Pauline explains all this with verve and enthusiasm. I just want to hop back in our car and go for a walk in the forest. But our children are as enchanted as my wife. Now, this would be exciting living, not the way it is in dirty old Paris. Can you believe it? I swear, this damned boat is bewitching, or maybe our children are getting too blase!
‘Smell the air, Dad, how great it would be to live out here after all the pollution in Paris.’
I sniff. It smells like an open sewer to me. This was over twenty-five years ago, and at that time, the Seine was virtually an open sewer. Paris and all the villages along the river down from Paris, in a beautiful, long, meandering curve, were dumping raw sewage directly into the river. Naturally, this boat is downriver from Paris!
To make everybody, that is, wife and kids, happy, I put in a ridiculous, insulting bid for this crippled wooden hulk. We go for our walk, and I’m ready to forget about the whole thing.
A week later, I’m shocked when my bid is accepted. Accept is mild – they jump at it. Yet, little as I bid, I must borrow money to swing this cockeyed, insane deal. Painters are rarely rich, or even reasonably comfortable. I often challenge friends to name fifty American painters making a regular living painting – not teaching, or working in TV or films, or in advertising – just painting pictures and selling them. Sometimes, there will be a flurry for a particular painter, but it rarely lasts more than a few years, then it’s back to the old easel and bean soup, especially if a painter happens to have a family. No one has ever come up with more than twenty who are truly making it. But it is a great life. So it goes.
For the next three months, my painting is suspended in the interest of romance, excitement, adventure, WITCHCRAFT – such an important change for a man who lives in the streets or out in fields and likes it. I’m feeling caught up in something wicked. I am! I’m not a river man. The Seine, for me, is something to paint. It is constantly moving, changing, at the same time it is still, like a good model.
Our lives up to this point have been something of a dream. I was an art teacher in the Los Angeles City Schools until 1960. Then, since I saw myself as an artist, not a teacher, we came to Europe. One of the main reasons was to keep our children away from American television. Also, at that time, living was cheaper here.
First we lived in a very small apartment in Paris, three hundred square feet, which we bought with my retirement money from the Los Angeles schools. We were very mobile, Paris in spring and fall, Bavaria in summer and for Christmas, then southern Spain for winter. It sounds like a millionaire’s life, but we were doing all this on three hundred dollars a month, plus my disability pension from World War II. Yes, if you’re careful, it can be done. For us, the poverty line is way above our heads.
When we had three children, we moved into an old carpenter’s workshop that we fixed up as an apartment. When I say ‘we’, I mean anyone in the family who could swing a hammer or spread paint with a brush. It was something like the boat project, mostly a family affair.
2
A Brief Enchantment
First, I build up that side with the water sloshing in. Then I clean out and scrape or scrap all the charred interior. This involves, among other things, replacing forty-five small mullioned windowpanes. There are also two huge plate-glass view windows that are so smoke- and soot-covered, nothing can be seen through them – two more days of scrubbing there. The walls of what served as a living room and bedroom are beyond mere painting; they will take more serious treatment.
I find a bolt of gold brocade cloth at the Marché Aligré, a street market near our apartment-cum-studio in Paris. For some reason, this brocade is only about the price of burlap, so I buy it all, three bolts full. I begin to know I’m going crazy because I look forward to sticking this cloth over all the black walls and ceilings. I’m being carried away. Perhaps the entire boat is enchanted.
I use paste to cover the walls and ceiling so I can attach the gold brocade – it does cover a multitude of sins. I buy inexpensive light fixtures with amber lightbulbs, and, after some considerable electrical work, much beyond my skill level, manage to fix them so they actually light, even turn on and off with primitive switches.
I call in the rest of the family on weekends to scrub out the bathroom, the kitchen, the usual comfort necessities. These are all a uniform smoke-brownish hue. Before the school year ends, late in June, we have the boat finished. According to my wife, it looks like a drunken pirate’s private whorehouse – she’s very conservative in these kinds of things.
The layout of the houseboat is quite simple. After one comes up the gangplank, one goes through a low oaken door, about five-feet six-inches high. I’m five-foot-ten. After bumping my head the tenth time, I consider wearing a hard hat permanently, or maybe an old-time bowler.
The door opens onto a tiny vestibule. Turning right, one goes through two swinging mahogany doors with beautiful brass fittings, very boatlike. These doors lead down two steps into the main room. On the left, looking out over the river, now, after much scraping, is one of two large plate windows. It’s about seven feet wide and four feet high.
The living room is approximately twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. At the far end, on the river side, is an entry to a small kitchen. In the center of that end wall is another pair of mahogany doors like those opening from the vestibule. These doors lead to a narrow hall with a bathroom, complete with toilet, sink and shower, opening on the right, the shore side.
Directly ahead are three steps up to the bedroom. Here we find the second of the large plate windows, also looking out on the river.
All along the shore side are small windows, four in all, opening onto the quay. These are house-type windows with shutters. There is also a window of the same design opening onto the kitchen on the river side.
It must have been a lovely place for the French explorer and his lady friend. I’m not sure how it’s going to work with a family of five, though.
We rent the boat out for the summer to a young woman (another witch) who works for the Foire de Trône, a sort of yearly carnival in Le Bois de Vincennes. My contract for our boat location stipulates someone must be on the boat at all times. The river-navigation people are already very suspicious of this crippled craft.
We leave for our usual summer vacation to the old water mill we’d bought in Burgundy when we first came to France. We paid the huge sum of two thousand dollars for this place. It was another romantic coup de foudre. Actually, the mill is only a three-hundred-year-old stone tent, but that’s another story.
Disenchantment!
We hadn’t been at the mill three weeks when we receive a telegram, our first French telegram. It’s from an elderly English couple who live two boats downriver from us. I don’t know why they wrote it in French. It says:
Votre bateau a coulé.
That’s said coo-lay, as in Kool-Aid.
I run across the street to a French neighbor hoping to find out what the word ‘coulé’ means. As if I didn’t know! I just don’t want to believe it.
I immediately take the train up to Paris, then the bus out to where the boat is. It is, indeed, coulé. Only a small corner of the roof is sticking above water. There is a medium-sized crowd along the bank. They surround the boat, babbling in French. Each seems to have a different idea as to why the boat has sunk. All of them, in French fashion, are convinced there must be a reason, C’est logique, n’est-ce pas?
After much running around, trying to find someone to lift the boat out of the water and getting nowhere, someone tells me about specialists in this kind of work, bringing up sunken boats. They are called les frères Teurnier. I phone them from the café on the corner. This town of Le Port Marly has seven restaurants, but only one café. It’s directly across the street from the boule courts, which are on the chemin de halage, or path, next to our boat. There are also