Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (37 page)

She was worried about Emily and what she might do, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Helena. Helena had become a constant for her; she lived in her dreams and daydreams and fantasies of the future.

Stella really needed Ivan to come and love her and ease her off the path to a sleepless night before the big meeting. The big showdown. But of course she also knew the meeting was only a preamble to something else, something that was possibly really good. Even if the contest was considered a failure, it was still kind of smart, wasn’t it? Depending, of course, on how Helena felt. And nothing bad could really happen at the meeting, could it? Nothing ever happened at meetings, at least not the meetings she attended.

She was at her kitchen table drinking rioja, thinking about how she used to listen to Gram Parsons and smoke pot from a tiny white ceramic pipe with her girlfriends and how she missed that part of herself. How far away that was, now that she mostly thought about her career. How much she depended on Ivan for fun, now. And before she realized it, she was reading
Canoe.
It had become her habit to just page around and look for inspirational sentences. She found:

Compromise keeps your canoe steady. Compromise and you’ll never go in circles.

Pop’s hand on Bess’s back was a promise. They would paddle through the afternoon together.

Everyday love must travel through my story to you, dear reader.

Horrible sentences! Addictive sentences. Undeniable sentences. And there were so many more like them. As if there was a mystery. As if there was a code. She had begun to hope that meeting him would be a huge disappointment. He would be totally fake. Or what would be even worse was if he totally believed in his fakeness. Like a television pastor. Maybe he would have a big diamond ring. Or a fat gold Rolex. Maybe he’d drop names of old famous people he’d once met, like Diana Ross or Joe Torre or Lorne Michaels. She hoped she didn’t like him so she could be disappointed and not feel so bad about the darn contest. So she could get back to slowly and obsessively building her career and enjoying what remained of her young life.

She began to read from chapter 9:

Suppers

I caught them kissing once. Bess was going to take hot soup to a friend in town who’d caught a summer cold. Pop was in the nook near the back door, carefully filling his tackle box for some moonlight fishing. I was reading the Hardy Boys:
The Mystery of the Chinese Junk
at the kitchen table and they couldn’t see me. But I could see them.

“Bring the boy back some ice cream,” he said.

“What type?”

“Chocolate—no, strawberry. Get both!”

She whispered, “Of course I will.”

She put the pot she’d been holding on the shelf in the nook, and he gently dropped the lures he’d been handling into the box. They kissed then, as I stayed still, watching.

She placed a hand on his chest and said, “Again.”

After they were done kissing for what felt to me like way too long, Bess slipped out the back door and walked down the dirt path to the Pontiac. Pop stood for a moment, still smiling down at his own shoes, and for a second I thought, Sweet old man. To be so happy. And about what? But now that we’re deep in these pages, I think that you and I, we understand.

“Come on, Peter. Let’s get out on those waters and catch our supper.”

“Okay,” I said.

Their love was as big and strong as old houses. And I learned one other thing, right then. If you can do nothing else, if you’re just running out to visit a friend and do a few errands and life is busy and humming all around you … Well, right then, remember to reach back into your home and your marriage. Remember to take good care of those who you love and who love you.

It’s okay to set down your paddles and love each other. Your canoe will find its way.

Lines like that one reminded Stella of what she had first seen in the book, that had resulted in her making out with Ivan in the parking lot. The sentences weren’t horrible. It was stupid of her to think that! After her initial calculations, she’d been seduced, hadn’t she? There was truth in
Canoe.
She went to bed and fell into an anxious, sweaty sleep.

“Hi, baby.” Ivan kissed the top of her head. His eyes were tired and his hair was standing up, but he smelled good. Already she was breathing slower. Loving him so intensely scared her, but at least she knew enough not to try and stop it. He said, “Want to come in the kitchen?”

“I have to rest. I’ve got this meeting tomorrow.”

“The big meeting! Got your six-shooter?”

“Shut up.”

Ivan sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes. She loved the sight of his bumpy spine through his shirt.

“Where’ve you been, anyway?”

“I was out with another woman who’s not you, having emotionally fraught sex. Are you thirsty?”

She frowned at him and got up and followed him into the kitchen. She found the bottle of wine and sipped at it, her head in her hand. He reached out and took the bottle. She smelled herself on him, on his hands and shirt. He was never with anybody else. She smiled at him.

“I’m an idiot,” she said. “You were editing film, weren’t you? I’m sorry.”

“You’re a weird monster of a person in some ways, but I love you.”

“Will you stay with me, even if I lose this job?”

“Especially if you blow this stupid job!” He laughed. “We could move to Buenos Aires and hang out with cool people. We could eat little plates of chorizo and octopus and then tango till three in the morning.”

“I’d be jealous of all the Argentinians if we lived there,” Stella said. “Why do I take all this work stuff so seriously? It’s just that Helena has me turned on. She’s so … great. And I won’t lose the job. I love the job. So long as this meeting goes okay, I’ll be able to do whatever I want.”

“When’s the meeting?”

“Tomorrow at ten.”

They began to walk back to the bedroom.

“Remember not to put your foot in your mouth.”

“I am going to keep quiet. You can bet on that.”

“Sure you are,” he said. She could see him raise an eyebrow and smile at her, even in the dark bedroom. She really did love him. It was something. Or, no. It had begun to feel like everything.

Peter and Emily and Stella and Helena, November 2011

Less than a minute after Peter announced himself to the receptionist, Lucy Brodsky came out to meet him. To Peter, she looked so young that her office clothes clashed with her face. The fabric of her blazer appeared to be more experienced than the rest of her.

“I’m an enormous fan of you and your book.” Her handshake was uncomfortably firm.

“Thank you.” He met her eyes. She looked away.

“No, really. I give it to all my friends. You wouldn’t believe how time-irrelevant your advice is. Or maybe you would.”

“I’m not sure…” Now that he was in the physical space of the publishing house, he adopted the soft dumb tones he’d used forty years earlier—to get through that odd time. He waggled his eyebrows and tried to look befuddled. This action appeared to make Lucy more comfortable. So he did it again.

She smiled and said, “Please follow me. Our meeting will take place in the Dreiser Room.”

She led him past rows of cubicles and then down a long hall to a conference room that was warmer than where they’d come from. They were alone.

“Coffee? Water?”

“No thanks, nothing for me.” He walked around the long conference table and leaned against a window frame. He glanced to his left and looked out at a corner of Central Park.

“How do you like these new offices?” he asked.

“These are the only offices I know. I’ve been here for almost a year and a half, ever since I graduated from Carleton. It’s in Minnesota.”

“Ladder & Rake’s old offices looked much … dowdier.”

“The offices on Park Avenue? I guess that was before I was born,” Lucy said.

“Also there were books around. I don’t see any books? Except those ones in the glass cabinets.”

“You can’t touch those. Anyway, paper books are not very green and Ladder & Rake is a green company these days.”

“But—”

“I know,” she said, half to herself. “Don’t start saying ‘but’ about business or you’ll go nuts.” She moved around the room, repositioning chairs.

“Do you work for Helena?”

She straightened and said, “Directly.”

Emily Babson came in with another young woman who had on an argyle sweater and a leopard-print scarf and maybe a little too much lipstick. Had they been made to wait somewhere else? That seemed odd. He did his eyebrow waggle again and Emily looked first confused and then angry.

“Sorry, Emily,” he said, instead of hello. “And are you Stella?” He walked over and shook both their hands.

Emily said, “It’s funny to see you in an office.”

“For me, too,” Peter said. “I haven’t been in a place like this in at least a decade. Maybe even two.”

Stella was both shorter and obviously younger, somewhere between Lucy and Emily’s age. She kept opening her mouth and then instead of allowing herself to speak, swallowing air. Finally, she said, “It’s really great to meet you after spending so much time on the phone. I just think—”

And then Helena came into the room through another door, moving fast and talking.

“Hello, hello, hello!” She looked only at Peter. He was striding toward her before he knew what was doing. But he knew he shouldn’t be so familiar with her. So he stopped and retreated to his place at the window. They hadn’t seen each other in such a long time.

“Well, I’m glad we decided it’ll just be the five or eight of us or whatever it is. My goodness, this is a big conference room for some little personalities! Stop. I mean the opposite. Let me see your charming faces, all of you.”

Everyone in the room looked up at Helena while she settled into a chair at the head of the table. Lucy immediately sat down to her right. Helena held the silence and Peter was thrown back in time to when they were very young and she had just begun to learn how to do that. Through the combination of yelling and sudden silence she could make any conversation dramatic, so even bringing a glass of water with or without ice to bed would turn into a heated exchange. She was capable of this all by the time she was twenty-four.

“Peter, dear—together again! I find I have to come a bit closer!” She got up and made her way to him. Now that he was invited, he pushed himself off the window and came to her.

He smiled and bent in and they kissed each other’s cheeks. How could a person smell of the same light flowery scent after nearly forty years? They couldn’t. She did. He glanced at her hand and the diamond bracelets around her wrists, and thought of her infinite ambition, the fortress she’d built for herself up high in an office building. There was a weirdly thick gold chain around her neck. He had been far away for so long. He really had. Her hair was silver-gray now, but her eyes were the same deep brown. Without thinking, he reached out. He wanted to touch her face. But she stepped back, still staring at him.

“You look great, Helena,” he said.

“Thank you. I’m happy to see you. I missed you, Peter Herman.”

She nodded and sat down again, not at the head of the table but in a chair near the windows. Peter sat next to her. She said, “Now this is what I like. A good solid meeting with just a few people, where we can have an honest and forthright conversation about where we are and where we need to be.”

And then everyone leaned in toward Helena and began to talk at once. Peter was overwhelmed by the noise. Could Helena have been who Lisa was referring to when she told him not to just be with Maddie? Could Lisa wish him back to Helena? Yes. His wife could have been that calculated about his life, at the end of hers.

The affair with Helen came back to him as snapshot images, the two of them in bed in her studio apartment on East Seventy-Second Street, followed by her screaming at him in the Lever House courtyard on Park Avenue, when Ladder & Rake’s offices were located across the street. It was 1975. They were coming from a lunch with someone and he was apologizing. He kept saying that what they had together was never serious. That he had gone and gotten married and he believed in the marriage. The book could be like a child between them, couldn’t it? Something they’d created that should make them feel proud. But no, that was all wrong and she had been furious at him. A child was a horrid simile, especially for a woman who did not yet have one. Even now, so many years later, he deeply regretted his choice of words.

“Nothing more than a few pokes, was it?” she had screamed.

She carried a stiff almond-colored pocketbook and she hit him with it, smacked him over and over again. And then she fell into him, crying.

“I could love you,” she said. Peter knew she meant, I do love you.

He had shaken her off, said he was sorry. He’d walked down to Grand Central and ridden back up to Millerton, hoping like mad she wouldn’t be too disappointed in him.

“What do you think, Peter?” she called out, now.

She put her hand on top of his. She wore gold and diamond rings on several of her fingers but she had no wedding band. No doubt she’d divorced a second or perhaps a third time. He smiled at her. Here she was again, after so long, in the seat next to him. And in mere hours, he’d be going back to Grand Central all over again.

“I don’t know what to think,” he said, falling back on the self he’d fashioned so long ago.

“I think we can rebuild the contest,” Stella spoke quickly. “I’m sure we can.”

The room’s attention focused on her. But she stopped as quickly as she started, perhaps realizing that she had not been asked what she thought. Peter found her engaging to look at. Of course, she was just like Helena. Though Stella was far less shrill and bossy. He imagined Stella’s career would be more of a ricochet than Helena’s had been.

Peter said, “Stella, you remind me of Helena when she was young. She was lovely, like you. And outspoken! You couldn’t get a word in…”

Stella opened her mouth. She had turned pale. “I am flattered, of course,” Stella whispered.