The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (7 page)

It happened on the train, in the morning. Mention you have tingling in the shoulder and the whole silver beast is halted and you’re yanked out and thrown onto a stretcher at the East Norwalk station, your undershirt cut open and a paramedic counting and a train full of bovine stares.
It could happen to you,
he later wished he had shouted,
any goddamn one of you!
But the fact was that it hadn’t, at least then; it had happened to him, a man with two boys under ten, a man with so much of his life left.

What happened next wasn’t due to the fact that they rushed him to the hospital and shot his veins full of dye, or that they found four plugged arteries, or that they needed to saw through his sternum and open him like a steer, leaving a long glossy seam from his clavicle to his navel. And it wasn’t because of the three softest faces in the world waiting for him when he opened his eyes, or the lectures on diet and lifestyle he received from every cardiologist in the county, or the new lease on life that seemed to come standard with a prescription for beta-blockers and the nitroglycerine pill he was to wear on a medic-alert chain around his neck for the rest of his life. All of those things fell under the codified umbrella of near-death experience; all of those things, on the spectrum of trauma, were totally normal.

No, what caused him to buy a new station car and fall in love with new age music—regardless of his kids’ moaning, regardless of his wife’s ribbing, discs and discs of Yanni and George Winston, of Enya and the smooth sax of later Van Morrison, some merely the sounds of creeks and wind and trees that, if he closed his eyes, could transport him back to the porch of the Longfellow Inn—what sent him west on a two-week trail ride, a group of men on horses with guides that was transformative and life-affirming, regardless of its many similarities to the Billy Crystal comedy that came out a few years later; what made him come home and announce to Helene that they were moving to Alaska and living off the land, that the kids would adapt and she would get used to it, that it was the only option he could come up with that would keep him alive—to which she had told him to calm down and poured him a drink and reminded him gently of the quality schools in their district and the community the kids already had and how quickly twelve years would go by—what prompted all of that was returning to work a week after the staples in his chest were removed and finding it exactly the same.

Later, his shrink told him the name for this, for the tendency to feel isolated rather than connected after a seismic event, the tendency to withdraw rather than reach out in the face of death, but the term never felt totally right. What to call the sensation of unlocking your station car in the sucker punch of a winter morning, worrying about your heart rate and the tender scar down your torso, worrying that someone might make you laugh and you would be torn open by your own muscles, and arriving to an unchanged platform of sleepy men with trench coats and wet hair, yawning up the tracks toward New Haven? What to call the trepidation he felt as he climbed aboard that silver worm and then sat as it crawled its way along the coast, all the while worrying that it might happen again, feeling every beat in his ribs as the train swayed and rocked and finally hissed to a stop in the dark tunnels under Grand Central? What to call being carried along, as always, through the scent of burning railroad brakes and up into the high marble chamber, where the frenetic clicking of heels was suddenly a threat and his careful pace created an eddy of beige coats charging through the eastern exit? And what to call the Springer Building, an ugly tiered structure of mirrored glass that the designers had meant to be stately and imposing but was now squat and gaudy and shining like a fleck of mica in the canyon of Lexington?

And what to call the newly promoted Brad French, who greeted him with a get-well card signed by the assistants and a delicate pat on the shoulder, then asked him if he was up for work and announced that there wasn’t really room for halfway, that he really needed everyone to hit the ground running? To say nothing of the work itself—what to call that? He was responsible for millions every week, nearly a billion each year, numbers he had once cited to his father, who early on didn’t understand what Anders did. Now he was citing them to himself while in the men’s room on the twenty-third floor, staring at the white tiles in front of the urinal and feeling as though the doctors had replaced his heart with a bundle of dynamite. A billion dollars. That was something, wasn’t it? It was a way of affecting people and their lives. It was money that went to build pipelines or expand ballparks or revamp zipper production and came back, after all that, profitable. A billion dollars. That was prosperity, wasn’t it? That was enough to affect the whole damn world.

Of course, there was no way to be sure. As he left the men’s room and headed back to his desk, which was in an office large enough to need a decorator, he wondered what to call the feeling of looking at the trophies the company had awarded him, chunks of frosted glass with his name etched in them that had accumulated along the sills and cluttered the tables and, eventually, filled the big echoey drawer of a filing cabinet. What to call the long ride home during which he shut his eyes and heard the chatter around him with new ears, the hymn of decency, the song of work and home, all that consensus about the importance of children and schools and opportunity? And who could disagree with any of that? It was the very basis of civilization. So what to call the fact that it suddenly made him furious?

Twelve more years wasn’t much. Helene was right about that. The previous twelve had gone by relatively quickly. They were a blur, really. And it wasn’t as though he were asking himself to sacrifice for nothing—in fact, nothing was
more
important to him in the aftermath than watching his boys from the sidelines and helping them with long division and checking on their tiny sprawled bodies before he slipped off to bed. So why the thickening fog of isolation he felt gathering around him? Why those silent, resentful nights he spent alone with Helene, the awful feeling that his limited time was being wasted on people who didn’t appreciate it? Why his purposeful retreat from them into his own head, those long wooded walks, his exaltation of solitude, and his tendency, when with them, to lecture? Why had it gotten to the point, after a few years, that even his family referred to him in the third person, that they talked about him at the dinner table as if he weren’t there?

The day that he decided to announce to Helene that he wanted a divorce was also the day that Preston, their younger son, received his degree in social policy from Northwestern. Anders had already consolidated his investments and given Springer his notice, so they were both preparing for a change anyway. “So long as he doesn’t start following me around the grocery store,” Helene would say to her friends on the phone, as though he weren’t sitting right there. She had given up on trying to reach him by then, no longer prodding him to have conversations about his feelings or asking if he’d read the books she’d left for him on his bedside table, books about rage and aging and living in the present, all written by people with different degrees but the same empathetic squint on the covers. The truth was they hadn’t spoken much in months, so he understood why she later described what happened on the trip as an ambush and why, to her, all of it,
the whole goddamn phase of life,
had come out of nowhere.

They were staying in downtown Chicago, its early-May air so chilly they wore scarves and windbreakers and clutched themselves as though they might, at any moment, be torn limb from limb. He decided to tell her on their way to dinner, in the back of a cab whose green-and-white exterior made it seem more like a European police vehicle. It hadn’t been an ideal time, he knew that now—and if he could do it over, he certainly would—but they had just cradled hot drinks together in the hotel bar, staring out the window at Michigan Avenue, and Anders had felt for the first time in a while that he could confide in her, trust her with a piece of his internal life. So he told her: he was no longer happy, he was ready for a major change, and the only way he could see himself being happy was if he was alone, away from the job, away from the house, away from her.

The rest of the cab ride was spent explaining the logistics of the whole thing—how long it would take, how expensive, which lawyer he recommended for her, what they would get for the house when they sold it—and as he rattled on, as if making his way through a PowerPoint presentation, Helene sat quietly, watching the salt-stained roads over the driver’s shoulder, as though making sure the cabbie at least was following her directions. Anders couldn’t tell if she had expected it because she didn’t respond at all—she didn’t cry, she didn’t yell, she didn’t exhale in relief—she just stared forward until they made it to their son’s celebration dinner, where she marched into the restaurant and greeted everyone with a warm peck on the cheek before sitting down with the wine list and ordering two bottles for the table and starting the meal off with a proud toast to their son.

It wasn’t until they had gotten back to the hotel room and she had removed her earrings that she spoke a word to him. “You’ve always had terrible timing,” she said as he was folding down the sheets to get into bed.

To this, he laughed. He had spent eight extra years commuting, marking off days in his mental calendar as his younger child flitted from culinary school to organic farming to whatever you called a clear-eyed determination not to get a college degree, while Helene had defended the enriching nature of his experiences and noted the courage it took to embark on a personal journey, which turned out to be a five-year baccalaureate in the uses of recreational drugs.

“I don’t think my timing is the problem.”

“You never have any idea what’s going on, do you?”

“He’s over thirty years old. We finally got him a degree. I’d say
my
timing is fine.”

“I think I’m dying,” she said as she wiped off her makeup.

“Look, if you’re talking about my doing it on the way to dinner, I know. It wasn’t ideal.”

“I had a weird mammogram last week. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means,” she said, “you aren’t the only one who can die.”

That phrase rang through Anders’s head for the next few months, as Helene returned for biopsies and consultations, a lumpectomy, and, when that didn’t work, a mastectomy, taking the breast clean off and clearing the way for a four-month period of chemo and reconstruction. Whenever Anders was present, the doctors would talk directly to him, as though he, as her husband, were the guiding force behind her decisions. They would explain to him the options, and Anders would nod along, feeling the icy indifference from the other side of the room.

But he
was
there, maybe in part because of her pronouncement in the hotel room, maybe because it was his duty, even though he had started renouncing that duty with paperwork and lawyers at the exact same time. Mostly it was out of guilt, he figured, and some sense that it was a test of his character. Helene could be dramatic and at times a catastrophizer, and if he stayed consistent and supportive, the quiet rock in the treatment room, he could feel okay about sticking to his plan once the whole ordeal was over.

But it didn’t end. Cancer spread to lymph nodes, which somehow created a new tumor in the good breast, a tumor that had to be removed in the middle of the chemo treatments for the other one, and still, despite predictions from Helene’s friends to the contrary, he stayed. Twelve months he stayed, a full year suspended in the amber of uncertainty, calendar pages filled with appointments and tests and consultations. He was there for the diagnosis, and he was there for the procedure, and when that didn’t work and the tumor’s ugly cells had been outside the margins, he was there when Helene asked the doctor, frankly and without self-pity, if she was going to die. And when the doctor’s response was laden with worry and medical jargon, it was Anders who had squeezed her hand and let her rest her head on his shoulder and who said, as sincerely as he could, that everything was going to be all right.

He could feel, as the second mastectomy approached, that he had become the person she again relied on, and even though he appreciated her trust, it also terrified him. They no longer talked about the divorce, she no longer broke into fits of rage and tears every time he tried to reassure her, she no longer pretended to be asleep with the lights and the television blaring when he climbed into bed at night. They attended all the same parties with all the same people, many of whom seemed to have no idea that anything had changed between them. And, he supposed, it hadn’t. They even spoke of the future—vacations, his retirement, the sale of the house—the way that they had in the apartment above the Penobscot Saloon, with a dreamy disregard for any possibility that didn’t fit their vision.

What was it then that made him drink too much and cause a scene that year in the middle of the Ashbys’ party? What was it that made him skip out of the hospital during her second operation to catch a Will Ferrell movie, only to return three hours later to find his grown sons in the waiting room, both of them looking up from the glowing rectangles in their palms with expressions that said,
What the hell is wrong with you?
What was it, when the three men stepped into that darkened recovery room to find her wrapped in blankets and on a morphine drip, that made him afraid to even touch her? Instead, he had paced around the room, pressing every button on the hospital walls as if to say,
Look, dear, look how fine these facilities are! I told you I’d take good care of you!
What was it that made him continue on like this, flipping the channels on the television, seeing how the toilet adjusted in height, until Helene, her body still sloshing with morphine, gathered the energy to say her first words since having her remaining breast removed: “Don’t do that, honey”?

And why couldn’t he stop even then? Soon his boys were telling him, “Dad, stop it,” but he continued until it was time to leave and he went home exhausted, falling asleep in his loafers, sprawled out on their king-size bed alone. He dreamed of college then, their days above the Penobscot, cooped up in a studio, when all of it—the beater they drove, the cases of Schlitz they served their friends in their dirt-lot backyard while they projected silent films on a neighbor’s garage wall, the hours of classes they’d logged, the insurmountable bank loans, the instant coffee, the mended and re-mended elbows of his sweaters—all of it was in the service of their future life, the life that they imagined endlessly in their kitchen and in their sagging twin bed, the fantasy they shared that made adulthood and aging and the long slog of a career and a marriage seem like something worth rushing into.