The Land of Steady Habits A Novel by Ted Thompson

Author:Ted Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

3

Anders figured he knew how it would all go down. Larry would know a guy, probably a kid Tommy’s age, a hedgie who worked from a laptop in a shed in his Darien backyard—the future, Larry would say, the sort of kid who had made a billion dollars last year in his Adidas sandals. Larry would tell Anders not to worry about it, it was just money, they could make it back in an hour; all Anders had to do was give him a number and Larry would place the order. He’d slap him on the shoulder and tell him to relax, it’s what friends were for, and toast him with his third drink of the morning.

Larry lived in the original farmhouse on Beachside, a property that had been divvied up into an entire avenue of waterfront estates, walled-off monuments with service entrances and wrought-iron gates and hunks of modern sculpture strewn about the front lawns. His greenhouse came off the side of his home, a tall glass structure that looked like it might hold the food court of a major museum. Inside, it was something of a gymnasium of flora—all leaves and humidity, dirt and cement. He led Anders down a long row of what appeared to be pots of earth. He was barefoot, the cuffs of his Dockers rolled, and as he walked, he’d occasionally touch the beds of soil with his thumb and then smell it. “Tells me if they’re healthy,” he said. “You develop a knack for it.” He went over to the corner and ran a pitchfork through a steaming heap of compost. It was black and as he turned it, some vapor escaped. “Put your hands in there,” he said. “Go ahead. It won’t hurt you.” It was surprisingly smooth, soft, really, and gave off a rich scent of organic matter. “Cleanest thing on the planet,” Larry said. “From garbage to the espresso of soil in a couple of months.”

When he had a lot of work to do, Larry said, he turned off the ringer. Anders had assumed that by “a lot of work to do,” he meant something like managing his portfolio, but Larry meant planting a kind of heirloom called Mr. Stripey. Raising tomatoes, he said, snapping a brown leaf from the bottom of a nearby plant, wasn’t just about bearing witness to the cycles of life—all that living and dying and producing of fruit—but about putting your hands in the ground. “Touch the place where we intersect with the earth, where our food comes from and where we’re eventually headed, get that stuff under your fingernails,” he said, “and you’re changed forever.” He’d been inviting classes from Bridgeport out there, elementary-school kids who had no idea their hamburger was cow and thought food came from bodegas. “Mostly I want them digging in the dirt,” he said. “That’s enough. I discovered the hard way they’re all plant murderers.”

In the week since Anders’s humiliating scrape with the law—a ridiculous incident, when he thought about it, the behavior of a crazy person—he’d been doing some evaluating.

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