. “Get it out.”

“How long?” was all Anders could think to say.

“A few months.”

“Months,” he said, cataloging everything he could remember—there was Emma’s horse show and OSU-Michigan and Thanksgiving, Jesus, Thanksgiving. Had Donny been there, at his dinner table, while Anders was all the way down in DC eating from a TV tray in his nephew’s suspiciously damp Georgetown apartment? Had Donny met the grandchildren? Had the
grandchildren
known?

He turned to Donny. It was startling how much of Donny had settled into his belly, all that upper body now a pillow for his big team ring.

“You live here now?”

Donny glanced at Helene. “I’m looking for a place.”

“Moving!” said Anders.

“Donny was just transferred to the city.”

“How about that. And you’re still married?”

“I was never married.”

“That’s right. You just sleep with married people.”

Helene turned so her face was only a few inches from Anders’s. Whatever he’d smoked was a serious narcotic. He felt as though he were drooling down his chin. “Please,” she said. “Don’t.”

He took a slug of his drink. “Don’t
what.
”

Helene shook her head in a way that Anders knew meant she was leaving the party, and he’d be the one to stay to the very end, drinking awkwardly with her friends. She lowered her voice. “Look around you,” she said. “Do you notice the people here?”

The rest of the room seemed somehow very far away.

“They’re too polite to say it, Anders, but they’re wondering why you’re here.”

“I was invited,” he said.

Her face fell into an expression of pity.

“
Everyone’s
invited.”

Even though he suddenly knew that was absolutely true, and even though he felt his dike of composure beginning to give way to a tide of humiliation, he didn’t say anything.

“What?” she said. “You think this is
funny?
”

He shook his head, but it was too late. He was laughing and wasn’t going to be able to stop.

She leaned in very close. “You were the one who wanted space,” she whispered. He nodded vigorously, as if to say,
I know, I know,
but she was already off. “I am so through with this crap, Anders, I am
done.
It’s not my job to babysit you anymore.” She shook her head. “Why would you come here?” she said. “You’re not welcome. These people are not your friends. I mean, you were the one who wanted out, so for God fucking sake, get
out.
”

He knew it would hurt like hell tomorrow morning when he reconstructed her words as best he could in his head, listening to the exact way she’d enunciated
welcome,
as in, “You’re not wel-comb,” trying to figure out if what she was saying was that he had no right to be mad or that he had no right to be there at all—trying to determine if his desire to hold her squirming against his chest as he had the night her mother died was during or after their little talk—and he knew he looked like a crazy person, giggling as someone scolded him, his eyes red, his drink mostly gone, and there was nothing he could imagine that would sober him at this point, until Mitchell Ashby came through the living room dragging Charlie by his armpits across the hardwood floors, yelling angrily for an ambulance. Charlie’s face was gray, his neck slack beneath his bushy head. Within seconds some doctors had gathered and pulled him out of the room with most of the party following, and it seemed a few seconds later the living room was filled with the eerie flashes of emergency vehicles, the scratchy voices on their radios cutting through the house like the Morse code of an urgent message.