Movie Stars Read online

  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 wi
th 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.”

  Marriage

  “BANANA CREAM PIE. COCONUT CREAM PIE.”

  “Chocolate icebox pie.”

  “Lemon icebox pie.”

  “Lemon meringue pie.”

  A great deal of meaning lay in that conversation, an escalating clash, a conflict and resolution, an understanding and harmony, and none of it about pie. It is not worth explaining. You could never understand it.

  Here’s an easier one:

  “The mail hasn’t come yet.”

  “It hasn’t come yet.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said the mail hasn’t come yet.”

  “Huh?”

  “It hasn’t come yet.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  But perhaps most to the point: