The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here,
too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key—a capacity not to be thrown off
course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge
certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which
others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know
that everything can eventually be set back in its place.
The blame is not on Rabih’s side alone. In having on the tip of her tongue such
words as 
weird
and 
perverted
, Kirsten does little to foster an atmosphere ripe for
revelations. Then again, she uses these words not out of nastiness or contempt
but rather out of fear that, by tacitly endorsing Rabih’s fantasies, she may end up
giving them greater license and so undermine their love.
She might instead, in another mood, as a different person, have said
something like the following in response to her husband’s scenario: “The nature
of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar, and frankly not a little
disgusting to me; but I’m interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because
more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are.
The person thinking of Antonella just now is the same person I married in
Inverness and the same little boy who stares out from that picture on top of our
chest of drawers. It’s him I love and refuse to think badly of, however much his
thoughts may sometimes disturb me. You’re my best friend, and I want to know
and come to terms with your mind in all its weird byways. I will never be able to
do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I’d like to think we can be the
sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative
is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.”
Or conversely, she might have revealed the vulnerability that has lain all the
while behind her annoyed demeanor: “I wish I could be everything to you. I

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wish you didn’t have such needs outside of me. Of course, I don’t really think
your fantasies about Antonella are repulsive; I just wish there didn’t have to be
—always—that imagined someone else. I know it’s madness, but what I want
most is to be able to satisfy you all by myself.”
In the event, Rabih didn’t speak, and Kirsten didn’t listen. Instead they went
to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of
their relationship, however, a warning light had come on.
It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or
sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign
that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination,
whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean
that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to
conform to our hopes—hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more.
Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and, unconsciously, to
blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the
courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her
husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and
chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out
more.
As for the raven-haired subject of Rabih’s fantasy, her name doesn’t come up
in conversation again for a long while, until one day Kirsten returns with some
news after having a coffee at the Brioschi Café. Antonella has moved up north to
work as the head receptionist at a small luxury hotel in Argyll, on the western
coast, and has fallen deeply in love with one of the housekeepers there, a young
Dutch woman to whom—much to her parents’ initial surprise but also eventual
delight—she plans to get married in a few months’ time in a big ceremony in the
town of Apeldoorn, information that Rabih receives with an almost convincing
show of complete indifference. He has chosen love over libido.

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Transference
Two years into their marriage, Rabih’s job remains precarious, vulnerable to an
unsteady workflow and clients’ sudden changes of mind. So he feels especially
pleased when, at the start of January, the firm wins a large and long-term
contract across the border in England, in South Shields, a struggling town two
and a half hours southeast of Edinburgh by train. The task is to redevelop the
quayside and a derelict hodgepodge of industrial sheds into a park, a café, and a
museum to house a local maritime artifact, the 
Tyne
, the second-oldest lifeboat
in Britain. Ewen asks Rabih if he will head up the project—a distinct honor, yet
one which also means that for half a year he will have to spend three nights a
month away from Kirsten. The budget is tight, so he makes his base in South
Shields’s Premier Inn, a modestly priced establishment sandwiched between a
women’s prison and a goods yard. In the evenings he has supper by himself at
the hotel restaurant, Taybarns, where a side of mutton sweats under the lamps of
a carving station.
During his second visit there, the local officials prevaricate on assorted issues.
Everyone is too terrified to make big decisions and blames delays on a range of
incomprehensible regulations; it’s a miracle they have even managed to get this
far. There’s a vein in Rabih’s neck that throbs at such moments. Shortly after
nine, pacing the plastic carpet in his socks, he calls Kirsten from his maroon and
purple room. “Teckle,” he greets her. “Another day of mind-numbing meetings
and idiots from the council causing trouble for no good reason. I miss you so
much. I’d pay a lot for a hug from you right now.” There’s a pause—he feels as
if he could hear the miles that separate them—then she replies in a flat voice that
he has to get his name put on the car insurance before the first of February,
adding that the landlord also wants to speak to them about the drain, the one on
the garden side—at which point Rabih repeats, gently but firmly, that he misses
her and wishes they could be together. In Edinburgh, Kirsten is curled up at one
end—“his” end—of the sofa, wearing his jumper, with a bowl of tuna and a slice
of toast on her lap. She pauses again, but when she responds to Rabih, it is with a
curt and administrative-sounding “Yes.” It’s a pity he can’t see that she is
fighting back tears.
It isn’t the first such instance. Something similarly frosty happened the last
time he was here, and once when he was in Denmark for a conference. That time

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he accused her of being odd on the phone. Now he is simply hurt. He only made
a reasonable plea for warmth, and suddenly they seem to be in a stalemate. He
looks out at the prison windows opposite. Whenever he’s away, he feels as if she
were trying to put an even greater distance between them than that of land or
water. He wishes he could find a way to reach her and wonders what could have
caused her to become so remote and unavailable. Kirsten isn’t quite sure herself.
She is looking with watery eyes at the bark of an old weathered tree just beyond
the window, thinking with particular concentration about a file she’ll have to
remember to take to work tomorrow.
The structure looks something like this: an apparently ordinary situation or
remark elicits from one member of a couple a reaction that doesn’t seem quite
warranted, being unusually full of annoyance or anxiety, irritability or coldness,
panic or recrimination. The person on the receiving end is puzzled: after all, it
was just a simple request for a loving good-bye, a plate or two left unwashed in
the sink, a small joke at the other’s expense or a few minutes’ delay. Why, then,
the peculiar and somehow outsized response?
The behavior makes little sense when one tries to understand it according to
the current facts. It’s as if some aspect of the present scenario were drawing
energy from another source, as if it were unwittingly triggering a pattern of
behavior that the other person originally developed long ago in order to meet a