If Only Life Could Be Predicted So Well

Lately I’ve had to concede that my wife is smarter than I am. I don’t mean she’s smarter in some superficial way, like being sharper of tongue. She understands money better than I do, for one thing, which is why I have put her in complete charge of our modest finances.

Perhaps most exasperating, she understands mystery and suspense movies on television better than I do. She knows what’s happening. Occasionally, she knows what’s happening before it happens.

She’ll say, for example, “He’s going to kill her.” She’s almost always right. I don’t know whether she has a better grasp of human nature than I do, or whether she’s psychic.

She has no such clairvoyance in the mysteries of everyday life. She rarely foresees the minor disasters that beset us all. She did not predict that our new dog, Lili, would wreak such havoc in our household. Lili picks up anything loose--slippers, shoes, panties, bras, T-shirts--and darts about the house, snarling and shaking them, defying us to get them back. It is obviously a game with her. She will come up and shake the contraband object under my nose, and when I slap her on the snout, which is the only thing she understands, my wife cries out, “Don’t do that!”

My wife is considering a woman’s offer to discipline the dog for $550, no guarantees. As I say, my wife has control of the money, but that seems extravagant to me.

The other night we were watching a movie called “House of Secrets.” It was a complicated story about two women who conspire to kill the husband of one. She opposes his plan to sell their estate, now the home of a sanitarium, for a casino. Besides, he is nasty. He beats her.

First, the two women give him a Mickey Finn. When he is helpless, they put him in the bathtub under water and presumably drown him. Then they wrap his body in a carpet and drop him into an ornamental pool that is thick with water plants. My thought at the time was, “Good riddance.”

Then his body disappears. The women fear he is still alive. Apparently he is. I cannot believe he was not drowned. He was under water too long. No, my wife said, he’s alive.

Next, he appears as Baron von Munchausen at a Mardi Gras, leads

his wife on a desperate chase, and finally frightens her to death. (She has a bad heart.)

We see her in her casket at her funeral. Now I didn’t realize it, but the other murderess was the wife of a man the dead woman’s husband had killed, evidently in a conspiracy with her. After the funeral, a detective in whom the supposedly drowned man’s wife had confided tells him that while he walked away from his first murder, they’ll get him for this one. Then we see the supposedly dead wife smiling down through a window.

That’s the way my wife reconstructed the story after it was over. I was lost at almost every turn.

Earlier, we had seen an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” The formula is always the same in these stories. The mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher wraps the murderer in the flimsiest web of circumstantial evidence--not nearly enough to convict him in court--whereupon he makes a full confession. End of episode.

My wife is not only contemptuous of these TV dramas, she is also contemptuous of me for spending so much of my time before the tube. I had been watching the U.S. Open most of the week, I am an aficionado of professional tennis. It is one against one, and nobody can help either one of them. Recently, I was absorbed in the match between Mary Joe Fernandez and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.

My wife didn’t criticize me. Probably figured it was better than a junk movie.

“This is a terrific match,” I said, explaining that Mary Joe was about to upset the dogged Spaniard. I have always favored Mary Joe because of her little boy face and slender figure.

Earlier that day I had watched Pete Sampras, the all-American boy, escape defeat at the hands of an 18-year-old Australian, but “just barely,” as The Times said.

My wife watched the last set of the Fernandez-Sanchez Vicario match standing up. That is typical. Evidently she wants me to know that what I’m watching is not really worth sitting down to see.

She thinks I should be answering my mail or writing a column. She will drop a handful of letters on my bed, aggravating my sense of guilt.

In the morning, though I had seen the match, I still could hardly believe Fernandez had defeated Sanchez Vicario. I found the story in the Sports section. Indeed she had.

That’s one thing my wife hadn’t predicted.

* Jack Smith’s column is published Mondays.