Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (14 page)

“Fooled around?”

“It was just that. Sex. It was nothing.”

“You left me out there in the garden. Now you’re telling me this?”

“Yes. Sex. Okay, I said it. I hate myself for it. Jenny and I had a meeting yesterday. She’s going to move back to Los Angeles. You are never going to see her again. I probably never will either. I wasn’t going to tell you till it’s official, but let’s call it official right now.”

“Moving back across the country is kind of a big reaction to something you keep trying to diminish.” Emily walked faster.

“It is and it isn’t. She wants to go back to L.A. She’s upset about it, too. It never should have happened.”

They walked along Church Street, past the strip of tiny fast-food restaurants. Emily had consulted on the logo and mission statement for 5 Napkin Burger. The place was empty. Then they passed a couple of bars where they’d been very drunk once, years ago when they were dating. She drank whisky sours and was so hungover the next day she almost couldn’t see. She remembered vomiting in the bathroom of his old apartment on Mott Street while he was in the kitchen making blueberry pancakes and she felt the beginning of being in love with him. They weren’t big drinkers. They had just been out of control and they were falling in love. They passed Babezta, a store that sold children’s clothes. She fixated on a tiny red-and-green plaid shirt that was achingly cute and then quickly looked away.

“You can hold my hand,” she said.

“You’re sure? Even though we’re fighting?”

“You don’t want to?” she asked. “All I’m asking is for you to hold my hand.”

They held hands and turned and began to head uptown. She didn’t know which street they were on. Then she saw that it was Hudson, a lovely windblown street that was utterly wasted on what had become a terrible late Saturday afternoon.

She breathed with her mouth open and fought back her anger. Sex. At least it had a concrete name now. Sex was clearer than hug. She held his hand as tight as she could. She sucked in her lower lip and bit at it, feeling pain and what she imagined might be blood on her tongue.

“I mean it about her moving,” Eli said. “I know it’s irrelevant to what’s going on with us, but it’s still true. She cares about this business. I understood that and I was—I did—set her up to go away. She can take UBA anywhere. The idea is she takes it to L.A., where it makes sense. We don’t actually need more bicycle advocacy in New York. And she’s got a boyfriend out there.”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“You’ll never have to.” Eli kept nodding his head. “Never again.”

“You can’t make her move. And that doesn’t solve it. You shouldn’t think it will.”

“She wants to. The boyfriend is serious, I think. She was trying to get away from him when she moved here. But she’s realized she loves him.”

“She cheated, too?”

“Stop it. It wasn’t like that. Stop saying that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. But she didn’t mean she was sorry—her mind had drifted for a moment, past this impasse, to where they might be better. He did seem contrite. Likely, it had happened more than once. She discovered that she could admit this to herself. There were worse things. A million worse things. She had arrived at the entirely logical conclusion that it was worse than what either of them was saying aloud, because he was taking it so seriously. And yet, even her mother had begun to say it was a fixable thing. Still, though. Sex was a betrayal. She walked for a few steps, staring forward and not realizing that she’d dropped Eli’s hand. Then, when she couldn’t feel him next to her, she turned around and looked back.

He was down on his knees in the middle of the sidewalk, facing her. He wasn’t smiling or laughing. He was just staring at her.

“What are you doing?”

“Please come back to me, Emily.”

“What?”

“I am on my knees.”

She looked around, embarrassed, and saw that they were at the little triangle of park at Hudson and Duane, Duane Park. People passed the two of them. They glanced back at Eli, who only looked up at her.

“Why are you doing that? You look like a monk.” She walked a few steps back, toward him.

“I promise you I will never, never do that again. Not any of it. You mean everything to me. These last few weeks are like a watershed. I fucked up. I will never fuck up again. I swear.”

She kept staring. His voice was different—solemn and without any levity. He did belong to her. They could make it that way again. She liked that.

“Are you getting a marriage proposal?”

Emily looked up at the person talking. It was not a crazy person, just an older woman walking a tiny curly-haired dog. The woman looked charmed. The dog yipped at its owner. It wanted to keep walking.

“Am I?” Emily asked, and then covered her mouth.

“That’s so sweet!” The woman picked up the dog and whispered, “Say yes—he’s so serious. It’s beautiful. I won’t get in your moment, but say yes.”

Eli smiled his brilliant smile. “Don’t you think she should say yes?”

Two women came around the corner of the park. One of them said, “She looks ready to cry. Get her to say yes before she does!”

And then a few other people saw the situation and jumped in, calling, “Say yes, say yes.” A man in a truck yelled it and a few teenagers hanging out at the fountain in the middle of the little park called out at them. At the same time, there were others who walked by and ignored the scene. But even the people who ignored them were smiling.

Emily frowned. She pulled in mouthfuls of cool air and then called out “Yes!” as loud as she could. Just to get everyone to leave them alone. To make it stop.

There was scattered clapping and Eli jumped up and hugged her.

“Wasn’t that amazing?” he asked. “I love this quiet park. And wasn’t that great, with everybody helping us? You know I planned this whole thing.”

She didn’t want to say that she still felt unsure. She leaned in and let him kiss her hard, her mouth going soft against his, the long kiss if not truly erasing than at least glossing, sexing over everything that had gone wrong.

They held hands as they continued up Hudson Street.

“I want everything to be okay,” she said to him. “I hate what happened, though. I want you to know that. I hate it and I am not going to forget it.”

“Do you accept my apology?”

“Is she really moving away?”

“Yes. I promise she will. But that isn’t important. What’s important is that I’m devoted to you.”

“I want her to go away. I want it to be like this didn’t happen.” Emily set her jaw. She was vanquishing Jenny Alexandretti. Making her leave their lives and forcing Eli to be truly humbled and contrite and even more hers. Or, hers again.

“It’s done. I love you so much. This is done. She’ll go live with her boyfriend in L.A. and you and I can go back to how we were.”

“Not how we were,” she said. “Not with you feeling free to do what you did.”

“No, better. Of course I’ll never do it again. I’ll be better.”

Emily didn’t say anything about better. She didn’t trust better. She wanted them to be different than the way they were before. And she wanted never to have another moment like the one in that garden. Eli would have to get rid of a part of himself that she hadn’t known was there. The part of him that could have an affair. She wasn’t sure it could be done. But she would have to let him try.

“You promise?” She looked up at him. He had his arm wrapped around her and she let herself be tightly pulled into him, his furry sweater against her cheek.

“I promise,” he said. “We’ll never have a bad moment like that again.”

“You didn’t even get on your knees when you proposed.”

“This is like—it’s like we’re really married now.”

She didn’t respond. She felt a little bit better. But she didn’t feel good enough to admit that to Eli, not just yet.

Stella Petrovic, October 2011

Dear Peter Herman,

My wife is leaving me. We did what you said and it didn’t work. I know we don’t get money back from her purchase of your stupid book.

But can I have something back? You don’t have anything in there about exterior problems. Let’s call them that, okay? I don’t have lots of money and she doesn’t either. So we don’t. Both our sets of parents undercut us emotionally sometimes—pretty often, actually, now that I think about it. We both work too hard at jobs we don’t love. You don’t get into what to do about those circumstances. You say support support support. In the canoe. We never go in the canoe.

Why’d we blow it when you make it sound so easy. I’m angry. I want to die.

The only thing we have to thank you for is for not writing another stupid book.

I would like to win the contest so my wife and I can come to your home and talk these things out with you.

Likamy Sobstory, from Fukyu, MA!

At least it had levels to it, and humor. For some reason Stella had begun to receive entries via regular mail, dozens each day, though she’d said that e-mail was fine. She had a couple of assistants from marketing reading the e-mail entries but she couldn’t stop opening the envelopes. She took her knife and slit open another. A whiff of ashtray hit her nostrils. She shrank back and groaned. With one arm thrown over her nose and mouth she read:

Dear Peter,

Please keep this confidential because, in the event that we win the contest, I may choose not to reveal what I am writing to you about now. I make love with a man who is not my husband.

My husband is a nice person and he helps me with upkeep on our house and he makes sure the two kids have their lunches and he loves me and even does a good job with our bills. But he does not satisfy me with his lovemaking. No, that is something I like to do with a man from work and sometimes with another man who is his friend. We do it in parking lots in the back of his van. Sometimes there are others. Otherwise we are normal. Am I a sex addict?

Can you help me and my husband? I know he knows because sometimes I hear him in the bathroom crying in the night. And I get so angry and yell at him about it—about what I do without saying what it is that I do. I know we can be fixed. If I can learn to get my husband to satisfy me? Can you teach us how to do this? We are very open sexually. Or at least I am. And you can watch us try to do it and tell us what is the matter. Because I want to get out of doing it in the van with near-strangers and back to sex inside my home with my hubby!

Matilda Gutierrez, Houston, TX

Dear Peter Herman:

I need help with my wife. She threatens to leave me. It is because of money. How can I be held responsible for the miserable state of the economy in this country? I need you to help explain this to her.

Thank you for considering.

Alan Chowski, Philadelphia, PA

Dear Peter Herman,

My husband’s name is David and he yells at me when I am sick. He has some problem with sickness so if I cough he locks me in the basement until I say I won’t cough more. How can we make him stop???

Other times he is nice to me and we live in a nice house and I know it is abusive. He makes the money for us in his job as a school superintendent and when I say let’s go into counseling he says that would only make it worse if I found out how much is the matter with me. Maybe he is right. I don’t know, but if we win the contest he would be shamed into going with me to see you and together we could keep David from making me wash all my clothes every day to keep away the germs from him. And burn my underwear at the end of my monthly.

It is getting crazy and I want to run away but maybe your contest is the answer.

I hope we win and then we can visit you and talk.

Anne-Marie Wilkinson, Sherman Oaks, CA

Stella had developed a form letter for these, much like her form rejection letter for unsolicited manuscripts. It listed national hotlines, websites, and organizations that offered counseling. She doubted this was corporately aboveboard, but that didn’t stress her out much—she figured she was on moral high ground.

She took a form letter from the top of a stack and wrote, “Your problems sound serious. Please get the help you need immediately,” across the top and sent it to Anne-Marie Wilkinson. Then she tossed the rest of the letters in the cardboard box she kept in the credenza, behind her desk.

There were now a few hundred of them, each one hopeless and upsetting in shocking combinations. She had not imagined there could be so many awful marriages and she was worried that all the human tragedy would rub off on her. What if she brought other people’s problems into bed with her and Ivan? She suspected that was already happening.

She hadn’t yet found an entrant whose marriage seemed fixable. There was certainly no top ten. And she had planned since the beginning to find a letter from a couple who were easily promotable, who weren’t in danger of not staying together. But apparently, once you bothered to enter such a contest, your chance of staying together was long gone. She should have known that. Stella kicked at the cardboard box. She stared up at the quotes from
Canoe
that she had printed out in twenty-eight-point type on white paper and stuck on her bulletin board.

Love infinitely and without question, as if the long days of summer will never end.

—Chapter 14, On Doubt

Remember that when a man breaks his promise in love, he breaks a promise to himself, too.

—Chapter 3, Marriage and Intimacy

She found her phone and texted Ivan.

Where are you later?

She felt too bummed about the contest to sound any cuter. If she didn’t make the thing work, Helena Magursky was going to have her ID card snipped in half. Or, no. If she didn’t make the contest work, she’d just evaporate, like the slick of coffee she left at the bottom of her ceramic LRB cup at the end of each day. Invited to no more meetings. Lord knew she’d heard of it happening before. Good editors suddenly isolated, left off e-mail chains about their own books and ignored in the big meetings until they were seen marching down the hall with one of the young women from HR, handbag in hand, sometimes crying. Stop! Stella knew she was being ridiculous. She was smart and everything would be fine. She prayed for just one good letter.