Living in a Foreign Language (16 page)

“Pasta's ready!” Caroline from the kitchen.

We sat down to steaming bowls of tortellini Bolognese, spooning freshly grated
parmigiano
on top. I opened the next bottle and filled everyone's glass. Bruno tasted the pasta, and then tasted again.

“Wow, this is the real thing. You got it right.”

I blushed with pleasure.

“You know, when Mayes and I first got married, she cooked pasta for me.”

“I had to learn Italian cooking immediately,” said Mayes in her Mexican-accented English. “Or he would have divorced me.”

“So I'm sitting there,” said Bruno, “waiting for my first dinner from my new wife—spaghetti carbonara, which she knows I've loved since I was a little kid in Rome. She brings it very proudly to the table and I see immediately it has little peas in it, and prosciutto instead of pancetta and . . . I couldn't believe it!!”

“You said it was great,” piped in Mayes.

“Yeah, it was fine, but it wasn't carbonara! Carbonara is pancetta, eggs, cheese, spaghetti.
Basta cosi!
I told her she could call it anything she wants—call it
pasta vaffanculo
—just don't tell me I'm having carbonara!”

Pasta vaffanculo
, by the way, can be roughly translated as “pasta up your ass.”

“So, the next day,” continues Bruno, “she brings me this pasta—it had like American ketchup on it and . . . I don't
know what else. And I asked her, ‘What's this?' And she looks right into my eyes and tells me, ‘That's
pasta vaffanculo.'

“I never criticized her cooking again.”

We had more tortellini; we filled the wineglasses again; we told stories about past cooking disasters, which quickly reminded me to check on my chickens in the fireplace. Then Jill cleared the pasta bowls and set the plates for our
secondo
, while I cut up the chickens—done just fine, thank God—into serving pieces. Mayes and Caroline talked about taking a hike together the next morning and Jill said that she would join them. That meant the girls could now eat the next course without guilt.

When Jill asked them about work, Bruno said that he was becoming much more selective these days—it was becoming harder for him to leave the home he'd created here in Umbria, and to be separated from Mayes. She shook her head resolutely.

“No. We need the money. We will still take the jobs.” Her forehead wrinkled with seriousness, which made her look all the more childlike. “And not just for the money. I love my work.”

I looked at Bruno; he smiled back and shrugged. He had made his success, over and over. Now, he seemed to be saying, he was ready for the next phase of his life. “But yeah, more money wouldn't be a bad thing, either.”

We all laughed. I felt a strong pull for this guy. It had been Bruno and Mayes—as much as the Rustico, the countryside and Italy itself—that had attracted us in the beginning, that first day under the pergola. The dinner had done its job.
II ghiaccio era rotto
. The ice was broken.

O
UR LAST WEEK AT THE
R
USTICO
came as a shock. I had been in complete denial about our departure until we started getting invitations to farewell dinners.

“Who's leaving?” I asked.

We were feted pretty much every night. Martin and Karen had us up to meet friends of theirs—some from Germany, some from the States. They cooked a Thai dinner that Martin had shopped for at the Mercato Coperto near the railway station in Rome. It's part of the outdoor market at the Piazza Vittorio and famous for its food products from all over the world. So, lemongrass, Thai chilies, fish sauce—all very un-Umbrian. Bruce and JoJo invited us over for some trout grilled over wood in the fireplace that was as good as any fish I've ever tasted. Bruce has a way with wood-fire cookery. Mayes cooked us a dinner of tagliatelle with porcini, proving that she had come a long way from the days of
pasta vaffanculo
. Then the whole gang hosted us for a farewell blast at the Palazzaccio. This merry band of expats and transplanted Italians party at the slightest provocation, and our departure to
the States was excuse enough for a weeklong celebration, one dinner spilling into the next. I was going to miss these people sorely.

Caroline was actually eager to get back to Mill Valley. She had her triathlon team waiting for her, all sweated up and ready to go; she had a new job about to start that needed her attention, and any number of suitors panting for the chance to take her out on the town. She was also getting nervous about all the pasta she was putting away.

Jill and I, on the other hand, couldn't figure out why we were going back. Our life in beautiful Mill Valley was very pleasant, to be sure, but we felt like we were leaving one vacation to go to another. Where was the work part? All our new friends in Umbria were artists of one kind or another and they were as passionate about their work as they were about living the good life. They made us aware that we, too, had some artistic muscles that needed flexing. It was time to get back to work. Our eight-year sojourn in Northern California had been great for us: it had helped us transition from burnt-out TV stars into human beings. But now we needed to make another transition: from human beings—a state we were never fully comfortable with—into actors again.

While we were turning this over, we got an offer to do a play at the Marin Theater Company, the professional troupe right around the corner from our house. It was a new play by a young writer out of New York, and we leapt at it. I had a wonderful time getting back on stage and, after knocking a little rust off, felt quite good about the whole thing. But Jill was a veritable revelation. She took the role between her teeth like a pit bull and didn't let up until it was hers completely. She was extraordinary. I couldn't help thinking that her performance needed to be seen by a
broader, more theater-savvy audience. It was work easily worthy of New York.

I called our agent in L.A. and told him he had to come up and see the show—that he had never seen Jill do anything like this. He turned me down flat. He said that it was pilot season and that he could do us more good by staying down in L.A. trying to get us back on TV. I tried to explain to him that he couldn't adequately represent Jill without first seeing her performance in this play—that there was a whole aspect of her work he had never seen. He had no idea what I was talking about—and no intention of coming to see the play. I started to feel more strongly than ever that we were living in the wrong state, on the wrong coast, perhaps in the wrong country.

The food thing wasn't working either. Which for me is basic. The first day back from Italy, we decided to go to a favorite Chinese restaurant in downtown Mill Valley. We hadn't had Chinese food in six weeks so, with Caroline, we walked into town for lunch. We sat down, ordered and twenty-five minutes later we were standing outside on the street corner, blinking in the sunshine, wondering what the hell had just happened. It certainly wasn't lunch. Lunch is two and a half hours followed by a nap; lunch is the focal point of the day, not a quick stop at the filling station.

The whole food situation was puzzling. In the States, Jill can't eat garlic or onions; bread and pasta are no-nos; and she tries to stay away from dairy products. She has a delicate digestion. In Italy she has no problem with any of those things. She eats it all, happily, and her digestion works just fine. So, what's the difference? Attitude? Lifestyle? Certainly. But there's also the thousand-year-old tradition of
eating well in Italy; there's
terreno
, the soil that things are grown in; and there's the crucial question of freshness.

In Mill Valley we shop—as do all the dutiful yuppies—at one of those health-oriented megastores with dazzling Disneyland displays of produce, condiments and packaged goods that all proclaim themselves to be “organic.” Well, they may well be organic, and they may be “artisinally grown”—but they damn well aren't fresh. The produce—which looks great—tastes like it's been on a truck for two weeks. Its vitality is gone. It's all show.

“Nostrano”
is a word that pops up on hand-written signs at local
alimentari
and roadside stands in Umbria. It comes from the word
“nostro,”
which means “ours.” If the ricotta they're selling today is proclaimed
nostrano
, it was made in the neighborhood and it's still warm. When the porcini start popping up from under the oak trees, they're suddenly everywhere—fresh and bursting with flavor. All the restaurants are serving them—in pastas, blanketing roasted meats, grilled on their own like steaks, glistening with olive oil. And the fun is that this can only be happening now, on the day they pop up—and here, from under trees you can see on the hillsides, just up the road from where you're eating them.

“Nostrano”
is also used when talking about meat. The pork we eat in Umbria is from pigs that could have walked to the butcher shop where they're sold. They're neighborhood pigs. They know people you know. Same with the wines—they grow in vineyards that you can see out the window. They're grown to be sipped with the food that grows near them. That's why they go down so well.
Nostrano
.

The problem in the States is that the Caesar salad with grilled chicken in San Jose is the same one you get in Providence; the arugula salad with baked goat cheese is
rubber-stamped and mass-produced until it appears on restaurant menus in all fifty states. It's Mall Food—as ubiquitous as the Gap, or Radio Shack, or T.G.I. Friday's.

Yes, there are farmers' markets in the Bay Area. Famously. It is, after all, the land of Alice Waters and the California food revolution. And yes, you can get fresh produce and products. But they don't come cheaply; fresh food is for rich people. Frustrated with the food we were getting, we took the advice of friends and went into San Francisco to shop at the market at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero. We found some nice grilling peppers—six pretty specimens: fourteen dollars; wild mushrooms that looked good for pasta: a medium-sized bag, twenty- two bucks; a cheese store with beautiful cheeses made artisinally in western Marin—we picked out one that looked good: eighteen dollars for a cheese the size of my fist. Before getting as far as meats or fish for the main course, we'd dropped seventy-five bucks for a meal for three.

I threw a dinner party for some friends, thinking I'd show off what I'd learned in Italy. I'd make a little
pasta alia Norcina
—sausages, cream and porcini—then a simple mixed grill of meats marinated in the Umbrian manner and cooked over wood; then I'd finish it off with a
rucola
salad and
parmigiano
. Then one of the guests called and reminded me that she ate no meat. Okay. I changed the menu to
spaghetti alle vongole
, scampi on the grill and the
rucola
with
parmigiano
. Then another guest called to remind me that she believed in food combining—which means that she didn't eat protein and carbs in the same meal. Fine. I changed the menu. I'd roast some chickens, maybe stuff them with some garlic-scented croutons—oops, can't do that. Okay, chickens, grilled with olive oil that we brought back—maybe a mixed
grill with ribs and sausages as well as the chicken oops, no meat; then just the
rucola
salad with
parmigiano
. Yeah, that would work. Then a third guest called to remind me that she was a vegan. Which means she eats nothing that ever lived or breathed, or dairy, or. . . .

I ached for Umbria. I e-mailed JoJo and Martin almost daily, getting news from the gang and negotiating whether we were going to go ahead with our
“ampliamento”
—the enlargement of the Rustico. The obvious impediment was money. It would cost approximately what we'd paid for the house originally. And, of course, construction always costs more than planned. Especially because we would have to open up 350-year-old walls to connect the two sections, and you never know what you're going to find when you do that—there could be an old monk in there. JoJo counseled patience.

“Maybe you've already got what you came for. A perfect little two-bedroom cottage—no room for guests. Over and done. You can put your friends up at the Castello. Much less of a pain in the ass anyway.”

Martin urged us to go forward with the project.

“If you don't do it now, there's every chance you will never be allowed to do it. The rules are tightening; the permits are more and more scarce. And a four-bedroom house with a pool in the olive groves will be worth a lot more money than it will cost you to build.”

I knew this to be true. It would be a good investment. Even JoJo agreed with that.

“Sure, you would have what everyone wants and no one can find. No question about that. It just depends on what
you
want—and what you can afford. But nobody ever lost money building in Umbria—not in my time here, anyway.”

So, after a lot of thought, we made two moves that would turn out to radically change the direction of our life—again. We called Martin and JoJo and told them to go ahead with the
ampliamento;
and, to help pay for it, we decided to make a concerted effort to get back in the game—the acting game, that is. This meant spending more time in L.A. or New York. Or both. We'd have to do it on a commuting basis, because we didn't really want to live in either of those places—L.A. had never been our town, really, and New York . . . well, Jill didn't feel she could live there again on a full-time basis. She had gotten too used to redwood trees and hiking trails in the woods, to the natural beauty of Northern California, to her full complement of alternative health care specialists. No, New York was too much hustle and bustle for her now. We'd try to commute when we got a job.

We called Judy Katz, our longtime friend and publicist in New York. We told her that we needed to get back to work in order to support our Italy habit. She'd been trying to get us back to New York for eighteen years, so she delightedly volunteered to cast about to find an agent who would want to take us on even though we would have to fly in from California for auditions. She said lots of actors went back and forth from L.A. to New York, so why not from Mill Valley to New York? She'd get right on it.