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“I could always traipse off to a new country—”
    “Any left? You go through countries the way most folks go through socks.”
    “Russia,” I noted. “But I’m not, for once, threatening to ransom my life to Aeroflot. Because lately ... everywhere seems kind of the same. Countries all have different food, but they all have food , know what I mean?”
    “What do you call that? Right! Codswallop.”
    See, you’d a habit back then of pretending to have no idea what I was talking about if what I was getting at was at all complicated or subtle. Later this playing-dumb strategy, which began as gentle teasing, warped into a darker incapacity to grasp what I was getting at not because it was abstruse but because it was all too clear and you didn’t want it to be so.
    Allow me, then, to elucidate: Countries all have different weather, but they all have weather of some sort, architecture of some sort, a disposition toward burping at the dinner table that regards it as flattering or rude. Hence, I had begun to attend less to whether one was expected to leave one’s sandals at the door in Morocco than to the constant that, wherever I was, its culture would have a custom about shoes. It seemed a great deal of trouble to go to—checking baggage, adapting to new time zones—only to remain stuck on the old weather-shoes continuum; the continuum itself had come to feel like a location of sorts, thereby landing me relentlessly in the same place. Nevertheless, though I would sometimes rant about globalization—I could now buy your favorite chocolate-brown Stove brogans from Banana Republic in Bangkok—what had really grown monotonous was the world in my head, what I thought and how I felt and what I said. The only way my head was going truly somewhere else was to travel to a different life and not to a different airport.
    “Motherhood,” I condensed in the park. “Now, that is a foreign country.”
    On those rare occasions when it seemed as if I might really want to do it , you got nervous. “You may be self-satisfied with your success,” you said. “Location scouting for Madison Avenue ad clients hasn’t brought me to an orgasm of self-actualization.”
    “All right.” I stopped, leaned on the warm wooden rail that fenced the Hudson, and extended my arms on either side to face you squarely. “What’s going to happen , then? To you, professionally, what are we waiting and hoping for?”
    You waggled your head, searching my face. You seemed to discern that I was not trying to impugn your achievements or the importance of your work. This was about something else. “I could scout for feature films instead.”
    “But you’ve always said that’s the same job: You find the canvas, someone else paints the scene. And ads pay better.”
    “Married to Mrs. Moneybags, that doesn’t matter.”
    “It does to you.” Your maturity about my vastly outearning you had its limits.
    “I’ve considered trying something else altogether.”
    “So, what, you’ll get all fired up to start your own restaurant?”
    You smiled. “They never make it.”
    “Exactly. You’re too practical. Maybe you will do something different, but it’ll be pretty much on the same plane . And I’m talking about topography. Emotional, narrative topography. We live in Holland. And sometimes I get a hankering for Nepal.”
    Since other New Yorkers were so driven, you could have been injured that I didn’t regard you as ambitious. But one of the things you were practical about was yourself, and you didn’t take offense. You were ambitious—for your life, what it was like when you woke up in the morning, and not for some attainment. Like most people who did not answer a particular calling from an early age, you placed work beside yourself; any occupation would fill up your day but not your heart. I liked that about you. I liked it enormously.
    We started walking again, and I swung your hand. “Our parents will die soon,” I resumed. “In fact,