The Spa King’s enthusiasm grew stronger the closer he came to being able to touch his toes without bending his knees. “Men aren’t naturally as flexible as women,” he explained to me. “Michele says not to bounce. I should just let the weight of my head gradually pull me down. It helps if you breathe into it.”
He was happy. He, who had never studied Spanish, was greeting the Mexican gardeners with a hearty “Buenos días!” as he sprinted from Morning Stretch Intermediate to Body Toning Intense. Suddenly he knew from “abs” and “glutes.”
I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. First of all, I was sore. And second of all, he was too happy. He was going to classes all day and nothing hurt. “Just breathe into the place,” he advised me, the perverse traitor. And third of all, I was the one who was supposed to be good at this. I was the one who had worked out for years. I was the one who could put her head on her knees and put her hand on the bottom of her foot and straighten her leg like a ballet dancer. I was the one with the tights. I was the girl!
And fourth of all, I was hungry.
Fantasy Real Estate
Our passion for travel is fraught with internal contradictions. We travel to go away and to come home. When we travel to foreign lands, we insist upon feeling “at home,” never mind that we’re surrounded by minarets or rice paddies or alps. And then, to add to the impossibility of our demands, we also refuse to be tourists, in spite of the fact that that’s precisely what we are.
It’s not enough to be enjoying the culture, eating the food, and drinking the wine; we have to own the place. One minute we’re behaving like proper sight-seers in Provence, Florence, or Prague, and the next we’re house hunting. We travel the way Caesar’s army conquered Gaul: we come, we see, we acquire real estate—at least in our dreams.
When in Rome, Larry the chameleon imagines himself sitting all day outside his apartment in the Piazza Navona. He is sipping cappuccino, reading a book on architecture, and smoking. (Larry resumes smoking on all of his fantasy vacations.) Larry does not have a job in Rome. I don’t either, unless diving for coins in the Trevi Fountain counts. In order to keep our fantasy aloft, we have learned to avoid the little pinpricks of reality, such as how we’re going to make a living, how fast we can learn the language, what we’ll do for friends, whether we can get a referral from our primary care physician, where to redeem our empty soda cans, or what to do with our children.
Not every vacation destination is good fantasy material. It may be a nice place to visit, but even inveterate dreamers wouldn’t want to live there. Some places are too hot; some, too cold. I’d be cutting sod in Ireland right now if it weren’t for the bloody rain.
We also don’t have many Third World real estate fantasies. I hate to think we could be so shallow, but it may be that our ability to have a good fantasy is linked to the life expectancy and gross national product of the country involved. We once went on a “trek” in the Himalayas. I passed scores of women who were also trekking, but they were doing it all day, every day, up and down the mountain, carrying plastic buckets of water on their heads.
The Nepalese fantasy outlook was a little more promising for Larry. The men in the villages spent their days sitting cross-legged, playing cards, smoking, and growing stubble. Sure, I yearned to breathe that pure mountain air on a permanent basis, and to see day break gloriously each morning over Mount Everest—but not with a bucket on my head.
Paris is our all-time favorite place in which to pretend to live. We’ve almost bought real estate there several times. We don’t care if the French aren’t friendly. When we are French, we won’t be friendly either.
I love to imagine who I’d be if I were French. Would I care to be that flamboyantly hennaed woman carrying the baguette, the one with the cheekbones, the magenta frock, and the green kid heels that do not hurt her feet? I imagine her on her way to the open-air market, where she will buy an armload of flowers and, on a whim, a canary in a cage. (I do not like birds and have never wished to own one, but in Paris I will.)
Larry the lawyer thinks he’s that insouciant guy over there, leaning against the archway, rolling a Gauloise around between his lips, letting the ash fall. Larry’s Parisian fantasy involves frequent visits to the Louvre, reading in the Tuileries, eating organ meats, and, in the summers, sailing off the coast of Normandy. (Larry doesn’t sail and we have lived for thirty years on the coast of Long Island Sound.)
After a few days of imagining ourselves French, we find we are speaking French. That is to say, we are speaking our very own spontaneous patois—using French words when we can remember them, and when we can’t, speaking English with a French accent, like Charles Boyer. But of course. We eat a lot of sandwiches au jambon. We return to the same café at dusk. We discuss which of our favorite reds should be our house wine.
Thus frenchified, we sense the time is right to find our fantasy a place to live. Invariably, on one of our many delightfully aimless walks, we find ourselves in front of a real estate office. We examine the photos on display in the window. Do we want a house or an apartment? Should we rent or buy, louer or acheter? The Left Bank, of course, but quel arrondissement?
Larry, whose favorite opera is La Bohème, would like something in the way of a garret, with a dormer window and chimney pots. And a sink in the corner. I’m not fussy, as long as there’s a place for my canary.
But can we afford it?
Larry, the one with a left side to his brain, converts the various asking prices from euros into dollars. These monetary conversions are followed by a pause, which is long and weighty enough to indicate that we are giving sober consideration to the matter. Then he speaks the words that let me know we’ve got a full-fledged fantasy on our hands: “I wonder how much we could get for our house.” We’ve got liftoff. It is embarrassing to think about the trail of aborted rental and purchase agreements we have left in our vacationing wake. In Saint-Rémy-de-Provence it was “Small house in town with irises and cyprus trees”; in Kathmandu, “Renovated monastery cell”; in Jackson Hole, “Log cabin, Teton backdrop”; in the Cotswolds, “One bedroom cottage, thatched.”
How easily we betray our real lives in our dreams! How heedless of the time and energy we put into home, community, and friends, never mind love of country. Vacation fantasizing is a lot like a midlife crisis: you want to dump your old life and marry some place newer.
We are not the innocent, faithful children we once were. We don’t call out a fond “Good-bye, house! Good-bye, door! Good-bye, steps! Good-bye, lawn!” as we back down the driveway. Instead, it’s “Lemme outta here,” as we make our escape, pursued by a swarm of stress: Did I change the message on the answering machine? Do I have my passport? Did I hold the mail, pay the bills, water the lawn, call off the newspaper, program the VCR, turn down the thermostat, straighten my sock drawer, review my will, forget the tickets, remember the current adapter? Who wouldn’t want to live somewhere else?
Most of the time we’re pretty good at keeping fantasy in its place. Of course we’re not going to live in a garret in Paris. We’re just playing house. We’ve learned our lesson the hard way. Whenever we have tried to mix fantasy with reality, the gods have exacted their price for defying the cosmic order. It can be paid either in cash or in humiliation.
After a particularly pleasant vacation in London a few years ago, we were able to resist the temptation to buy a flat and instead settled for actually buying a London cab. At the time, cabs that had been retired from service were sold at a garage near Elephant and Castle. Ours had over three hundred thousand miles on it. It had a running board. It was full of quaint advertisements. The seat flipped down. The meter worked. We imagined what fun we’d have picking up our friends for dinner and a movie.
Once home, we waited eagerly for the word from Hoboken that our taxi had arrived. When Larry claimed it at the dock, he and three guys with tattoos had to push it to get it started. Then the wheels fell off. The customs inspector felt so sorry for Larry that he refused to charge
him any duty.
In 1971, when we were young and idealistic, we trespassed the threshold between fantasy and reality big-time. We moved from Connecticut to Big Sur, California, on the strength of a two-week stay at the Esalen Institute, where I was convinced that I could actualize my human potential by pounding on a pillow and hugging strangers. (This was before E-mail.)
It’s not as if our friends didn’t try to warn us, but we stubbornly refused to get the point.
“Haven’t you ever had a fantasy about living a better life in another place?” I asked a friend who was trying his best to stop us.
“Sure I have. I think about moving to London and hiring out as a butler in a well-appointed home,” he said. (This was a man whose house was messy and his professional life complicated and unpredictable.)
“Well, then, why don’t you do it?” I said.
“Because then I wouldn’t have it as a fantasy any more.”
For an entire year I was a California mountain woman. I went braless. I wore a black leotard and long paisley skirts that could double as tablecloths. I grew all my hair and made my own granola. I said things like “far out” and “head trip.” But no matter what I did or how hard I pounded, I was still from the Northeast.
Larry, who is better than I am at making the best of a bad deal, smoked a lot of Camels and volunteered as a model for the massage class. When we finally got home and slipped back into reality, we vowed we’d never, ever again lose our grip on fantasy. That didn’t last long.
Reality Real Estate
We had been dreaming for years about renting a villa in Italy. We imagined a place perched high on a hill, a view of red-tiled rooftops and vineyards below. There would be rosemary growing in the garden, and cozy rooms cluttered with family heirlooms. We’d hang ropes of garlic and a Parma ham in the sunny kitchen and dip crusty bread into a terra-cotta bowl filled with redundantly chaste extra-virgin olive oil. This time we would not be tourists, always on the outside of life, moving from hotel to hotel, packing and unpacking, collecting tiny bottles of shampoo. We’d shop only at farmers’ markets: spaghetti, pomodoro, pecorino, porcini—no problema. We’d go on picnics. We wouldn’t feel the typical tourist compulsion to see everything. We wouldn’t stand in line at the Uffizi. We’d stay home, curled up in a cozy armchair, and read all day if we wanted to. We’d stay home and make love all day if we wanted to. And we’d see the Piero della Francescas too.
I pored over a number of rental catalogs, looking at photos and reading descriptions, until I came upon what I was sure would be the rental home of our dreams—“a renovated mill, located in the heart of the Chianti Classico region, only two kilometers from the center of San Gimignano, a hill town famous for its beautiful towers. A perfect base for exploring Tuscany.”
In retrospect, the description was accurate as far as it went, although I think the photograph of the living room, featuring the sofa in the foreground, in no way suggested that it was the only piece of furniture in the room. It is true that the catalog never mentioned anything about heirloom furnishings, the view, or rosemary in the garden. Maybe I should have inquired about these specifics. And to be fair, I probably should have known that we would not be looking down on rooftops, or anything else, for that matter, since, as Larry did not hesitate to point out to me rather testily once we got there, “You knew you were renting a converted mill. You know that mills use waterpower. You know that water doesn’t flow uphill.” Nor was it the agent’s fault that it rained every day of our stay, or that I brought the Scrabble set but forgot the tiles, or that Larry started smoking again, or that the fiasco had cost us $1,750.
By the end of our two-week vacanza in purgatorio, which felt like a year, we thought it only decent to leave a note of warning for the couple from Oregon who had rented the place for the next two weeks.
“Benvenuto! We are the Weismans, the people who rented this villa for the two-week period just before yours. We hope you won’t look upon this note as an impudent invasion of your privacy, but rather as an act of compassion.
“Welcome to Villa Potemkin. Right about now you must be wondering why the house is so dark; what happened to the furniture; why there are no rugs on the floors, no spoons in the kitchen, soap in the soap dish, or hangers in the closets; and what to make of the fact that the only art in the house, which hangs over the kitchen table, is a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless man in a sport jacket, holding his own entrails.
“We suggest that you take a look at the ‘house book’ right away. That’s the loose-leaf notebook on the kitchen table, next to the flashlight. It’s packed with diagrams, troubleshooting advice, and the phone numbers of people to call in an emergency. The book was written by Villa Potemkin’s owner, Nigel Potemkin, who is also a well-known London architect and the man responsible for this millhouse renovation. We learned from Mark, the English caretaker who stops by from time to time to offer his condolences, that Mr. Potemkin is a member of the postmodernist school of English architecture aptly known as the New Brutalism. Prince Charles, who is very concerned with preserving Britain’s architectural legacy, has spoken out often against the deconstructionist vogue, but his words have failed to deter Mr. Potemkin.
“Nicoletta is the name of the housekeeper. She comes in every Saturday to hose down the floors, strip the beds, and change the batteries in the flash-lights. Nicoletta has mixed feelings about the New Brutalism. ‘This is easy place to clean,’ she says, ‘but hard place to live in.’
“As you are bound to discover, the house book, although detailed and informative, is irrelevant or incomplete in too many instances. Don’t bother to read the chapter titled ‘How to Operate the Cappuccino Machine.’ The machine does not va bene any longer, having blown up several rentals ago.
“Familiarize yourself especially with the text and diagrams on page 15, under ‘Electrical Problems’: ‘If electrical supply cuts out, set restart button on incoming supply. If electrical supply cuts out to ground floor only, set internal restart button.’ This information will prove particularly important if you’re renting the villa during the rainy season, which you are. We know that the guidebooks say that September and October are ideal months to visit Tuscany and that the Italian rainy season begins in early November and lasts through December, but Nicoletta disagrees. She says that for the last few years the rainy season has occurred early, in September and October.
“The Italian rainy season is very impressive, very operatic. Che tempo orribile! (What awful weather!) Very vivace, very fortissimo, very agitato, with molte, molte blown fuses (lampadina bruciata). The instructions in the house book are fine as far as they go, but they won’t help you once you have an Italian-speaking electrician on the other end of the phone.
“An ordinary tourist can get by on ‘Grazie’ (‘Thank you’), ‘Per favore’ (‘Please’), and ‘Dov’è il gabinetto?’ (‘Where is the bathroom?’). You, however, will need to know how to say, ‘Dov’è la valvola?’ (‘Where is the restart button?’).
“All Italian appliances have valvolas. At any time, any one of them may be hit by lightning. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking ‘Dov’è la valvola? Dov’è la valvola?’ with metronomic regularity. Try it to the tune of ‘La donna è mobile.’
“In addition to the information above, which we trust will be useful, Larry and I have attempted to anticipate some of the questions that may arise during your stay.
“Where is the view? Not everyone who rents a villa in a hill town in Tuscany automatically gets a view. Somebody’s got to live in the valleys. Villa Potemkin is located at the bottom of a valley, at the end of a two-kilometer rutted dirt driveway, so steep, winding, and narrow that it must be executed in first gear, and then only under dry, daytime conditions. You will get used to life in a hole. So you don’t have a view of acres of rolling vineyards, rows of stately cypress trees, and the charmingly scabby ocher farmhouses with their red tile roofs. You’re a part of somebody else’s view. You’re somebody else’s red ti
le roof!
“Why is the underside of my rental car making that funny noise? Parts of it are falling off. See ‘Where is the view?’ above.
“Are there screens for the windows, to keep out flies and those long, gray things that have wings and jump? No.
“Where is the nearest garden market? There is no nearest garden market. There’s an A & P about twelve kilometers from San Gimignano (not counting the driveway). A & P went to Italy at about the same time D’Agostino’s came to New York. It costs five hundred lire to rent a shopping cart. That’s the silver coin with the copper center. Risotto ai funghi porcini comes in a plastic bag with directions to drop the contents into ‘acqua in ebollizione.’ It’s ‘pronto in l5 minuti.’ (So many of the words are the same.) The Parmesan is grated. The tomatoes come from New Jersey. The bakery sells croissants. Take a number.
“Why does the shower fill up and pour under the bathroom door and run down the hallways? Because there is hair in the drain.
“Why does our hair feel so thin and lifeless? Because the house has its own well and there are chimici nell’acqua (chemicals in the water). That’s your hair in the drain.
“Why is there an echo? What else would you expect from a virtually unfurnished, renovated mill with barrel-vaulted ceilings as high as major duomos, thirty-two stone steps, a living room the size of the Roman Forum, a fireplace in which you could roast a wild boar—if it weren’t bricked over—and no drapes. A cast-iron sofa, a slate kitchen table, two folding chairs, two metal beds, and a broken cappuccino machine don’t provide much acoustic relief under those conditions. We both should have asked the agent to send us pictures of the inside of the house. We actually considered buying a sofa and a couple of chairs in nearby Siena. Furniture, the more upholstered the better, would absorb sound and act as a wind barrier as well. Some rugs on the terra-cotta tile floors and a few tapestries on the gray plaster walls would also help to cut down on the echo. Or you can just stop talking to each other. That’s what we did. Plus we drank a lot of Chianti Classico.”
Traveling while Married Page 6