Love Is a Canoe: A Novel Read online

  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.

  Eli had been a guest lecturer, back when Emily was getting over Gordon Dubrow, who had left New York for a good teaching job at Oregon State University. The final year with Gordon had begun with the offer for the OSU job. The job offer e
ngendered an intense, two-day discussion that constantly verged on a fight, that revolved around how Gordon’s work would always be theoretical and how he would probably never build a sailboat of his own. At the end of it, Emily realized she’d been attacking him. They had spent much of that year realizing that though they loved each other, she wasn’t leaving New York. And when he volunteered to stay, she said no to that, too. There was an imbalance. Though she loved him, he loved her more. She understood this but dared not articulate it, for fear of hurting him as badly as she had when they fought about the sailboat he would never build. She would miss him. But she wanted to be in New York with its unending supply of lectures, its promise to keep her busy and engaged, no matter how shy she became. She also suspected that she wanted someone cooler, someone just a little outside the world she’d made for herself. Though if Gordon had grabbed her by the shoulders and demanded that she move to the West Coast, she probably would have gone. But he hadn’t grabbed her.

  Eli had started his lecture by talking about his first career as a graphic designer and how he’d enjoyed that. But he’d had a growing fascination with bicycle design. He’d already built one bike and was thinking that it might be more than a hobby. And so, on a trip to Italy, he came up with the idea for his company, Roman Street Bicycles. The longer he stood in front of the class, the less he talked. Instead, he showed pictures on PowerPoint. He began with a silver-colored, steel frame, single-speed bicycle. He showed the class how he stenciled “Roman Street” or “RSB” on each part in ghostly white paint. He showed pictures of himself shaking hands with the lanky owners of independent bike shops in Williamsburg and Fort Greene and on Third Avenue in Gowanus. There were photographs of his bikes in their windows. He showed how the city was newly lined with bicycle lanes, so many lanes everywhere that they looked like some vast interlay of green threads. Within eighteen months, he was importing steel tubing from China and manufacturing completely new bikes in a factory in the South Bronx where the laborers were mostly illegal but were paid as if they weren’t. He showed pictures of the factories in China and his dozen workers in the Bronx. His lecture trailed off completely as he showed pictures of his inspirations, ancient Bianchi bicycles, photographs of working women bicycling in Rome in the fifties, Greg LeMond, the Italian national cycling team, and rain-soaked commuters biking up hills in Seattle.

  Afterward, instead of bowing her head and sneaking out during the applause, Emily fought past the constraints she had allowed to define her and went to the front of the room to talk to him. She wanted to know how much of what he did was fashion and how much was building custom bikes. How much was really for the riders? He stood up straight and she was afraid that he might not like her questions or how tall she was. He asked her to come for a drink at Café Loup.

  He had such dark eyes. He spoke with his thick hands. He shaped bicycles in front of her, showed her discarded logos on napkins, eventually took her hands and held them in his while he explained how it felt to build a bicycle and then use it to take you anywhere you wanted to go. She did not tell him about Gordon and the theoretical waves and the unbuilt sailboat. She didn’t tell him how in love she’d been, and how recently. To compensate for these omissions, she didn’t ask many questions about his past.

  “I know I’m having a hard time finding the words to explain all this,” Eli said.

  “That’s okay,” she said with a smile. “I understand everything you’re saying.”

  She stared at his hands. She found out he was five years older than her. The elusive thing that had not happened with Gordon in six years happened with Eli in only a few hours. She could imagine being married to him.

  Now Emily imagined Eli stenciling “Roman Street” between the pair of sweet dimples she’d seen above Jenny’s ass. In Emily’s mind, Jenny had started to look like Megan Fox, but smarter and with those incredible lazy ringlets of hair. Emily fantasized about finding Jenny mistakenly riding her Roman Street bicycle onto the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and running her down with a big car. Cool-ass Jenny. Easy going, L.A. Jenny. There was something Emily hadn’t given Eli and he had found it in Jenny. Where Emily liked things that were explainable, Jenny had accessed the part of Eli that was inexplicable. And now Emily was miserable and frightened and confused.

  Emily shook her head and reminded herself that Eli was an excellent husband. He had an autographed Thurman Munson baseball in his sock drawer and that was the only odd thing in there. She had never found a fetish-porn magazine, a suspicious USB cartridge, unexplained lipstick-stained boxers, or a duct-taped manila envelope stuffed with photos of a girl from high school or college. There was never anything like that. He was obsessed with his work and thought about little else, and she had always loved guys like that, since she was a teenager. There had been nothing to worry about for years and years until there was Jenny.

  She pulled out her phone to call Sherry back and then just stared at it.

  Fucking phones. She had picked up Eli’s phone on a morning two weeks earlier to find a text from Jenny that said, Can’t wait to see you at work today. After that, Emily had scrolled through her own texts back and forth with her husband and there weren’t a whole lot of can’t waits. They were both guilty of a ton of I’ll be lates, so many back and forth, informing the other not to be disappointed about this latest reduction in the time they would spend together. There was also a whole lot of discussion of food and when to eat it. The texts he exchanged with Jenny were not dirty. They were solicitous and kind. They were kinder than coworker kind. You were great today! I just got the name of an investor who I think you’ll really like. Call me later? Want to connect with you before bedtime. And then when he’d returned from L.A., a text from Eli to Jenny that said, Thanks for the hug, work wife. A hug from a work wife. Emily had intended to be his wife for work and for home. But that was over. Still, she had hope. She had to figure out how to push them through this thing, past Jenny. If only she had any idea how to do that.

  Her home screen was a picture of Eli winking. She thought of his muscular legs and the way she loved him as she stared at his face. She leaned against a bookshelf. She was in big trouble.

  Emily put her phone away and left the self-help section. She picked up the August Vogue and Me on You, a second novel by Ida Abarra, an Ethiopian-American woman who had been at Sarah Lawrence when she was there, someone she had never been that close to but had really admired. She’d always had funny conversations with Ida at the extremely drunken dinner parties that they’d both gone to right after college in too-small apartments in the Lower East Side and Greenpoint, before everyone paired off and moved to the softer terrain of brownstone Brooklyn.

  I’ll be supportive and buy Ida’s novel, she thought.

  Her phone vibrated.

  “Are you finished with whoever you ran into?” Sherry asked. “I only have a few more minutes to talk before I go onstage.”

  “No, still catching up,” Emily whispered. “Sorry.” She hung up again.

  She loved her younger sister but didn’t want to hear about the date she had with a movie producer after she finished her show. She knew she was being awful, but she couldn’t help it.

  It was warm in the bookstore, this rather alien outpost of a new minichain that had sprouted up six months earlier, a brightly lit place with plenty of bleached wood tables and some oversize canvas-covered armchairs where high school kids were surreptitiously touching one another’s thighs.

  She walked toward the front of the store. She and Eli were going to make dinner together. She needed to buy fish because it was Monday and they were often virtuous early in the week, before succumbing on Wednesday or Thursday evening to takeout Thai or just cereal or reheated spaghetti, eaten standing up in the kitchen with beer.

  And then, before she got on line to pay, she circled back and scooped up the version of Marriage Is a Canoe she’d come in to look at. Admittedly, she already had the book at home. But this was a different edition that appeared to have a shorte
ned version of the original exercises in it. She had always loved the book. She had read and reread the copy that lived in her parents’ bathroom when she was growing up. When she was twelve, she had fantasized about being the girl called Honey who Peter Herman had kissed and later married. She realized, suddenly, that that was twenty-one years ago. And ever since, she had kept a copy of Canoe with her wherever she lived.

  She hated people who made fun of Canoe. She loved the elegance of it, the simplicity of its lessons and the fact that they were undeniably right and true. The book kept the dream of the ideal marriage alive. Canoe had helped her look away from her parents’ marriage, which was cold and New Englandy and had lasted fourteen brittle years. She and Sherry always joked that it had gone on about a dozen years too long. By the time Emily was in seventh grade and Sherry was in fourth, her mother had refused to celebrate Christmas and her father wouldn’t celebrate Chanukah, so the winter holiday arrived heavy and silent in the house. Emily and Sherry mutely understood that their home life was stagnant and wouldn’t last, so Sherry forced herself on their friends and Emily spent much of her time alone, reading. This marital outcome was precisely unlike the ones described in Canoe, except for much of chapter eleven, a chapter Emily always skipped when she reread. Emily loved Canoe. Though, ever since college, she kept the book on a high shelf where friends wouldn’t see it and tease her about it.

  She paid and smiled at the cashier and thought about how she ought to share more about herself with people, to not be so tight-lipped and interior. But she only really knew how to talk about objects—she didn’t see a way to explain herself. And maybe that was beginning to crop up as a problem with Eli, too.

  She called Sherry from the street.

  “Emily, what the hell are you up to?”