The Course of Love (7 page)

“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.

For a good while, everyone else feels superfluous to them. They don't want to see any of the friends on whom they each depended in the long years before their meeting. But then guilt and a renewed curiosity gradually get the better of them. In practice this means seeing more of Kirsten's friends, as Rabih's are scattered around the world. Kirsten's Aberdeen University gang congregate in the Bow Bar on Fridays. It's way across town from their flat but it offers a great range of whiskies and craft beers—although, on the night Kirsten persuades Rabih to visit, he settles for a sparkling water. It's not because of his religion specifically, he has to explain (five times); he's just not really in the mood for a drink.

“ ‘Husband and wife'! Wow!” says Catherine, a trace of mockery in her voice. She is against marriage and responds best to people who confirm her bias. Of course, the phrase
husband and wife
still sounds a bit odd to Rabih and Kirsten as well. They likewise often place the titles in ironic quotation marks to mitigate their weight and incongruity, for they don't feel anything like the sort of people
they tend to associate with the words, which evoke characters far older, more established, and more miserable than they take themselves to be. “Mrs. Khan is here!” Kirsten likes to call out when she comes home, playing with a concept that remains only distantly believable to either of them.

“So, Rabih, where do you work?” asks Murray, who is gruff, bearded, in the oil industry, and a onetime admirer of Kirsten's at university.

“At an urban-design firm,” Rabih tells him, and feels distinctly like a girl, as he does sometimes in the presence of more solid males. “We do civic spaces and spatial zoning.”

“Hang on, mate,” says Murray, “you've lost me already.”

“He's an architect,” Kirsten clarifies. “He's done houses and offices as well. And hopefully he'll do more when the economy picks up again.”

“I see: Sitting out the recession in these dark parts of the kingdom, are we, before bursting back into the limelight to put up the next Great Pyramid of Giza?”

Murray chortles a bit too loudly at his own unfunny jibe, but it's not this that bothers Rabih; rather, it's the way Kirsten joins in, cradling in her hand what remains of her pint, inclining her head towards her old college buddy and laughing heartily along with him, as though something quite amusing really has been said.

Rabih stays quiet on the way home, then claims he's tired, answers with the famous “Nothing” when asked what's wrong, and—once they are inside the flat, which still smells of fresh paint—heads into the den with the sofa bed in it and slams the door shut behind him.

“Oh, come on!” she says, raising her voice to be heard.
“At least tell me what's going on.”

To which he replies, “Fuck you, leave me alone.” Which is sometimes how fear can sound.

Kirsten brews herself some tea, then goes to the bedroom, insisting to herself—not entirely truthfully—that she has no idea what her new husband (who truly did look an odd sight in the Bow Bar) can possibly be so upset about.

At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.

Eventually she gets out of bed and knocks at the door of the den. Her mother always said one should never go to bed on an argument. She is still telling herself that she does not understand what's up. “Darling, you're behaving as if you were two years old. I'm on your side, remember? At least explain what's wrong.”

And inside the narrow room crammed with books about architecture, the oversized toddler turns over on the sofa bed and can think of nothing beyond the fact that he will not relent—that and, irrelevantly, how strange seem the words stamped in silver foil along the spine of a book on a nearby shelf:
MIES VAN DER ROHE.

It's an unusual situation for him to be in. He always tried very hard, in past relationships, to be the one who cared a little less, but Kirsten's buoyancy and steeliness have cast him in the opposite role.
It's his turn now to lie awake and fret. Why did all her friends hate him? What does she see in them? Why didn't she step in to help and defend him?

Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn't have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.

That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don't have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.

When he can't bear it any longer, he tiptoes into their bedroom and sits on her side of the bed. He is planning to wake her up but thinks better of it when he sees her intelligent, kind face at rest. Her mouth is slightly open and he can hear the faintest sound of her breathing; the fine hairs on her arm are visible in the light from the street.

It's cool but sunny the next morning. Kirsten gets up before Rabih and prepares two boiled eggs, one for each of them, along with a basket of neatly cut soldiers. She looks down at the willow tree in the garden and feels grateful for the dependable, modest, everyday things. When Rabih enters the kitchen, sheepish and disheveled, they start off in silence, then end up by smiling at each other. At lunchtime he sends her an e-mail: “I'm
a bit mad, forgive me.” Although she's waiting to go into a council meeting, she replies swiftly: “It would be v. boring if you weren't. And lonely.” The sulk is not mentioned again.

We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker's fury. We would recognize the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

They're in a café they sometimes go to on a Saturday, ordering scrambled eggs, catching up on the week and reading the papers. Today Kirsten is telling Rabih about the dilemma faced by her friend Shona, whose boyfriend, Alasdair, has abruptly been relocated to Singapore for work. Should she follow him there, Shona wonders—they've been together two years—or stay in the dental surgery in Inverness, where she's only just been promoted? It's a pretty weighty decision by any measure. But Kirsten's exegesis is proceeding rather slowly and not always linearly, so Rabih also keeps an eye on the events covered by the
Daily Record.
Some peculiar and macabre situations have been unfolding recently in venues with highly lyrical place names: a history teacher has beheaded his wife with an ancient sword in a house outside Lochgelly, while in Auchtermuchty police are searching for a fifty-four-year-old man who fathered a child with his sixteen-year-old daughter.

“Mr. Khan, if you don't stop thinking that everything I tell you is merely background noise which you can shut out at will, I promise
you that what happened to that poor woman in Lochgelly will come to seem to you like a day at Disneyland,” says Kirsten, who then jabs him hard in the ribs with a (blunt) knife.