Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (32 page)

On Sin

“The twist I never saw coming was the twist and shout!” Pop loved to say that—it was his rock ’n’ roll joke.

I found it funny the first time, and kept laughing after that, just as Bess did.

But eventually I discovered that the joke was also meant as a kind of code for adultery. He never said: Look what happened to your parents because of adultery. But I was beginning to be able to understand him pretty well. On this evening, Bess had gone off to play bridge in the back room at the library and Pop and I were watching the sun go down together out in the canoe. He was drinking Yukon Jack whiskey from a copper flask and I was whittling.

“You will have your head turned by a pretty lady, you can be sure of that. You will twist. You may shout!”

His rough yell across the lake was like a crow’s caw. I still hear it when I see a pretty woman in stockings and a tight skirt pass me by in the busy midday street.

“Pretty girls are nice to look at,” I said, thinking of my Honey. “I mean, how can a guy keep from wanting to be with lots of girls?”

“You cannot keep from wanting. You will commit adultery. It’s a fact of life, like playing sports. You’ll keep playing sports as you get older, won’t you, Peter?”

“Yes.”

“At least football. You must play that in high school, or basketball, so you’ll know what it is to be on a team and to trust your teammates and work toward a common goal. But here is what you must remember. Even if you don’t take a woman who is not your wife in your arms and love her, you are certain to look at a woman with lust. This is adultery.”

“Adultery,” I said. And I won’t lie—it felt good and illicit to speak such a word aloud.

How little I knew! How innocent I was. But my Pop knew that from the moment I clambered off the bus on Main Street, with my army-green duffel stuffed with white T-shirts and blue jeans. I was blank enough for every sort of imprinting, right or wrong.

But everything I learned that summer was right.

Especially this:

You will look at others with lust, and this will challenge the strength of your marriage. But if you’re going to have a happy journey through this life, stay in your own canoe.

Peter snapped the book closed and laughed aloud at his own ridiculousness. The hubris he must have had to type such blather! Yet people liked it. And Emily Babson—she really believed this stuff. How could that be? She seemed intelligent. Maybe she was just being kind. And then everything had blown up around her. He had failed her. But what about the exercises? Maybe they were the kernel that held the true value and everything that surrounded them was so much husk. Maybe the exercises would be his excuse to call Emily. He would read them, and then he would call her because he wanted to talk about them. He could say that she and Eli ought to do an exercise. He imagined the two of them in their apartment in Brooklyn. Probably not speaking to each other this week but possibly, just possibly living through each day with the hope of salvaging their marriage.

He had been slow to write the exercises when he was asked in 1977. But Ladder & Rake had been after him to expand the reach of his book then, too. The later seventies were a healthy sales period for the book, because the energy crisis created plenty of marital problems among people who liked the idea of
Canoe
in the first place. The sort of people who were sick to death of hearing about the wild sex the guys in rock bands like Led Zeppelin and all their teenage fans seemed to be having. The people who loved
Love Story
and wished there were more books and movies like it to get them through the tough years, they were Peter’s audience. He was okay with that. It was a big audience.

The best he could do was to keep the exercises short. He decided to make each one no more than a dozen or so words. Let readers figure out the rest for themselves. Though he tried to be cool about it, he resented LRB’s insistence that he add the exercises. Though he didn’t say it aloud, he had begun to think of his book as a koan. He made a few things up and checked them with Lisa. She agreed they were reasonable and harmless. They had tried each of them at one time or another, and hadn’t been hurt by them. So, if he dug a bit, he could rationalize adding exercises to a program that was not entirely logical in its underpinnings. Doing these little things was part of his life. They were not lies. Of course, they also weren’t really exercises:

  1. Erase a trait. If there’s something your partner doesn’t like about you, change it.

  2. Buy each other dinner. And not just at the local diner.

  3. French kiss for a minute or more each day.

  4. Make out in the parking lot after the movie against your car and then inside in the backseat.

  5. Tell your lover all the little things about you that will help them understand you. Why are you holding back? Your lover needs to know.

  6. Excuse behaviors you don’t like. If your partner can’t erase the trait, accept it.

  7. Be free with money. You’ll be dead soon enough.

  8. Go dancing somewhere that’s just a little dangerous.

  9. Take a trip to a nearby spot you’ve passed dozens of times and treat it like a five-star vacation.

10. Hold hands in the supermarket.

Everyone wanted more. More advice. Specifics. LRB thought he should give stock market tips. But he didn’t understand how to invest money and so he wouldn’t answer. He understood that not having money led to the worst periods in married life and often destroyed otherwise stable marriages. Peter ended up going on
Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser
to talk about stability. Helena immediately published a pamphlet based on the exercises that was endorsed by the American Society of Certified Public Accountants.

None of this would help Emily. Peter pulled out another, newer edition.

In the fall of 1993, after Belinda left home to begin her freshman year at Berkeley, he rebuilt the exercises. This happened because he’d been at the ShopRite outside of town buying groceries and was arrested by a six-pack of Charmin toilet paper. He noticed how thick the rolls had become, and how the language on the packaging seemed more terse than he remembered. More emphatic, more conscious and deliberate in its flirtation and subsequent demand that the consumer complete the purchase. It was looking to be a quiet fall, so he set his sights on tightening up the exercises that had always bothered him. Also, he was grateful that he and Lisa had survived their own spell of bad years and were still together, and he wanted to commemorate that.

He sent the changes in to Ladder & Rake, and they were happy to revise the latest edition and send out a press release. They also sold first serial rights to
Woman’s Day
.

The new exercises were entirely different and were even less like exercises. Really, they were commandments:

  1. Listen to and respect every word your lover says.

  2. Accept. Accept the love that’s given as a whole. Do not parse it out or solicit more to garland the love that’s already been given.

  3. Give. Give wholly. Speak fully, share completely, and don’t hold back.

  4. Make out in the parking lot.

It had been a grave fifteen-year period, during which he’d gone from being a man in his early thirties who laughed easily and lacked a true sense of the world to a man in his middle forties who hadn’t entirely lost his sense of humor, but did live with a growing sense that he was often the butt of the joke. The Hudson Inn had ultimately been both a wasteful and painful project. He’d had no idea what the people from New York who came to visit Hudson for the antiques wanted in an inn or its restaurant, and he was hurt a lot more by the discovery of his obliviousness to sophistication than he could ever admit.

Readers wrote to Ladder & Rake and said they preferred the first group of exercises. Could an edition be published with both sets? Ladder & Rake complied, because they were contractually allowed to do so. He checked and discovered they could do whatever they damn well wanted. This bothered Peter quite a lot. It was during the ensuing disagreement that he stopped writing for good and broke off contact with Ladder & Rake and their then-corporate parent, Baron Holdings.

Ladder & Rake tried desperately to reconnect with him for over a year, and then gave up. Baron Holdings’ CEO ultimately dispensed with the issue by sending a handwritten note to Peter suggesting that time would heal the wound. Peter did not reply, though he agreed with this sentiment. He was surprised at how much the book and its legacy mattered to him. And he reminded himself of that now—that no matter how much he sneered at his book, it was always there with him. Its lessons were in him and he cared about them and was responsible for them. He was responsible for them even when they failed, as they obviously had for Emily Babson and her husband, Eli Corelli. Or no, he had failed Emily. The book hadn’t.

The stupid contest was hubris. If it were remembered at all, it would be known as the icing on his cake, the last nail in his coffin. Suddenly, he was ready to leave Millerton with Maddie. He was ready, but he had a whole laundry list of things to do first. He had to settle up with Henry and close out his interest in the inn. See his daughter a few times. Rent his house to someone he trusted—maybe even to Jenny; she was an excellent caretaker. And also feel better, happier about all that he’d promised Maddie. It was quite a long list of things he needed to handle. Still, even if he left town, he hated to admit his failure with Emily Babson. He had to give her a call. That call belonged before everything else, at the very top of his list.

Emily, November 2011

Emily sat in the back row of Tishman Auditorium at the New School. She was wrapped up in her navy belted raincoat and shivering. She imagined she was about a third of the way through what was turning out to be a really awful lecture by an English artist named Ryan Gander. He’d opened by explaining that what he was doing was actually a “loose association exercise,” not a lecture. She’d caught the eye of another 111 member when he started, and they’d twitched their noses at Gander’s lazy style.

“A rope bridge,” he said. “An arch at the new Yankee stadium, a children’s story by Oscar Wilde.” A series of pastel drawings of little boys and girls were projected behind him. The boys and girls had large eyes and they looked out at the crowd and remained completely unrelated to what he was saying. The program explained that they were drawings of his friends from childhood. Enlisted, she wondered, to participate in his nonsense shows for perpetuity? Or did it all work? Maybe it did. In her current state, she had lost her ability to discern. She wiped her runny nose and was ducking her head down when her phone vibrated.

It was a text from Eli:
Can you please let me know youre okay

What was the matter with grammar? Even Ryan Gander, whose Elton John glasses took up all of the space between a seventies porn-star mustache and a bald skull, sounded like he knew where to put an apostrophe.

“Central Park. We love you, you urban forest. The beauty of new bicycles…”

She shook her head no and stooped down to grab her bag. Not bicycles. Bicyclists seemed constantly to want to run her over these days. Just before coming here, she’d argued with a man on a bike who had barreled through a stoplight on Sixth Avenue and Thirteenth Street.

Please?
Eli texted.

She didn’t respond to this, his eighth or tenth message, and felt a curdling in her stomach. She jogged through her thoughts, to their familiar intransigent end. He wasn’t coming back. So she did not want to talk to him. She looked again at the phone.

Can you please let me know youre okay

Am I okay? No.

She did not write back.

“The old magic that is Stonehenge. I am an Englishman so I build a new ritual each day with old stones. Now let’s look at a new work by Andy Goldsworthy…”

She again shook her head no, pushed open the heavy doors, and slipped into the warm lobby. She thought: I don’t need to reassure you that I am okay and I don’t know what’s the matter with me that I could have ever chosen to be with someone who could dare to ask such a question. A question you’re compelled to ask so you won’t feel guilty! You left me in Millerton. You ran. You fuck, you ran! That was the question and you answered it. You departed. And before that, you betrayed me. So, no. You don’t get to know if I’m okay or not.

It was Thursday evening, and she had lived for four days past her winning weekend. She stood in the lobby and texted Sherry,
Can you meet earlier? My lecture ended early.

Sherry texted back a no. She was doing a read-through of a friend’s new script. Emily shrugged and figured she would go to the restaurant. Go have a glass of wine at the bar, alone. A newish activity that already felt maddeningly familiar. Emily rushed down the street. Daylight savings had come and Eli was still gone. She looked up at the sky and found the darkness profoundly resolute.

She went east on Twelfth Street. She tried desperately to focus her thoughts on a new semi–pro bono project—happily unrelated to her core day-to-day tasks—which centered on rebranding New York City’s parks. She’d taken on the job in addition to her regular work since, goodness knew, she now had the time. The person who ran the project with her had contracted with Susan Sarandon and Jay-Z and other celebrities to do thirty-second spots about their favorite parks. Sonic Youth had recorded a song about Tompkins Square Park that was rhythmic and bittersweet. She hummed it as she walked. She wished Susan Sarandon was her friend. Susan Sarandon knew something about heartbreak and how to deal with it. So did Kim Gordon, come to think of it.

The restaurant was called Tony’s Hot Spot, on Second Avenue and Eleventh Street. She settled in at the bar, ordered a glass of merlot. The bartender was a woman with unsurprising tattoos who left her alone. But then a man came and sat two stools away and watched her while he waited for his martini. She reached into her bag for something that would serve as a shield to keep the man away and found
Canoe
. She still carried it everywhere she went and couldn’t let it go, even after all that had happened. The man sipped his drink and made an
ahhh
sound. She instantly hated him for it.