The Course of Love (18 page)

Rabih has presents for everyone (bought in a duty-free shop on the other side of passport control). He tells Kirsten he can take over with the children, prepare supper, and do bath time; he's sure she must be exhausted. An impure conscience is a useful spur to being a bit nicer.

Rabih and Kirsten go to bed early. She has, for an age, been his
first port of call for every piece of news, however trivial or grave. How odd it seems, therefore, for him to be in possession of information at once so significant and yet so deeply resistant to the customary principles of disclosure.

It would be almost natural to start by explaining how curious it was that he and Lauren happened to bump into each other by the lifts—since he was scheduled to be at a talk at the time—and how touching he found it when, after their lovemaking, she haltingly described the illness and death of a grandmother to whom she had been unusually close throughout her childhood. Adopting the same easy, digressive approach they take when picking apart the psychology of people they meet at parties or the plotlines of films they see together, they might review how moving and sad it was for Rabih to say good-bye to Lauren at Tegel Airport, and how thrilling and (a little) scary to receive a text from her on landing. There could be no one better qualified to consider such themes with than his insightful, inquisitive, funny, and observant co-explorer of existence.

It is a bit of a job, therefore, to keep reminding himself how close he is to unleashing a tragedy. Esther apparently has a playdate the following morning at an indoor ski slope. This is where their story could come to a decisive end, and madness and mayhem begin. They will have to leave the house at nine to be there by a quarter to ten. It would, he is aware, take only a sentence to bring everything settled and coherent in his current life to a close: his brain contains a piece of information a mere six or so words long which is capable of blowing the household sky-high. Their daughter will need her gloves, which are in that box in the attic marked
Winter Clothes.
He marvels at the mind's capacity not to let slip a single outward indication of the dynamite it contains. All the same, he is tempted to check in the bathroom mirror to make sure that nothing is leaking
out of him.

He understands—for the idea has been drummed into him from an early age by society—that what he has done is wrong. Very wrong indeed. He is, in the language of the tabloids, a scumbag, a love rat, a cheat, and a traitor. Nevertheless, he also registers that the exact nature of the ill he has committed is not in fact entirely clear to him. He does feel some concern, but for cautionary, secondary reasons—that is, because he wants tomorrow to go well, and the days and years thereafter. In his depths, however, he can't find it in himself to believe that what has happened in the Berlin hotel room is truly bad in and of itself. Is this perhaps, he wonders, just the eternal excuse of the love rat?

Through the lens of Romanticism there can be, quite simply, no greater betrayal. Even for those willing to countenance almost every other kind of behavior, adultery remains the one seismic transgression, appalling in its violation of a series of the most sacred assumptions of love.

The first of these is that one person can't possibly claim to love another—and by implication in any way value their life together—and then slip off and have sex with someone else. If such a disaster were to happen, it could only be that there had been no love to begin with.

Kirsten has fallen asleep. He brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. He recalls how differently responsive were Lauren's ears and her belly, even through her dress. By the time they were at the bar, it looked like something was going to happen between them: it became a certainty the moment she asked if he came to these conferences often, and he replied that this already felt like a very unusual one, and she smiled warmly. Her directness was the centerpiece of her enchantment. “This is nice,” she turned around and said when they were in bed, as though trying out some unfamiliar dish in
a restaurant. But the mind has many chambers, and a dazzling capacity for building firewalls. In another zone, another galaxy entirely, there remains untouched the love he has for Kirsten's way of telling rude jokes at parties, the surprising trove of poems she keeps in her head (Coleridge and Burns), her habit of pairing black skirts and tights with trainers, her skill at unblocking a sink, and her knowledge of what might be going on under a car bonnet (the sorts of things which women let down by their fathers at a young age seem to be particularly good at). There's no one on earth he'd rather have dinner with than his wife, who is also his best friend. Which hasn't, however, in any way prevented him from possibly ruining her life.

A second assumption: adultery isn't just any old kind of disloyalty. A transgression involving nakedness is of a fundamentally different order, says the world; it's a betrayal of a cataclysmic and incomparable sort. Screwing around is not somewhat bad; it's the very worst thing one person could do to another whom he or she claims to love.

This wasn't—clearly—exactly what Kirsten McLelland signed up to, many years ago, in that salmon-pink registry office in Inverness. Then again, there have been a number of things over the course of their marriage that Rabih Khan didn't anticipate, either, including his wife's strong objection to his wish to return to architecture, primarily because she didn't want their income to be curtailed for even a few months; her cutting him off from many of his friends because she found them “boring”; her tendency to make jokes at his expense in company; the blame he has to shoulder when things go wrong at her work; and the exhausting anxiety she suffers over every aspect of their children's education. . . . These are the stories he has told himself, lines of reasoning that are simpler than wondering if
he may have held
himself
back in his career or if his friends really might not be quite as entertaining as they seemed when he was twenty-two.

Still, Rabih questions whether that half an hour should so conclusively shift the moral calculation against him, if it should on its own be what commits him to fiery damnation. While they may lack the same power to stir up ready indignation, there are betrayals of an equally damaging (if less visible) sort in her habits of not listening, of failing to forgive, and of casting unfair blame, and in her casual belittlement and her stretches of indifference. He doesn't want to add up the ledger, but he isn't sure that—on the basis of this single, admittedly deeply wounding act—he ought so easily and definitively to qualify as the villain of the entire piece.

A third assumption: a commitment to monogamy is an admirable consequence of love, stemming from a deep-seated generosity and an intimate interest in the other's flourishing and well-being. A call for monogamy is a sure indication that one partner has the other's sincere interests at heart.

To Rabih's new way of thinking, it seems anything
but
kind or considerate to insist that a spouse return to his room alone to watch CNN and eat yet another club sandwich while perched on the edge of his bed, when he has perhaps only a few more decades of life left on the planet, an increasingly disheveled physique, an at best intermittent track record with the opposite sex, and a young woman from California standing before him who sincerely wishes to remove her dress in his honor.

If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the eighteenth floor in order to
enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a near stranger. Otherwise it may seem that what we are dealing with is not really love at all but rather a kind of small-minded and hypocritical possessiveness, a desire to make one's partner happy if, but only if, that happiness involves oneself.

It's past midnight already, yet Rabih is just hitting his stride, knowing there might be objections but sidestepping them nimbly and, in the process, acquiring an ever more brittle sense of self-righteousness.

A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of emotional health.

Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything in one other being—someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur, and a business partner? What a recipe for disappointment and resentment in this notion upon which millions of otherwise perfectly good marriages regularly founder.

What could be more natural than to feel an occasional desire for another person? How can anyone be expected to grow up in hedonistic, liberated circles, experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, listen to music full of longing and lust, and then, immediately upon signing a piece of paper, renounce all outside sexual interest, not in the name of any particular god or higher commandment, but merely from an unexplored supposition that it must be very wrong? Is there not instead something inhuman, indeed “wrong,” in
failing
to be tempted, in failing to realize just how short of time we all are and therefore with what urgent curiosity we
should want to explore the unique fleshly individuality of more than one of our contemporaries? To moralize against adultery is to deny the legitimacy of a range of sensory high points—Rabih thinks of Lauren's shoulder blades—in their own way just as worthy of reverence as more acceptable attractions such as the last moments of “Hey Jude” or the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace. Isn't the rejection of adulterous possibilities tantamount to an infidelity towards the richness of life itself? To turn the equation on its head: Would it be rational to trust anyone who
wasn't
, under certain circumstances, really pretty interested in being unfaithful?

The texts are, at first, purely civil. Did he get back safely? How is her jet lag? Some professional themes come into it, too: Has he received the post conference newsletter? Does she know the work of the urbanist Jan Gehl?

Then, at eleven one night, he feels his phone vibrate and goes into the bathroom. From Los Angeles she has written that she is, truth be told, finding it hard to forget his cock.

He deletes the message at once, takes out the phone's SIM card and hides it in his wash bag, stashes the phone under a tracksuit, and goes back to bed. Kirsten stretches her arms out towards him. The next day, with the phone reassembled, he sends Lauren a return text from the laundry cupboard under the stairs: “Thanks for an extraordinary, wonderful, generous night. I won't ever regret it. I think of your vagina.” For a number of reasons, he deletes the last sentence before sending.

As for the never regretting: in reality, surrounded by drying towels, it's starting to feel rather more complicated.

The following Saturday, in a toy shop in the center of town where he has gone with William to buy a model boat, an e-mail arrives with an attachment. Beside a shelf full of small sails, he reads: “I love your name, Rabih Khan. Every time I say it out loud to myself, it satisfies me somehow. And yet it also makes me sad, because it reminds me how much time I've wasted with men who don't share your genuine and passionate nature, and who haven't been able to understand the parts of me that I need to have understood. I hope you'll like the attached photo of me in my favorite Oxfords and socks. It's the real me, the one I'm so thrilled to know you saw and may see again before too long.”

William tugs at his jacket. There's dismay in his voice: the boat he's been obsessing about all month costs far more than he anticipated. Rabih feels himself go pale. The self-portrait shows her standing in a bathroom, facing a full-length mirror with her head angled to one side, wearing nothing but lace-up shoes and a pair of knee-high yellow and black stockings. He offers to buy William a toy aircraft carrier.

The message stays unanswered for the rest of the weekend. He has no time or opportunity to come back to it until the Monday night, when Kirsten is out at her book club.

When he opens his e-mail app to reply, he sees that Lauren has got there first: “I know your situation is difficult, and I'd never want to do anything to jeopardize it—but I was just feeling so vulnerable and silly that night. I don't usually send naked pictures of myself to men I hardly know. I was a little hurt by your nonresponse. Forgive me for saying that; I know I've got no right. I just keep thinking of your kind, sweet face. You're a good man, Rabih—don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. I like you more than I should. I want you
inside me now.”

For the sweet-faced man, things are feeling ever more tricky.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Rabih becomes increasingly aware of his wife's goodness. He notices the trouble she takes with nearly everything she does. Every night she spends hours helping the children with their homework; she remembers their spelling tests, rehearses lines for school plays with them, and sews patches onto their trousers. She's sponsoring an orphan with a lip deformation in Malawi. Rabih develops an ulcer on the inside of his cheek, and—without being asked—his wife buys a healing gel and drops it off for him at work. She is doing a fine job of appearing to be a great deal nicer than he is, which he is both extremely grateful for and, on another level, utterly furious about.

Her generosity seems to show up the extent of his inadequacy, and grows less tolerable by the day. His behavior declines. He snaps at her in front of the children. He drags his heels about taking out the trash and changing the sheets. He wishes she would be a little bit awful back to him, in order that her assessment of him might appear better aligned with his own sense of self-worth.

Late one evening, after they've gone to bed and while Kirsten is relaying something about the car's annual service, his discomfort reaches a pitch.