The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel by Ted Thompson

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.
    When the cab arrived at One Fifth Avenue, Helene was standing outside the building, beside its long green awning, in a patch of bright sun. Her face was serene and tilted at the sky as she smiled in her sunglasses. A doorman opened the cab door, and they followed a real estate broker inside, clicking across the tile floor of the lobby, which still smelled of fresh paint. There was something about the broker, Mr. Addelfield, that reminded Anders of his father—it could’ve been the marionette lines that came down from the corners of his mouth, making him look forever as though he were frowning, or it could have been simply the attention he paid to Helene, who was the only thing in Anders’s life his father had ever approved of, but it contributed to the rush that he felt later as they were handed floor plans across Mr. Addelfield’s desk and he could see that, at least with his expected salary bump, the building’s asking prices were all within reach. It was an astonishing prospect that provoked a squeeze of his knee from Helene with every floor plan, as it suddenly seemed as though they were being shown a diagram of their future.
    After Anders signed the bid and felt the approval in Mr. Addelfield’s handshake, they decided to blow off work, and they took a walk lengthy enough to get them pleasantly lost in their new neighborhood. They found a café on the warm side of a quiet street and shared a bottle of champagne with their late lunch. Despite trying several times in later years, Anders was never able to find that café again, its canary-yellow facade lost in the haystack of those streets. But he could never forget that afternoon, with the light disappearing behind him and Helene wearing his suit coat, which she’d put on when she felt a chill, her slender frame swallowed in it as though she were playing dress-up in her father’s closet.
    They were exhausted when they got home to their rental on Seventy-Fourth Street and climbed the bowed stairs whose worn carpet had a sweet odor that combined with the champagne to produce in Anders a brutal headache. Though the apartment was dark and hadn’t been adequately dusted in four years, Helene had no problem pushing him through the door and onto the gritty rug, a fall that was as loud as it was jarring but that didn’t stop her from unbuckling his belt with the front door still open.
    Maybe it was prudish of him to be unable to concentrate on anything but that open door, what with his pants around his ankles and his wife’s underwear beside him, but he couldn’t. So he waited it out on the filthy rug and was unable to stop his head from smacking again and again against the floor, as though someone were trying to shake him into consciousness.
    When it was over, Helene closed the door and curled up beside him, falling asleep to the muted horns of rush hour, while Anders stared at the blank ceiling and felt his heart rumble in his head. The thing about the Athena deal, which he just couldn’t get out of his mind, wasn’t just that it was a crappy product; it was that all the people who’d bought it—families, like him and Helene—had projected their futures into empty rooms. And as outrageous as it sounded, he couldn’t help seeing their new apartment as being possible only because all those families had entered into bad loans—as the product of a deal that hurt almost everyone except the people who created it.
    Because that was the truth, wasn’t it? No one was benefiting quite as much from this as he was, and therefore, it would be hugely destructive for him to back out of it now, regardless of what