Living in a Foreign Language Read Online Free Page A

we attended lectures by various experts who talked about what men want as opposed to what women want. And we took courses on sex. On sex, about sex and all around sex. And I must say it came as a surprise to me how much there was to learn on that subject.
    This was all going along wonderfully until one afternoon, at the checkout counter of the Mill Valley Market, the cashier asked me to sign something. I looked down and it was the front page of some tabloid with the headline,
“L.A. Law
Stars in Kinky Sex Cult.” Which was, by the way, incorrect in all aspects—in that we hadn’t been stars for a while, our sex life had no noticeable kinks and the only group we had joined in all the years of our marriage was the Automobile Club of Northern California.
    It seems, though, that we had talked too much. We had come off like missionaries, bringing the couples of the world to a higher plane—you can imagine how boring we were. We lost some friends. The jobs dwindled. We became fringe people, which was okay except when we saw someone we knew in a movie or on TV playing a role that we’d have been good in. That still irked.
    Money became an issue. We were still living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, without earning any income to speak of. The pressure of our dwindling bank balance started to undermine our little paradise. So I decided to get an appraisal on our house in Big Sur. This was our getaway place, our dream house, perched on a ridge between the mountains and the sea that we built when the TV money was flowing likewater. I had to approach Jill carefully about this idea, because she had often said in moments of great tenderness that we would grow old together in that house. I was concerned that we would just grow poor. It wasn’t that Big Sur cost us that much out of pocket—we had built it for cash—but after the appraisal it was clear that it was worth too much for us not to sell it.
    â€œHome” is a funny word; it means different things to different people. Jill grew up an only child; her dad’s business required the family to move every year, so she was perennially the new kid in school. She grew up to become a nester with a vengeance—ostensibly for her kids, but for her own peace of mind as well. For Jill, home is a cause.
    I, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get away from my roots—nice people and all, but I was more interested in seeing the world, checking out how the gentiles lived. And whereas Jill and I had had a series of homes over the last thirty years, I’d never thought twice about selling one in order to move on to the next. For me, home was a base for the next adventure. This was always an area of tension between us, and when I sold the Big Sur house, thinking to put us in good financial shape, I broke her heart.
    Then when Max, our youngest, got ready to leave for college, our different philosophies of mothering and fathering came into conflict as well. Jill was feeling extremely umbilical about the whole thing. Not that I was blasé, mind you—I would miss Max enormously. But I thought of his going off to college more as a celebration. He had gotten into his first-choice school, he was pursuing his dream of a career in music, he felt confident in himself, he was sure of his path. As a dad, I felt, frankly, successful—not an emotion I’d experienced in this area all that often. But for Jill,his departure was a wrenching loss, the fatal final curtain on a role she’d been playing with total commitment and steely determination for thirty-three years. So, while I was chilling the bottle of champagne to celebrate our incipient liberation, Jill was quietly gearing up to play the last act of
Medea
.
    So I blundered right in—while she was reeling from the loss of her home and her baby—to convince her that what we really needed to do was buy a house in Italy. This was an old bone of contention between us. I had tried