by Ben Schrank
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.
“Peter Herman! We’ve been reading about you in the newspaper,” she’d said.
“Had a laugh at my expense?”
“Oh, now,” said Lisa with a frown. “I wouldn’t put it quite that way. I’m sure your book is very sweet. I plan to read it.”
It was the summer of 1972. He had paced Main Street until he found her coming out of the post office. She wore Levi’s overalls and her hair was up in a messy bun. It didn’t seem to him that she was in a rush to find a man, and that was refreshing after all the fast and free love he’d seen in Manhattan.
“The fact of the matter is that I’ve come for your hand,” he’d said, and meant it.
She was twenty-four and he was twenty-three. They were married in the fall at the inn, a storybook wedding that worked as the opening chapter to a sweet fable of a life.
The Times covered it: “Marriage Is a Canoe Author Marries Woman from His Book.” Peter Herman and his childhood sweetheart step into their own canoe. Suddenly they were managers of the inn, with a child of their own, Belinda. The second book? Well, no.
Lisa, who had always planned to help out with her parents’ inn, discovered that she had an accountant’s love of business. Within a few years, she was able to ensure that the inn saw positive cash flow at the end of each month. The waitresses who joked with Peter during their shifts wouldn’t look at Lisa because they knew that if they stole even a few dollars, she would catch them. Peter found that both his wife and their employees depended on him to be the center of good times. Everyone needed his levity to cover up for the never-ending war between the petty thievery that eats away at a business like an inn and his wife’s vigilant desire to keep the place both honest and profitable.
“We’re a team,” she said in 1978, when Belinda was three. By then Lisa’s parents had moved down to Key West, to retire and keep an eye on a couple of B&Bs where they’d invested their savings. Lisa left Peter each day to run the inn in Millerton from a suite of offices behind the kitchen.
Nineteen seventy-nine was the last year he stayed home to write in the office that had once been his grandfather’s study. He mostly sat at the desk and doodled. Or he’d eat a bagel with plenty of cream cheese and tomato and that would lull him into a nap. He knew he did not have a block. He understood there was nothing else he needed to say. In the afternoons, he drove down to see Lisa and help out. Some days they had lunch with Henry, who was an assistant manager at that time.
“Did you write well today?” she would ask.
When he could no longer bear to answer that question, he came up with the idea of building a new inn in nearby Hudson. He wasn’t a good businessman and they both knew it. But she loved him and she let him try to make a go of the Hudson Inn for many, many years.
At home in the evenings, he’d frown and try to understand why he was so unable to make the Hudson Inn turn a profit, when the Lake Okabye Inn had no problems at all.
“Don’t brood,” she liked to say. “You know I don’t like it.”
And then she’d put away her papers and get up and sing, there on the back porch, bits and pieces of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
“Don’t forget I’m a hippie at heart,” she would call out. Though the truth was that at heart, she was patient, uncomplaining, and a fine innkeeper. She was playful when she could see that was what he needed to keep going. He would whistle and stomp his feet. Lisa had a strong alto voice. Singing had gotten them through more than a few ugly impasses. Weeks when town gossip about his drinking and his jokey intimacy with the maids made every room in both inns feel sour. Those weeks became just over a decade that covered the eighties. But Peter and Lisa stayed together. And Peter still didn’t write. He knew not to even try. Then came 1993, the year when there was very little singing and Lisa had to focus all her energy on shutting down the Hudson Inn and selling shares of the Lake Okabye Inn to Lockport Savings Bank, where she’d known the bank manager since grade school. Lisa had to work hard to keep them from losing both places. It was Henry who eventually took all his savings and bought the shares back from Lockport Savings. That move made Henry a partner. Lisa never blamed Peter.
Lisa loved singing and numbers. They grew older and she kept the business solvent and the vendors paid and feeling just a little bitter, which is how she thought it ought to be. After the long stumble that Peter had created with the Hudson Inn, Lisa had to work to tame the numbers day in and day out. And she did it. She saved them from bankruptcy. When she got sick Peter wondered if so many years of keeping their finances under control was the problem. When the numbers saw the weakness in her mind, they reared up and took their vengeance.
Peter had felt immobilized and was unable to stop the loss of their savings. He knew that sooner rather than later he would have to sell his stake in the inn to Henry. Lockport Savings had become First Niagara and he understood that there wasn’t much point bothering with anybody there anymore. All his relationships with banks had grown pretty stiff. This was because, at the end of her life, before they had fully embraced the diagnosis and implications of Pick’s disease, Lisa had played with their savings on Poker Junkie and PartyPoker and Full Tilt Poker and the rest of the Internet casino sites with a brain she could no longer control. He imagined that the tau proteins in her brain did it to set her free, because her soul resented having to save him, and their money, so many times over nearly forty years. If that were true, he couldn’t blame her. When he’d discovered that he had nothing more to write after Canoe, he’d gone to work and built something that did nothing but bleed their money away. If life was only about money, Lisa had spent most of hers repairing the damage Peter had done. If life was about more than that, they had done well together. They had a smart and beautiful child. Lisa had laughed longer and harder with Peter than she would have without him. If Peter were being honest about the choices he’d made, he could admit that by coming up to Millerton and staying with Lisa he had snuck away from the grand stage Canoe might have afforded him. But Peter didn’t think that way too often—not about money or choices or any of it. Not until he was forced to.
Now, his income paid for heat and gas and insurance and not much else. And because he’d leased a new Subaru before discovering that Lisa had lingering medical bills, he had come to owe more than he had. What he had was his home and a fifth of the inn. Millerton was a little town and people knew his situation. They knew his finances needed fixing and they wanted to help. They wanted to have him back, voluble and kind and with enough money and not much need. And if Peter couldn’t be made to be that way, they wouldn’t want him around. They would feel that moving away with Maddie Narayan was a darned good idea. Because if he was seen as dragging Millerton down, they would want him to leave.
* * *
A few weeks before Lisa entered the hospital for the last time, they had spent an evening on the back porch with mugs of hot tea.
They could hear Jim Foxton out on the lake, paddling around in his canoe. Jim often asked Peter to join him. But Peter had once overheard Jim bragging at the Sally Forth bar about canoeing with the world’s most famous paddler and he hadn’t said yes to Jim since. That had been more than twenty years ago.
“When I go, I want you surrounded by women,” Lisa said. “That will make me happy. I’m cold. Let’s go in and eat.”
Peter didn’t stir.
“I want that for you because I’m dying too early.” She was crying, but not loudly.
&nb
sp; In a few minutes, he would heat up pea soup, thinned with water. He would put bread in the oven, a nice garlic bread she had taught him to make when they were first married, that he still made, thick white bread with butter and sliced bits of garlic. She would only eat soup and bread.
“Hot, sexy women,” she said. “That’s what I want for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I want you to be open to what comes. Compliant.” He watched her mouth lose its shape around the big word. She said, “No, that’s not it. Just agreeable. That’s all I want from you. Just be agreeable with this change in your life. In our lives. I want happiness for you. I know I never let you figure out what kind of man to become.”
He tugged at his ears and made an O with his mouth. After she died, he regretted that in that moment, and in many others, he had chosen to pretend not to understand her, or at the least, absolve her of guilt. His aimless life was certainly not entirely her fault.
“Don’t just be with Maddie Narayan.” Lisa had grinned and stuck out her tongue. “I know you have a thing with her.”
Peter was surprised. He did not have a thing with Maddie. But Lisa wasn’t wrong. He did have things. Over the years he had indulged in a long and indecent hug or a hard kiss with a waitress or a maid after closing time at the Sally Forth. Maybe a little more than that. He didn’t like to think about it. Once he and Lisa had gotten past the first few years of marriage, and he’d found his footing, he had never again dared to launch into a full-fledged dalliance. Well, here and there he had. But never in the sort of stupid-making way that would push him to wonder if he ought to leave his wife’s side.
He said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m on to you. I’ll be watching.” And then she lost her language and made a nonsense sound.
He was looking at her beautiful hair. She dyed it auburn and had done so for years, but then stopped once they’d found out, and now suddenly there was an inch and a half of dense gray at the roots. He liked the gray better than the auburn, but couldn’t figure out how to tell her. He was afraid she thought of it as her dying hair. And he wanted so badly for her to live and stopped abruptly at the beginning of any conversation that seemed to be about her death. But then, that was all they seemed to talk about. He felt stupid and confused and again, baffled at who exactly he was supposed to be. Worse, what was he supposed to become?
He’d overheard her once, talking to Henry in the office, when he was stopping by the inn to pick up a cake the chefs had made for Belinda’s big college send-off dinner. He’d been walking, preoccupied, and he’d jerked his head up when he heard his name.
“I tell Peter whatever he wants to know,” Henry said.
“Not about our finances,” Lisa said. “We can’t let him get involved. Never again. I’m too old to fix everything another time.”
Henry whistled. He said, “Okay, we’ll do just as you like.”
Peter came around the corner and watched Lisa draw away from Henry. If he hadn’t overheard, he would have wondered if they were having some kind of affair.
“Hi, honey,” Lisa said. “I was just telling Henry that we’ll gather at the house at six for the picnic.”
“I’m picking up the cake right now.”
“Sounds good.” Lisa made Henry nod alongside her.
“Can you believe it? Eighteen years and she’s just about to disappear.” She’d looked away from both of them. “Why don’t you two drive over to the house together? There’s just a little more I want to take care of here.”
Peter had accepted the white lie. He understood his role. He was good with people, bad with money, and something of a town fixture—well-loved and respected and expected to be as he’d always been. And he’d always been a charmer. Taking care of their daughter. Not too tethered to any one job. Cared for by a good wife who wasn’t afraid to bend the truth if that was what was necessary to keep them together, solvent and happy.
* * *
The worst was when Lisa had been in Lambert Hospital for three straight days. She was given drugs that allowed her to reclaim some of her distant memories and she’d immediately tried to tell him every secret she’d kept. A man at a financial seminar she’d attended in South Carolina one summer. Another in Sonoma County, where she had gone once in the late seventies for a week with her roommates from the University of Buffalo, where she’d been secretary of her sorority. An unexpected royalty windfall that she had lost and never recovered when she had optimistically invested in a friend’s Christmas tree business, back when they were very young. In fact, between the money she had encouraged him to spend on the inn in Hudson and the poor investments she had made, they had wasted nearly all of his royalty money. The unexplained losses and the hidden infidelities were coming out now.
“How lucky I am to have spent my life with you,” she whispered. “I should keep my secrets, shouldn’t I? You don’t want them.”
He didn’t. He said, “You know, you’re right. How lucky you were to have married a man who truly understands what makes a marriage happy.” They laughed about it together.
Her body became increasingly stiff. The doctor began to worry less about the progressive debilitation of the healthy cells in her brain and more about the common infections she was no longer able to fight. She got pneumonia and the doctor said there wasn’t much hope. He said the pneumonia was stronger than she was, that it was massive and sprouting like a common cold in a punch bowl at a holiday party. She was given painkillers. She floated. While her beloved watched her from his chair.
Peter dried his tears with a handkerchief she had brought back from a walking trip in the Scottish highlands she had taken with her sister Gwen, who lived down in Florida and who had died just two years before.
“You had moments with other women, didn’t you?” she asked.
He only shrugged. She was always and intermittently able to find her voice. At the very end, with shame, he found himself wishing she would stop being able to access these harsh, appraising parts of herself. The buzz of the hospital’s lights was cut by the clipped voices of the nurses in the hall.
“You wouldn’t remember Erich Fromm,” an old nurse said to a young one, now within Peter’s range of hearing, which was still as good as it was when he was a boy—and he’d been quite an eavesdropper then, too.
“No, but I know my Mitch Albom. Tuesdays with Morrie for couples! Imagine the money! Imagine having that to guide my marriage. I bet he could’ve saved it. That man in there could have saved my marriage. I feel sure of it.”
“I’ll bring you my copy.”
“Too late.”
“You could still use it—for next time. Here, I’m programming a reminder into my phone.”
He listened to the nurses’ sneakers as they wandered down the hall. Years earlier, someone had given Peter Tuesdays and he thought it was pretty bad—maybe even a bit derivative of his own work. He was fonder of Dr. Phil because they’d corresponded at one point and Dr. Phil had mentioned Canoe on his show. He liked Dr. Phil.
Peter never claimed to be brilliant. Of course he had made up parts of the stories, embellished where necessary, toyed with the through-lines of the days spent with his grandparents until the anecdotes were taut, self-effacing, and sometimes gorgeous in their accept-the-dusk-but-welcome-the-dawn sentiment. But Canoe was no cynical exercise. Over and over, the book conveyed simple truths. It was not his fault the world loved the idea of a book full of answers to unanswerable questions.
The cover of the book’s newest edition was a photograph of a couple’s hands intertwined. The sunlight behind them was red and gold and white, their glossy wedding bands glinting. What crap. He had never worn one.
From Marriage Is a Canoe, Chapter 2, On Desire
The end of our first true day of fishing found us without a single trout in our green bucket. I felt guilty about it, as if that sad empty bucket was all my fault.
Pop said, “First thing tomorrow, we go out again.
”
His voice was steady as we came off the lake. There was deep golden late-afternoon light all around us, settling like a promise that that evening, that sweet mid-July evening, would be a pleasant one.
Pop showed me how to hop out of the canoe and drag it up onshore, flip it over, and prop it up on the wooden beams attached to the tiny dock.
I remember I was thinking of a cigarette I’d smoked with a friend some weeks earlier, on Third Avenue, in front of a candy store. My brain had been so addled that I’d nearly walked into traffic, thinking, No wonder adults smoke all the time. I wanted a cigarette right then, after our day of fishing.
“Did you hear me?” Pop asked.
I shook my head no.
“You dreaming of something?”
“I guess I kind of miss being at home.”
“Are you boys coming in?” Bess called from the porch. I looked up. I saw she was smiling and I worried over whether she could read my mind.
“Yes, we are,” Pop said. “Didn’t catch a thing, though.”
“That’s all right. I baked a chicken.”
“Now that is truly a fine woman!” Pop yelled out. “What is it I always say?”
“Don’t tell the boy things like that.” Bess shook her head.
“If I don’t, who will?” Pop asked. He looked at me and pointed at her. He said, “I’m her servant as sure as I’m alive. Whatever she wants, whatever she desires—be it milk or fresh air or hand-holding—that is my desire, too.”
“He’s laying it on pretty thick,” Bess said. “But that’s my good man—not afraid to keep life sweet as syrup. You two come on up here and we’ll have some dinner.”
“Desire?” I asked, thinking, I know what desire is. It’s me wanting to get a hold of a Winston and smoke it out on the road where they couldn’t see.
Pop turned to me then as if he were thinking of something so great that it was not meant for me alone, as if his words were not only for me, but for you and me both.
