Houseboat on the Seine. William Wharton
finger points to his chest. I get the message: If I need help, call. They drive off. I hope one of them is the designated driver, but that doesn’t sound very French.
An Impossible Task
I spend two days checking everything to see if the boat’s still leaking. It seems OK. I hose down and clean out the interior, checking to see where the leaks were, and to a small degree, still are. Meanwhile, I’m cleaning all my furniture off in the river, trying to wash off the worst of the mud. Then, after I’ve dragged all the dried-out and falling-apart furniture, along with the mostly dry mattresses, sheets and so forth back on the boat, I remount all the floating doors. I’m ready to leave. My raggedy skin has mostly peeled off, and I’m dead weary, sick and tired, with the boat, with myself.
I stop by at the Le Clercs’ and ask if they’ll keep an eye on my péniche for me. They aren’t too happy about the idea, but agree to phone the farmhouse near the mill if anything goes wrong. I give them the number. They’re both worried about voleurs, that is, robbers. I hate to tell them, but at this point I’d be glad if somebody would come along and steal the entire shebang. I’ve investigated, and it would cost a minimum of fifteen hundred francs to have the boat towed away and burned. That’s what they do with witches and witchcraft anyway, isn’t it?
I sleep two days when I’m back with the family. The stone tent seems incredibly luxurious. I carefully try recouping my tan. When I arrived, my wife said I looked like a giant fetus, or a very premature baby. I feel damned premature.
I decide the only thing, against all advice, is to try stopping the leak from inside the boat. What else? I ask my older boy, Matt, who’s in high school, if he will help me with it on weekends. It doesn’t seem to scare him. Ah, youth, good spirits and enthusiasm; we’ll lick those devils and witches yet.
When we come back up to the boat from the mill, the hull has water in it, too much water for comfort, but it isn’t listing. We bail one whole day. After much asking around, we find a product guaranteed to be waterproof. Happily, Matt speaks excellent French. He has lived most of his life in France. He went to French schools for the first seven years of his education. Rosemary, my wife, speaks excellent ‘Ma Perkins’ French, as do most French teachers in American high schools, but I have virtually no skills in language. I can bumble about in French, German, Italian and Spanish, but can’t speak much of any of them. The happy part is that I understand much better than I speak, not always, especially in a complex area such as the resuscitation of our boat, unhappily.
We buy fifty-liter canisters and wind up with twenty huge containers of this black, gooey, smelly stuff. We pull up all the regular flooring in the boat and pour this goop into the hold, smearing it with broad spatulas into every nook and cranny. On top of this, we jam in panels of plywood smeared with it, then work in more of this black gunk over them, again everywhere we can reach. It seems as if it should work. Foolish optimism strikes again.
We came home black as minstrels. The only thing we find that takes this goo off is turpentine. We give each other turpentine rub-downs with old towels. But around our eyes and in our cuticles and nails, including toe cuticles, we’re black as coal miners. Matt’s wonderful about it, going to school each Monday looking as if he’s just come up from some Texas oil well-drilling operation. By Friday evening, just when we’re starting to look normal, we go back at it again. I can’t coax the girls, or my wife, near this messy operation. I don’t want to, it seems so futile. Some things are too much; this project comes in the ‘too much’ category.
I manage to buy a small, used electric water pump. We attach an automatic float to turn it on, just in case water starts seeping in again. I have a length of plastic tubing to carry the water out the window and into the Seine, where it belongs. This allows me to sleep somewhat easier nights, but the jinxed boat continues to leak, not ‘sink-leak’, but there’s persistent, consistent dripping, a small puddle of water floating on our ‘impermeable’ black coating each day. And we can not find from where it’s seeping. The whole affair is maddening.
Then, one day, as we’re scraping and shoveling out mud from everything, checking our pump regularly, our summer renter of the boat arrives. She’s not drowned, she’s fresh in a pair of toreador pants and a flowered shirt. I scramble up the bank to find out how the boat sank, what happened; is she all right. She smiles. She explains in her delightfully accented French English.
‘Well, I woke late and went across the street for some croissants and a cup of coffee. I didn’t need to be at the foire until one. When I came back, the boat was on the bottom, oop la! I didn’t know what to do, and I was already late to work. So, I plucked one of the most beautiful roses from the bank and threw it onto the top of the boat. It was sort of like a Viking funeral, you see.’
I don’t see! It’s like ‘you know’. People keep saying ‘you know’ at the end of just about every sentence, and most of the time I don’t know, but they’re really not interested in whether I do or not.
‘But couldn’t you have called to tell me what had happened? It seems the least you could do.’
‘I had your address in my address book, and I’d left it in the boat. I only knew you were in the Bourgogne somewhere, and no one around seemed to know your address.
‘By the way, do you have any insurance? I lost quite a bit of clothing along with my thesis and my typewriter.’
‘No, I don’t have insurance, I’d just bought the boat. You can look through the junk I’ve pulled out and dried off. They’re piled here on the bank or in the boat. It’s an awful mess, is all I can say. I didn’t see any typewriter, and if I did, I doubt very much it would ever work again. Everything was totally saturated with mud.’
‘Oh, well, that’s all right. I guess these things just happen. I’d better rush to work now.’
With that, she’s off, probably to some other foire in some other part of France. Maybe I should have told her why the boat sunk, about that damned powdered board, but I don’t think it would have meant anything to her anyway.
The Diaper Caper
It’s becoming clear we can never really stop the leak in the hold of the boat, at least not from inside. I’m becoming more and more desperate. Then, that week, an old friend and client for my paintings comes to Paris from California for a visit. He’s shocked at what he sees. Except for our family, and those wonderful Canadians, it’s the first real sympathy I feel. I tell him about my wild-ass, last-gasp solution to the leak problem. I’ve been lying in bed nights, trying to work my way out of this mess.
My friend, whose name is Arthur, manages and is in charge of research and development for a PCV-extruder plant in East Los Angeles. I ask if it would be possible to make a heavy-duty pool-type cover with grommets all around that I could then slip under the boat like a giant diaper. A huge smile wraps around his face under his thick wire-rim glasses when I tell him the idea. He admits it’s a fascinating and possible solution, only it would be expensive. I figured on that.
‘How much would it be, Arthur?’
I might as well know the worst. He looks at me, eyes twinkling, behind those milk-bottle glasses.
‘How about two of the best paintings you’ve done this year. I’ll let you choose. I don’t have much time – I need to be at a conference in Geneva tomorrow. How’s that for a deal?’
‘You’re on. I can’t thank you enough, Arthur. The only thing which permits me to accept this wonderful gift is I know the paintings will be worth more than the pool cover, the boat, and most of this river before we’re both dead.’
We measure all around, and Arthur writes it down in a small notebook.
‘I’ll even send it air freight. I have a special rate through the company. It should be here within two weeks. What color do you want, blue or green?’
‘Green to match the Seine.’
‘That water looks more black than green to me.’
‘OK,