The Course of Love (12 page)

“I really do love you. I love you so much,” he says.

“So much that you're always wanting to change me? Rabih, I wish I understood. . . .”

Harsh lessons allow pupils to fall back on the comforting thought that their instructor is simply crazy or nasty and that they themselves must therefore be, by logic, beyond criticism. Hearing an unreasonably extreme verdict can make us feel, consolingly, that our partner could not possibly be at once vicious and, in some small way, perhaps also right.

Sentimentally, we contrast the spousal negativity with the encouraging tone of our friends and family, on whom no remotely comparable set of demands has ever been made.

There are other ways to look at love. In their philosophy, the ancient Greeks offered a usefully unfashionable perspective on the relationship between love and teaching. In their eyes, love was first and foremost a feeling of admiration for the better sides of another human being. Love was the excitement of coming face-to-face with virtuous characteristics.

It followed that the deepening of love would always involve the desire to
teach and in turn to be taught ways to become more virtuous: how to be less angry or less unforgiving, more curious or braver. Sincere lovers could never be content to accept one another just as they were; this would constitute a lazy and cowardly betrayal of the whole purpose of relationships. There would always be something to improve on in ourselves and educate others about.

Looked at through this ancient Greek lens, when lovers point out what might be unfortunate or uncomfortable about the other's respective character, they shouldn't be seen as giving up on the spirit of love. They should be congratulated for trying to do something very true to love's essence: helping their partners to develop into better versions of themselves.

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects—teaching and being taught, calling attention to another's faults, and letting ourselves be critiqued—might after all be loyal to the true purpose of love.

Rabih never does manage to control himself enough to get his point across. It will take a lot of time, and many more years of insight, before they properly master the art of teaching and learning.

But in the meantime Rabih's criticism of his wife on the materialistic score is blunted by one seismic humbling development. Five years into their marriage, at a highly auspicious moment in the real estate market, Kirsten manages to sell their flat, secure a new mortgage, and acquire, at a very advantageous price, a light and comfortable house a few streets away, in Newbattle Terrace. The maneuver brings out all of her skills as a financial negotiator. Rabih observes her, up late at night checking different rates and up early sounding
tough on the phone with estate agents, and concludes that he is exceptionally lucky to be married to a woman so obviously adept at dealing with money.

Along the way he also realizes something else. There may indeed be a side to Kirsten that is unusually alive to how others are doing financially and which aspires to a certain level of material comfort. This could be seen as a weakness, but insofar as it is one—and Rabih isn't even sure it is—it is intimately related to a strength. The price that Rabih must pay for relying on his wife's fiscal talent is having to endure certain associated downsides as well. The same virtues that make her a great negotiator and financial controller can also render her, sometimes—most particularly when he feels anxious about his career—a maddening and unsettling companion with whom to consider the achievements of others. In both scenarios, there is the same attachment to security, the same unwillingness to discount material criteria of success, and the same intelligent concern for what things cost. Identical qualities produce both amazing house deals and insecurities around status. In her occasional worries about the relative wealth of her friends, Kirsten is, Rabih can now see, exhibiting nothing more or less than the weaknesses of her strengths.

Going forward, once they have moved into their new house, Rabih endeavors never to lose sight of those strengths, even at times when the weaknesses to which they can give rise are
especially apparent.

Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide, four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn't seem a wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable sobriquet: “my parents.”

During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they should be
doing.
Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins, herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus,
at a party or doing the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.

Rabih often places his hand protectively over her belly. What's going on inside is so much cleverer than they are. Together they know how to do budgets, calculate traffic projections, design floor plans; what's inside knows how to build itself a skull and a pump that will function for almost a century without resting for so much as a single beat.

In the last weeks they envy the alien its final moments of complete unity and understanding. They imagine that in later life, perhaps in some foreign hotel room after a long flight, it will try to drown out the noise from the air-conditioning and dampen the disorientation of jet lag by curling up into itself in that original fetal position in search of the primordial peace of the long-lost maternal brine.

When she at last emerges after a seven-hour ordeal, they call her Esther, after one of her maternal great-grandmothers, and secondarily Katrin, after Rabih's mother. They can't stop looking at her. She appears perfect in every way, the most beautiful creature they have ever seen, staring at both of them with enormous eyes that seem infinitely wise, as if she had spent a previous life absorbing every volume of wisdom in the world. That wide forehead, those finely crafted fingers, and those feet as soft as eyelids will later, during the long, sleepless nights, play a not-incidental role in calming nerves when the wailing threatens to test parental sanity.

At once they begin to fret about the planet they have brought
her into. The hospital walls are a sickly green; she is held awkwardly by a nurse and jabbed at by a doctor's inquiring spatula; screaming and banging can be heard from neighboring wards; she's alternately too hot and too cold—and in the exhaustion and chaos of the early hours there seems little else left for her but to weep without measure. The cries pierce the hearts of her desperate attendants, who can find no dictionary with which to translate her furious commands. Huge hands stroke her head and voices keep murmuring things she can't make sense of. The overhead lamps emit a fierce white light, which her paper-thin eyelids are not yet strong enough to resist. The task of latching onto the nipple is like trying to cling for life to a buoy amid a raging ocean storm. She is, to put it mildly, a bit out of sorts. After titanic struggles, she eventually falls asleep on the outside of her old home, heartbroken to have left without keys, but comforted somewhat by the rise and fall of familiar breaths.

Never have they cared so intensely and conclusively about anyone. Her arrival transforms what they understand about love. They recognize how little they had previously grasped of what might be at stake.

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it, to be loved rather than to love.

Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer—through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability—an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself
for the sake of another.

The morning after the birth, the nurses discharge the new family without guidance or advice, save for one leaflet about colic and another about immunizations. The average home appliance comes with more detailed instructions than a baby, society maintaining a touching belief that there is nothing much that one generation can, in the end, reasonably tell another about life.

Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations.
An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else's call.
We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm, or soothe us.
Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with serious discomfiture, no “point” to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly—and we are in a position to provide it.
We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasize autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, “self-made”: we are all heavily in someone's debt.
We realize that life depends, quite literally, on our capacity for love.

We learn, too, that being another's servant is not humiliating—quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.

They wipe her little bottom, time and time again, and wonder why they never really understood clearly before that this really is what
one human has to do for another. They warm bottles for her in the middle of the night; they are overwhelmed with relief if she sleeps for more than an hour at a stretch; they worry about, and argue over, the timing of her burps. All of this she will later forget and they will be unable or unwilling to convey to her. Gratitude will come to them only indirectly, through the knowledge that she herself will, one day, have a sufficient sense of inner well-being to want to do this for somebody else.

Her sheer incompetence is awe-inspiring. Everything must be learnt: how to curl fingers around a cup, how to swallow a piece of banana, how to move a hand across the rug to grasp a key. Nothing comes easily. A morning's work might include stacking up bricks and knocking them down, banging a fork against the table, dropping stones into a puddle, pulling a book about Hindu temple architecture off a shelf, seeing what Mama's finger might taste like. Everything is amazing—once.

Neither Kirsten nor Rabih has ever known such a mixture of love and boredom. They are used to basing their friendships on shared temperaments and interests. But Esther is, confusingly, simultaneously the most boring person they have ever met and the one they find themselves loving the most. Rarely have love and psychological compatibility drifted so far apart—and yet it doesn't matter in the slightest. Perhaps all that emphasis on having “something in common” with others is overdone: Rabih and Kirsten have a new sense of how little is in truth required to form a bond with another human being. Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.

Literature has seldom dwelt long in the playroom and the nursery, and perhaps for good reason. In older novels, wet nurses swiftly bear infants away so that the action can resume. In the living room
in Newbattle Terrace, for months nothing much happens in the outward sense. The hours appear to be empty, but in truth everything is in them. Esther will forget their details entirely when she finally awakens as a coherent consciousness from the long night of early childhood. But their enduring legacy will be a primary sense of ease with and trust in the world. The fundamentals of Esther's childhood will be stored not so much in events as in sensory memories: of being held close to someone's chest, of certain slants of light at particular times of day, of smells, types of biscuits, textures of carpet, the distant, incomprehensible, soothing sound of her parents' voices in the car during long nighttime drives, and an underlying feeling that she has a right to exist and reasons to go on hoping.

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.