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

those high avenue walls, was the sudden certainty that, right or wrong, his decisions were no longer his to make.
    He hoofed it back uptown, determined to put a halt to both the deal and the apartment, which would have been unthinkable even a day ago. But now just the thought of unburdening himself, of leaving the whole mess behind, had him running up their rental’s steps, convinced of how little any of these concerns would matter once they had settled into a life far from the glassed-in cubes of midtown. When he burst in, Helene was curled on the sofa, rubbing her eyes with a confused squint. He’d woken her up. The apartment was dark except for the soundless flashes from a television in the other room. There was a bottle of wine open on the table next to a plate for him that she’d wrapped in foil. She saw him in the door and smiled.
    “Where were you?”
    “Just walking,” he said, but that sounded more evasive than he’d intended. “Downtown.”
    She looked at him a moment, waiting for more. “Why?”
    Anders wanted to tell her then about the Athena deal, about the way it was structured and about the farmers and about what the land had looked like when he’d driven through it—one brown arid expanse, not a leaf around, that would be rolled with sod and plumbed with sprinkler systems and staked with adolescent trees. He wanted to tell her about the shoddiness of those homes, how in the model you could feel the wind in the closets but that Jim Cranby had rapped his knuckles on a hollow-sounding wall and assured him the homes would pass inspection, which they would, and they would also be filled with families who would spend their lives working to pay the loans off. He wanted to tell her all of it, how he was able to persuade an entire table of bosses to follow him when the truth was that most mornings he felt ridiculous in his suit, like an actor. There was a private part of him that was waiting for this phase of his life to end, this moneymaking, debt-dissolving, self-negating, morally correct phase, so he could get on with the business of actually being himself. He wanted to tell her that he’d read in the paper there was a shortage of fire-tower lookouts in the parks out west and in a moment of whimsy he’d written a letter to the Parks Department in Colorado and that he’d actually heard back—it didn’t pay much but families were allowed, even encouraged, and wouldn’t that be something, the two of them at the top of a mountain in Colorado?
    But looking at her, sitting in the dim light that came through the window, he couldn’t. And it wasn’t because she wouldn’t understand, because she would, and it wasn’t because he couldn’t bring himself to deprive her of the happiness he’d seen earlier that day. That was too simple. The real truth was that he liked the way he felt when Helene looked at him, the authority she seemed to think he had, and the confidence. He liked the way she saw him in the world. And because there was a part of him that was still a kid in a dishwashing apron, a part of him that was still in awe of the fact that she was his, and because every time she smiled at him, he felt as though he were being showered in light, he couldn’t bear to watch her redefine her image of him. Not now; not today.
    “Anders?” she said. Her face had softened with concern. “What’s going on?”
    He looked out the window then, at the lights of the city, crisp and pure as sodium bulbs. “The apartment,” he said. “They took another offer.”
    By the time Jim Cranby sold the last of his five hundred units, Anders had been moved to an office with a door. And while he’d never admitted to the lie, soon Helene was pregnant and talking about a house with a yard; soon she knew all sorts of surprising things about school districts. So despite his fervent belief they were not Connecticut people, despite his distaste for the best-of-both-worlds rationalizing so many of those people did, he found