The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Winter Clothes.
He marvels at the mind’s capacity not to let
slip a single outward indication of the dynamite it contains. All the same, he is
tempted to check in the bathroom mirror to make sure that nothing is leaking out
of him.
He understands—for the idea has been drummed into him from an early age
by society—that what he has done is wrong. Very wrong indeed. He is, in the
language of the tabloids, a scumbag, a love rat, a cheat, and a traitor.
Nevertheless, he also registers that the exact nature of the ill he has committed is
not in fact entirely clear to him. He does feel some concern, but for cautionary,
secondary reasons—that is, because he wants tomorrow to go well, and the days
and years thereafter. In his depths, however, he can’t find it in himself to believe
that what has happened in the Berlin hotel room is truly bad in and of itself. Is
this perhaps, he wonders, just the eternal excuse of the love rat?
Through the lens of Romanticism there can be, quite simply, no greater betrayal.
Even for those willing to countenance almost every other kind of behavior,
adultery remains the one seismic transgression, appalling in its violation of a
series of the most sacred assumptions of love.
The first of these is that one person can’t possibly claim to love another—and
by implication in any way value their life together—and then slip off and have
sex with someone else. If such a disaster were to happen, it could only be that
there had been no love to begin with.
Kirsten has fallen asleep. He brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. He
recalls how differently responsive were Lauren’s ears and her belly, even
through her dress. By the time they were at the bar, it looked like something was
going to happen between them: it became a certainty the moment she asked if he
came to these conferences often, and he replied that this already felt like a very
unusual one, and she smiled warmly. Her directness was the centerpiece of her
enchantment. “This is nice,” she turned around and said when they were in bed,
as though trying out some unfamiliar dish in a restaurant. But the mind has many
chambers, and a dazzling capacity for building firewalls. In another zone,
another galaxy entirely, there remains untouched the love he has for Kirsten’s
way of telling rude jokes at parties, the surprising trove of poems she keeps in
her head (Coleridge and Burns), her habit of pairing black skirts and tights with

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trainers, her skill at unblocking a sink, and her knowledge of what might be
going on under a car bonnet (the sorts of things which women let down by their
fathers at a young age seem to be particularly good at). There’s no one on earth
he’d rather have dinner with than his wife, who is also his best friend. Which
hasn’t, however, in any way prevented him from possibly ruining her life.
A second assumption: adultery isn’t just any old kind of disloyalty. A
transgression involving nakedness is of a fundamentally different order, says the
world; it’s a betrayal of a cataclysmic and incomparable sort. Screwing around
is not somewhat bad; it’s the very worst thing one person could do to another
whom he or she claims to love.
This wasn’t—clearly—exactly what Kirsten McLelland signed up to, many
years ago, in that salmon-pink registry office in Inverness. Then again, there
have been a number of things over the course of their marriage that Rabih Khan
didn’t anticipate, either, including his wife’s strong objection to his wish to
return to architecture, primarily because she didn’t want their income to be
curtailed for even a few months; her cutting him off from many of his friends
because she found them “boring”; her tendency to make jokes at his expense in
company; the blame he has to shoulder when things go wrong at her work; and
the exhausting anxiety she suffers over every aspect of their children’s
education. . . . These are the stories he has told himself, lines of reasoning that
are simpler than wondering if he may have held 
himself
back in his career or if
his friends really might not be quite as entertaining as they seemed when he was
twenty-two.
Still, Rabih questions whether that half an hour should so conclusively shift
the moral calculation against him, if it should on its own be what commits him to
fiery damnation. While they may lack the same power to stir up ready
indignation, there are betrayals of an equally damaging (if less visible) sort in
her habits of not listening, of failing to forgive, and of casting unfair blame, and
in her casual belittlement and her stretches of indifference. He doesn’t want to
add up the ledger, but he isn’t sure that—on the basis of this single, admittedly
deeply wounding act—he ought so easily and definitively to qualify as the
villain of the entire piece.