The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth Page B

At our best, at our bravest and most sensible and most devoted, we do try very hard to hate what divides us rather than each other. If only that past of hers weren’t so vivid, so grandiose, so operatic—if somehow one or the other of us could forget it! If I could close this absurd gap of trust that exists between us still! Or ignore it! Live beyond it! At our best we make resolutions, we make apologies, we make amends, we make love. But at our worst … well, our worst is just about as bad as anybody’s, I would think.
    What do we struggle over mostly? In the beginning—as anyone will have guessed who, after three years of procrastination, has thrown himself headlong and half convinced into the matrimonial flames—in the beginning we struggle over the toast. Why, I wonder, can’t the toast go in while the eggs are cooking, rather than before? This way we can get to eat our bread warm rather than cold. “I don’t believe I am having this discussion,” she says. “Life isn’t toast!” she finally screams. “It is!” I hear myself maintaining. “When you sit down to eat toast, life is toast. And when you take out the garbage, life is garbage. You can’t leave the garbage halfway down the stairs, Helen. It belongs in the can in the yard. Covered.” “I forgot it.” “How can you forget it when it’s already in your hand?” “Perhaps, dear, because it’s garbage—and what difference does it make anyway!” She forgets to affix her signature to the checks she writes and to stamp the letters she mails, while the letters I give her to mail for me and the household turn up with a certain regularity in the pockets of raincoats and slacks months after she has gone off to deposit them in the mailbox. “What do you think about between Here and There? What makes you so forgetful, Helen? Yearnings for old Mandalay? Memories of the ‘crate’ and the lagoons and the elephants, of the dawn coming up like thunder—” “I can’t think about your letters, damn it, every inch of the way.” “But why is it you think you’ve gone outside with the letter in your hand to begin with?” “For some air, that’s why! To see some sky! To breathe!”
    Soon enough, instead of pointing out her errors and oversights, or retracing her steps, or picking up the pieces, or restraining myself (and then going off to curse her out behind the bathroom door), I make the toast, I make the eggs, I take out the garbage, I pay the bills, and I mail the letters. Even when she says, graciously (trying, at her end, to bridge the awful gap), “I’m going out shopping, want me to drop these—” experience, if not wisdom, directs me to say, “No—no, thanks.” The day she loses her wallet after making a withdrawal from the savings account, I take over the transactions at the bank. The day she leaves the fish to rot under the car’s front seat after going out in the morning to get the salmon steaks for dinner, I take over the marketing. The day she has the wool shirt that was to have been dry-cleaned laundered by mistake, I take over going to the cleaners. With the result that before a year is out I am occupied—and glad of it—some sixteen hours a day with teaching my classes and rewriting into a book my thesis on romantic disillusionment in the stories of Anton Chekhov (a subject I’d chosen before even meeting my wife), and Helen has taken increasingly to drink and to dope.
    Her days begin in jasmine-scented waters. With olive oil in her hair to make it glossy after washing, and her face anointed with vitamin creams, she reclines in the tub for twenty minutes each morning, eyes closed and the precious skull at rest against a small inflated pillow; the woman moves only to rub gently with her pumice stone the rough skin on her feet. Three times a week the bath is followed