Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (12 page)

She said, “You didn’t tell me you were going to have her run UBA.”

“I thought I just explained this?” Eli looked over her head at the bright kitchen windows and the noise of the party.

Emily felt electricity in her lips. She said, “You did something with her in L.A. I know you did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you did something. When you went there last month. I can feel it. I saw the text.”

“You don’t understand. That was, like, that was like a hug.”

“A hug? Why are you using that word?”

Eli sighed. “We had a thing.”

“A thing? Would you care to be one iota more specific?”

“I want to. Listen, I do. But at the same time, let’s not get into specifics,” Eli said. “It was basically less than what you think it was.” Eli put his hands on her forearms. She shook him away. “Look, Emily, it would’ve been selfish to tell you. It would have made it bigger than it was.”

“So you hid it?”

She watched him take a long breath. And in that breath she imagined that she could see how he had been in this position before, if not with other wives, then other girlfriends. He said, “You’re right. You’re right about everything and I am totally sorry and that is the worst thing I ever did and I am sorry.”

“Hiding it didn’t work so now you’re admitting it?”

“This thing that happened when me and her were drunk? That was like a hug? A hug. Yeah. I mean, this is not the place to talk about it. I feel awful. But Emily, it happened because things were going well for the business. It was stupid, like a high five. I’m embarrassed to even be talking about it.”

“A high five? Really, Eli? And now all you do is see her and plan things with her, and you lie to me and hide from me! Shit! Something’s been wrong all summer!”

“All summer? That is not true! Please. I feel terrible about what happened and you are right and I’m sorry! I am sorry. But the two things are not related. UBA is hers. She found the investors and I’m just helping out. Look, don’t make this bigger than it is.”

“Make it bigger? Are you kidding me?”

“I said I’m sorry! You want to decide what’s okay and what isn’t. And then it doesn’t matter in the end because nothing is okay according to you.” He pushed his eyebrows together and shook his head. “I kind of hate that, that you do that.”

“What? Now you hate how I am?”

“No. Forget it. Let’s not ruin tonight, please?” She watched him try out a pleading smile. He said, “We can spend however long talking about what happened and I can swear I’ll never do it again. I fucked up and I know that. I don’t know what you saw in a text but nothing bad happened. Just let’s not talk about it tonight, okay?”

“Eli?” A man looked down at them from the open kitchen door.

“Rick, I hear you, man,” Eli said. “I know I need to be up there.”

“We have to do another toast. The Neubergers came after all with some other people and so another quick toast is really important. Hi, Emily.”

“Okay, okay,” Eli said.

“Please give us a minute,” Emily said.

“This toast is important,” Rick said before closing his kitchen door.

Eli paced away from Emily, toward the back of the garden. She could see him touch the vines growing up the fence. It was darker back there than she thought the city should ever be.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Emily said. “You don’t see the emergency. You don’t even know how big of a deal this is. Your mind can’t even compute it.”

“I do see! And I will. But look, if you really love me, give me some time right now, okay? Give me the time to do right by this party and then I am all about you. I owe you everything. I know that. And I love you.”

“Owe me?” She dropped her head to one side. “What do you mean? We’re married. It’s not about owing me. Please—” She walked to the back of the garden and felt her way along the fence and found him. She reached out and touched his frowning face. His breath was hot and she could feel the sweat on his cheek and neck.

“How did we get here?” he asked. “I don’t want this to be happening and neither do you. But right now? Give me the time I need now. And then we’ll fix this thing, I promise.”

“What happened is a big deal, Eli. I’m really hurt. Really fucking hurt.”

“Look, I know. I want to focus on you. But I need to go back to the party now. Just for another hour, okay?”

He reached forward and kissed her on the lips before she could move. Then he turned and took several long steps through the garden. She thought he looked like a deer leaping across streams. No, not a deer. He was a satyr. No, he was the devil himself. He grabbed the stair rail and launched himself up the steps and was at the kitchen door. Once he was up there, safely far away from her, he turned. She couldn’t see his expression. She was sure he hadn’t said anything. He slipped into the house and left the door swinging open behind him. Emily listened to a burst of clapping.

She looked up at the light shining from the tall kitchen windows and heard a surge of noise from the party. She turned and threaded her fingers through the fencing and the vines. There was only the one way out of the garden and that was up the stairs, through the door, and back through the kitchen. She would have to walk through those crowded rooms.

“Eli?” she whispered to herself. “You went back to the party?”

The garden was quiet. There was only the sound of idling engines in the street. She covered her mouth with her hand and wrapped her other arm around her chest. She stared up at the bright dancing light that streamed through the windows of the house.

From
Marriage Is a Canoe
, Chapter 3, Marriage and Intimacy

Out on the porch at about five o’clock one afternoon, after we’d been on the lake for hours without a catch, I sat with my legs swinging and whittled a stick. Pop had given me a three-inch pocket knife with a pearl handle and I’d taken to whittling little sticks with an eye toward eventually assembling a miniature raft.

I could hear Pop and Bess moving about behind me in the kitchen. I didn’t know what they were doing. I was bored the way boys are bored when they say they are bored but they mean something deeper: confused, adrift. Though at least I had it in me to whittle.

“What are we up to?” I asked. I had been there about ten days and I was beginning to think of the three of us as a group. Not a true family, but three people living together.

“Your Pop and I are going for a walk.”

“Around the lake? Which way?” I jumped up. I much preferred lake walks that took us toward town, because if we ended up there, I might buy a pack of baseball cards and check the Yankees scores.

“We are going round the long way, and then up to the ridge.”

“Okay.” I pushed myself up so I was standing.

“You might go into town on your own,” Bess said.

“Alone?” I raised an eyebrow and dared to glare at her. I did not like what I was hearing.

“Go ahead.” Bess moved closer to me. “Take some time for yourself and we’ll do the same. We love you. You know that. But we want a little time to be together.” She kissed my forehead and left me there, on the porch.

I had a piece of chamois cloth and I began to wrap up my stick and knife in it. I heard Pop and Bess talking in the house but I didn’t listen. Instead, I went down the steps and stood out on the grass. I kicked at the grass and pulled out the knife and threw it down into the dirt, hard, so it stuck in the soft earth.

“Hey, there,” Pop said. He’d come up behind me. When he wanted to he could move very quietly for such a big man. “Listen up, now. Don’t get yourself in a snit. We take a little time each day to be alone together—just me and my Bess. You understand.” He gave me a mock salute and went back inside the house.

I got my knife and wiped it on my shorts and then wrapped it and the stick in that chamois. I ran and put the bundle safely away in my room and changed into my jeans. Off I went, hurt, and never looking back.

In that day’s dusk, I walked down to Main Street and that’s where I saw Honey for the first time, walking with her parents. So I knew for sure something more than good comes of giving those close to you time for themselves. What happened after I saw Honey, you ask? That’s another chapter.

Find time to be together every day
—just the two of you—
in your canoe.

Peter, September 2011

“I’ll come down and fire him myself,” Peter said. He banged open the hall closet and grabbed his coat. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Peter, I’m not asking you to intervene,” Henry said. “I’ll handle it.”

“Let me get it straight,” Peter said, and turned back to his kitchen, where he grabbed up his cup of coffee and took a sip. “A cook’s been there three weeks. He closes down the kitchen for the night, drinks a couple of bottles of our wine, beds down on the rice sacks, ends up setting fire to a wall with a cigarette, and you’re going to have a talk with him? He’s gone!”

“No. First I have to bring in the insurance people and file a report and all that. I know how to handle this,” Henry said.

“This is crazy. He’s finished. I’m coming down there.”

“Stop. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

“What?”

“You can’t fire him. He’s new. He doesn’t even know who you are. I was trying to get across what a pain in the ass running this business is. That’s all.”

Peter sat down at his kitchen table, nodded at the trees outside his window. “I get it.”

“Can you believe this asshole? We’ll take care of it. What about coming in for some lunch? We’re auditioning an eggplant dish.”

“I’ll be in later this week. I can’t stand eggplant. I used to like it. But not anymore.”

“Got some mail here for you.”

“Yeah. It can wait. I’m sorry I misunderstood you. I’ll talk to you later.”

Peter ended the call and stood up. He put his coffee mug in the sink, ran cold water over it, and placed it on the wooden rack. He licked at his dry lips and tasted the bad old-man smell that seeped out of the widening spaces between his teeth.

He heaved himself out of the kitchen and went to the hutch in the front foyer. He was afraid to call Maddie now that he’d told her he would move to the West Coast with her. Surely someone else needed him. Surely … yes. He found the phone number for the young woman from Ladder & Rake. Stella. Sexy name.

He had worked with quite a few young women during his many years with LRB. His favorites had been flirtatious; a few had been strangely inept, some had been curt, and one or two had been entrepreneurial. These smart ones got around Lisa and tried hard to draw him out. They were handling editors but they were also ever-so-carefully interested in a new book from him. A new book meant big money. But they all lived with the fear that he might not return their calls and Helena would find out they lost him.

He dialed the number. Voice mail. He apologized for the few days he had taken to return her call and said he was free to talk.

And then he went for a walk around the lake. He felt the cold on his face and wrapped an old wool scarf of Lisa’s around his neck. Kept going. He hadn’t thought about LRB in so long. The one-million-copies party they’d had for him at the end of the seventies. And then the party for twenty-five years in print at the Grill Room at the Four Seasons. Helena had presided over both events. Could she still be there? Most likely she’d retired to the little house he had heard she’d bought in the village of Sag Harbor, where she could spend her days gardening and her evenings at intimate dinner parties with Ed Doctorow and his wife and Louis Begley and the rest of her old publishing friends. Or maybe she’d left that snobby scene. Maybe she had a new husband—he believed she’d broken with the old one. A new husband would mean getting used to a new life. Perhaps there were stepchildren in addition to her daughter, Elizabeth. He was sure she was still close to Elizabeth. The one bit of gossip he’d heard was that Helena had been heartbroken when her daughter had gone to Stanford and had never gotten over the new distance between them.

He found the big black rock he’d always liked and settled on it until he felt the shock of cold through his lined khakis. The clouds were hanging low. But maybe a cold tailbone and brisk weather were good things. He kneaded his hands against his knees. Lisa had been seated next to Helena at a few dinners in the early years, when he and Lisa still ventured down to New York for publicity and marketing meetings. Helena had been the key to the book’s success, so Lisa had tolerated her as best she could.

Okay. Enough of this indulging. He was freezing his butt off. He whistled the opening sequence to
A Fistful of Dollars
to himself as he made his way back home. He’d watched the movie the previous evening once he was sure Maddie wasn’t going to visit him. He was surprised at how much he still loved the movies he’d watched when he was young. If Maddie didn’t come around again tonight, he planned to find
Duck, You Sucker
on Netflix and watch it on Lisa’s computer screen if he had to. Belinda had given him a couple of CDs of Ennio Morricone’s film scores when she’d caught him watching
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
late one night, the year before, when Lisa was dying and she had stayed over. She’d discovered him huddled on the couch, crying into his shirt sleeve. The only thing he’d found to say in the moment was, “I just love this music.” The CDs were probably in a downstairs closet and he would find them. He might put a speaker up to one of the windows that opened onto the back porch and listen while he looked out at the lake. Sure. He ought to do something like that at least once before moving out to live in a high-rise condominium in San Francisco.

The phone was ringing as he came through the back door.

“Hello? No, now’s a good time to talk,” he said, once he’d settled himself with the cordless on the hard chair by the hutch in the front hall. He tried to cross his legs. Nope, couldn’t do it.

Stella went on for a while, introducing herself. And then he heard her say, “Really, we want you just as you are.”

“Want me just as I am? I don’t understand.” He laughed but refrained from the easy joke, from saying, You mean finished? Packing up? Getting out of town?