Michael and Ana Maria talked every day. Sometimes it struck me that their relationship was more meaningful, more fraught with depth and nuance, than ours. I wasn’t exactly jealous, but I did wish I could debate the finer points of double-hinges with greater panache.
Slowly but steadily our order took shape. Of course there were inventory issues. Even though we had deliberately chosen a very simple cabinet style, most items in that line were on back order. Maybe, I reasoned, it was because we had chosen such a simple style that this was true. Which in turn caused me to picture kitchens all over America (not to mention its territories and possessions) looking exactly like ours.
Finally, after about three weeks of fits and starts, the order shipped.
We considered popping open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate but ended up downing a few shots of tequila instead.
Not quite as elegant, but mission accomplished.
Our victory lap, alas, was premature. Steve, our new carpenter, called to say that one of the kitchen cabinets had arrived damaged.
“I’ll call Home Depot right now and complain,” Michael said.
“That’s one option,” Steve replied calmly, in the measured cadences of a Zen master. “However, we’re probably talking months for a replacement. I was hoping to get this done pronto.”
“Okay…” Michael said, dialing down his tone to match Steve’s wonderfully calm vibe. “What are our options?”
“I’ll just fix it.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure.”
Deep breath while this sank in.
“Um…great!”
“And by the way, the counters didn’t arrive.”
Gulp.
“But they told me they’d shipped everything.”
Steve laughed.
“They lied.”
Michael called his friend Ana Maria at the Home Depot in Carolina.
“Where are our counters?”
“They’re in Vieques,” she replied point-blank. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Washington, but that’s beside the point. Our contractor said they never arrived.”
Short pause.
“I call you back.”
The news wasn’t good. Even though our Home Depot lady in Virginia had produced fabulous drawings based on our “to-the-quarter-inch” measurements, Home Depot’s hard-and-fast policy was to send out one of their own men to measure for kitchen counters.
No exceptions.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Michael asked Ana Maria.
“I didn’t know.”
“How could she not have known something so relevant to her job?” we asked ourselves, though this was the kind of question we were quickly learning not to ask.
“But ‘sending someone out’ means that a guy has to come from the big island to Vieques?” Michael asked.
“Exactly. He will fly.”
“Fly? Who’ll pay his fare?”
“You will, of course. The customer. It’s your counter.”
Maybe he and Ana Maria didn’t have such a special relationship after all.
Not only did we end up paying the counter guy’s airfare. A storm blew up while he was on Vieques and he was forced to spend the night at a hotel.
At our expense.
But there was more. Home Depot’s policy also specified that one of their employees had to bring the counter back and install it personally.
I’ve heard of liver transplants that were less labor-intensive.
This time, of course, the Home Depot dude came by boat. Luckily the weather gods were with us, and we only had to shell out for his time and travel costs to Fajardo and back.
Even so, tack on $350.
“How does it look?” Michael asked Steve when the whole farce had played itself out and the counters were finally installed.
“Like a million bucks.”
“How appropriate. That’s almost exactly what we paid.”
Fourteen
Cold Comfort
My cell phone rang one evening in June as we were coming out of a movie theater near our apartment in D.C.
“Your new laundry room is awesome!” Jane all but screamed.
Frankly I’ve never been comfortable with phone calls beginning with declarative statements. Most of the time I pretend not to know who’s calling, even if I know all too well. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective survival technique.
“May I ask who’s speaking?”
Short pause.
“Patrick?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Jane.”
Deliberate, lengthy pause.
“Oh hi, Jane. You were saying something about our laundry room?”
This usually throws people off. As a result, the little speech (or, more often, the rant) they’ve memorized before they called becomes so garbled it loses all meaning.
But Jane wasn’t so easily deterred. In fact, she kicked back into high gear with impressive dexterity. “You won’t believe how fabulous it looks!”
“Oh, that’s great.”
Michael was looking at me now, his face a huge question mark. I put my hand over the phone.
“The laundry room. It’s done.”
“Is everything hooked up?” he asked, practically panting with excitement.
I handed him the phone. They talked for ten minutes about lint traps.
We walked around the corner to our favorite Chinese restaurant for dinner. I had just tucked into a platter of beef with black bean sauce when my phone rang again.
It was Jane.
“I’m sorry to bother you but I just had to tell Michael one more thing.”
Something about cubic foot capacity. Talk about a match made in heaven.
☼ ☼ ☼
We decided to go back to the island in July. Most people tend to avoid the Caribbean like the plague in midsummer but we couldn’t wait.
The more we thought about our return, though, the more convinced we became that the clap-trap air conditioner in the upstairs bedroom was likely to conk out halfway through our visit.
So we ordered a new one, a wall-mounted unit with a remote control. Amazingly (suspecting this day would come soon enough), we had taken a photo and written down the specifications of a unit we’d seen in a little furniture store in Isabel on our last trip.
We gave Jane the information and asked her to order the unit and have it installed before our return.
She called me at work a few days later with a “you are there” report.
“Guess where I’m sitting,” she said.
I was busy and not in my best mood.
“In a hot tub with your top off.”
“Not so much. Guess again.”
“In our bedroom.”
“Bingo.”
“And I’m guessing it’s cool.”
“As a cucumber.”
“You’re the absolute best property manager we currently have.”
“I’m blushing.”
“Don’t forget to turn it off when you leave.”
In hindsight, maybe that last comment wasn’t such a great idea.
☼ ☼ ☼
When we arrived in Vieques three weeks later, on one of the hottest days of the summer, our new air conditioner started up willingly enough but it refused to gasp out even the tiniest breath of cool air. We stood like morons underneath the rectangular box on the wall and waited in vain for relief.
Nothing.
I dialed Jane.
“Remember that day when you said it was cool as a cucumber in our bedroom?”
“Sure,” she said, her voice already uneasy.
“Well, the cucumber just turned into a pickle.”
She took this in.
“The AC. You’re sure you turned it on right?”
“As in, did we hit the on button?”
Exasperated sigh.
“Okay, did you try the reset button?”
“Yep.”
“I’
ll be right over.”
She tried everything. She called the man who had just installed the unit but unfortunately he was off-island. She called another air conditioning guy, who came over and said our coolant had leaked out.
“Can you replace it?” we asked.
“Absolutely,” he replied with a winning smile. “In two or three days.”
I tried to imagine spending even one night in the sweat lodge formerly known as our bedroom.
“I can’t do this,” I said, feeling cowardly but oddly unrepentant.
It was too hot to repent. It was too hot to breathe.
“We’ll have to go to a hotel.”
Michael rolled his eyes. Jane shifted her eyes minimally but diplomatically stopped short of any rolling action.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said in her most conspiratorial tone. “And you’ll love it.”
She moved us to one of her other rental properties. It was fabulous and had a lovely pool. Best of all, there was a fierce air conditioner in the bedroom that kept us shivering all night.
We were glad when our own air conditioner finally got fixed a couple of days later but, all the same, it was nice to have a vacation from our vacation.
Our kitchen was finished and it looked superb. Steve was every bit the master woodworker Jane had said he was.
It was hard to believe that Luong’s deft flicks of the wrist, three months earlier in our local Home Depot, had wrought such handsome results fifteen hundred miles away.
And yet here it was.
Renovated Kitchen
We got to thank Steve personally the day we moved back into the house. Jane called that morning to ask if she could bring him by to discuss finalizing the upstairs work and to go over our plans for the lower level.
A few months earlier Jane had briefed us on Steve’s background. Born and educated in Maine, he’d worked as a graphic designer in Boston before chucking it all five years earlier and moving with his second wife, a veterinarian, to start a new life in Vieques.
Jane had characterized him as an interesting enigma.
My take was slightly less nuanced. “Aging hippie” flashed across my brain when he walked in the door—long of hair, lean of limb, and decidedly mellow of mood.
So mellow, in fact, that I couldn’t help wondering if he’d taken a hit or two off the old bong that morning.
“How’s it been living here?” I asked, curious to get his take on Vieques.
Big smile.
“Fabulous.”
“Any regrets?”
He stroked his stubble.
“None. In fact, I’ve never been happier in my life.”
“And your wife?”
“She’s in heaven. Never liked the city anyway. Born and bred in Vermont.”
He spoke in short, staccato phrases. This unusual speech pattern could be attributed, I decided, to one or all of the following factors: (a) he was a New Englander; (b) he was shy; and/or (c) he was high as a kite.
And a bit of a loner. In fact he struck me as one of those guys who’d rather dig a drainage ditch than sit through a meeting, particularly with people he didn’t know very well.
But it was clear that he was passionate about his craft. After a couple of minutes of chit-chat, he headed for the kitchen and began inspecting his work. When we joined him he explained how he’d repaired the damaged cabinet (we wouldn’t have known which one it was if he hadn’t told us) and how he’d found a place to stow the gas cylinder for the stove in a dead space under the counter.
Clearly, he was a gem.
Maximum points for Jane.
☼ ☼ ☼
Over the next few days we settled easily into our old routine. We’d get up early and work like banshees for four or five hours, at which point we’d look at each other in disbelief.
“Why aren’t we at the beach?” we’d ask in unison.
Cut to a gorgeous, unspoiled beach, where we’d have a fine old time cavorting in the waves (Michael), and reading paperbacks in the shade of our multi-colored umbrella (yours truly).
And yet, after a couple of hours of beach time, we’d find ourselves almost embarrassingly anxious to get back to our chores.
So we’d hurry home and put in another two or three hours of work, followed by quick showers, cocktails, dinner, and—finally—blessed sleep.
Next day: same thing.
It was an odd mix of intense activity and equally intense leisure, with lots of mental cross-pollination: as we spackled, painted and swept our way through another grueling morning of labor, we’d often find ourselves dreaming about the glorious, sun-drenched beach; but just as frequently, we’d find ourselves loitering under our beach umbrella while obsessing over all the household chores that remained undone.
Normally Michael, the more motivated member of our crew of two, was still working long after I had clocked out for the day. But there was one day when I simply couldn’t put down my paint brush.
In short, I became obsessed with gloss white paint.
In my defense, I should point out that white paint has a miraculous, generally unrecognized, ability to obliterate a multitude of sins. You can paint it on pretty much anything and said thing will look brighter, cleaner and more attractive.
Trust me on this.
I woke up one morning, during our July visit, determined to paint all of the upstairs woodwork—three doors and a large closet in the bedroom—by the end of the week. This sounded perfectly reasonable.
My plan was to paint two doors the first day and cruise through the rest of the project by week’s end.
But once I got started I couldn’t stop. The curse was upon me.
First of all, the cheap stained wood I was trying so industriously to disguise absorbed paint like a sponge. I’d paint the upper half of a door and by the time the paint had dried the color had faded from pristine white to splotchy beige. Although this was disconcerting, I made myself move on and paint the lower half—with similar results. To make things worse, the strip where the two coats of paint overlapped turned gummy and morphed into an even less attractive shade of oatmeal.
At noon, Michael ostentatiously consulted his watch, sighed, and mentioned something about the beach.
“I’ll be done soon,” I tossed out unconvincingly.
At twelve-thirty he stuffed his beach towel into his backpack.
“Any minute now,” I assured him.
At one o’clock he was on his way out.
“I’ll take my bike,” he said. “When you’re done, just drive over to Secret Beach. We can put the bike in the back of the car when it’s time to come home.”
“Great idea,” I said, barely looking up from my labor.
This paint job wasn’t going to get the better of me.
By three o’clock I was aching from head to toe, sweaty, and covered in paint. And the work was far from finished.
At three-fifteen, in what I considered a remarkable demonstration of free will, I tore myself away from my Mission and jumped into the shower, determined to salvage a tiny bit of the day for myself.
At three-thirty I pulled out of the driveway and the sky was perfectly clear. By three-forty I was halfway to the beach. I could hardly wait.
Then, out of nowhere, it began raining. Hard.
That’s when I saw Michael headed towards me, pedaling like hell. I stopped. He looked dejected, but gritty, and he didn’t say a word. We loaded his bike into the back of the car and drove home, damp and frustrated.
At four I began painting again. Two of the three doors were finished and I was ready to tackle the bedroom closet.
After a brief pause for cocktails (my work admittedly became a little sloppy at that point), I painted like a fiend until midnight.
First thing the next morning, I walked around inspecting my handiwork.
Beautiful.
Then, like a reformed alcoholic tossing out his empties, I threw away my paint brushes.
All eight of them.
It wa
s wonderfully cathartic.
Fifteen
Name Game
Two more trips to the island and it would be time to put the house on the rental market.
We couldn’t possibly be ready—except of course we had to be.
Late summer whizzed past in a blur of list-making.
We talked with Jane an average of three times a week and Steve at least once or twice, mainly about putting the finishing touches on the kitchen.
The new stove, which we’d bought earlier in the year from the same dusty furniture store in Isabel where Jane had ordered the air conditioner, finally arrived from wherever it had been languishing in back-order land. Steve slotted it into the space where the old stove had served as a placeholder the past few weeks. Jane called us the next day, exultant. “It’s a real kitchen now!”
Meanwhile back in D.C. we tentatively began emailing a few friends and colleagues photos of the house.
Except for our families, we hadn’t said much about our Puerto Rican adventure to anyone. As the place took shape, however, we began thinking about rolling it out to prospective renters and took a set of staged photos to post online.
Nothing fancy, just an exterior shot or two, three or four photos of the great room, a couple of the kitchen, one of the bedroom.
The response from our circle of friends was sometimes puzzling.
“I always had you pegged as the European type,” our neighbor, Tony, remarked. “Why didn’t you buy a house in France?’
I didn’t know how to answer this question without seeming rude. We had never even considered buying a house in France. We had wanted a house in Vieques and that was where we’d bought one. I decided to be as vague as possible.
“Oh, you know, the beach and all.”
“The beach? That’s so bad for your skin.”
Okay, my mistake. We clearly should have taken a poll of our friends’ likes and dislikes before buying our second home.
“And the laid-back lifestyle,” I tossed in, trying to shore up my faltering case.
“If peace and quiet are what you want, why not move to West Virginia?”
Excuse me, did you say West Virginia? I mean, I know it’s a beautiful state and all, but not exactly the exotic locale with year-round-perfect-weather we were going for.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 9