The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (5 page)

“Sorry about that,” she said, standing on the other side of the desk like a guest with a complaint.

“About what?” He shuffled through some papers and scribbled something in the ledger. When he glanced up, Helene was still there, smiling at him. She came around to the empty stool.

“You really stay awake all night?”

“It’s not bad.” He pointed to a big thermos of regular coffee. “With all that.”

To pass the time during the quietest hours, he’d been whittling a squirrel out of driftwood that he hoped, eventually, would find a home beside her ceramic friends.

“Are you in love with me?” she said.

He looked up from the ledger. It felt like an accusation.

“Of course not.”

“Because we love you. We both do, you know that. But we can’t have—”

“I said I didn’t.”

“You kissed me.”

He chewed the inside of his lip.

“Did you two have a little conference up there?”

“Donny’s not stupid.”

“I had a
fever
when that happened, by the way, and I apologized. What do you want me to say?”

“I just want to be clear.”

He took a deep breath and managed a smile. “Don’t worry about it. I get it. I understand completely.”

The squirrel’s tail was still a beige block when he tossed it onto the woodpile out back. When Helene stopped coming to their room altogether because of him, and Donny sulked in after practice alone and refused to talk, Anders finally went out to retrieve it. It was buried under a frozen mound of split logs but otherwise unharmed. The wood was still white and fresh where he’d cut into it and it still smelled like the sea and the trees, which was to say like the air he’d come to associate with both Helene and his freedom. He finished the creature with details gleaned from a wildlife encyclopedia—the texture of the fur, the inset ears, the tiny frown of a mouth—and decided to leave the driftwood unpainted. He arranged to meet her for supper in the dining hall and tucked the squirrel in his big wool coat’s pocket along with a card he’d made using a long flat strip of birch bark, but the dining staff wouldn’t let him in. His ID number, said the woman in chef’s pants at the door, was invalid. Inside, he could see Helene sitting alone at a table, waiting for him.

“Look, I’m meeting someone,” he said. “If you could just let me tell her—”

“Sir, you’re blocking the line.”

He yelled for Helene and waved his arms.

“This facility is for enrolled students only.”

He left a note in her mailbox afterward explaining it all—how his father had sent a letter and the college had suspended his aid, so he’d taken out the maximum amount of loans so he could finish the semester and was living in a room above the Penobscot Saloon, which stank of cigarettes and sour whiskey and whose jukebox rattled his floor every night until two, but that he’d love to see her, if only to give her something, a thank-you of sorts for the time she’d saved his life. But she didn’t write back to that or any of his subsequent notes. Her life must have been much easier, he figured, with him out of the picture. Donny’s room was now a single with two beds that could be dragged side-by-side to make a kind of honeymoon suite, and at hockey games she could ring the cowbell with abandon at every concussed opponent, and mostly she could spend time alone with her boyfriend without feeling like she was disappointing anyone. So you can imagine his surprise when she showed up at his door on a warm April night, holding a stack of his letters and the fat, creased spine of his copy of
Middlemarch.

“Why do you keep sending me these?” she said.

He was packing, putting the few things he’d collected—books, mostly—into old liquor boxes. By the roar downstairs, he could tell it was somewhere in the one o’clock hour.

“Please,” he said. “Come in.”

His unmade bed was the only place to sit besides a laundry basket filled with books, so they both stood. She had a jacket over her party dress, and her ballet flats were speckled with mud.

“Can I get you anything?” He had a Coke and some saltines on the windowsill.

“Here,” she said, holding out the stack. “These are yours.”

“I was hoping you’d come by.”

“Take them.”

“I wanted to say a proper good-bye.”

She lowered her arms.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. I’m out of money.”

“So, what, like permanently?”

He shrugged and she plopped down on his bed, the book and the letters in her lap.

“There are loans, you know.”

He ignored that.

“Can’t you just ask your dad?”

Anders laughed.

“But you have a
life
here.”

He stopped laughing and looked at her. She had her hands balled in her lap on top of the book, and her toes were pointed together; she blew at a strand of hair that’d fallen across her face. Apparently she’d been drinking.

“I can loan you money,” she said all of a sudden.

Anders picked up the book from her lap and dropped it in the basket. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I have it. It’s just sitting there in an account. My grandmother wanted me to use it for real estate but—”

“Helene.”

“Don’t leave.”

He sighed and sat down on a box.

“How much wine have you had tonight?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Your lips are purple.”

“I’m trying to tell you something serious—”

“Yeah, that you want me to stick around so you can feel pretty and special without ever having to answer a single letter.”

“I couldn’t!”

Anders squinted at her.

“My
boyfriend,
Donald Fitzsimmons, also known as
Fitzy,
perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

“Fitzy?”

“It’s a nickname. It’s kind of new.”

“Good, then let’s call
Fitzy
to come get you.”

“You know, you’re a coward.”

“What?”

“Why don’t you ask me?”

“Ask you
what?
”

“Anders, you’ve never
asked
me.”

He watched her for a moment. When she was angry, her eyebrows looked as though they had been cinched with a drawstring.

“Wait a second. You made it
very clear.
You wanted no confusion.”

“I know.”

“So don’t come in here and start accusing me.”

“Just ask me.”

“Ask you what? There’s nothing to ask!”

She opened one of the letters and started reading. “ ‘I still think about you, you know—’ ”

He reached for it. “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that.”

“ ‘—obviously I do, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get a chance to—’ ”

“Helene.”

“ ‘—if I’ll ever get a chance to speak openly, and because I can only assume you’re reading these, I wanted you to know I saw you first. If that means anything. I know it’s stupid, and it probably makes me just another sad guy lurking around you, but it’s true. I loved you from the moment I saw you. I loved you from that very, very instant.’ ”

She looked up from the letter. Downstairs, the bar was roaring.

“This is really embarrassing.”

“You can’t go.”

Later, in the easy air of the summer that followed and the six semesters of mountainous debt he happily accrued, and much, much later, after he’d long paid that off and finished paying for the educations of their own children, when every bill-free return trip from the mailbox became a private toast to that accomplishment, he would think about the ways that debt and marriage were intertwined, how the taking on of one had meant the taking on of the other, and that once he’d signed his name to the first, there was only one way forward. It was a simplification, he knew, to reduce a marriage to the cold, flat terms of lenders and borrowers, especially considering all that later transpired, but the idea had first occurred to him on the beautiful morning Helene moved into his room above the Penobscot with nothing but a crate of knickknacks and a camping backpack, and persisted through the evening, eight years later, that he and his new bride left Manhattan for Connecticut.

The story he often told of how he and Helene, two youngsters in love with New York, had ended up out there centered on a particular day in 1975. They had been looking at an apartment, a real steal in the newly renovated One Fifth Avenue, a building that was a genuine prewar colossus, with charming brass fixtures and mosaic floors and a fleet of doormen with taxi whistles around their necks. They’d both rushed there on their lunch breaks and, as the story went, fell in love with an enormous two-bedroom whose every window looked onto Washington Square and the tangle of low-lying buildings beyond. Anders placed a bid and made an appointment with the bank for the following morning. But—and he’d lean in while he was telling this part, letting his voice stay very calm—on his way back to work, nagged by doubts about the future of that increasingly dirty city, he stopped for a paper and saw the headline on the
Daily News:
“Ford to City: Drop Dead.” So he canceled the meeting at the bank and withdrew the bid and so lost the apartment that was probably worth millions today.

It was a great dinner-party anecdote, and he used it whenever he could, partially because of the perverse pleasure he took in dangling a dream apartment in front of a bunch of ex–New Yorkers, all of whom had been forever infected by the city’s real estate mania, but mostly because it provided a plausible counternarrative to his life and asked them to enjoy for a moment what could have been were it not for President Ford: the Anders of Greenwich Village, who raised his children in the belly of the city and was not an interloper but a part of its storied fabric. He relished the brief pause that followed the telling, when he could feel the table considering that vision of his life.
There was another man inside there,
the episode said,
don’t jump to conclusions.
And thus, even though Helene had been there too, it became one of the stories that only he told, one that she must have listened to a hundred times, silently verifying it, even though they both knew it was false.

On the real day, in the real New York, it was blustery, bright October, the sort of day where you walked around clutching your jacket over your arm, and the clouds, like giant warships, revealed or removed warmth as they passed on to wherever it was they were headed. Anders took a cab down Park, with the trip’s enjoyable whoosh under the Pan Am Building and out the other side, where eventually stone and glass gave way to the sky and he could see, for the first time, the day’s magnificent blue. His cabbie had a heavy foot and caught a remarkable string of green lights, accelerating block after block, almost never stopping, which was fine with Anders, who could feel, with the window cracked and his suit coat unbuttoned, the stale air of the office fly from him and with it the remnants of a meeting that had left him unsettled.

It was silly, he knew, to get hung up on it. By any measure, he should have been celebrating. A deal he had sourced and pursued, despite the fact that it was considered around the office to be a total Hail Mary, had actually been approved, and there was a sudden surge of confidence in him among his superiors because of it. The deal was with an outfit called the Athena Property Group, whose executives wanted to turn the farmland at the northern edge of Kansas City into what they called a “neighborhood,” a campus platted with five hundred homes that, at least from the window of a regional jet as it descended into KCI, made geometric designs in the land that swirled and fractaled and reminded Anders of an abstract representation of snails.

At the time, it was considered ludicrous to be sniffing around in housing, with interest rates high and inflation even higher (Brad French, his immediate supervisor, had told him he was playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded). But he’d stuck with it because, if you looked a little closer, the numbers were good. Despite every national trend, demand in this particular case was clear—Athena had already presold over a hundred plots to families moving up from the city—and so, as far as Springer was concerned, it had a chance to beat the market. Which was why he’d pursued it to begin with, why he’d risked being laughed out of the room, and likely why he’d found himself being considered for a second promotion in so many years.

But the problem with Athena, the thing he was still trying to understand as the cab blew by Union Square, was that if you looked at the larger picture—specifically, the loans those hundred families were getting (almost all, it turned out, from the same thrift in downtown KC called Liberty Federal), not to mention the thin walls and cheap materials of the development—the whole thing became untenable. And it was untenable because, at a time when property values everywhere were evaporating, none of those loans had taken into account the possibility of those values doing anything but rising. It was all optimism, nothing else. He’d never seen a deal where no one on the other end seemed the least bit concerned about risk. He’d never
heard
of a deal like that. And yet when he’d brought it up in the meeting this morning, when he’d cleared his throat and mentioned that he was concerned about what kinds of loans all of these homeowners were getting, he was met with a kind of perplexed silence, a frankly embarrassing moment that was finally broken when Brad French, now the plan’s biggest proponent, asked him directly if he was changing his mind.

And what the fresh air coming through the taxi window was washing from him was the nagging sense that even though he’d been the one to source the deal, and he’d been the one to fly out to KC and have steak with Jim Cranby, Athena’s cowboy-booted owner, and bring back a stack of financials packed with impressive numbers, he should have looked at Brad French and that whole table of senior vice presidents and said yes, he had, he’d changed his mind. But the reason he was even in the room, the reason that all those people, including his own boss, were letting him speak, was that he already owned this deal—it was his—and so his success and his pending promotion were already tied to its fate. It had even become how he was identified on the twenty-third floor. Because he
was
good at it, he knew that. For all the reasons to move to the financial center of the universe and build a career at a behemoth like Springer, none was as compelling as that. He was already a success. So if some little savings and loan in Middle America was going to lose its shirt, too bad. And though the houses seemed cheap and flimsy and enormously overpriced, it wasn’t really his job to regulate such things. Jim Cranby may have worn shiny cowboy boots and two signet rings and he may have spoken with a boot-heel drawl that Anders felt was a little put on, but there was no question he was building houses that people wanted despite the shitty economy, and in that, there was good money to be made.