But not yet. At that moment he was pointing at the massive crack in the plaster of the wall that ran from the floor (now tiled over the concrete) to the huge oak beams about fifteen feet above our heads.
“You used too much concrete for the subfloor.” Gégé cast both Franck and Olivier a withering look. “Its weight is causing the walls to crack.”
Olivier narrowed his eyes at Franck who, judging from his twitching lips, appeared to be fighting back a smile. “How did we calculate the thickness Franck?” he asked. “I can’t remember.”
“We didn’t,” Franck said. “But I do remember that we tried to make you a nice, thick floor - better than having you fall through to the cellar below.”
Gégé snorted. “Little risk of that. Par contre. As for the walls caving in…”
“I don’t want my walls to fall in!” Olivier cried. “What can I do? There must be something. Stop torturing me, Gégé.” For all his Oracle-like ways, Olivier was very quick to alarm.
“I think he’s enjoying torturing you,” Franck observed. Gégé inclined his head, acknowledging this truth. He then took several thoughtful drags on his cigarette, milking Olivier’s panic for all it was worth.
“A steel beam,” he pronounced, at last.
Olivier groaned. “Where?”
“In the cellar to support the floor. It needs to run under its whole length. Then you’ll have to plaster up that crack. ”
“Can you do that?” Olivier said. My heart leapt. Given the state of our walls, if we were lucky enough to find a plasterer…”
“Non, not me,” Gégé said. “Plastering requires real skill, but I have a friend who might help.”
Olivier waved us back towards the kitchen. “There is a lot to discuss. We need another drink.”
Once we were seated around the kitchen table again, second kir in hand and the beam fully debated, Olivier said to Franck, “I’ve been telling Le Gégé about your little problem.”
“Doesn’t sound so little,” Gégé noted.
I thought briefly of playing down the bind we had gotten ourselves into, but then realized that if we were lucky enough to get Gégé in the door, he would be seeing it all for himself.
“To be honest, I wonder now if we were crazy to buy the house,” I admitted.
“I’m sure Franck made you do it.” Gégé tapped the side of his head with his cigarette. “He’s always been crazy. Can’t believe you married him. Perhaps you’re a little crazy too?”
Franck seemed pleased rather than offended by this observation and went on to recount in horrific detail our rotting, humid walls, the turquoise bathroom fixtures, and our mysterious lack of hot water. He paused for a moment after this edifying description, during which time my heart seemed to stop. Only a masochist would sign up for such a project.
“Want in?” Franck asked, as though he were offering Gégé a rare treat.
Gégé stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. The church bell rang the seven o’clock angelus which lasted a good five minutes. I began to wonder if Gégé had heard Franck’s question. Finally, his shoulders twitched infinitesimally.
“Pourquoi pas?” he said.
“What?” I asked, not sure I trusted my ears. “You want in?”
“Is it a hopeless cause?” Gégé asked.
Franck and I exchanged a glance. “Yes,” we admitted.
Gégé smiled. “In that case, I’m in.”
The next day was Le Réveillon, or New Year’s Eve. Gégé hadn’t given us any idea when he would appear but we both clung to the hope he would materialize on our doorstep sooner rather than later. We waited all day for the sound of his footsteps on our massive stone staircase, but they never came.
Franck and I didn’t have the budget or the heart to go out and celebrate, so instead we made a foray into Nuits-Saint-Georges and sprung for a rabbit-eared antenna for the ancient black and white TV that we had unearthed from the depths of the buffet. Franck uncorked a bottle of 1985 Corton-Charlemagne that his uncle Georges had given him for his twentieth Birthday. We sipped it out of Duralex kitchen glasses while we watched the dancers of the Crazy Horse revue direct from Paris on our dusty sofa bed. The stunning dancers looked grainy – our reception was far from perfect – but we could make out their perky bare breasts and their glinting sequins and the audience, chicly dressed and swilling Dom Pérignon. We could not have stumbled upon anything farther removed from our current and decidedly unglossy reality.
Even so, there was something satisfying about spending New Year’s Eve together in a disintegrating house. Previously, celebrating New Year’s had always felt forced to me. We usually ended up at one party or another but I always felt pressured to have a marvellous time when in fact, all I really wanted to do was go home and curl up on the couch with a good book. Trying to orchestrate joy, like I did most on New Year’s, always backfired. Joy seemed to prefer sneaking up and pouncing on me where it was least expected.
It had been that way on our New Year’s the year Franck and I lived in Paris. I was studying Medieval French at the Sorbonne for my third year of university and Franck was working as a journalist at a magazine called Expo News. We had made epic plans for New Year’s Eve – meeting up with friends of mine from Canada in Edinburgh to celebrate Hogmanay, the raucous Scottish celebration of New Year’s that involves copious amounts of beer and scotch.
Two days before our departure, Franck developed a dental abscess and I came down with a bronchial infection. Instead of careening around the Royal Mile we stayed in our postage stamp sized apartment in the rue des Fossés Saint Bernard just behind Notre Dame. That night, cuddled on our hand-me-down mattress we watched our grainy black and white television that was about the size of a Kleenex box and captured channels with a radio dial. Franck, who had undergone half a root canal the day before and had to withstand the second half in two days’ time, propped the TV on his stomach. I made us each a bowl of Blédina – a vegetable puree that all French babies adore – and that was about the only thing Franck could get down. And we ate our baby food while we watched some obscure movie about a girl who goes back in time to the Middle Ages. We were both unconscious by the time one year ceded to the next.
The next day we woke early, medicated ourselves heavily, wound long scarves around our necks, and wandered through the empty streets of our quartier, holding hands. I had never seen the streets of Paris so quiet or the cafés so deserted. We stole into a modest café on the Boulevard Saint Germain with a long zinc counter. On top was a metal rack of hard-boiled eggs for sale. We bought one each, and ordered strong black espressos to wash them down.
Franck leaned over the zinc and kissed my lips, still salty from my egg.
“I think this is the best New Year’s I’ve ever had,” he said. I kissed him again in agreement.
Why then did I make a habit of trying to wrestle the universe into submission, forcing it to deliver joy and happiness on demand? It was silly, I realized as I sipped my Corton and watched the Crazy Horse girls strut. Joy always snuck up on us when it was least expected.
The week after our restful Crazy Horse New Year’s celebration, Franck called Olivier several times to ask if he’d heard from Gégé. We idly wondered if he’d been kidnapped by aliens or merely forgotten all about his promise to visit us.
“Should I call him?” Franck mused when we bumped into Olivier a week later at the boulangerie across from Franck’s house.
“I wouldn’t,” Olivier said. “Be patient.”
Patience. That was something we did not have. The only thing we felt equipped to do was scrape off old wallpaper, and we were getting close to the end of that with only the kitchen and the living room left to go. We only had three months and three weeks left before our first guests arrived. Olivier was asking the impossible.
Five long and impatient days later, I heard an unfamiliar scratching sound while I was scraping in the living room. I whipped around just in time to see a waft of smoke curl around the front do
or which I had left open a crack in an attempt to chase away the rubber smell. I lunged across the entrance tiles and flung the door open.
Gégé stood there, eyebrow cocked. “Waiting for someone?”
I was far past playing it cool. “Oui! You!” I grabbed the sleeve of his green utility jacket and dragged him inside, then shut the door firmly behind him.
I gave him a hearty bises on each cheek. “Un café?” He nodded, slightly stunned and let me push him into the kitchen.
The phone rang and I heard Franck pick it up in the bedroom. “Franck!” I hollered, not wanting to leave Gégé’s side in case he tried to sneak away. “Gégé’s here! We’ll be in the kitchen having a café.”
One of my very best Christmas gifts that year was a cornflower blue coffee maker given to me by Stéphanie. Coloured household appliances were one of the things I loved about France. Who, after all, declared that coffee makers and toasters and kettles should only be white, black or beige?
By the time Franck joined us the coffee was made and Gégé and I were enjoying a second cup each. Gégé didn’t say much but I talked enough for both of us, rattling on just to keep him nailed to his chair by the centrifugal force of my verbal diarrhoea.
The two of them shook hands and Franck leaned over and gave me a kiss that I knew was thanks for being wily enough to trap our potential saviour in the kitchen.
“Bonjour Gégé. I see Laura’s been looking after you.”
Gégé blushed right up to the bald spot on the crown of his head. Franck served himself a coffee while Gégé recovered his nonchalance. His attention became riveted by the underside of the staircase leading up to the attic.
“I’ve never seen such a crooked staircase,” he said finally. “The stonemason who built it must have been completely sloshed.”
“Maybe we could knock it out and put - ” Franck began.
“Non!” I said. “I like that it’s crooked.” Franck and Gégé both looked at me. “It gives the house character,” I explained.
“We could have a much bigger kitchen,” Franck reminded me.
I shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Gégé raised one thin brow. “Franck told me Canadians were strange about old things. To think I didn’t believe him.”
“You see?” Franck raked back the black hair out of his eyes.
“Anyway,” Gégé concluded, “I’m not sure you could take down the staircase without the house falling around your ears. That’s the way these old stone houses were built.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “Want to show me the rest of this castle of yours?”
We started the grand tour in the bedroom that overlooked the church.
“Bon Dieu.” Gégé placed a hand on the slanting wall. “These walls must have been laid by the same stonemason.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and twisted it around his nose – the French symbol for drunk. He meandered over to the window which boasted beautiful, albeit rusty, metal fixtures with an ornate handle.
“Single pane,” he sighed. “No wonder it’s freezing in here. Not to mention that.” He pointed up to the large patch of plaster on the ceiling above the window that was falling down in flaking yellow chunks. “And that!” He waved at the hole I had made in the wall. “L’humidité.” Humidity. He imbued this word with the same death-knoll tone as Franck.
“So…you’ll need new windows…” Gégé began. Franck extracted the notebook he carried in the worn back pocket of his jeans and started scribbling. “I can do electricity and plumbing but not plaster, tiling, or windows,” Gégé informed us. “For those things, we’ll need to find somebody else.”
Franck frowned, and scribbled something else down. I inwardly rejoiced at Gégé’s use of “we” as though it went without saying that he was already part of our team. I tried not to smile though. I sensed that if anything could scare Gégé away from our disaster it would be boisterous enthusiasm.
“Nice floors.” Gégé turned his attention to the oak parquet underneath our feet. He kneeled down and laid his hand on them. “These rooms are over the passageway, hein? Feel this floor. It’s freezing.” Franck gave an apologetic shrug in the affirmative.
Gégé beckoned us down to his level, and we both placed reluctant hands on the beautifully worn and old floorboards. The glacial air coming up from between the strips of oak took my breath away.
“There’s probably no insulation between the floorboards and the plaster on the top of the passageway. It’s a wind tunnel down there.” More problems and we hadn’t even made it to the second bedroom. Suddenly the renovation budget that we had planned of 50,000 francs seemed like a pittance. A knot formed under my sternum.
The visit continued in much the same vein as we revisited the kitchen (bad plumbing and no space for a dishwasher, not to mention the parlous state of the single paned window), the living room (the tile floor near the fireplace was irretrievably stained, and the fireplace could probably never be used again), and the WC (linked up to a septic tank, meaning no end to the problems that entailed), until we reached the end of the line, the bathroom with its turquoise fittings and meager hot water.
Gégé climbed up onto the rim of the bathtub to inspect a patch of the wall where there was a big dark splotch on the wallpaper.
“Do you have a hammer?” he asked Franck.
By the time Franck brought it to him Gégé had peeled off the wallpaper that was barely clinging to the wall, revealing a sprawling orange stain underneath. He began to hit the wall with the hammer as Franck and I watched. Franck reached for my hand, his eyes filled with foreboding. A shower of plaster rained down with each hit. The hole got deeper and deeper. Would he end up in the neighbour’s living room? Oh well, I reasoned, seeing as we hadn’t been graced with a visit from the cadastre yet the neighbor still owned our bathroom anyway. Still, maybe this wasn’t the best time for us to burst through his wall.
The chunks of plaster that fell from the hole got bigger and bigger, but instead of looking grimmer Gégé’s shy smile grew. At last the hammer clunked on something more solid sounding than the muffled ‘shlunk’ of wet plaster.
“Le voilà!” He beckoned us over with a crooked finger.
The hole in our wall was about half a foot deep. Franck and I peered inside, neither of us particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of what we were going to see.
“La pierre!” Gégé crowed as I took in the sight of Burgundy’s famous pink and ochre stone covered by a fine layer of white dust.
I didn’t know what to think. I’d always wanted exposed stone walls, or pierres apparentes as the French called them, but I’d also heard that they took an epic amount of work – not to mention a stonemason - to uncover and restore properly.
“Is that good or bad?” Franck asked, cautious.
“It’s certainly not good!” Gégé exclaimed with joy.
“I’ve always wanted a wall in pierres apparentes,” I said. “Does this mean…”
Gégé snorted with laughter and jumped down to the irretrievably-stained tile floor. “Impossible. There’s plumbing and wiring running through the plaster.”
“So what can we do then?” Franck asked.
Gégé took a last appreciative glance into the hole. “Dig out these rotten spots, refill, and re-plaster.” He lit a cigarette with a langor that I normally associated with post-coitus. “Are you religious?”
Franck glanced at me. Not this conversation again. I shrugged. “Sort of. Sometimes. Depends.”
“In that case” - Gégé let out a short, staccato of a laugh - “I would recommend a lot of prayer.”
Thirty minutes later Gégé was back at the kitchen table, cheerfully outlining his plan for digging out the humid sections of the walls and re-plastering them. The only problem was, he seemed delighted to remind us, that plastering, like the making of a truly good baguette, required un sacré coup de main, or skill, which he simply did not possess.
“I can learn,” Franck said. “But I need somebod
y to teach me.”
Gégé played with his cigarette for a very long time. “I may have an idea,” he said, just when I began to worry that he had gone mute. “Paulo.”
“’Paulo?” I echoed. Was this a place or a thing or a person?
“A friend of mine from work. He talks non-stop, but if you can put up with that there’s no better plasterer.”
“What’s his number?” Franck asked.
“He’s Portuguese,” Gégé added, a stickler for full disclosure.
“So?” I asked.
“Hot-blooded. Good guy, but never disagree with him or interrupt him when he’s telling a story. I’m warning you, he tells a lot of stories.”
“Can he talk and plaster at the same time?” Franck said.
Gégé considered this and then blew a puff of air between his lips. “Pourquoi pas?”
Franck nodded. “Let’s call him.”
Chapter 19
From that day on, Gégé arrived in the morning with a hearty appetite for disaster and a bag of hot croissants and pains au chocolat from his favourite baker in Nuits-Saint-Georges. By the end of the first day I knew he took his coffee piping hot and with three sugars. Gégé had a call in to his friend Paulo, the Portuguese plasterer, but the word was he had gone to Portugal and no one seemed entirely sure when he’d be back. Franck, Gégé, and I surmised that maybe he was having a stolen vacation with the cadastre, or surveyor, who had cancelled two visits to our house and now managed to be “out of the office” every time we called.
“At least we still have the furniture,” Franck said. “I’m starting to hope that the owners’ children have forgotten all about it.”
I knocked on the wooden table top for luck. They had said they would call us after Christmas to set up a time to pick up everything, but it was now mid-January and we hadn’t heard a peep out of them. I wasn’t sure what we would do if they did in fact remember. If we did only what Gégé insisted was the bare minimum needed for our reno, we would have absolutely no money left over to buy ourselves so much as a solitary chair.
My Grape Escape Page 15
