My wife and I are big boosters of our neighborhood and big fans of our lives. Partly for this reason, and partly because we are used to encountering suburbanites who think we have to pack heat to take out the trash and can hear our neighbors arguing through the walls, we are in the habit of talking the place up whenever given the opportunity. Sometimes, when one of the empty places down the street is having an open house on the weekends, we’ll go over and chat up the looky-loos just to show them we live here and/or let them know what they’re getting into, neighbor-wise.
I fear that this could get us into trouble.

The other night, as two-income households are wont to do at the end of a mutually hard workday, the wife and I ordered some pizza. When the pizza eventually arrived, we both took our respective duties: my wife went to the door to pay the good man, and I went to chase the cat. “Our” cat, in case I’ve never said so here, is an ill-tempered malcontent who hates all human life and reacts to encounters with it in, shall we say, unpredictable ways. (Some of my friends cite this as proof that pets take after their masters, but you know what?, f*** those a-holes.) The first time I came to my wife’s apartment and met her cat, he didn’t claw my face off, and on that basis she knew she would marry me someday. So I have to keep him away from the front door whenever it’s open; the theory is that he’ll see someone at the door, become terrified of them, and in his terror he will run directly towards them and outside into the street, where a truck will terrify him causing him to run under it.

This theory cannot really be scientifically verified. It’s sort of my wife’s theory more than mine. Pick your battles.

Anyway! I have to chase the cat upstairs, so I do. I got him up there last night when the pizza came and was soothing his misanthropy when I heard my wife talking to the pizza guy about what a nice place we have. At length. As I listened, it slowly dawned on me that my wife was doing her usual duty as Auxiliary Real Estate Cadet First Class, talking up the place and selling it to a curious party. In my significantly more jaded mind, however, it quickly began to seem clear that what had actually happened was a complete stranger had just come to our door, and she was now describing to him our security system’s various weaknesses.

“You all totally live on top of each other, right? And with these alarm systems… man, it must be so noisy.”

“Oh, no, not at all. Our insulation is so advanced and thick that stuff happens right next door and we never even hear it. Sometimes, people accidentally set off their alarms and we don’t even notice for like half an hour.”

I tried to lunge down the stairs, crying out, “Big dog! Kitchen guns!” but by the time I got there, he was making change and my words were more like, “Guh fuh buh! Nuh nuh. Pant, pant. No hurty.”

Immediately after he left, I explained to my wife why she doesn’t get to answer the door ever again, and then spent the next half hour regretting the paranoia tsunami I had just caused and reassuring her it was probably nothing. (Still, just to be on the safe side: tell the CSI guys that it was the Papa John’s guy delivering at 6:45 on 3/7, or someone he knows. My estate thanks you.) The problem isn’t that my wife grew up on Sunnybrook Farm, but that she married a frustrated criminal mastermind. When local-boy-made-evil Michael Devlin (from whom I am two degrees of separation) was arrested for kidnapping those kids, there was briefly a completely untrue rumor that he was a pizza delivery guy; talk radio know-nothings speculated that, as he went door to door with his pies, he was scouting out houses with kids to swipe. When I heard this speculation, this monstrous speculation, I confess that my first thought was, “Oh my God, that’s brilliant. You have to give it up for the ingenuity.”

And that is not even in the top 10 reasons why I’m going to hell. Pray for me.