The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Loch Davan.
Every week he goes out on the high seas, often venturing as far
as Iceland or the tip of Greenland. He has a brutish, arrogant manner, a sharp
jawline and angry, impatient eyes. The children won’t be back from their
friends’ for another hour at least, but Kirsten gets up and shuts the bedroom door
tightly nonetheless before taking off her trousers and lying back on the bed.
She’s on the 
Loch Davan
now, assigned a narrow cabin next to the bridge.
There’s a fierce wind rocking the boat like a toy, but above the roar she can just
make out a knocking at the cabin door. It’s Clyde; there must be some
emergency on the bridge. But it turns out to be a different matter. He rips off her
oilskins and takes her against the cabin wall without their exchanging a word.
The bristles of his beard burn her skin. He is, crucially, barely literate, extremely
coarse, almost preverbal, and as utterly worthless to her as she is to him.

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Thinking about the sex feels crude, urgent, meaningless—and very much more
exciting than making love in the evening to someone she cares about deeply.
The motif of a beloved taking second place to a random stranger in a
masturbatory fantasy has no logical part in Romantic ideology. But in practice it
is precisely the dispassionate separation of love and sex that may be needed to
correct and relieve the burdens of intimacy. Using a stranger bypasses
resentments, emotional vulnerability, and any obligation to worry about
another’s needs. We can be just as peculiar and selfish as we like, without fear
of judgment or consequence. All emotion is kept wonderfully at bay: there is not
the slightest wish to be understood, and therefore no risk, either, of being
misinterpreted and, consequently, of growing bitter or frustrated. We can, at
last, have desire without needing to bring the rest of our exhaustingly
encumbered lives into the bed with us.
Kirsten isn’t alone in finding it safer to partition off some bits of her sexuality
from the rest of her life.
Tonight Rabih checks that his wife is asleep, whispers her name, and hopes
she won’t answer. Then, when he is sure it is safe, he tiptoes out, thinking he
might, after all, make a good murderer, and heads down the stairs, past the
childrens’ rooms (he can see his son curled up with Geoffrey, his favorite bear)
and to a little annex off the kitchen, where he navigates to his favorite chat room.
It is almost midnight.
Here, too, things are so much easier than with his spouse. There’s no need to
wonder whether another person is in the mood; you just click on their name and,
given the part of the Web they’re in, assume they will be game.
He also doesn’t have to worry, in this milieu, about being normal. This isn’t
the version of himself which has to do the school run tomorrow, or give a talk at
work, or later host a dinner party with a few lawyers and a kindergarten teacher
and his wife.
He doesn’t have to be kind to or care about others. He doesn’t even have to
belong to his own gender. He can try out what it’s like to be a shy and
surprisingly convincing lesbian from Glasgow taking her first tentative steps
towards a sexual awakening.
And then, the moment he’s done, he can shut off the machine and return to
being the person that so many other people—his children, his spouse and his
colleagues—are relying on him to be.
From one perspective, it can seem pathetic to have to concoct fantasies rather

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than to try to build a life in which daydreams can reliably become realities. But