Love Is a Canoe: A Novel

by Schrank, Ben

  “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?”

  “I mean, they didn’t get along. You saw that, right?”

  “Did I?” Eli pointed to his
chest. He laughed. “Yes, I guess I saw that. They had that timing thing with their stories that was funny. The no-you-tell-it thing. They’re not a disaster, though. He loves her. She’s way out of his league.”

  “That’s so nice of you to say!” Emily felt herself brightening. She looked up, and the street lamp that had been broken forever on their corner seemed to have been fixed. She was too embarrassed to tell Eli that she’d called 311 about it, so she kept her happiness to herself. She loved calling 311.

  “Nice of me?” Eli asked. He unlocked their door and they went inside.

  “I mean, we could both see it. They’ll be okay—they’re just emotionally tender right now because having a kid is freaking them out. They’re cool.”

  “Cool,” Eli said. “I’m not sure that’s a word I’d use to describe them. Arch?”

  “Sure! Arch is the right word,” Emily said. “Nicely done.” She kissed him. He smiled at her and looked confused, like a dog, she thought, who was not sure why he was being praised. Now they both stood just inside the door, still in their coats. Their house smelled of them, she thought, of olives and radiator heat and wool coats and bicycle inner tubes. Eli checked his phone and Emily began to open their bills. Soon after they’d married, she had discovered that Eli never dealt with his own bills, and so she’d taken on the financial-management aspect of their marriage. She opened a letter from the Fresh Air Fund and thought again of children. She was beginning to feel their lack.

  “We should give a bicycle to a Fresh Air Fund kid,” Emily said, to herself.

  Eli looked up from his phone. He said, “Emily, I’m actually not that optimistic about Billy and Ida. Compared to us? Aren’t we kind of … better than they are? Even though I gave us this awful bump. I mean, I’m not forgetting that. But aren’t you sort of thinking that we’re more in sync than they are?”

  Was she thinking that? She hadn’t been. But she loved that he was musing about them versus another couple. She was suddenly angry with herself for being pragmatic, thinking about their mail when her husband was dwelling on their marriage, on the value of their bond.

  “Yes,” she said. “I love that you’re chewing over the night. I get what you mean about them, too.”

  “I’m exhausted but I’m glad you took us out,” Eli said. He dropped his coat on the floor and wandered toward the back of the dark apartment.

  Eli was always quick to fall asleep. And so Emily slipped out of bed as soon as she heard his even breathing. She had to see the contest on the Internet. It was real. She couldn’t quite believe it, and read through the copy several times. It had been going on for two full weeks. She was amazed she’d missed it. She never paid enough attention to pop culture. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. No, she thought. That was a lie. She didn’t care. She read tech columns and the business section of the Times. She looked at arts coverage rarely, always dutifully, and only because she was scanning for new documentary films or design symposiums, which she usually knew about anyway. And because of that, she’d almost missed the contest.

  Could she enter? She would. In the morning. Just as a funny thing, another cathartic moment that spoke to the ongoing fix for her marriage. She found her bag by the front door and got out the edition she’d bought at the end of summer when the trouble started. The one she’d talked about with her sister was still on their coffee table. And there was another copy in the bedroom. Given how incredibly nonobservant Eli was of things around the house, she wondered when he would ever notice. Really, did she have to throw the book at him? She curled up with a blanket in the red suede chair.

  This edition began with “Stolen Bases.”

  “Stolen Bases,” from Marriage Is a Canoe, a new foreword to the third edition, first published in serialized version for six consecutive Sundays in July and August 1982 in Parade magazine

  Another inspiration for this book came from a game of stolen bases that we played on a late afternoon in mid-August of that summer.

  My Pop and I had taken over the baseball field in Robertson’s private park, in town.

  Pop was teaching me and a few other children to steal bases. He had made a game of it, with scoring. We weren’t any good and there was loads of bunting and it was hard work, staying or running like mad and always having to pay attention. The afternoon turned to dusk and it was evening before we really noticed. And then it was nearly eight and one of the kids who lived nearby was called home by his mother. The five or six other kids we’d gathered thanked us and ran off to their own houses, where they’d apologize for being so late and then enjoy their franks-and-beans suppers.

  I rounded up the heavy bases, made of sand encased in thick rubber and canvas, and dragged them to the supply shed at the side of the field. Pop swept the dirt in the running paths back into place. And then we heard a call, and when we looked up, we saw there was a boy still out there in center field, a small boy called Johnny who had helped Pop field balls because he was too shy to run bases.

  “We’re all tucked away here for the night,” Pop said. “Thanks for your help, young man. We’re all set!”

  “It’s Johnny.” The boy came closer to us.

  “Yes, Johnny. I know.” Pop slapped his hands clean on the sides of his khakis. He had a gift of giving the person he was talking to time to settle themselves so they might say what they cared to say without being rushed. But this boy, Johnny, he just stared at me and Pop.

  “You’re standing there like you’ve got something to tell us, Johnny. Like there’s a thing and you want to say it and you’re looking for your cue. Well, here’s your cue.”

  Johnny did just what I’d have done—what any of us would do. He kicked a rock.

  “Want us to walk you home, Johnny? Evening shadows bother you?”

  “No, sir. It’s not that. I don’t want to go home.”

  “We can walk you home.”

  “It’s my parents. I don’t want to see them.”

  “Yes. That happens sometimes and it’s okay. We’ve all got to work together to make our homes a good place.”

  “I don’t like being there…” Johnny wandered off and stood on the foul-ball line, a couple of yards past third base.

  “We’re going to help out a bit,” Pop whispered to me. And then, louder, he said, “Let’s all walk over to your place together and see about it, Johnny.”

  Johnny walked toward us like he was in a trance.

  He lived just four blocks from the field, on a wide-lane street that trucks used to come into town called Thayer Avenue. His house was a green Cape Anne with more than one broken shutter and a garden that could have benefited from two or three hours of weed picking.

  We hadn’t talked the whole way there and we didn’t when we arrived. Instead, Pop gestured for Johnny and me to stay on the curb and he walked up the steps to the porch and knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” It was a woman’s voice, a little tremulous.

  “It’s Hank Latham. I’m here with your boy Johnny and my grandson, Peter.”

  The screen door swung open and Johnny’s mom came out. Johnny’s father was behind her. They were not beautiful people, though the woman had streaked blond hair. The man had a clean white shirt on. The woman was small and the man was large in stature, but the woman somehow took up more space in my head. It may have had to do with how her hair made her hazel-colored eyes shine bright, like brass buttons on a camel-hair coat.

  My Pop said, “First things first. I’ve got no right to come to your house, no right to intrude, so if you ask me to leave, I’ll leave straightaway.”

  “That’s awfully grave,” Johnny’s father said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “I’ll come in for a moment,” Pop said. “My boy Peter will stay outside with Johnny. They’ll play catch there in the street, by the streetlight. There’s not much traffic and they’ll be safe.”

  He turned and nodded at us and went inside. The screen door banged shut behind him.

  Johnny and I stood together. All of a
sudden it was dark out, dark as if it were after midnight and I was waking only to go pee before drifting back to bed.

  “I’m going to eavesdrop,” I said.

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “But how are we going to make the sound of catch?”

  I looked at him. He was hunched over and he reminded me of a character from The Little Rascals, in his tin-colored T-shirt and dirty jeans. I’d gained some weight since I’d arrived in June and I’d begun to stand up straighter. I said, “They won’t be listening for us.”

  That was something I’d learned for sure in my own home, during the hard spring that came before that wonderful summer.

  We dropped to all fours and crept up the stairs to take positions on either side of Johnny’s front door. The porch was cool and quiet in that dark night, though I could see some chairs scattered about behind Johnny, knocked up against one another and pointing every which way. You could tell no one had sat out there for some time.

  “Thank you,” my Pop said. I imagine he’d been asked to take a seat. Then there were a full five seconds of quiet. And I could only hear Johnny’s breathing. I saw where he’d placed his glove under his knee, a move I found more delicate than I expected from him.

  “Sir—”

  “Call me Hank.”

  I looked at Johnny and he had his eyes closed and was humming.

  “Nothing? How about a glass of water?”

  “All right,” Pop said. “You’ve got a boy who doesn’t want to come home at night. I’m sorry to be forward about it. But something is the matter.”

  “What’s that to you?” the father asked.

  “I’ll leave if that’s what you’d like me to do.”

  “Johnny came to you about our problems?” It was the wife talking now.

  “He did.”

  “That’s bad,” the wife said.

  “He ought to know better,” the father said, roughly.

  But the wife must have cut him off. She said, “Maybe we should thank him. Here’s a chance to talk and I’m going to take it. We ought to have it out. I will tell you what’s the matter. My husband here, he tells me everything I do is wrong. Not just one thing or another, either. Every single goddamned thing! How I cook peas to the way I make beds to the style I like for my hair, to—the way I sneeze! Can you imagine? Can you imagine the life I’m having to live here with this man? And now you—you come in my home, uninvited, and you say—well—what have you got to say about it?”