After my wife signed up for that cooking class she stopped following recipes altogether. When a sauce calls for white wine, she uses red. For chicken breast she’ll substitute tofu or steak or lobster tail, as if money is no more an object than recipes are. And when something is supposed to be boiled she sautés it instead, usually in olive oil but sometimes it’s peanut or chili or avocado. I didn’t even know avocados produced oil until the first time she used it to cook what I thought were going to be mashed potatoes.

“I don’t like being told what to do,” she said when I asked why she was poaching asparagus in heavy cream. “I’m tired of always doing what I’m supposed to.”

The chef she had on TV was steaming his asparagus above lemon water, and I’m sure all the viewers cooking along at home were doing that, too, all of them except for my wife. To be honest, that turned out to be one of her more successful -- and delicious -- deviations, but it was also early on in her experimentation. When she first began making a little change here, a little change there, she put her personal stamp on a meal without veering too far from expectation and the dishes were often quite tasty. It quickly got of hand, though, and now it’s like she’s been possessed by the bad spirit of some renegade chef.

“I never realized there were so many ways to make Caesar salad,” she said one Sunday morning as we read our respective sections of the newspaper. The other sections, the ones neither one of us reads, were stacked on the table between us. “There are so many things I’ve never tried.”

“It’s really only Caesar salad,” I said, “if you make it in the approved way.”

It used to be she couldn’t make anything without a cookbook propped up before her. I even bought her one of those plastic display stands, the kind that holds the book open and protects it from splashing sauce, too, and is easy to wipe clean when you’re done. She always read each recipe through before taking a step, and made sure to consult the instructions at each stage as she moved forward and the meal came together. She was careful, and meticulous, and I could count on her meatloaf to taste exactly the same every Thursday, week in and week out, no matter what happened at work or if the Red Sox were losing or if I’d put our cans out too late for the garbage truck again that morning. Her meatloaf was reliable. Until she wrapped it in leek stalks instead of with bacon, and glazed it with hoisin sauce instead of with ketchup. Part of me wishes we could eat something else on Thursdays now, because I never know what I’m going to get, but it’s important to stick to what works so I hang onto hope that her meatloaf will get back to normal.

A few weeks ago, while I was at work, she took the display stand away from the back of the stove and replaced it with a row of steel hooks hung with slotted and solid spoons that don’t match our pattern, three sizes of whisk, and an electric stick-blender she finds a reason to use on everything now. One Tuesday I sat down to a plate of rib-eye, au gratin potatoes, glazed carrots, and garlic sourdough bread with gorgonzola cheese melted on it. It was a far cry from the chicken parm she’d set out to make -- it was Tuesday night, after all -- but for once, lately, the meal looked familiar, it was something I knew, and I was excited to eat it. But as I spread a napkin over my lap she grabbed the plate away and raced back to the kitchen, saying, “I’ve just got to do one more thing.” I drank my wine and I waited, and with each distant pulse of the blender my excitement ebbed a bit more until at last she returned with a big bowl of orange soup streaked through with beef blood and speckled with green flecks of cheese. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever eaten, but it was no closer to rib-eye than it was chicken parm.

She must have been pleased with the way that meal turned out, because I’ve been eating rib-eye gorgonzola sourdough soup and its equivalents more and more often. It’s been weeks since I could distinguish one element of a meal from all the others -- meat courses, salads, starches, who knows. And, even worse, now she’s refusing to follow directions of any kind, not just in the kitchen. She blew through a stop sign last Friday night when we went to the mall, and nearly ran over a priest as he crossed himself in the crosswalk with his eyes closed. She swore she hadn’t seen him in time to swerve, but I’m not convinced that was true. And the next afternoon she put all our stamped mail in the metered mail slot.

“Honey,” I said, “maybe you should follow at least some of the rules. It’s one thing to fool around in the kitchen, but sometimes there’s a good reason to do things the way they’re usually done.”

She said, “I should have done this a long time ago,” then tossed the assembly instructions for our new coffee table into the fireplace before I’d even taken the pieces out of the box. I spent the rest of the evening on line, trying to find pictures of the table from other angles to complement the diagram on the box so I could figure out how it went together.

She stopped going to work, and stopped brushing her teeth, and began drinking tap water instead of the filtered. That’s when I became nervous: if she was willing to flout all those conventions, what other rules could she ignore? What about vows, I wondered, aren’t those a kind of rule, too? Maybe it was that chef who was teaching her class -- she hadn’t said much about him, and she hadn’t mentioned her class in weeks, but that could be the biggest sign something was wrong or that she wasn’t telling me something.

So one morning after she backed out of the driveway and stayed in reverse the whole length of the street, I followed in our other car. Going forward, of course. I stayed back (or front?) as far as I could, but I think she was too busy trying to hold the car in a straight line, bumping on and off the sidewalk and swerving back and forth in her lane, to spot me on her tail, or her nose... I’ll have to write the grammar columnist for the newspaper to find out how that should be said. If I hadn’t known my wife to be a conscientious driver for so many years, if I’d seen a stranger driving the way that she was, I would’ve suspected her mind was on something else instead of the road, that she was distracted in some significant way. Because even with her windshield facing my way, she didn’t spot me. I should have been at work myself by that time, and I hadn’t even called in, but I felt it was important to do this right away and I could explain to my manager later.

We went through the center of town, my wife with the stereo so loud the car’s windows were shaking. I was paying so much attention to her that I ran a red light and almost bumped a schoolbus, but pulled away at the last second. The bus driver gave me an angry look, but I gave a quick wave I hoped was sufficient to tell her, “I’m sorry, but I’m on a very important mission this morning. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have made such a mistake.”

I thought my wife was headed for the cooking school she’s been attending, and the handsome French chef I’m sure is her teacher. She’s never been unfaithful to me -- nor I to her, naturally -- but her recent behavior had been so suspicious that as we drove I imagined scenarios in which I caught the two of them flagrante delicto behind the shelves of canned goods, or on a makeshift mattress of flour sacks, and confronted them with a rolling pin or a hardcover Larousse Gastronomique like the one I bought my wife as a wedding gift raised overhead in one hand. But to my surprise, perhaps even relief, though she slowed down and turned her head while passing the culinary academy the car rolled right past without stopping.

Instead, she went two more blocks and pulled into the clinic where I had a dark spot removed from my back a few years ago for some tests--it turned out to be nothing, thank goodness. I pulled up to the curb a little way down the street, and watched her drive into the lot. It was a surprise, frankly, that she was visiting a doctor because I was pretty sure she’d been for a checkup just a few weeks before.

She backed up nice and straight into a space near the door. She wiped her eyes with one hand (it’s no wonder she worked up a sweat with that dangerous driving!) while the other stayed on the wheel, then she freshened her makeup in the rearview mirror before walking into the clinic shoulders slumped and head down. When the automatic doors slid closed, the glass was too dark for me to see her inside.

I waited a minute, to see if she would come out. I thought about going in after her, but the morning was marching forward and I knew work was waiting for me. How many rules could she break at the doctor’s? And, hopefully, she would be more careful as she drove home. So I pulled away from the curb and toward the highway, thinking of excuses I might offer when I arrived, and hoping that when I got home the meatloaf would be back to normal. Or, I thought, perhaps we might even go out for some seafood, bouillabaisse or lobster bisque, and made a mental note to call my wife later -- after she would be home from the doctor’s -- so she would have time to adjust to the change in her plans.