Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (7 page)

“I’m picking up the cake right now.”

“Sounds good.” Lisa made Henry nod alongside her.

“Can you believe it? Eighteen years and she’s just about to disappear.” She’d looked away from both of them. “Why don’t you two drive over to the house together? There’s just a little more I want to take care of here.”

Peter had accepted the white lie. He understood his role. He was good with people, bad with money, and something of a town fixture—well-loved and respected and expected to be as he’d always been. And he’d always been a charmer. Taking care of their daughter. Not too tethered to any one job. Cared for by a good wife who wasn’t afraid to bend the truth if that was what was necessary to keep them together, solvent and happy.

*   *   *

The worst was when Lisa had been in Lambert Hospital for three straight days. She was given drugs that allowed her to reclaim some of her distant memories and she’d immediately tried to tell him every secret she’d kept. A man at a financial seminar she’d attended in South Carolina one summer. Another in Sonoma County, where she had gone once in the late seventies for a week with her roommates from the University of Buffalo, where she’d been secretary of her sorority. An unexpected royalty windfall that she had lost and never recovered when she had optimistically invested in a friend’s Christmas tree business, back when they were very young. In fact, between the money she had encouraged him to spend on the inn in Hudson and the poor investments she had made, they had wasted nearly all of his royalty money. The unexplained losses and the hidden infidelities were coming out now.

“How lucky I am to have spent my life with you,” she whispered. “I should keep my secrets, shouldn’t I? You don’t want them.”

He didn’t. He said, “You know, you’re right. How lucky you were to have married a man who truly understands what makes a marriage happy.” They laughed about it together.

Her body became increasingly stiff. The doctor began to worry less about the progressive debilitation of the healthy cells in her brain and more about the common infections she was no longer able to fight. She got pneumonia and the doctor said there wasn’t much hope. He said the pneumonia was stronger than she was, that it was massive and sprouting like a common cold in a punch bowl at a holiday party. She was given painkillers. She floated. While her beloved watched her from his chair.

Peter dried his tears with a handkerchief she had brought back from a walking trip in the Scottish highlands she had taken with her sister Gwen, who lived down in Florida and who had died just two years before.

“You had moments with other women, didn’t you?” she asked.

He only shrugged. She was always and intermittently able to find her voice. At the very end, with shame, he found himself wishing she would stop being able to access these harsh, appraising parts of herself. The buzz of the hospital’s lights was cut by the clipped voices of the nurses in the hall.

“You wouldn’t remember Erich Fromm,” an old nurse said to a young one, now within Peter’s range of hearing, which was still as good as it was when he was a boy—and he’d been quite an eavesdropper then, too.

“No, but I know my Mitch Albom.
Tuesdays with Morrie
for couples! Imagine the money! Imagine having that to guide my marriage. I bet he could’ve saved it. That man in there could have saved my marriage. I feel sure of it.”

“I’ll bring you my copy.”

“Too late.”

“You could still use it—for next time. Here, I’m programming a reminder into my phone.”

He listened to the nurses’ sneakers as they wandered down the hall. Years earlier, someone had given Peter
Tuesdays
and he thought it was pretty bad—maybe even a bit derivative of his own work. He was fonder of Dr. Phil because they’d corresponded at one point and Dr. Phil had mentioned
Canoe
on his show. He liked Dr. Phil.

Peter never claimed to be brilliant. Of course he had made up parts of the stories, embellished where necessary, toyed with the through-lines of the days spent with his grandparents until the anecdotes were taut, self-effacing, and sometimes gorgeous in their accept-the-dusk-but-welcome-the-dawn sentiment. But
Canoe
was no cynical exercise. Over and over, the book conveyed simple truths. It was not his fault the world loved the idea of a book full of answers to unanswerable questions.

The cover of the book’s newest edition was a photograph of a couple’s hands intertwined. The sunlight behind them was red and gold and white, their glossy wedding bands glinting. What crap. He had never worn one.

From
Marriage Is a Canoe
, Chapter 2, On Desire

The end of our first true day of fishing found us without a single trout in our green bucket. I felt guilty about it, as if that sad empty bucket was all my fault.

Pop said, “First thing tomorrow, we go out again.”

His voice was steady as we came off the lake. There was deep golden late-afternoon light all around us, settling like a promise that that evening, that sweet mid-July evening, would be a pleasant one.

Pop showed me how to hop out of the canoe and drag it up onshore, flip it over, and prop it up on the wooden beams attached to the tiny dock.

I remember I was thinking of a cigarette I’d smoked with a friend some weeks earlier, on Third Avenue, in front of a candy store. My brain had been so addled that I’d nearly walked into traffic, thinking, No wonder adults smoke all the time. I wanted a cigarette right then, after our day of fishing.

“Did you hear me?” Pop asked.

I shook my head no.

“You dreaming of something?”

“I guess I kind of miss being at home.”

“Are you boys coming in?” Bess called from the porch. I looked up. I saw she was smiling and I worried over whether she could read my mind.

“Yes, we are,” Pop said. “Didn’t catch a thing, though.”

“That’s all right. I baked a chicken.”

“Now that is truly a fine woman!” Pop yelled out. “What is it I always say?”

“Don’t tell the boy things like that.” Bess shook her head.

“If I don’t, who will?” Pop asked. He looked at me and pointed at her. He said, “I’m her servant as sure as I’m alive. Whatever she wants, whatever she desires—be it milk or fresh air or hand-holding—that is my desire, too.”

“He’s laying it on pretty thick,” Bess said. “But that’s my good man—not afraid to keep life sweet as syrup. You two come on up here and we’ll have some dinner.”

“Desire?” I asked, thinking, I know what desire is. It’s me wanting to get a hold of a Winston and smoke it out on the road where they couldn’t see.

Pop turned to me then as if he were thinking of something so great that it was not meant for me alone, as if his words were not only for me, but for you and me both.

“Desire, young man, is what your heart wants when it’s not fettered by your brains.”

And at that moment, all I knew was that the desire he was talking about had nothing to do with cigarettes.

Desire for your loved one gives you the strength to paddle on.

Emily Babson, August 2011

“Wait, I see someone I know,” Emily said. “Sherry, let me call you back. Hi!”

Emily ended the call with her sister and dropped her phone in her bag. She was alone in the self-help section of a bookstore on Smith Street, a few blocks from her apartment. Lately she was quick to jump off the phone before Sherry tried to get into what was going on with Emily and Eli, because talking about it was going to make the problem real—fast. Emily did not want it to grow into a bigger deal. And if and when it did, then it would in large part be Sherry’s fault.

Emily pulled a paperback copy of
Marriage Is a Canoe
from the shelf. Sherry had sent an old edition of the book to Emily in a care package from L.A. when she was there during pilot season a few years ago. She had sent it with a Post-it note on it that said, “Remember this?” Because before their parents were divorced—when Emily turned thirteen and Sherry was ten—their mother had kept a copy sitting on top of the toilet tank in the bathroom off the master bedroom in Milton, where Emily and Sherry had grown up.

Emily held the book in her hands and closed her eyes. She stood in the quiet bookstore and tried to explain to herself—yet again—that Eli, her husband of almost three years, had experienced some kind of epiphany a few weeks earlier on a business trip to L.A. and was going to do something nonprofit-related with his company. He had barely told her a thing about it. She had begun to suspect that he was figuring out the new business with Jenny Alexandretti, who was now helping with everything related to Roman Street Bicycles. Eli rarely asked Emily questions about his business anymore. Ever since Jenny had moved to New York from L.A. a year ago and started working at Roman Street, Eli had been a little evasive. Something was wrong. Emily was sure about that.

The most interesting thing that Emily had learned about Jenny Alexandretti was that her father was a famous photographer who had taken nude pictures of her at twelve, pictures that were still kicking around the Internet. She knew that Jenny no longer spoke to her father. Eli had told her that, back when Jenny still came up in conversation. She knew from Sherry that since Jenny had started at Roman Street, she had tattooed several bike parts on her body. First a fork, Sherry had told her. Then a sprocket. Sherry couldn’t recall the name of the latest part and where it was on Jenny’s body, but she had assured Emily that this had nothing to do with Eli. It was just that Jenny was the sort of person who got really obsessed with scenes. Thus, the tattoos. Because she’s kind of lost, Emily had said. Right, Sherry said. Nothing to worry about. Just a lost soul who, thanks to Sherry and Eli, had found her calling. But now Emily suspected that Eli and Jenny had had a kiss. Which meant there was something to worry about.

Emily put
Canoe
back and went over to the magazine section. She looked for the bike magazine where Roman Street placed its ads. Eli had been featured on the cover back in May. She had blocked the magazine’s name, just remembered that it was stupid and she didn’t like it. If Eli had consulted her, she would have steered him toward smaller ads in bigger magazines like
Sports Illustrated
. When they first began dating seriously, Eli had checked in with Emily about everything related to marketing Roman Street. At first, he’d been shy about it. But she knew he was aware that having her help steer his business had been one of the keys to its success. Eli never denied that.

She had met Eli five years earlier, when he was a guest lecturer at a night course Emily was taking on industrial design at the New School, where he’d been an undergraduate. Emily had always loved lectures. She tried, whenever possible, to visit the New School or Parsons or FIT and catch lectures on design. Her job at Yes was to explain industrial design to people, to market great design and its relationship to technology. And she was good at it. Every few months she would visit OXO’s headquarters on Twenty-Sixth Street, where they’d created the Good Grips line. She would be brought back to a conference room where a designer would be sitting with a new kitchen gadget. She’d say, I see you’ve got something there. Want to tell me about it? And they would try, and fail. She would coax out the best name for the thing, the best description. She could create a whole way of thinking about a new object, so that people wanted it and believed they needed it. And then she was on to the next company, and the next thing.

She had discovered this talent after college, when she’d first come to New York. Back then she worked nights at a law firm copyediting legal briefs and spent her days as a freelance assistant at a big design firm that mostly worked on branding for film and music festivals. She imagined she’d go to grad school for art history, or go further in design management, or at worst, go to law school and hate it but have money in her future and something to talk about with her father during their infrequent dinners that occurred when he was working on a case out of his firm’s New York office. And then she went to a lecture on a third date with Gordon Dubrow, who was a grad student in computer science and wave theory at NYU. They had met during a day trip she’d taken one Saturday with a girlfriend around New York Harbor on an old sailboat. Gordon had been on the boat alone. She had observed him for half an hour while he obsessively watched the waves and every so often stuck out his hand and tried to follow their pattern, looking like he was doing a dance step from the eighties. She sat down next to him and they had ended up talking about boats. At that lecture, she sat holding hands with Gordon and listening to a professor from New Zealand talk about what wave theory could mean for ship design. It was then, when she found she was better at explaining to Gordon how big ships ought to look in order to perform well on the high seas than he was to her, that she realized she didn’t want to build things. She wanted to explain them. And she had discovered a career. She then fell in love with Gordon and they’d spent six foggy years together.

During her twenties, whenever she was at a loss or just had a free evening, she went to lectures on math or science. But she also went to anthropology lectures at the Museum of Natural History or lectures on art history at the Met or MoMA. She went to screenings of documentaries and stayed for the Q&As. She sought out lectures on urban planning at the Museum of the City of New York and lectures on textiles at the Cooper-Hewitt. Her most recent obsession was Gary Hustwit, the man who had made the documentaries
Helvetica
and
Objectified
. She loved his tweets even more than his films. He knew how to explain the world. She thought he shared her gift. He made his subjects sound better and clearer and, when he was at his best, more charming. Emily could do that, too.

She often felt like her profession was dorky and, if she was feeling really down on herself, boyish. She felt guilty that she didn’t see more friends and go to more parties. She hated that she could be so bold in a meeting and yet so quick to cross the street or hide behind a car when she saw an acquaintance. Over the years, the best way she’d found to unite these parts of herself had grown out of becoming part of an e-mail Listserv that kept its exclusive group of never more than 111 members updated on industrial design events in New York and general global ID trends. She raised eyebrows at the other members of the Listserv at events and followed them on Twitter, though she never tweeted. Showing up at events and silently acknowledging others wasn’t quite work life and it wasn’t precisely social life, and that made her feel okay. Not so shy. Though she hated that word. She understood that she had consciously chosen to inhabit a small world full of awkward people who freely admitted they’d rather work with objects than humans. She felt happy and even a little proud to have found her place in this group. When she occasionally contributed a thought or passed along an article to the Listserv and received positive responses, she got so excited she had to stop looking at all personal e-mails for a few days, until she flattened out and felt like herself again.