Living in a Foreign Language by Michael Tucker

turned to us. “Ask Bruno. He’ll tell you what a crook he is.”
    â€œBruno does not know everything, JoJo.”
    â€œFind another contractor.”

    Martin
    After a pause, Martin suggested that he and JoJo work this out between themselves and that we, as clients, needn’t worry ourselves with these details. Behind his eyes, however, I could see that he was thinking forward to at least a year of being second-guessed by JoJo and wondering whether it was worth it. As much as I liked Martin and felt I could trust him, I wasn’t ready to lose JoJo on the project. She would be our agent, our staunch advocate when we were six thousand miles away. And she would watch the purse strings. No, they’d just have to learn to get along.
    â€œCould I ask a technical question?” asked Jill, changing the subject.
    â€œOf course. You’re the client,” said Martin, beaming.
    â€œWhat do we do for electrical sockets? I can’t find more than one plug in the living room.”
    â€œYou do what any good owner of a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old house does—you buy an extension cord.”
    JoJo piped up to say that she knew where we could get one and suggested we follow her into Spoleto. Then, she said, we could grab a little lunch up at the Piazza Mercato.
    â€œI will leave you to it. Some of us, unfortunately, must work for a living,” said Martin as he gathered his plans and bid us good-bye.
    The electric shop in Spoleto was small, featuring shelves piled high with lamps, toasters, fans and TVs—all in various states of repair. There was one man behind the counter and two people in front of us in line. While we were waiting, JoJo filled us in a bit more about Martin. She said he had an excellent reputation—not only for his work, but for his ability to deal with the local bureaucracies that hand out building permits in each
comune
, or township. Our area, she told us, is one of the most difficult areas to get permission to build—because of the olive groves, which are fiercely protected from development. She then confided that if it hadn’t been for Martin’s abilities to persuade, pester and cajole the authorities, our permit—which had already been approved—could have taken a year or two to actually be delivered into our hands. Now, she said, we would need his talents even more to get them to quickly approve our
variazione
—meaning the changes from Bruno’s approved plans to our altered ones. The footprint, the square footage and the pool design would have to be exactly the same, and whatever changes we did inside would need the approval of the
comune
.
    Eventually, our turn came to speak to the man behind the counter of the electric store. JoJo let us try to handle it ourselves. I had already looked up the word for extension cord before we left the house, so I was feeling confident. I noticed there were three people in line behind us, but I figuredwe wouldn’t be but a moment. Just an extension cord, after all.
    â€œBuon giorno, signore,”
I started.
“Ho bisogno una prolunga.”
    â€œAh!” he said.
“Perché?”
    He wanted to know what we wanted to use it for. Jill and I then got into a discussion about what our particular needs were—portable tape player, two lamps, a laptop computer and a TV, with only one electrical outlet on that side of the living room. As we explained the layout of the room, he took out a pen and paper and had us draw it for him. Then we negotiated the perfect length for the cord and the right number of plugs for the end. That led us to a discussion of color. I looked nervously behind me at the line, which had gotten longer; but no one seemed to be in a hurry. The line had transmogrified into a discussion group and they were all talking quite happily about God only knows what. After a long discussion of our own, we decided on
marrone
—brown.
    Then he carefully measured out the