Love Is a Canoe

by Ben Schrank

  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.

  She held Canoe and looked deeper into her bag. There were bills. Eli hadn’t been back to their place and she kept fantasizing about putting them all in a big envelope and sending them to him. But that would be small and she knew she would regret it so she hadn’t done it. Also, it was much too early for that kind of thing. An AT&T bill was on top. The cell phone bill. It listed the calls made on both their iPhones. Number, time, and duration.

  She thought back to the honesty of his underwear drawer as she tore t
he envelope open and spread the pages flat over the bar. Eli’s calls were right there, time-stamped, right up to Monday morning. He wasn’t calling his parents while he struggled through their weekend in Millerton. No. What she had long suspected was true. She glanced back through the month. There were dozens of short and long calls to different, strange numbers. Three minutes. Forty-two minutes. She paged up to the Millerton weekend. Timed precisely to when he went for his run was a twenty-six- minute call to a 310 number, which she knew perfectly well was Los Angeles. Jenny’s phone. The sheets of calls filled in his absent moments so deftly and undeniably that she almost felt bad for Eli, was nearly sympathetic to his head-spinning inability to figure out what the fuck he was up to. But the pages went on and the calls became regular and revealed that eventually, yes, he had made his choice and figured out what he wanted to do.

  The tears that fell as she stared at the phone bill hurt her face, as if they were too salty or were made of acid. She kept wiping them away with bar napkins and then examining the smears for color or texture or smell. What did she expect? Orange and smoky and redolent of kung pao chicken? Kind of. There was definitely something suspicious about her tears. She mashed the pages of the bill together. She reached into her bag, past an Eckhart Tolle book one of her yoga instructors had given her after she’d cried in class a few days earlier, and got out Canoe and paged around. She gulped down wine and read:

  On Healing After Disagreements

  “Don’t you ever fight?”

  I was with my Pop, out in the canoe. It was cool out, early morning, mist still on the water that I never stopped confusing with smoke from a fire. We hadn’t put bait on our lines yet. We were just sitting out there, listening to the morning.

  “Not a pretty word, is it, Peter? Fight? Bite off the last bit of the t in order to say it right and it sounds like something ugly.”

  “Like a cuss.”

  “Yes, exactly like a cuss. You have your hat?”

  I put on my New York Yankees cap. On that day in August I was finally past my sunburn and my nose had gone from pink and freckled to a dark tan. My hair had changed color, too. It was sandy brown instead of the dark mink color it had been when I arrived. And by then I was in love with Honey—if a twelve-year-old boy can feel that kind of love.

  “You know what the best part of a fight is?” Pop asked.

  “Making up,” I said.

  “Yes. And what is making up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  By then, I’d learned that honesty was prized above all else and so not knowing an answer was better than guessing. My grandparents had no love for ingenuity. The philosophical talk that informed the way they chose to live was like black bread, dense and warm and honest and heavy and ready to absorb any challenge that came.

  “Forgiveness is at the heart of making up. Because if you can’t forgive, you can’t make up.”

  “What if … what if someone really hurts you?”

  I was thinking then of another little girl—a green-eyed girl from Manhattan called Irene. A few months earlier in the spring, before I met Honey, I had told Irene I liked her and she said she liked me, too. But then a bigger boy named Charlie Gimmelstop told Irene he liked her, and she thought about it and then let us both know she liked him more than me. I was cast aside.

  I realize now that I wasn’t asking about hurting. I was asking about betrayal.

  “Even if someone really hurts you, you can forgive them. But in serious relationships, like marriage relationships, people try not to hurt each other terribly because, you know, they promised not to when they got married. But sometimes—heck, all the time—there are little things that go wrong, little moments of forgetting or ignoring or a little less caretaking when there should be more caretaking. But if both members of the relationship practice forgiveness, then there’s no mounting up of pain, you see? Instead, there is peace. And peace is the best goal.”

  By then the mist that I thought of as smoke had lifted. The day was growing warm.

  “Absolute forgiveness. You can’t get there easily, that’s for sure. But you can keep on striving for it. You see?”

  I was just quiet. No, I didn’t see.

  “Absolute forgiveness brings peace. Sure as a kind call brings the dog. Sure as seasons follow, as the Yankees play great baseball. Absolute forgiveness is the fastest and best way to peace.”

  “Okay,” I said. I pulled down hard on my cap. It was a big thing to hear. I’m not sure I totally accepted what he said, then. I didn’t feel like forgiving that girl, Irene. Not ever.

  “Okay? Come on now! It is magnificent! You’ll understand that someday. Now let’s quit talking and catch a fish for a darn change!”

  After an argument, only absolute forgiveness puts your canoe on a smooth path once again.

  Emily put the book down and she knew that, though it was not nearly over, it was going to be okay. Someday she would be able to forgive Eli. That didn’t make her feel better, but it was true. After his things were gone and the agreements were signed and the lawyers were paid.

  Emily’s phone buzzed again. She was amazed that she could feel it through the new Kanye song that was shaking the bar. She didn’t recognize the number. But she thought, Openness, forgiveness. Answer it. It’s probably a wrong number. That’s okay. If it was Eli calling from some strange phone, well, she would just hang right up on him.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello?” A man’s voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this Emily Babson?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Peter Herman.”

  She went blank for a moment. She had locked him up in her mind and didn’t imagine that she would ever be in touch with him again.

  “Listen, I want to come and see you.”

  “What?” The music grew louder and she could hardly hear.

  “I’m moving to California but before I go I owe you a visit.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “It’s time I came to the city. And I want to see you and Eli. Are you okay?”

  She could hear how he had to strain to have a phone conversation and she felt guilty. She looked at her knees. She held them tightly together and pressed them against the bar. They were starting to hurt. She felt a hand on her shoulder and there was Sherry, smiling at her, about to apologize for being late, even though she wasn’t late. Emily motioned, just a moment.

  “Please. I need to know. Are you all right?”

  Emily said, “No, I’m not all right. And I will not see you with Eli.”

  Sherry shook her head, rubbed Emily’s back. She picked up Emily’s glass and drank from it.

  “Then I will see you alone. I’ll be there on Tuesday or Wednesday. Can we agree to meet on Wednesday evening?”

  “Couldn’t you just tell me on the phone what to do? You saw us together. That’s the crazy thing. You saw us together and you saw us fall apart. It’s over, right? Or is that not true? Did you see something between us that you want to tell me about? Is that it?”

  “No, Emily. I just want to talk with you. That’s all.”

  “Wait.” She wrapped her free arm around her sister. Peter Herman was on the phone. He wanted to help her. She wanted to say: Tell me what to do right now, this minute. She felt herself stuttering into the phone, grasping to hear him, realizing that even his breath on the phone made her feel some hope.

  “Eli isn’t sleeping at home. And it’s freaking me out, like, really badly. Please.” She clenched her eyes shut against a sudden and gritty breeze that came through the bar’s open door. “You were there with us. Can you tell me what to do right now?”

  Sherry frowned and looked around the bar.

  “You know I can’t do that. I wish I had some magic to share with you,” Peter said. “But we should talk. I’ll be in touch soon, as soon as I get there. Tuesday afternoon. Or Wednesday. I’m not sure yet. Goodbye, Emily.”

  “Who was that?” Sherry asked when E
mily set the phone down on the bar. Sherry had one hand on her belly and the other around Emily. She always worried that she was growing a gut when she was between jobs. Emily didn’t move. She wanted her sister to hold her.

  “Peter Herman.”

  “Oh, Christ! That sanctimonious bastard! Can’t he leave you alone?”

  “Sherry! Don’t be so theatrical—I’m sorry!” Emily covered her mouth. It was the meanest thing she could say to her sister.

  “It’s okay. I mean, like I care.”

  “Listen. I was just looking at my phone bill. Eli’s calls are there. Eli was talking to Jenny the entire time we were together in Millerton. I know that for sure.”

  “He is such a bastard.” Sherry sighed. “I shouldn’t have said that about Peter Herman. I was being kind of theatrical. Eli is the bastard.”

  “He was lying to me the whole time. To himself, too, I guess.”

  “I hate him, Emily. I really do.”

  “Mom apologized for calling me controlling. She agrees that what he did is unforgivable. He wasn’t really with me, you know?”

  “I know.” Sherry hugged Emily tighter.

  “I had to take the morning-after pill. I told you that, right?”

  “Yes.” Sherry kept holding on to Emily. “Emily, I know.”

  “I should have married Gordon. I should be in Oregon with two children and Gordon right now, walking on a—on a rocky trail.”

  “Stop,” Sherry said.

  Emily looked around the bar, which was all black wood and mirrors. She and Emily would eat in the back at a table with a candle and a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and they would drink lots more wine and eat things slathered in red sauce. They could be sloppy together. It didn’t matter.