Love Is a Canoe: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

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