Of Plumbers and Falling Water

There was absolutely nothing wrong with him—he was perfect in all respects: he did his work efficiently, he was pleasant, he was completely fluent in one language, and then (after some significant chatting) he went away. What more could anyone want from a plumber?

Well, he never showed up.

At least, that’s how I figured it, since he didn’t arrive on Friday, promised to come on Saturday but couldn’t, was off doing something else on Monday, and—in theory—spent two hours looking for parking in Old San Juan on Wednesday. Oh, and another day? Well, it was raining—and we all know how plumbers feel about water!

So we didn’t have a sink but a slop bucket, and guess who got to lug that all the way down the hall to the bathroom? Well, my right arm now could be mistaken for Schwarzenegger’s, and I’m walking with a pronounced list to the right, as well, but no worries! Hasn’t changed my politics!

So I called the company yesterday, and they assured me that they were panting, almost drooling to do business with me, but the parking in Old San Juan. Impossible, as we all know, since it’s never good and especially now, since it’s Christmas. And did I mention that a couple of days ago, there were three huge cruise ships in the harbor, and so the streets and especially the sidewalks were clogged with tourists, all of them very much on vacation time, which meant that they tended to move at half anyone’s normal pace for ten feet, and then stop, to call out hellos to other people they knew from the cruise. And since two of them were Carnival cruises, the tourists tended to be….

Has anybody every written about classicism and cruise lines? Because anybody in Old San Juan will tell you: you don’t have to run down to the harbor, a simple look outside on the sidewalk will tell you. If you see silver-haired, white, trim, sixty-year old guys wearing the latest in Polo and accompanied by a slender, beautiful, thirty year old blond woman, you’ll know that the Silver Spirit is in town. And their website? It’s so exclusive that they decline to allow me to download a picture of their cruise ship so that I can upload it to you. They did permit me, however, to copy the paragraph describing their best accommodation. Enjoy!

The name Owners Suite says it all. A stylish apartment. Prestigious and classic. For those whose standards are higher than most on a cruise.  Available as a one-bedroom configuration or as two-bedrooms (as illustrated) by adjoining with a Vista Suite.

Naturally, this doesn’t come cheap for “those whose standards….” So what’s the tab? Well, I really can’t tell you, because unlike any other website, they decline to dirty themselves with electronic pricing. Instead, they ask you to provide contact information, and assure you that a “representative” will call you in the next business day. That gives them time—presumably—to look you up on Forbes 500 richest list.

OK—that’s Silver Spirit. What about Carnival? It’s the exact opposite.

So anybody can see that my plumber and his company were completely justified in declining to come to San Juan unless…

“Yes,” I asked.

I provided parking.

OK—it was a day when my behavior was a bit more tropical than Nordic. Or was it that I was speaking Spanish? Because I hit the roof.

“Look,” I said, “we’ve been using you guys for twenty years, and never once have we had to provide parking. Nobody in San Juan provides parking! There’s no city in the world…”

So this morning, I was waiting for Juan, and fiddling around on my computer, since any serious writing was impossible, because what if Juan came as the muse was crooning in my ear? What would she do, if I told her that a mere plumber was of greater interest to me than she? Would she desert me for the guy at the next table? Would she ever come back?

So Juan called just as I was absorbing the interesting fact that…well, here it is: in 1928, Edgar made the first direct Pittsburgh to Paris telephone call to enquire about a designer dress.

Edgar being E. J. Kaufmann, the guy who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Fall Water. Right—always good to know about the first direct call from Pittsburgh to Paris—but Juan’s call, when it came, was a trifle more interesting. And guess what! He was here, but he couldn’t find…parking!

I sputtered, I fumed, I provided the list of three parking lots that could accommodate a pickup truck, I spoke so loudly that I woke up Taí, who came out of a profound sleep to enquire whether there was a bull fight going on. Then I went back to reading about Falling Water—and did you know that Mrs. Kaufmann could read in three languages: English, French and German? Wow—that’s class.

So I was making coffee—not that my stomach needed it, since it was rough seas down there, but just because it was the one thing I could do—when Juan arrived. Taí and I instantly got down to our knees and kissed his feet and hands, since the Stockholm Effect had taken hold, and we begged him to grace our kitchen. Oh, and we gave him coffee.

Well, this company has the interesting habit—though lucrative, for some—of coming (after repeated pleas and promises) fixing something, and then breaking something! Quite a business model—since the last time, Freddy the plumber broke two very beautiful and quite expensive faucet handles, and then pointed out that it was a very good thing, since who would want things so difficult to replace? So now we’re wonderfully happy with Home Depot’s cheapest, and Freddy was good enough to take away the remaining two pristine—and stupidly expensive—handles! Now that’s service!

So Juan had come, fixed the clog, and then broke the canasta of the sink—though it was probably our fault, since we had used Drano—horrors!—and that might have made the plastic brittle. So there he was, after having tested our love and devotion over the past week to see if we really wanted him.

Right—so then it was the work of ten minutes to fix the problem, after which I took Juan firmly be the hand and lead him to the morning room, where he could do no further damage. Juan then told me the entire history of his life, as well as the complete chronology of interesting events in his hometown, and I now can tell you that I know more about Juan than I do about Mr. and Mrs. Kaufmann. So I paid him a hundred buck—no charge for the history!—and went off to the café, where I discovered…

…toilet’s broken!     

   

The Didion Moment, Revealed

Let me tell you about a blog: it’s just like a conversation. How? Well, you start off meaning to talk about one thing, and end up talking about another.

You legions of Alert Readers out there will remember yesterday’s opening sentence, in which I said it had been a Didion moment. And then I went on to talk about Montalvo and his utterly exemplary behavior—he could have taught a course or two at Miss Porter’s Finishing School, or whatever it’s called—and the French pronunciation of the word oeuvre, and then….well, all those things you need to know.

And had I ever revealed the Didion moment? Of course not, since I was actively engaged in waiting for the plumber, who is reportedly en camino, which is “on the way” but literally “on the path,” and is it just me who feels it sounds so much better? Mystical, a soul forging his way to its destination.

So the plumber is on the way—presumably from Indochina—and I have sat down to write this, only to be interrupted by Mr. Fernández, who had spent all day in bed, with his entire body hurting, especially his head.

“Did I fall or something?”

It’s probable, since it didn’t take too much exertion of the famous grey cells to put it together. What’s “it?”

·      An ashtray next to the green resin chair had been overturned

·      Cigar butts everywhere

·      Four bottles of wine the night before, after which I had retired, leaving Taí and the gentleman to start in on the scotch

·      The gentlemen, rather, since Taí had wisely switched to beer

So we have a probably traumatized Mr. Fernández, now looking at “his boys” on the Internet, and we have a plumber who is on his way, but is it his way or my way? Since it is pouring in Puerto Rico, that means that everyone will have to get home to avoid be incommunicated—works in Spanish, computer!—but really to lie in bed and drink soup, since that’s what everybody does. See!

So will I ever get around to telling you about that Didion moment?

It started by Taí venting her rage at the Muslim extremists—or rather, extremist—in Sydney, Australia, who had gone into the chocolate shop and held hostages for sixteen hours or so, eventually killing two people. Right, so that was news for Montalvo, even though most of the rest of the world had been following the story  more or less constantly.

“It’s just ridiculous that a guy can barge into a café, demand that patrons recite verses from the Koran, and then kill anybody who can’t do that,” said Taí.

Montalvo’s reaction?

Well, it was on the lines of “some fucked-up dude,” but what wasn’t there? Any interest whatsoever in the matter, much less moral indignation. Right—he’s 21, time to bring the matter home.

“OK—you’re in the Poet’s Passage, and some guy comes in with a gun, and shouts ‘everybody line up’ and then he’s got the gun on your face and he’s demanding that you recite Romans 22:13.’”

This Montalvo sort of gets, but will it ever happen? Of course not, so he goes on his way, mentally speaking. I consider pointing out that there are 3,000 Muslims in Puerto Rico, as well as eight mosques, but then I realize, does it matter? Because it’s not the number of Muslims or the mosques we have to worry about, but rather that one guy with too much time on his hands who gets militarized in front of his computer.

“And why isn’t the rest of the Muslim world speaking out…” when we hear a pop.

“What was that?” I asked. Nobody knew but Montalvo: it had been a shot.

“Oh my goodness,” said Taí, standing up. “Where did it come from?”

Both Raf and Montalvo thought it came from the east, and was quite close. Taí moves into the library.

“What are you doing?” said Montalvo. “You’re not calling 911, are you?”

He was incredulous.

“I mean, look, this is Old San Juan. Hundreds of people heard that shot. There are cops all over the place: they’re probably running like crazy motherfucks to get to the scene.”

Right, so then it was time to jump back half a century to Kitty Genovese, who got stabbed to death—as seen by umpteen people, all of whom assumed that someone else was calling the police. So I’m attempting to get to that teaching moment, when Taí comes back with the question: what kind of a gun was it?

“It was an 9 millimeter,” said Montalvo, “and it was a block away, probably in front of…” He named a restaurant or bar, which I had walked past a million times, but knew nothing about.

“It’s about leadership,” I said—all that time at Walmart must have had some effect after all. “Most people stand around and wait for somebody to do something. Or they wait for somebody to tell them what to do. But…”

Here the telephone rings.

“They’re calling back,” said Montalvo.

“But she didn’t give our number…” I said.

Dear Readers, some looks can scald as badly as boiling oil….

Well, we had invited him over to see him, but also—truth comes out!—to figure him out, since Taí—fiercely protective—had not been impressed with him, on her last visit. And a friend had taken me aside, and said, “there are some people for whom the con is a way of life.” So were we that stalest item, the liberal do-gooding couple? Was this kid playing us for free food, attention and—when needed—bail?

That’s when it hit me: the Didion moment. This kid grew up where people didn’t call the police. This kid grew up expecting that the police, when they came, would be unannounced and uninvited, and not there to do anybody’s bidding but their own. This kid knew stuff that we had no idea about—such as when a sound is in fact a shot, and what pistol had fired it. Nor had he reacted in any way when he had heard it.

This kid’s world? It’s his neighborhood—not Sydney or Pakistan, or any other place where extremists have attacked this week. To worry about the rise of Muslim extremism is—to Montalvo—a pleasant worry to have. He worries about whether his mother can pay the rent, and whether he can help her when she is—as she recently was—hospitalized.

Do I have the answer to the question: is this kid playing us?

No.

Worse—now I don’t know if that’s the right question….

          

Montalvo Meets Walcott

Well, it was a Joan Didion moment, or would have been if I were Joan Didion, or could even halfway approximate the skill with which Didion would have analyzed the setting, considered the antecedents, and then scrupulously scalpelled—I KNOW, computer, but it should be a word—the incident until it revealed precisely (a favorite Didion word) whatever it was she wanted to reveal.

So we were at the table, Raf and I, joined by Taí and Montalvo, since we had called him to tell him about Kitty’s death, and then to invite him to dinner. And however wrong it seems to serve up the news of Kitty’s death in an adverbial clause, trust me—we hadn’t taken it lightly.

We had taken Kitty to the veterinarian on Wednesday; on Thursday he was doing much better. But on Friday morning, the vet called to say that Kitty had a blood clot in his brain, and was showing neurological symptoms. When I saw him on Friday afternoon, it was clear: Kitty was suffering and no longer the cat we knew.

I wrote a poem about it, since there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I could write, and since I had been strong for Raf over the weekend, and now had the time to collapse on Monday. So we were talking about the poem, which went as follows:

                                Grief

The problem? Somebody decided it was time

To sandblast my heart, the fucker,

And so the stains of love, of nurture, of life itself

Have to be scoured away.

It will be a gray, gritty sludge that will drip from the attacked walls

Even as my heart still beats

Though at this point, well,

Is there a point?

The same committee sent someone off to find more

Hydrochloric acid to pressure-pump into my churning stomach,

Which has decided that food is no longer a necessity,

Since will anything again ever nurture me?

The chairman of the committee?

Well, they called him up on emergency duty,

Since there are now three shifts, the most active being

Of course! The night shift….

So I am there where he is not, alone in a dark apartment,

Looking at light outside that not again

Will come inside, despite the lamps that will get turned on

Only to light up nothing.

I only wonder, what manner of beast would chose this work,

What past traumas had left sullen purple keloids on every nerve,

What cataracts had so blinded their eyes

That even light was a distant memory, or perhaps forgotten?

They are the termites of the soul, these mites who man the hoses,

Who scour off both the stains and the patina,

Until the bleeding, beating heart is scraped of everything,

Until nothing is left but memory.

Well, it’s not much of a poem, but then, I’m not much of a poet. So we were talking about a man who is very much of a poet, Derek Walcott, who was born in St. Lucia and trained as a painter, which presumably is how the brother of a friend of Taí’s became friends with him. (Just parenthetically, though come to think of it, this is parenthetically, shouldn’t there be a word for “the friend of a friend?” How many times have you had to say that? I propose cousinfriend.) And Montalvo had never heard of him, though Walcott had won the Nobel Prize, for which Montalvo has the speech if not yet the book, or even the oeuvre, a word which came to my mind, since I had just read that the Nobel Committee had said that Walcott had “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

Well, an oeuvre seems like a totally cool thing to have, especially if some committee decides to give me a prize. But then I wondered, does having written over 700 blog posts count? Didn’t seem likely, so I went over to ask Lady, who definitely has an oeuvre, since the poems are hanging all over the walls, and what could be more evident—or oeurvent—than that?

So Lady doesn’t know the word oeuvre, but Nico does, since he’s French and therefore can even tell us how to pronounce it: “it’s just like the sound you make when you vomit—oeuvre (that italics being the best I can do to sound like a Frenchman on the computer….)

So Lady hears the story of Walcott and Montalvo, and goes on to tell me that she met Walcott, years before he won the Nobel, and what was Walcott doing? Being a bum on the beach.

“So we talked for a long time, and then he asked if he could come and take a shower at my house. So I took him home, and my mother talked to him for a while, and then she let him take a shower….”

See? Lady’s updated the old English saying: always be nice to the girls, because you never know whom they might marry. Or in this case, win the Nobel prize….

Then Lady goes on to say: she had texted Montalvo that he owed her an apology, and he had texted back: don’t hold your breath. Not a very inventive response for a poet….

“So he’s all yours now; I’m watching from a distance. I’ve done it for a lot more years than you….”

What had happened? Lady, ever trying to work Montalvo back into the Passage—that’s the Poet’s Passage, in case you thought that first phrase was vaguely obscene—had hired Montalvo to work at a private party. What had happened?

“I need to see you right now, because I’m having a nervous breakdown….”

That’s what Lady had said to me the day after the party, the entertainment—ok, the show—of which had been Montalvo, and nobody had been amused. In fact, Lady had spent four hours crying afterwards, and had thought to call me at four in the morning.

Montalvo’s story? He, surrounded by perfidious and jaundiced eyes, had been slandered!! Fresh snow looked like 42d Street in its luridest days next to Montalvo!

“So I’m done with him,” says Lady, and then goes on to ask, why had we been talking about Walcott?

“Well,” I tell her, and that’s when…

…the gun went off. 

 

   

Open Arms for the Dalai Lama

I want to say this in ringing tones—nay, I want to declare this as fiercely, as ardently, as passionately as did the Christian martyrs, avowing their faith even as the crowd jeered at them, hissed at them, spat upon them, and even as the lions raged towards them, their open mouths lusting for blood!

I stand ready at any time, at any moment, to meet the Dalai Lama!

Nor am I alone in this courageous stance, since I have just gone to check in with Lady, who was taking a moment’s respite from redesigning the storefront’s window, since it’s Christmas time, and the original design nobody liked.

“Hey, would you meet the Dalai Lama?”

“Sure….”

We are, you see, unhampered, unfettered by fear and pusillanimity, undaunted by the economic might of China, even though we stand as the merest motes of dust as compared to that country. And in my case, at least, I’m a considerably diminished mote, since I seem to be battling everything, and guess what? Everything is winning.

I have a crazy Spaniard, for example. The owner of the floor below us, he makes a pretty penny—actually, it should be a luscious penny—renting the space to a shoe store, part of a chain, whose headquarters is in Omaha. So every time there is a problem? Omaha writes to him, and that’s a problem, since his English is rudimentary. So he calls the store, and then he calls Raf, and whom does Raf call?

“You have to go home right away, since the plumber is there, and it’s major, and they think it’s coming from above.”

“Oh, and call García and tell him you’re there.”

García being the Spaniard….

OK—go home, after first telling the manager of the store that I am home, and that the gate to the foyer is open. Oh, and where is the plumber?

“On the way….”

A plumber on the way comes as often as Santa Claus in July, so why is my day being disrupted?

Right—so what should have been a morning spent writing now becomes a day waiting for the plumber, so what to do? I decide to clean the dining room, which means washing an polishing two large buffets, two china cabinets, two small tables, eight chairs, the table itself and what can only be described as The Old Curiosity Shop’s entire inventory of bric-a-brac.

The plumber, a charmer, comes at five PM, which means that I had to cancel my class at the island’s largest bank—a client I would like to keep happy. But he does what he does in fifteen minutes, and tells me that it’s completely dry downstairs—just some old water stains, nothing emergent, now cascading torrents of brownish water—as had been described by the manager via Omaha via García via Mr. Fernández. So I pay 135 bucks and send Juan on his way.

Oh, but there is a problem, since Juan discovered that part of the sink is broken. So water was in fact spewing over our kitchen floor. And does Juan have the part? Of course not, so he will come back “tomorrow afternoon.” Given that today is Friday, that “tomorrow afternoon?” Next Tuesday, at the earliest. Still, I gave the plumber my number, and promised to have my cell phone next to me at all times, residing perpetually in my peripheral vision.

So I was grouchy this morning, since I hate it when a cat is at the vet, partly because Mr. Fernández really hates it, and that makes us both cranky. So I had just told him that I didn’t know if I was going to buy the damn turkey that his mother wants him to cook for Sunday supper, since we are celebrating the arrival of a sister.

“I’m having my coffee in peace and quiet and I’ll let you know about the damn turkey,” I told him. So he goes off to work and then is shouting at me from downstairs. Why? There’s a note from García saying the plumber is on his way!

Yeah? The same plumber who has my number and was gonna come in the afternoon? Then I get it—García wants to put me under house arrest, so that I can open the door to any putative worker who might need to show up.

So I break the world’s record for the highest ratio of swear to non-swear words in my response to Mr. Fernández, and then I go to the café, since that was the deal, and no—I’m not gonna spend another day waiting for the plumber, who makes Godot look like the soul of punctuality itself.

So there I am, and the phone rings and I conscientiously try to answer it, but guess what? I’d forgotten that while I can make calls on my wonderful new phone, I can’t for the life of me receive calls, so that means I have to call back one of Rafael’s sisters. And what happens?

There are people, Gentle Readers, whose voice can induce an insurrection, and is it her fault that she has one? Nor is it her fault that I am engaged in an insane transaction with…well, who? That, at least, is my problem, since I know that I bought an apartment as an investment but also as a place for a caregiver to live. And there’s a wonderful caretaker—the apartment is right next to the parents’ apartment—and everything is fine. Except the electric bill is too high, and maybe we should find a caretaker who would consume less electricity. Whatever happened to the romance of candlelight?

So now that’s a problem, but the other problem is that my brother, a lawyer, pointed out that—however logical this whole deal may seem to minds swept by gentle Caribbean breezes—it’s a little half-cocked. Who, for example, am I renting to, if anyone at all? And if the caretaker gets hit by a falling kitchen cabinet—John had a case just last week of that—well then, do I get sued?

So now I have a day with an impending plumber, a turkey that needs to be bought, an entire house that needs to be cleaned, and a stomach that is raging because I forgot to buy my medicine—as I always do, and then remember when guess what? You got it.

So I completely go off on my sister-in-law, who only wants to know if I have a charger for the MacBook Pro, since hers is broke and it costs about 90 bucks at Best Buy—oh, and it’s not just the charger who is broke.

Well, Robertson Davies once said that the person you have become is just as true as the person you were—all those years ago before you became the reigning diva of the Metropolitan opera, and began speaking of your pied-a-terre in Paris. So what does that mean? It means that a six feet three gringo is screaming, telling sis that this family has got to come up with a plan for their aging parents and I cannot be getting calls from six siblings and two parents all asking, demanding, pleading for things that have to be done right away. Remember that plumber? So of course I behave completely irrationally, and tell her that I AM NOT coming to any family gatherings this year, or until everybody gets their act together. Is this reasonable? No. Did I ever say it was?

No.    

So now it’s time to go talk to Lady, and get her to call me, so I can do Telephony 101—how to receive calls. And Lady, as she always does, has the answer. You don’t press the little green telephone, but instead swipe it, towards the little red telephone. Oh, and if you don’t want to take the call, you swipe the red telephone….

So now I’m totally annoyed with everybody, and what has to happen? I have to worry myself again about the Vatican, since it appears that the pope may not meet the Dalai Lama, for fear of offending China. Here’s The New York Times on the subject:

The action provoked a boycott by other Nobel laureates. Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, the South African winner of the 1984 prize for his battle against apartheid, responded to Mr. Zuma’s action by saying he was “ashamed to call this lickspittle bunch my government.”

And what had the “lickspittle”—first good thing to happen in my day, thanks!—bunch done? Denied the dear old Dalai a visa to attend the Nobel laureates convention!

Lady drifts by, and I have to make sure.

“You’re not gonna renege on the Dalai Lama, are you?”

Lady is wise beyond her years: she knows when it’s better not to ask.

“Nope,” and goes off to find some Christmas ornaments for the front window.

Oh, and if the Dalai Lama wants to come on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve?

I’m available!