The Course of Love

Pro

He makes it home early on Saturday afternoon. To his surprise, the world appears to be carrying on much as it has always done. No one stares at him at the airport or on the bus. Edinburgh is intact. The front door key still works. Kirsten is in the study helping William with his homework. This accomplished, intelligent woman, who has a first-class degree from Aberdeen University, who is a member of the Scottish chapter of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and daily handles budgets in the millions, has been ordered to sit on the floor by a seven-and-a-half-year-old boy who holds an unparalleled command over her and is just now impatiently urging her to color in some archers in his version of the Battle of Flodden Field.

Rabih has presents for everyone (bought in a duty-free shop on the other side of passport control). He tells Kirsten he can take over with the children, prepare supper, and do bath time; he’s sure she must be exhausted. An impure conscience is a useful spur to being a bit nicer.

Rabih and Kirsten go to bed early. She has, for an age, been his first port of call for every piece of news, however trivial or grave. How odd it seems, therefore, for him to be in possession of information at once so significant and yet so deeply resistant to the customary principles of disclosure.

It would be almost natural to start by explaining how curious it was that he and Lauren happened to bump into each other by the lifts—since he was scheduled to be at a talk at the time—and how touching he found it when, after their lovemaking, she haltingly described the illness and death of a grandmother to whom she had been unusually close throughout her childhood. Adopting the same easy, digressive approach they take when picking apart the psychology of people they meet at parties or the plotlines of films they see together, they might review how moving and sad it was for Rabih to say good-bye to Lauren at Tegel Airport, and how thrilling and (a little) scary to receive a text from her on landing. There could be no one better qualified to consider such themes with than his insightful, inquisitive, funny, and observant co-explorer of existence.

It is a bit of a job, therefore, to keep reminding himself how close he is to unleashing a tragedy. Esther apparently has a playdate the following morning at an indoor ski slope. This is where their story could come to a decisive end, and madness and mayhem begin. They will have to leave the house at nine to be there by a quarter to ten. It would, he is aware, take only a sentence to bring everything settled and coherent in his current life to a close: his brain contains a piece of information a mere six or so words long which is capable of blowing the household sky-high. Their daughter will need her gloves, which are in that box in the attic marked Winter Clothes. He marvels at the mind’s capacity not to let slip a single outward indication of the dynamite it contains. All the same, he is tempted to check in the bathroom mirror to make sure that nothing is leaking out of him.

He understands—for the idea has been drummed into him from an early age by society—that what he has done is wrong. Very wrong indeed. He is, in the language of the tabloids, a scumbag, a love rat, a cheat, and a traitor. Nevertheless, he also registers that the exact nature of the ill he has committed is not in fact entirely clear to him. He does feel some concern, but for cautionary, secondary reasons—that is, because he wants tomorrow to go well, and the days and years thereafter. In his depths, however, he can’t find it in himself to believe that what has happened in the Berlin hotel room is truly bad in and of itself. Is this perhaps, he wonders, just the eternal excuse of the love rat?

Through the lens of Romanticism there can be, quite simply, no greater betrayal. Even for those willing to countenance almost every other kind of behavior, adultery remains the one seismic transgression, appalling in its violation of a series of the most sacred assumptions of love.

The first of these is that one person can’t possibly claim to love another—and by implication in any way value their life together—and then slip off and have sex with someone else. If such a disaster were to happen, it could only be that there had been no love to begin with.

Kirsten has fallen asleep. He brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. He recalls how differently responsive were Lauren’s ears and her belly, even through her dress. By the time they were at the bar, it looked like something was going to happen between them: it became a certainty the moment she asked if he came to these conferences often, and he replied that this already felt like a very unusual one, and she smiled warmly. Her directness was the centerpiece of her enchantment. “This is nice,” she turned around and said when they were in bed, as though trying out some unfamiliar dish in a restaurant. But the mind has many chambers, and a dazzling capacity for building firewalls. In another zone, another galaxy entirely, there remains untouched the love he has for Kirsten’s way of telling rude jokes at parties, the surprising trove of poems she keeps in her head (Coleridge and Burns), her habit of pairing black skirts and tights with trainers, her skill at unblocking a sink, and her knowledge of what might be going on under a car bonnet (the sorts of things which women let down by their fathers at a young age seem to be particularly good at). There’s no one on earth he’d rather have dinner with than his wife, who is also his best friend. Which hasn’t, however, in any way prevented him from possibly ruining her life.

A second assumption: adultery isn’t just any old kind of disloyalty. A transgression involving nakedness is of a fundamentally different order, says the world; it’s a betrayal of a cataclysmic and incomparable sort. Screwing around is not somewhat bad; it’s the very worst thing one person could do to another whom he or she claims to love.

This wasn’t—clearly—exactly what Kirsten McLelland signed up to, many years ago, in that salmon-pink registry office in Inverness. Then again, there have been a number of things over the course of their marriage that Rabih Khan didn’t anticipate, either, including his wife’s strong objection to his wish to return to architecture, primarily because she didn’t want their income to be curtailed for even a few months; her cutting him off from many of his friends because she found them “boring”; her tendency to make jokes at his expense in company; the blame he has to shoulder when things go wrong at her work; and the exhausting anxiety she suffers over every aspect of their children’s education. . . . These are the stories he has told himself, lines of reasoning that are simpler than wondering if he may have held himself back in his career or if his friends really might not be quite as entertaining as they seemed when he was twenty-two.

Still, Rabih questions whether that half an hour should so conclusively shift the moral calculation against him, if it should on its own be what commits him to fiery damnation. While they may lack the same power to stir up ready indignation, there are betrayals of an equally damaging (if less visible) sort in her habits of not listening, of failing to forgive, and of casting unfair blame, and in her casual belittlement and her stretches of indifference. He doesn’t want to add up the ledger, but he isn’t sure that—on the basis of this single, admittedly deeply wounding act—he ought so easily and definitively to qualify as the villain of the entire piece.

A third assumption: a commitment to monogamy is an admirable consequence of love, stemming from a deep-seated generosity and an intimate interest in the other’s flourishing and well-being. A call for monogamy is a sure indication that one partner has the other’s sincere interests at heart.

To Rabih’s new way of thinking, it seems anything but kind or considerate to insist that a spouse return to his room alone to watch CNN and eat yet another club sandwich while perched on the edge of his bed, when he has perhaps only a few more decades of life left on the planet, an increasingly disheveled physique, an at best intermittent track record with the opposite sex, and a young woman from California standing before him who sincerely wishes to remove her dress in his honor.

If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the eighteenth floor in order to enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a near stranger. Otherwise it may seem that what we are dealing with is not really love at all but rather a kind of small-minded and hypocritical possessiveness, a desire to make one’s partner happy if, but only if, that happiness involves oneself.

It’s past midnight already, yet Rabih is just hitting his stride, knowing there might be objections but sidestepping them nimbly and, in the process, acquiring an ever more brittle sense of self-righteousness.

A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of emotional health.

Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything in one other being—someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur, and a business partner? What a recipe for disappointment and resentment in this notion upon which millions of otherwise perfectly good marriages regularly founder.

What could be more natural than to feel an occasional desire for another person? How can anyone be expected to grow up in hedonistic, liberated circles, experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, listen to music full of longing and lust, and then, immediately upon signing a piece of paper, renounce all outside sexual interest, not in the name of any particular god or higher commandment, but merely from an unexplored supposition that it must be very wrong? Is there not instead something inhuman, indeed “wrong,” in failing to be tempted, in failing to realize just how short of time we all are and therefore with what urgent curiosity we should want to explore the unique fleshly individuality of more than one of our contemporaries? To moralize against adultery is to deny the legitimacy of a range of sensory high points—Rabih thinks of Lauren’s shoulder blades—in their own way just as worthy of reverence as more acceptable attractions such as the last moments of “Hey Jude” or the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace. Isn’t the rejection of adulterous possibilities tantamount to an infidelity towards the richness of life itself? To turn the equation on its head: Would it be rational to trust anyone who wasn’t, under certain circumstances, really pretty interested in being unfaithful?