He's out in the living room lying on the couch pretending to be asleep, a cup of his damn tea cooling on the coffee table in front of him. Someday, he'll use a coaster and I'll die of shock. There's a whole pile of them right next to the couch. Since we got married, my wood coffee table, which I've kept in perfect condition, has become covered with rings.
I know he's peeved with me because he wanted an omelet for dinner and I forgot, on purpose, to pick up a carton of eggs at the supermarket. He doesn't notice but the whole house perpetually reeks of the sulfur smell of eggs. Disgusting. No roomspray or scented candle seems to help. And I now have an aversion to eggs in any form. I've started to hate seeing him eat them. Can't he eat something that requires a knife?
After an enthusiastic start, when we became a couple and then got married, I now have to treat him with kid gloves hoping to get him in a good enough mood to have sex.
Turns out, all those years when I thought he was an upbeat guy brought down by the death of his family, I now realize that he's, by nature, a very depressed and moody person who can sometimes get himself together to be gregarious with strangers.
So in public, he's a fun guy but as soon as he's home in private with me, he descends into an irritable melancholy. Angela must have had a hard road with him too. And that kind of personality would be tough on a kid.
He had savings from his time in show business that he used for years to supplement his small salary at the CBI. But after he paid for a big, lavish wedding, which I didn't want, that money ran out.
The house in Malibu is worth about ten million dollars but he won't sell it. He still has a sentimental attachment and that means, we have to scrape together forty thousand a year for the taxes. So I'm counting pennies and, since he doesn't care about money, he has no anxiety about it.
When we got married, I made him swear to quit gambling. So I'd be humiliated if I had to ask him to play poker to get us solvent.
I always admired his brilliant mind and we were a great team at the CBI. He was the brain and I was the brawn. He could talk circles around perps. I could kick the crap out of them and then throw the book at them.
Now that we're married, the intellectual gap and even the socio-economic differences between us are very apparent. He's way ahead of me in solving any problem and is very well read. His tastes are sophisticated. He understands wine, art, poetry, the ballet and the opera. He likes foreign films. He's well travelled, can get by in Spanish and is fluent in French.
My tastes run to beer and nachos and team sports and action flicks and romance novels. So it turns out, we don't have much in common. And he has to notice that a lot of his interests are way over my head. I never knew this but Angela had a PHD in Physics.
I can hear him stirring in the living room. He'll probably want to go out to a diner for eggs. So I have to get off the phone now, Dr. Meltzer. Tell me the truth, do you think this marriage can be saved?