The Course of Love

Sex and Love

For their second date, after the kiss in the botanical garden, Rabih has suggested dinner at a Thai restaurant on Howe Street. He arrives there first and is shown to a table in the basement, next to an aquarium alarmingly crowded with lobsters. She’s a few minutes late, dressed very casually in an old pair of jeans and trainers, wearing no makeup and glasses rather than her usual contact lenses. The conversation starts off awkwardly. To Rabih there seems no way to reconnect with the greater intimacy of the last time they were together. It’s as if they were back to being only acquaintances again. They talk about his mother and her father and some books and films they both know. But he doesn’t dare to touch her hands, which she keeps mostly in her lap anyway. It seems natural to imagine she may have changed her mind.

Yet, once they’re out in the street afterwards, the tension dissipates. “Do you fancy a tea at mine—something herbal?” she asks. “It’s not far from here.”

So they walk a few streets over to a block of flats and climb up to the top floor, where she has a tiny yet beautiful one-bedroom place with views onto the sea and, along the walls, photographs she has taken of different parts of the Highlands. Rabih gets a glimpse of the bedroom, where there’s a huge pile of clothes in a mess on the bed.

“I tried on pretty much everything I own and then I thought, ‘To hell with that,’” she calls out, “as one does!”

She’s in the kitchen brewing tea. He wanders in, picks up the box, and remarks how odd the word chamomile looks written down. “You notice all the most important things,” she jokes warmly. It feels like an invitation of sorts, so he moves towards her and gently kisses her. The kiss goes on for a long time. In the background they hear the kettle boil, then subside. Rabih wonders how much further he might go. He strokes the back of Kirsten’s neck, then her shoulders. He braves a tentative caress over her chest and waits in vain for a reaction. His right hand makes a foray over her jeans, very lightly, and traces a line down both her thighs. He knows he may now be at the outer limits of what would be fitting on a second date. Still, he risks venturing down with his hand once again, this time moving a bit more purposefully against the jeans, pressing in rhythm between her legs.

That begins one of the most erotic moments of Rabih’s life, for when Kirsten feels his hand pressing against her through her jeans, she thrusts forwards ever so slightly to greet it, and then a bit more. She opens her eyes and smiles at him, as he does back at her.

“Just there,” she says, focusing his hand on one very specific area just to the side of the lower part of her zip.

This goes on for another minute or so, and then she reaches down and takes his wrist, moves the hand up a little, and guides him to undo her button. Together they open her jeans, and she takes his hand and invites it inside the black elastic of her panties. He feels her warmth and, a second later, a wetness that symbolizes an unambiguous welcome and excitement.

Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.

Her jeans are wide-open now, and both of their faces are flushed. From Rabih’s perspective, the excitement springs in part from the fact that Kirsten gave so little indication over so long that she really had such things on her mind.

She leads him into the bedroom and kicks the pile of clothes onto the floor. On the bedside table is the novel she’s been reading by George Sand, whom Rabih has never heard of. There are some earrings, too, and a picture of Kirsten in a uniform standing outside her primary school, holding her mother’s hand.

“I didn’t have a chance to hide all my secrets,” she says. “But don’t let that hold you back from snooping.”

There’s an almost full moon out, and they leave the curtains open. As they lie entwined on the bed, he strokes her hair and squeezes her hand. Their smiles suggest they’re not completely past shyness yet. He pauses in mid-caress and asks when she first decided she might want this, prompted in his inquiry not by vanity but by a mixture of gratitude and liberation, now that desires which might have seemed simply obscene, predatory, or pitiful in their unanswered form have proved to be redemptively mutual.

“Pretty early on, actually, Mr. Khan,” she says. “Is there anything more I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Go on.”

“OK, so at what point did you first feel, you know, that you might . . . how can I say . . . well, that you’d perhaps be on for . . .”

“Fucking you?”

“Something like that.”

“Now I see what you mean,” she teases. “To tell you the truth, it started that very first time we walked over to the restaurant. I noticed you had a nice bum, and I kept thinking about it all the while you were boring on about the work we had to do. And then later that night I was imagining, stretched out on this very bed that we’re on right now, what it would be like to get hold of your . . . well, okay, I’m going to get shy now, too, so that may have to be it for the moment.”

The idea that respectable-looking people might be inwardly harboring some beautifully carnal and explicit fantasies while outwardly seeming to care only about a friendly banter—this strikes Rabih as an entirely surprising and deeply delightful concept, with an immediate power to soothe a raft of his own underlying guilty feelings about his sexuality. That Kirsten’s late-night fantasies might have been about him when she had simultaneously seemed so reserved and so upright at the time, and yet was now so eager and so direct—these revelations mark out the moment as among the very best of Rabih’s life.

For all the talk of sexual liberation, the truth is that secrecy and a degree of embarrassment around sex continue as much as they have always done. We still can’t generally say what we want to do and with whom. Shame and repression of impulse aren’t just things that our ancestors and certain buttoned-up religions latched onto for obscure and unnecessary reasons: they are fated to be constants in all eras—which is what lends such power to those rare moments (there might be only a few in a lifetime) when a stranger invites us to drop our guard and admits to wanting pretty much exactly what we had once privately and guiltily craved.

It is two in the morning by the time they finish. An owl is hooting somewhere in the darkness.

Kirsten falls asleep in Rabih’s arms. She seems trustful and at ease, slipping gracefully into the current of sleep while he stands at the shore, protesting against the end of this miraculous day, rehearsing its pivotal moments. He watches her lips tremble slightly, as though she were reading a book to herself in some foreign language of the night. Occasionally she seems to wake for an instant and, looking startled and scared, appeals for help: “The train!” she exclaims, or, with even greater alarm, “It’s tomorrow; they moved it!” He reassures her (they have enough time to get to the station; she’s done all the necessary revision for the exam) and takes her hand, like a parent preparing to lead a child across a busy road.

It’s more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as “making love.” They haven’t just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act.

We call things a turn-on but what we might really be alluding to is delight at finally having been allowed to reveal our secret selves—and at discovering that, far from being horrified by who we are, our lovers have opted to respond with only encouragement and approval.

A degree of shame and a habit of secrecy surrounding sex began for Rabih when he was twelve. Before that there were, of course, a few minor lies told and transgressions committed: he stole some coins from his father’s wallet; he merely pretended to like his aunt Ottilie; and one afternoon in her stuffy, cramped apartment by the Corniche, he copied a whole section of his algebra homework from his brilliant classmate Michel. But none of those infractions caused him to feel any primal self-disgust.

For his mother, he had always been the sweet, thoughtful child she called by the diminutive nickname “Maus.” Maus liked to cuddle with her under the large cashmere blanket in the living room and to have his hair stroked away from his smooth forehead. Then one term, all of a sudden, the only thing Maus could think about was a group of girls a couple of years above him at school, five or six feet tall, articulate Spaniards who walked around at break time in a conspiratorial gang and giggled together with a cruel, confident, and enticing air. On weekends he would slip into the little blue bathroom at home every few hours and visualize scenes that he’d will himself to forget again the moment he was finished. A chasm opened up between who he had to be for his family and who he knew he was inside. The disjuncture was perhaps most painful in relation to his mother. It didn’t help that the onset of puberty coincided for him almost exactly with the diagnosis of her cancer. Deep in his unconscious, in some dark recess immune to logic, he nursed the impression that his discovery of sex might have helped to kill her.

Things weren’t completely straightforward for Kirsten at that age, either. For her, too, there were oppressive ideas at play about what it meant to be a good person. At fourteen she liked walking the dog, volunteering at the old people’s home, doing extra geography homework about rivers—but also, alone in her bedroom, lying on the floor with her skirt hiked up, watching herself in the mirror and imagining that she was putting on a show for an older boy at school. Much like Rabih, she wanted certain things which didn’t seem to fit in with the dominant, socially prescribed notions of normality.

These past histories of self-division are part of what makes the beginning of their relationship so satisfying. There is no more need for subterfuge or furtiveness between them. Although they have both had a number of partners in the past, they find each other exceptionally open-minded and reassuring. Kirsten’s bedroom becomes the headquarters for nightly explorations during which they are at last able to disclose, without fear of being judged, the many unusual and improbable things that their sexuality compels them to crave.

The particulars of what arouses us may sound odd and illogical, but—seen from close up—they carry echoes of qualities we long for in other, purportedly saner areas of existence: understanding, sympathy, trust, unity, generosity, and kindness. Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and understanding.

It’s three weeks now since their first time. Rabih runs his fingers roughly through Kirsten’s hair. She indicates, by a movement of her head and a little sigh, that she would like rather more of that—and harder, too, please. She wants her lover to bunch her hair in his hand and pull it with some violence. For Rabih it’s a tricky development. He has been taught to treat women with great respect, to hold the two genders as equal, and to believe that neither person in a relationship should ever wield power over the other. But right now his partner appears to have scant interest in equality nor much concern for the ordinary rules of gender balance, either.

She’s no less keen on a range of problematic words. She invites him to address her as though he cared nothing for her, and they both find this exciting precisely because the very opposite is true. The epithets bastard, bitch, and cunt become shared tokens of their mutual loyalty and trust.

In bed, violence—normally such a danger—no longer has to be a risk; a degree of force can be expended safely and won’t make either of them unhappy. Rabih’s momentary fury can remain entirely within his control even as Kirsten draws from it an empowering sense of her own resilience.

As children they were both often physical with their friends. It could be fun to hit. Kirsten would whack her cousins hard with the sofa pillows, while Rabih would wrestle with his friends on the grass at the swimming club. In adulthood, however, violence of any kind has been prohibited: no grown person is ever supposed to use force against another. And yet, within the boundaries of the couple’s games, it can feel strangely pleasing to take a swipe, to hit a little and be hit; they can be rough and insistent; there can be a savage edge. Within the protective circle of their love, neither of them has to feel in any danger of being hurt or left bereft.

Kirsten is a woman of considerable steeliness and authority. She manages a department at work, she earns more than her lover, she is confident and a leader. She has known from a young age that she must be able to take care of herself.

However, in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her.

The idea has never appealed to her before, but only because she believed that most bossy people were not to be trusted; they didn’t seem, as Rabih does, truly kind and utterly nonviolent by nature (she playfully calls him “Sultan Khan”). She’s craved independence in part by default, because there have been no Ottoman potentates around who were nice enough to deserve her weaker self.

For his part, Rabih has all his adult life had to keep his bossiness sharply in check, and yet, in his deeper self, he’s aware of having a sterner side to his nature. He is sometimes sure he knows what’s best for other people and what they rightly have coming to them. In the real world he may be a powerless minor associate in a provincial urban-design firm, with strong inhibitions around expressing what he really thinks; but in bed with Kirsten he can feel the appeal of casting aside his customary reserve and enforcing absolute obedience, just as Suleiman the Magnificent might have done in his harem in the marble and jade palace on the shores of the Bosphorus.

The games of submission and domination, the rule-breaking scenarios, the fetishistic interest in particular words or parts of the body—all offer opportunities to investigate wishes that are far from being simply peculiar, pointless, or slightly demented. They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defenses and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance—which are the real psychologically rooted reasons why games are, in the end, so exciting.

They fly to Amsterdam for a weekend and, midway there, over the North Sea, elope to the toilet. They’ve discovered an enthusiasm for having a go at it in semipublic places, which seems to bring into sudden, risky, but electrifying alignment both their sexual sides and the more formal public personae they normally have to present. They feel as though they are challenging responsibility, anonymity, and restraint with their uninhibited and heated moments. Their pleasure becomes somehow the more intense for the presence of 240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.

It’s cramped in the bathroom, but Kirsten manages to unzip Rabih and take him into her mouth. She has mostly resisted doing this with other men in the past, but with him the act has become a constant and compelling extension of her love. To receive the apparently dirtiest, most private, guiltiest part of her lover into the most public, most respectable part of herself is symbolically to free them both from the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good—in the process, as they fly through the glacial lower atmosphere towards Scheveningen at 400 kilometers an hour, returning unity to their previously divided and shamed selves.