Living in a Foreign Language (28 page)

I called Caroline with the news, which we knew was not going to please her. Her home was being sold out from under her and her adopted family was abandoning her for New York. Even though she had been moving on her own in the direction of independence, to have it be our decision was a lot tougher to take. And we'd be asking her to adopt our dog, Buddy, as well. Buddy was twelve years old and set in his ways. He thinks there's too much traffic in Mill Valley, so we all felt New York would be too much of a shock to his system. Caroline also agreed that Buddy and Jade, her dog, should not be separated after all those years together.

But Caroline's a survivor extraordinaire; she always has been. She found a great place to live, renting Birgit's guest house—Birgit, whose birthday party in Puglia was the start of our whole Italian adventure. She can keep both dogs there and walk them on the same trails they're used to. She'll have her job, her friends, her triathlons—everything except Mike and Jill to come home to.

It was a big change for us as well. We would be living “two in a box” for the first time in thirty years. Our kids were both up and out, pursuing their own lives, and now Caroline would be doing the same. We would have to see
what it was like to have only each other as roommates after all these years.

Jill's mom's visit was a triumph. We put her up in a furnished apartment just down the block from us. It was an apartment usually rented out to visiting opera singers at the Met. Lora thought that was just perfect. She had her privacy, her own kitchen and bath, and yet we were steps away if she needed us. She went to see Jill's play, of course, which she loved. We had given her the script beforehand because her hearing's not so great anymore. This way, she had no trouble following the plot. We decided to give her the full New York experience: galleries, shows, concerts, lunch at the boathouse in Central Park—the whole schmear. Lora got a good four-month cycle out of the trip—a month of excited planning, the trip itself and then at least two months of bragging about it to her friends and neighbors back in Santa Barbara. She had been worried she wouldn't be up for a trip like this, but the moment she hit the Big Apple she seemed to shed fifty years. We planned immediately to do another trip the following year.

I did a guest shot on
Law and Order
, which was fun. I did a few play readings. I hunted up voice-overs. And I planned my belated sixtieth birthday party in Umbria—Mike's Birthday Observed. The party was originally set for the middle of June but when we got to New York the theater told us they wanted an option to extend the play until the first of July. This would not work for the party, so I canceled it. But a number of people—the Liedermans, my brother Ed and his wife, Barb, and others already had their plans booked and were coming anyway. So when it turned out that the play wasn't extended, we went forward with a scaled-down version of the party. Scaled-down in guests, that is—not food.

Liederman, who had already threatened to do a pig in our oven, now also wanted to roast a baby lamb. He asked if I had a good butcher. A good butcher? I had four. David said he expected the party to last a week.

We found an apartment—a lovely two-bedroom pied-à-terre only six blocks from where we lived in the old days. Our Mill Valley house sold before we put it on the market. We made plans—with Caroline's help and supervision—to move most of the furniture and all the art across the country, where it would be stored until we got back from Italy. Then we'd move in and start our new life.

W
E ARRIVED BACK IN
U
MBRIA
and plunged almost immediately into a vortex of festivity. On Sunday night, Mariane and George threw a farewell party for Bruce and JoJo at Due Querce (Two Oaks), a trattoria / pizzeria near where they live. They bought out the entire patio area and had about fifty of their friends to a sumptuous feast. This was the kickoff to a series of dinners thrown that week to make sure that Bruce and JoJo would remember their friends in Umbria. But since they weren't actually leaving until after my birthday bash the following Saturday, the two celebrations collided head-on midweek at a big dinner party on the back patio of the Palazzaccio. My out-of-town guests had arrived—Ed and Barb; Barbara Bosson and her friend Sara from L.A.; Loring and Margarita from San Francisco (who had rented Bruce and JoJo's house for a year, giving them the means to go to Mexico); and David and Susan Liederman, who were already in the process of ravaging the countryside for small animals to roast in our
forno
. The farewell party celebrants joined up with the birthday party crowd
and they all melded together into one pulsating party organism.

“More lambs! More pigs!” called out Liederman.

“And pizza. When we run out of local protein we'll cook pizzas for the rest of the night.”

When David heard how celebrated Bruce's pizza was, he got competitively engaged. He wanted to go one-on-one with Bruce—dueling doughs. Bruce just smiled and told him that he abdicated the crown. He was already thinking about tortillas.

We told jokes that night—after dinner, when the Palazzaccio's giant house-bottle of grappa came to the table and was ceremoniously passed around and around. We told the old ones, the great ones. Half the people—the Italian / expat contingent—had never heard them before, and many of the rest of us had forgotten that we knew them, so it was like the first time. I don't recall ever laughing so much. The jokes are equal opportunity offenders—Jews, African-Americans, Japanese, Italians (especially the carabinieri) were all equally and properly disrespected. The two party crowds were now joined at the hip.

On Thursday, I brought a ringer in—just in case. I walked up the hill to speak to Benedetto, owner and impresario of Da Beppino. Could he provide some of his famous antipasto for the party? And some tables and chairs? And tablecloths and napkins?

“Si, certo, con piacere.”
Yes, of course, with pleasure.

We decided on the antipasto—deer carpaccio, goose carpaccio, sausages in crust, roasted vegetables,
prosciutto in pane
, grilled tomatoes, melon and prosciutto and plates of assorted house-made
salume
and cheeses. All this would be on the tables when the guests arrived.

Jokes at the Palazzaccio

David decided we needed some kind of roasting pan with a grill for the pig, so we all went shopping. None of the kitchen stores had anything big enough, so we called Mayes and she directed us to a store that might have something. Under the highway in a very unscenic part of Trevi we found Raspa, a store unlike any other I've ever seen. They sell hardware, goldfish, lawn furniture, livestock feed and some very nice corduroy pants—everything except the out-sized grill pan that David needed. But he spied a rectangle of sheet metal propped up in the corner, asked the proprietor if he could borrow a sledgehammer and went to work banging this thing into the shape he needed. Then he rummaged through a pile of junk in the corner and came up with two pieces of open aluminum shelving that would fit side by side on top as a grill. We were all set.

On Friday, the day before our party, Liederman and I went on a tour of the butchers. First, of course, I took him to Ugo. We didn't order the pig from him because, being a purist, Ugo didn't feel this was the right time of year for a suckling pig. Yes, they could be found, but suckling pig—
maialino
—was a winter dish, for New Year's Eve. We did, however, taste some of his prosciutto and take the tour of the back of his shop where it's all made.

Then we went to Fabio, Lauro's son and heir. That's where we picked up the pig and the lamb. We also bought two chickens, because David wanted to test the oven. We would fire it up that night to make sure he understood its subtleties in preparation for the party the next day. We hauled the wrapped carcasses out to my VW Golf, looking like Mafia hit men after a long day at the office. On the way home, we stopped at Fortunati, my neighborhood truffle purveyor, where David picked out a few beautiful specimens to slice—razor-thin—and put under the skin of the chickens before roasting.

Barb, my sister-in-law, volunteered to be David's sous-chef—or slave—and learned more in the next twenty-four hours about the insides of chickens, pigs and lambs than she'd perhaps had in mind. She was stalwart, but I won't tell you the places her hand found itself. Ed and David and I built a pyre in the
forno
and fired it up. David marveled at the fact that the flue of the oven is on the outside, just above the opening; the oven chamber itself is a sealed vault so the fire vents out the door and straight up into the chimney—right in front of your face if you're putting something in the oven. This must have been a very effective form of population control back in the 1600s.

“This is a big fucking oven,” said David solemnly, once
the roaring fire had turned the bricks white. “We're gonna have to wait a couple hours before we can put these chickens in. Ideally we should be doing pizzas now. This is a seriously hot oven.”

Two hours later we roasted the truffled chickens. David said the oven was still too hot, but we were all hungry. By gingerly moving them in and out, David managed to cook them perfectly. He was getting into the oven now.

“We're going to roast the pig tonight. All night. By the time people arrive for the party tomorrow it'll be perfect. This is an incredible oven.”

Much later, after we had eaten the chickens and cleaned up, we were all sitting outside under the pergola, chatting away. At about midnight, David said it was time. Barb, who had been second-in-command with rubbing, marinating, stuffing and buffing the
maialino
, helped David bring it out from the kitchen. And just before we all went off to bed, we loaded it into David's makeshift roasting pan and placed it in the coolest corner of the oven, away from the banked coals. We propped up the steel door over the mouth of the oven and all went off to sleep.

The next morning I woke up to the sound of tables and chairs being set up around the pool. Benedetto and two strong young men were setting up. I went down and offered him coffee. He checked out the construction of the
ampliamento
and was very pleased to see it was done properly—in the old style.

“Buon lavoro,”
he muttered as he inspected the stonework. Given that we were his only neighbor within sight, he wanted to make sure that we hadn't trashed the neighborhood. Then he told his two helpers to pick me up and throw me into the pool. It was an Italian birthday tradition, apparently. I, not
being a traditionalist, tried to resist, and Benedetto got a good laugh out of it.

“Tucker, tell him to take a look at this!” shouted David from the oven. He was taking his first look at the
maialino
that had been roasting all night.

Benedetto went to look as I dried off and followed. The pig was a dark, almost purplish color. At first I thought it was overdone.

“No.
É perfetto”
proclaimed Benedetto, who specialized in such things. He tapped the hard skin to test its crispness. He looked at David with a look of obvious respect. David stood proudly next to the pig, like a hunter who had just bagged his first rhino.

“We'll just leave it until later. Cover it up so the bugs don't get it. Room temperature will be perfect.”

Benedetto asked what time the guests were arriving and then told me everything would be set up and waiting for them. He asked if I needed wine, but I told him we had taken care of it. Susan had scoured the Montefalco area and come back with more wine than we thought we could possibly drink. We were wrong, of course.

Kids in the pool

At one o'clock sharp, George arrived with Mariane and two cases of perfectly chilled Prosecco. All forty or so of the other guests showed up within fifteen minutes of them. Unlike in America, where people are often fashionably late, this crowd arrived hungry and ready to dive in.

Although we had tables and chairs set up around the pool and down toward the
bocce
court, everyone congregated under the pergola. It's a powerful magnet, it seems. People pulled up chairs two deep around the table and then others just stood behind them. The food and drink were set up buffet style on tables next to the
forno
and everyone just helped themselves. The antipasti from Da Beppino—which was enough food to feed the Italian Army on maneuvers—was being inhaled at startling speed. The
salsicce in crosta
, which are the Umbrian version of pigs in a blanket, were gone within fifteen minutes. We made a space in the middle of the table and Liederman uncovered the pig and brought it in, to a round of applause. This, too, was sliced into, savored (there is nothing—nothing—that's better-tasting than Umbrian pork) and gone within the hour. It was a frenzy; it was like locusts.