Love Is a Canoe

by Ben Schrank

  “What are we up to?” I asked. I had been there about ten days and I was beginning to think of the three of us as a group. Not a true family, but three people living together.

  “Your Pop and I are going for a walk.”

  “Around the lake? Which way?” I jumped up. I much preferred lake walks that took us toward town, because if we ended up there, I might buy a pack of baseball cards and check the Yankees scores.

  “We are going round the long way, and then up to the ridge.”

  “Okay.” I pushed myself up so I was standing.

  “You might go into town on your own,” Bess said.

  “Alone?” I raised an eyebrow and dared to glare at her. I did not like what I was hearing.

  “Go ahead.” Bess moved closer to me. “Take some time for yourself and we’ll do the same. We love you. You know that. But we want a little time to be together.” She kissed my forehead and left me there, on the porch.

  I had a piece of chamois cloth and I began to wrap up my stick and knife in it. I heard Pop and Bess talking in the house but I didn’t listen. Instead, I went down the steps and stood out on the grass. I kicked at the grass and pulled out the knife and threw it down into the dirt, hard, so it stuck in the soft earth.

  “Hey, there,” Pop said. He’d come up behind me. When he wanted to he could move very quietly for such a big man. “Listen up, now. Don’t get yourself in a snit. We take a little time each day to be alone together—just me and my Bess. You understand.” He gave me a mock salute and went back inside the house.

  I got my knife and wiped it on my shorts and then wrapped it and the stick in that chamois. I ran and put the bundle safely away in my room and changed into my jeans. Off I went, hurt, and never looking back.

  In that day’s dusk, I walked down to Main Street and that’s where I saw Honey for the first time, walking with her parents. So I knew for sure something more than good comes of giving those close to you time for themselves. What happened after I saw Honey, you ask? That’s another chapter.

  Find time to be together every day

  —just the two of you—

  in your canoe.

  Peter, September 2011

  “I’ll come down and fire him myself,” Peter said. He banged open the hall closet and grabbed his coat. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Peter, I’m not asking you to intervene,” Henry said. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Let me get it straight,” Peter said, and turned back to his kitchen, where he grabbed up his cup of coffee and took a sip. “A cook’s been there three weeks. He closes down the kitchen for the night, drinks a couple of bottles of our wine, beds down on the rice sacks, ends up setting fire to a wall with a cigarette, and you’re going to have a talk with him? He’s gone!”

  “No. First I have to bring in the insurance people and file a report and all that. I know how to handle this,” Henry said.

  “This is crazy. He’s finished. I’m coming down there.”

  “Stop. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t fire him. He’s new. He doesn’t even know who you are. I was trying to get across what a pain in the ass running this business is. That’s all.”

  Peter sat down at his kitchen table, nodded at the trees outside his window. “I get it.”

  “Can you believe this asshole? We’ll take care of it. What about coming in for some lunch? We’re auditioning an eggplant dish.”

  “I’ll be in later this week. I can’t stand eggplant. I used to like it. But not anymore.”

  “Got some mail here for you.”

  “Yeah. It can wait. I’m sorry I misunderstood you. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Peter ended the call and stood up. He put his coffee mug in the sink, ran cold water over it, and placed it on the wooden rack. He licked at his dry lips and tasted the bad old-man smell that seeped out of the widening spaces between his teeth.

  He heaved himself out of the kitchen and went to the hutch in the front foyer. He was afraid to call Maddie now that he’d told her he would move to the West Coast with her. Surely someone else needed him. Surely … yes. He found the phone number for the young woman from Ladder & Rake. Stella. Sexy name.

  He had worked with quite a few young women during his many years with LRB. His favorites had been flirtatious; a few had been strangely inept, some had been curt, and one or two had been entrepreneurial. These smart ones got around Lisa and tried hard to draw him out. They were handling editors but they were also ever-so-carefully interested in a new book from him. A new book meant big money. But they all lived with the fear that he might not return their calls and Helena would find out they lost him.

  He dialed the number. Voice mail. He apologized for the few days he had taken to return her call and said he was free to talk.

  And then he went for a walk around the lake. He felt the cold on his face and wrapped an old wool scarf of Lisa’s around his neck. Kept going. He hadn’t thought about LRB in so long. The one-million-copies party they’d had for him at the end of the seventies. And then the party for twenty-five years in print at the Grill Room at the Four Seasons. Helena had presided over both events. Could she still be there? Most likely she’d retired to the little house he had heard she’d bought in the village of Sag Harbor, where she could spend her days gardening and her evenings at intimate dinner parties with Ed Doctorow and his wife and Louis Begley and the rest of her old publishing friends. Or maybe she’d left that snobby scene. Maybe she had a new husband—he believed she’d broken with the old one. A new husband would mean getting used to a new life. Perhaps there were stepchildren in addition to her daughter, Elizabeth. He was sure she was still close to Elizabeth. The one bit of gossip he’d heard was that Helena had been heartbroken when her daughter had gone to Stanford and had never gotten over the new distance between them.

  He found the big black rock he’d always liked and settled on it until he felt the shock of cold through his lined khakis. The clouds were hanging low. But maybe a cold tailbone and brisk weather were good things. He kneaded his hands against his knees. Lisa had been seated next to Helena at a few dinners in the early years, when he and Lisa still ventured down to New York for publicity and marketing meetings. Helena had been the key to the book’s success, so Lisa had tolerated her as best she could.

  Okay. Enough of this indulging. He was freezing his butt off. He whistled the opening sequence to A Fistful of Dollars to himself as he made his way back home. He’d watched the movie the previous evening once he was sure Maddie wasn’t going to visit him. He was surprised at how much he still loved the movies he’d watched when he was young. If Maddie didn’t come around again tonight, he planned to find Duck, You Sucker on Netflix and watch it on Lisa’s computer screen if he had to. Belinda had given him a couple of CDs of Ennio Morricone’s film scores when she’d caught him watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly late one night, the year before, when Lisa was dying and she had stayed over. She’d discovered him huddled on the couch, crying into his shirt sleeve. The only thing he’d found to say in the moment was, “I just love this music.” The CDs were probably in a downstairs closet and he would find them. He might put a speaker up to one of the windows that opened onto the back porch and listen while he looked out at the lake. Sure. He ought to do something like that at least once before moving out to live in a high-rise condominium in San Francisco.

  The phone was ringing as he came through the back door.

  “Hello? No, now’s a good time to talk,” he said, once he’d settled himself with the cordless on the hard chair by the hutch in the front hall. He tried to cross his legs. Nope, couldn’t do it.

  Stella went on for a while, introducing herself. And then he heard her say, “Really, we want you just as you are.”

  “Want me just as I am? I don’t understand.” He laughed but refrained from the easy joke, from saying, You mean finished? Packing up? Getting out of town?

  “You�
��ve helped so many people. Now we want to bring you and your book to an even larger audience. And that’s why we came up with a contest.”

  “A contest?”

  “We want to send a winning couple to visit you later this fall. You just sit and chat with them. They’re the winners.”

  “Chat? You mean about marriage?”

  “Yes. I know it sounds weird, but we think it will really strike the right chord with the public. Don’t you agree?”

  He breathed in loud enough so she could hear. He didn’t imagine he had actually helped any of the couples he’d talked with over the years. He mostly managed to weasel out of any sort of in-depth conversation. There was that period in the late seventies when evenings found him at the Sally Forth bar, drinking good scotch for free and talking to just about anybody. But then that scene had gone bad and they had to shut down the bar. He didn’t remember that period so well. Of course, Canoe did affect some people deeply. He knew that. But hanging around with him didn’t enhance the reading experience, that was for sure. Then again, he was usually pretty good at making people feel like they were glad they checked in with him. People found him emotionally intuitive. He kind of was.

  “Well, I wrote the book on it, didn’t I?” he asked, partly to reassure himself and partly to see what she’d say.

  “Yes, yes of course you did. It’s funny that you put it that way because that’s just how I like to say it around the office.”

  “And I’d need to stay where I am for a little while, wouldn’t I?”

  “Do you mean stay in Millerton? Why, yes,” Stella said. “To welcome the winners.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We can offer you … forty thousand dollars against future advances for your participation. And another forty thousand in six months if sales substantially increase, let’s say by two hundred percent beyond where they are now. There’s paperwork on this that I can send you.”

  “My wife used to negotiate for me,” he said. “At first I didn’t have an agent. And then my wife was my agent. We were never sure if we had a good deal. But we always remembered to ask for the best that could be offered.”

  “I’ve been empowered to offer you the best possible amendment to your contract. I can assure you of that.”

  “You know, the more I talk with you, the better I like your idea. Let’s do it.”

  “Wonderful,” Stella said. “And I hope you won’t find me too forward when I say that I’m surprised we’re seeing so eye to eye on this contest! After so many years of you … keeping to yourself.”

  “Was I doing that? I don’t think so. I’ve just been minding my own business.” There was something else he wanted to ask. He wanted to know whether Helena had retired. “Tell me, is Helena Magursky still working at LRB?”

  “Yes, she’s our president. She asked after you. Do you have a message you want me to pass on to her?”

  “No, no. I’m just curious. She was my first editor. It’s been a lot of years…”

  “I’ve been here just less than one year,” Stella said. “But I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with you now!”

  “Yes, I’m looking forward to it, too.”

  “Will you want to see our marketing materials before we release them? I can’t exactly give you approval—but I can at least involve you in the process.”

  “No, no. Do what you like. I’m sure you know how to do your job. I trust you. I just want to meet the nice young couple. Let’s make them young, please. And solid. They ought to be solid, handsome people. That will make things smoother.”

  “Of course. We’ll send you a few essays and you can select your favorite. And we’ll check their backgrounds as best we can.”

  “That’s smart. I’m glad to talk with you, Stella. It’s better to call in the mornings. I’m most—I’m at my best then.”

  After the call was over, he was surprised to discover that he did want to drive to town and catch up with Henry and look over the damage from the fire. But Henry was right. He would observe but he wouldn’t interfere with the life of the inn. Who needed the trouble? He only wanted to have lunch with an old friend. But he’d be damned if Henry would get him to try the eggplant.

  Press release for the “Win a Day with Peter Herman Contest,” sponsored by Ladder & Rake Books, a division of Timmler Products, Inc.

  AN ANNIVERSARY AND CONTEST FOR MARRIAGE IS A CANOE

  Peter Herman’s Marriage Is a Canoe, continuously in print since it was first published by Ladder & Rake in 1971, is the preeminent self-help book of our time on love and marriage.

  Marriage Is a Canoe is the spellbinding true story of Peter Herman’s thirteenth summer, which he spent with his grandparents on Lake Okabye, near Millerton, New York, in 1961. During that summer, Peter absorbed lessons about life and marriage from his grandparents, largely while trout fishing with his grandfather.

  Mr. Herman wrote his book directly after graduating from Columbia University, where he received a degree in English. He wrote in the mornings and at lunch while working as an advertising copywriter for McCann Erickson in New York City. The first edition was published in October 1971, when Mr. Herman was twenty-three. It is his only published work.

  This sensational book began its life as a gift edition–size hardcover emblazoned with a painting of two figures paddling a canoe on a lake at sunset—a timeless American image meant to appear nostalgic. Canoe sold 5,900 copies in that first edition, copies that are now rare and worth thousands. Since then, Marriage Is a Canoe has been in print as a paperback Ladder & Rake Evergreen edition, with three distinct revisions, five new forewords, and several afterwords, addendums, and notes to new and old readers. There are over two million copies of Marriage Is a Canoe in print, and thirty-eight foreign editions.

  The book has never appeared on The New York Times or USA Today bestseller lists because expert publishing analysts have called it the most shared self-help volume in the world. At the same time, its consistent sales over so many years must be attributed to the undeniable universal wisdom that every reader discovers in the book’s anecdotes.

  Two thousand eleven marks the fiftieth anniversary of the events upon which the book is based. In celebration of this anniversary, beginning on October 1st and ending on November 1st, Ladder & Rake will hold a contest. The winners of that contest—one lucky married couple, a couple with normal everyday problems—will visit with Peter Herman.

  All contest entries must be no longer than two hundred words. The most compelling dozen entries will be read by Peter Herman, who will select our winning couple. Then, on a Saturday in November, toward the end of leaf season, he will meet them for a stroll around Lake Okabye followed by afternoon tea and supper at his home in upstate New York.

  Our winning couple will also enjoy a complimentary weekend at the Lake Okabye Inn, in Millerton, New York. They will receive the entire back catalog of important self-help books from Ladder & Rake, and a signed first edition of Marriage Is a Canoe.

  One hundred second-prize winners will receive signed copies of the new, fiftieth anniversary edition of Marriage Is a Canoe, to be released with selected new commentaries in a handsome collectible hardcover edition, priced at $40.00 and available to all for purchase in late December 2011.

  Emily, September 2011

  “I’m serious,” Eli said. “Please hold my hand.”

  Emily and Eli were walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, toward Manhattan. Eli had on sunglasses so Emily couldn’t quite see his eyes. His hair was standing up in places and he had on a furry white pullover Patagonia sweater that made him look like a sheep, a handsome, dark-headed sheep.

  She took his hand, but didn’t speak. He pulled off his sunglasses and gave her the same pleading look he’d been using constantly since the UBA party. They had been through several bad days, arguing over what had happened and what it meant for them. Eli would not stop apologizing. Emily couldn’t figure out what to do. She had told herself they were married and she couldn’t imagin
e that what had happened would destroy their marriage. She had tried to stress to herself how tiny and meaningless the infraction had been. She had talked to her mother, who agreed with her. But she felt she had lost all control of their situation, and frustratingly, she no longer possessed a clear vision of their future. She was now back in a place she thought she would never have to visit again, where she had to be patient and wait and see where her life was headed. Canoe had never suggested that marriage ought to contain this sense of loneliness and loss.

  They arrived at the spot where the wooden slats ended and the walkway turned to concrete. Emily immediately missed the slats. They were scary because a crazy person could come and saw through them and then everyone would fall into the East River, but at the same time, on the slats you were suspended and buoyant—there was rushing air all around you. The concrete meant you were coming down from that suspension. Her footfalls were harder and she turned back to look at the wooden part of the bridge.

  “Watch out for the bikers,” Eli said.

  “I am. I always do.” She glared at him.

  They were planning to see Sherry in Flight, her new play at the Minetta Lane Theatre. But they had a few hours and they weren’t hungry. It was windy out. Emily suddenly yanked her hand away from Eli and wrapped her coat tightly around her. She’d been so proud, just a few hours ago—of being able to fight through this funk for long enough to wriggle into her pale gray skirt and charcoal tights, her brown suede flats. In the mirror she’d had a moment of fantasy of looking like Gwyneth Paltrow, at her absolute gloomiest, with darker brown hair. Then Eli had come in to the bedroom and told her how beautiful she looked and the furtiveness in his eyes pushed her right back into that awful over-landscaped garden in Fort Greene. She flashed back to the minutes that she’d stood alone in the garden before Eli came back down the stairs, after the toast, and begged again for her to forgive him. She’d carefully gone back into the house with him, found her coat on a steel rack in the hall, and left. Eli hadn’t stopped her. That was on the list now of things she was not sure she would be able to figure out how to forget. That had been four days ago. She was keeping a list in her head of the moments when Eli had incontrovertibly failed her.