My Grape Escape (24 page)

Now that the weather had turned warm I had begun to sand the shutters down in the courtyard. I went back down, plugged in the electric sander and ran it over the peeling white paint of one side of the shutters. When I was done I went back inside to get a glass of water from the kitchen.

I watched as Antoine slipped the new window in the hole made by the old one and anchored it with several little wedges of paper.

I whistled. “You measured that perfectly. I’d never be able to do that.”

“You would if you did it all day long, every day.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Paying attention to detail actually hurt my brain. This was probably why pouring over obscure contract clauses during my law degree had felt akin to being stretched on the rack.

“Do you like doing it?” I asked.

“Doing what?”

“Installing windows.”

He shrugged. “I have to earn money somehow. How else can I buy nice wine and antiques and go out to restaurants? There are a lot of more unpleasant ways to earn money. ”

I took a sip of my water. I had always been brought up believing that people
were
their career. They
were
a doctor, or a lawyer, or a real estate agent. In North America, one of the first questions you asked upon meeting someone was
,
“what do you do?” Of course, what you were really asking was
,
“what are you?”

Yet here was Antoine, clearly an expert on installing windows but also an expert of so many other things
,
given our myriad
of
conversations about French literature and antique furniture and his favourite wines. Installing windows was something he merely did, not who he was.

Maybe I too should just look for a way to earn money that I didn’t hate, and which would finance my other pursuits, like sanding shutters and rescuing ancient door hinges.

The little whistle on the pressure cooker began to turn in lazy circles and a delicious honeyed smell filled the kitchen.

“Who…” I started to ask.

“I’m cooking us a
rôti de porc au pruneaux,
” Antoine said. A filet of pork with prunes. Yum. “It will be ready at noon. While you’re down there sanding, could you grab us a bottle of wine to go with it? One of Claire’s
Côte de Nuits
should do nicely. Your window should be installed by the time we uncork the bottle.”

It was while we were still mopping up the succulent sauce of Antoine’s
roti
that Momo brought by his employee who would be installing our new radiators. Gégé had been invited to join us for lunch, despite the fact that Antoine still resented him for suggesting he work with inferior materials. This did not seem to hinder Gégé’s enjoyment of Antoine’s cooking in the slightest. He made grunts of pleasure as he chewed his last sauce-soaked piece of baguette.

Momo let himself into the kitchen, trailed by a mammoth man with an untamed forest of hair on his head and a thicket of a beard. Momo, who stood about five-foot four and was as sinewy as they come, looked as though he could easily be squeezed up into a ball and lobbed out the window by his employee.

“I’ve brought you your electrician.” Momo helped himself to a glass of coffee. He waved in the giant’s direction. “Meet Tintin.”

“Don’t you sit down and eat a proper lunch?” Antoine demanded of the two arrivals without even saying
bonjour
. “We haven’t even begun our cheese course yet.”

“No,” Momo said. Tintin didn’t answer, but glanced at our food and then back at Momo resentfully.

Tintin couldn’t possibly be his real name unless his parents were completely deranged. Tintin was a comic book hero that French children were weaned on. Our Tintin had virtually no physical similarities with the eternally boyish hero with the blond duckbill of hair of Hergé’s comic books. Franck, Antoine and Gégé were all casting sideways glances at our new electrician, surely wondering, like me, how he had earned his sobriquet but asking him directly didn’t seem like the smartest idea.

“Would you like a coffee, Tintin?” Franck ventured.

“
Non
,” Tintin grunted. “Where are the radiators?”

“A charmer, isn’t he?” Momo laughed and slapped Tintin on his hulking back. “He is probably the stupidest of my guys but he was the only one available.
Salut
!” On this parting note, Momo set down his espresso cup and left.

Antoine widened his eyes at me. Had Momo been joking about Tintin being a bad electrician? I didn’t know Momo that well. Surely he wouldn’t foist his worst electrician on us.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit down with us and have something to eat or drink?” Franck asked again. Tintin cast us a baleful look with flat black eyes that reminded me of a shark.

“No. Momo wants me to start. Where are the radiators?” Franck had no choice but to push back from the table and lead him down to the cellar where the radiators were stored in their boxes.

“What do you think?” Gégé said when they were well out of earshot. “Do you think he’s really here to install the radiators or to murder one of us?”

Antoine considered this. “Maybe he’s here to murder all of us.”

“I’m not sure about Tintin.” I got up and started putting together the cheese plate. “But if Momo really sent us his worst electrician
,
I will definitely murder
him
.”

Tintin began working in the front bedroom. There was a tension in the air while he was under the same roof as the rest of us. The few times he spared a glance for one of us on his way outside to smoke a cigarette he looked as though he was contemplating how to dispose of our bodies.

Finally, around six-thirty, he walked out a final time with all his tools.

“
Au revoir
Tintin,” Franck called after him. “See you tomorrow!” Tintin grunted.

I ran to the kitchen window and watched as he got in his rusty red car and sped off. “He’s gone!”

Franck, Antoine, and Gégé joined me in the front bedroom to inspect Tintin’s handiwork.

“
Merde alors
,” muttered Franck. Not only had Tintin made a mess of Franck’s beautifully plastered and sanded stretch of wall under the window, but instead of centering our expensive rectangular flat radiator in the space below the window he had placed it a mere centimetre or so from the floor itself.

Antoine flushed scarlet. “What is this pig’s work!?” He bent down and stuck his finger in the huge cut Tintin had made in the plaster and blew out an angry puff of air. “He has installed it this way because he is a lazy bastard who does not want to re-plaster any more than necessary.”

“Are
you
going to tell him that?” Gégé asked Antoine.

Antoine sniffed and stood up. “That is not my place. I am not the homeowner.” He cast Franck a loaded glance.

The next morning Tintin arrived at seven thirty and stalked back to the front bedroom without so much as a
bonjour
to the rest of us.

Gégé gave Franck a pat on the back and we all huddled in the kitchen and listened for sounds of carnage as Franck went to talk to Tintin about repositioning the radiator. After what seemed like a very long time Franck came back to us.

“You’re still alive!” Gégé said.

Franck shushed him.

“What happened?”  Antoine asked. “Did you tell him he worked like a pig?”

Franck rolled his eyes. “Ah. . . .
non
. I put it a little more diplomatically that that. I asked if it would be possible to put the radiator higher up, as I was worried about it being kicked so close to the floor.”

I got up and gave Franck a hug for his bravery. “And?” I said. “How did he take it?”

“He wasn’t very happy, but I think he’ll do it. We’ll see.”

We had no choice but to go on with our respective work. We all stayed away from Tintin and the bedrooms. I began to prime the first pair of sanded shutters outside. Swallows chirped and the tractors trundled past on their way out to the vineyards. Winter had vacated the premises and the sunshine warming my hair made me feel as though anything was possible.

Tintin’s presence was menacing but it united the rest of us. Franck and I stopped arguing about whether the walls were ready to paint or not, and even Gégé and Antoine stopped pushing each other’s buttons. Most of the time anyway.

Tintin clearly didn’t want to be installing the radiators at our house. I didn’t take this personally, as my instinct told me that he didn’t want to be installing radiators in anybody’s house. He felt no compunction to even pretend that he was happy with the circumstances. His disgust for his job and us was unnerving but I had to admire its honesty.

I dipped my brush in the paint pot again, and brushed the shutter on the sawhorse in front of me.

The last two years during law school I had pretended to be happy out of a sense of obligation to others. It never even occurred to me that I had a choice in the matter. It would have been immensely satisfying to stalk into one of my tutorials and respond to my tutors with grunts,
á la
Tintin.

Happy might be a big word for how I felt now – of course, I was exhausted and stressed about not getting everything finished – but there was a sense of satisfaction in transforming this dump of a house into something charming and, dare I say it, beautiful. Moreover, working alongside Gégé and Antoine and Franck meant that I was never alone with the daily triumphs and worries. I had always considered myself to be someone who preferred flying solo in my work but now I wasn’t so sure.

I fell even deeper into the meditative act of painting and lost track of time until Tintin stalked out of the house with his jacket on, presumably to go to lunch.

“
Bon appétit
!” I said as he passed. He didn’t even turn around.

Gégé sprung out the veranda door a few moments later as I was inspecting my shutters for errant bugs stuck in the paint. “You have to see this!”

I followed him into the house, then to the green bedroom where both Antoine and Franck were standing in front of the newly moved radiator, their faces a study of consternation.

“Is it possible that Tintin doesn’t understand what the word “centered” means?” Antoine asked the room. The radiator was now installed so high up that it was no longer possible to open Antoine’s newly installed window above.

“Momo wasn’t lying.” I ground my teeth. “Tintin really is his worst electrician.
Salaud
.”

This was a huge waste of time. We needed to get the radiators installed so I could begin painting. Six rooms - each with at least one coat of primer and two coats of paint - that was a lot of painting to do in only three weeks.

“At least there is no risk now that somebody will kick it by accident,” Gégé pointed out. “You have to give him some credit for that.”

Franck maintained a stony silence that we all respected. After all, Franck would have to be the one to ask Tintin to reposition the radiator for a third time.

“There’s nothing further we can do right now,” Antoine declared at last. “Let’s have lunch.”

Between my shutter painting steps I had prepared us steaks in delectable red wine sauce that was bubbling away on the stove. We devoured them while debating the best way to approach Tintin.

“Pay him compliments,” I suggested.