by Don Wallace
A real estate Gold Rush was going on. All over the city, people prayed for the arrival of the Black Book, as the prospectus was called. For many older renters, going co-op was like hitting the lottery. They could buy their apartments, flip them immediately, pocket a few hundred grand, and buy a cheap condo in Florida.
Straight from the airport and France, we’d dragged our suitcases out of the stairwell and stopped, staring. A thick book lay on our frayed doormat. Not a new phone book, it was the Black Book. What every New Yorker hoped for, we dreaded. For us—subletters, and illegal ones at that—it meant the jig was up. We had no insider’s rights. We’d have to move.
Losing our place was bad enough, but then the delayed reaction hit. The cheap rent that had allowed us to save for Belle Île was going away, too. We’d banked on it when signing the devis with Denis LeReveur. Where would we get the money now?
At least, if we could hang on for a year or so, we could sock away our savings—although a significant portion would have to go toward forming a war chest for finding a new place. Moving in New York often sucks up half or all of your savings, regardless of how much you have socked away. But even that hope vanished when our neighbors, the only residents of the London Terrace to whom we’d confided our illegal status, invited us over.
“They’re going to push everyone out or make them buy in,” said Bob. “They’ve hired a management company that specializes in clearing people out. You won’t be able to escape these guys. I’ve just met with them. Sorry.”
But we hadn’t gotten this far just to give up, especially with a baby coming. Mindy called the elderly legal tenant, a crusty former gal-about-town who’d once dated Mindy’s grandfather. Irene had made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with the apartment; it was ours as long as we could fool the doormen and the management. We’d lasted almost three years, thanks to bribing our doormen lavishly and keeping a low profile—never being seen together, never even taking the elevator to our floor.
Mindy pleaded with Irene to sign the initial agreement, which would take the heat off us by giving management what it wanted, a buyer. “Look,” Mindy said, “you can always back out, but down the line they may even make you an offer to take it off your hands. You could make a lot of money.”
Irene wasn’t impressed. In the end, she agreed to meet and discuss it. But she wanted Mindy’s grandfather there. Could we bring him to lunch near her little house in rural Connecticut? We guessed she wanted to get one last look at him, the one who got away.
In a cold slant rain of November that brought down all the faded grandeur of the fall foliage, the two cranky Yankees, former lovers now in their eighties, ate their toasted tuna-fish sandwiches in a diner in Darien. Then we followed Irene back to her plain, white-painted saltbox cottage, which Mindy’s grandfather circled, checking the rain gutters and inspecting for dry rot. Inside, at a rolltop desk, Irene signed the papers. “Okay, kids, I hope you’re happy.”
She looked at Mindy’s grandfather. “Are you happy?”
He snorted. “Don’t be silly.”
Later, Mindy told me that was when she had her wild surmise, which, as we drove off in the rain, Mindy’s grandfather indirectly confirmed. “I bought that house for her,” he said. “After I remarried.”
All the pieces came together with a brisk click. On our train ride back to the city, Mindy described fuzzy memories of visits to Hawaii from Grandpa and “Aunt Irene” when Mindy was very small and Grandpa was still married to Grandma.
“Irene must’ve been his mistress.” A little later, out of nowhere, she added, “That was when he promised me a pony.”
We amused ourselves, as novelists do, with the notion that this plot twist worthy of a French film noir might buy us time. If the management didn’t kick us out in the next year, maybe we’d even save enough to carry out the renovations of Belle Île. As things stood now, however, we lacked the money for the demolition of the old floor and for pouring the new one and building the staircase. Any downstairs renovation would have to wait.
Mindy wrote Denis and told him to only complete the roof, the twin upstairs chambers with their dormer windows, and the bathroom.
We were doing the thing that Gwened had warned us against: not getting the work done all at once. The agreements and schedules of the workmen would now unravel, with no guarantee or obligation to ever return and finish the job. But we had no choice: all our money was gone.
• • •
“Push.”
“It hurts.”
“Push.”
“Oh god!”
“Look at the wave!”
As I’d noticed when we first toured New York Presbyterian Hospital, the plain, white birthing room had a large blank wall opposite the foot of the bed. Thinking of how it would feel to be undergoing the greatest pain short of dying, as our Lamaze teacher had described childbirth—helpfully, I’m sure—I’d packed a poster from Hawaii in our go bag and tacked it up the moment we arrived.
The nurses and doctor were taken aback, but I knew Mindy would be inspired. The poster showed a perfect fifteen-foot Pipeline barrel throwing out a 360-degree lip with a spiraling tube that seemed to go on forever the longer you looked into it. This, I figured, would remind Mindy of the birth canal and give her encouragement.
“Just look at the wave.”
“I don’t want to look at the wave! Ow! Ow! Ow!”
Mindy’s brown toes spasmed open and closed. So far everyone in the hospital had noticed and commented on her feet. This nurse, the one who was monitoring her cervix, was no exception. She did a double take: “Good heavens, your toes, they’re as wide as fingers!” Luau feet, I explained. Children in Hawaii grow up going barefoot on the sand.
“Shut up! It hurts! Fuck!”
The nurse looked shocked.
“Ow! It hurts! Oh my God, it hurts! Do something! I can’t stand it!”
The nurse leaned forward. “Do you want an epidural?”
“No. No shots.”
“Okay, then. I’ll leave you two together…” Out the door she went.
“Ow! Ow! Oh my God!”
I pointed to the Pipeline. “Okay, look at the wave. Look at the wave on the wall. Look at the tube. You’re inside the tube…”
“Oh god, oh god, oh god… I don’t want to be in the tube! Fuck the tube. Oh, oh, oh… It’s not helping. The-tube-is-not-helping!”
“Okay, we’re going for a walk…”
“A WALK? I’m dying! How can I go for a walk?”
“Shhh… It’s an imaginary walk. You have to take your mind off the pain. Here we go.”
“I-don’t-want-to-go-for-a-walk, GODDAMMIT!”
“We’re on Belle Île. Summer. Everything is golden. We’re at the top of the road that leads into the valley. The road that runs below Kerbordardoué. We’ve just left the village square, and you remember how it starts, the walk, with those tall elms and the high hedgerows with flowers making it feel like a deep cool tunnel, and there’s Queen’s Anne lace growing in the water ditches and…”
“It always stinks, the water in the ditches. It’s that damn fosse smell.”
“Yes, you’re right. It really does smell.”
“Why does it smell? Whose fosse is responsible? I hate that smell.”
“It’s okay. We’re past the water ditches. The smell is gone. Let’s keep walking.”
“When we get to Belle Île this year, we have to find out and put a stop to it.”
“That’s right, that’s right. And now we’re past the water ditches, and we’re passing the slope filled with blackberry brambles, and all the berries are ripe and we can stop and pick some on our way back. Look, there are spiderwebs everywhere! Look at that, will you? They’re shining with dew and those huge, yellow-bellied spiders are bouncing in the breeze…”
“The valley’s so pretty.”
“Yes, and look: above us a hawk is hovering. Looking for rabbits.”
“There are always rabbits in the pasture.”
“Yes!” I felt our imaginations merging. “And just a little farther down, now, look, we’re passing the tall cypress windbreak on our right. See how the tips of the cypresses bend in the wind, like the tips of paintbrushes swaying over the sky like a canvas…”
Three hours later, after two or three trips up and down the valley and a long walk along the beach at Donnant, a baby boy was born.
• • •
As life got more complicated, options narrowed. Buy a ruin, have a child, sign a paper, bribe a doorman to ignore the stroller in the hall. Now the wife couldn’t bear to leave the baby to go back to work, perfectly understandable in light of the ten days he spent in critical care. But that meant it was time for the husband to find a real job, not one like at the boating magazine, with its casual travel itineraries and adventurous, even loopy subject matter.
As for Belle Île, a curious transformation took place after baby Rory’s arrival. Suddenly we wanted to see more of our families. Suddenly we understood why our parents had kept stressing how far away France was, thousands of miles in the wrong direction. It was as if our relationships with our parents had reached a turning point, or halfway point, and the rubber band of attachment had snapped us back home.
We also woke up to the fact that they needed us, our support. A couple of years earlier, my parents had skirted bankruptcy in a real estate deal. Père Wallace had also suffered a mild heart attack, though nobody would talk about it. Time was no longer on our side. But we had a solution, we thought: like new parents everywhere, we believed our baby could restore animal spirits and morale. And Rory didn’t let us down.
Funny how time flies when you’re living La Baby Loca: May, June, July, August, and September passed before we even noticed that we weren’t going to Belle Île that year. Instead, I spent a lot of time on one of the strangest beats in journalism: simultaneously covering the preparations for the upcoming America’s Cup in Australia and the antics of the speedboat-racing, cocaine-smuggling kings of the Colombian cartels. It was amusing how blue bloods in tasseled loafers and jefes in white jumpsuits could want the same thing: a cover photo on a boating magazine. What was frightening was the lengths both would go to get it.
I spent the first part of 1987 covering the America’s Cup in Perth, while Mindy and Rory stayed with her mother and grandfather in Honolulu. We’d just settled back into life in New York City when a new blow fell: my sister Anne was given a terminal cancer diagnosis.
For anyone, a terrible shock. In the case of someone as vital and generous as Anne, the diagnosis had the effect of a moral crisis: Where had I been? We rushed back the moment we heard. Disliking the fatalistic attitude and ameliorative treatment plan of her doctors, we persuaded her to visit UCLA’s top cancer center for a second opinion. Risky and experimental neck and jaw surgery followed. She lived. But her husband sued for divorce. From that moment on, I had to be a better brother and to be as present in Anne’s life as I could.
No sooner were we back in New York than the next phase in the co-op transfer arrived, in the form of a request for a nonrefundable thousand-dollar deposit. This would formalize a future purchase agreement. No deposit, no apartment: thirty days to sign or vacate.
So that was it. We’d gained a year; now we had a month. It didn’t give us a lot of time to look for a new place, or me for a new job. Any chance of going to Belle Île in 1987 went out the window. We dove into the newspaper listings on both fronts. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment ran about $1,750 a month, and I only made $30,000 a year. So far nobody had given my résumé a second look. Things began to feel more than a little desperate.
Then inspiration struck. Perhaps we’d been living in the same city with Donald Trump for too long. But the implications of Irene turning down the chance to buy finally sank in. There was nothing to prevent us from following the deal to its conclusion, if we had the nerve. There was something dark and a little shady about it that appealed to the New Yorker in us. We’d scuffed about the city, living on pennies. Now we were going to do what investment bankers, Wall Street traders, and other go-getters had been doing for the past ten years of the real estate boom: leverage ourselves and make a killing. With the proceeds we could buy a bigger apartment with a bedroom for the baby. Maybe there’d even be something left over for the Belle Île renovations.
We paid the thousand dollars down by cashier’s check, after drawing up a side agreement with Irene, who signed to buy the apartment in exchange for $10,000 of our future gains (and one more supervised visit from Grandpa). Now all we had to do was find me a new job, scrounge up the down payment, get a mortgage, arrange to complete the sale to Irene, and have her flip to us on the same day. Easy.
Then we had to turn around, find a buyer, and flip it again fast. Even if we were on the hook for more than we could ever pay, we figured it was all worth it. For little Rory’s sake, of course. In the week or two or three until we flipped and made our killing, we would experience life like financiers, flying high and living dangerously in a leveraged world. What the heck. We’re already on a treadmill. We’ll just run a little faster, that’s all.
Not without effort, a key piece of the puzzle fell into place when I got a job at a perpetually struggling small-business magazine. My salary would jump over a third, and we would qualify, barely, for a mortgage if our subterfuge worked. I was sorry to leave MotorBoating & Sailing. There I’d worked under my first real boss, Peter Janssen, who’d taught me magazine editing and, with a wry smile, enabled our trips to Belle Île by allowing me to do stories in Brittany and Europe.
I’d made my first friends in the city through the magazine, and many friends in the field. I’d stalked cocaine smugglers and Nicaraguan contras in Key West, America’s Cup skippers in Perth, Richard Branson in his attempts to break the transatlantic powerboat record, solo ocean racers in Trinité-sur-Mer—the latter so conveniently across the bay from Belle Île.
A chapter in my life was closing with real regret. Only as I was leaving MB&S did I pause to reflect on how I’d gotten the job in the first place. Or at least cinched it—because when challenged by a snippy New York Yacht Club member during my interview to provide some evidence of nautical ability or experience, I’d broken out the tale of a mad winter’s night sail with our neighbor and sometime skipper, Franck, at the helm of his twenty-two-foot sloop. Yes, it had certainly been a near thing during that stormy Bay of Biscay crossing. Why, at midnight the winds reached Force 6 and laid us on our side in crazily foaming seas… We came about and dove into the lee of a rocky islet to spend the night.
Soon after we dropped anchor, a splendid sailing yacht arrived to do the same. A gorgeous woman in a party dress and high heels stepped down into the inflatable dinghy. We watched, soaked and clammy in our foul-weather gear, as her men in formal evening wear handed down a bottle of Champagne and glasses. And then a terrific gust of wind hit and blew her out to sea, into the night, standing up all alone on the dinghy with her arms outstretched, bottle in hand. The men scrambled to raise anchor and give chase, aiming a spotlight on the rapidly disappearing inflatable until…well…
“The woman, what happened to her?” demanded the New York Yacht Club member.
“Never saw her or the yacht again.”
“What island was this?” he asked, like a policeman demanding to see my license.
“Houat.”
“What?”
“Yes, Houat,” I replied. “Slept like a baby.”
When the New York Yacht Club member shuddered, I knew I had the job.
Thank you, Belle Île.
My new job came with a different tale. Two weeks before I started at Success! and one month before the apartment sale was to be completed, the stock market crashed. It was the largest-ever up to that date: October 19, Black Monday.
Mindy and I stood before our ancient black-and-white television, staring at the streaming numbers. What would it mean? The answer came over the next few months. With forty thousand jobs lost on Wall Street, the real estate bubble popped.
But before that was made eminently clear, we’d gone through with the sale, like robots, because we had to. Naturally, it went off like a charm. Only afterward, no buyers queued up at the door. Just like that, we were locked into a dingy apartment at a precrash price in a building full of newly renovated model units going begging for buyers.
Meanwhile, I’d traded a job following the lordly sea for one following the almighty shrinking dollar. The morning I started my new job at Success! workmen on stepladders were taking off the exclamation point. People were shouting at each other when I stuck my head in. The receptionist, I was informed, had just been laid off. The publisher was swapping ad space for bartered goods, including a pallet of soft drinks. Have a Coke, Don?
Time stands still when you’re on a slow treadmill. At home, we were crammed into two dark rooms with a foldaway kitchen in the foyer. Every night the three of us ate at a table sandwiched between our two writing desks, Rory gleefully hurling his dinner and yowling like a banshee. (A happy banshee, I must add.) Every night we folded out our futon-style sofa bed on the floor, while Rory got the crib in the bedroom.
We hung a map of Belle Île in the hallway beside the bathroom door. We put a cracked Quimper vase, found in a Greenwich Village antique shop, on a shelf to hold flowers and remind us of our village’s blooming hydrangeas, our maison saine.
Sometimes, to console ourselves, we brought out our dreams and gently blew on the embers until they sprang to life. Sometimes we brought out memories of our first winter in Kerbordardoué, shaking them into motion like snowflakes trapped under a dome of glass.
