Dennis P. Hagerty standing in the doorway of his second-floor bathroom on East Ridgewood Avenue in Paramus, N.J., on Wednesday morning, shortly after the exchange with his wife that has since become a point of sustained marital discussion. Credit: Ross Featherington/The New York Time5
Dennis P. Hagerty standing in the doorway of his second-floor bathroom on East Ridgewood Avenue in Paramus, N.J., on Wednesday morning, shortly after the exchange with his wife that has since become a point of sustained marital discussion. Credit: Ross Featherington/The New York Time5

PARAMUS, N.J. — The bathroom, it should be said, is new. Dennis P. Hagerty, 43, renovated it last month — new tile, new vanity, a rainfall showerhead he has described to neighbors as “transformative” — and it was, by any measure, a space he had designed for himself, a private sanctuary on the second floor of the split-level ranch on East Ridgewood Avenue where he has lived with his wife, Lori, for eleven years. It was in this bathroom, at approximately 6:50 on Wednesday morning, that Mr. Hagerty used the replacement bidet — a Toto Washlet C5, installed two weeks ago to replace the Kohler AquaStream Pro 9000 that perforated his lower abdomen in an incident last month — and, in the process, produced an odor that his wife, standing in the hallway outside the closed door, characterized as “unbelievable.”

What happened next is not in dispute. Mrs. Hagerty knocked on the door. She told her husband, firmly and without ambiguity, that he needed to stop using the bidet. Her objection, she later clarified, was not to the bidet itself but to the broader situation — that the device had become, in her words, “a whole production” that extended the duration and atmospheric impact of her husband’s morning routine by what she estimated to be a factor of three. “Before the bidet, it was five minutes,” she said, seated at the kitchen table later that morning, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee she had not yet sipped. “Now it’s fifteen, twenty minutes. And the smell is — I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like the bidet makes everything worse somehow. Like it’s stirring things up.”

Mr. Hagerty, by his own account, listened to his wife’s request. He considered it. And then, still seated on the toilet, he called back through the closed door: “Do you ever stand next to a distant wall and listen to the echo of your voice?”

Mrs. Hagerty did not respond.

“I didn’t know what to say to that,” she said. “I’m standing in the hallway, the smell is coming under the door, and he’s asking me about echoes. About walls. I didn’t know what we were talking about anymore.”

Mr. Hagerty, interviewed separately in the living room, where he sat in a recliner with his hands folded over a small decorative pillow, said the question was genuine. “I think about it sometimes,” he said. “You’re standing next to a wall — a big one, a building, a cliff, whatever — and you say something, and it comes back to you. Your own voice, but from somewhere else. It’s the same words, but they sound different.” He paused. “I think that’s interesting. I think more people should think about that.”

When asked what the question had to do with his wife’s request regarding the bidet, Mr. Hagerty was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know that it had anything to do with it,” he said finally. “I think it was just something I was thinking about, and she was there, and I said it.” He looked toward the staircase. “That’s most of what talking is, if you think about it. You’re just saying the thing you’re thinking to whoever’s closest.”

Dr. Judith Fenn-Caraway, a clinical psychologist in Ridgewood who specializes in marital communication and who agreed to comment on the exchange in general terms, said the dynamic was “not uncommon.” She noted that what she calls “non-sequitur deflection” — the introduction of an unrelated topic at a moment of interpersonal tension — is a well-documented behavior in long-term relationships. “The question itself is almost irrelevant,” she said. “What matters is the function it serves. It closes one conversation and opens another, and the other person is left holding both.”

Dr. Fenn-Caraway added that the content of Mr. Hagerty’s question — the echo, the distant wall, the act of hearing one’s own voice returned from somewhere far away — was “symbolically rich, if you want to read it that way, though I would caution against doing so without more context.” She paused. “That said, I’d be lying if I told you it wasn’t evocative.”

Mr. Hagerty’s relationship with bidet technology has been, by any measure, turbulent. He was hospitalized on March 24 after his previous bidet, a Kohler AquaStream Pro 9000, produced a water jet of sufficient force to perforate his lower abdomen, an incident that remains under investigation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Borough of Paramus Department of Code Enforcement. He spent four days at Hackensack University Medical Center and made a full recovery. He asked, at the time, that the bidet be removed.

It was removed. And then, twelve days later, he purchased a new one.

“I like being clean,” Mr. Hagerty said, when asked to explain the decision. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing. I like being clean, and a bidet makes you clean. The first one tried to kill me. This one doesn’t. I don’t see the issue.”

Mrs. Hagerty sees the issue. “The issue is that a bidet put a hole through him three weeks ago, and he went out and bought another bidet,” she said. “And now he’s in there for twenty minutes every morning, and it smells like — I can’t even — and when I say something, he asks me about echoes.” She set her coffee down. “That’s the issue.”

The couple’s neighbor, Phil Amato, who was retrieving his recycling bins from the curb at the time of this reporter’s visit, said he was aware of the ongoing situation. “Dennis told me about the new bidet the day he got it,” Mr. Amato said. “I said, ‘Dennis, are you sure?’ And he looked at me like I was the crazy one.” Mr. Amato shrugged. “He’s a guy who knows what he wants. I’ll give him that.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the bidet remained installed. Mrs. Hagerty said she had not yet stood next to a distant wall and listened to the echo of her voice, but added that she was “not ruling it out, if it means he’ll answer a direct question.”