The Course of Love

Silly Things

In the City of Love, the Scottish wife and her Middle Eastern husband visit the dead at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. They search in vain for the bones of Jean de Brunhoff and end up sharing a croque-monsieur on top of Édith Piaf. Back in their room, they pull off what Kirsten calls the “spermy bedcover,” spread a towel out, and—on paper plates and with the help of plastic forks—eat a dressed lobster from Brittany which called to them from the window of a deli in the rue du Cherche-Midi.

Opposite their hotel, a chichi children’s boutique sells overpriced cardigans and dungarees. While Rabih is soaking in the bath one afternoon, Kirsten pops in and returns with Dobbie, a small furry monster with one horn and three deliberately ill-matched eyes who, in six years’ time, will become their daughter’s favorite possession.

On their return to Scotland, they start to look for a flat. Rabih has married a rich woman, he jokes, which is true only in comparison with his own financial status. She owns a little place already, has been working for four years longer than he has and wasn’t unemployed for eight months along the way. He has money enough to pay for the equivalent of a broom cupboard, she remarks (kindly). They find somewhere they like on the first floor of a building on Merchiston Avenue. The seller is a frail, elderly widow who lost her husband a year ago and whose two sons now live in Canada. She isn’t so well herself. Photos of the family when the boys were young line a bank of dark-brown shelves which Rabih promptly begins sizing up for a TV. He’ll strip off the wallpaper, too, and repaint the vivid orange kitchen cabinets in a more dignified color.

“You two remind me a little of how Ernie and I were in our day,” says the old lady, and Kirsten answers, “Bless,” and briefly puts an arm around her. The seller used to be a magistrate; now she has an inoperable tumor growing inside her spine and is moving to sheltered accommodation on the other side of town. They settle on a decent price; the seller isn’t pushing the young couple as hard as she might do. On the day they sign the contract, while Kirsten ventures into the bedroom to take measurements, the lady holds Rabih back for an instant with a remarkably strong yet boney hand. “Be kind to her, won’t you,” she says, “even if you sometimes think she’s in the wrong.” Half a year later they learn the seller passed away.

They’ve reached the point where, by rights, their story—always slight—should draw to a close. The Romantic challenge is behind them. Life will from now on assume a steady, repetitive rhythm, to the extent that they will often find it hard to locate a specific event in time, so similar will the years appear in their outward forms. But their story is far from over: it is just a question of henceforth having to stand for longer in the stream and use a smaller-meshed sieve to catch the grains of interest.

One Saturday morning, a few weeks after moving into the new flat, Rabih and Kirsten drive to the big Ikea on the outskirts of town to buy some glasses. The selection stretches over two aisles and a multitude of styles. The previous weekend, in a new shop off Queen Street, they swiftly found a lamp they both loved, with a wooden base and a porcelain shade. This should be easy.

Not long after entering the cavernous homeware department, Kirsten decides that they should get a set from the Fabulös line—little tumblers which taper at the base and have two blobs of swirling blue and purple across the sides—and then head right home. One of the qualities her husband most admires in her is her decisiveness. But for Rabih it swiftly becomes evident that the larger, unadorned, and straight-sided glasses from the Godis line are the only ones that would really work with the kitchen table.

Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply—at long last—a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.

“You’re really going to like these once we get them home, unpack them, and put them next to the plates, I promise. They’re just . . . nicer,” says Kirsten, who knows how to be firm when the occasion requires it. To her, the plain tumblers are the sort of thing she associates with school cafeterias and prisons.

“I know what you mean, but I can’t help thinking these ones will look cleaner and fresher,” replies Rabih, who is unnerved by anything too decorative.

“Well, we can’t stand here discussing it all day,” reasons Kirsten, who has pulled the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands.

“Definitely not,” concurs Rabih.

“So let’s just go for the Fabulös and be done with it,” inveighs Kirsten.

“It seems crazy to keep disagreeing, but I genuinely think that would be a bit of a disaster.”

“Thing is, I just have this gut instinct.”

“Likewise,” responds Rabih.

Though both equally are aware that it would be a genuine waste of time to stand in the aisles at Ikea and argue at length about something as petty as which glasses they should buy (when life is so brief and its real imperatives so huge), with increasing ill-temper, to the mounting interest of other shoppers, they nonetheless stand in an aisle at Ikea and argue at length about which sort of glasses they should buy. After twenty minutes, each one accusing the other of being a little stupid, they abandon hopes of making a purchase and head back to the car park, Kirsten remarking on the way that she intends to spend the rest of her days drinking out of her cupped hand. For the whole drive home they stare out of the windscreen without speaking, the silence in the car interrupted only by the occasional clicking of the indicator lights. Dobbie, who has taken to traveling with them, sits daunted in the backseat.

They are serious people. Kirsten is currently at work on a presentation titled “Procurement Methods in District Services” which she will be traveling to Dundee next month to deliver in front of an audience of local government officials. Rabih meanwhile is the author of a thesis called “The Tectonics of Space in the Work of Christopher Alexander.” Nevertheless, an odd number of “silly things” are constantly cropping up between them. What, for example, is the ideal temperature for a bedroom? Kirsten is convinced that she needs a lot of fresh air at night to keep her head clear and energy levels up the next day. She’d rather the room be a bit cold (and if necessary that she put on an extra jumper or thermal pajamas) than stuffy and contaminated. The window must stay open. But winters were bitter during Rabih’s childhood in Beirut, and combating gusts of wind was always taken very seriously. (Even in a war, his family continued to feel strongly about drafts.) He feels safe somehow, snug and luxurious, when the blinds are down, the curtains are tightly drawn, and there’s some condensation on the inside of the windowpanes.

Or, to consider another point of contention, at what time should they leave the house to go for dinner—a special treat—together on a weeknight? Kirsten thinks: The reservation is for eight. Origano is approximately 3.2 miles away, the journey is normally a short one, but what if there were a hold up at the main roundabout, she reminds Rabih, like there was last time (when they went to see James and Mairi)? In any event, it wouldn’t be a problem to get there a bit early. They could have drinks at the bar next door or even take a stroll in the park; they have a lot to catch up on. It would be best to have the cab come by for them at seven. And Rabih thinks: An eight o’clock booking means we can arrive at the restaurant at eight fifteen or eight twenty. There are five long e-mails to deal with before leaving the office and I can’t be intimate if there are practical things on my mind. The roads will be clear by then anyway. And taxis always come early. We should book the cab for eight.

Or, again: What’s the best strategy for telling a story at, let’s say, a rather swanky party at the Museum of Scotland, to which they’ve been invited by a client whom Rabih needs to impress? He believes there are clear rules in force: First establish where the action takes place, then introduce the key participants and sketch out their dilemmas before moving in a quick and direct narrative line to a conclusion (after which it’s polite to give a turn to someone else—ideally the CEO, who has been waiting patiently). Kirsten, on the contrary, maintains that it’s more engaging to start a story midway through and then track back to the beginning. That way, she feels, the audience gets a more solid sense of what’s at stake for the characters. Details add local color. Not everyone wants to cut right to the chase. And then if the first anecdote seems to go down well, why not throw in a second?

Were their listeners (standing next to a display of a giant stegosaurus whose bones were found in a quarry near Glasgow in the late nineteenth century) to be polled for their opinions, they probably wouldn’t express any great objections to either approach; both could be fine, they would affirm. Yet, for Kirsten and Rabih themselves—testily recapping the performance as they make their way down to the cloakroom—the divergence feels a great deal more critical and more personal: How, each wonders, can the other understand anything—the world, themselves, their partner—if they are always so random or, at the opposite extreme, always so regimented? But what really adds to the intensity is a new thought that arises whenever a tension comes to light: How can this be endured over a lifetime?

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positively absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner.

I’ve married a lunatic, he thinks, at once scared and self-pitying, as their taxi makes its way at speed through the deserted suburban streets. His partner, no less incensed, sits as far away from him as it is possible to do in the backseat of a taxi. There is no space in Rabih’s imagination for the sort of marital discord in which he is presently involved. He is in theory amply prepared for disagreement, dialogue, and compromise, but not over such utter stupidity. He’s never read or heard of squabbling this bad over such a minor detail. Knowing that Kirsten will be haughty and distant with him possibly until the second course only adds to his agitation. He looks over at the imperturbable driver—an Afghan, to judge from the small plastic flag glued to the dashboard. What must he think of such bickering between two people without poverty or tribal genocide to contend with? Rabih is, in his own eyes, a very kind man who has unfortunately not been allotted the right sort of issues upon which to exercise his kindness. He would find it so much easier to give blood to an injured child in Badakhshan or to carry water to a family in Kandahar than to lean across and say sorry to his wife.

Not all domestic concerns carry equivalent prestige. One can quickly be made to look a fool for caring a lot about how much noise the other person makes while eating cereal or how long they want to keep magazines beyond their publication dates. It’s not difficult to humiliate someone who cleaves to a strict policy on how to stack a dishwasher or how quickly the butter ought to be returned to the fridge after use. When the tensions which bedevil us lack glamour, we are at the mercy of those who might wish to label our concerns petty and odd. We can end up frustrated and at the same time too doubtful of the dignity of our frustrations to have the confidence to outline them calmly for our dubious or impatient audiences.

In reality, there are rarely squabbles over “nothing” in Rabih and Kirsten’s marriage. The small issues are really just large ones that haven’t been accorded the requisite attention. Their everyday disputes are the loose threads that catch on fundamental contrasts in their personalities.

Were he a keener student of his commitments and disappointments, Rabih might, in relation to the air temperature, have explained from under the duvet: “When you say you want a window open in the middle of winter, it scares and upsets me—emotionally rather than physically. It seems to me to speak of a future in which precious things will be trampled upon. It reminds me of a certain sadistic stoicism and cheerful bravery in you which I am generally in flight from. On some subconscious level, I feel afraid that it’s not really fresh air you want but that, instead, you’d ideally like to push me out of the window in your charming but brusque, sensible, daunting way.”

And were Kirsten similarly keen to examine her position on punctuality, she might have delivered her own touching oration to Rabih (and the Afghan driver) on the way to the restaurant: “My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it’s a technique I’ve developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It’s my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.”

With their respective needs contextualized like this, with each side appreciating the sources of the other’s beliefs, a new flexibility might have ensued. Rabih could have suggested setting out for Origano not much past six thirty, and Kirsten might have arranged an airlock for their bedroom.

Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counterarguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character.

The two parties just hope the problems—so boring to them both—will simply go away.

As it happens, it’s in the middle of yet another stand-off about the window and the air temperature that Kirsten’s friend Hannah calls from Poland where she lives with her partner and asks how “it”—by which she means the marriage (a year old now)—is going.

Kirsten’s husband has donned an overcoat and woollen hat to maximize the force of his objection to his wife’s demands for fresh air and is sitting huddled in childish self-pity in a corner of the room with the duvet over him. She has just referred to him, and not for the first time, as a big Jessie.

“Just great,” answers Kirsten.

However fashionable an openness around relationships might be, it remains not a little shameful to have to admit that one just may, despite so many opportunities for reflection and experiment, have gone ahead and married the wrong person.

“I’m here with Rabih, having a quiet night in, catching up on some reading.”

There is in reality no ultimate truth in either Rabih’s or Kirsten’s mind as to how things actually are between them. Their lives involve a constant rotation of moods. Over a single weekend they might spin from claustrophobia to admiration, desire to boredom, indifference to ecstasy, irritation to tenderness. To arrest the wheel at any one point in order to share a candid verdict with a third party would be to risk being held forever to a confession which might, with hindsight, turn out to reflect only a momentary state of mind—gloomy pronouncements always commanding an authority that happier ones can’t trump.

So long as they keep making sure there are no witnesses to their struggles, Kirsten and Rabih are free not to have to decide quite how well or how badly things are going between them.

The ordinary challenging relationship remains a strangely and unhelpfully neglected topic. It’s the extremes that repeatedly grab the spotlight—the entirely blissful partnerships or the murderous catastrophes—and so it is hard to know what we should make of, and how lonely we should feel about, such things as immature rages, late-night threats of divorce, sullen silences, slammed doors, and everyday acts of thoughtlessness and cruelty.

Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.

But too often a realistic sense of what an endurable relationship is ends up weakened by silence, societal or artistic. We hence imagine that things are far worse for us than they are for other couples. Not only are we are unhappy, we misunderstand how freakish and rare our particular form of unhappiness might be. We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.

They are spared continuous bitterness by two reliable curatives. The first is poor memory. It is hard, by four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, to remember quite what the fury in the taxi the previous evening was really about. Rabih knows it had something to do with Kirsten’s slightly contemptuous tone, combined with the flippant, ungrateful way she responded to his remark about having to leave work early for no good reason. But the precise contours of the offense have now lost their focus, thanks to the sunlight that came through the curtains at six in the morning, the chatter on the radio about ski resorts, a full in-box, the jokes over lunch, the preparations for the conference, and the two-hour meeting about the Web site’s design, which together have gone almost as far towards patching things up between them as a mature, direct discussion would have done.

The second remedy is more abstract: it can be difficult to remain furious for very long, given quite how large the universe happens to be. A few hours after the Ikea incident, around mid-afternoon, Rabih and Kirsten set off on a long-planned walk in the Lammermuir Hills to the southeast of Edinburgh. They start out silent and cross, but nature gradually releases them from the grip of their mutual indignation, not through its sympathy but through its sublime indifference. Stretching interminably far into the distance, created through the compression of sedimentary rocks in the Ordovician and Silurian periods (some four hundred fifty million years before Ikea was founded), the hills strongly suggest that the struggle which has lately loomed so large in their minds does not in fact occupy such a significant place in the cosmic order and is as nothing when set against the aeons of time to which the landscape attests. Clouds drift across the horizon without pausing to take stock of their injured sense of pride. Nothing and no one seem to care: not the family of common sandpipers circling up ahead nor the curlew, the snipe, the golden plover or the meadow pipit. Not the honeysuckle, the foxgloves, or the harebells nor the three sheep near Fellcleugh Wood who are grazing on a rare patch of clover with grave intent. Having felt belittled by each other for most of the day, Rabih and Kirsten are now relieved from feeling small by an apprehension of the vastness within which their lives unfold. They become readier to laugh off their own insignificance as it is pointed out to them by forces indomitably more powerful and impressive than they are.

So helpful are the limitless horizon and ancient hills that, by the time they reach a café in the village of Duns, they have even forgotten what they are meant to be furious with each other about. Two cups of tea later, they have agreed to drive back to Ikea, where they eventually manage to pick out some glasses that they will both succeed in tolerating for the rest of their lives: twelve tumblers from the Svalka line.