
I'm taking a day off. It's a rainy day. We need the rain. Our yard is parched. Temperatures today are supposed to stay in the low 70s F.
So we spent the years between 1997 and 2003 working in Silicon Valley, living in San Francisco, and driving down to Salton City to see and stay with CHM and Frank several times a year. In 2002 I made the decision to quit my job and explore the possibility that we might be able to leave California and move to France. I needed to tell CHM that we would definitely not be buying his Paris apartment from him. We were planning to leave California as soon as possible and we'd need a place to live right away, not at some undefined time in the future.
In October 2002 we drove down to Salton City one more time. We didn't stay with CHM and Frank. We were camping on that trip, and we'd reserved a campsite a few miles west of Salton, near the town called Borrego Springs. We spent one night camping in Death Valley. In France, CHM had recommended a notaire (a government-licensed contracts lawyer) who he had dealt with earlier. I had temporary custody of CHM's keys to the Paris apartment. I went to see the notaire and arranged for him to send over one of his staff members to see the place. The notaire then recommended what price I should pay CHM. He still wanted a lifetime right to live in the place for at least part of the year.
We had realized that we wouldn't really able to afford a place in Paris comparable to our SF house. And since we planned to move to France with our dog Collette, it wouldn't be easy to live there and take walks with the dog. One thing the Paris apartment didn't have was a garage or parking space, and I wasn't sure I was ready to live without a car. I told Walt I was going to try to find a real estate agent who might be able to help us. I had quit my Silicon Valley job, so I had plenty of free time. I'd target the Loire Valley. We had recently spent two vacations there and liked the region. It was close enough to Paris and the airport. We still had to see what a property like the one we envisioned would actually cost.
I found an agent who said he'd be glad to help us find a house to buy. When I told CHM we were going to go house-hunting around Amboise, he had no choice but to accept the situation. He also said that we were making the biggest mistake of our lives by not buying his apartment. Time will tell, I told him. We hadn't yet put our SF house on the market. We started getting it ready to sell and we scheduled a trip to the Loire Valley in early December to work with the agent there. We viewed a total of 15 houses in four days, and we found one we liked.
To be continued...
In 1992, Walt and I decided to take a vacation and spend a couple of weeks in Paris, a trip that included a road trip in Normandy and Brittany. CHM, as it turned out, was planning a trip to Paris at the same time. An elderly couple, old friends of his parents, had been living in his Paris apartment — again, rent-free, he told me — for nearly a decade. They were preparing to move to a retirement home. CHM wanted to inspect the apartment.
As a result, CHM needed to stay in a hotel for his time in Paris. He booked a room at the hotel where Walt and I were staying, near the Jardin du Luxembourg on the Left Bank. We spent time with him. He had met Walt in DC back in the 1980s, but they didn't know each other well. That 1992 trip to Paris was when CHM learned that Walt and I had been living together for ten years, first in DC and then in California. I was afraid he might be shocked, but he wasn't. I didn't yet know about his partner Frank, who had been living in Salton City for years.
At the end of the summer, CHM and Frank would drive back to Salton City. Then CHM would fly back to DC and go back to work. Often, they would visit us and Frank's daughter in Silicon Valley. In 1995, Walt and I bought a house in San Francisco. Neither one of us wanted to live in Silicon Valley any more, even though we both continued working down there. CHM started flying to San Francisco every summer, staying with us for a few days and then flying down to Palm Springs to meet up with Frank and do their drive across the U.S.
The Paris apartment stayed empty from some point in the 1990s until the spring of 1999. We had stayed in touch with CHM all through the '90s. We had moved to Silicon Valley in 1992 and we saw CHM and Frank every summer during that time when they came to see Frank's daughter. We went to see CHM in southern California (Salton City) for the first time in 1997. I didn't know what to expect. Two old desert rats, you know. I didn't start taking a lot of photos until I got my first digital camera. It was a 1998 Christmas present from Walt and Charles-Henry.
To be continued...
I am not at all sure when it was that CHM took possession of the apartment where he had grown up. It must have been in the 1960s. I remember that he told me he had had his parents' apartment divided into two smaller apartments by having an interior wall built. He sold one half of the apartment and kept the other half for himself. The half that he kept had been his father's medical office. He had bathroom fixtures put in and I guess he had the kitchen fitted too. Then he decided to move to the U.S. in 1969. I think he had been there only once before, in 1948.
He settled in Washington DC because he had French friends there. One of them had a house in the village called Carteret in Normandy that I had visited. He stayed with them for a while, I think, and then he met his friend/partner Frank and moved in with him. Some years later Frank moved to southern California (for health reasons). Other members of his family were living out there. CHM bought Frank's house in Arlington VA from him at that point.
During all that time, CHM let people live in his Paris apartment rent-free, if I remember correctly and if he was telling me the truth. Sometimes he didn't tell the truth about such things, I've learned. He didn't like to be asked what he called personal questions. The Paris apartment was getting run down because the people who lived there for free didn't maintain the place, and they certainly didn't improve it.
In fact, the first couple who lived there for a few years did a lot of damage to the place, CHM said. CHM returned to Paris for a visit in 1979 for the first time since he had moved to the U.S. in 1969, he told me, and asked that couple to move out. I met CHM in 1982, when I returned to the U.S. after three years of living in Paris. I applied for a job as a translator at USIA and he was one of the people who evaluated the translation that was part of the test. He called me and offered me a job.
I went to work with him in January 1983. We produced the French version of a magazine that was distributed in French-speaking Africa. Because the magazine was consistently weeks and then months behind schedule. CHM was a perfectionist who had a hard time signing off on the final versions of the articles we were editing. He always wanted to make more changes to the text.
Because he kept telling the managers of the government agency who were in charge that the reason he couldn't stay on schedule was because he couldn't find good English-to-French translators in DC, they made the decision to transfer the work to the U.S. embassy in Paris. I quickly found a position as a writer and editor in another department of the organization we worked for. CHM was eventually transferred to that service as well, but he was no longer my supervisor. In 1986, Walt and I quit our jobs in DC moved to California, for various reasons.
To be continued...One of the late CHM's Paris apartment's most attractive features is that it has a back yard. It's a small back yard, but still, a back yard in Paris! That's pretty much unheard of. The apartment also has very large windows from which you can see the yard, and the big grassy courtyard beyond it that is part of the property of the Lycée Buffon. The apartment's windows face south, so there's plenty of light.
The apartment itself features what CHM called un rez-de-chaussée surélevé. The rez-de-chaussée is the street-level floor of a building. In this case, the "street level" is slightly above ground level. That means that there's what I've heard called an English basement in the U.S., which has windows at ceiling height that let in daylight. When Walt and I thought about buying the apartment from CHM, we thought the basement would be the perfect place to convert into a master bedroom and bathroom. CHM used it just as storage space.
With the bedroom down in the basement and the main living level of the apartment directly overhead, you wouldn't have to worry about neighbor noise from above. CHM was fairly deaf toward the end of his life, so he couldn't hear the people walking on the floor above his living/dining area. But I could when I was there. There were children upstairs who must have been riding tricycles around in their apartment. They made a lot of noise.
With the basement that is only partially underground, you walk up just six or seven steps to get to the apartment's front door. There is an elevator to take you up to the five or six floors above. In addition to the basement, CHM said, there are two caves where you can age wine or keep other things you might want to store.
The size of the living/dining area is about 25 feet by 12 feet, I think, or maybe a little bigger. The kitchen is tiny but could be turned into a WC (a half-bath with toilet and sink). The bathroom is small, but it could be converted into a small kitchen. The bedroom on the main level, where CHM slept, is small, but about the size of the bedrooms on the main level in our Saint-Aignan house; say 10 x 12. I never got a chance to measure or estimate the size of the basement, but it must have been about the same size as the main level. I also don't know about ceiling height.
There are windows on the side of the apartment that faces the courtyard. CHM had them covered in white plastic (I think) sheeting that let in a lot of light but kept the bathroom and bedroom private. I have some pictures of the courtyard and more pictures of the interior of the apartment, but I'm having a hard time finding them in my photo database. More tomorrow...