Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (8 page)

Eli had been a guest lecturer, back when Emily was getting over Gordon Dubrow, who had left New York for a good teaching job at Oregon State University. The final year with Gordon had begun with the offer for the OSU job. The job offer engendered an intense, two-day discussion that constantly verged on a fight, that revolved around how Gordon’s work would always be theoretical and how he would probably never build a sailboat of his own. At the end of it, Emily realized she’d been attacking him. They had spent much of that year realizing that though they loved each other, she wasn’t leaving New York. And when he volunteered to stay, she said no to that, too. There was an imbalance. Though she loved him, he loved her more. She understood this but dared not articulate it, for fear of hurting him as badly as she had when they fought about the sailboat he would never build. She would miss him. But she wanted to be in New York with its unending supply of lectures, its promise to keep her busy and engaged, no matter how shy she became. She also suspected that she wanted someone cooler, someone just a little outside the world she’d made for herself. Though if Gordon had grabbed her by the shoulders and demanded that she move to the West Coast, she probably would have gone. But he hadn’t grabbed her.

Eli had started his lecture by talking about his first career as a graphic designer and how he’d enjoyed that. But he’d had a growing fascination with bicycle design. He’d already built one bike and was thinking that it might be more than a hobby. And so, on a trip to Italy, he came up with the idea for his company, Roman Street Bicycles. The longer he stood in front of the class, the less he talked. Instead, he showed pictures on PowerPoint. He began with a silver-colored, steel frame, single-speed bicycle. He showed the class how he stenciled “Roman Street” or “RSB” on each part in ghostly white paint. He showed pictures of himself shaking hands with the lanky owners of independent bike shops in Williamsburg and Fort Greene and on Third Avenue in Gowanus. There were photographs of his bikes in their windows. He showed how the city was newly lined with bicycle lanes, so many lanes everywhere that they looked like some vast interlay of green threads. Within eighteen months, he was importing steel tubing from China and manufacturing completely new bikes in a factory in the South Bronx where the laborers were mostly illegal but were paid as if they weren’t. He showed pictures of the factories in China and his dozen workers in the Bronx. His lecture trailed off completely as he showed pictures of his inspirations, ancient Bianchi bicycles, photographs of working women bicycling in Rome in the fifties, Greg LeMond, the Italian national cycling team, and rain-soaked commuters biking up hills in Seattle.

Afterward, instead of bowing her head and sneaking out during the applause, Emily fought past the constraints she had allowed to define her and went to the front of the room to talk to him. She wanted to know how much of what he did was fashion and how much was building custom bikes. How much was really for the riders? He stood up straight and she was afraid that he might not like her questions or how tall she was. He asked her to come for a drink at Café Loup.

He had such dark eyes. He spoke with his thick hands. He shaped bicycles in front of her, showed her discarded logos on napkins, eventually took her hands and held them in his while he explained how it felt to build a bicycle and then use it to take you anywhere you wanted to go. She did not tell him about Gordon and the theoretical waves and the unbuilt sailboat. She didn’t tell him how in love she’d been, and how recently. To compensate for these omissions, she didn’t ask many questions about his past.

“I know I’m having a hard time finding the words to explain all this,” Eli said.

“That’s okay,” she said with a smile. “I understand everything you’re saying.”

She stared at his hands. She found out he was five years older than her. The elusive thing that had not happened with Gordon in six years happened with Eli in only a few hours. She could imagine being married to him.

Now Emily imagined Eli stenciling “Roman Street” between the pair of sweet dimples she’d seen above Jenny’s ass. In Emily’s mind, Jenny had started to look like Megan Fox, but smarter and with those incredible lazy ringlets of hair. Emily fantasized about finding Jenny mistakenly riding her Roman Street bicycle onto the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and running her down with a big car. Cool-ass Jenny. Easy going, L.A. Jenny. There was something Emily hadn’t given Eli and he had found it in Jenny. Where Emily liked things that were explainable, Jenny had accessed the part of Eli that was inexplicable. And now Emily was miserable and frightened and confused.

Emily shook her head and reminded herself that Eli was an excellent husband. He had an autographed Thurman Munson baseball in his sock drawer and that was the only odd thing in there. She had never found a fetish-porn magazine, a suspicious USB cartridge, unexplained lipstick-stained boxers, or a duct-taped manila envelope stuffed with photos of a girl from high school or college. There was never anything like that. He was obsessed with his work and thought about little else, and she had always loved guys like that, since she was a teenager. There had been nothing to worry about for years and years until there was Jenny.

She pulled out her phone to call Sherry back and then just stared at it.

Fucking phones. She had picked up Eli’s phone on a morning two weeks earlier to find a text from Jenny that said,
Can’t wait to see you at work today.
After that, Emily had scrolled through her own texts back and forth with her husband and there weren’t a whole lot of
can’t wait
s. They were both guilty of a ton of
I’ll be late
s, so many back and forth, informing the other not to be disappointed about this latest reduction in the time they would spend together. There was also a whole lot of discussion of food and when to eat it. The texts he exchanged with Jenny were not dirty. They were solicitous and kind. They were kinder than coworker kind.
You were great today! I just got the name of an investor who I think you’ll really like. Call me later? Want to connect with you before bedtime.
And then when he’d returned from L.A., a text from Eli to Jenny that said,
Thanks for the hug, work wife
. A hug from a work wife. Emily had intended to be his wife for work and for home. But that was over. Still, she had hope. She had to figure out how to push them through this thing, past Jenny. If only she had any idea how to do that.

Her home screen was a picture of Eli winking. She thought of his muscular legs and the way she loved him as she stared at his face. She leaned against a bookshelf. She was in big trouble.

Emily put her phone away and left the self-help section. She picked up the August
Vogue
and
Me on You
, a second novel by Ida Abarra, an Ethiopian-American woman who had been at Sarah Lawrence when she was there, someone she had never been that close to but had really admired. She’d always had funny conversations with Ida at the extremely drunken dinner parties that they’d both gone to right after college in too-small apartments in the Lower East Side and Greenpoint, before everyone paired off and moved to the softer terrain of brownstone Brooklyn.

I’ll be supportive and buy Ida’s novel, she thought.

Her phone vibrated.

“Are you finished with whoever you ran into?” Sherry asked. “I only have a few more minutes to talk before I go onstage.”

“No, still catching up,” Emily whispered. “Sorry.” She hung up again.

She loved her younger sister but didn’t want to hear about the date she had with a movie producer after she finished her show. She knew she was being awful, but she couldn’t help it.

It was warm in the bookstore, this rather alien outpost of a new minichain that had sprouted up six months earlier, a brightly lit place with plenty of bleached wood tables and some oversize canvas-covered armchairs where high school kids were surreptitiously touching one another’s thighs.

She walked toward the front of the store. She and Eli were going to make dinner together. She needed to buy fish because it was Monday and they were often virtuous early in the week, before succumbing on Wednesday or Thursday evening to takeout Thai or just cereal or reheated spaghetti, eaten standing up in the kitchen with beer.

And then, before she got on line to pay, she circled back and scooped up the version of
Marriage Is a Canoe
she’d come in to look at. Admittedly, she already had the book at home. But this was a different edition that appeared to have a shortened version of the original exercises in it. She had always loved the book. She had read and reread the copy that lived in her parents’ bathroom when she was growing up. When she was twelve, she had fantasized about being the girl called Honey who Peter Herman had kissed and later married. She realized, suddenly, that that was twenty-one years ago. And ever since, she had kept a copy of
Canoe
with her wherever she lived.

She hated people who made fun of
Canoe
. She loved the elegance of it, the simplicity of its lessons and the fact that they were undeniably right and true. The book kept the dream of the ideal marriage alive.
Canoe
had helped her look away from her parents’ marriage, which was cold and New Englandy and had lasted fourteen brittle years. She and Sherry always joked that it had gone on about a dozen years too long. By the time Emily was in seventh grade and Sherry was in fourth, her mother had refused to celebrate Christmas and her father wouldn’t celebrate Chanukah, so the winter holiday arrived heavy and silent in the house. Emily and Sherry mutely understood that their home life was stagnant and wouldn’t last, so Sherry forced herself on their friends and Emily spent much of her time alone, reading. This marital outcome was precisely unlike the ones described in
Canoe
, except for much of chapter eleven, a chapter Emily always skipped when she reread. Emily loved
Canoe
. Though, ever since college, she kept the book on a high shelf where friends wouldn’t see it and tease her about it.

She paid and smiled at the cashier and thought about how she ought to share more about herself with people, to not be so tight-lipped and interior. But she only really knew how to talk about objects—she didn’t see a way to explain herself. And maybe that was beginning to crop up as a problem with Eli, too.

She called Sherry from the street.

“Emily, what the hell are you up to?”

“Nothing!”

“Have you talked to Mom this week?”

After her divorce, their mother had left the house in Milton where she’d brought up her daughters and cooked healthy dinners for her lawyer husband, and she’d reclaimed her existence as Rebecca Bauman. Now she taught English composition at Bates, had the sense of humor of a mid-career Joan Baez, and talked to her daughters nearly exclusively about their relationships and her academic career. She revealed almost nothing about her personal life. It was possible that she was gay, and embarrassed about it. Though both things felt wildly improbable, Sherry and Emily hoped that was the explanation. That or something like it. They both preferred to imagine that their mother hid a life better and richer than the one she shared with them.

“Yeah.” Emily nodded. “She suspects the worst so she wants to rip Eli’s head off. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to help. Then I had to hear about all her problems with the Henry James book. She says she’s close. I know she’s lying to herself.”

“What?” Sherry asked. Emily could hear Nancy, the other woman in the play, also talking on the phone in their shared dressing room. Sherry was always tense before a performance, and her teeth were chattering. Emily listened to her sister’s clicking teeth and remembered her mother yanking open the door to the master bathroom where Emily had thought she’d locked herself in. Her mother had found her reading
Canoe
and she started laughing hysterically. “Great, Emily! Keep reading! Keep dreaming! That fucking stupid book—memorize it! And pretend you can’t hear another word of this!” And then her mother ran out of the bathroom and back down to the living room to continue fighting with her husband. Emily didn’t much care for her mother’s full sentences or her sarcasm. But Emily also wasn’t forthright enough, even as a child, to tell her mother that was exactly what she had been doing.

“Emily? I’ve really got to go. It’s true Mom will never finish that thing. Call me later, or tomorrow morning. Look, it’s probably not as bad as Mom thinks, and please stop hanging up on me! It’s just a work-wife thing which is exactly what they’re both saying. That’s all it is.”

“
Hugs with a work wife.
I hate it. I hate how that stupid line is imprinted on my brain. Be ready, because I am going to call you later,” Emily said.

“Can you hear my teeth chattering? I hate previews,” Sherry said, and hung up.

Emily began to rush down the not-too-hot August street. She saw the fish store closing for the night. Part of her wanted to talk her way past the guy fiddling with the pull-down gate to grab up the last piece of tuna. By channeling the saleswoman in her, she could be quite good at that sort of convincing. But no, no. Too late. Move on. Her timing was just horrible lately. Driving Sherry crazy right before she had to go onstage, choosing odd ways home, obsessively attending inarguably dull lectures on subjects like the design of Byzantine coins, and avoiding her husband.

Her handbag dragged at her shoulder. Her life felt too up in the air and here she was, buying books she already owned to weigh her down. There was something frozen that they could heat up and eat, she was sure of it. That would be fine. Some ribs that Eli had cooked for friends two weeks earlier. No. Defrosted ribs were gross. He could have them sometime when she was out. She was sure there was pasta. Probably there were some frozen beans, too.

Her husband was really just a driven and occasionally distracted guy who had said, “You make me better,” when he’d asked her to marry him at Café Loup after they’d been together a little over a year. He told her all the time how much he loved what she had made of their lives. Still, now, knowing he was a good guy wasn’t helping. She had to believe he wasn’t up to anything with Jenny. They were just in a mental I-would-so-do-you type of affair because they were both good-looking in a similar dark-and-sexy way, and also because Roman Street had been unstoppable lately, transitioning from a cool brand with serious supply problems to talk of growth plans and distribution partnerships and a feature on Forbes.com. And what was a hug, anyway? A hug was not a kiss. And Eli was such a poor writer that she doubted he was capable of a euphemism. He wasn’t traveling anytime soon and she would just be more vigilant. She would kill whatever was growing. Somehow, they’d get past it. She would figure out a way to get them past it.