THE TV PEOPLE ignore me from the very outset. All three of them have this look that says the likes of me don’t exist. They open the door and carry in their TV. The two put the set on the sideboard, the other one plugs it in. There’s a mantel clock and a stack of magazines on the sideboard. The clock was a wedding gift, big and heavy—big and heavy as time itself—with a loud sound, too. TRPP Q SCHAOUS TRPP Q SCHAOUS. All through the house you can hear it. The TV People move it off the sideboard, down onto the floor. The wife’s going to raise hell, I think. She hates it when things get randomly shifted about. If everything isn’t in its proper place, she gets really sore. What’s worse, with the clock there on the floor, I’m bound to trip over it in the middle of the night. I’m forever getting up to go to the toilet at two in the morning, bleary-eyed and stumbling over something.

Next, the TV People move the magazines to the table. All of them women’s magazines. (I hardly ever read magazines; I read books—personally, I wouldn’t mind if every last magazine in the world went out of business.) Elle and Marie Claire and Home Ideas, magazines of that ilk. Neatly stacked on the sideboard. The wife doesn’t like me touching her magazines—change the order of the stack, and I never hear the end of it—so I don’t go near them. Never once flipped through them. But the TV People couldn’t care less: They move them right out of the way, they show no concern, they sweep the whole lot off the sideboard, they mix up the order. Marie Claire is on top of Croissant; Home Ideas is underneath An-An. Unforgivable. And worse, they’re scattering the bookmarks onto the floor. They’ve lost her place, pages with important information. I have no idea what information or how important—might have been for work, might have been personal—but whatever, it was important to the wife, and she’ll let me know about it. “What’s the meaning of this? I go out for a nice time with friends, and when I come back, the house is a shambles!” I can just hear it, line for line. Oh, great, I think, shaking my head.