Just Visiting, part 2

For many years I’d told my husband Mike, a financial services consultant, “If you ever get an opportunity to live overseas, talk to me before you turn it down!” And finally it had happened: He’d been asked to move to Spain for two years. Though I was not the kind of parent who thought it would be great to take her kids on a European vacation, I was doing just that—in an effort to see if I thought we could be happy in Madrid.
Mike had been working for the consulting practice of Price Waterhouse for two years. He spent the first year in Chicago, consulting for a Japanese bank, flying out each Monday morning and returning on Friday night. This, coming after six months of unemployment for him, was a real hardship for me. We’d tightened our belts a good bit while he was out of work. Suddenly he was gone during the week, enjoying fancy hotels and lavish dinners every night while I struggled to take care of two little girls by myself. It also took me a while to get used to having an income again—I’d become accustomed to self-denial as far as spending was concerned.
The second year he worked mainly in Manhattan with a Dutch bank—a real relief for me. He was eager to become a partner of PW, and it was a little unclear how that was going to happen. If you’re a business-getter you can make partner, but he wasn’t one. If you have a unique specialty you can make partner, so he was trying to specialize. But in the New York office, he told me, “If you’re available, you get pulled onto any consulting assignment that comes up,” which made it difficult to become a specialist.
I had lots of doubts about whether Mike would ever make partner. I thought he was a very talented consultant, but he was no salesman. I worried that he wouldn’t make it, and that the resulting disappointment would crush him. When he lost his job at GE Capital in 1991 it was like a kick in the gut, but he’d done wonderfully in outplacement and had found his way back to consulting, which he’d done years before. If that didn’t work out for him, I was afraid he’d lose his confidence completely.
It was at the 1993 Christmas party of Mike’s department that Juan Pujadas, a young (early 30s) partner originally from the Dominican Republic said to Mike, “Be ready to take an assignment in Madrid.” The Madrid office of PW had won a consulting assignment with Banco Santander, Spain’s largest bank, to work on risk management, the area in which Mike was trying to specialize. Normally such a job would be staffed by the London office, as Madrid had no one qualified to do it. But the London office had a condescending attitude toward the rest of Europe, and the consultants there were unwilling to travel to Spain.
Because Juan was a Spanish speaker he had formed a relationship with the partners in the Madrid office, and he offered to staff the job for them. Mike was indeed available—“on the beach,” as they said in the firm—an unenviable condition that left him subject to the needs of partners filling assignments. Though he had not a word of Spanish, he was the guy for the job, because it looked like he had the next four months free.
I wasn’t happy about Mike’s going to Europe for four months (I knew he’d be able to come home every other weekend), but after a year of having him home I knew my days were numbered. “Consultants travel,” he always said. “That is the nature of the business.” And I was excited about the possibility of getting myself a trip to Madrid somewhere along the line. I wanted to see the city’s great art museum, the Prado.
As the next few weeks went by, the assignment firmed up, and I resigned myself to Mike’s being away for a good long while. He started Spanish lessons at Berlitz, and we went away on a previously planned Caribbean vacation with two other couples. Then in mid-January he left for Madrid, housed first in a hotel, then in a sort of apartment-hotel, and later in a rented apartment.