The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (11 page)

“To your mother, your sister, and your bicycle,” said Larry, as the three of them touched the wobbly glasses of complimentary shots. “Next one’s on me.”

And so it went, round after round, with Heather taking the microphone every half hour to direct a trivia question to the two tables, and even if they all answered it wrong, they got Budweiser koozies and more free beer. After a few hours, the kids at the other table left and she stopped using the microphone altogether, and since Larry was buying imports and top-shelf stuff, the girls stuck around, relieved, it seemed, to no longer have to talk about Budweiser and to drink for free while still, Anders supposed, clocking the hours.

And it was nice, the attention. The smaller girl, who said her name was Mona, “like the Lisa,” pinned a blinky button on each of them, set Styrofoam cowboy hats on their heads, and finally reached into her plastic goodie bag, brought out fake mustaches, blond and curly, and diligently stuck one on each man’s face. She did it all with a silent seriousness, never once cracking a smile. It was the way a little girl would play dress-up, placing the granny wig on her father’s head and talking to him between sips from an empty plastic teacup. It reminded Anders of Emma, his granddaughter, who he knew had never felt comfortable enough around him to play, which he also knew was his failing, and not hers, and five or six drinks in, he made a private resolution to set that right.

“There,” Mona said, standing back and looking at them, the two new cowboys who’d sauntered in. “Wait.” She leaned forward and straightened the mustache on Anders’s lip, touching it with four fingers. “Now that’s right.”

Heather clapped, and the men smiled bashfully, as though they were enduring something, though neither of them took any of it.

Heading to the men’s room, Anders looked at his watch. He hadn’t realized how late it was—nearly two—or how much he’d had to drink. The student union was dark, lit only by the exit lights; the music coming from the bar seemed boomy and far away. It was like being in an empty train terminal—it didn’t feel right. There was something about it that he liked, though, the palpable excitement of college that lingered in the smells and the very walls of the building. He felt it in all of these student buildings, these little incubators of generations. He could feel it in the empty pizza boxes and the half-finished coffees that littered the big, dark room. Anders sat down on one of the sofas and leaned his head back. He thought of the info desk, Helene’s name tag, the night he’d watched her from a distant table, pretending to listen to the Red Sox on his pocket radio. She’d had on a down vest and her hair was in a braid that was on the verge of coming undone. It was an image that made him enormously happy. The beginning. He thought of her in her nightgown at the Longfellow Inn, the smell of those dusty rugs, that big crackling fireplace and his head swimming in youth. That was a good place. That was a pure place. He could go back up there, stay at the inn, try a life as a professor. That would be a new beginning, a bold beginning, and it’s what he would do.

He reached into his breast pocket and felt the stiff rectangle of Sophie’s card. He took it out and tried to read it, but it no longer made much sense. It was the alcohol and the handwriting and the faded ink. It was the stupid amount of money he’d just asked for and the fact that he couldn’t pay it back and the fact that, in so many ways, Sophie had been right. He crumpled the card in his fist, or tried to, but it was too stiff to be satisfying, so instead he tore it into fresh pieces and let them litter the floor.

He was spinning. He sat up, a little nauseated. He had forgotten how badly he needed to pee. He walked around a corner, a little off balance, past the dark wall of mailboxes and the red glow of a Coke machine to the blinding light of the men’s room. The bank of urinals was new and gleaming, recently scrubbed with bleach, which lingered in the air, and as he swayed there, he glanced at himself in the mirror. He’d forgotten about the cowboy hat and the mustache, which was again crooked on his lip. He pulled it off.

Maybe he should grow a mustache. He stepped away and the urinal flushed quietly. He put the mustache back on, pressed the adhesive as hard as he could to his lip, chuckled at its sad lopsidedness, lost his balance, and grabbed onto the door. “Jesus, fuck,” he mumbled, and was answered by the unmistakable sound of a child retching.

“You all right in there?” he said.

There was no answer. The stall door was unlatched and when he pushed it open, Mona was kneeling over the toilet, her rayon dress bunched awkwardly at the tops of her legs.

“You okay?”

She retched again, throwing her whole body into it like a long jumper. “Oh, that’s okay,” he said and handed her some toilet paper to wipe her chin. “You’re gonna be fine.” He reached forward to rub her back.

“Please don’t touch me,” she said finally and she spit into the toilet, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I know what I’m doing.”

When she turned around, he saw her lipstick had rubbed off. She looked at his shoes, his crotch, and when her eyes made it up to his face, she said, “Can you go get Heather?”

He headed back through the dark union and to the pub, whose doors were closed and, as Anders discovered, yanking on them again and again, very locked. The lights were off and the music had stopped and there was no one in there, not even a bartender wiping the tables—or, it turned out, his good friend Larry.

Mona was rinsing her mouth at the sink when he came back. “I called us a cab,” she said, typing into her phone with her thumb and then snapping it shut and adding, “Heather’s such a ho.” She straightened her dress in the mirror, then reached up and pulled the mustache off Anders’s lip and dropped it to the floor. “Sorry,” she said. “That thing was making me really sad.”

Anders half expected to pass Larry stumbling home through the frozen leaves on the side of the road, so he kept his eyes open, watching through the blurry cab window the entire way back to his house. And it wasn’t until the cab pulled over and he looked across the back of the sleeping girl that he realized he’d given the wrong address.

Helene had decorated the place tastefully: garland around the front door, lit with a spot and twinkling with a simple strand of white lights. There was a candle in each window, and behind the glass the house was dark, peaceful, the sky above it huge and black. She had been their art director, instructing him from the ground on how to drape the garland and where to place the wreaths. She had an instinct for these things and she was always right. 

The cabbie looked at him in the rearview mirror, waiting for payment. It was three o’clock in the morning, no time for serious decisions, and yet before he could correct the address, he was out of the car and on his way to the front door, ready to tell her, finally, what a terrible mistake he had made.

The numbers weren’t
adding up. She knew the computer didn’t lie and that the cells of this particular program had been calibrated by her development director, who had a degree in statistics and who also didn’t lie, but unless Helene had accidentally added a zero somewhere, there was no way the budget for this fiscal year would balance. Which was really just perfect, considering the timing—three weeks before the board arrived expecting bagels and a budget surplus—and she would have to spend her morning sifting through sheets of numbers to identify places to cut or somehow come up with a painless solution (
Money from trees!
That was essentially what the board wanted,
a forest of money trees!
) before the fiscal year ended in June.

With responsibility came numbers, and her new job was held hostage by them. Budgets, stats, literacy rates, statehouse funding. And also by time: calendars that were synced to all her handheld devices and governed her days with their buzzes and chirps. This month alone she had the board meeting and an audit and a best friend who was camped in the hospital with her son, and somehow in the midst of it all, the holidays were supposed to happen, the Christmas Eve dinner she had insisted on hosting for reasons of tradition she now regretted. She had thought it was familiar, and after the year that she’d had, she found herself clinging to anything familiar. In months like this, it was less and less clear why she had courted this job to begin with.

Through the slats of her blinds, t
he gray industrial compost of Bridgeport Harbor that she could see was always there to remind her: this was a bankrupt city on every level, littered with dormant factory chutes and docks that had rotted to their stanchions; the red-and-white smokestack of an outdated coal plant standing like the shaft of a giant, filthy candy cane. Even the new single-A ball field and college hockey arena—built for the Volvo drivers and the Volvo drivers’ money—did nothing more than ensure that the only jobs available in the port of this city’s name were behind a concession stand. On bright days like this one, at the brightest hour of the morning, all that postindustrial blight seemed to absorb the light. Helene had worked here, on and off, for twenty-three years, and while the whole country got rich, this city had stayed poor. Or at least the people who lived here had. The ones who ran the city and the ball field and the harbor-front lofts, the ones who cornered her at council meetings and spoke of a utopian future in which the creative classes were lured out on the Metro North, seemed to blame the city’s misfortune on its own citizens and believed the best route to revitalization was simply to replace them. Which, of course, was why they needed all that state aid—to run out the riffraff. And to help pay the high property taxes on the developers’ homes in the surrounding towns.

She smiled. This was what the numbers did—they provoked her vitriol; they made her political. You couldn’t last in this job without staying in touch with the human element. Without it, there were just problems, big immovable problems, but walk through the center and peer into the classrooms, and there they were: people, brave people, sounding out the words to
Curious George
and transforming their lives in the process. Helping even one person in a year learn how to read—that was progress. That was a miracle.

She closed her blinds and called in her development director to go through the numbers; she didn’t have the time to do it herself. Her boyfriend—well, you could call him something more than that, though she had never understood the politics of the word
partner,
and given that he now lived with her (which was a whole other story), not to mention the fact that they were both over sixty,
boyfriend
just seemed absurd—anyway, her
guy
had instructed her to meet him in the city tonight at some Italian place in the West Sixties. He’d been so earnestly excited—something that had been in short supply for the men in her life as of late—that she’d agreed, even though it meant she had to leave work early, and if she managed to do that, on this day of all days, it would be another kind of miracle.

But first, her nine o’clock, a meeting with a client who had levied some serious accusations against his tutor, a situation that would not normally have been her responsibility except that the tutor happened to be her son. Preston had been living at home for three weeks because he’d been unable to support himself in Chicago. She’d convinced the board, perhaps regrettably, to ignore the conflict of interest and give her son an hourly wage for doing the same work that the volunteers did for free. So she and her man-friend and her thirty-three-year-old son had all been living under one roof, in bedrooms that were across the hall, and Preston, who was so furious with his father, so absolutely unforgiving in his judgment, had refused to tell him that he was even in town or that he was living at home. All of which was beside the point, but still, she hated lying—it filled her with a dread that was always more excruciating than coming clean—and she also hated accusing others of lying, as she was going to have to do in her nine o’clock.

The client was one of her favorites, a Haitian man named Guerlens Baptiste who worked as a mover and was learning to read, he said, so he could help his daughters with their homework. He had been a board-meeting talking point, possibly the spotlight story for their annual appeal, but then he accused Preston of stealing money from him. Despite the fact that she knew this to be ridiculous—Preston might have had some wayward years but he was no
thief
—it put her in a highly unfortunate position: she had to either ask the board to take her word for it or fire her son. In any case, her morning would be spent documenting Mr. Baptiste’s story with a finicky old tape recorder and writing a report, and she had to come to a decision that didn’t reek of nepotism before tomorrow’s meeting.

She had all her calls routed to voice mail and turned off her cell phone. The last thing she needed were the interruptions, the relentless calls of apology—highly subtle, densely coded, interpretable-only-after-thirty-years-of-marriage apologies—that her ex-husband had been making pretty much on the hour.
Bloomberg
had a piece on fund-raising in the Internet age, he’d send her a link; the forecast mentioned snow and he wanted to remind her to tell the guys not to plow the graveled part of the driveway; Stop & Shop had a special on the kind of gruyère she liked; there were geese in Hillspoint Pond,
geese,
if you could believe it, so if there was any other proof those people needed of the existence of global warming, as if the melting of half of Greenland hadn’t been enough, he was staring at it right now in Hillspoint Pond; on and on, when all he really wanted to know was if she’d forgiven him for being a total lunatic and waking up the house at three in the morning. He should have just considered himself lucky that Donny had recognized him before the nine-iron had taken off his head and that the police had been so understanding, but instead, the messages were piling up, turning her phone into an electronic guilt machine that made her angry and ashamed at feeling guilty in the first place, a guilt she would never tell anyone about because it implied that she still cared for him, even after this, the last piece of bullshit in the massive pile of bullshit he’d put her through.

In the dim, cramped confines of her office, Mr. Baptiste was immoderately tall. Part of it was the room, which had been closing in on her with piles of unread
Times
and the near-daily reports on the rising illiteracy and shrinking incomes of the largely immigrant populations they worked with, but part of it was also his proportions. He was skinny, unbelievably so at the waist, with the broad shoulders of an Olympic swimmer and the sort of charming short dreads that (she hated herself for even thinking it) would photograph quite nicely for the organization’s appeal. His flannel shirt was open to a tank top, and over his shoulder was a leather weightlifting belt that he’d punched with an extra hole nearly an inch past the tightest one. He must have been a mover who used his frame—the mere physics of his skeleton—to lift objects twice his size, a thought that brought to mind the absurd image of this man carrying leather sofas around the great rooms that had been tacked onto the sides of all the saltboxes in her town. She opened the blinds to let in some light and cleared off a chair for Mr. Baptiste.

“How’s that?” she said. She placed the tape recorder, an ancient tool they still used for assessments, on the coffee table between them and explained that it was part of the organization’s protocol for dealing with these kinds of situations, and he should just talk naturally and try to forget it was there.

Mr. Baptiste smiled at this and she wondered if maybe she needed an interpreter who spoke Haitian Creole.

“So,” she said. “I understand there’s been a dispute with your tutor?”

“It’s not a dispute,” Mr. Baptiste said, still with that smile. There was nothing in the least bit sarcastic or menacing about it. It was earnest, which made her wonder if maybe the man was cognitively impaired, even if the language was fine. “He stole from me.”

Helene nodded. “Okay,” she said. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Baptiste, would you explain everything, including as many specifics as you can—dates, exact things people said, anything like that.”

“He stole from me.”

Again Helene nodded. “Okay. Mr. Baptiste, if you don’t mind, I’m going to ask you some questions that will hopefully help you fill out your…” She couldn’t think of the right word.
Statement
?
Testimony
? Both implied that this was some sort of hearing, which, considering the situation, would be terribly unethical. “Perception of the events.”

“On November the twentieth,” said Mr. Baptiste, “my tutor”—he paused and glanced at Helene—“your son, told me about an opportunity to make money.”

“Okay,” said Helene. He could obviously understand quite a bit. “What kind of opportunity?”

“It was a game.”

“The opportunity was a game?”

Mr. Baptiste shook his head. He pretended to hold an object about the size of a racquetball and made a long curved motion with his hand, as though something were protruding from his knuckles. “Like this,” he said.

“Lacrosse?”

Mr. Baptiste shook his head sadly. There was real disappointment on his face. “They throw the ball,” he said and before she could say anything else, it hit her with an awful recognition what he was talking about.

“Jai alai.”

Mr. Baptiste smiled.

“He told you that you could make money on
jai alai?
”

“My truck is broken. I tell him this and he tells me he can help.”

Helene exhaled. This was more like it—Preston offering to help. Of course he would offer to help.

“I didn’t have enough but he told me to bring him the money and in one week he would bring back more.”

“I see,” she said. “And did he tell you how he planned to bring you more?”

“He said he knew who would win.”

Years ago, there had been a jai alai facility visible from I-95 somewhere around Milford, one of the stranger aberrations in this part of the world, and as a child, Preston had been fascinated with it. Because of the nature of the sport and its huge dependence on gambling, she’d refused to let him attend the games (you didn’t bring a kid to the dog track, did you?), though he did two reports on it for his Spanish class, hot-gluing photos he’d Xeroxed from the encyclopedia to a poster board. His reports, what she could understand of them, always emphasized the danger of the game—the injuries that could occur when a ball was moving at high speeds—and so she’d assumed his fixation with the place was just an early-adolescent curiosity with the forbidden. Though she could’ve sworn that the facility had been closed since the first Clinton term, something about Mr. Baptiste’s story was making her uneasy.

“Did he say
how
he knew who would win?”

“Your son,” said Mr. Baptiste, “is very persuasive.”

“But what did he tell you?”

“He told me he knew a man who knew who would win—it was unexpected, nobody would guess. He said he was putting in all of his money—”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“He said he was putting in all of his money.”

Helene composed herself, nodding.

“And that if I wanted a new truck, I should give him what I had. Like I said, your son is very persuasive,” he said. “So I brought him my two thousand—”

Helene held up her hand. Two thousand was too much. It took this out of the realm of a good-hearted but boneheaded suggestion and into plain-old con.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Baptiste. How much did you say it was that you gave him?”

“Two thousand dollars,” he said.

Helene leaned forward and clicked off the recorder.

She taped a note to her office door and slipped down to her car. She tried Preston from the highway and was greeted over the stereo by the solicitous chirp of his voice mail. She hung up and merged into the fast lane on I-95, which, during the hours it wasn’t clogged with traffic, was something like the Autobahn. Instinctively, she’d gotten on the highway heading south, toward home, but it was already after noon, and something in her gut told her to turn around. She exited at Black Rock, took the roundabout without braking, and floored it up the ramp. She’d had a better idea.

According to the Internet, there was a new jai alai fronton not far from the old one, which, she could see from the exit, had been turned into a sports bar with a vast, empty parking lot. The new arena had been built beside a batting cage at the end of an anonymous office park, and it was clear that no one was there. She supposed that after noon on a weekday wasn’t a big time for underground gambling, but she did notice a few cars parked along the side of the building, so she rapped on the locked door until somebody came to answer it, a small man who appeared to be cleaning the floors. Behind him, pinned to the bulletin boards, were flyers for youth leagues, camps, in-house tournaments, all brightly colored and welcoming, in both Spanish and English. The place smelled less like an OTB parlor than a rec center, and as the man looked at her, she felt suddenly foolish.