I took the first crack at making him understand what we wanted. Then in desperation I handed the phone to Michael. He tried even harder, eventually sounding out, in a non-visual version of Charades, the words “spiral staircase.”
(Don’t ask.)
Needless to say, his efforts were unsuccessful.
Yes, you guessed it.
Our next call was to Jane.
Twenty-Six
Downward Spiral
“We want a spiral staircase like the one at Jack’s Coffee House,” I blurted out.
“Hmm,” she responded hesitantly.
“Do you know Alfredo?” I plunged ahead.
“Junior or Senior?”
She really did seem to know everyone on the island.
“Not sure. Who does ironwork?”
“Both of them.”
“Who built the staircase at Jack’s?”
“Probably Senior, but I’ll find out.”
She found out. It was Alfredo Senior, but he couldn’t build our staircase, at least not for a while, because his wife was seriously ill.
“How awful,” I murmured sympathetically, adding in the same breath, “could Junior do it instead?”
I wasn’t sure I liked myself anymore.
“I’ll find out.”
Alfredo Junior couldn’t do it, but Senior decided he could. He needed to keep busy, he explained to Jane through her sidekick and translator, Pablo. And anyway, he could use the money to pay his wife’s medical bills.
First we asked for an estimate, including installation. This took three weeks. When it came, it seemed high. But then everything seems outlandishly high or low when you lack a frame of reference.
So we went online and got a general idea of how much metal spiral staircases cost in the U.S. Then we took a second look at Alfredo’s estimate and decided it was more or less reasonable (for Vieques anyway).
We gave Jane the green light.
A month later Jane called to say that Alfredo needed to come out to measure the space again.
“But that means he hasn’t done anything yet!” I wailed.
“Could be,” Jane responded in her matter-of-fact way. “Should I tell him not to come?”
She had me there.
“Of course not,” I said, “but tell him to hurry.”
She paused for effect.
“I’ll get right on that.”
A week later she called to report that the staircase was ready. I dashed into the other room to tell Michael.
“It’s ready!” I gasped histrionically.
He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“The staircase! They’re installing it tomorrow!”
“Seriously?”
“Yes! Jane says it looks great.”
“She saw it?”
“She went to Alfredo’s shop.”
“She’s a treasure.”
“She’s a goddess!”
“You need to rest.”
☼ ☼ ☼
Jane called us two days later.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your new staircase. It doesn’t fit in the hole.”
“It doesn’t fit?” I repeated, genuinely puzzled. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I—and I was there when they tried to install it. Eight men hauled it in and stood it up straight. It looked perfect. I swear it gleamed in the sunlight but it didn’t fit in the hole.”
Michael, having caught the gist of our conversation, grabbed the phone out of my hand.
“You mean it’s too big?”
“Not really.”
“Too small?”
“Not so much. It’s the…” she hesitated, clearly at a loss for words. “You know, the way it faces.”
“The orientation?”
“Yes!”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Well, everything starts out okay at the top, but when you get to the bottom you run into the balustrade.”
Michael put her on speakerphone so I could hear. We both tried to picture the problem. “So he miscalculated?” he asked.
“I guess,” she replied, clearly at a loss.
“So what’s next?”
“They took it away.”
“The staircase?”
“Yep. To fix it. It took nine men.”
I couldn’t resist weighing in.
“It took more men to take it out than to bring it in?”
“They were depressed.”
“But if the orientation doesn’t work it doesn’t work,” Michael commented, bringing us back to reality. “I mean, there are only so many variables here. The tread size is a given, the distance between treads is a given. And you can’t expect people to climb over a balustrade to get upstairs. So what exactly does Alfredo plan to change?”
“I have no idea. But I saw the look in his eye. He’ll make it work if he possibly can.”
I took a deep breath. “Are you sure?”
She sighed.
“Absolutely not.”
In the end Alfredo took the staircase apart and put it back together, piece by piece, adjusting the space between each step infinitesimally.
It made all the difference and a week later the whole thing was in place.
Jane sent photos.
It was heaven.
☼ ☼ ☼
Coming back to Vieques was always a thrill.
Admittedly, the journey itself had become a bit humdrum—it’s hard to get excited about being crammed into a seat designed for a masochistic elf for almost four hours.
But once we landed in Vieques we always felt a shiver of anticipation. We were back!
And yet no matter how excited we were, we invariably experienced a sinking feeling when we turned that final corner and began climbing the hill towards our house. After all, we never quite knew what to expect.
The last leg of our return journey that October was no different. The neurosis du jour was our suspicion that Jane had somehow managed to photograph the spiral staircase from its only favorable angle. When viewed in person, we feared, it would have all the appeal of a gigantic barnacle on a ship’s hull.
The night before our return to the island my overactive imagination had even transformed my anxieties into a nightmare in which I began going down the stairs and literally couldn’t stop. There was no bottom. It didn’t take a house call from Dr. Freud to figure out that the never-ending downward spiral of my dream was a remarkably apt metaphor for the staircase project itself.
Ten hours later we unlocked the carport gate and turned towards the staircase with equal measures of excitement and foreboding. I’m not sure exactly what we expected—maybe just that this newest addition to our house would somehow ruin the whole effect—but our fears were completely unfounded.
If anything, the stairs were a huge plus. Pristine white, faultlessly designed, and elegantly compact, the staircase was like a modern sculpture with benefits—it not only looked good, it got you from one place to another with ease and style.
The spiral staircase
I went up first. The structure felt sturdy yet supple, and as I wound my way up, the ocean view slowly unfurled itself in all its glory. And then suddenly I was at the top, standing on the broad white balcony, the verdant landscape spread out below.
As we stood awestruck, mesmerized by the view, it slowly dawned on us that the voices we had been hearing since we’d come up the stairs were coming from inside our house.
Our hackles, as it were, rose.
Michael edged his way along the breezeway running along the east side of the house. Pausing outside the bedroom window, he listened intently, then uttered a hushed “hello?”
After a moment an equally uncertain voice answered. “Hey.”
“Who’s there?” Michael asked, this time in his most authoritative voice.
“It’s Kevin.”
The voice was even more muffled now, almost inaudible.
>
“Kevin who?”
“Jane’s Kevin.”
We didn’t even know Jane had a Kevin.
“You mean you work for her?”
“Yes.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“She said it was okay.”
Michael digested this information.
“Let us in.”
A pale, red-headed waif with a wispy goatee unlocked the door.
Michael introduced himself and, after a couple of awkward moments, spoke again.
“So what exactly are you doing here?”
Kevin tugged nervously at his goatee.
“I didn’t have anywhere to stay the past few days, so Jane said I could stay here.”
“I see. And she didn’t mention that we were coming in today?”
Kevin looked perplexed.
“Not at all,” he said, as if there were degrees of mentioning the imminent arrival of the owners of the house you’re essentially squatting in. “But, man oh man, am I embarrassed,” he giggled, darting a glance back towards the bedroom. “Caught red-handed watching The Dukes of Hazard.”
Regrettable as his taste in TV may have been, it struck me that this was the least of his worries at the moment.
“What happened to the place you were staying in before?” Michael asked.
“I kinda got asked to leave,” Kevin replied, blushing demurely.
I digested this less-than-encouraging piece of information.
“Bummer,” I said.
“I know. Another embarrassment.”
“Hmm.”
“So Jane said I could stay here.” He smiled for the first time. “She sure did. Good old Jane.”
That’s not exactly how I would have characterized Jane at that precise moment. In fact I was mentally reducing her Christmas bonus by fifty percent as he spoke, but I could see how Kevin might feel a bit beholden to her.
“Speaking of good old Jane,” I said, “I think I’ll give her a call.
To her credit, and (yes, I admit) my intense satisfaction, Jane was mortified.
“I thought you weren’t coming in till tomorrow!”
“Not unless we’re in Tokyo,” I responded glibly.
There was dead silence while she tried, and presumably failed, to process my feeble attempt at humor. “Where it’s already tomorrow,” I added helpfully.
“Oh my God,” she giggled uncertainly. “And now you’ve got poor homeless Kevin on your hands.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have him out in a day or two.”
I was speechless. “Listen Jane…”
“Got you!” she yelped (I was beginning to wonder if she’d finally succumbed to the island’s intense October heat). “I’m joking,” she said in a less manic tone. “Just making a little joke. Put him on the phone. I’ll get him out of there in a jiff.”
I handed the phone to Kevin, who had been following our conversation with the expression of a rescue dog hoping to be sprung from the pound.
“Hullo,” he mumbled, his voice quivering slightly. He listened, mouth slightly agape, as Jane talked. “Okay,” he said in the same flat voice, then handed the phone back to me.
“He’ll be out of your hair in thirty minutes flat,” Jane informed me, all business now. “But it’ll take me longer to round up Lydia and bring her over to clean up the place. Probably a couple of hours.”
I did the math. Lydia would be vacuuming and dusting at six o’clock.
“You know what,” I said, “we’ll just do it ourselves and save the money.”
Jane was aghast. “But the bathroom,” she wailed. “I’m not having you clean up Kevin’s mess.”
“Hey, it’s fine, just relax,” I said, walking towards the bathroom. It couldn’t be that bad.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, almost involuntarily. It was an absolute pigsty.
“Tell me,” she intoned breathlessly, as if we were discussing porn.
I gulped. “Well, it’s pretty grim.”
“Save it for me. I’m on my way.”
I did as I was told. She had chosen the bathroom as her penance. Who was I to interfere?
By the time Jane got there, Kevin was long gone, and Michael and I had stripped the bed, cleaned up the kitchen and swept the whole house. Jane knocked off the bathroom in a jiff. Then we sat down for a celebratory drink.
“So what do you think of the staircase?” she asked, clearly proud of what she’d accomplished.
“It’s fabulous.”
She sat back with a contented sigh.
“I have to admit, that was one painful project.”
“It must have been awful when they brought it over the first time and it didn’t fit.”
Jane nodded, flashing back to the moment.
“Alfredo was crushed. He came to me with tears in his eyes. He said, ‘Miss Jane, that circle ladder do not fit.’”
“Circle ladder?” Michael repeated.
“That was his name for the spiral staircase.”
We loved it. In fact, that’s what we’ve called it ever since.
Twenty-Seven
The International Language of Gardening
Having more or less recovered from the shock of finding a goateed stranger camping in our house, we took stock of our little slice of paradise.
We couldn’t help admitting that the house looked superb. In fact, after puttering around for a couple of days, touching up barely-discernible wall scratches, straightening pictures that were no more than a quarter-inch off plumb and rearranging the sixty or so books in our bookcase, we ran out of things to do inside.
So we turned our attention to the garden.
By rights this was Michael’s domain. Early in our relationship he had demonstrated a green-ish thumb by rescuing a couple of all-but-dead plants from my balcony and lovingly nursing them back to health.
The following spring he bought a spindly-looking palm tree and fertilized, trimmed and cajoled it into a state of spectacular vibrancy by summer’s end. One August afternoon I actually saw a tourist turn his camera away from the stunning Gothic cathedral across the street from our apartment building and train it instead on the behemoth palm on Michael’s balcony.
In short, Michael was a born gardener. And now that we were the proud owners of a small square of turf in Vieques, he set his jaw and resolved to bring order to the overgrown mess we’d inherited from the previous owners.
While the garden to the west of the house contained a number of impressive fruit trees, including breadfruit, avocado, lime and mango, it also boasted a variety of highly unusual garden ornaments:
•three massive concrete pylons originally intended (we were told) to support a cistern before the project was abandoned
•random blobs of concrete that had been unceremoniously dumped into the garden at the conclusion of earlier construction jobs
•a highly-visible septic tank
•and the rusted chassis of an old car
We had dealt with these eyesores as methodically as possible. The concrete pylons, which we dubbed ‘Stonehenge South,’ had been the first to go—Daniel had overseen their dismantling during his brief tenure. He had also made sure the concrete blobs disappeared.
During her first months on the job Jane had hired a couple of guys to hack their way through the gnarly thicket that had become our side yard. They had disentangled the Buick from the thick undergrowth and a flatbed truck had carted it to the local landfill.
She then more or less reversed this process to solve the septic tank problem; instead of hacking vines away, she encouraged them to run rampant over the offending structure until it was barely visible from the upstairs balcony.
As she often said, nature happens fast in Vieques.
Despite these Herculean efforts, the side yard remained singularly uninviting. The soil was sandy and hard and immature banana trees poked up randomly here and there. The whole affair sloped downward at an alarming angle from our neighb
or’s retaining wall at the top of the lot, to our own crumbling wall at the bottom.
In short, it was a much bigger job than we were ready to tackle at the moment. Endless truckloads of dirt would have to be brought in to make the space even remotely utilitarian, whether for a garden or, more ambitiously, a pool. And in either case some or all of the trees would have to go—an eventuality we weren’t prepared to face emotionally or financially just now.
In the meantime Michael set his horticultural sights on less ambitious territory—the small sections of garden near the driveway on the east side of the house. These little patches of turf were both manageable and woefully in need of attention.
And Michael was up for the challenge.
At least theoretically.
☼ ☼ ☼
In hindsight, we probably should have known better than to take gardening advice from Feliz, our alcoholic neighbor.
As you may recall, Feliz’s English left a lot to be desired, and our Spanish didn’t exactly qualify us for translating positions at the U.N.
So what were we thinking?
Not much, apparently.
It happened like this. We were standing in the driveway staring at the starved-looking plants and bare rocky soil that constituted our sideyard, hoping for inspiration, when Feliz shot down the road towards us like a stunt man out of a cannon.
“¡Hola!” he chortled. “You make jardín? ” (garden)
“Sí,” we said somewhat unenthusiastically. In truth, we were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man was both mentally defective and a hopeless drunk—what else could explain his permanent state of cheerfulness, his complete lack of inhibition, his casual friendliness?
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. They’ve lived in the big city too long and they’re jaded. Give the guy a break.
All good and well.
But you would be wrong—at least about the drinking part.
The guy was permanently plastered. You could see it in his crimson-flecked eyes, in his jaundiced skin, in the roaring sourness of his breath—and if these subtle signs didn’t convince you, there was always the fact that he stood on his roof in the morning and crowed with the roosters.
The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House Page 17