The Course of Love (9 page)

The first heady period of sexual adventure and total honesty passes. It is significantly more important to Rabih now that he remain attractive to Kirsten than that he be a truthful correspondent of the reality of his inner life.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key—a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

The blame is not on Rabih's side alone. In having on the tip of her tongue such words as
weird
and
perverted
, Kirsten does little to foster an atmosphere ripe for revelations. Then again, she uses these words not out of nastiness or contempt but rather out of fear that, by tacitly endorsing Rabih's fantasies, she may end up giving them greater license and so undermine their love.

She might instead, in another mood, as a different person, have said something like the following in response to her husband's scenario: “The nature of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar, and frankly not a little disgusting to me; but I'm
interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are. The person thinking of Antonella just now is the same person I married in Inverness and the same little boy who stares out from that picture on top of our chest of drawers. It's him I love and refuse to think badly of, however much his thoughts may sometimes disturb me. You're my best friend, and I want to know and come to terms with your mind in all its weird byways. I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I'd like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.”

Or conversely, she might have revealed the vulnerability that has lain all the while behind her annoyed demeanor: “I wish I could be everything to you. I wish you didn't have such needs outside of me. Of course, I don't really think your fantasies about Antonella are repulsive; I just wish there didn't have to be—always—that imagined someone else. I know it's madness, but what I want most is to be able to satisfy you all by myself.”

In the event, Rabih didn't speak, and Kirsten didn't listen. Instead they went to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of their relationship, however, a warning light had come on.

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes—hopes which will thereby be endangered
all the more.

Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and, unconsciously, to blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out more.

As for the raven-haired subject of Rabih's fantasy, her name doesn't come up in conversation again for a long while, until one day Kirsten returns with some news after having a coffee at the Brioschi Café. Antonella has moved up north to work as the head receptionist at a small luxury hotel in Argyll, on the western coast, and has fallen deeply in love with one of the housekeepers there, a young Dutch woman to whom—much to her parents' initial surprise but also eventual delight—she plans to get married in a few months' time in a big ceremony in the town of Apeldoorn, information that Rabih receives with an almost convincing show of complete indifference. He has chosen love over libido.

Two years into their marriage, Rabih's job remains precarious, vulnerable to an unsteady workflow and clients' sudden changes of mind. So he feels especially pleased when, at the start of January, the firm wins a large and long-term contract across the border in England, in South Shields, a struggling town two and a half hours southeast of Edinburgh by train. The task is to redevelop the quayside and a derelict hodgepodge of industrial sheds into a park, a café, and a museum to house a local maritime artifact, the
Tyne
, the second-oldest lifeboat in Britain. Ewen asks Rabih if he will head up the project—a distinct honor, yet one which also means that for half a year he will have to spend three nights a month away from Kirsten. The budget is tight, so he makes his base in South Shields's Premier Inn, a modestly priced establishment sandwiched between a women's prison and a goods yard. In the evenings he has supper by himself at the hotel restaurant, Taybarns, where a side of mutton sweats under the lamps of a carving station.

During his second visit there, the local officials prevaricate on
assorted issues. Everyone is too terrified to make big decisions and blames delays on a range of incomprehensible regulations; it's a miracle they have even managed to get this far. There's a vein in Rabih's neck that throbs at such moments. Shortly after nine, pacing the plastic carpet in his socks, he calls Kirsten from his maroon and purple room. “Teckle,” he greets her. “Another day of mind-numbing meetings and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so much. I'd pay a lot for a hug from you right now.” There's a pause—he feels as if he could hear the miles that separate them—then she replies in a flat voice that he has to get his name put on the car insurance before the first of February, adding that the landlord also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one end—“his” end—of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice of toast on her lap. She pauses again, but when she responds to Rabih, it is with a curt and administrative-sounding “Yes.” It's a pity he can't see that she is fighting back tears.

It isn't the first such instance. Something similarly frosty happened the last time he was here, and once when he was in Denmark for a conference. That time he accused her of being odd on the phone. Now he is simply hurt. He only made a reasonable plea for warmth, and suddenly they seem to be in a stalemate. He looks out at the prison windows opposite. Whenever he's away, he feels as if she were trying to put an even greater distance between them than that of land or water. He wishes he could find a way to reach her and wonders what could have caused her to become so remote and unavailable. Kirsten isn't quite sure herself. She is looking with watery eyes at the bark of an old weathered tree just beyond the
window, thinking with particular concentration about a file she'll have to remember to take to work tomorrow.

The structure looks something like this: an apparently ordinary situation or remark elicits from one member of a couple a reaction that doesn't seem quite warranted, being unusually full of annoyance or anxiety, irritability or coldness, panic or recrimination. The person on the receiving end is puzzled: after all, it was just a simple request for a loving good-bye, a plate or two left unwashed in the sink, a small joke at the other's expense or a few minutes' delay. Why, then, the peculiar and somehow outsized response?

The behavior makes little sense when one tries to understand it according to the current facts. It's as if some aspect of the present scenario were drawing energy from another source, as if it were unwittingly triggering a pattern of behavior that the other person originally developed long ago in order to meet a particular threat which has now somehow been subconsciously re-evoked. The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the “transference” of an emotion from the past onto someone in the present—who perhaps doesn't entirely deserve it.

Our minds are, oddly, not always good at knowing what era they are in. They jump a little too easily, like an erstwhile victim of burglary who keeps a gun by the bed and is startled awake by every rustle.

What's worse for the loved ones standing in the vicinity is that people in the throes of a transference have no easy way of knowing, let alone calmly explaining, what they are up to; they simply feel that their response is entirely appropriate to the occasion. Their partners on the other hand may reach a rather different and rather less flattering conclusion: that they are distinctly odd—and maybe even a little mad.

Kirsten's father leaves her when she is seven. He walks out of the house without warning or explanation. On the very day before he
goes, he plays at being a camel on the living room floor and carries her on his back around the sofa and armchairs. At bedtime he reads to her from a book of German folktales, those stories of lonely children and wicked stepmothers, of magic and of loss. He tells her they are only stories. And then he disappears.

There could have been many responses. Hers is not to feel. She can't afford to. She is doing so well; that's what everyone says—the teachers, her two aunts, the counselor she sees for a time. Her schoolwork actually improves. But she's not even remotely coping inside: it takes a certain strength to cry, the confidence that one will eventually be able to staunch the tears. She doesn't have the luxury of feeling just a little sad. The danger is that she might fall apart and never know how to put the pieces back together. To prevent the possibility, she cauterizes her wounds as best she can, aged seven.

She can now love (in her own way), but what she really can't countenance is missing someone too much, not even if the person is only in a town a couple of hours to the southeast and is most definitely going to be returning home in a few days on the 18:22 train.

But of course she can't explain or even quite grasp this habit of hers. It doesn't make her popular at home. She would ideally have in her employ a guardian spirit with magical powers to pause the action just as Rabih begins to get annoyed, in order then to whisk him out of his budget hotel and bear him aloft, through the dense clouds of the lower atmosphere, to the Inverness of a quarter century before, where he could peer through the window of a little house and into the narrow bedroom in which a small girl in bear pajamas is sitting at her desk, coloring in squares on a large piece of paper with methodical precision, trying to hold on to her sanity, her mind blank from a sadness too overwhelming to admit.

If Rabih were presented with this picture of Kirsten's stoic endurance, compassion would come naturally to him. He would understand the touching reasons for her reserve and would immediately quell his own hurt so as to offer her tender reassurance and sympathy.

But as there is no spirit waiting in the wings, and therefore no stirring sensory narrative cued up to illuminate Kirsten's past, Rabih has only her affectless response to try to make sense of—a challenge that inspires in him a predictably irresistible temptation to judge and to take offense.

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.

Rabih is not so different from his wife. He, too, constantly interprets the present through the distortions of his past and is moved by obsolete and eccentric impulses which he cannot explain to himself or Kirsten.

What does it mean, for example, to come home from the office in Edinburgh and find in the hall a big pile of clothes which Kirsten planned to take to the dry cleaner's but then forgot about and says she will get around to sometime in the next few days?

There's one swift and leading answer for Rabih: that this is the onset of the chaos he fears and that Kirsten may have done this specifically to unnerve and wound him. Unable to follow her advice to leave the pile until the next day, he takes
the clothes out himself (it's seven at night) and then, on his return, spends half an hour noisily cleaning up the rest of the flat, paying particular attention to the muddle in the cutlery drawer.

The “chaos” is no small matter in Rabih's mind. All too quickly his unconscious draws a connection between minor things that are out of place in the present and very major things that were once out of place in the past, such as the scarred hulk of the InterContinental Phoenicia Beirut hotel that he used to see from his bedroom; the bombed-out American embassy that he walked past every morning; the murderous graffiti that routinely appeared on the wall of his school and the late-night shouting he would hear between his mother and father. With complete clarity, he still sees today the black outline of the Cypriot refugee ship that finally took him and his parents out of the city on a dark January night, and the apartment that they later heard had been looted and now housed a family of Druze fighters, his room reportedly serving as an ammunition dump. There is a good deal of history in his hysteria.

In the present, Rabih may be living in one of the safer, quieter corners of the globe, with a wife who is fundamentally kind and committedly on his side, but in his mind Beirut, war, and the cruelest sides of human nature remain threats forever just out of his line of sight, always ready to color his interpretation of the meaning of a pile of clothes or an organizational erosion in the cutlery drawer.