"But Rick is with your parents."
"They got fed up with him. Now he is with my sis."
"Fed up with gentle Rick?"
"Kids are dirty."
"We should take them with us." Her thought was of rescuing her favorite from such in-laws to her and laws to him.
"Honey, we can't afford them initially. Do you know how much international schools cost?" She at last saw his point. She felt apologetic. Maybe his reason for this marriage had not been to get her money after all. "Besides," she thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.
"Go by yourself then. I'll stay with the boys. When I sell what I have painted — I can pull in 20,000 more or less—I'll send it to you. However, regarding the mortgage of my house you can get that out of your thoughts! The day I'm expected to mortgage my house is the day I file the divorce papers." She smiled malevolently.
"Of course. I shouldn't have asked that. Please come to Sapporo with me. It might be your only time to actually live outside America."
He was putting the taste for new experiences back within her palate, and to her the taste of it was uniquely tactile and sweet like a wad of chewing tobacco. The possibility of going elsewhere potentially out of the reach of America's long shadow made her soar as invincibly as an archaeopteryx departing from a tyrannosaurus, if indeed these two creatures were coeval.
Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to immerse itself whole in a pool of water. America exported greed and violence in cinematography, had sovereignty in technological exports, dictated world affairs, overthrew leaders, craved for energy to give to its race horse economy despite its havoc on the environment, and believed with certainty that God gave hegemony in this superpower status to they who relentlessly pursued gluttonous freedoms in a world of misery ridden masses. If she were to live elsewhere experiencing other cultures fully she felt that the inhabitants would be a "totally different fish;" and being exposed to a different fish would be her mutation into something higher.