Love Is a Canoe: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, Stella?”

  She turned around. Should she dare to call her Helena? Their names were kind of similar. Should she mention that? All around them were dimly lit blowups of bestsellers from the past fifty years. There was Valley of the Dolls and Love Story and then there was Michael Caine’s autobiography and a special section dedicated to the memoirs of ex-presidents. Each cover was uglier than the last. But these covers were bestsellers. And they were bestsellers because Helena knew the audience and she knew content. And so many others, incredibly, didn’t.

  Helena was now a foot away, smelling of dry cleaning and too much foundation.

  “Have you ever spoken to Peter Herman?” Helena asked.

  “Well, no. His wife died last fall, so I stayed away. Of course we sent flowers and a note and a donation—as a house. But I thought it best to wait until I’d proposed my idea to you before contacting him. I understand he’s a very private man—”

  “I know what kind of man he is,” Helena said. “Since I near invented him.”

  “Of course,” Stella said.

  “And I know his wife died. Very sad. But much better if he’s a widower, believe me. Everybody loves a man who loved his wife vigilantly until she died. My soul is already making this story feel good. Stop. I mean the opposite.”

  Stella reared back and fought off a smile. “Right. I mean, yes, me, too. I’ll put everything I’ve got into it.”

  “Go see him if you have to. Or—he may not want that. But I think your idea has a shot and I want to see it succeed. Your colleagues in the digital group might be able to run with it. Don’t ask me how, but I imagine they’d say that. They always do. Have a meeting with them and see if they don’t say exactly that. When you do get in touch with Peter, you tell him Helena says hello.”

  “Yes, yes I will.”

  “Good,” Helena said. She didn’t move.

  They were, as Helena always was, shadowed by Lucy, who held her iPad in front of her the way a schoolgirl holds her notebook to protect her breasts from boys. A half dozen others also stood nearby, listening.

  Stella was not good at letting silence go unfilled. She said, “Did you … edit him?”

  “You can say that again. Practically made up half the book myself, goddamn it. That, Small Is Beautiful, and cheerleading for Jonathan Livingston Seagull made my career. And believe me: working with Peter was a lot more fun than dealing with those others. But last time I checked—and given the nonstop nightmare we’re living through, I have no choice but to check every day—who gives a shit? We need billing today, not a million years ago, got me?”

  “Got you,” Stella said.

  Helena kept staring at her.

  Stella stood still and wished she more closely resembled Helena. If only she were more … black-and-white like Helena and Lucy. But no. She was invariably unkempt and slightly hippieish, since she was one of five children brought up by husband-and-wife garden designers who had moved around a lot when she was young, and who now lived on a flower farm outside Charlottesville. Stella was the only one of her siblings who worked in an office. She could never be quite corporate enough, no matter how she tried. She’d even attempted the inversion of being so noncorporate as to actually be extremely corporate, so that she spent some weeks making a point of arriving at work looking like she was going to spend the afternoon drinking on a bench under an umbrella at a beer garden in Williamsburg. That hadn’t worked either.

  “Good,” Helena said. “You tell that lonely old man I say hello, and when it’s all locked up, get him here to New York and we’ll have a breakfast and talk about the old days when life was simple and books were made out of paper.” Helena turned to Lucy. “Where are we going?”

  “To see Bob Payne,” Lucy said. “New Google litigation update.”

  “Shit, shoot, goddamn. A bad day gets worse…” Helena didn’t move. “Stella?” Helena’s voice rose higher.

  “Yes?” Stella found herself staring down into Helena’s dark brown eyes. They were filmy. But Stella saw the beauty there. The beauty of being able to get people to do whatever she wanted.

  “When you’re up to something as wacky as this, or really when you’re doing anything, always ask yourself: Where is the romance? Got me?”

  “Got you.” Stella smiled and tried not to look overly focused in a way that would reveal she was trying to remember every single word Helena said.

  “Come on,” Helena said with a laugh. “Say it like you damn well have got to find out where the romance is.”

  Stella took half a breath. She remembered the way she felt with Joe, who she had been with before Ivan, who had always kept the romance and the sex to a minimum—that asshole.

  “Where is the romance?” she asked through bared teeth.

  “Yeah,” Helena said, and smiled. “Go find it.”

  Helena walked away. Stella stood at the elevator bank feeling taller, lighter, and more kempt. She knew she ought to be frightened of the attention she’d received, that there were enemies everywhere and she didn’t even know who some of them were. But at the same time, wow! Helena was obviously brilliant because she’d seen the potential in Stella’s idea—and she’d made a great point. Stella felt vindicated. She had been right to come to LRB and to get close to Helena. And she had a good idea but didn’t yet know where the romance was … in it. But now Helena was helping her and Stella was definitely feeling inspired. She was going to find it!

  From Marriage Is a Canoe, Chapter 1, First Day

  On the morning of my first day, before I went fishing with Pop, I helped Bess with the chores. Pop had gone into town to buy groceries and a few things he said he thought we might need for fishing.

  Bess and I started in the little bedroom above the kitchen, where she threw a summer quilt in the air. It floated down onto the single bed that my mother had slept in when she was a little girl and that I would use during my stay.

  “Did you see that?” Bess asked.

  “It’s a nice quilt,” I said.

  “It’s not just nice,” Bess said. “This is a wonderful patchwork quilt. It is made up of squares of fine and different materials double-stitched together so tightly that not even an angry outdoor cat can claw it apart. It’s stronger than it looks. Do you understand?”

  “Sure,” I said, uncertainly. I didn’t yet know whether I wanted to be there or not. I missed my friends. But my grandparents’ world was so fresh and new and I didn’t yet dare to even act grumpy around them.

  “Now we’ll open all the windows so that sweet Lake Okabye air can rush through the house.”

  “Okay.” Obediently, I went into the hall and opened the window at the top of the second staircase.

  “Light as feathers and strong as iron,” she called out to me.

  “What is?” I asked. She followed me into the hall and then we went into one of the spare bedrooms and started on the bedding in there.

  “Our quilts are,” she said. “Will you get us some pillowcases?”

  I went and found them in the linen closet. When I got back she said, “Sit with me a moment.”

  So I sat down with her on the side of the bed in that big spare bedroom that nobody ever used.

  “Peter, listen. We know you’ve witnessed some ugliness between your mother and father.” She hugged me before going on. She had blond hair that I’d watched her put in curlers the night before. I thought she smelled like flowers. “If you want to talk about it with us, you can. Now let’s make this bed.”

  I think we both knew I wouldn’t be able to really talk to her. I was too embarrassed. I was twelve. She threw another patchwork quilt in the air. I stared, transfixed by the orphaned bits of fabric, now stitched together, spinning in the light.

  “Pick up an end and pull,” she said.

  And I did just what I was told and I couldn’t help noticing that it was light as feathers and strong as iron!

  “I like this quilt,” I said.

  “Yes, this is a good one—I made i
t out of Pop’s old shirts and some Italian wool he brought back from the war.” She paused. “I think I hear him now.”

  I pricked up my ears and I could hear him, too.

  “Hello!” Pop yelled. Bess smiled. We could hear him lumbering around in the kitchen.

  “Ready, Peter?”

  “Are we done, Bess?” I asked.

  “I’m not but you are. You two see if you can catch some trout.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I’d never touched a live fish before. I followed Pop to the kitchen. He was much, much taller than me. He was a burly, clean-shaven man with a bald head, in a white T-shirt and blue-jean overalls, always with a Lucky Strike cigarette either between his lips or tucked behind his ear.

  “Let’s gather what we’ll need,” he said.

  I found myself nodding, uncertain about what to do next. But just like his wife, Pop smiled patiently at me.

  He said, “We can only bring with us what makes sense to bring. And not more than that. Why do you think we can’t bring more?” Pop stared down at me and waited. I understood that he was trying to teach me a lesson, though it looked like it had been a while since he’d done that.

  “Because the boat will sink?”

  “Yes. And who needs the weight? Not two people in a canoe. When Bess and I go out, which we’ve been doing since long before your mom was born, we just bring what we need. You can’t bring too much in the canoe because it’ll just get in the way. Wait’ll you see our canoe! It’s strong, and if you care for it through the seasons like we’ve been doing, it’ll support you and it won’t break down. But it’s just built for two adults and maybe a few children, at the most. Try to make it hold more than that and it’s just no good at all. But we do need our icebox for sandwiches and the bait bucket and a towel for you in case you want to swim.”

  “Sure thing,” I said.

  Pop wrapped the sandwiches and I put them in the icebox. It was so quiet in that house that we could hear Bess humming Hank Williams’s “Crazy Heart” on the floor above us.

  We gathered the rest of what we needed and went out to the great lawn behind the back porch. And, because I’d come in after dark the evening before, that was the first time I saw the canoe. It was old and the outside was painted a milky green and the inside had mahogany ribs that glowed in the sunlight.

  “This is sure something!” I cried out. And I didn’t stop myself the way I would have in the city, where I was learning to play it cool and not show too much enthusiasm for anything.

  “As I said, Bess and I have done a nice job of taking care of it,” Pop said. “You know how to paddle?”

  I felt some heat on my cheeks, and I frowned and shook my head, looked down at the shiny grass beneath my sneakers.

  “Never paddled a canoe?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir! I’m your Pop. All right, what about fishing?”

  I could only shake my head.

  Pop laughed a big belly laugh and he smacked the back of my neck and I stumbled forward. I glared up at him when he did that, because I felt ashamed for not holding my ground.

  “That’s fine! First we’ll learn how to handle this canoe. You’ll see what it can hold and what it can handle and what it can’t. Then we’ll learn to paddle it, together, just like me and Bess did when we first met, so that someday you’ll know how to take a moonlit canoe ride with your sweetie. And then we’ll show you how to fish!”

  “Okay,” I said, and then lower, “thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. You’re going to work this summer. You’ll do your share. And we’ll have you paddling and catching fish soon enough!”

  Good love is a quilt—light as feathers and strong as iron.

  A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a few kids.

  Peter Herman, August 2011

  Peter Herman leaned into the white picket fence that surrounded the front garden of the Lake Okabye Inn. He wore moccasins and had one foot up on a horizontal board, his forearms snug in the fence’s interstices. He set his chin on his knuckles and looked out at the traffic. Still as a bird on a wire, there in a pose that he hadn’t much changed since he’d gotten involved with the inn nearly forty years earlier.

  He raised his big head and smiled at a former cook, driving by the inn with her children in her pickup. When children looked at him now, he imagined they saw an old man with eyes that were placed far apart, like a fish. His ears had grown large and they were covered in white fuzz. When he was unhappy with himself, as he was now, he thought the world saw him as a sort of aged cartoon version of the handsome man he once was. He sighed and breathed in deeply. Thirty years ago, in the same spot, he would have been able to smell chickens baking in the kitchen off the restaurant. But they’d quadrupled the size of that kitchen, added a bakery, and moved it to the back of the property in the expansion of ’86. Now all he smelled was the newly blacktopped road and the end of the morning dew. He tilted his head back and listened to a screen door squeak open. That would be Henry. His old friend’s footfalls ended with a couple of squishes in the grass.

  “Actually, they don’t like a widower hanging around the place so much anymore! Those days are gone, windbag!”

  “Morning, Henry.” Peter didn’t turn his head, only reached out and clapped Henry Talkington on the back. “What’d Maddie say?”

  “You mean your girlfriend? ‘Oh, hell,’” Henry said. He leaned the other way on the fence, so he could look into the breakfast-room windows. Henry was short and round. He was puffy in the places where age had pruned and etched at Peter.

  “Now that doesn’t sound right. I’ve never heard her curse. Not once.”

  “With me, she curses. You’re asking about before she left for California? She’s back this week, I believe. She stopped by for lunch with me before she left. But you’d know that.”

  Peter rubbed his chin with his thumb. “I didn’t feel like making the trip,” he said.

  Henry nodded and said, “I know it.”

  Peter waited for Henry to say more. Lisa had been gone for nearly ten months and he was now involved with Maddie Narayan. She wanted him to leave Millerton and begin a new life with her in San Francisco so she could be near her daughter, Anjulee. He was not so sure he wanted that. He’d recently discovered that he wasn’t even quite ready for a weeklong visit.

  “Maddie’s trying to get a handle on what you two have, is all,” Henry said. “She can’t gauge it and you’re not helping. But she does know she’s loving the Bay Area.”

  Peter only turned to Henry and smiled. When they’d first met, Peter was the talkative one and Henry was the hired man who listened and took care of details. But since Lisa died, Henry had become the talker. People like Henry, who had known Peter for most of their lives, filled in the new silences Peter created, and didn’t appear to notice the difference.

  “Also she doesn’t like to feel that she’s being made to chase you,” Henry said. “She loves you. She respects what you had with Lisa. Now she feels like you’re a prize that she can’t quite seem to win. I know better. But not her. And I can’t explain to her why you don’t give in, since I think you ought to.”

  “Maddie’s too good for me. I should visit Belinda at Vassar. She must know some old professor ladies who are single.”

  “Your daughter’s coworkers? Now they’d be too good for you, too!”

  “Thanks, Henry. What’d Manuel put on the menu for the lunch special?”

  Henry sighed and stared at his feet. The bright sun shined through the sugar maple trees and down on the top of his bald head. The wind wasn’t much and the two men were still. Peter realized that yet again his old friend Henry had cornered him to try to make him see his point, which was that it was time for Peter to let the inn go, sell his house so he could pay his bills, and move on to a new life with Maddie.

  “Catfish sandwiches,” Henry said. “Lightly fried. With a celery root rémoul
ade. And French fries, not that I’d allow either of us to have any.”

  “Any good?”

  “Pretty good. I’ve seen him do it before. It’s not catfish, exactly, but close.”

  “Whitebait?” Peter squinched his lips, as if he tasted something rotten.

  “Or something. It’s fresh fish, I believe. From the fellow who comes over from Orient on the ferry.”

  “Maddie say when she’ll go back to California? I don’t like to ask her too many questions. So that’s why I’m asking you.”

  “She’ll be going back and forth fairly often. She’s also thinking about selling her place. Apparently she’s waiting on you more than she could ever have imagined. So she says.”

  Peter shook his head and said, “Why anyone would ever bother waiting on me—now that is the real mystery.”

  “I agree. She’s fifty-two,” Henry said. “And she’s a beautiful woman. She might want to get remarried. You should figure out if you’re capable of that before stealing any more of her time.”

  “Thanks, Henry. Thanks for the light talk.”

  “Anytime, anytime. Now get off the damn fence!”

  * * *

  Lisa had just turned sixty-two when the disease showed itself, though later, Peter understood it had been growing for some time. A growth of tau proteins that had forced her brain cells to shrink, pressed them down and impacted her ability to be herself, the self that was nice to him and took care of both of them. He had assumed the newly constant surliness in her character represented some kind of reconfiguring that came with age. He also felt partly to blame. She made unprecedented mistakes and got upset about the bills, and she worried over relinquishing these tasks to Peter since he had always been the one who was clumsy with money. He felt bad and believed he had overburdened her.

  What was Peter left with after Lisa died? A jolly shell of a self he’d been avoiding but now had no choice but to get to know. Forty years earlier, he had returned to Millerton within a year of publication of Canoe because working in Manhattan for McCann Erickson as a copywriter was sapping his ability to write a second book. He had a few thousand dollars and the arrogance that accompanied a very young man’s success. And he went and found the girl he’d kissed when he was twelve—only then she’d been called Honey, and she’d been the innkeeper’s daughter.