by Ben Schrank
“Is that a new tabby?” he asked the waiter.
“That is Matilda,” the waiter said. “What can I get you, sir?” The waiter threw a napkin down on the mahogany side table to his right and placed a brass carousel on it. He looked at the carousel’s half-full bowls of peanuts, minipretzels, and potato chips and thought, Hell, I’m on a trip. I’ll eat it all.
“Give me a scotch and soda, please. Make it Johnnie Walker Black. I’m staying here at the hotel. Matilda, huh?”
He pulled out his cell phone and looked inquiringly at the screen. He listened to a voice mail from Stella Petrovic who was asking that he please, please call when he arrived in town. She was so much looking forward to the next day’s morning meeting. Also Helena looked forward to seeing him. The whole message was jagged, in that tentative and calculated style of speech Stella used. He’d meant to come a day earlier and walk around, maybe visit the Met or the Frick, go to one of the places that Lisa used to like to go. But he’d ended up feeling hesitant to spend more time in New York than he had to, so he hadn’t driven himself to the train station until that morning.
He clopped the phone closed. And then he toyed with the phone some more and saw that the message icon hadn’t gone away, that his daughter, Belinda, had left a message. He listened to her saying that she hoped he had had a smooth trip to New York and maybe he could visit on his way back, have dinner with her and her partner, Jancy?
He called Belinda and said he’d be there for dinner, probably tomorrow night. He’d call again tomorrow and check in. He missed her and told her so.
Then he called Maddie.
“The packing is going well. I am nearly finished here!” Her voice was bright. He wondered at that since she was not typically a bright-sounding person. “You will be back tomorrow or Friday?”
He said he wasn’t sure.
“Peter, I want to tell you how happy I feel now that you have decided to come with me. It is without question the most romantic thing a man has ever done for me.”
Her syntax felt odd to him—even beyond her inability or unwillingness to use contractions. But he didn’t mention it, choosing instead to just agree with her and then get off the phone. He felt increasingly afraid of Maddie. He didn’t want to let her down. He had always hated disappointing people. That had been the paramount good, for so many years, about his life with Lisa. No matter what foolish thing he did, she loved him. He could never let her down. And he had loved that. He had depended on her for that acceptance. He had been lost and fretful before Lisa, and was likely forever lost again without her. And if their relationship had lacked true romance, well, that was a fair trade-off and they both knew it. He settled deeper into the chair, feeling some shame and surprise that it took coming to New York to knock such a simple thought back to the front of his brain.
Maybe getting a little drunk wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He took a long sip of his drink and finished the chips and started in on the peanuts. Lisa didn’t let chips in the house and Maddie wouldn’t want him to eat them either. He felt like an old Hudson Line locomotive pulling into Grand Central for the last time, chugging right into a salt-, carb-, and alcohol-fueled gastrointestinal slump. After ordering another scotch, he called Emily.
“Hello?”
“I’m here in New York.” He paused. “As we discussed. If I can’t see you with your husband, I will see you alone. Are you by any chance in midtown?”
“Where are you, Peter?”
“The Algonquin, in the bar in the lobby.”
“We can meet briefly. I have something scheduled for later.”
She would be there in less time than it took to finish another drink. He adjusted his belt buckle so it didn’t bite into his stomach. He rustled the newspaper, made sure he could feel his toes waggling in his Rockports.
She was at his side far sooner than he could have imagined. Taller, thinner, than he remembered. Had it been ten days? Could a woman take on such a haunted look in ten days?
He stood up to say hello but she turned and went away from him. She spoke to the waiter and then found a big brown armchair and dragged it toward him, ignoring the room instead of apologizing, the crowd of business people all oblivious anyway, bent in toward one another and trying to ignore the woman banging into their knees with an armchair. An upright bass player and a piano player began to warm up not a dozen feet from them. She dropped her bag and kicked it out of the way.
“Emily.” He chewed his lip and tried to find the personality he’d used with her and her husband.
“I should have asked this on the phone. Before we say anything else, are you seeing me so you can fulfill your obligation to your publishing company?”
“Of course not.”
“You’re sure?” Her eyes were puffy around the edges, and she seemed funereal in a black turtleneck sweater and black pants.
“I have a responsibility to you. To you and your husband. I signed on to help.”
“I wanted to see you. But I think we’re through with all the help.”
They brought their heads closer to each other and fought the soft chairs to do it. He could see that her lips were newly painted, but dry around the edges.
“What do you mean?”
“My marriage is over.”
“Please don’t say that, Emily.”
“He left me for another woman. You watched him do it.” She sunk back into the chair. “Now I understand that he was trying to stay married in front of you. He was fighting himself. But he gave up and I lost him. You saw.”
“I have to tell you something.” He took a gulp of his drink.
“Please, no more recycled sayings. I love your book. But when you say the stuff in it aloud—I think it’s better if the words just stay in the book.”
“No, this isn’t in the book. Here’s the thing. I was happily married. That’s true. But my wife, Lisa, she would have been better off if she left me. I didn’t give her everything I could have. I was mean when I didn’t need to be. I did some philandering. And Eli, if he’s not going to give you everything—I’m not saying what happened is okay. I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Yes.” Emily looked at her shoes. “We already figured that out. You and Eli are a bit alike.”
“Ouch,” Peter said.
Emily only smiled up at the waiter who delivered her wine.
Peter said, “I can’t wait to meet Stella, the young woman who started all this.”
“She’s quite a character. An editor who can’t even edit herself.” Emily took a long sip and held the glass.
“You met her?”
“Yes. She reminds me of how I was right when I met Eli, when I couldn’t figure out the difference between my career and my personality. But I’m over that. Look, I figured something out. It’s not you that I care about. How could I care about you when I didn’t know you? It’s the book.”
“I’m not the book.” Peter smiled but he knew he couldn’t hide how sad he looked.
“You sure aren’t.”
“So you’ll go to the meeting tomorrow?”
“I will go. Because that’ll be where all this ends.” Emily nodded and pursed her lips. “That kind of meeting is important. I’ll go in and help shut the whole thing down. And of course reinforce the no-media message.”
“No media. That wouldn’t be right.”
“I really did believe we were a happy couple when I entered the contest. That was honest, I swear. I’m sorry it turned out this way.”
“You are not the one who needs to apologize.” Peter looked at this beautiful young woman he’d so admired—her dark hair was cut into severe bangs over her eyes but it fell softly over her shoulders. All dressed up and being polite when she should be crying. It was horrible.
“You don’t have to look so sad,” she said. “I understand now that he would’ve left me anyway. All of this only exacerbated it.”
“Is that the right word?”
Emily nodded and said, “It is.”
“The stories about your childhood are so good. I love the way you wrote them. They’ve gotten me through some tough moments. The parts that happen in the canoe are quite … magical. I know it’s not brilliant, but it’s become a part of me.”
“All that canoe stuff came from someone else, actually.” Peter nodded and made a dry noise in his throat. “Not quite lies but like lies, which is far worse.”
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to keep your secrets. I can’t stand it.”
She stood up. But he didn’t. She looked down at him, and he was honest with himself and realized that there didn’t need to be another moment of connection between them. He thought, I’ll see her tomorrow morning and then never again. He flashed on Maddie. He’d be back in Millerton late the next evening, after dinner with his daughter. He would help Maddie pack boxes of scarves. Wary, always wary, of disappointing her.
“I’m sorry all over again,” he said. “I should never have indulged in all that talk about my book with you.”
“When a fan like me gets too close to the source, I guess that’s what happens.” She twisted the strap of her bag around her arm.
“So you’ll come to the meeting?” he asked, though he was in a haze. Why did he care? And hadn’t they already discussed this?
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Emily said. “Goodbye.”
“You have to leave right now?”
“I have to. If I don’t, I’m going to be late for a lecture at the Harvard Club. Chelsea Clinton is interviewing some of the first woman fighter pilots from Pakistan and I don’t want to miss the beginning.”
After he watched Emily go, Peter strolled over to Third Avenue and found the right sort of Irish bar at which to have a burger and beer while sitting on a stool, looking at whatever everyone else was watching on the television. It turned out to be the Rangers game. The food he was eating would hurt like hell in the morning. He was already regretting the trip, ashamed that he meant well but used his intentions as an excuse for his blunders.
“I’ve got to get up,” he said to no one in particular.
But at the same time, he kind of had gotten up, hadn’t he? He was trying to help and that was something. He was present in New York and he had reached out to Emily, the contest winner. He was being honest, at the very least. Divorcing himself, at this late date, from the damn book.
He stood outside after he’d eaten, leaned against a parking meter, fist on chin, watching the cars rush uptown on Third Avenue, thinking, Which direction back to the hotel? He was nobody special. Just an old guy from upstate who needed to do half a day’s business in midtown, not feeling the cold weather since it was nothing compared to nights on Lake Okabye.
He thought of the evenings when he and Helena would meet for drinks after work. They would talk about his book and its upcoming publication and toast to what they hoped would be their first big success. Those were wonderful evenings. But even then he worried over what would happen when he left her. And she kept saying that they had their whole futures before them. He loved that expression. He loved that she wasn’t afraid to say it. But he knew she loved something that he wasn’t, and he didn’t want to spend his whole life pretending otherwise. But, was he even right about that? Had he called that one wrong, too? What was he, really? He didn’t know.
Now, looking back on the mess he’d made, he felt like such a damned sentimentalist under his cynical veneer. Or, he thought, as he wandered back to the hotel, was it the opposite? Either way, his sentimentalism was tightly threaded through his cynicism. Like a barber pole. On nights like this he could hardly tell where one ended and the other began. How could women stand such disparity in one man? But he knew that somehow, they did.
Stella, November 2011
Ivan wasn’t home when she got in and what the hell? Stella really needed him. He was being totally unreachable and she had no idea why. Or was she overreacting and he was just working? She needed to chill out. Her body hurt. Her head hurt. Her brain hurt.
The weirdest part was that at the end of the workday, when her mind was on other things, she had bought a new book. She’d cornered Sara Byrd on the Joan of Arc pitch and the thing had turned out to be sixty pages and an outline of something that only had a veneer of the medieval and really was an analysis of character traits. But it also had lots of cool metaphors about using your sword in a fight and how dating was a battlefield, and she felt the whole thing was a little sexist and it made her want to throw up, but whatever. She liked books about character traits. She’d been aggressive on the phone with the agent and closed the deal. She heard the author was both shy and mercurial. Big surprise.
She was worried about Emily and what she might do, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Helena. Helena had become a constant for her; she lived in her dreams and daydreams and fantasies of the future.
Stella really needed Ivan to come and love her and ease her off the path to a sleepless night before the big meeting. The big showdown. But of course she also knew the meeting was only a preamble to something else, something that was possibly really good. Even if the contest was considered a failure, it was still kind of smart, wasn’t it? Depending, of course, on how Helena felt. And nothing bad could really happen at the meeting, could it? Nothing ever happened at meetings, at least not the meetings she attended.
She was at her kitchen table drinking rioja, thinking about how she used to listen to Gram Parsons and smoke pot from a tiny white ceramic pipe with her girlfriends and how she missed that part of herself. How far away that was, now that she mostly thought about her career. How much she depended on Ivan for fun, now. And before she realized it, she was reading Canoe. It had become her habit to just page around and look for inspirational sentences. She found:
Compromise keeps your canoe steady. Compromise and you’ll never go in circles.
Pop’s hand on Bess’s back was a promise. They would paddle through the afternoon together.
Everyday love must travel through my story to you, dear reader.
Horrible sentences! Addictive sentences. Undeniable sentences. And there were so many more like them. As if there was a mystery. As if there was a code. She had begun to hope that meeting him would be a huge disappointment. He would be totally fake. Or what would be even worse was if he totally believed in his fakeness. Like a television pastor. Maybe he would have a big diamond ring. Or a fat gold Rolex. Maybe he’d drop names of old famous people he’d once met, like Diana Ross or Joe Torre or Lorne Michaels. She hoped she didn’t like him so she could be disappointed and not feel so bad about the darn contest. So she could get back to slowly and obsessively building her career and enjoying what remained of her young life.
She began to read from chapter 9:
Suppers
I caught them kissing once. Bess was going to take hot soup to a friend in town who’d caught a summer cold. Pop was in the nook near the back door, carefully filling his tackle box for some moonlight fishing. I was reading the Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Chinese Junk at the kitchen table and they couldn’t see me. But I could see them.
“Bring the boy back some ice cream,” he said.
“What type?”
“Chocolate—no, strawberry. Get both!”
She whispered, “Of course I will.”
She put the pot she’d been holding on the shelf in the nook, and he gently dropped the lures he’d been handling into the box. They kissed then, as I stayed still, watching.
She placed a hand on his chest and said, “Again.”
After they were done kissing for what felt to me like way too long, Bess slipped out the back door and walked down the dirt path to the Pontiac. Pop stood for a moment, still smiling down at his own shoes, and for a second I thought, Sweet old man. To be so happy. And about what? But now that we’re deep in these pages, I think that you and I, we understand.
“Come on, Peter. Let’s get out on those waters and catch our supper.”
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br /> “Okay,” I said.
Their love was as big and strong as old houses. And I learned one other thing, right then. If you can do nothing else, if you’re just running out to visit a friend and do a few errands and life is busy and humming all around you … Well, right then, remember to reach back into your home and your marriage. Remember to take good care of those who you love and who love you.
It’s okay to set down your paddles and love each other. Your canoe will find its way.
Lines like that one reminded Stella of what she had first seen in the book, that had resulted in her making out with Ivan in the parking lot. The sentences weren’t horrible. It was stupid of her to think that! After her initial calculations, she’d been seduced, hadn’t she? There was truth in Canoe. She went to bed and fell into an anxious, sweaty sleep.
“Hi, baby.” Ivan kissed the top of her head. His eyes were tired and his hair was standing up, but he smelled good. Already she was breathing slower. Loving him so intensely scared her, but at least she knew enough not to try and stop it. He said, “Want to come in the kitchen?”
“I have to rest. I’ve got this meeting tomorrow.”
“The big meeting! Got your six-shooter?”
“Shut up.”
Ivan sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes. She loved the sight of his bumpy spine through his shirt.
“Where’ve you been, anyway?”
“I was out with another woman who’s not you, having emotionally fraught sex. Are you thirsty?”
She frowned at him and got up and followed him into the kitchen. She found the bottle of wine and sipped at it, her head in her hand. He reached out and took the bottle. She smelled herself on him, on his hands and shirt. He was never with anybody else. She smiled at him.
“I’m an idiot,” she said. “You were editing film, weren’t you? I’m sorry.”
“You’re a weird monster of a person in some ways, but I love you.”
“Will you stay with me, even if I lose this job?”
“Especially if you blow this stupid job!” He laughed. “We could move to Buenos Aires and hang out with cool people. We could eat little plates of chorizo and octopus and then tango till three in the morning.”
