Living in a Foreign Language (27 page)

I wanted to wait for Jill to make sure we got into the same class. I was sure I spoke Italian much better than she did and I didn't want her to have to enter into a room full of strangers by herself. But she was nowhere to be seen, so off I went to room number four. I opened the door carefully and peeked in. The room was packed, and I took a seat way in the back so as not to interrupt the lesson.

The teacher was talking—much too quickly, I thought—about the difference between the imperfect tense—the
imperfetto
—and the past tense—the
passato prossimo
. She was rattling on about when you used one and when you used the other and I had no idea what she was talking about. Then she started around the class, asking each of us to solve an example in the book. The girl next to me was kind enough to share
her book, since I didn't have one yet. She showed me where we were—at machine gun speed—and when it was my turn, I noticed that my shirt was soaked in sweat. I stammered a few
mi scusas
and
mi dispiaces
, treading water like a son of a bitch, trying to figure out what was going on. The teacher cut me off—a little rudely, I thought—and told me to go down to the office and buy a book: level four. By the time I got back they were onto the
congiuntivo
, which I couldn't even explain to you in English. At that point I kind of blacked out, which happens to me at moments of extreme tension. I was finding it hard to believe that I was putting myself through this torture voluntarily—on my birthday, no less. It was like having my fingernails ripped out.

At the break, I found Jill. She shrugged and said she was finding the whole thing too easy. And I damn near decked her right there in the hallway. Too easy? My God. Then she looked at me strangely and asked if I was all right and I told her that I wasn't and we set off together to the office to find out what the hell was going on. The woman listened to both our stories and then looked at our test results, which she had in front of her—one in each hand. The she smiled and crossed her hands, one over the other, indicating that she had mistakenly sent us to each other's class assignments. We all got a jolly little laugh out of this—never mind that at least ten years had been shaved off the end of my life—and she asked what we wanted to do. Jill told her that her class, level one, would be much too easy—even for me—and I assured her that level four would be much too hard for Jill. Even she didn't know the
congiuntivo
. So we decided to both go into level two, which we certainly knew some of, use it as a little refresher and then learn some things we didn't know. And we'd be together, which is what this was all supposed to
be about anyway. And level two turned out to be just
bravissimo
.

We had two teachers—one for grammar and one for conversation. The conversation guy—Franco—was worth the price of admission alone. He was a handsome, strapping fellow, rode a motor scooter to work through the streets of Rome and flirted outrageously with all the young girls in class. And he openly berated anyone who was too shy or afraid to speak out in Italian. He was brutal; he would just turn away and ignore you, as if you weren't there. There were two or three students who transferred out of his class because they felt they couldn't learn from him. But he turned out to be great for Jill. For a day or two she sat there, frozen in fear, and then—because Franco refused to pay attention to her—she blurted. All the syntax was wrong; her tenses were flying all over the place; her endings were askew—but she plunged in. And that was the moment Jill really started speaking Italian. I knew it was right because she sounded a lot like me—completely grammatically incorrect, spouting like a sperm whale. Franco loved it. He went on to tell us that it could take ten years of daily study to get the grammar just right and that most Italians' grammar is horrendous anyway. The point was to speak and let the grammar catch up when it could.

We decided that we would speak only Italian for the whole two weeks in Rome, which led to conversations filled with long pauses as we frantically thumbed through our dictionary in order to finish our thoughts. The Rotunnos had us up to dinner a couple of times, and they promised to also speak only in Italian as well—a much easier task for them. I must admit our language skills improved remarkably—even though my head felt like the inside of a golf ball, with all
those tight little rubber bands wound around each other under four thousand pounds of pressure.

We had dinner with a woman named Pam, whom we had just met in Umbria. Pam is a charter member of the expat community there, and the only reason we hadn't met her before was that she was starting her life all over again as well—in New York. She's actually one of the people who created the Castello di Poreta, or rather
transformed
it, into the wonderful hotel where we stayed during our first days in Umbria. Pam is an American who has lived in Italy for many years—at first in Trastevere. So she gave us a personal walking tour, pointing to this apartment building and that
alimentari
, spinning for us her romantic story of love and marriage to an Italian composer and their eventual divorce. The tour ended at Da Augusto, a tiny trattoria filled only with locals—not Romans, but Trasteverini. It's such a local place that a tourist could pass it a thousand times and never know it's there. Again, we spoke only Italian. Well, mostly.

We met Joie, Judith Auberjonois' friend, a writer who also lives in Trastevere. She took us to Spirito di Vino, a more upscale restaurant on the other side of Trastevere—the Santa Cecilia side—and we ate the best dinner we've had yet in Rome.

We went—just the two of us—to Baffetto, the great pizzeria on the Via Governo Vecchio, near our school. I think it was on that night that we decided—quite unconsciously—that Rome was really ours. Sitting next to us—the tables at Baffetto are quite close together—were two young tourists from Ireland traveling on the backpack circuit. They were trying out their Italian with the waiter, and not having much success. It was either anchovies or artichokes they wanted on their pizza, and the waiter didn't want to get it wrong. After
I'd leaned over and deftly straightened out the whole situation, they looked at me with great appreciation. Well, no problem, Rome's my beat. And I'm bilingual, by the way. Over there's where I got my haircut; there's where we bought our dining room table; there's a wine bar around the corner where they have this great cheese drizzled with balsamica. Check it out.

On the way home, Rome was showing off its winter aspect; it was cold and rainy, dark and shimmering, ancient and vital. We walked through the puddled streets to our hotel room, snuggled under the covers and drilled each other—in Italian, I mean.

The next night the phone rang and our agent said they were offering the play to Jill. She would start the following week in New York, three days after our final class. Jill was conflicted at first; she was scheduled to visit her mother in Santa Barbara—the trip was all planned, and she didn't want to let her mom down. Lora, her mom, was eighty-seven and her husband, Ralph, was ninety, and Jill's visits were very much looked forward to. Jill was also concerned about Caroline and the dogs and her acupuncture appointments in Mill Valley, and . . . I gently reminded her that maybe flying off to New York to star in a wonderful play, just after finishing a two-week Italian intensive in Rome, was not too shabby a scenario for an aging ingénue. She exhaled and smiled, and that was that.

W
E ARRIVED AT
JFK
AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON
, right along with a picture-perfect late winter snowstorm. Jill's contract provided us with an apartment, which, after a little shopping around, ended up being located on the Upper West Side, our old neighborhood. It was a three-floor walk-up in an old brownstone with an utterly useless kitchen, a tiny one-person bathroom and a bedroom so small that we had to get in and out of bed on the same side. It wasn't all that dissimilar to our first apartment in New York when we were thirty-five years younger—shabby, tight as a sardine can and utterly romantic; we were in the first act of
La Bohème
and nobody had a cough yet.

A few days later Caroline flew in like the Red Cross bearing suitcases filled with winter clothes, hats, boots, vitamins, supplements, Chinese herbs and an inflatable bed—for guests (not that we were planning on doing a lot of entertaining). Imagine for a moment how small that apartment was with the three of us in it.

Cristo's Gates were still up in Central Park and we
trekked for miles, wandering along the orange daisy chain that stood out shamelessly against the bright white snow in the park. New York was never this much fun in the old days.

Jill started rehearsal, Caroline went back home and I had the days free to wander the streets, write in my little garret for a few hours a day, shop at Fairway and, when I couldn't put it off any longer, contact my agents to look for work. Mostly, I reconnected with old friends. David and Susan Liederman, who still hadn't completely gotten over the fact that we left New York twenty years before, were delighted to have us back. They now had a restaurant farther upstate in Mount Kisco and were well-connected—as always—with the food scene in New York.

Whenever Liederman came into town for business, we'd tie up for lunch, hunting through Chelsea or the meatpacking district or Chinatown for great, cheap food. It was as if I had never left. And Susan, who has been the sommelier for all their restaurants over the years, added me to the list of the Susan Wine Club—which every couple of weeks delivers a handpicked case of fabulous, little-known wines at scandalously low prices. Being on Susan's list is reason to move to New York all on its own.

We fell in again with Ron Shechtman and Lynne Meadow (Lynne runs the theater where Jill was performing). Between them and the Liedermans we had invitations to get out of the city—to Connecticut or Westchester—whenever Jill had a day off.

At voice-over auditions, I reconnected with old buddies from our early days in New York—all older but not in any way wiser. One afternoon I ran into Chris Murney on the Upper West Side and we sat on a bench in the middle of
Broadway, sipping coffee, cars whizzing by on both sides, and reminisced like the two old geezers we had become.

Jill was deep into her work. And I enjoyed welcoming her with a hot meal when she got home. If this had happened (and it did) in our early years, I would have felt jealous and peevish, but now—Thanks to what? Growing older, being together as long as we have, all the courses we took in Marin, or maybe the success I'd managed to achieve on my own?—I was free of any obligation to compete and just enjoyed being there for her. I even let her fall in love with her costar—just a little.

We invited Lora to come and visit when the play opened. This way we could circumvent any guilt Jill may have felt about not visiting her mom. The idea was to let Jill have her experience—unadulterated—without having obligation to anyone or anything else. And it worked. About three weeks into the process, she came home lit up like a Christmas tree.

“This is what we should be doing, honey. Plays in New York!”

I had no argument. The idea of splitting our time between New York and Italy seemed to me to be a perfect life. When the work dries up, which it always does, we'll hop over to Umbria and fire up the pizza oven. It was all I could do not to pick up the phone, call my real- estate broker in Mill Valley and put the house on the market. But I remembered that the flush of excitement you have in the third week of rehearsal could be seriously eroded on opening night, when the critics come and bring everyone back down to earth. We decided to wait until the play opened before seriously considering uprooting ourselves. If Jill still wanted to move after that, we'd get into it.

I did, however, start to prowl around the neighborhood, checking out open houses on Sunday afternoons—just to get the lay of the land. In my mind, I wanted to find an apartment that cost about what we'd get for our house in Mill Valley—just a little flip job. But when I looked at a dozen or so in that price range, I became frustrated. I called David Liederman, who is as shameless a real estate slut as I am, and told him my problem.

“I can't find anything in that price range that I wouldn't be embarrassed to bring my friends to.”

“Forget it,” he said flatly. “Not at that price. But I have a tip for you.”

“What's that?”

“Call it a pied-à-terre. Then all your friends will love it. They'll say, ‘Ooh, what a wonderful pied-à-terre!' You'll have a shitty apartment, but a great pied-à-terre.”

In the middle of all this tumult, another change occurred that took us completely by surprise—around the third week of March, spring happened. We had forgotten what spring was like when you have to wait through the whole, long winter. Spring in California comes too easy. And it's so close to the experience of winter you're never really sure it's happened. That ain't it. Spring is when the earth defrosts after months in the freezer and gives off an aroma that's as good as pizza dough rising. It's when the scrawny branches outside the window of our garret are—overnight—filled with green buds all the way down the block. It's walking through Central Park with thousands and thousands of other people who are as happy as you are to be able to open your coat and feel the sun on your skin. Spring is orgiastic. Jill walked every day to rehearsal and back, through the park and out onto Central Park South, and I
think she enjoyed that as much as the rehearsals. Spring was about change, and so were we.

The play opened and Jill received love letters from the critics. They essentially agreed with what she'd said in the third week of rehearsal—that New York is where she should be and plays are what she should be doing. That was it. The gloves were off—we were moving to New York.