Free Love Is a Canoe: A Novel by Ben Schrank

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