Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (3 page)

The phone kept ringing. Peter picked up a handset from the bedside table where it sat next to a stack of
Poughkeepsie Journal
s and
The New York Times
, both of which Lisa still liked to have within reach even though she no longer bothered to even pretend she was able to read.

“Yes?”

“Hello, may I speak to Peter Herman?”

“This is Peter.”

Lisa returned from the bathroom. She stood in the doorway, her graying auburn hair pulled back badly in the braid Peter had learned to make just a few months earlier. Her face had turned pale over the years and the blue in her eyes had grown lighter, too. Just the sight of her wearing her purple robe leavened him. Though he’d been frowning at the phone, now he smiled. Eleven in the morning and she thought she should be getting ready for bed. He beckoned her to him. But she remained in the doorway.

“My name is Katherine and I’m calling because of your book.”

“You’d be better served by sending a letter to me care of Ladder & Rake. I can’t take calls.”

“I’m sorry—I do understand and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but your book means so much to me. There’s a passage in the beginning, after you explain how marriage is a canoe and then later when you say the voyage you take in it is driven by passion—let me find it—anyway, I’m having trouble with passion and how it relates to staying in the canoe and—”

“Listen, listen now, Katherine, is it? Here’s the thing. You’ve called my home. And my wife is ill. So you can see how this call is an intrusion.”

“Of course. But Peter, now that I’ve reached you—”

“Goodbye.” He pressed
OFF
and threw the handset on the rug. He caught his breath and put his hands on his lower back. He weighed less than a dozen pounds more than he had in college. He had a couple of blazers from back then that still fit, and though now he had a visible belly, he could get into the Levi’s he wore in the mid-seventies, when their daughter, Belinda, was born. His spine had begun to bend, so he’d lost the couple of inches that had put him above six feet. But the mornings when he woke up and had to roll rather than spring out of bed were still blessedly rare.

He spread his arms wide and waited. Lisa padded toward him.

“Who was that?” Lisa’s voice contained a glimmer of her old jealousy. She didn’t mind sharing him with Millerton. But over the years she had come to hate when he was asked to go away, down to New York or to do a talk somewhere. He had begun to live his life much closer to home because of her preference, and that didn’t bother him at all.

“Oh, Lisa. Who was that?” He didn’t want to tell her that the call was from a fan of
Canoe
. She didn’t like those people and never had, and if he downplayed the call she would get upset but she would not be able to understand why. So he began to sing. “Who? Who?”

“Stop … Peter, stop.”

“Who are you? Who are you? Come on, tell me, who are you?”

She started to laugh, finally sitting on the bed next to him, putting her head on his chest, banging her fists on the tops of his thighs.

“It’s the oddest thing,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re not a particularly goofy person and yet here we are being playful all the time. It’s a change.”

She did not respond.

“Lisa?”

She looked up at him. He wanted to stop. He knew he was being a little mean. But he was losing her and he was angry about it. He had built his adult self around the guarantee of her stability. And now with so much of her gone, sure, he was resentful—in flashes—before returning to this new caretaker role.

When he didn’t move, Lisa pulled the flannel sheets back, grasped his shoulder so she was pushing him down with her into the bed. He felt her spittle on his chest and was reminded of thirty-five years ago, just after Belinda was born, when they would go to sleep holding each other and he would wake in the morning with his undershirt drenched from her breast milk.

He said, “Wait. What are you doing?”

“Going to bed. Bedtime.”

“No, no,” Peter said. “Can’t you feel the sun? It’s nearly lunchtime.”

“Bedtime.”

“No.” Peter bit back the catch in his voice. “Please don’t.”

“At least kisses, then.”

“Yes to kisses!” Peter quickly took her in his arms and kissed her, her thick braid flopping onto his shoulder.

“Now what?” she asked after half a minute of quiet. He knew she would, by then, have forgotten that she wanted to go to bed. But the phone call would have penetrated somewhere else, into some more emotional place in her mind. In a different voice, she said, “What was the call? More stupid stuff about
Canoe
?”

“No, no,” he said. “Nothing for you to even bother thinking about.”

He stroked her neck and shoulders and she closed her eyes. His life had always been one way with Lisa and he had never imagined he’d have to relearn her. He had become fairly good at taking care of her, but she had never needed him before and nobody had prepared him for this reversal of roles. There had been no time for her to explain how she managed him. When they were younger they had never bothered to delve deeper into the meaning of their lives together than what could be found in the passages of his book. He watched her now. Had she ever even read it? Really read it? She must have, he had to believe that, but now it was too late to ask.

No one seemed to understand how much he was struggling with the loss of her. They thought he was full of wisdom. After all, he had created
Canoe
, remembered and recounted and celebrated for coming up on forty years in print. Really, it was just a bunch of simple life lessons, none more complex than what was found in greeting cards or country songs. He was the main character. The oracle! The book had meant a hell of a lot to the multitudes.
Marriage Is a Canoe
helps people! Peter Herman, you can’t deny it! When he’d tried to deny it, people wouldn’t let him, even if they made fun of the book in the next breath. He had come to understand that when people decide a thing you made is part of them, you shouldn’t dare try to change it. They’ll think you’re trying to take it away from them. It was yours once, sure. But now it’s theirs. After some years of wrestling, he had given up. His little book belonged far more to its readers than to him.

“Let’s go get you some lunch,” he said. “We’ve got the doctor later.”

She shook her head no, and her turned-down mouth was a reminder of how she’d been for so many years. She made her way and wasn’t pushed around by anyone. Certainly not him.

“Fine, no lunch. Then at least kiss me.”

Again, she shook her head.

He pouted his lips and tugged at his big ears and kissed her. This new version of her laughed and forgave him.

And why shouldn’t she? He was still tall and handsome, with a wild thatch of gray hair. He had begun to hope that this new levity in her personality had in part come about because she had begun to see him as he had been forty years ago. What was coming true now was a product of the hard work from back then, when he had tried to fool the world into thinking he was kindhearted gentry in his green tweed blazer and pale blue button-down shirt, with a dream backstory of one great book and an endearing inability to outfox anyone, ever. He was distinguished, like Gregory Peck but with softer edges, a small-town Gregory Peck. By the time Reagan was president, Peter fit in as well as anyone in the Hudson Valley. If the fact that he’d written
Canoe
demanded that people see him as a study in contrasts, then they invariably concluded they were not especially sharp contrasts.

“Not going,” Lisa said. “I am not going to the doctor today.”

“Okay, we won’t go. You’re stubborn. Do you remember how stubborn you are?” he asked. They’d had forty happy years. Fifty, if smudged, and why not smudge a bit? Smudging the truth had been the smartest thing he had ever learned how to do.

“No, you,” she said now. “You’re stubborn. Stop petting me down. You … Who called you?”

“Someone from Ladder & Rake.”

He was testing her. Mentioning Ladder & Rake used to make her glare and flare her nostrils. She would be angry that the royalties weren’t right, worried that they might want to take him away for some event or another, reminded again of the world just beyond their little town encroaching. But now she had no reaction. How lost you are, he thought, as he appraised the uneven work he’d done on her braid.

“Come downstairs with me,” he said. “There’s Triscuits. And cheddar from Pantomime’s. We’ll try eating that. Then we’ll see about the doctor.”

She said, “People call you … Hubbell Gardner.”

He shook his head no and watched her try to find other words. She made noises, looking for a tune to sing. But she was lost. Her voice turned into meaningless low notes that wandered into the corners of their bright bedroom at the top of the house, big as any country person could ever want, bay windows overlooking Lake Okabye, gray-and-green-striped carpet over oak floors and white plaster walls solid as stone.

He held her hand and stared at her lips, the sheer pink of them. They didn’t age. No one besides her had ever called him Hubbell Gardner. A few weeks earlier they had watched a DVD of
The Way We Were
on the downstairs television because she loved Barbra Streisand. He hated the movie when he was young, and had even brought it up in interviews as a kind of antithesis to
Canoe
. Though he knew the reference was a clumsy one that had never quite worked. But his post-publication antics never hurt the book.

“Do you say that because you remember watching
The Way We Were
with me?” he asked. “Are you making a joke?”

“My funny valentine…” She tried to sing but lost her words. She smiled down at her hands. He took her in his arms and gently raised her to her feet. She would remember this hug, this same old awkward hug. She fell on him and he loved her for her trust. At the very least, she trusted him, still, as much as she ever had. And they had loved each other. So he had lost the stable love he’d had with Lisa and had it replaced with this lengthy goodbye.

Peter did not enjoy listening to doctors. He wasn’t nearly as good as Lisa had once been at absorbing and analyzing the information they shared. But he did understand that, regardless of how he parsed out what he understood of Pick’s disease as it related to his wife’s brain, new options did not arise. Pick’s disease meant that their time left together was limited and everything that was wrong with Lisa was absolutely not going to be right again.

Stella Petrovic, July 2011

“You say this year is the fiftieth anniversary of what?” Helena Magursky’s voice was both scratchy and strident. “I’m not sure I heard you.”

Stella Petrovic frowned. She watched Helena Magursky, president and CEO of Ladder & Rake Books, lean forward, a half inch per second. They were twenty minutes into their weekly Wednesday morning nine o’clock, or whenever-Helena-wants-to-start-and-she’s-always-late-but-you-damn-well-better-not-be meeting, recently retitled “Free Thinking/New Billing.”

The living legend that was Helena Magursky was why Stella had left Orange Blackwell and come to the far bigger Ladder & Rake, so called because of its origin as a press for home repair and gardening manuals born in the back of Olitski Brothers Hardware Store in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1907. And a middling regional press is what LRB would have stayed if Helena hadn’t been hired right out of City College as the secretary for the single New York City–based salesperson in 1968. She had then gone on to hold nearly every position in the company, including several she’d made up. Helena had snatched Ladder & Rake from bankruptcy and merger more than once. The reason for this, people said, was because she knew content. She knew content and audience and she wasn’t afraid to appropriately charge the audience for content that they liked. Helena was long-divorced and had one daughter, Elizabeth, a pediatrician who lived in Chicago with her husband and daughter. For decades, Helena had been Ladder & Rake’s mother. And that was how she was treated, like a mother, a stern mother who everyone wanted to please.

Now, Helena commanded the attention in Ladder & Rake’s very best conference room—the Dreiser Room—a long, thin space on the twenty-third floor of 38 East Fifty-Seventh Street, with windows facing uptown and Central Park.

“The book is
Marriage Is a Canoe
,” Helena’s current assistant, Lucy Brodsky, said.

“Yes, that’s what I thought I heard.” Helena pushed her lower lip out in a frown. She had allowed her black hair to go gray. Today it was in a high ponytail. She propped her lower lip up with her fingers and looked at Lucy.

“You want us to skip this item?” Lucy asked. Helena quieted her with a thrust of her chin.

“Let the young editor gather her thoughts and finish whatever point she’s trying to make,” Helena said to Lucy. Lucy had a high ponytail, too, and she wore a slinky J.Crew charcoal suit and a pale gray blouse. Stella thought Lucy should quit publishing and become a junior account executive for an old-school ad agency, J. Walter Thompson or Leo Burnett. She’d fit in better. But Stella knew that Lucy had taken the job as Helena’s assistant because she loved books and wanted to stay true to her undergraduate, English-major self. So Lucy put up with an unending parade of days filled with Helena’s ever-changing moods, all so maybe, someday, she’d get to switch jobs and become an editorial assistant. Stella smirked. She didn’t believe Lucy was going to make it. Stella had done a year in marketing before going into editorial, and though that year had been a nasty grind, she’d learned a lot. And now Stella was an editor. A very young editor, too. That had been her dream and now here she was, living it. Stella’s throat and cheeks turned purple whenever she talked about how much she’d loved Alice Munro in high school and then Mary Gaitskill when she’d been in Wisconsin for college. And now she’d just about die if she could discover the next Junot Díaz or Miranda July or Tom Vanderbilt, since she’d learned to be interested in nonfiction, too. You have to nurture your passion, Stella thought. You have to look the corporation right in its eye and be unafraid to make enormous mistakes. Because someday you will be so, so right.