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.