The course of Love

love

In Love Kirsten suggests a trip to Portobello Beach, half an hour away by bicycle on the Firth of Forth. Rabih is unsteady on his bike, rented from a shop that Kirsten knows off Princes Street. She has her own, a cherry-red model with twelve gears and advanced brake calipers. He does his best to keep up. Halfway down the hill he activates a new gear, but the chain protests, jumps, and spins impotently against the hub. Frustration and a familiar rage surge up within him. It’ll be a long walk back up to the shop. But this isn’t Kirsten’s way. “Look at you,” she says, “you big cross numpty, you.” She turns the bike upside down, reverses the gears, and adjusts the rear derailleur. Her hands are soon smudged with oil, a streak of which ends up on her cheek. Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion. He has fallen in love with her calm; her faith that it will be OK; her lack of a sense of persecution, her absence of fatalism—these are the virtues of his unusual new Scottish friend who speaks in an accent so hard to understand that he has to ask three times for clarification on her use of the word temporary. Rabih’s love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness—and from a desire to be made whole. He isn’t alone in this. Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to make up for deficiencies. She didn’t travel outside Scotland until after university. Her relatives all come from the same small part of the country. Spirits are narrow there, the colors grey, the atmosphere provincial, the values selfdenying. She is, in response, powerfully drawn to what she associates with the south. She wants light, hope, people who live through their bodies with passion and emotion. She reveres the sun while hating her own paleness and discomfort in its rays. There is a poster of the medina in Fez hanging on her wall. She is excited by what she has learnt about Rabih’s background. She finds it intriguing that he is the son of a Lebanese civil-engineer father and a German air-hostess mother. He tells her stories about a childhood spent in Beirut, Athens, and Barcelona, in which there were moments of brightness and beauty and, now and then, extreme danger. He speaks Arabic, French, German, and Spanish; his endearments, playfully delivered, come in many flavors. His skin is olive to her rosy white. He crosses his long legs when he sits and his surprisingly delicate hands know how to prepare her makdous, tabbouleh, and Kartoffelsalat. He feeds her his worlds. She, too, is looking for love to rebalance and complete her. Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another’s fragilities and sorrows, especially when—as happens in the early days—we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them. Seeing our lover despondent and in crisis, in tears and unable to cope, can reassure us that, for all their virtues, they are not alienatingly invincible. They, too, are at points confused and at sea, a realization which lends us a new supportive role, reduces our sense of shame about our own inadequacies, and draws us closer to them around a shared experience of pain. They take the train to Inverness to visit Kirsten’s mother. She insists on coming to meet them at the station, though it means a bus journey from the opposite side of town. She calls Kirsten her “Lambie” and hugs her tightly on the platform, her eyes closed achingly. She extends a hand formally to Rabih and apologizes for the conditions at this time of year: it is two thirty in the afternoon and already nearly dark. She has the same vivacious eyes as her daughter, though hers have an additional, unflinching quality that causes him to feel rather uncomfortable when they settle on him—as they are to do repeatedly, and without apparent occasion, during their stay. 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-yearold 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 longburied, 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.

Sex and Love 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 . . .” “f*****g 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 s****l liberation, the truth is that secrecy and a degree of embarrassment around s*x 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. It is two in the morning by the time they finish. An owl is hooting somewhere in the darkness. Kirsten falls asleep in Rabih’s arms. She seems trustful and at ease, slipping gracefully into the current of sleep while he stands at the shore, protesting against the end of this miraculous day, rehearsing its pivotal moments. He watches her lips tremble slightly, as though she were reading a book to herself in some foreign language of the night. Occasionally she seems to wake for an instant and, looking startled and scared, appeals for help: “The train!” she exclaims, or, with even greater alarm, “It’s tomorrow; they moved it!” He reassures her (they have enough time to get to the station; she’s done all the necessary revision for the exam) and takes her hand, like a parent preparing to lead a child across a busy road. It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had s*x; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act. We call things a turn-on but what we might really be alluding to is delight at finally having been allowed to reveal our secret selves—and at discovering that, far from being horrified by who we are, our lovers have opted to respond with only encouragement and approval. A degree of shame and a habit of secrecy surrounding s*x began for Rabih when he was twelve. Before that there were, of course, a few minor lies told and transgressions committed: he stole some coins from his father’s wallet; he merely pretended to like his aunt Ottilie; and one afternoon in her stuffy, cramped apartment by the Corniche, he copied a whole section of his algebra homework from his brilliant classmate Michel. But none of those infractions caused him to feel any primal self-disgust. For his mother, he had always been the sweet, thoughtful child she called by the diminutive nickname “Maus.” Maus liked to cuddle with her under the large cashmere blanket in the living room and to have his hair stroked away from his smooth forehead. Then one term, all of a sudden, the only thing Maus could think about was a group of girls a couple of years above him at school, five or six feet tall, articulate Spaniards who walked around at break time in a conspiratorial gang and giggled together with a cruel, confident, and enticing air. On weekends he would slip into the little blue bathroom at home every few hours and visualize scenes that he’d will himself to forget again the moment he was finished. A chasm opened up between who he had to be for his family and who he knew he was inside. The disjuncture was perhaps most painful in relation to his mother. It didn’t help that the onset of puberty coincided for him almost exactly with the diagnosis of her cancer. Deep in his unconscious, in some dark recess immune to logic, he nursed the impression that his discovery of s*x might have helped to kill her. Things weren’t completely straightforward for Kirsten at that age, either. For her, too, there were oppressive ideas at play about what it meant to be a good person. At fourteen she liked walking the dog, volunteering at the old people’s home, doing extra geography homework about rivers—but also, alone in her bedroom, lying on the floor with her skirt hiked up, watching herself in the mirror and imagining that she was putting on a show for an older boy at school. Much like Rabih, she wanted certain things which didn’t seem to fit in with the dominant, socially prescribed notions of normality. These past histories of self-division are part of what makes the beginning of their relationship so satisfying. There is no more need for subterfuge or furtiveness between them. Although they have both had a number of partners in the past, they find each other exceptionally open-minded and reassuring. Kirsten’s bedroom becomes the headquarters for nightly explorations during which they are at last able to disclose, without fear of being judged, the many unusual and improbable things that their sexuality compels them to crave. The particulars of what arouses us may sound odd and illogical, but—seen from close up—they carry echoes of qualities we long for in other, purportedly saner areas of existence: understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity, and kindness. Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and understanding. It’s three weeks now since their first time. Rabih runs his fingers roughly through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect, to hold the two genders as equal, and to believe that neither person in a relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner appears to have scant interest in equality nor much concern for the ordinary rules of gender balance, either. She’s no less keen on a range of problematic words. She invites him to address her as though he cared nothing for her, and they both find this exciting precisely because the very opposite is true. The epithets bastard, b***h, and cunt become shared tokens of their mutual loyalty and trust. In bed, violence—normally such a danger—no longer has to be a risk; a degree of force can be expended safely and won’t make either of them unhappy. Rabih’s momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience. As children they were both often physical with their friends. It could be fun to hit. Kirsten would whack her cousins hard with the sofa pillows, while Rabih would wrestle with his friends on the grass at the swimming club. In adulthood, however, violence of any kind has been prohibited: no grown person is ever supposed to use force against another. And yet, within the boundaries of the couple’s games, it can feel strangely pleasing to take a swipe, to hit a little and be hit; they can be rough and insistent; there can be a savage edge. Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft. Kirsten is a woman of considerable steeliness and authority. She manages a department at work, she earns more than her lover, she is confident and a leader. She has known from a young age that she must be able to take care of herself. However, in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her. The idea has never appealed to her before, but only because she believed that most bossy people were not to be trusted; they didn’t seem, as Rabih does, truly kind and utterly nonviolent by nature (she playfully calls him “Sultan Khan”). She’s craved independence in part by default, because there have been no Ottoman potentates around who were nice enough to deserve her weaker self. For his part, Rabih has all his adult life had to keep his bossiness sharply in check, and yet, in his deeper self, he’s aware of having a sterner side to his nature. He is sometimes sure he knows what’s best for other people and what they rightly have coming to them. In the real world he may be a powerless minor associate in a provincial urban-design firm, with strong inhibitions around expressing what he really thinks; but in bed with Kirsten he can feel the appeal of casting aside his customary reserve and enforcing absolute obedience, just as Suleiman the Magnificent might have done in his harem in the marble and jade palace on the shores of the Bosphorus. The games of submission and domination, the rule-breaking scenarios, the fetishistic interest in particular words or parts of the body—all offer opportunities to investigate wishes that are far from being simply peculiar, pointless, or slightly demented. They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defenses and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance—which are the real psychologically rooted reasons why games are, in the end, so exciting. They fly to Amsterdam for a weekend and, midway there, over the North Sea, elope to the toilet. They’ve discovered an enthusiasm for having a go at it in semipublic places, which seems to bring into sudden, risky, but electrifying alignment both their s****l sides and the more formal public personae they normally have to present. They feel as though they are challenging responsibility, anonymity, and restraint with their uninhibited and heated moments. Their pleasure becomes somehow the more intense for the presence of 240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.

To be continued......