The Course of Love (24 page)

Rabih feels ready for marriage because he has despaired of being fully understood.

Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don't have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we hate the same people; we both want to try that rather specialized sexual scenario.

It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers' capacities for understanding, we mustn't blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn't fully fathom who we
were—and we did likewise. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

Rabih feels ready for marriage because he realizes he is crazy.

It's profoundly counterintuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good—to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step . . . and yet, maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he has understood that it isn't Kirsten who is difficult.

They seem “difficult,” of course, within the cage of marriage when they lose their tempers over such petty things: logistics, in-laws, cleaning duties, parties, the groceries . . . But it's not the other person's fault, it's what we're trying to do with them. It's the institution of marriage that is principally impossible, not the individuals involved.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he is prepared to love rather than be loved.

We speak of “love” as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural—and dangerous—fixation on the former.

We start out knowing only about “being
loved.” It comes to seem, quite wrongly, the norm. To the child, it feels as if the parent were just spontaneously on hand to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, and clear up while remaining almost constantly warm and cheerful.

We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly, and make everything better. It sounds “romantic,” yet it is a blueprint for disaster.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he understands that sex will always cohabit uneasily with love.

The Romantic view expects that love and sex will be aligned.
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.

We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core. A single meaningless adventure truly does have a recurring habit of ending everything. It's impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner's mind during the “betrayal,” when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defense as often as we like, but we'll be sure of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as a trustworthy human. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against the tide.

He is ready for marriage because (on a good day) he is happy to be taught and calm about teaching.

We are ready for marriage when we accept that, in a number of significant areas, our partner will be wiser, more reasonable, and more mature
than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. And at other moments we should be ready to model ourselves on the best pedagogues and deliver our suggestions without shouting or expecting the other simply to know. Only if we were already perfect could the idea of mutual education be dismissed as unloving.

Rabih and Kirsten are ready to be married because they are aware, deep down, that they are not compatible.

The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.

Rabih is ready for marriage because he is fed up with most love stories and because the versions of love presented in films and novels so seldom match what he now knows from lived experience.

By the standards of most love stories, our own real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium.
The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories—stories that don't dwell so much on the beginning, that don't promise us complete understanding, that strive to normalize our troubles and show us a melancholy yet hopeful path through the course of love.

It is Kirsten's birthday, and Rabih has arranged for them to spend the night at a wildly luxurious and expensive hotel in the Highlands. They drop the children off with a cousin of hers in Fort William and drive to the nineteenth-century castle. It promises battlements, five stars, room service, a billiard room, a pool, a French restaurant, and a ghost.

The children have made their unhappiness clear. Esther has accused her father of ruining her mother's birthday. “I just know you're going to get bored without us and that Mummy is going to miss us,” she insists. “I don't think you should be away for so long.” (They will be meeting again the following afternoon.) William reassures his sister that their parents can always watch television and might even find a games room with a computer.

Their room is in a turret at the top of the building. There is a large bathtub in the center, and the windows look out over a succession of peaks dominated by Ben Nevis, still carrying a light dusting of snow on its tip in June.

Once the young bellboy has dropped off their luggage, they feel awkward in each other's presence. It has been years, many years, since they have been alone in a hotel room together, without children or anything in particular to do over the next twenty-four hours.

It feels as if they are having an affair, so differently do they act towards each other in this setting. Encouraged by the dignity and quiet of the vast, high-ceilinged room, they are more formal and respectful. Kirsten asks Rabih with unaccustomed solicitude what he might like to order from the room-service tea menu—and he runs her a bath.

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

He lies on the bed and watches her soak in the tub: her hair is up, and she is reading a magazine. He feels sorry for and guilty about the troubles they have caused each other. He looks at a set of brochures he has picked up off the desk. There is shooting offered in September, and options for salmon fishing in February. When she is finished, she rises from the bath with her arms crossed over her breasts. He is touched, and a little aroused, by her reserve.

They go downstairs for dinner. The restaurant is candlelit, with high-backed chairs and antlers hanging on the walls. The headwaiter describes the six-course menu in an absurdly high-flown manner which they nonetheless surprise themselves by very much enjoying. They know enough about the squalor of domesticity by now not to resist the chance to revel in a bit of elaborately staged hospitality.

They start by talking about the children, their friends, and work; and then, after the third course—venison on a bed of celeriac mousse—they move on to less familiar territory, discussing her
suppressed ambition to take up an instrument again and his desire to invite her to Beirut. Kirsten even begins, finally, to speak of her father. She explains that whenever she's in a new place, she wonders whether he might happen to be living somewhere nearby. She wants to try to get in touch with him. Her eyes shine with withheld tears, and she says she's tired of being angry with him her whole life long. Maybe she would have done the same thing as he did, in his shoes. Almost. She'd like him to meet his grandchildren and, she adds with a smile, her horrible and peculiar Middle Eastern husband.

Rabih has ordered some recklessly expensive French wine, almost the price of the room itself, and it has begun to have its effect. He wants to get another bottle for the hell of it. He senses the psychological and moral role of wine, its capacity to open up channels of feeling and communication which are otherwise closed off—not merely to offer a crude escape from difficulties, but to allow access to emotions which daily life unfairly leaves no room for. Getting very drunk hasn't seemed so important in a long time.

He realizes there is still so much he doesn't know about his wife. She seems almost a stranger to him. He imagines that it's their first date and she has agreed to come and fuck him in a Scottish castle. She has left behind her children and her awful husband. She is touching him under the table, looking at him with her clever, skeptical eyes, and spilling a bit of her wine on the tablecloth.

He's very grateful to the waiters in their black uniforms and the locally reared lamb that has died for them and the three-layer fondant chocolate cake and the petits fours and the chamomile tea for conspiring to create a setting which places the fundamental mystery and charm of his wife on appropriate display.

She isn't good at receiving compliments, of course, but Rabih knows this by now, knows where it all
comes from—the independence and reticence which have been so upsetting to him in the past but won't be so much in the future—and he plows on nevertheless and tells her how beautiful she looks, what wise eyes she has, how proud he is of her, and how sorry he is about everything. And instead of rebuffing his words with one of her normal stoic remarks, she smiles—a warm, wide, quiet smile—and says thank you and squeezes his hand and may even be starting to tear up slightly again just as the waiter comes and asks if he can get Madam anything else at all. She replies, slurring slightly, “Just some more loveliness,” then catches herself.

It's gone to her head, too, making her brave—brave enough to be weak. It feels like a dam breaking inside her. She has had enough of resisting him; she wants to give herself to him again, as she once did. She knows she will survive whatever might happen. She is long past being a girl. She is a woman who has buried her own mother in the clammy soil of Tomnahurich Cemetery and put two children on the earth. She has made a boy and so has a knowledge of what men are like before they are in any position to damage women. She knows that male viciousness is mostly just fear. From her newfound position of strength, she feels generous and indulgent to their hurtful weakness.

“Sorry, Mr. Sfouf, that I haven't always been who you wanted me to be.”

He strokes her bare arm and replies, “Yet you've been so much more.”

They feel a giddy loyalty towards what they have built up together: their disputatious, fractious, laughter-filled, silly, beautiful marriage that they love because it is so distinctly and painfully their own. They feel proud to have come this far, to have kept at it, trying again and again to understand the spectres
in each other's minds, hammering out one peace accord after another. There could have been so many reasons not to be together still. Breaking up would have been the natural, almost inevitable thing to do. It's the sticking around that is the weird and exotic achievement—and they feel a loyalty to their battle-hardened, scarred version of love.

In bed back in the room, he cherishes the marks on her stomach that their children have made, how they have torn and damaged and exhausted her with their innocent primal egoism. She notices a new undulating softness to him. It is raining heavily; the wind whistles around the battlements. When they are done, they hold each other by the window and drink a local mineral water by the light of a lamp in the yard below.

The hotel has assumed a metaphysical importance for them. The effects will not be limited to these exotic premises; they will carry the lessons in appreciation and reconciliation into the colder, plainer rooms of their daily life.

The following afternoon, Kirsten's cousin returns the children to them. Esther and William run to greet their parents in the billiard room by Reception. Esther is carrying Dobbie with her. Both parents have headaches as if they'd just stepped off a long-haul flight.

The kids complain in the strongest terms about having been abandoned like orphans and forced to sleep in a bedroom that smelt of dog. They demand explicit confirmation that this sort of trip will never happen again.

Then, as planned, the four of them go for a walk. They follow a river for a while and then ascend the foothills of Ben Nevis. After half an hour they emerge from the woods, and a landscape opens up before them that stretches out for miles in the summer sun. Far below, they can see sheep and toy-like farm
buildings.

They make a base camp in a patch of heather. Esther takes off her boots and runs along a stream. She will be a woman in a few years, and the story will start all over again. William tracks a trail of ants back to their nest. It is the warmest day of the year so far. Rabih lies down on the earth, spread-eagled, and follows the path of a small, unthreatening cloud across the blueness.