The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel by Ted Thompson Page A

everything in his better self was telling him. Were this a normal day, he’d have been getting home about now, and he would’ve poured himself an Old Charter, stood in their galley kitchen, and talked the whole thing out with Helene, who, he knew, once she’d heard all the details, would have insisted he back out. But it wasn’t a normal day, and, lying exposed on the living-room floor, he could still feel Helene’s hand squeezing his knee, the flush of pride it brought him, his baptism into the world of One Fifth Avenue. He could still see Helene opening the bedroom closets and beaming at their size, and he couldn’t remember a time she’d seemed so happy. No, it was an exceptional day, the sort of day whole careers are built around, and he had enjoyed every second of it, the sudden awareness of how quickly they had gone from being kids to being property owners and the realization that he had done it entirely on his own—college to grad school to this —without the support of his family and without bending to the edicts of his father. So why did he find himself with a knot in his chest and a pounding hangover and the feeling that his wife, deeply asleep at his side, was clinging to him with all her might?
    It wasn’t difficult to maneuver his way out from beneath her arm, pull up his pants, and go down their creaking stairwell into the sober evening air. Their block was quiet and he walked west toward York, past the single-family mansions with giant planters on their stone steps, for once not even bothering to peer into their parlors and wonder what books lined their shelves. Instead, he stared straight ahead and moved at a purposeful pace until he hit Madison, where he caught a roaring downtown bus without bothering to note its number.
    He enjoyed the view through its big window, liked looking down on the hats and shopping carts on the sidewalk as the bus crept its way down the longest swath of the island. He hopped off at a dirty corner in Astor Place and wandered down Bowery, which he’d really seen only from the window of a moving cab but whose reputation he was suddenly drawn to—an entire district of deviants and drunks, of those who, his father often reminded him, were separated from the rest of us by only four or five decisions. He headed west to Bleecker, past the boisterous mobs of NYU, past the booming bars made famous ten years earlier by all of those folk musicians, past an elderly drag queen who was tap-dancing to a Dixieland tune playing from a radio at her feet. He was carried along through the smells of falafel and pizza, his jacket slung over his shoulder, enjoying the very casualness of the night air.
    He was twenty-eight, soon to be a senior associate at Springer Financial, a man by any calculation, and yet it suddenly terrified him to look at the wall of midtown, which began with One Fifth Avenue, right on the other side of Washington Square, and extended like an impenetrable forest northward from there. This was where he was headed and yet there was a part of him, a growing part of him, that no longer wanted anything to do with it. And it wasn’t just Jim Cranby and his cowboy boots, which he’d propped up on the table, right on the white tablecloth, at the end of their meal; or the soy farmers it was easy to see he’d underpaid for their land; or the fact that the land itself would be bulldozed and paved and dredged to make artificial lakes—none of which, he knew, was any of his business. And it wasn’t even Brad French, who, after he’d looked at the financials from KC, had called Anders into his office and closed the door and said that he had really hit it with this one, that it wasn’t about chasing the small stuff anymore but about creating new models that opened the door to a slew of other deals like it, and so the SVPs wanted him in their meeting to get his input on this and a bunch of other prospects they were already calling Athenas. No, what terrified him, looking north at