Our list of miscellaneous items was even longer: a second television; a dorm-size fridge and a microwave for the kitchen; second sets of bedspreads, mattress pads and sheets for all the downstairs beds; a rug for the bathroom; and a thousand other incidentals.
Our first stop again was Sears, which, though hardly our furniture emporium of choice back in the real world, had yielded a bumper crop of good deals the last time around. Also, this particular Sears included a mini-Pier 1 tucked conveniently within its walls (alas, now closed) and it shipped to Vieques at a very cheap rate. What wasn’t to love?
But luck wasn’t on our side this time. The sofas in Sears were too big and those in Pier 1 too small. The dining tables were pseudo-Mediterranean monstrosities almost as big as our house, the chairs mini-thrones more suited to a mock medieval banquet than a vacation home.
After a couple of hours of retail despair we finally managed to buy the bedding we needed at Sears and two rattan armchairs and a bookcase in Pier 1.
That done, we dashed over to the electronics section where we found the TV we wanted, along with a small refrigerator and an inexpensive microwave. For shipping purposes, all of our selections were painstakingly assigned a single order number, a process that involved several long and spirited discussions among the sales associates and a number of phone calls back and forth between departments.
Once this exhausting transaction was completed, we dashed up to the food court on the top floor and wolfed down plates of tacos and rice in the midst of rowdy teenagers who never seemed to be in school.
After lunch we sprinted back to the car and drove hell for leather to the Discount Furniture Outlet on the other side of San Juan.
This outlet was where we had bought some of our favorite pieces of furniture the year before (including the corner cabinet Daniel had somehow managed to misplace). It consisted of a warehouse crammed to the rafters with a vast array of mostly contemporary furniture and shoddily constructed knock-offs of modern Italian design, with the odd traditional or Caribbean-influenced piece tossed in for good measure.
The hideousness of most of the merchandise made shopping at the Discount Furniture Outlet remarkably easy—we were able to power walk through whole sections of the store with barely a comment except for the occasional shriek of horror. Our spirits sank as we sped from room to room.
Nothing. What would we do about a dining table, so easy to find at home but so stunningly expensive to ship to Puerto Rico?
Then, just when it seemed like we were destined to go home empty-handed, we rounded a corner and there it was—a handsome Balinese-style carved mahogany table and six cane-back chairs. Maybe a little darker than we had in mind but perfectly in keeping with our décor. And marked down!
Lurking prominently nearby, as if they were just hoping we’d take them home, were a handsome teak coffee table and a side table in a similar style. Riding our little wave of victory, we rounded the final corner and came across some perfect seagrass chairs for the downstairs bedrooms.
Barely believing our last-minute luck, we paid up, arranged for shipping, and were back at the airport with time to spare.
Despite our streak of good fortune, there was still the problem of a sofa for the newly-renovated downstairs. On the sunset flight back to Vieques, I allayed my fear of flying by obsessing about this problem. Needless worry is sometimes such a handy distraction.
Certainly there was nowhere on Vieques to buy a sofa and shipping a sofa from D.C. was as much out of the question as shipping a dining table—maybe even more so.
Michael, as always, worked hard to soothe my anxieties. Perhaps Jane could locate a sofa of some sort and we could have neutral slipcovers made for it until we found what we really wanted. Or maybe we could round up two or three easy chairs from other parts of the house and arrange them downstairs so that the absence of a sofa wasn’t immediately noticeable.
“After all, who demands that their rental house contain two sofas?” Michael asked rhetorically, while no doubt suspecting that he was addressing just such a person at that precise moment.
All the same, I appreciated his efforts to haul me back into the land of reality and agreed that the problem could be solved one way or another.
But I didn’t sleep that night.
Yes, I know. Pathetic.
But that’s the way I’m put together.
When I was twelve, I woke up early one morning and realized I detested the furniture in my bedroom and couldn’t stand it another minute. While my parents snoozed downstairs, I found a bucket of white paint and whitewashed everything in the room.
Horrified at first, my mother later admitted that it was an improvement.
I’ve been on a roll ever since.
☼ ☼ ☼
The next morning found me staring glassy-eyed at the relatively empty living space downstairs.
If I’d been the dramatic type I would’ve wailed and torn my hair. Instead, I whimpered and ate some Cheerios.
Around ten o’clock Michael loaded me into the car and drove me into Isabel, where he strong-armed me into the one and only furniture store on the island, a retail establishment whose garish wares made those we’d strolled past with such disdain the day before seem like masterpieces of restraint.
I considered grumbling but decided against it—Michael can be formidable when he’s worried about me or when he’s just sick of hearing me complain.
The selection, as expected, was appalling: Louis XV-style living room suites in carved wood with embroidered upholstery (who would defile his tropical getaway with such ornate stuffiness?), Early American-style side tables with quaintly turned legs, and, intriguingly, a half-keg coffee table that had obviously been designed to grace the rec room of a Milwaukee tract house but had somehow migrated south to the Caribbean.
The proprietor rushed over excitedly to greet us. “You find what you need?”
“Hmm…” I began disingenuously, not wanting to hurt the guy’s feelings despite his stunningly bad taste.
“Not so much,” Michael interjected. “Is this everything you have?”
The man’s face lit up, then fell.
“Ah, we have some very plain things upstairs. But nothing you would like.”
Plain things. That’s exactly what we would like. “Could we see?”
He led the way through a back door and up an external staircase, apologizing all the while for exposing us to the unworthy trash we were about to encounter.
The unworthy trash, of course, was exactly what we were looking for.
The first thing we saw when we walked into the dusty, shadowy space was a dark-stained rattan two-seater sofa with off-white cushions. Nearby were two matching easy chairs and a coffee table.
New furniture for downstairs living area
Perfection.
Making a quick calculation that the proprietor might be willing to part with such “undesirable” merchandise at a discount, I offered seventy-five percent of the asking price—a savings of more than $300.
He jumped at it.
But back downstairs, once we had arranged to have the pieces delivered, he took me by the elbow and steered me back towards the half-keg coffee table.
“Very high-class piece,” he said.
“It’s nice, but I don’t think…”
“Fifty percent off, and free delivery for everything.” He really was a very persuasive salesman when he tried.
I admit I wavered a bit. Maybe it wasn’t so hideous after all. Maybe we could use it as a trough for the neighborhood horses to drink from.
Or firewood, if we’d had a fireplace.
“We’re done here, thank you,” Michael said firmly, guiding me from the store.
It’s so great to be saved from yourself sometimes.
Twenty-Five
Vacant Stair
Back in D.C., we cautiously congratulated ourselves on having successfully completed the two main floors of the house.
There was just one problem—they did
n’t connect.
To get from the upper floor to the lower, you had to walk along the upper breezeway, unlock the gate, descend a short flight of stairs into our neighbor’s driveway, walk down the main road that runs beside the house, swing into our own driveway, unlock the carport gate and enter the second floor breezeway.
I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
If we rented out the house as a three-bedroom unit (think parents upstairs, children down), the guests would think we had lost our marbles and demand a refund.
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t foreseen this problem. Steve had, in fact, produced a number of spiffy designs to solve it. But this was before he’d gotten sick and work had fallen behind schedule and we had spent a lot more money than we expected.
In short, it had been a problem that was easy to ignore—until it wasn’t.
Which was now.
We pulled out Steve’s designs and reconsidered. Each was ingenious in its own way and yet there was something indefinably wrong with all of them. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then the problem hit me: all of the staircases were situated on the exterior of the house.
Whatever our little casa’s architectural shortcomings might have been, it was nonetheless a perfectly contained unit, a large rectangular block with balconies on two sides and unadorned façades on the other two. Steve’s staircases would need to be appended to one of the two balcony façades and would, in essence, violate the integrity of the structure. That didn’t seem right.
We racked our tired brains for a solution.
For a brief moment we considered putting the staircase on the garden side, where at least it wouldn’t be an eyesore from the road. But to make this work we’d have to break through the exterior walls to install at least one and maybe two new doors. And although we were admittedly desperate for a solution, we were pretty sure we lacked the intestinal fortitude to endure another demolition project.
The logical fallback, of course, was to put the staircase inside. Hailing as we did from a latitude where staircases are almost always found indoors, this seemed to make perfect sense.
But it didn’t take us long to figure out that staircases gobble up a great deal of square footage—we’d have to sacrifice a hefty amount of living space if we chose this option. Also, the few places where it made sense to locate the head of the staircase on the upper level made no sense at all in the corresponding space below.
In desperation we turned to magazines.
Alas, most of the staircases in Architectural Digest and The World of Interiors are grand, sweeping and often marble.
Not quite what we had in mind.
So we moved on to travel magazines, many of which feature vacation houses in far-flung locales. But since staircases in vacation homes tend to be utilitarian rather than decorative, few staircases are actually depicted.
In fact, almost none.
“Let’s look at photos of our own house,” Michael logically suggested one afternoon. “Maybe we’ll get inspired.”
So we downloaded the photos from our recent trip onto my laptop and prepared ourselves for an epiphany. Here, after all, were beautiful shots of the great room, the bedroom, the kitchen, the balcony.
We stared until our eyes hurt.
Nothing. Or at least nothing we hadn’t thought of before. There just didn’t seem to be a practical solution to our problem.
“Maybe we should rebrand our advertising campaign,” I suggested. “You know, Vacation with your kids without ever seeing them, or, Stay with us and lose ten pounds walking from bedroom to bedroom.”
Michael wisely ignored me and continued scrolling through our photos: sunset at the beach, a long shot of the fort, an interior of the coffee bar in Isabel.
Hang on. The interior of the coffee bar. What’s that in the middle of the picture?
It’s a spiral staircase.
A spiral staircase!
Perfect.
☼ ☼ ☼
But—where to put it?
The great room seemed the obvious spot. Measuring in at twenty-four by twenty-six feet, it could handle a moderate-sized hole in its floor with ease.
And yet.
If we put the staircase in the front corner, where the sofa and end table met, it would spiral down into the front crook of the L-shaped living space on the lower floor, blocking the French doors we’d paid so much to have installed.
Putting it in the back corner, near the bathroom door, would block access to the garden door on the level below. Positioning it in the middle of the large back wall of the great room might work, but doing so would eliminate most of the seating area on the lower floor.
Locating the staircase in the bedroom didn’t make sense either. Although the bedroom was large, it wasn’t huge, and putting a four-foot wide hole in one corner of the room would definitely limit the furniture placement possibilities.
Also, who wants to have to schlep into the bedroom to go downstairs, particularly if someone else is having a private moment in there—sleeping, playing Tiddlywinks, or whatever.
Finally, and most conclusively, the bedroom, which was air conditioned, was positioned squarely above the carport, which wasn’t.
We stared at each other in disbelief. Maybe the two floors weren’t meant to connect. Maybe the twain simply weren’t intended to meet.
I broke out the cocktail shaker.
☼ ☼ ☼
Alcohol, I’ve discovered, can sometimes un-stop even the most log-jammed brain. The first time I discovered this was when I moved to D.C. in the summer of 1994.
I had bought a new bed for myself, a large, metal, canopied contraption with at least forty or fifty parts. I laid out the components on the floor of my new apartment and stared at them in rapt silence for at least a half-hour before it occurred to me that I was never going to get this thing put together without some sort of mental lubrication.
A gear was stuck in my brain, and it needed oil.
Or vodka.
I downed a couple of stiff drinks and soon a task that had appeared impossible seemed not only possible but embarrassingly simple.
The bed almost constructed itself, which was a good thing since I was so sloshed I collapsed into it the minute I was done.
Meanwhile, back in where-to-put-the-staircase land, we sipped our cocktails and waited for a visitation from the Staircase Muse, who stubbornly resisted our call.
Michael sat quietly on the sofa nearby.
“How about connecting the balconies?” he asked in his most casual voice.
This is one of the things about Michael. He never acts excited or screams Eureka! when he’s solved a difficult problem.
He just solves it and tells you the answer.
My mind raced.
Of course.
We could put the staircase in the front corner of the balcony, near the driveway, facing the water. Nothing was happening in that corner of the balcony anyway. And just think of the ocean views as you went up and down.
Good old vodka.
The next time you have a problem, give it a try.
☼ ☼ ☼
Okay, now all we needed was to find out where the owner of Jack’s Coffee House and Bar got his spiral staircase.
I dialed the number and was told that the owner, whose name was Joseph, wasn’t available at the moment.
“Is he on the island?” I asked.
“Yes,” the woman on the phone reluctantly admitted. “But he’s not here.”
I cleared my throat. “Do you happen to know where he got his staircase?”
“Excuse me?” I could hear a blender in the background.
“The spiral staircase.” The one right in front of you. “Any idea where he got it?”
Silence.
“Not really. But it was his friend Charlie’s idea. You know Charlie?”
“I met him once a few months ago. Does he happen to be there?”
“Nope.”
“Any chance you’ve got his number?�
��
“Everyone’s got Charlie’s number,” she said.
Michael called Charlie.
“This is Michael, your neighbor. From the big white house down the hill.”
“Huh?”
“We met at Jack’s a few months ago.”
“Oh yeah?”
Clearly didn’t ring a bell. So much for considering ourselves memorable.
Michael took a deep breath.
“We’re the guys Daniel fired.”
“Oh, sure, I remember you!” he yelled. “That bastard.”
Michael held the phone away from his ear.
“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but we heard it was your idea to put that spiral staircase in Jack’s. Where’d you get it?”
“Excuse me?”
“We like the spiral staircase at Jack’s and we’re considering putting one like it in our house. Do you know where it came from?”
A fair amount of hemming and hawing ensued. It was obvious that Charlie knew all about the staircase but for some reason didn’t want to tell us.
Was it stolen? Bought on the spiral-staircase black market? Or was Charlie just a jerk?
He tap-danced around Michael’s questions for a surprisingly long time, but Michael was his usual persistent self (he would have enjoyed terrific job security during the Spanish Inquisition) and eventually Charlie caved under pressure.
“AA Ironworks. A guy named Alfredo. But he’s got a huge backlog. It’ll take months,” Charlie added hopefully.
“Is there anyone else who could do it?”
“In Vieques?” he snorted. “Absolutely not.”
Michael gave me a thumbs-up.
“Then Alfredo it is. Do you have his contact information?”
“Uh, I did, but I think I lost it.”
Of course you did.
“No worries. We can look it up.”
Charlie was a piece of cake compared to Alfredo. He didn’t seem like a particularly chatty guy under any circumstances and then there was the fact that he didn’t seem to speak much English. If any.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 16