Movie Stars

Your Cat Can Be a Movie Star!

NO MATTER HOW I SEARCH MY MEMORY, I CANNOT RECALL WHEN Sandy Baker Jr., bartender at the Green Bear, first mentioned in passing that his cousin in Hollywood was a high-level “animal wrangler”—a gruesome phrase for a noble profession!

Have you ever enjoyed the sight of a chimpanzee on roller skates and wearing human clothing in a motion picture? Perhaps the chimp has donned a beanie as well, and the brightly hued plastic propeller on top spins around and around as he skates merrily along.

You would be a heinous prevaricator of the highest order or else a withered misanthrope with a heart of stone were you not moved to the loftiest realms of entertainment by such a sighting of the playful primate in question. It is a little known fact I read in a magazine or saw on TV that Clint Eastwood’s highest-grossing film is not one of his brooding contemplations on the nature of violence and the decay of the body, but the one with the orangutan who gave everybody the finger. It is a mark of the popularity of such films that I recall the orangutan’s name as Clyde, whereas my brain has retained no memory whatsoever of the name given to Clint Eastwood’s character who liked to hang around with Clyde.

Now, how do you think the chimpanzee (or in Clint Eastwood’s case, orangutan) who has given you so much joy got to work that day? Did he ride the bus? It is highly unlikely, though I have no doubt a chimpanzee could be taught to count out correct change for bus fare.

You guessed it! Mr. Buttons (for that is what we will call our hypothetical chimp “chum”) arrived to the set right on time, his grateful belly freshly filled with ripe bananas, thanks to the tireless efforts of an animal wrangler.

That’s all well and good for the ape family, comes the logical rejoinder. I imagine an ape or a monkey could be a real handful. But what about the spider in Annie Hall? They probably just found a spider walking around on the ground.

Wrong again, on several counts. First of all, there is no spider in Annie Hall. I believe you are referring to the eminently touching scene in which Diane Keaton would like to get back together with Woody Allen after a breakup. She calls him on the phone, weeping, and tells him about a large spider in the bathroom. An amusing scene follows in which an outmatched Woody Allen, armed with a tennis racquet, attempts to vanquish said spider, which he describes as being “as big as a Buick,” using the humorous methodology of hyperbolical speech. The spider, however, is never seen. Characteristic of Woody Allen’s filming techniques, Mr. Allen is visible only in part through a doorway, his frantic, half-obscured motions indicating his mammoth struggle with his arachnid foe, probably to save money on animal wranglers. For yes, a spider would have required a spider wrangler, as amazing as that may sound.

In Europe there are no animal wranglers, which is why every European movie has a scene that starts with a live duck getting its head chopped off. They don’t build up to it with some dramatic music that goes dum-dum-DUM. There might be a couple smooching or some people walking in a field, then BANG! A duck getting its head chopped off.

There is a reason no one wants to know “how the sausage is made.” How the sausage is made is terrible.

Let’s get back to this spider for a minute, you may understandably insist. It concerns me that an animal can be implied in a movie. How do I know that Hollywood will make room for my cat, whom I wish to turn into a movie star, if they are so big on leaving everything to the imagination? In fact, isn’t the pioneering 1940s horror movie named after cats, Cat People, all about what is left off the screen, in the darkness of the viewer’s imagination?

Fair enough! But there is good news concerning your cat’s movie star potential. For you see, a cat is often used as a substitute for the darker forces being explored. In other words, you can imply a spider, but a cat is the implication, and therefore cannot in itself be implied. Is there a murderer lurking about? Then certainly a cat will knock over a garbage can and give everyone a scare. This happens in Pickup on South Street and numerous other films. Even in Cat People, which you mention, an innocent kitten serves as visual counterpoint to the mysterious and otherworldly “Cat Lady,” who is never exactly seen except in her sultry and all-too-delectably-human form. Did you know that actress dated George Gershwin? He was a lucky guy! Until he died of an agonizing brain tumor just at the prime of his young life.

Movies would be nothing without cats, whereas spiders (with the notable exception of Kingdom of the Spiders) are almost wholly dispensable. Even the greatest movie spider of all is never seen. Do you recall, in Through a Glass Darkly, when Ingmar Bergman’s heroine reveals that God crawled on her face and He was a horrible cold spider? Of course you do! Well, we never saw that spider, did we? To see it would have defeated the point. There is no way any individual spider is going to become a movie star.

Most of my conversations with Sandy Baker Jr. on this admittedly inexhaustible subject must have occurred at some point in my enjoyment of the fruits of his labors as a bartender. Nor was the relative viability of various animals breaking into the film industry the only subject upon which he proved to be a perceptive and appreciative sounding board. I recall telling him about my idea for a children’s book about Scriabin. I imagine the conversation may have gone like this:

“Who’s this Scriabin character?”

“As a young boy he used to kiss and hug his piano.”

“If you say so.”

“He was a visionary composer who wanted to bring about the end of society with his cataclysmic music.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Before he could finish, he picked at a pimple on his face and the next thing you know he was dead of gangrene.”

Sandy took to calling me “The Old Idea Man,” and hinted that he, by contrast, was a man of action. He put such wild things in the air as the veiled suggestion that he had once had to eat part of his own body to survive.

Well, this guy is obviously full of beans, comes the swift judgment.

You didn’t know him, with his compelling line of talk and wet, hypnotic eyes.

No, he was no buttoned-down milquetoast, scared of braggadocio. Is that what you want in an advocate? I knew from the start that Sandy Baker Jr. was a volatile type, the sort of person who in the worst-case scenario becomes a petty demagogue or tells his followers to eat poison so the UFOs can come get them. I was warned about him.

As may be imagined, the old farmer who frequented the Green Bear tavern was stoic and in tune with the cycles of nature. Naturally, he was wary of people from the “me generation” or “generation X” or the “flower people” or “young rowdies” or “potheads” or whatever it was that Sandy Baker Jr. apparently represented to him. I should have guessed as much. I suppose I was fooled by my own image of the bar as an oasis full of the cheerful barbs characteristic of masculinity as it is practiced in the United States and on the classic sitcom Cheers. It is instructive to consider how many times the character Cliff Clavin would have committed suicide in real life had he been subject to such bullying as he endured on that show.

One evening I took my customary walk to the bar a little later than usual. As I recall, twilight was in the air and the weather was cooling nicely. My wife was out of town for work and I felt some mild and pleasant sense of liberty.

A stranger (to me) was tending bar, a gruff bald man replete with misshapen teeth in sore need of a dentifrice. Some younger people were milling about, a few in lab coats, refugees from the local chemical plant. Sometimes a familiar place can seem like a different world.

At least I saw one of my fellow “regulars,” the old farmer, and I was moved by sentiment. I had never before had the courage to simply sidle up directly next to him on a stool and engage in casual chitchat, but suddenly I found myself not only willing but eager to do just that, my lonely feelings due to my wife’s absence intensified and supplemented by the natural impulse toward “male bonding.”

To my astonishment, the old farmer was garbed in a gray pinstripe suit, a far cry from his usual dungarees or overalls. I fear that my opening remark was some jovial observation on the subject.

“My friend died,” came his sobering reply.

He was referring to Ned Brick, the old detective with whom he had so often gambled.

We spoke for a while of sad things, such as a trip to Alaska he had always hoped to make with his first wife but never had.

The old farmer had been a pallbearer at the old detective’s funeral. I speculated aloud at one point as to whether Sandy Baker Jr. had been similarly employed. This the old farmer answered with a grunt.

I made some remark about Sandy, something about how he didn’t seem so bad to me, a half-hearted defense, I must admit, because at the moment my most cherished hope was that the old farmer would like me. We are always going around criticizing St. Peter for denying Jesus thrice before the crowing of the cock, but come on! It is so easy to want to “go with the crowd” who happens to be around. We all just want to fit in.

“You must know about my disappointing, fat son,” the old farmer said.

I was startled in numerous ways. For one, it seemed that a very personal conversation was about to ensue. Also, it was intriguing to think what association Sandy Baker Jr. might have with the old farmer’s disappointing, fat son. Also, it seemed to be a terrible way to describe one’s son. Also, there is the matter of my own weight.

I noted that the old farmer was drinking gin, a harder libation than usual. On the spot I made the mental decision to recall his every word as closely as possible, and to use the lengthy restroom breaks for which he was so justifiably famous to make some notes in my own form of shorthand, which I planned to transcribe in my leisure at home. As you will see from the following, my plan was a success in that regard.

“You’re telling me you never heard of my fat, disappointing son? His name is Shell.”

I paused to think. It is true that I had heard the name Shell mentioned somewhat frequently, though I could not recall in what capacity. I had a nagging sense that the Shell of which I had heard was a woman, or had been talked about in strictly womanly terms. I was amazed to think that this Shell of my imaginings could be a male of any kind. I thought it best not to mention this, and merely shook my head as if in blankness.

Shell, I was informed, blogged constantly about a young actress named ______. I leave the name blank not from pretension or postmodernism, but simply because the old farmer could not remember the name of the actress that his son liked to blog about. Otherwise alert people of a certain age begin forgetting the names of current superstars, and why shouldn’t they? This man probably knew everything about the phases of the moon.

From various clues, I would suspect that the old farmer might have been trying to refer to Scarlett Johansson, due to a number of mentions of “red hair,” though I cannot say so with certainty. Ms. Johansson has been viewed in films with various shades of hair, red certainly among them. Perhaps a certain jpeg from Shell’s blog, at which the old farmer had gazed with disgust, had fastened itself to his mind with, dare I say it, the strange admixture of lust and distaste that is so common for all of us who participate in humankind.

Shell was fifty years of age, and the old farmer found it unseemly that the girl of his obsession still had baby fat on her, in the old farmer’s estimation. This also makes me suspect that her identity was that of Scarlett Johansson, who is a person so soft and creamy, resembling nothing so much as a nourishing bowl of oatmeal.

Hypocrisy! cries the alert reader familiar with the area and its inhabitants. Isn’t this the same old farmer who has a child bride named Cherry of all things, covered in pale, pink freckles from head to shapely toes?

To which I can only respond, “Touché.”

But may I suggest that we pause before rushing to judgment and take a hard look at our own lives and impulses? It is probably far from uncommon that we recognize as great sins the small faults in others that we fail to recognize in ourselves.

Not that there was any sin involved, on the face of it, with the marriage of the old farmer to his legally aged wife Cherry. As I brood on this complicated matter, it occurs to me that what really bothered the old farmer was his son’s timidity. Shell was not going after his dream! Rather than tracking down Scarlett Johansson (for the sake of argument) and asking her on a date, he was content to scan the Internet for candid photographs of her, in effect building a virtual shrine to her in full view of a disbelieving public, at which he could kneel and worship like a wretched mooncalf.

One warm evening the old farmer came home, or so he related, after dropping off his young wife Cherry at the airport, to notice that the living-room furniture had been pushed against the walls. Next he saw Sandy Baker Jr. with his shirt unbuttoned all the way. Sandy Baker Jr.’s ribs were prominent and pronounced and his chest was quite hairless, almost as if denuded by artificial means. As another part of this scenario, the old farmer’s middle-aged son Shell was on his hands and knees. Sandy Baker Jr. was riding Shell around the room like a horse.

Have I mentioned that Shell was living with Cherry and the old farmer at the time, due to his pending divorce? Naturally, the old farmer wished to ascertain what was “going on.”

“I was showing Shell here some tricks,” Sandy Baker Jr. offered, buttoning his shirt, having dismounted, and attempting to make himself look presentable under the circumstances.

The old farmer thought of a postcard that Cherry had mailed him from one of her shopping trips to Dallas, showing a spider monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a large dog. At the time, everyone had said it was “cute” and “funny.” But now he remembered with stark immediacy the grim, desperate faces of the monkey and the dog.

As he told his story, the old farmer had been staring into the filthy mirror behind the bar, staring the way he might have stared at a fallow field, full of longing and knowledge, seeing things a layman could never see. Suddenly he turned those burning eyes on me.

“Stay away from Mr. Sandy Baker Jr. He’ll beguile you with his powers, and soon you’ll be his henchman on his bloody, hidden deeds.”

This was interesting news, because I had recently given Sandy Baker Jr. the sum of $300 that didn’t exactly belong to me so that he could have some special publicity shots of my cat made up.

Inspired by the old farmer’s newfound passion for gin and the reluctant thought of returning to my own dark house, I consumed a quantity of Gibsons and made many embarrassing proclamations, only a few of which I can recall with any certainty, most if not all of them to uninterested strangers.

A basketball game came on the TV, and as the national anthem was being played I arose with a ceremonious air and hoisted my conical glass and the three wondrous white onions impaled on a toothpick within to the beautiful young woman singing and the enormous flag held parallel to the ground like a safety net by a contingent of artfully arranged Marines. I became belligerent afterward because no one else had stood. “I guess I am the only one standing up for a lady,” I am afraid I declared. “A lady called America!”

At another blurry juncture, I tried to persuade the frightening bartender to turn over the personal telephone number of Sandy Baker Jr. In retrospect, it should have given me a clue to his nature that Sandy was so secretive in his refusal to reveal those very digits, which should have been tucked in my wallet seeing that we had become business partners of a sort and even partners in crime, for what had I done but robbed my wife’s company under her very nose, like a mastermind for whom the FBI agent in charge of the case develops a grudging respect?

Yet thank goodness the fearsome barkeep did not comply! I was left bereft of the contact information I so assiduously sought.

What a condition I was in: drunken, combined with doubts and anger. Given the volatility of my intended communicant, I cannot imagine that the confrontation would have gone well.

What if I had used Sandy’s number as a means of finding his address? What if I had gone over to his apartment or hovel and banged on the door in a rage?

In one such imagining I am pinned to a wall by the projectile of a crossbow and my body, once pried free with some difficulty, is dumped in the old farmer’s catfish pond, along with so many others. I suppose most catfish are farm-raised now, and it is a good thing. They are awful creatures, monstrous to gaze upon, and will eat anything, including my remains. To name a thing like that after its supposed resemblance to a cat is the gravest insult. I hope you do not have a pet catfish because chances are he will never be a movie star! Ha ha!

I should pause to admit two things:

1) Sometimes I call my cat “Catfish” as a nickname because of her cute little puffy fish face.

2) There is a movie called Catfish and for all I know it has a catfish in it. We should all be more scrupulous and not fling around generalizations with abandon. Why am I imagining a catfish circling and circling in a cheap inflatable wading pool? Is that something I read about in a review of the film? A catfish is possessed of extremely sharp and painful cartilaginous (I guess) “whiskers.” Anything inflatable, which might be endangered by harsh poking, would be an unwise container for a catfish. Perhaps that is a central metaphor of the movie, the folly of keeping a catfish in a rubber wading pool. I have not seen it, so I hope I am not giving anything away. Somebody apparently put his catfish in a movie long before my cat became a movie star, so hats off to that enterprising gentleman (or woman). The more I think of it, the less can be said with any certainty on any subject whatsoever. My tongue is a small sea creature indeed, thrashing about so crazily in the hull of an enormous fishing boat christened Ignorance. Wittgenstein was right when he philosophically told us all to shut our big kissers for good. I believe that wily old German went so far as to say that we shouldn’t even make pronouncements like, “The sun will come up tomorrow.” But just try telling that to Little Orphan Annie. Who said that Wittgenstein is necessarily right about everything all the time? Why shouldn’t we say, “The sun will come up tomorrow”? What if it doesn’t? In that case, we will have lots of worse things to worry about than what we said about the sun yesterday. In actual fact, what we say about the sun has very little effect on the sun at all.

When I thought about what to say to Sandy Baker Jr., not every outcome I considered ended with me dead, a clunky bolt shot through my throat.

I also imagined that I might murder Sandy Baker Jr. in self-defense.

What if he came at me with his crossbow raised? What choice would I have but to pick up the novelty “lava lamp” I imagine he would have sitting on an end table for irony? I might smash the lava lamp in his face, releasing its scalding contents, which would blind him. Or perhaps a shard of it would sever one of his arteries. Were it still plugged in, it might well electrocute him.

Thank goodness, then, for the professionalism of the reticent yet ugly bartender. A bartender is used to receiving many slurred requests, few of which he fulfills, unless they involve a fresh drink. That is as it should be. One thing we can be content to know in this world is that we can count on most people to do their jobs in good faith.

One thing from which the unattractive if dedicated service professional could not save me was a wretched hangover. When one’s spouse goes out of town, the initial thought is, “Welcome back, bygone days of bachelorhood. I may as well loosen up and have some wholesome fun!” The reality always ends in pain.

Upon my wife’s return, I managed to choke out a catalog of my misdeeds.

For business purposes, she has been endowed by her employer with an American Express card devoid of any limit. With it, she pays for meals and necessary sundries on business trips. She then files an expense report to the accounting office. Once it has been approved, a check is issued. My wife deposits the check and uses the funds to pay off her corporate American Express card in a timely manner.

Potentially limitless funds! You can see the unfortunate temptation for a spouse who wishes to turn his cat into a movie star.

I regret to say I “borrowed” my wife’s corporate credit card without her knowledge. It was with an excess of adrenaline that I met Sandy Baker Jr. at the prearranged spot: a particularly shabby and generic automatic teller machine near a diseased tree.

My hands were quaking as I slipped the stiff rectangle of fiduciary plastic into the appropriate slot. The source of said quaking was twofold: first, what right had I? Could my actions get my wife fired, or even jailed? Second, my attempt at entering the personal identification number represented the sheerest of guesswork. Perhaps an entirely random number had been assigned by my wife’s company. I chose to assume, however, that this card shared the “PIN” of all our other cards and accounts. (An interesting side note: I almost just told you what it is before deleting it! That is how at ease I feel with you, dear reader, with whom I share so many dreams and goals. But that is no reason to throw caution to the wind entirely, as I am sure you will agree. Suffice it to say, the number bears a poignant romantic association for my wife and myself.)

Luckily (or unluckily) my marital instinct paid off to the tune of three hundred big ones. Sandy Baker Jr. could not possibly have been more delighted.

In contrast, my wife’s response to this tale was not a good-humored one.

“You’ve never kept secrets from me,” she said. After a pause, she added, “Have you?”

I suddenly realized what my breach of trust had done! It had thrown everything good and true into question.

She was also upset because a credit-card payment was imminent, and where was this extra money supposed to come from? She did not say it, for she is the least cruel of persons, but the implication — whether intended or not — was that no extra money might be had from any source, thanks to my unemployment and despair.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You let this vagabond into our home? And he took pictures of our cats? What else did he take? Do I need to inventory the china? I can’t believe you let this character near our cats!”

I tried to soothe her by explaining that Sandy Baker Jr. had never set foot over our sacred threshold, that our feline transactions had been entirely digital in nature and had involved just one of our cats — the one that seemed destined for movie stardom. I had sent him a wide selection of good photos of our potential movie-star cat over Facebook. He needed the money in order to have them printed out on the proper high-quality photographic stock expected in Hollywood, with the required amount of “resolution” and “pixels,” and a professionally “pumped-up” kitty résumé printed on the back in an acceptable font. Multiple copies and shipping costs were other considerations. We had both agreed after some deliberation that Priority Mail with an official notification of receipt was the way to go.

My wife was having none of it. “I don’t like it when somebody takes advantage of my sweetie,” she said. Her brown eyes flashed with exciting danger! She expressed her idea that we should “march right down to that bar” and demand the money back.

I begged her to reconsider. I was willing to admit that maybe Sandy Baker Jr. had made a fool of me. But I could not stomach the idea that my foolishness — if such it was — might be made manifest in front of the crowd at the Green Bear, of which I had come to think as a kind of peaceful sanctuary. From what? That is a difficult question. Not from home, surely, where my cats and wife reside. From life? Better not to spend one’s life in constant analysis, as proven by the bestseller in which Malcolm Gladwell tells us, “Just do things without thinking about it like the great geniuses of history, who never thought about anything, and soon enough you will be a genius like me (and by implication, your cat will be a movie star if you have one).” Action! Action is the key.

“We could invite him over here,” I said.

“That’s it!” my wife agreed. “Under some pretext.”

My expression revealed that I did not know quite what she was getting at.

“And he was never seen again,” she said.

We laughed, enjoying my wife’s dark sense of humor.

“We could invite him over to dinner,” I said. “Keep it private and friendly.”

“And if he doesn’t fess up, then whack!” my wife said. “Hold on.”

She left the dining room, where we had been seated, and I heard her going down the hallway to our bedroom, one of the cats humorously following and making a cute little sound characteristic of it: myuh-myuh-mew-M’YOW!

I felt my capillaries become chilled with fright. I knew what she was going after. And sure enough, she returned, slapping it methodically against her palm: an old-fashioned policeman’s “sap,” its leather glowing a deep, warm black with age.

“Nobody messes with my sweetie,” she said.

I beg your pardon. Do you know what a sap is? It is a small, light instrument for concussive purposes, a deceptively sweet-looking little club with lead concealed in the “business end.” You would not wish your tender brains to come up against one! This particular weapon my wife kept under the bed in case of intruders. It was an antique, belonging to her great-grandfather, a beat cop in Mobile, Alabama, who died of a heart attack at an extremely young age one day as he pounded his beat. There are a number of fascinating stories about him, particularly his death and its aftermath.

Oh, this is just what we need, groans the burdened reader. Genealogy. I reckon it is the only subject we haven’t covered yet in this tedious encyclopedia of human knowledge in its cosmic entirety.

To which I would counter with what has been proven again and again in many major studies: writing is at heart a therapeutic practice, meant to make the writer feel better. How often as a teenager did you scrawl a poem in your loose-leaf notebook, just to get something off your chest? Can it truly be that you have lost your sense of youthful innocence? If your main hope is to turn your cat into a movie star, you should hold such feelings tightly to your breast.

As we grow older, and some of our hearts grow bitter, closed, and frigidly cold, we turn to the writing of others, hoping that some of the therapy will rub off. It is in that spirit that I hope you will indulge me.

No, I was going to tell you a lot of things, such as when the cop climbed up into the attic a week before his death and saw his deceased first wife stretching out her arms toward him, but now I don’t feel like it anymore.

“If he doesn’t come clean, we’ll knock him out and roll him,” my wife said. “I hope his skull isn’t too thin.”

I knew she was speaking in jest, but there was an underlying seriousness at play. Back when I was working, I would often tell my wife of some perceived slight done to me in the callous wording of an e-mail.

“They’d better be glad they’re in another state,” she would say. “I’d kick their asses.”

This sort of rough talk coming from my gentle spouse had always made me smile. At the same time, I had always sensed that the fierceness of her loyalty was no joke, a fact which filled me with deep and unending satisfaction.

The next time I saw Sandy, I invited him over to dinner. I behaved as my wife had suggested, with no hint at all of her suspicions. I used the reason she had concocted: that he needed to meet our cat in person, the better to “sell” her unique talents and personality to his cousin the animal wrangler.

“Funny you should mention that,” he said. “Those pictures didn’t work out. I should bring over my special camera that has the right amount of pixels. We’ll do a little fashion shoot with kitty kitty.”

“She’s shy if you don’t know her,” I said. “So you didn’t end up using those pictures I sent? Maybe I should get my money back so we can reinvest it in other opportunities along these same lines.”

“Well, no, bro, it’s not like that. I already shelled out for the special-order materials, didn’t I? And I sent some of the goods out to Glendale already, to my cousin’s office out there. I can’t help it if he tore them in half. He says we got just one more chance to make good, so we really have to shoot the works this time, do it up right, impress the hell out of him, show him we’re not just a couple of country rubes, that we know you have to spend money to make money. Speaking of which, I’m out a good bit of money on this deal already.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I was also sorry that I couldn’t get the money back from him, because that would have gone a long way toward easing my wife’s concerns.

I still had hope. If there is one thing you learn, it should be “Keep Hope Alive.” Sandy Baker Jr. might still have been on the up-and-up as far as I was concerned. He certainly had a lot of details on the tip of his tongue, such as the authentic-sounding word “Glendale.”

I knew that my wife’s hope, counter to his, was to shame him into admitting he had “conned” us. I knew that his hope was to talk my wife out of more money. I admit I was torn. Really I wanted my wife to be convinced, so I could continue to be convinced, so we could be convinced together. Sandy Baker Jr. was a good convincer. He was the man for the job, I thought. I just wanted everything to be easy.

But everything is not always easy.

On the Saturday that Sandy Baker Jr. was to come to our place for dinner, I set about my housework like Cinderella herself, sure to get at every spot with my duster, my broom, and my mop. My wife, who normally felt the urge to tidy up before company arrived, did not share my enthusiasm on this occasion. She remained in bed, enjoying the melodramatic domestic dramas of the Lifetime Network, while I sat at the computer, my chores completed, my chicken simmering, and devised a new iTunes playlist of background music which I felt sure would be to Sandy Baker Jr.’s liking, though we had never discussed his tastes.

When the knock came on the door, my wife emerged, and I was a little dismayed to see that she had not changed out of her lime-green sweatpants, stained T-shirt with a garish flower on it, and old cloth robe. Overall, she appeared tousled and uncaring. To me, of course, she remained the most beautiful vision in existence.

Sandy Baker Jr. held out a bottle. “You can only get this sh** in Chicago,” he said. “It’s godawful.”

“How thoughtful,” my wife said. She had some snideness coming through, which was on purpose. She read from the label. I can’t recall what it said exactly, nor what the stuff was called, but what my wife read aloud was something like, “Brewed from random vegetation.” She asked Sandy what that was supposed to mean.

“My friend Abby Greenbaum says they make it from the stuff that grows in the sidewalk cracks.”

His delivery of the one-liner was charming, and I was pleased to see that my wife was moved to laugh her wonderful laugh. It boded well. She straightened her hair coquettishly, I thought.

“I stole it from Ned Brick’s house after he died,” he admitted to me in an aside that seemed perversely calculated to wreck the goodwill he had earned thus far, but my wife’s interest appeared to be absorbed in the unusual bottle.

“Should I open this?” she asked.

“Hell no,” said Sandy. “Don’t you have anything decent?” This earned another laugh.

“We have some red wine open, don’t we, sweetie?” she said.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Sandy. He was on a roll!

He had pretended that my wife’s “sweetie” was addressed to him, a harmless conceit that further broke the ice. We had a few drinks in the living room, and some specially spiced almonds that I handed round on a tray. He touched some of our fragile belongings in a familiar manner that made me nervous, but otherwise, everything was going along just great.

Then Sandy Baker Jr., who was wearing a denim vest, dropped an almond and it rolled under the couch.

“Chefs do this,” he said. He felt around under the couch, found the dusty almond, and popped it in his mouth. I silently considered that he had just lost a few points with my wife, but then one of the cats came out and seemed to like him, though not the movie-star cat. The cat, wrong cat though it was, gave him a kiss on the elbow, which we all took as a good sign.

“He never does that!” my wife said, jealousy mingled with admiration in her voice. She had forgotten the dirty almond.

But when we got to the dinner table, the good times were over.

“Ugh, mushrooms,” he said.

“Yes,” I explained, “it’s a complicated French sauce that requires cognac and armagnac.”

“Yuck,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You worked on this all day,” said my wife.

“What’s for dessert?” Sandy asked.

“Chocolate mousse,” I answered. “Would you like to skip right to that?”

He made a face. “Is that the world-famous treat known the world over for looking like a bad case of diarrhea?”

“I hope not,” I said, rising. “I hand-whipped it.”

“I bet you did,” he said. “But what about the chocolate mousse?”

I cast a nervous look toward my wife. This sort of ribald talk was okay for the barroom, but not as welcome at a fancy dinner party. If my wife had caught his implication, she did not register as much.

“Nothing for you, then? That’s just fine. I thought you were here to take glamour shots of my pussy anyway,” she said.

I cannot guess who was more startled at the double meaning of my wife’s statement — myself or Sandy Baker Jr.! The latter played it cool, of course.

“If that’s what you want,” he said, locking eyes with her. I have remarked before upon the uncanny power of his strange and disturbing eyes like fiendish jewels.

Nor are my wife’s eyes a couple of slouches. They stared right back at him. “I thought it’s what you wanted.”

“Who knows what anybody wants in this crazy world?” he said. I thought it was an excellent point.

“Where’s your camera?” my wife asked.

“My phone has a camera in it.”

“I thought you were filling my sweetie’s head with a bunch of talk about a ‘special camera.’”

“It’s special,” he assured her. “Everything about me is special.”

His cell phone didn’t look special to me, but there are a lot of things I don’t know about. Technology changes in the blink of an eye, causing the older among us to feel every bit our age.

Their eyes were fixed in a powerful interlocked beam of torrential psychic energy. It made me feel scared and weird, as if a couple of immortal wizards were battling for the fate of my soul.

“Your chicken is getting cold!” I shouted, hoping to startle my wife, thus breaking the mysterious spell.

It did not work.

Without tearing her eyes from his, my wife picked up a slippery piece of chicken with her fingers.

The chicken had required slow cooking for many hours. The process rendered it moist and delectable to be sure, but some of its more delicate bones had turned to slivers in the oven, I am sad to report.

A small, jagged dart of bone surprised my wife by stabbing her on the inside of the cheek. Her concentration was broken as she put her linen napkin to her mouth in the way favored by polite society in order to spit out the offending portion.

Sandy Baker Jr. laughed. “Good thing I’m skipping the chicken,” he said. “I might have choked to death.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a shame?” my wife replied. But her zinger was interrupted by a cough and she was forced to resort to her water glass.

Sandy Baker Jr. laughed again. He had defeated her in some essential way. I was not too happy about it. It was at this point in the evening that I grabbed his bottle of strange Chicago intoxicant and began downing the vile, thick stuff with some urgency.

“I guess that’s why they call it choking the chicken,” he said.

His remark made little sense. At this point, I was fed up with Sandy Baker Jr. My allegiance had switched.

Of course my primary allegiance is always to my wife, but you know what I mean.

“I’m suddenly in the mood for some of your diarrhea pudding after all,” said Sandy Baker Jr.

“It’s chocolate mousse,” I said in a surly tone.

He just laughed. You see, he knew very well it was chocolate mousse. Oh, he seemed invincible, like an evil knight.

In a way, a glimmer somewhere deep inside me admired him for his unrelenting “take charge” attitude. I went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared into its sparkling depths of awful cleanliness, and began to cry.

Here come the waterworks! mocks the reader.

Indeed. It would be wrong for me to suggest that turning your cat into a movie star is all roses and sunshine, a cakewalk, a waltz, or some other pleasurable activity. It’s not just the job of making your cat into a movie star where this applies. There must come a moment when all seems lost in whatever you’re doing, or you’re not doing it right.

Should we take a moment to discuss St. John of the Cross and his “Dark Night of the Soul”? Probably not. But I would like to mention that it doesn’t mean exactly what you think it means. I have heard the phrase “Dark Night of the Soul” misused far more often than I have heard it used correctly.

I discovered by chance that I had carried Sandy’s disreputable bottle into the kitchen. I took it into the bathroom with me, locked the door and had a few slugs and sat there for quite a while, until I could make myself stop crying. My movie-star cat rustled behind the shower curtain; the bathtub was one of her favorite spots for hiding when there was a noisy stranger in the house. She had gotten herself in a funny position and couldn’t quite figure out how to negotiate the curtain and escape the tub. I helped her, and it was good to take my mind off of myself for a minute.

She jumped on my lap. I gazed into her eyes, which were the color of a certain kind of shiny Greek olive you can get at a nice grocery store. She had a funny way of looking you right in the eyes.

Then she buried her face in my armpit. She thought I was her mother. I thought about how nice it was to be loved.

By the time I returned with Sandy’s chocolate mousse, I was surprised to find him dancing with my wife to one of the rocking tunes I had put on my special Sandy Baker Jr. playlist.

“The chicken was great, sweetie!” my wife said. She shouted, actually, because they had turned the song way up. It turned out to be a song they both loved very much, “Strobe Light” by the B-52s. Music had brought them together, at least for the moment. In the lyrical portion, the male singer and female singer promised each other that they wanted to “make love to you under the strobe light,” which rankled me in my ambivalent mood, as well as the promises from the male that he would kiss the female “on the pineapple,” though clearly it was the rhythmic fun that had arrested the listeners, and after all, the selection was of my own choosing.

“I had some!” screamed Sandy, referring to the chicken. “It’s okay once you pick all the mushrooms off! F***! Your wife can really dance!”

“I love to dance!” she confirmed.

“Do you guys go out dancing a lot?”

“No!”

“You should!”

“We really should! When we were first dating, we went out dancing all the time!”

If only all this merrymaking had commenced a little earlier.

The song ended. A ballad came on, Bobby Short. I was the only one who liked Bobby Short. They turned him way down. I picked at my chicken. I don’t know what they were doing, just horsing around like old chums. Who was playing whom? I couldn’t tell. Sometimes I think I might have a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome, or a severe case of Asperger’s syndrome.

“You should come hear my band.”

“When?” my wife said.

“Tonight!” said Sandy Baker Jr. “I’m going to have to get on out of here pretty soon. Sound check.”

“Hold it a second, hotshot,” my wife said. “We haven’t talked about the money yet.”

“Oh.”

His “oh” made it clear that he knew just what she was talking about. It was practically a confession.

“Oh!” he said again, changing his tone to something devious and jolly. “First let’s get these dishes washed. You don’t want to get up in the morning with a load of dirty dishes.” He started collecting items to wash. I put my arm around my plate, like a man in a prison movie.

“Dishwasher’s broken,” said my wife. “You’ll be sorry you volunteered.”

“He doesn’t look so broken to me. Well, maybe a little.” Sandy Baker Jr. was implying that I was the dishwasher in the family. I believe it was meant to be emasculating.

“If that is meant to be an insult, I don’t get it,” I said. Inside I thought, What’s wrong with a man washing the dishes? Nothing is wrong with a man washing the dishes.

“I like doing things the old-fashioned way!” said Sandy Baker Jr. to my wife, ignoring me.

Off they went, making little cheeping noises like little baby chickens in a chicken yard.

I guess they got the water all warm and sudsy and one washed and the other dried, and Sandy Baker Jr. was probably wearing an apron for some kind of disarming effect. Strangely attractive gloves of yellow latex were involved, I feel sure. Then my wife changed clothes and asked was I sure I didn’t want to go out and hear Sandy’s band.

I, on my third snifter of chocolate mousse, declined.

When my wife came home she smelled intoxicatingly of sweat, perfume, liquor, and old cigarettes. I was reclining on a chaise longue. If I may say so politely, she immediately sat athwart me and tried energetically to rekindle the old romantic spark in our marriage despite all the chocolate mousse I had inside me.

“What’s got into you?” I inquired.

The cats were certainly alarmed. It may be that they had grown unaccustomed to displays quite so strenuous, mellowing as our household had with the inevitable passing of the years.

I should stop and indicate that though I enjoyed the aroma of tobacco commingled with other sins that was making my wife’s skin so slick and hot, smoking is not cool, nor do I endorse it.

“What’s this?” my wife asked teasingly, from atop me. She withdrew from her shirt pocket (she was wearing a white shirt with a front pocket like a man’s) some twenty-dollar bills so damp and soft. There were three of them. Her pants had been shed by this point. I am not trying to be erotic, especially about my own wife. Having described her shirt, it seemed disingenuous to skip the remainder of her couture.

“I got his take of the door,” she said. “It was just forty dollars, the poor dingbat. I shook another twenty out of him. I doubt we’ll see any more of our money.”

“Did you…seduce him?” I said.

“Shut up, baby,” she replied.

At what I should term the highlight of our intimacy, my wife whispered into my ear, “You don’t really want our cat to be a movie star, do you?”

“No,” I said. “No, no.”

“You would miss her too much.”

“Yes!” I shouted.

“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter at all.”