Living in a Foreign Language Read Online Free Page B

for years, in vain, to convince her that we should buy a house in the south of France—in Ramatuelle, just outside Saint Tropez. There’s a beach there five miles long filled with young, naked women. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t interested.
    Then, a couple of years later, a friend asked me why I wanted to buy a house in the south of France and I told him it was because it was so close to Italy. Eureka! Ever since then I’d been trying to sell Jill on the idea of a house in Italy. And now that Max had left for college in New York, I pushed even harder.
    Jill was understandably cool. She couldn’t get why, if we’d had to get rid of her dream house in Big Sur, we would plunge into buying another house—especially one that was six thousand miles away. For me it made perfect sense: The Italian house wouldn’t cost us a fraction of what we earned from the sale of Big Sur; our nest was empty and forlorn; we had—regrettably or not—no professional reason to hang around; and we were at a perfect time in our life to start a new cycle—to learn a new language in an exquisite, ancient country, to meet new friends. Now was our time to travel—while we could still do stairs. Now was our time to savor the glories of Italian cuisine—while we still had ouroriginal teeth. Now was the time to take a romantic plunge together—while our plumbing was still up and functioning. Jill looked at me like I was crazy. Or worse, she told me that if I really wanted it, it was okay with her. This is the kiss of death. If I learned one thing from all those courses we took, when she says, “If you really want it, it’s okay with me,” she’s actually saying, “I don’t want this.” And who needs to be in Italy with a woman who doesn’t want to be there—who’s unhappy with me for insisting on my own agenda? Not going to work. What I could do was occasionally put it in front of her—like an item on a menu that she might one day develop a taste for—and wait to see if she bit.
    So, a year later, when a friend of ours, Birgit, invited us to her sixtieth birthday party, I saw my shot. Birgit was born in Germany, lives in Mill Valley and is building a house in Tahoe with her husband, but her birthday party was to be in Puglia, at the very southern tip of the heel of Italy. Which tells you something about Birgit.
    I used the occasion to propose a trip that would take us the entire length of the Italian Peninsula. After making a solemn promise that I wouldn’t buy a house, we flew off for a month’s journey that would give us a taste of Italy, from stem to stern.
    Third in our party—and party it was—was our friend Caroline, who had also been invited to Birgit’s birthday. We first met Caroline when she’d worked for us as a personal assistant—a job, by the way, that you shouldn’t give to a dog. If I had to be my personal assistant I’d shoot myself. But Caroline thrived—perhaps because she’d spent her first four years as an orphan in South Korea and after that even our job looked good. Over the years, the three of us became such good friends—living in the same house, traveling together,manning the calendar together, raising our dogs together—that we finally had to fire her. So now she’s part of the family. She travels well, having grown up with her adopted parents in India, Pakistan and Indonesia before moving to Europe for what she calls her “professional years.” She speaks five languages fluently—English, perhaps, not quite as fluently.
    Caroline and Jill have grown together over the years—as confidantes, fierce supporters of each other, sisters in the great fight, as it were—and have formed a unit in our house that stands as a powerful counterbalance to the rampant male ego that is me. Whereas I can usually bully my way past one of them, or do an end-around