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.