The other day, my wife and I returned from a midnight screening at an art film movie theater. I looked at her standing in the bedroom, moonlight streaming in through the window and dancing off her hair, and I had only one thought.

“Who’d think a digitally restored version of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal would make me horny?” I said.

“Uh, huh,” she said. It was a romantic uh huh. When you’ve been married for over 25 years you know these things. In no time, I was out of my clothes and into a bottle of mouthwash.

I finished just in time to hear her moan. It was the kind of moan that could deflate more than a grown man’s ego. When you’ve been married for over 25 years you know that, too.

Clearly, something had broken the evening’s romantic mood. As a husband, it was my duty to restore it.

“Didn’t Max von Sydow have great hands? I mean, when he grabbed a pawn didn’t it give you shivers?”

“The sheets are all wrinkled,” my wife said, standing over a now turned-down bed. (FOR THE RECORD: It is important to note here that she was fully clothed.)

She smiled. It was not a romantic smile.

My wife cannot get into a bed with a wrinkled sheet. And by “a wrinkled” I mean “a wrinkle.”

Making the bed in the morning now takes me 10 minutes, including five and a half to smooth out the sheets and another three to insure the edge of the bedspread is absolutely parallel to the floor. Somewhere in the distant past, my mother-in-law must have told my wife to always be prepared for a surprise visit from Martha Stewart.

Or Euclid.

“Oh, honey,” I said, stroking her cheek, “nobody can tell if the sheets are wrinkled when the bedspread is on.”

Logic, it turns out, inflames my wife’s desires slightly less than the Magic Fingers found on old Motel 6 beds. And reminding her that, for all she knew, she wrinkled the sheets when she turned down the bed, clocks in as somewhat better than a cold shower.

“If it helps, see the sheets as both wrinkled and unwrinkled until you look at them. Then, their condition is a matter of probability,” I said.

I was thinking about the famous thought experiment proposed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Using the laws of quantum physics, Schrödinger explained how a cat locked in a box with a vial of poison could be dead and alive at the same time, until the box was opened.

“The next time you look at the sheet it might not be wrinkled.”

My wife sat down on the bed and smiled as she stripped off her blouse, wriggled out of her slacks and slowly let the straps on her bra fall away. I sat down next to her.

She stood up, opened her dresser draw and pulled on her flannel pajamas, the ones with buttons up the front. From this I concluded there was a reason quantum physicists were rarely invited to orgies.

“We’re only going to wrinkle the sheets anyway,” I said, hopefully, not wanting to waste dinner and a movie. Or the mouthwash.

Fifteen minutes later, my wife came out of the bathroom, smoothed out her side of the bed and slipped in between the sheets. That was my cue to run my hand up her thigh.

“Would you like me to come back wearing curlers and cold cream?” she said.

Two in the morning is a funny time of day. It’s a time when people are desperate enough to imagine the romantic possibilities of quantum physics. And, it’s a hell of a time for a cold shower.