Think of me, at lunch with the wily ocelot and the nimble marmoset. I was outclassed, really, neither as wily as the former nor as nimble as the latter, and much less fabulously cute than either. The nimble marmoset ordered the especial ejecutivo, and the wily oscelot had corvina a la plancha, with a side of patacones.

“This life,” I told them, leaning over the edge of the table, “is beginning to overwhelm.” But the wily ocelot and the nimble marmoset were not too interested in what I had to say about “this life.” I could tell this by the look they were giving me.

“You know what I was thinking,” said the nimble marmoset. But no one knows what the nimble marmoset was thinking. That is the nimble marmoset’s tragedy, the reason that, despite being so nimble, so twee, so fabulously cute, the nimble marmoset has never once been really happy.

“Of course I don’t,” said the wily ocelot, “wily though I am.”

“I was thinking of trying the flan,” said the nimble marmoset.

“That’s not really something you need to tell us,” the wily ocelot said.

“Don’t have the flan,” I said. “It’s not very good here.”

Across the room, a man was going on at length about how when he had been a ski instructor somewhere, his SUV had surprised many people by being much more powerful than they had expected. It was a man with only one earring.

“Honestly,” I said, “the feeling I’m getting is that I’m kind of regressing into a weird incomprehensible dream babyhood. And I’ve stopped being really clever, or even kind of funny. I think it might be the beauty of the landscape.” The nimble marmoset and the wily ocelot stared at me for a while, and said nothing.

“I think I’m going to try a piece of lemon meringue pie,” I said. And then when the waiter came around again, I ordered a piece of lemon meringue pie.