Houseboat on the Seine: A Memoir

by William Wharton

  Welding

  The answer is WELDING. He tells me he’ll weld braces from the side of the metal boat up to the level of the proposed veranda, then weld horizontal supports for the veranda itself, plus a railing going the entire length of that side of the boat to the front deck. The door from Rosemary’s office will open onto the back end of the veranda.

  I watch. I’m ready to sort of retire, myself. The problem with being a painter or writer, nobody tells you to stop. You need to recognize, yourself, when you don’t want to do it anymore or what you do isn’t satisfactory to you, yourself, or any potential readers or lovers of paintings. I don’t believe I’ve reached that point, but I’d probably be the last to know. I do know I don’t want to join in this wild welding scheme. I can help with the placing of the veranda planks when the framework is done and do some painting of wood or framework, but that’s about it.

  Sam says he’s already contacted Tom and he’s agreed to come out and help build the office and veranda. He estimates it can be done in a month, before it starts being too cold.

  I watch the first few days of work, then can’t stand it anymore. I bury myself in work down at my desk. I’ve started another book. It’s less strenuous work than painting, and definitely less strenuous than what they’ll be doing.

  Down there, directly under them, I can hear all the tearing up and hammering as they work. I concentrate on my Macintosh, my recent toy, and thank the powers that be for the money I now have that enables me to pay others to do the kind of work I really don’t do very well.

  I stop each morning before they arrive on the RER to see what they’ve done. First, for the office, they build up a platform for the new floor, then put up the studs and rafters for the roof. It’s beautiful in the sunlight, the raw wood against the blue autumn sky. Later, they lay the floor and cut out a door from our bedroom into the office. One goes down two steep steps into the bedroom. This is necessary to give enough headroom in the office. Our bedroom has a very low ceiling, just low enough to clear my head.

  It is about now that a most interesting encounter takes place. I’m outside repairing our railing along the sides of the gangplank. A couple, younger than us but not young, stops to watch me and keeps smiling. I walk over to see if I can help.

  ‘You don’t remember us, do you?’

  This is a truly petite blond woman with glinting eyes. She’s speaking a blend of American and English English.

  ‘Should I? You do look vaguely familiar. From where would I know you?’

  ‘From death itself.’

  This is said by the man, a very thin, tall, almost cadaverous man with a somewhat smug smile. He stares into my eyes. They both start laughing.

  I’m baffled. Then they start telling me some of the things I’ve already written into this book. These are the people who, over twenty years ago, when I was pulling all the things out of the boat and almost died from the sulfuric acid, saved my life by dragging me, practically lifeless, down to their boat, where they and their kids nursed me back to life.

  We shake hands all around and they recount what happened those days when I was half-conscious. It turns out she’s a writer, too. She’s from Chicago, but has lived with her Canadian husband in Winnipeg all these years. He’s an engineer and works at the university in Winnipeg. They have five children and come to France once a year as a part of Don’s job. Don is his name, Carol is hers. She publishes under her married name, Carol Shields, and recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her book Stone Diaries.

  Now, I’ve read all of her books and they might well be some of the best books I’ve read in the last ten years. She writes very intimately with great strength. There’s a quality of whimsy and a sort of quilt-making mentality putting together little pieces carefully, convoluted and controlled. She also writes beautiful poetry and was first published as a poet. I don’t believe in coincidence anymore. We’ve since become fast friends and see each other every time they come to France. They’ve even bought themselves a country home in the Vosges.

  Now we get back to this story.

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  Nineteen

  Bringing It Together

  Our entire boat is littered with small sets of one, two or three steps as one walks its length. There are also narrow double doors in teak between almost every room. It’s great for holding heat in a particular room but maddening to be constantly opening and closing doors in the winter. Coming in the front door, one closes that, then there are a pair of doors into the living room that must be closed also. Immediately after that are two steps. On the other side of the living room is another pair of doors to be opened and closed, with a step down before coming to the bathroom door, which also must be opened and closed. There are two steps up to the John. Then, only the toilet seat needs closing.

  When one comes out of the John, in order to enter our bedroom there are three steps up and another pair of doors.

  Now we have another door and two more steps down into Rosemary’s office. It’s a bizarre way to have things arranged, but it seems to work. Each room has its own level, its own privacy. Of course I’m not even going again into the stair situation to the bottom of the boat, or the doors between rooms down there.

  When it’s finished, Rosemary’s office is beautiful. They’ve lined the walls with wood, and bookshelves are installed around two sides. It’s floored in a tan nubbed rug and the entire effect is very much like Rosemary, subdued and gracious but not slickly elegant. I promise her a new Macintosh PowerBook to celebrate her retirement. With this, she can really keep up with her massive correspondence, write the book she’s been threatening since I’ve known her and organize a database on all her kindergarten children. Everything she really ought to know about her kindergartners, she’ll know.

  Her door by her desk is another suicide jump. It steps right out into the river. The project will be to build the veranda. I keep calling it a porch, but Rosemary insists on veranda. After all, it’s being built for her.

  It soon becomes apparent that two people are not going to be enough to do the welding of the veranda onto the boat. Sam has it all worked out, but he winds up standing in our small rocking dinghy with the power box, oxygen bottles and a quiver full of welding sticks. Tom is leaning over, handing him parts as he needs them, but somebody needs to hold the support bars in place and still, while Sam gets a flux started and can make a good weld to the side of the boat. I also wind up with the job of cleaning off the paint and rust from the sides of the boat where Sam intends to weld. Sometimes, I’m leaning out one of those dining room French doors, my feet tied to a support post so I won’t go head over heels into the water. Or sometimes I’m in the boat with Sam. Either way, it’s not very comfortable. To be honest, my arms feel as if they’re being pulled out of their sockets. I’m definitely getting too old for this kind of thing.

  To make it worse, the moron who runs the boat club keeps roaring up and down the river beside the sculls in a motorboat with a megaphone. He’s shouting something totally incomprehensible to me into his megaphone at the scullers, but, most of all, he’s making waves. There’s no way one can spot-weld while standing in a boat going up and down. We keep hollering at him, but he can’t hear anything over the sound of his motorboat and his own loud shouting at the scullers. Sometimes, because of the bouncing, it takes as many as five sticks just to make one weld. But it gets done. The supports are then welded to a long piece across the top, some more fun, but they hold.

  Sam now has a way to stand up out over the space where the veranda will be. He welds more support pieces horizontally from this top horizontal to the diagonal supports going down to the boat. The next part is relatively easy. This is building the rail along the outside of the veranda-porch.

  The Finishing Touches

  We go down the next weekend and buy oak from the lumbermill near our mill. Sam has all the measurements, and we cut the oak down there with his power saw. We could never bring up all this heavy two-
centimeter-thick oak. It’s in three-meter lengths when we buy it.

  We have, by this time, bought another station wagon, a VW Passat. It isn’t new but it’s one of the newest cars I’ve had in a long time, twelve years old. It’s perfect for going out on painting trips or hauling anything. We also have, for Rosemary, a ten-year-old Mercedes 200 in perfect shape. We bought both cars from people who were going back to America after serving their stint for their companies here in Paris.

  Ah, the glories of extra money, but not too much. The poor old Hillman Husky finally gives up the ghost. We asked too much of it. The Simca begins being too hard and expensive to maintain. It’s also always stopping in the most inconvenient places, like in the middle of the Place de la Concorde. With some money, we are less willing to suffer the inconveniences of these cars.

  Driving up to Paris in the VW Passat with a load of at least two hundred kilograms of wood for the veranda, a drive of three hundred kilometers, mostly on autoroutes, is some scene. It challenges in ‘nervous making’ almost any of the trips I’d made around Port Marly building the boat. But, again, we make it. Maybe as I grow older, I’m just made nervous more easily.

  Matt and I paint the wood before we slip it into place on the veranda. We use one of those paints that not only makes the wood look good (dark oak again) but protects it from all the little beast-ies that like to eat wood. We have all the boards numbered as to how they fit in, because the veranda varies in size from one meter to almost two. They fit in without any trouble, and then we can have the fun of walking out any of those doors past the bay along one side to the upper deck or back to Rosemary’s office. We hang flower boxes along the railing. I paint the railing black, and we plant geranium in long pots with wells under them to hold water.

  We paint the hull sort of geranium colors. It’s two shades of green, a light green of a geranium leaf with sun shining through it and a darker green of the top of a leaf on a clear day reflecting blue sky. We also have pots of geranium all along the sides of the front deck. We buy a lawn table with six chairs and put them at a wide space near Rosemary’s office window.

  On the other side of the table and chairs is the window opening over the kitchen sink. This makes it so we can pass food out from the kitchen directly to where we eat. I build a folding platform to make this easy. We begin eating breakfast, lunch and dinner out there whenever the weather is good, or even just good enough.

  Obviously we’ve moved permanently into the boat. We begin to realize this is the last of our nests. This is where we’ll retire. We hope to travel, because this is one of Rosemary’s dreams, but the boat will be home.

  We’ve discovered the joy of taking a little rowboat out and rowing slowly upriver on a late sunny evening and drifting back with the flow of the river. Sometimes we fish from the veranda. The water is cleaner and lighter every day. The only time we smell the river-sewer smell is when we have the boat closed up for several weeks and only when we come in. After we open the windows, it’s cleared out in ten minutes.

  The village of Port Marly is developing the chemin de halage, a bit at a time, into a most lovely pathway with a park along its length, with slides, seesaws and sandboxes for little children. The intention is to call it La Promenade des Impressionnistes.

  To encourage the idea, I regularly put paintings in the windows on the land side of the boat so strollers can see some paintings even if they aren’t by Impressionists. Once in a while I put paintings on the water side, for the scullers.

  ♦

  We have eleven different restaurants of all kinds in our town, from the two restaurants de routiers, to fancy French restaurants, one with specialties of Savoie – cheese fondue and raclette – another with an American ambiance called Buffalo Grill. There are also specialty restaurants, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican. They’re all quite good. We can eat better here, and for less, than in Paris. There is a barbershop, two bakeries, several antique stores, a drugstore, a small grocery and, of course, the café of Alfred Sisley. Port Marly, along the Seine, is a regular small French village.

  We’re well known in the village now, and more or less accepted. There are more boats, and some of the people on them are quite interesting, a good melange of nationalities, with boat ownership a common denominator.

  Across the street from us is a doctor’s office with two young women general practitioners, each with young children. They are quite efficient and give us very good frontline medical care under the auspices of French Social Security. When there is need for more complex or elaborate medical analysis, they refer us to La Clinique de I’Europe, a modern hospital, just a five-minute walk up the hill behind them. I often go to the doctor or the hospital in my slippers. It’s all extremely low key and high quality.

  For a long time, M. Teurnier would wave, or sometimes stop, when he was going up or down the river to help some other poor soul whose boat is in trouble. Once I invite him aboard, and while we’re chatting I do an oil sketch of a portrait, not bad for me. (I’m not a very good portraitist.) But he likes it and I give it to him. He doesn’t seem to change, although he must be over eighty now.

  People who visit often ask if there’s any chance they could buy a boat, and do I think they’d enjoy it. It’s a hard question to answer. It’s one of the reasons I wrote this book. If someone thinks they can live through the kind of misery we did and stick it out, or has natural skills like Sam’s, I say go to it. Living on a boat is not easy, but it’s fun, a never-ending challenge that can lend a real uniqueness to life.

  ∨ Houseboat on the Seine ∧

  Twenty

  Blood in the Street

  Although living on a houseboat is very pleasant, what with being on the water and separated from the shore by the length of a gangplank, life has had its interesting, often amusing, sometimes frightening, moments.

  Also, Port Marly itself is generally a quiet village, set aside from most of the surrounding bedroom communities by the N13 highway on the one side and the Seine on the other. However there have been some moments of high drama over the past twenty or so years we’ve been living on the river.

  ♦

  We’ve been here over twenty years, have our boat tightly moored to the berge, are well accepted in the community, and are gradually beginning what turns out to be a lifetime activity of maintenance. A houseboat, like a yacht, maybe even more so, takes continual care. One can even say, as with a yacht, that’s it’s a hole in the water into which one shovels or throws money.

  One day, I’m up on the roof trying to repair holes that have been poked through during the last river rage. This time, we went up four and a half meters. I’m unrolling tar paper when I hear some horn blowing, a scream, then a shout from up on the road. I can see from high on the boat roof that two cars are parked in the street at the intersection where Rue de Paris meets Rue Jean-Jaures. I think there might have been a traffic accident, so I quickly climb down from the roof and run through the public garden up toward the café on the corner to see if I can help.

  When I arrive there, Pierre, the man who runs the restaurant just across the Rue de Paris from where we normally park our car, is standing outside his car with the door open.

  His son, Sebastian, is on the curb. Behind Pierre’s auto is a second auto. The driver of this car is also standing in the street. The two of them are screaming and shouting at each other. I look, but there’s no glass on the street and no other sign of an accident. Just then, as I arrive, the man in the second car dashes toward Pierre and takes a good roundhouse swing at him. This surprises me, because most French attack with their feet. Also, it’s obvious this man does not know Pierre is a black-belt judo instructor. But he finds out in a hurry.

  Faster than the eye, at least my eye, by some Oriental martial magic, the man is on his back in the street. It doesn’t seem as if Pierre has moved a muscle. Now, I am shocked, not so much by the fact that the man is on his back but because he’d actually taken a swing at Pierre. The French law is very clear
and strict about these impromptu street encounters. Regardless of fault, in the case of a dispute, the person who touches the other first is wrong. So, perhaps our visitor flat in the street made two mistakes. First, he attacked a black-belt judo expert, and secondly, he broke the French law. Now he looks as if he’s broken more than the law.

  He slowly pulls himself to his feet, rubbing the back of his hand across his bleeding nose. How the nose got to bleeding I’ll never know. I saw everything and I saw nothing.

  Suddenly, again so quickly, I hardly see it, the young man reaches into his pocket, pulls out a knife and drives it into the stomach of Pierre! Pierre stands there looking down at the place where the knife has, so silently, been driven in and pulled out again. What kind of judo is this? Blood is already spurting from the wound. Pierre’s pulling up his sweater and shirt to see what’s happened. His boy, Sebastian, is still standing there on the curb beside me, not seeming to know what’s happened any more than I do.

  The man is already in his auto, twisting it sharply. He drives past and away down the street. Stupidly, I don’t think to take down the license-plate number. Luckily, Mme. Colombe, who lives in an apartment just over the doctor’s office, is not so stupid. She also runs down and tells Dr. Avignat what has happened.

  Sebastian and I are on the road beside Pierre, who has dropped to his knees. I’m not usually squeamish about blood, but this is an exceptional amount of blood. Obviously an important artery had been severed. I stretch Pierre out on the street and try to stanch the blood by holding my hand over the wound. I’m getting nowhere. People have started running out from the café. It’s one of those times I really wish I could speak adequate French. Everyone is leaning over, just watching, as if we’re giving some kind of Red Cross CPR lesson. Poor Sebastian has been crying, but now he’s passed out. He’s a very sensitive and sensible boy. Pierre is completely white and barely conscious.