The Course of Love

Contra

The texts are, at first, purely civil. Did he get back safely? How is her jet lag? Some professional themes come into it, too: Has he received the post conference newsletter? Does she know the work of the urbanist Jan Gehl?

Then, at eleven one night, he feels his phone vibrate and goes into the bathroom. From Los Angeles she has written that she is, truth be told, finding it hard to forget his cock.

He deletes the message at once, takes out the phone’s SIM card and hides it in his wash bag, stashes the phone under a tracksuit, and goes back to bed. Kirsten stretches her arms out towards him. The next day, with the phone reassembled, he sends Lauren a return text from the laundry cupboard under the stairs: “Thanks for an extraordinary, wonderful, generous night. I won’t ever regret it. I think of your vagina.” For a number of reasons, he deletes the last sentence before sending.

As for the never regretting: in reality, surrounded by drying towels, it’s starting to feel rather more complicated.

The following Saturday, in a toy shop in the center of town where he has gone with William to buy a model boat, an e-mail arrives with an attachment. Beside a shelf full of small sails, he reads: “I love your name, Rabih Khan. Every time I say it out loud to myself, it satisfies me somehow. And yet it also makes me sad, because it reminds me how much time I’ve wasted with men who don’t share your genuine and passionate nature, and who haven’t been able to understand the parts of me that I need to have understood. I hope you’ll like the attached photo of me in my favorite Oxfords and socks. It’s the real me, the one I’m so thrilled to know you saw and may see again before too long.”

William tugs at his jacket. There’s dismay in his voice: the boat he’s been obsessing about all month costs far more than he anticipated. Rabih feels himself go pale. The self-portrait shows her standing in a bathroom, facing a full-length mirror with her head angled to one side, wearing nothing but lace-up shoes and a pair of knee-high yellow and black stockings. He offers to buy William a toy aircraft carrier.

The message stays unanswered for the rest of the weekend. He has no time or opportunity to come back to it until the Monday night, when Kirsten is out at her book club.

When he opens his e-mail app to reply, he sees that Lauren has got there first: “I know your situation is difficult, and I’d never want to do anything to jeopardize it—but I was just feeling so vulnerable and silly that night. I don’t usually send naked pictures of myself to men I hardly know. I was a little hurt by your nonresponse. Forgive me for saying that; I know I’ve got no right. I just keep thinking of your kind, sweet face. You’re a good man, Rabih—don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. I like you more than I should. I want you inside me now.”

For the sweet-faced man, things are feeling ever more tricky.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Rabih becomes increasingly aware of his wife’s goodness. He notices the trouble she takes with nearly everything she does. Every night she spends hours helping the children with their homework; she remembers their spelling tests, rehearses lines for school plays with them, and sews patches onto their trousers. She’s sponsoring an orphan with a lip deformation in Malawi. Rabih develops an ulcer on the inside of his cheek, and—without being asked—his wife buys a healing gel and drops it off for him at work. She is doing a fine job of appearing to be a great deal nicer than he is, which he is both extremely grateful for and, on another level, utterly furious about.

Her generosity seems to show up the extent of his inadequacy, and grows less tolerable by the day. His behavior declines. He snaps at her in front of the children. He drags his heels about taking out the trash and changing the sheets. He wishes she would be a little bit awful back to him, in order that her assessment of him might appear better aligned with his own sense of self-worth.

Late one evening, after they’ve gone to bed and while Kirsten is relaying something about the car’s annual service, his discomfort reaches a pitch.

“Oh, and I had the wheels realigned; apparently you need to do that every six months or so,” she says, not even glancing up from her reading.

“Kirsten, why would you ever bother with that?”

“Well, it might matter. It can be dangerous not to do it, the mechanic said.”

“You’re frightening, you know.”

“Frightening?”

“The way you’re so . . . so organized, such a planner, so goddamned reasonable about everything.”

“Reasonable?”

“Everything around here is deeply sensible, rational, worked out, policed—as if there were a timetable all laid out from now till the moment we die.”

“I don’t understand,” Kirsten says. Her expression is one of pure puzzlement. “Policed? I went to have the car fixed, and at once I’m a villain in some anti-bourgeois narrative?”

“Yes, you’re right. You’re always right. I just wonder why you’re such a genius at making me feel I’m the mad, horrible one. All I can say is, everything is very well ordered around here.”

“I thought you liked order.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Thought, past tense?”

“It can start to seem dead. Boring, even.” He can’t help himself. He’s impelled to say the very worst things, to try to smash the relationship to see if it’s real and worth trusting.

“You’re not putting this very nicely at all. And I don’t think anything around here is boring. I wish it were.”

“It is. I’ve become boring. And you’ve become boring, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Kirsten stares straight ahead of her, her eyes wider than usual. She rises from the bed with silent dignity, her finger still in the book she has been reading, and walks out of the room. He hears her go down the stairs and then shut the living room door behind her.

“Why do you have to have such a talent for making me feel so damned guilty about everything I do?” he calls after her. “Saint fucking Kirsten. . . .” And he stamps his foot on the floor with sufficient force briefly to wake up his daughter in the room below.

Twenty minutes of rumination later, he follows Kirsten downstairs. She is sitting in the armchair, by the lamp, with a blanket around her shoulders. She doesn’t look up when he enters. He sits down on the sofa and puts his head in his hands. Next door in the kitchen, the fridge lets off an audible shiver as its thermostat kicks the motor on.

“You think it’s funny for me, all this, do you?” she says eventually, still without looking at him. “Throwing the best parts of my career away in order to manage two constantly exhausting, maddening, beautiful children and an oh-so-interesting on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown husband? Do you think this is what I dreamt of when I was fifteen and read Germaine Greer’s bloody Female Eunuch? Do you know how much nonsense I have to fill my head with every day of the week just so this household can function? And meanwhile all you can do is harbor some mysterious resentment about my supposedly having prevented you from reaching your full potential as an architect when the truth is that you yourself worry about money far more than I do, except you find it useful to blame me for your own caution. Because it’s always so much easier if it’s my fault. I ask one thing and one thing only from you: that you treat me with respect. I don’t care what you daydream about or what you may get up to when you go here and there, but I will not tolerate your being uncivil towards me. You think you’re the only one who gets bored of all this now and then? Let me tell you, I’m not constantly thrilled by it, either. In case it hasn’t occurred to you, there are times when I feel a little dissatisfied myself—and I certainly don’t want you policing me any more than you want me doing the same to you.”

Rabih stares at her, surprised by the end of her speech.

“Policing? Really?” he asks. “That’s an odd choice of word.”

“You used it first.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did, in the bedroom: you said everything here was sensible and policed.”

“I’m sure I didn’t.” Rabih pauses. “Have you done anything that I ought to be policing you about?”

The heartbeat of their relationship, which has been going nonstop since the afternoon in the botanic garden, appears to pause.

“Yes, I’m fucking all the men on the team, every last one of them. I’m glad you finally asked; I thought you never would. At least they know how to be civil towards me.”

“Are you having an affair?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I have lunch with them occasionally.”

“All of them at once?”

“No, Detective Inspector, I prefer one at a time.”

Rabih is slumped at the table, which is covered with the children’s homework. Kirsten paces by the larder, to which is tacked a large picture of the four of them on a memorably enjoyable holiday in Normandy.

“Which ones do you have lunch with?”

“Why does it matter? All right: Ben McGuire, for one, up in Dundee. He’s calm, he likes to go walking, he doesn’t seem to think it’s such a terrible flaw that I’m ‘reasonable.’ Anyway, to get back to the larger point: How can I make it any clearer? Being nice is not boring; it’s an enormous achievement, one that ninety-nine percent of humanity can’t manage from day to day. If ‘nice’ is boring, then I love boring. I want you never again to shout at me in front of the children the way you did yesterday. I don’t like men who shout. There’s nothing charming about it at all. I thought the whole point of you was that you didn’t shout.”

Kirsten gets up and goes to fetch a glass of water.

Ben McGuire. The name rings a bell. She’s mentioned him before. She went to Dundee for the afternoon once. When was that? Three months ago, perhaps? There was some sort of council get-together, she said. How dare this McGuire fellow invite his wife to lunch? Is he entirely out of his mind? And without even asking Rabih’s permission, which he would certainly never have given?

He begins his inquisition at once: “Kirsten, have you done anything with Ben McGuire, or has he otherwise indicated that he would like in some way to do something to—or should I say with—you?”

“Don’t adopt that strange, detached, lawyerly tone with me, Rabih. Do you think I’d be talking like this with you if I had something to hide? Just because somebody finds me attractive, I’m not the narcissistic type who feels immediately forced to strip off. But if someone does actually think I am rather terrific, and if he notices that I’ve had my hair cut or admires what I’m wearing, I don’t hold it against him, either. Surprisingly, I am not a virgin. You’ll find that very few women my age are, these days. It’s probably even time you came to terms with the fact that your mother wasn’t the Madonna she lives on as in your imagination. What do you think she was doing with her evenings when she flew around the world—reading selected passages of the Gideons’ Bible in her hotel room? Whatever it was, I hope for her sake that it was wonderful and that her lovers adored her—and I’m glad she had the decency never to involve you in any of it. Bless her. Except that she gave you, through no fault of her own, some very skewed views about women. Yes, women do in fact have needs of their own, and sometimes—even if they have husbands they love and are good mothers—they would like for someone new and unknown to notice them and want them desperately. Which doesn’t mean they won’t also be the picture of sensible concern every day and think about what kinds of healthy snacks to pack inside their children’s lunch boxes. Sometimes you seem to believe you’re the only one around here who has an inner life. But all of your very subtle feelings are in the end very normal and no sign of genius. This is what marriage is and what we signed up for, both of us, for life, with our eyes open. I intend to be loyal to that, as much as I can, and I hope you will be, too.”

With that, she falls silent. On the counter next to where she’s standing there’s a large pack of flour, brought out from the pantry in anticipation of a cake she’ll make with the children the next day. She stares at it for a moment.

“And as for your complaint that I never do anything crazy . . .” The pack of flour is across the room before he can say a word, striking the wall with such vehemence that it explodes into a white cloud, which takes a surprisingly long time to settle across the dining table and chairs.

“You stupid, hurtful, inadequate man—was that crazy enough for you? Perhaps while you’re cleaning it up you’ll have time to remember how much fun housework can be. And please don’t ever, ever call me boring again.”

She goes back upstairs, and Rabih gets down on his knees with the dustpan and brush. There’s flour everywhere: it takes nearly a whole roll of paper towels, carefully dampened, to get the bulk of it off the table, off the chairs, and out of the crevices in the tiles, and even then he knows that reminders of this event will remain visible for weeks to come. As he works he also recalls, in a way he hasn’t done for a while, that he had good reason to marry this particular woman.

It seems especially painful, therefore, to think that Rabih may have lost her to a fellow surveyor from the Dundee Council—and, what’s worse, just when he has no leg to stand on and no moral authority to exert. Yes, he knows he’s being ridiculous, but the thoughts crowd in nevertheless. How long has the adultery been going on? How many times have they met? Where do they do it? In the car? He’ll have to check it thoroughly in the morning. He feels nauseous. She is by her very nature so secretive and discreet that she could be carrying on a whole second life, he reflects, without his having a clue. He wouldn’t begin to know how to intercept her e-mails or bug her phone. Does she really even belong to a book club? When she said she was visiting her mother last month, was she actually off for a weekend with her lover? What about the “coffee” she sometimes has on a Saturday? There might be a tracker he can slip into her coat. He is at once beyond outraged and entirely terrified. His wife is about to leave him, or else she plans to stay but to treat him coldly and angrily for eternity. He misses their past life so much, when all they knew was (he manages to convince himself) calmness, loyalty, and stability. He wants to be cradled in her arms like an infant and to turn back the clock. He thought they were going to have a quiet evening, and now everything has come to an end.

To be mature is, we’re told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone. It’s what wise people have taught us since our earliest days: Let Jack play with your fire engine; it won’t stop being yours if he has a turn. Stop throwing yourself on the floor and thumping your small clenched fists on the carpet in rage. Your little sister may be Daddy’s darling. But you’re Daddy’s darling, too. Love isn’t like a cake: if you give love to one person, it doesn’t mean there is less for anyone else. Love just keeps growing every time there’s a new baby in the family.

Later on, the argument makes even more sense around sex. Why would you think ill of a partner if they left you for an hour to go and rub a limited area of their body against that of a stranger? After all, you wouldn’t get enraged if they played chess with someone you didn’t know or joined a meditation group where they talked intimately of their lives by candlelight, would you?

Rabih can’t stop asking certain questions: Where was Kirsten last Thursday evening when he called her and got no answer? Whom is she trying to impress with her new black shoes? Why, when he types “Ben McGuire” into the search box on her laptop (which he has fired up in secret in the bathroom), does he get only boring work-related e-mails between the two of them? How and where else are they communicating? Have they set up hidden e-mail accounts? Is it Skype? Or some new encrypted service? And the most important and stupidest question of all: What’s he like in bed?

The stupidity of jealousy makes it a tempting target for those in a moralizing mood. They should spare their breath. However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.

He tries consciously to slow down his breathing. It seems as if he might be angry, but at heart he’s merely terrified. He tries a technique he once heard described in a magazine: “Let’s imagine what Kirsten, if she did have a few experiences with Ben, might have meant by them. What did it mean when I was with Lauren? Did I want to abandon Kirsten? Emphatically no. So in all likelihood, when she was with Ben, she didn’t want to run off, either. She was probably just feeling ignored and vulnerable and wanted an affirmation of her sexuality—things she’s already told me she needs and that I need, too. Whatever she may have done was probably no worse than what happened in Berlin, which itself wasn’t really so bad. To forgive her would be to come to terms with some of the very same impulses I myself have had, and to see that they were no more the enemies of our marriage and our love for having been hers rather than mine.”

It sounds very logical and high-minded. Yet it makes no sliver of difference. He is starting to learn about “being good” but not in the normal, secondhand kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through having a chance to explore the long-term consequences of bad behavior from within.

So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others, sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative.