The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House

by Youngblood, Patrick

  I squinted and was rewarded with the sight of a small squat woman sitting in an aluminum lawn chair consuming an enormous sandwich with admirable concentration.

  “Hello,” I said before remembering that I was practically a local now. “Hola,” I amended.

  The woman, chewing furiously, didn’t answer. We stood in awkward silence and waited while she masticated the two or three pounds of cold cuts she had just crammed into her mouth.

  “I hope this isn’t Melinda,” I said under my breath.

  “I hope you aren’t Melinda,” Michael said out loud.

  She wasn’t. After another thirty seconds of chewing followed by the consumption of a gallon of iced tea, the woman swiveled in our general direction and said, with a friendly-enough smile, “Melinda, she not here.”

  I glanced at my watch. Five past three.

  “We have a three o’clock appointment,” Michael said politely.

  Eyeing the remains of her sandwich the way a dog regards a juicy bone, the woman laughed philosophically, nodding her head.

  “Is good,” she offered, not unkindly. “She come.”

  We glanced at one another.

  “Have you talked to her?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” the woman said. “One hours ago she call. She say one hour and one half she come.”

  “So she’ll be here at three-thirty?”

  The woman looked at me with obvious merriment.

  “Quizá,” she said. Maybe.

  We looked around the wretched hut. There was no place to sit. Additionally, our hostess’ sandwich had attracted an extended family of large green flies that now dive-bombed our ears with unbridled delight.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Michael suggested.

  “We’ll come back in a while,” I told the woman, who nodded absently as we fled into the warm, bright afternoon.

  We dawdled purposefully on the Malecón, the walkway that lies between the modest strip of businesses in Esperanza and the sea.

  The Malecón in Esperanza

  We stretched and yawned and commented on stunningly inconsequential sights.

  Our plan was to keep Melinda waiting for a few minutes to give her a dose of her own medicine.

  At three forty-five, thoroughly bored but certain that Melinda would now be anxiously awaiting our return, we sauntered back into her rabbit warren, prepared to forgive her tardiness.

  It could happen to anyone, we had mentally rehearsed telling her if she apologized too profusely. Let bygones be bygones, and so forth.

  But this time the place was completely empty. Not a soul in sight, not even Señorita Cold Cuts.

  Shaking our heads in disbelief, we sat down dejectedly on the front steps, unsure of our next move. At about four o’clock Melinda’s assistant came waddling up the road, this time fortifying herself with a rapidly melting ice-cream cone.

  “Ah, you come back!” she exclaimed delightedly, as if our return was the most astonishing occurrence of her life.

  “Have you heard from Melinda?” Michael asked.

  With a quick dart of her bright pink tongue she polished off the ice cream (slurp slurp), and then the cone (crunch).

  We waited in breathless silence.

  “Yes, she call,” she said at length.

  “And?”

  With a dull thud, she sat down at the other end of the porch, which creaked ominously under her weight.

  “She has rummy-tummy problem.”

  Michael drew in his breath with a sharp, sucking sound.

  “Rummy-tummy?”

  “You know,” she said, blushing slightly.

  We stared.

  She blushed deeper still. Finally she made a vaguely lady-like raspberry sound, rubbing her stomach all the while.

  As pantomimes go, it was a bit crude but we got the point.

  “She no come today,” our friend concluded.

  We drove back to the house in silence, barely noticing the litter strewn along the side of the road.

  After all, it was somebody else’s problem now.

  Six

  Eureka!

  Five months later we were sitting in our apartment in D.C., sipping cocktails.

  “Let’s take another shot at Vieques,” Michael said, completely out of the blue.

  Vieques had barely been mentioned since we’d come home in May with our tails tucked firmly between our legs.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Let’s not put ourselves through that again.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  I went into the kitchen to make us a second round.

  “Are you kidding? The Vieques Chamber of Commerce practically took out a restraining order against us.”

  He laughed. “Well, they better dust it off, ’cause here we come.”

  “Huh?”

  He wandered into the kitchen waving a sheet of paper.

  “I bought the tickets yesterday.”

  Oh God.

  I spent the next two weeks calling every realtor in Vieques. After all, this was it. Either we scored this time or we walked away forever.

  The response was mixed.

  Most seemed puzzled by my determination to make an appointment.

  “Sure, give me a call when you get down, I’ll check my schedule.”

  “No, I want to book something now,” I insisted.

  Dead silence.

  “Is that possible?”

  Not really, it seemed.

  After some thought and a couple of stiff drinks I called Suzanne, the realtor who seemed to have no interest in selling houses whatsoever.

  “Sure, I remember you,” she said. “Short guys from Boston.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Not exactly. We’re kind of tall. Actually, Michael’s very tall. And we’re from D.C.”

  “Right,” she said. I could hear her tapping away on her computer in the background.

  “Can we make an appointment for next Wednesday morning at ten?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But I still don’t have anything to show you.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Look, Carl, there’s nothing out there.”

  “That’s kind of hard to believe,” I protested lamely. “And by the way, my name is Patrick.”

  “Right,” she said, tapping furiously. “I’d love to sell you a house, Peter, I really would, but I just don’t have anything on my books right now. Try me again next year.”

  Uh, I don’t think so.

  Next, I tried a realtor named Clara we’d heard about from a friend of a friend. She answered the phone herself.

  “I’d be happy to show you around,” she said politely. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.”

  Encouraging, but we weren’t quite ready to put all of our house-hunting eggs in one basket.

  For giggles we decided to try Melinda again. Yes, I know she’d stood us up before but we needed at least one more option and frankly I was out of ideas.

  “Sí, I remember,” said her assistant. “The men who wasn’t here when Melinda come.”

  I pondered this minor masterpiece of revisionist history.

  “Right, that’s us. Can we make an appointment for next Wednesday at two?”

  “Okay,” she said “I tell her.”

  “Two sharp?”

  A long silence, punctuated by chewing sounds. Finally, “¿Qué?”

  Oh, never mind.

  Game on.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Clara’s office was on Route 997, about halfway between Isabel and Esperanza. She was working with another set of clients when we walked in the following week. And when I say working with I don’t mean showing them brochures. She was teaching a yoga class.

  She looked up from her gyrations and flashed us a brilliant smile.

  “Yoga or real estate?”

  We couldn’t help laughing.

  “How about both?”

  A half-hour later she dismissed her limbered-up acolytes and loaded us into
her un-air conditioned Volvo.

  “I’ve chosen three properties to show you. All of them are pretty perfect for you guys, I think.”

  The first was a mildew-infested hovel with no view of anything except the hovel next door. In an excess of politeness we let her show us around, picking our way gingerly through the stuffy, over-furnished rooms.

  “You like it?” she asked as we climbed over the owner’s dirt-smeared clothes piled on the kitchen floor. “It’s a good buy.”

  “It isn’t quite what we had in mind,” I said quickly, thinking that what I really had in mind was a bar of lye soap, a wire brush, and a scalding shower.

  The next place was marginally better. It was trim and clean and even boasted an ocean view. Unfortunately, it also featured a panoramic view of a house trailer standing in the middle of the front yard.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Clara laughed good-naturedly.

  “That’s where the owner lives now. He wants to stay close by.”

  “So, he’s planning to continue living on the property after he sells it?” Michael asked.

  “Right,” said Clara. “This is a pretty common thing in Puerto Rico. He was born in this house, and although his financial situation is forcing him to sell it, he doesn’t want to leave the property.”

  After a quick tour of Clara’s third choice (“see, it has a taco stand right out front”), I decided to take her aside for a one-on-one.

  “I’m afraid these houses aren’t really what we’re looking for.”

  She stared at me uncomprehendingly.

  “No?”

  “Not really.”

  Her tone turned on a dime from incredulous to vaguely sinister.

  “Not good enough for you?”

  “Exactly.”

  On the way back to her office she offered us free yoga classes.

  We declined.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  Melinda was waiting for us later that day.

  Well, not exactly waiting, not the way a realtor typically waits for a client (i.e., decked out in a nice outfit, clipboard in hand, unctuous smile plastered across her face).

  In fact, she was repairing a flat on her truck.

  But at least she was there.

  And she seemed marginally pleased to see us. Okay, let’s not get carried away, but she wasn’t openly hostile either.

  She told us she had moved to Vieques in 1990 from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where she’d been a “professional bartender and drunk,” as she put it. Now she sold houses, was teetotal and hadn’t had sex in fourteen years. The phrase too much information beat like a drum across my brain as she rattled on. Having provided this rather exhaustive autobiography, Melinda told us that her colleague Armando was going to show us around today.

  Huh?

  Ten minutes later Armando arrived at the office. A tall green-eyed stunner, he actually seemed like a salesman. In other words, he gave every indication that he’d enjoy shifting some cash out of our bank account into his. We could hardly believe it.

  And though he was a native Puerto Rican, his English was nearly perfect.

  After a few preliminaries, he whisked us off in his SUV to Villa Borinquen, the site of our first rental eighteen months earlier. The views were even more spectacular than we remembered.

  Directly below, and tumbling down into the middle distance, lay a patchwork of small properties—tiny family farms, smooth lawns, the occasional swimming pool. Further down stood the small town of Isabel and beyond that miles of cerulean water. To the left, and in the far distance, rose the high jade-colored hills of the big island. To the far right was Culebra. A wide swatch of crystal blue sky stretched between. The effect was stunning.

  The first property Armando showed us had goat pens on three sides (goats, it would appear, were the mascot of this precinct of the island), and the shrubs out front had been brutally hacked down almost to ground level. The house itself had a melancholy abandoned air. The porch boasted a rusty washing machine and the front door creaked open like a coffin lid in a Roger Corman film.

  At first glance, the interior was surprisingly light and airy with pleasant views from the living and dining rooms. But we quickly realized that it would cost several times the asking price to make the place even remotely habitable.

  No, thank you.

  House number two (number five if one counted the dumps from the previous day) was actually the nicest we’d seen so far, although in truth this wasn’t saying much.

  “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this,” Armando began as he steered his massive SUV through the narrow lanes of Isabel, “but lots of owners tell me that in-town properties are highly rentable because people don’t like paying money to rent a car, and if they’re in town they don’t have to.”

  This had a ring of truth to it, although I couldn’t imagine coming to this island and not arranging for some mode of transportation to get to the series of gorgeous beaches circumscribing it, most of which are on the old Navy base at least fifteen minutes from town.

  The house was just off the town square. Perched high above the street and fronted with a broad porch sporting a crisply painted concrete balustrade, it had potential. The rooms were small but sunny, and the view from the roof terrace was striking.

  But Michael didn’t want to live in town.

  “Too noisy,” he said, over Armando’s polite protests. “We live on one of the busiest streets in D.C., and we’d like something a little more out of the way for our dream home.”

  “Okay, guys,” Armando said, ready to write us off. “Can you be more specific about what you’re really looking for?”

  “That’s easy,” I blurted out. “We want something nice.”

  He laughed.

  “Great, give me an extra $100,000 and you’ve got it,” he said.

  I’m sure it was meant as a joke but it didn’t strike us as particularly funny.

  “I think we’ll just call it a day,” I said.

  He shrugged and led us back to the car. It seemed we’d read him wrong after all. Like so many of his fellow islanders, he didn’t seem to care if he made the deal or not.

  “Let’s take a short cut,” he said, serenely oblivious to our moods.

  Soon we were twisting and winding along poorly paved roads through the range of low hills stretching lengthwise across the middle section of the island.

  “Does this area have a name?” Michael asked.

  “Yep,” Armando said. “It’s called La PRRA. Stands for—let me think—Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, or something like that. It borders an area called Los Chivos, which means ‘the goats,’ because it used to be full of goat farms.”

  And I’d thought they were all in Villa Borinquen.

  As he talked, we rounded a sharp curve and began climbing our way up a steep hill. Near the top, Armando pointed out a large white house on the right.

  “This place was actually on the market in the past year, until the owners decided not to sell after a couple of offers fell through.”

  I barely let him finish.

  “Stop the car!” I gasped with the utter certitude of someone who has just careened headlong into his lifelong dream.

  He slammed on the brakes.

  “Give me a minute,” I said, all but leaping from the car and bounding along the driveway for a closer look.

  Although the house had seen better days, its outline was impeccable. Built on a steep incline, it meandered slowly up the hillside in three handsome levels, all boasting panoramic views of the ocean half a mile away. Surrounding the house, mature trees swayed in the breeze, including one of the largest mangoes I’d ever seen.

  It was perfect—not too big, not too small, settled, cozy, strangely familiar even before we’d set a foot inside.

  In a word, this was IT.

  First sight of our dream house

  “It’s a fabulous property,” Armando enthused when I climbed back into his car. “I’ve always loved
it.”

  I remembered Michael’s entreaty not to appear too keen.

  “Yes, it seems nice enough.”

  Armando laughed.

  “Oh come on, it’s nicer than just nice.”

  “Well,” I allowed, “it has great views.”

  “Stupendous.”

  His English really was very good.

  “The owners are an old couple with a retarded daughter,” he went on, then stopped himself. “Oops, we’re not supposed to say that word “retarded” anymore, right?”

  In fact, his English was so good I was having a hard time keeping up.

  “Right,” I agreed. “I think people say mentally challenged instead.”

  A short pause.

  “Oh, okay. A mentally challenged daughter.”

  “How sad.”

  Another pause.

  “Somehow that doesn’t sound right.”

  Now he was doubting my grasp of the language. “Look, I get your point. She’s slow.”

  “Yes, slow, that’s better. Anyway, they put the house on the market last winter with another agent and nothing happened. I heard the agent didn’t try very hard. She has another business on the side.”

  “Is this by any chance Clara?”

  “So you’ve met Clara?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Frightening, isn’t she?”

  I hesitated. This wasn’t a road I particularly wanted to go down.

  “I don’t know, she’s kind of fascinating.”

  “Oh, please,” he said. “She’s a monster. The people who own the house you’re interested in were scared of her. She kept trying to give them free yoga lessons.”

  “She made us the same offer.”

  “Don’t do it,” he warned ominously. “She’ll cripple you for life.”

  Seven

  A Gloom with a View

  A half hour later we were sitting in Melinda’s office in Esperanza, sweating profusely.

  “There must be a way to convince them to put it back on the market,” I said to Armando.

  He sipped his soda, then smiled broadly.

  “Money usually works.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” Michael chimed in.