Matt runs across the gangplank and comes out of the boat with a rope. The driver and I have all our weight on the land end of the I-beam, just holding it in place, keeping it balanced on the rock. Matt slips the rope over the boat end of the beam and wraps it on the same bollard we used to tie up the gangplank. We, the driver and I, keep pushing at Matt’s signal, a little at a time, until Matt can pull that end over the edge of the upper boat. Matt’s pleased as a little boy; so am I, and so’s the driver.
He starts explaining in fast French what we should do with the second I-beam. I pick up only part of it, but Matt seems satisfied. The driver brings out the invoice for me to sign. I reach in my pocket for some change as Matt runs into the boat. I’m trying to force the driver to take twenty francs, when Matt comes out with a bottle of red wine, not the best, but better than ordinary table wine, vin ordinaire. Matt holds it out to him as he races cross the gangplank. This he’ll take, and with a smile.
Then he puts up a hand and goes back to his truck. He returns with two small pieces of I-beam about a foot long each. He explains to Matt how we’re to use them. We shake hands all around and then guide him back down the chemin de halage through the trees. This is quite a trick, but I imagine it’s duck soup compared to many of the deliveries he makes.
Matt explains to me what we need to do with the second I-beam. It seems simple enough, but I’m not convinced we can do it without the know-how and probably ninety kilos of pure muscle from the truck driver. The idea is to swing the beam around the same as we did the first time, then slide it out on top of the I-beam already in place. It sounds simple enough and, despite my reservations, it turns out not to be beyond our strength or ability.
After securing the boat ends of the I-beams, we slide the land ends to the edge of the gangplank. We lift the gangplank, using the heavy metal ladder as a lever, and slide the two I-beams under the gangplank, one on a side.
Then we go up onto the boat bringing my auto jack with us. Now we check out the truck driver’s idea. We jack up the ends of the I beams there on the boat, and slide under each of them those small bits of I-beams the driver’d given us. They prove much more than an even exchange for the wine. It brings the end of the gangplank right up even with the door. I swear it looks as if we planned it. We retie the wooden gangplank to the bollards, and everything is tight and secure.
Matt and I go inside, our shirts drenched with sweat, and each open a bottle of Kronenberg 64 beer. Matt hardly ever drinks beer. We come out again and walk back and forth over our now-solid gangplank. It’s been a big achievement for each of us. It’s been a day Matt could well afford to miss school.
When the girls come home, they’re thrilled. They walk up and down the gangplank the way we did, even jumping. They try all three of them at once. It’s still steady. Matt and I watch with pride.
Massive Mahogany
Other projects keep coming up, and we do them one at a time, as we can. But I can paint now. I start painting up and down the river, pedaling on my bicycle with the paintbox and canvas on my back. Not only is the river beautiful, but all the little western suburban towns have nooks and corners, old buildings, just begging to be painted. The Impressionists knew what they were doing. With this kind of material, one can hardly miss. I’m painting better and more than I ever did in Paris.
One of my first non-painting projects on the boat, which isn’t exactly an emergency, is to build a big desk. In Paris, I’ve found a place where they have huge, thick slabs of mahogany shipped in on enormous trucks, most of them from Africa. Then they cut them in thin layers to use as veneer on furniture. It could break your heart.
After selling five more paintings, I make a bid on one piece of wood, solid mahogany, six centimeters thick, three meters long and a meter wide! I buy it for only seventy dollars. There’s a slight crack in it, so they give it to me for about half the regular price. They say they’ve never actually sold any of this wood directly to someone who doesn’t want to slice it like cheese. I ask if they’ll split it down the middle so I have two three-centimeter pieces. They do it with incredibly big band saws. It’s a sacrilege to cut it, but I could never manage with the full thick slab.
The Hillman isn’t Husky enough for this job. I go in on a Saturday morning and, with the workers’ help, hoist it up onto the roof rack of the Simca and tie it down. They estimate it weighs more than a hundred and fifty kilos (over three hundred pounds).
I drive slowly the width of Paris from east to west, then another seventeen kilometers out to the boat, the same distance Rosemary and the kids had been doing before we fixed up the boat. I’m wondering all the time how Matt and I will manage to haul all this off the car and down into the hull of the boat. I’ve already done the measuring; it will fit down through the staircase, but at an angle and juste.
Matt’s waiting for me. He’s already called Tom, but Tom was working on preparing for some exam. Matt wants to see if we can do this just ourselves, again.
When we try to lift the wood, I’m really glad I had it cut in two. There’s no way we could’ve maneuvered the original six centimeters over that gangplank. Even with all the I-beams, it might have dumped us into the water.
Carefully we push it through the front door of the upper boat, tilting it to turn the corner and down the steps. I’m hoping my measurements are right, and they are, juste. That seems to be my style, juste. We have the first piece positioned, finally, at the top of the steps. I duck under it and squeeze through to the bottom. Matt holds tight while I take the weight of it, and we slide it down the steps one at a time. It’s a really tight squeeze, but we do it. I’m ready to quit, but Matt says let’s get it over with while we’re in the swing of things. God, YOUTH!
When they’re both down there, we spread them out in what will be the studio when I’m finished. I still haven’t put thefrisette ceiling on the back room. This should be a good place to work. I show Matt my plans for making a U-shaped desk using no nails. He’s excited, too. The idea is to make the supports of solid pieces fitted into each other the way the old egg-crate boxes were. That is, we cut vertical cuts in the middle and halfway through each piece and slide them tight over each other. It sounds complicated and it is, but it works. First, we portion out what’s to be the top of the desk, with about a three-foot wraparound on each side, then cut the four beautiful, deep, redwood panels to make the supports. We come out with just the amount of wood we need, virtually no waste. I’m beginning to feel I’m not such a klutz after all.
When we put it together, we fasten all the joints and intersections with dowling. We rent the hand sander and get the top smooth. The natural grain of the wood begins to show. When we have it waxed and finished, it isn’t perfect, but it’s a beautiful piece of sculpture. It took us two weeks, but Matt had school many of those days, and this slowed us down.
I put my typewriter storage boxes and an extra phone I found in an abandoned boat down river onto the desk and begin to feel like a big-shot businessman. It’s to be a desk everybody can use for homework, grading papers or whatever. We set it up at the very back of the bottom boat.
Time Flies
This gives some idea of the kinds of things we do to make the boat a really special place to live. Another time, there’s a brocante sale on the island about three kilometers from the boat, sort of a flea market. I go and fall in love with wall clocks, something the French, at that time, seem to think are useless and a nuisance. Why wind a clock when one can have a nice electric clock that doesn’t tick and doesn’t chime?
I buy seven of these clocks, as well as a grandfather job. I spend time between painting, cleaning and fixing these up, finding missing pieces at a shop in Paris and then varnishing the outside of the clocks.
I get all seven of them going at once, down in the hull. I have them set just a bit off each other so they sing in sequence. I learn to adjust the timing by lengthening or shortening the pendulum. After a week of clocks dinging and donging frantically, on the quarter hour, prac
tically all the time, the family revolts. It’s decided I can run only one at a time, plus the grandfather clock in the living room upstairs.
Then there’s the rug scene. Despite all my scrounging around for rugs at Abbe Pierre’s, the rugs are a bit dingy. It’s like that – when everything is a mess, everything new looks good, but when it’s fixed up, they begin to seem more shabby all the time.
There’s an advertisement in the school newspaper for a washing machine and dryer. We haven’t had anything like that since we left the States. The price is right. An IBM manager is going back to the States, and IBM has decided that although these machines are still working, they aren’t worth shipping back. We call immediately and make arrangements to see them. They’re wonderful and we buy them. The plan is to keep them out on the front deck with a removable cover. Rosemary is absolutely tickled; in Paris there were several Laundromats nearby, but out here in the suburbs there are not so many, and they’re all far away from the boat.
∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧
Seventeen
The Rug Merchants, Part I
I’m delivering a painting to an American woman in Saint-Cloud. She and her family are being shipped back home and want to take something of Paris with them.
I’m walking around admiring the rugs in her beautiful apartment. They’re the kind you almost need to lift your feet not to trip over, heavy, thick, deep brown. The woman sees me looking.
‘IBM only allows us so much weight and we’re never going to fit these into the weight limit. We’ve investigated and found it would cost a fortune to ship them ourselves. Do you think you’d like to buy them?’
Sure I would. Then I could paint for the rest of my life trying to pay this bill off.
‘They’re certainly beautiful.’
‘They’re wool, practically brand new, and have rubber bubbled lining under them. Feel it.’
I kneel down to feel. I’ve never felt rugs like these, and they’re wall-to-wall through the entire apartment, bedrooms, closets, the whole place.
‘I don’t think we can ever afford anything like this, but it is really tempting. We live on a boat, you know, and the cold seems to come in from everywhere, especially up under our feet.’
‘Let me ask Bill. I think I’ll change to lighter colors when we’re back in Boca Raton. Florida is different than France, you know.’
Yep, I know. France is better. She leaves and goes to another part of the house. She comes back.
‘Bill says you can have all the rugs if you’ll wait until the day we move, then move them out yourselves. He says that under those conditions, he’ll let you have them for two thousand francs.’
I can’t believe it. I want to go right out and start painting.
‘That’s certainly generous of you. Are you sure?’
She was sure. They were sure.
And so we buy this beautiful rug. I can’t believe it. We’re going to live like millionaires. I’ll roll around on that soft rug at night and all I’ll need is some soft stereo music playing. I should look in that school newspaper to see if anybody is switching from records to tapes or tapes to cassettes and I can buy their beautiful, low-tech music. I’m going crazy. When I tell her, Rosemary looks, staring at me as if she’s looking for definite signs of insanity.
We promise to have the check for the rug as soon as possible. They’re moving just before we go down to the mill, but I’m not going to wait that long to give her the check. She might just come to her senses. Then I’d really go crazy, walking around on hard floors.
Canaries
While waiting for the big rug day, I’m running in circles, figuring where to put all this beautiful liner and rug. I also begin thinking about my canary aviary. It will be four meters wide, two meters deep and three meters high. The birds would love a carpet like this, too, soft as grass, but it’d be hard to clean. I hate keeping creatures in captivity, but birds in an aviary like this could really fly; they probably won’t notice they’re in a cage. I start calculating the cost of materials and canaries. I can hear them singing. It will be beautiful, better than any stereo.
I do a double-mesh cage with dark-green half-centimeter-square, plastic-covered wire. I build the frame for the cage with French two-by-fours and place them two feet apart. I finish the frame with a dark oak stain. I build a small hobbitlike door I can just squeeze into on the land side of the cage. I double-mesh in the ceiling, too, for safety.
Over the top of this, I lay clear corrugated plastic with the corrugations facing toward the rear of the boat to run off the water.
The floor of the cage I line with Astroturf. It will complicate cleaning the cage but makes it more natural; the green is as good an imitation of natural grass as I’m going to find. I thought of planting grass sod on the floor, but this would be impossible to clean, even if it grew.
The back window of our bedroom opens directly into the cage, and I build a platform just outside where I can put feeders and waterers I buy in the bird market. Later, I intend to find a large cement garden bowl and keep it aerated and filled with water from a small fountain. I do finally do that, too. I’m going overboard, almost literally, but this is something I’ve always wanted.
Sundays, in Paris, the flower market is converted to a bird market where anyone who has birds for sale or is interested in buying a bird, or who just likes birds, comes.
It’s a place I’ve always enjoyed visiting. Now I have an excuse and a reason. I’m interested in birdsong; not color, not size, not flying. I want to hear beautiful birdsong on my boat in the river. I ask around all the bird dealers and amateurs who have birds to sell. I finally decide to invest in one of the best canary breeds for song, in France, the Malinoise. These are a radiant yellow, usually with one dark spot somewhere on the head.
Since I’m making the big investment, I look only at birds that have been in song competitions and have scorecards, like pedigrees for dogs. These cards show their songs and their scores in all the various kinds of singing arias expected of this breed. There are over twenty different arias to be evaluated, and points are given for each. The highest total score I see is ninety-six, but, for reasons of my own, reasons I can’t even define, I don’t like this bird. But there is a bird with a score of seventy-six who sings every time I pass by, and I swear he’s singing right to me. After listening to him three Sundays in a row, I buy him. I don’t tell Rosemary how much I pay for this bird. Each of us has a folie.
I buy a special seed mix for Malinoise canaries, along with cuttlefish bone, gravel for his crop, some health food and special feeders and waterers to put on the shelf outside our window. I also buy a book on raising Malinoise canaries.
When I turn him loose in the cage, leaning through the bedroom window, my heart’s in my mouth. What if I didn’t find and close all the possible places he can escape? What if cats can somehow grab him through the mesh? I’m a nervous wreck.
Then he starts singing. He sings as if he sees the lovely flowing river, the spring trees coming into bloom, the beautiful French sky with the moving, expanding, billowing French clouds. I know he’s an artist bird. I leave the window open and stretch out on the bed. Soft winds waft his song to me, and I’m no longer nervous. This is better than any Valium. This is better than any other kind of music.
The Rug Merchant, Part II
Then the day comes to go fetch the carpet. The owners are moving out on Sunday, and they want the carpet removed on Saturday after all the furniture has been packed and hauled away. Saturday’s great because Matt and Tom have the day off from school, although final exams are coming up.
We pull up in front of the apartment with the Simca. Their children see us from the third floor and wave; one comes down to let us in. We shake hands all around, and the lady of the house is crying. She really doesn’t want to leave France, even for Boca Raton. The apartment looks immense now without the furniture, and those carpets seem to stretch all the way to the horizon.
We check the places where
the men who laid the carpet have made the joinings, and we loosen them. They’ve used the kind of tape that’s glued on both sides to hold the carpet down. We decide to take out one of the bedroom carpets first. We line up on the wall under the window and start to roll. Already I can see this verges on the impossible. How can rugs be so heavy? We tilt the roll up and muscle it into the hall. We’re looking at each other and wondering. Even the rubber underliner is no lightweight. I’m amazed the floors of this place didn’t cave in. My boat will be sitting several centimeters deeper in the water, that is if we can ever actually push and pull these big babies into the boat.
After much struggle, discovering we can’t force the carpet through the door and down the elevator, we elect to push it out the window. We stagger with one rolled rug over to the balcony and lift it onto the railing. My job is to go downstairs and warn anybody who might be coming in or out the door to stop, and then give the signal to let her fly!
I wait down there till all’s clear, then yell and wave my arm. They push. The roll of rug comes down faster than I thought. I almost don’t get out of the way, and it makes an enormous thump when it hits. Several people appear on different balconies of the building, looking concerned. We smile and try to ignore them. Then, one, two, three, we swing and roll the rug up onto the roof of the car. We’re all pooped.
I’m beginning to have my usual feeling that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Also, I’m wondering how these rugs were lifted up into the apartment. It must have been done by some kind of piano movers. We tie the rug on tight, then go up for the second rug. We take the elevator up.
Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir Page 17
