The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel by Ted Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

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