The Course of Love (3 page)

Home is a narrow, one-storey grey-terraced house located directly opposite the primary school where the mother has been teaching for three decades. All around Inverness there are grown-ups—now running shops, drafting contracts, and drawing blood samples—who can remember their introduction to basic arithmetic and the Bible stories at Mrs. McLelland's knee. More specifically, most recall her distinctive way of letting them know not only how much she liked them but also how easily they might disappoint her.

The three of them eat supper together in the living room while watching a quiz show on TV. Drawings that Kirsten made in nursery school march up the wall along the staircase
in neat gilt frames. In the hall there is a photograph of her baptism; in the kitchen a portrait of her in her school uniform, sensible looking and gap-toothed at age seven; and on the bookshelf a snapshot from when she was eleven, bone-thin, tousled, and intrepid in shorts and a T-shirt at the beach.

In her bedroom, more or less untouched since she went to Aberdeen to take a degree in law and accountancy, there are black clothes in the wardrobe and shelves packed with creased school paperbacks. Inside the Penguin edition of
Mansfield Park
, an adolescent version of Kirsten has written, “Fanny Price: the virtue of the exceptional ordinary.” A photo album under the bed offers up a candid shot of her with her father standing in front of an ice cream van at Cruden Bay. She is six and will have him in her life for one more year.

Family folklore has it that Kirsten's father upped and left one morning, having packed a small suitcase while his wife of ten years was off teaching. The sole explanation he provided was a slip of paper on the hallway table with “Sorry” scrawled on it. Thereafter he drifted around Scotland, taking up odd jobs on farms, keeping in touch with Kirsten only through an annual card and a gift on her birthday. When she turned twelve, a package arrived containing a cardigan fit for a nine-year-old. Kirsten sent it back to an address in Cammachmore, along with a note advising the sender of her frank hope that he would die soon. There has been no word from him since.

Had he left for another woman, he would merely have betrayed his wedding vows. But to leave his wife and child simply to be by himself, to have more of his own company, without ever furnishing a satisfactory account of his motives—this was rejection on an altogether deeper, more abstract, and more devastating
scale.

Kirsten lies in Rabih's arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.

On her side, she feels much the same about him—and in his own history there are no less sorrowful circumstances to recount. When Rabih was twelve, after a childhood marked by sectarian violence, roadblocks, and nights spent in air-raid shelters, he and his parents quit Beirut for Barcelona. But only half a year after they arrived there and settled into a flat near the old docks, his mother began to complain of a pain near her abdomen. She went to the doctor and, with an unexpectedness that would deal an irremediable blow to her son's faith in the solidity of pretty much anything, received a diagnosis of advanced liver cancer. She was dead three months later. Within a year his father was remarried, to an emotionally distant Englishwoman with whom he now lives in retirement in an apartment in Cádiz.

Kirsten wants, with an intensity that surprises her, to comfort the twelve-year-old boy across the decades. Her mind keeps returning to a picture of Rabih and his mother, taken two years before her death, on the tarmac at Beirut Airport with a Lufthansa jet behind them. Rabih's mother worked on flights to Asia and America, serving meals at the front of the aircraft to wealthy businessmen, making sure seat belts were fastened, pouring drinks, and smiling at strangers while her son waited for her at home. Rabih remembers the overexcited near nausea he felt on the days she was due to return. From Japan she once brought him some notebooks made of fiber from mulberry trees, and from Mexico a painted figurine of an Aztec chief. She looked like a
film actress—Romy Schneider, people said.

At the center of Kirsten's love is a desire to heal the wound of Rabih's long-buried, largely unmentioned loss.

Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover's insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.

“You're in your ‘angry-and-humiliated-yet-strangely-quiet' mode again,” she diagnoses one evening when the car rental Web site Rabih has used to book himself and four colleagues a minibus freezes on him at the very last screen, leaving him in doubt whether it has properly understood his intentions and debited his card. “I think you should scream, say something rude, then come to bed. I wouldn't mind. I might even call the rental place for you in the morning.” She somehow sees right into his inability to express his anger; she recognizes the process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust. Without shaming him, she can identify and name the forms his madness sometimes takes.

With similar accuracy, she grasps his fear of seeming unworthy in his father's eyes and, by extension, in the eyes of other male figures of authority. On their way in to a first meeting with his father at the George Hotel, she whispers to Rabih without preamble: “Just imagine if it didn't matter what he thought of me—or, come to think of it, of you.” To Rabih, it feels as if he were returning with a friend in broad daylight to a forest he'd only ever been in alone and at night and could see that the malevolent figures which had once
terrified him were really, all along, just boulders that had caught the shadows at the wrong angles.

There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.

At eleven at night, with one supper already behind them, they go out for another, fetching barbecued ribs from Los Argentinos, in Preston Street, which they then eat by moonlight on a bench in the Meadows. They speak to each other in funny accents: she is a lost tourist from Hamburg looking for the Museum of Modern Art; he can't be of much help because, as a lobsterman from Aberdeen, he can't understand her unusual intonation.

They are back in the playful spirit of childhood. They bounce on the bed. They swap piggyback rides. They gossip. After attending a party, they inevitably end up finding fault with all the other guests, their loyalty to each other deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.

They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.

They normally have to answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes
“Teckle,” the Scottish colloquialism for
great
, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous, nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes “Sfouf,” after the dry Lebanese cake flavored with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a delicatessen in Nicolson Square, and which perfectly captures for her the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.

For their second date, after the kiss in the botanical garden, Rabih has suggested dinner at a Thai restaurant on Howe Street. He arrives there first and is shown to a table in the basement, next to an aquarium alarmingly crowded with lobsters. She's a few minutes late, dressed very casually in an old pair of jeans and trainers, wearing no makeup and glasses rather than her usual contact lenses. The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It's as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn't dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.

Yet, once they're out in the street afterwards, the tension dissipates. “Do you fancy a tea at mine—something herbal?” she asks. “It's not far from here.”

So they walk a few streets over to a block of flats and climb up to
the top floor, where she has a tiny yet beautiful one-bedroom place with views onto the sea and, along the walls, photographs she has taken of different parts of the Highlands. Rabih gets a glimpse of the bedroom, where there's a huge pile of clothes in a mess on the bed.

“I tried on pretty much everything I own and then I thought, ‘To hell with that,'” she calls out, “as one does!”

She's in the kitchen brewing tea. He wanders in, picks up the box, and remarks how odd the word
chamomile
looks written down. “You notice all the most important things,” she jokes warmly. It feels like an invitation of sorts, so he moves towards her and gently kisses her. The kiss goes on for a long time. In the background they hear the kettle boil, then subside. Rabih wonders how much further he might go. He strokes the back of Kirsten's neck, then her shoulders. He braves a tentative caress over her chest and waits in vain for a reaction. His right hand makes a foray over her jeans, very lightly, and traces a line down both her thighs. He knows he may now be at the outer limits of what would be fitting on a second date. Still, he risks venturing down with his hand once again, this time moving a bit more purposefully against the jeans, pressing in rhythm between her legs.

That begins one of the most erotic moments of Rabih's life, for when Kirsten feels his hand pressing against her through her jeans, she thrusts forwards ever so slightly to greet it, and then a bit more. She opens her eyes and smiles at him, as he does back at her.

“Just there,” she says, focusing his hand on one very specific area just to the side of the lower part of her zip.

This goes on for another minute or so, and then she reaches down and takes his wrist, moves the hand up a little, and guides him to undo her button. Together they open her jeans, and she takes his hand and invites it inside the black elastic of her panties. He feels her
warmth and, a second later, a wetness that symbolizes an unambiguous welcome and excitement.

Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.

Her jeans are wide-open now, and both of their faces are flushed. From Rabih's perspective, the excitement springs in part from the fact that Kirsten gave so little indication over so long that she really had such things on her mind.

She leads him into the bedroom and kicks the pile of clothes onto the floor. On the bedside table is the novel she's been reading by George Sand, whom Rabih has never heard of. There are some earrings, too, and a picture of Kirsten in a uniform standing outside her primary school, holding her mother's hand.

“I didn't have a chance to hide all my secrets,” she says. “But don't let that hold you back from snooping.”

There's an almost full moon out, and they leave the curtains open. As they lie entwined on the bed, he strokes her hair and squeezes her hand. Their smiles suggest they're not completely past shyness yet. He pauses in mid-caress and asks when she first decided she might want this, prompted in his inquiry not by vanity but by a mixture of gratitude and liberation, now that desires which might have seemed simply obscene, predatory, or pitiful in their unanswered form have proved to be redemptively mutual.

“Pretty early on, actually, Mr. Khan,” she says. “Is there anything more I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Go on.”

“OK, so at what point did you first feel, you know, that you might . . . how can I say . . . well, that you'd perhaps be on for . . .”

“Fucking you?”

“Something like that.”

“Now I see what you mean,” she teases. “To tell you the truth, it started that very first time we walked over to the restaurant. I noticed you had a nice bum, and I kept thinking about it all the while you were boring on about the work we had to do. And then later that night I was imagining, stretched out on this very bed that we're on right now, what it would be like to get hold of your . . . well, okay, I'm going to get shy now, too, so that may have to be it for the moment.”

The idea that respectable-looking people might be inwardly harboring some beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies while outwardly seeming to care only about a friendly banter—this strikes Rabih as an entirely surprising and deeply delightful concept, with an immediate power to soothe a raft of his own underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten's late-night fantasies might have been about him when she had simultaneously seemed so reserved and so upright at the time, and yet was now so eager and so direct—these revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih's life.

For all the talk of sexual liberation, the truth is that secrecy and a degree of embarrassment around sex continue as much as they have always done. We still can't generally say what we want to do and with whom. Shame and repression of impulse aren't just things that our ancestors and certain buttoned-up religions latched onto for obscure and unnecessary reasons: they
are fated to be constants in all eras—which is what lends such power to those rare moments (there might be only a few in a lifetime) when a stranger invites us to drop our guard and admits to wanting pretty much exactly what we had once privately and guiltily craved.