Love Is a Canoe Read online

  “Do you say that because you remember watching The Way We Were with me?” he asked. “Are you making a joke?”

  “My funny valentine…” She tried to sing but lost her words. She smiled down at her hands. He took her in his arms and gently raised her to her feet. She would remember this hug, this same old awkward hug. She fell on him and he loved her for her trust. At the very least, she trusted him, still, as much as she ever had. And they had loved each other. So he had lost the stable love he’d had with Lisa and had it replaced with this lengthy goodbye.

  Peter did not enjoy listening to doctors. He wasn’t nearly as good as Lisa had once been at absorbing and analyzing the information they shared. But he did understand that, regardless of how he parsed out what he understood of Pick’s disease as it related to his wife’s brain, new options did not arise. Pick’s disease meant that their time left together was limited and everything that was wrong with Lisa was absolutely not going to be right again.

  Stella Petrovic, July 2011

  “You say this year is the fiftieth anniversary of what?” Helena Magursky’s voice was both scratchy and strident. “I’m not sure I heard you.”

  Stella Petrovic frowned. She watched Helena Magursky, president and CEO of Ladder & Rake Books, lean forward, a half inch per second. They were twenty minutes into their weekly Wednesday morning nine o’clock, or whenever-Helena-wants-to-start-and-she’s-always-late-but-you-damn-well-better-not-be meeting, recently retitled “Free Thinking/New Billing.”

  The living legend that was Helena Magursky was why Stella had left Orange Blackwell and come to the far bigger Ladder & Rake, so called because of its origin as a press for home repair and gardening manuals born in the back of Olitski Brothers Hardware Store in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1907. And a middling regional press is what LRB would have stayed if Helena hadn’t been hired right out of City College as the secretary for the single New York City–based salesperson in 1968. She had then gone on to hold nearly every position in the company, including several she’d made up. Helena had snatched Ladder & Rake from bankruptcy and merger more than once. The reason for this, people said, was because she knew content. She knew content and audience and she wasn’t afraid to appropriately charge the audience for content that they liked. Helena was long-divorced and had one daughter, Elizabeth, a pediatrician who lived in Chicago with her husband and daughter. For decades, Helena had been Ladder & Rake’s mother. And that was how she was treated, like a mother, a stern mother who everyone wanted to please.

  Now, Helena commanded the attention in Ladder & Rake’s very best conference room—the Dreiser Room—a long, thin space on the twenty-third floor of 38 East Fifty-Seventh Street, with windows facing uptown and Central Park.

  “The book is Marriage Is a Canoe,” Helena’s current assistant, Lucy Brodsky, said.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought I heard.” Helena pushed her lower lip out in a frown. She had allowed her black hair to go gray. Today it was in a high ponytail. She propped her lower lip up with her fingers and looked at Lucy.

  “You want us to skip this item?” Lucy asked. Helena quieted her with a thrust of her chin.

  “Let the young editor gather her thoughts and finish whatever point she’s trying to make,” Helena said to Lucy. Lucy had a high ponytail, too, and she wore a slinky J.Crew charcoal suit and a pale gray blouse. Stella thought Lucy should quit publishing and become a junior account executive for an old-school ad agency, J. Walter Thompson or Leo Burnett. She’d fit in better. But Stella knew that Lucy had taken the job as Helena’s assistant because she loved books and wanted to stay true to her undergraduate, English-major self. So Lucy put up with an unending parade of days filled with Helena’s ever-changing moods, all so maybe, someday, she’d get to switch jobs and become an editorial assistant. Stella smirked. She didn’t believe Lucy was going to make it. Stella had done a year in marketing before going into editorial, and though that year had been a nasty grind, she’d learned a lot. And now Stella was an editor. A very young editor, too. That had been her dream and now here she was, living it. Stella’s throat and cheeks turned purple whenever she talked about how much she’d loved Alice Munro in high school and then Mary Gaitskill when she’d been in Wisconsin for college. And now she’d just about die if she could discover the next Junot Díaz or Miranda July or Tom Vanderbilt, since she’d learned to be interested in nonfiction, too. You have to nurture your passion, Stella thought. You have to look the corporation right in its eye and be unafraid to make enormous mistakes. Because someday you will be so, so right.

  Stella cleared her throat and repeated herself, “Fiftieth anniversary of the events upon which Marriage Is a Canoe is based—”

  A door opened and Alex Wales, head of National Accounts, came in and whispered to Lucy, who whispered to Helena. Helena held up a hand for silence, and got it.

  “Hold there,” Helena said.

  Stella went still. A few weeks earlier, Stella’s direct boss, Melissa Kerrigan, whom she barely ever saw, gave her a copy of LRB’s nonfiction backlist catalog and asked her to see if she could figure out how to get any of those old, barely-in-print books to start selling in a real way again.

  “I mean, we can’t expect you to draw blood from stones, but you can at least find out if any of those stones have a pulse.” Melissa had laughed and then disappeared, keeping to the pattern she’d created since hiring Stella.

  It was a horrible assignment, but Stella knew she’d never be able to buy any big new books of her own if she didn’t first do some shit work for Melissa. And that was how she’d discovered Canoe. It was the fifteenth or eighteenth nonfiction book she’d taken home and she was as cynical about it as she was about all the others, many of which she’d left on the seat next to her on the 7 train. But then she’d found herself actually reading it. That was weird. She listened to her new boyfriend, Ivan, and held hands with him, just like the book said to. After the listening and hand-holding worked and they found themselves out past midnight, hungrily making out in the scary parking lot of a low-income high-rise near their apartment, she realized she thought about Canoe’s hokey lessons all the time. She figured if she could buy into Canoe, she could convince others to do the same. And then, one morning while taking an overlong shower with Ivan still sleeping, she came up with an idea for a contest.

  Stella folded her hands in front of her on the table and waited. She had just turned twenty-eight, and she had too-long, honey-colored hair that she wore loose on most days. She had a proclivity for checked fabrics: houndstooth and tweed and nubby wool. Today she wore a dress with a brown-and-white wave pattern on it, very Ray Eames, with a bright red cardigan.

  Helena liked a long silence and an overly warm conference room, which was why the young assistants whispered that the Dreiser Room ought to be called the Drowsy Room.

  “Mmm.” Helena looked around the room and smiled. “Let’s hear more from Stella. But first let me finish with Alex, since he flies out to Amazon later this morning. So, all of you relax and let’s let Stella get her bearings and I’ll be right back with you.”

  Everyone in the room smiled and took the opportunity to begin to whisper. Because Stella was in mid-pitch, no one talked to her. So Stella looked around and began to count things. Ionic columns framed three evenly spaced entry points. Fifty-nine people sat in the room, twenty-seven at the table and the rest on hard chairs against the side walls. Twelve windows in three bays. Eighteen bookshelves, and between the bookshelves, in halogen-lit nooks, there were fourteen framed #1 New York Times bestsellers, all published since January. Stella stopped counting and began to poke at the little microphone that was set flush into the conference table in front of her. If she poked it, it popped up, like a tiny periscope. She poked it.

  “Don’t play with that.”

  Stella looked up and saw Melissa Kerrigan sitting a couple of seats to her right.

  “Sorry. Hi, Melissa. I didn’t see you there.”

  “But if you had,” Melissa
whispered, “you would have mentioned that you were pitching something big this morning, right?”

  “Yes.” Stella smiled. “In fact, I did mention it, but then the meeting was canceled a few times so maybe you forgot.”

  Melissa glared and didn’t speak. Stella began to poke the microphone in front of her again and it popped up an inch. Poke, poke. Stella looked away from her boss. This was the first Wednesday-morning meeting in over a month. They were always canceled when Helena was out, and she’d been away often lately, first at a Future of the Book conference in Cologne, then for a vacation with her daughter at a spa in Montana, and finally for the sales conference of a trade magazine group that was in a completely separate division of LRB’s current parent company, Timmler Products Incorporated. The trade magazine group needed Helena’s input and comments because they hadn’t seen positive revenue in over two years and were in danger of being shut down. Publishing was simpler than that, Stella thought. You needed hits. Everybody knew about the easy road to oblivion. It was no secret. No hits? Get the fuck out. You took the job. You knew the deal. You invested plenty of hard work and lots of company money in your books and prayed for the best. But then … you got no hits? Sooner rather than later, you were done and it was time to go.

  Stella hadn’t minded waiting for this meeting. The waiting made everything more intense and the intensity turned Stella on. She loved books and she was ambitious and she knew it. Her ambition was why she’d come to Ladder & Rake. It was why she was so fascinated with Helena. Stella thought about BookScan percentage increases week to week, and surprise pop-ups on the Times and USA Today lists when she was having pre-workday sex with Ivan. When a grapefruit- and sprouted foods–based diet book she’d been shepherding was mentioned on The View and they did a rush printing and the cartons began to fast-ship from the warehouse to Ingram and Levy distribution centers, the whole process rebuilt itself in her dreams. She had read that UPS workers had box nightmares. She had box fantasies; squat rectangular boxes filled with twelve and twenty-four counts of books, taped shut and then circled once with yellow plastic tape that said STRICT ON SALE/DO NOT OPEN UNTIL. Oh yes, boxes filled with units that would perk right up like fresh daisies on the new release table and then move through the register. So there she sat, silent, focused, and excited. Turning purple and covering her neck and waiting for Helena’s attention. Since arriving at LRB, Stella had begun to idolize Helena even more than she’d thought she would. Now she watched as Helena dismissed her salesperson.

  “Okay. Canoe. I know Canoe,” Helena said. “I practically invented it—you say it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the events? I mean, even that’s so odd—the events? This discussion would make me feel old if I indulged in that feeling, which I do not.” Helena massaged her breastbone by kneading the thick gold chain she wore every day.

  Stella said, “Upon which the lessons are based, yes.”

  “Well, so?”

  Stella said, “I did some research and I think it’s something we could exploit—”

  “How?” Helena asked.

  The room grew quieter. A few of the senior people seated nearest to Helena began to smirk and shift in their chairs.

  Helena went on, “We haven’t heard from Peter Herman since dear old Jane Segal drove up to interview him. They sat down on a Saturday for tea and after two utterly innocuous questions he threw her out of the house.” Under her breath, but so nearly everyone could still hear, Helena muttered, “Must we go on with this?” The comment and its import rippled down the table via nudges and eye rolls.

  But Stella was patient. She had dug deep on Canoe and she was sure Helena would listen to her pitch. This was just standard hazing. Since arriving at LRB, Stella had occasionally heard Helena allude to a tougher early life than her official biography revealed. So Stella figured that Helena was entirely self-made and a bit of a street fighter. That was okay with Stella. She was a lot of things, but she was not afraid. She knew that if she didn’t make noise and create a hit that got her noticed now, she’d blow her chance to become a go-to editor at LRB. And then she’d lose two or more years of her life as she sat unnoticed before moving on to take another shot at some other house. She was not going to let that happen.

  “We hold a contest,” Stella went on. “I’ve done some research. Canoe is a very special book.”

  “Do you remember what Erica Jong called it when we asked her to write one of those new introductions a decade or so ago?” a lieutenant to Helena’s right whispered. “‘The Art of Loving for Dummies.’”

  “Haw,” Helena said. “Good one.”

  “And Maureen Dowd?” said Sara Byrd, the associate publisher for the women’s fiction imprint, Ladder & Rake Romantic. “She called it ‘The Art of Loving Dummies’! Because it’ll help you learn to love and put up with anyone! Remember she sent Hillary a copy!”

  “Which isn’t exactly logical since that’s not what the book is about.” Helena was suddenly serious. “Though that logic stretch is certainly Maureen Dowd’s gift. You see, Stella? We know it’s a special book since these very smart and important women have made light of it. So we all knew that before you said it. But please, go ahead. Take up more of our time. Elaborate. Indulge. Expand.”

  Stella breathed deeply. Her palms were dry. The heat at her temples would not transform into perspiration. She had been in rooms like this before. She had won the respect—if not the love—of those rooms.

  She said, “As we at this table have just noted, Canoe continues to be one of the most widely read self-help books in the country. But all we’ve got is steady sales, of about eleven thousand copies a year—in the very best years. And the trend is down, not up. But it’s because people share those copies! They don’t cherish our edition. They pass theirs to a friend and that person passes it on and so on. But with a great marketing plan and a new special edition we could revive Canoe. We could make it a phenomenon. So we hold a contest. Let me connect with publicity and do a press release…”

  And here, Stella took her gamble. She paused. She believed that if she was headed in a bad direction, Helena would cut her off. One beat, two beats. No interruption.

  Stella brought her finger to her temple and deferentially wiped away a nonexistent bead of sweat. “On this, the fiftieth anniversary of the events that are the basis for Marriage Is a Canoe, the preeminent book of marriage advice of the twentieth and now the twenty-first century, Canoe’s author, Peter Herman, invites one couple to his home for a day of home-cooked meals and homespun advice. The day spent with Peter Herman will be cherished by the winning couple for the rest of their happily married lives. This is a ‘save your marriage’ contest. The contest and the new edition will force the book back to the front of stores and to the top of the digital charts. Everybody has marriage troubles so everybody can relate. Then we put Mr. Herman and the winning couple on morning shows, like Good Morning America—”

  “Unless the couple won’t talk to the press,” Helena cut in. “And then what happens if the poor devils break up! Forget about Peter—I haven’t seen him in New York for more than a few hours since the eighties. We did do a few very successful book tours with him—this was way back when I invented the book tour, which I did for him, for writers like him anyway. Actually, I should call Peter. Lucy?”

  Lucy nodded. Stella could see that she had already made a note on her iPad.

  “Though the elusive quality of our contest wouldn’t hurt a classic,” Stella said. She was beginning to feel upbeat. “If there’s secrecy, we maintain the mystique. Buy the book to learn what they learned.”

  Then Stella shut up. She knew she’d flubbed it by talking too much. Her excitement was the same as when she had rambled back in high school and lost debates. But she was determined to learn from her mistakes. Shushhh! Shut up! She drove her fingers into her thighs and frowned. Take big risks, she thought. Risk everything! That’s the only way to win.

  Everyone in the room watched Helena and held their breath.


  “Mmm.” Helena nodded. “You’d have to guarantee pictures of the meeting, at the minimum. The couple on either side of Peter Herman, all of them smiling. Maybe video. You’d need video.”

  “I can promise all of that,” Stella said, quickly.

  Helena frowned. Then she arched forward, like a drug addict on a doze, until her overlarge forehead tapped the tabletop and her gold chain clanked against the table’s rim. The room had seen this before. This was a great woman doing some serious thinking. The room waited and stared at the part in her steel-gray hair. Eventually, Helena came back up and blinked at them all.

  “Fine!” Helena said. “Done. I mean, I largely hate the idea. But do it. Just make absolutely sure not to destabilize the core sales pattern. Tell me details, two weeks. And make it happen for the fall. Rush it! I like an inspirational story. So make it inspirational and we’ll all enjoy that. Gives me a nice story to tell the TPI board. Okay, next item?”

  “Hang on…,” Lucy said.

  “For goodness’ sake, Lucy! Let’s not spend what’s left of our miserable lives in this horrible room, am I right? I was feeling good just a moment ago. Now what is the next item?”

  “I don’t know—it’s not here.” Lucy glared at her iPad and shook it.

  “Then we’re in luck,” Helena said. “Because our meeting is over.”

  Stella covered her smile. She didn’t want to appear to be laughing at Lucy and have Helena see that. She knew Helena was insanely protective of her assistants, no matter how inept they were, since she had hired them and took responsibility for their growth. So Stella bit her lip, gathered her things, and got the hell out of the room as quickly as she could. Melissa Kerrigan was standing just outside the doorway, talking to Jenny Oh, the woman who handled the Target account. Stella bobbed and nodded, and mouthed a hello to Jenny, who lived somewhere near her and who she knew for a fact regularly ducked her on the subway. Stella made it down the hall. She was at the elevator bank when she heard the voice behind her.