Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (17 page)

He said, “You have to sell your house, too. We can wait until the spring to go.”

“You are sixty-two. You have plenty of time to start something new. Why dawdle?”

“Dawdle? I don’t think I’m making enough of this contest. It’s important to me. It’s become part of my legacy.”

“Your legacy? I am not sure I would agree that a marketing-based contest burnishes a legacy, even if I am willing to be forced to agree that a single book makes a legacy.”

“It still sells. It’s—at least I know it’s still in print.” He stopped. Then he said, “Why are you dragging me along? It can’t be fun for you.”

“You are right.” She bowed her head. “I was trying to explain that to Henry.”

“Explain what?”

“How my faith in others always gets me into trouble.”

He looked away and sucked air through his teeth.

“Shall we walk?” he asked.

“No.” She kept shaking her head. He wanted to kiss her shoulder and then he crossed the cold kitchen and did just that, pulling at the neck of her sweater. She pushed him away.

He said, “What can I do, Maddie?”

“I am sorry, Peter. I did all the things my husband wanted to do and I regret that now. My daughter needs my help. You made me a promise and now you are having trouble keeping that promise. I understand that.”

He smiled. Had he promised? He knew he could be slippery with promises.

Maddie said, “Earlier you wanted a drink. I will drink with you even if you are not to be trusted. What about white wine? Do you have any?”

“I’m sure there’s a bottle around here somewhere.”

He went out of the kitchen and into the pantry, knowing there was no wine there, stalling her, looking for a few minutes to straighten himself out so that he wouldn’t reveal with more surety what she had already discovered about him.

“Won’t you sing an old song with me?” he whispered to himself, on his knees now, pawing through old bottles of apple vinegar and jars of strawberry preserves. There was wine in the kitchen. He was afraid she would find it and discover yet another lie, on top of the fact that he was afraid to leave Millerton with her, even though, apparently, he’d promised.

She called out, “You know what? Forget it. We will leave each other alone this evening.”

He heard her open the front door. “Wait!” Peter struggled to his feet. “Don’t go!” He followed her, stepped onto the front porch and spread his hands over the railing.

“Maddie, stop!”

She turned and stood halfway down the path between him and her car.

He said, “I’m going to throw myself into a new life with you. I’m—I get that I’m hedging just a bit. Like you say. But there’s this contest.” He realized how loud he was—nearly yelling—and that he needed to stop yelling, but he couldn’t, so he kept going. “I’m sorry about this afternoon. Let me just make good on my commitment to this contest and then I’ll leave with you. Doesn’t that sound fair?”

“Since when,” Maddie asked, “does fair have anything to do with romance? I think you ought to read your—what do you call it? Your goddamn book.”

Emily, October 2011

Instead of meeting Ida Abarra alone for a drink, Emily called her from work on the morning they were supposed to get together and asked if she and Eli could go to dinner with her and Billy.

“Of course,” Ida said. “I never invite Billy anywhere. He’ll glow. But I should tell you that as of a week ago I’m not drinking.”

“That’s fantastic, Ida! Congratulations.”

“Of course we’re not talking about it or telling anybody and we’re nervous as hell but I feel like it’s the right thing to do. I’m thirty-four, so may as well. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three,” Emily said with a nod. Her small office was open plan but she was determined not to edit herself too much in front of others. Nobody at work messed with her. She was one of the few people at Yes who could explain what the company actually did and that made most of the rest of the staff tiptoe around her.

“You’ve got time,” Ida said.

“Eli turned thirty-nine a couple of months ago. He’s definitely ready.”

“Did you work out the thing from when I last saw you?”

“Sort of. He’s really sorry. We’re treating it like a watershed.”

“Listen, I saw every moment of it and I meditated on it and you two are going to be okay. I promise. Do you want to meet us at Frankie’s, at … seven thirty? We can have a drink while we wait? I mean, I can’t but the three of you can. You’ll need more than one if Billy gets going on what Christine Lagarde ought to do with the IMF, which will definitely happen. You’ve been warned.”

*   *   *

“I guess trading on the international markets means you can work at any time. Must be stressful,” Emily said to Billy, at the bar at Frankie’s.

“We call it trading an international book,” Billy said, without looking at her.

Emily nodded and said, “Yes, I know that.” Ida had gone to the bathroom. They were lucky to have gotten spots at the bar since it was crowded. Emily was closer to Billy than she would have liked. But he didn’t seem to notice. He also ignored the fact that she understood what he did for a living. Emily sighed. She had a glass of wine but Billy had ordered bourbon that he’d asked for by saying, “Do you have…” and then a name she’d never heard of, and then when the bartender said no he would try again. So he was grimacing through his fourth-choice bourbon and the bartender clearly hated him. He was pretentious and Emily saw why he’d gone for Ida. She was a prize.

“In fact, I’ve heard of your husband,” Billy said. “Everybody loves someone who can manufacture a simple technology like a bicycle with their hands. He’s quite the entrepreneur.”

“Don’t use big words like that with him,” she said. “I’m joking—but you’ll see. He’s smart but he’s smart the way a brilliant designer is smart. By which I mean he is less than well-spoken. I mean, I’m kidding. You see how I’m kidding?”

Billy nodded and didn’t smile, which made Emily feel bad for talking so much. Billy was tall with a curly brown mane of what Emily thought of as trader hair, and he wore an expensive button-down shirt and really nice glasses. Ida came back from the bathroom and she and Billy raised an eyebrow at each other. Next to Billy’s fussiness, Ida looked even more beautiful than she did on her own.

“My point is that I like that your husband actually makes things,” Billy said.

“Billy loves that idea,” Ida said. “I make things, too, but he says it’s not the same.”

“Words are not things.”

Ida sucked in her cheeks. She said, “I make books.”

“It’s true books are things, but things made of words…” Billy rolled his eyes and smiled at Emily, who didn’t know how to react.

“Thanks a lot, honey,” Ida said. “Emily works with words, too.”

“No, she explains things to people. She was just telling me.”

“Her work is important,” Ida said. “She is involved with the practical world in a way that I am not.”

“Exactly what I was thinking!” Billy laughed.

“Don’t start.” Ida shook her head and stared at her husband.

“Yeah? Don’t egg me on.”

Emily said, “Eli will be here soon, I promise. There was a problem…” It was something about meeting a deadline for a bicycle he was building on his own for a billionaire who lived out west somewhere. Was the rich man going on a bike trip with Robert Redford? It was something like that, but she couldn’t quite remember. She looked down at her shoes. Or maybe he was lying to her and he was just late like he always was and he was talking on the phone to Jenny. She knew they still talked. She had to accept this contact with Jenny. Accept it short-term, anyway.

Eli came running in and slipped his arm around Emily’s waist. He kissed her and nuzzled her neck while he held out a hand to Ida and then Billy and said, “I’m sorry I’m late! It’s so good to meet both of you.”

“Take notes,” Ida said to Billy. “I want the same treatment later.”

“So do I,” Billy said. “But any good statistician will tell you we can’t all have our wishes come true on the same night—otherwise the world would explode.”

“Shut up now, Billy.” Ida winked at Emily. “Eli, can we get you a drink? Can I order you two? I’m pregnant but we’re not talking about it, so I’ll just smell mine and then you can drink it.”

They were seated in a dark corner of the restaurant, next to windows facing the back garden. Emily sat down and looked at the ovens across the room and breathed in the smell of roasting vegetables. She bit into some warm focaccia and thought everything felt oily and wooden and a little louche in a good way and she immediately wished her whole life was made up of dinners like this—and then she fought back against her interiority in order to enjoy the evening she was actually in. She smiled at Ida and Ida began to talk. Within minutes, Billy and Eli were both leaning far back in their chairs, entirely facing each other, deep in a conversation about funding. Billy knew venture capitalists and he was sure they would love what Eli was up to. But how to inject loads of money without losing that artisanal feel? Roman Street was such a modern post-boom business. It was so physical and green and everyone wanted to get in on it, but there were only so many slices to go around. Emily couldn’t stop staring at Eli. She wanted him to take her hand while he talked. And then, when she most wanted it, he did reach out and take her hand, not just for a second, but he held her hand across the table, as if he could do it forever.

“See?” Ida whispered.

“What?”

“You two are okay.” And then Ida went back to her story. She said, “So I’m having lunch with this magazine person today and she’s pitching me stuff and I’m like, no, no way am I going to the supposed bra master for an article—if I am nothing else I am sure as hell past that. Then I pitch her pieces where I actually get to think and she’s like, no—not
think
pieces. I’m talking about bras. Think about bras. It’s like we were in a bad Funny or Die skit, I swear.”

“What about bras?”

“She wants me to write about getting sized and buying proper-fitting bras and how they feel on me. Because I’m a writer so I can describe tit-feel in fabric better than anybody else. I wanted to throw up.”

“Who finds you these people?”

“My publicist. Which means at some point, she totally had a conversation with this magazine editor about my tits.”

Through her laughter, Emily surreptitiously looked at Ida’s perfect breasts and thought the publicist was damned good at her job.

“It doesn’t stop there,” Ida said. “Then I called my publicist and complained about the lunch and she told me that I should enter this idiotic contest she’d heard about that’s based on some self-help book. About a boy in a canoe?
Canoe
?
The Love Canoe
?”

“
Marriage Is a Canoe
?” Emily leaned in closer and tried through gesture to get Ida to do the same. Ida did.

Ida said, “You win and the author sees you at his house and listens to you and he tells you his old stories. Then when it gets boring you take a walk and look at fall foliage. Like that’s interesting. So for me and Billy to win would be a stunt. I was like, why don’t you just ram me with a canoe and I’ll write about that.”

“What?”

“Uh.” Ida looked confused. “Which part didn’t you get?”

“
Marriage Is a Canoe
? You’re sure?” Emily had her hands on her knees. Ida gestured at and then ate some of Emily’s pumpkin ravioli.

“Mmm. Yeah. That’s it. That’s the one. She thinks I can win it because she’s seen me with this asshole.” Ida jutted her chin at her husband. “She knows we’re not going to break up but we drive each other insane. So my career always boils down to some stupid stunt. Though the stunt is mostly about blackness at the end of the day.” Ida looked away. “At least she didn’t pitch me my blackness.”

“I bet she thinks your awesome breasts are about your blackness,” Emily said quickly.

Ida laughed and said, “True.”

“This contest—it’s going on now?”

“Yeah, just started.”

Emily said, “I love that book,” and immediately felt embarrassed about it.

Ida leaned forward and whispered, “You should enter!”

“I wouldn’t. Too shy. But I love that book. My mom had it in our bathroom when I was growing up.”

“Totally you should enter. Get on the other side of your watershed. Or at least just entering would be cathartic, you know. Forget winning. That’s stupid.”

“Maybe, maybe you’re right. I should.” Emily grabbed Ida’s hand and squeezed it.

“What are you two talking about?” Eli smiled at them and sipped at his beer.

“We’re going to start a company to rival yours,” Ida spoke quickly. “We’ll revive seventies roller skates.”

“I would invest in that one, for sure,” Billy said. “I’ve got a fantasy involving a couple of women on roller skates.”

Ida reached forward and pushed two fingers into her husband’s rib cage. She said, “Shut up, Billy.” They were all suddenly quiet because of the force of her voice. In the stiffness that followed, the waitress came and took away their pasta plates.

“Sorry.” Ida smiled. “It’s just that some jokes, I don’t want to hear them anymore, you know? Maybe it’s hormones.” She relaxed her hand and patted her husband’s stomach.

Emily stared at them. She watched Billy frown at his wife. He adjusted the collar of her sweater and Ida started glaring all over again.

Afterward, on the street, the four of them stood and said how much they’d enjoyed meeting one another. Ida and Emily watched Billy and Eli exchange cards.

“I’ve still got plenty of months before we hole up. Call me,” Ida said as she hugged Emily. “And enter that contest.”

“I’ll call you soon,” Emily said. “Congratulations again on the … um … everything.”

Emily walked down the street with Eli. He threw an arm around her shoulder and held her close, as he always did now.

“What’d you think of them?” she asked.

“He was really smart. She was, too. I wish I understood half of what he said about analyzing developing countries. That’s an awesome way to perceive the world.”

“Yes, but, as a couple, what’d you think?”

“As a couple?”