The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

parts of me that I need to have understood. I hope you’ll like the attached photo
of me in my favorite Oxfords and socks. It’s the real me, the one I’m so thrilled
to know you saw and may see again before too long.”
William tugs at his jacket. There’s dismay in his voice: the boat he’s been
obsessing about all month costs far more than he anticipated. Rabih feels himself
go pale. The self-portrait shows her standing in a bathroom, facing a full-length
mirror with her head angled to one side, wearing nothing but lace-up shoes and a
pair of knee-high yellow and black stockings. He offers to buy William a toy
aircraft carrier.
The message stays unanswered for the rest of the weekend. He has no time or
opportunity to come back to it until the Monday night, when Kirsten is out at her
book club.

---

When he opens his e-mail app to reply, he sees that Lauren has got there first:
“I know your situation is difficult, and I’d never want to do anything to
jeopardize it—but I was just feeling so vulnerable and silly that night. I don’t
usually send naked pictures of myself to men I hardly know. I was a little hurt by
your nonresponse. Forgive me for saying that; I know I’ve got no right. I just
keep thinking of your kind, sweet face. You’re a good man, Rabih—don’t let
anyone ever tell you otherwise. I like you more than I should. I want you inside
me now.”
For the sweet-faced man, things are feeling ever more tricky.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Rabih becomes increasingly aware of his wife’s
goodness. He notices the trouble she takes with nearly everything she does.
Every night she spends hours helping the children with their homework; she
remembers their spelling tests, rehearses lines for school plays with them, and
sews patches onto their trousers. She’s sponsoring an orphan with a lip
deformation in Malawi. Rabih develops an ulcer on the inside of his cheek, and
—without being asked—his wife buys a healing gel and drops it off for him at
work. She is doing a fine job of appearing to be a great deal nicer than he is,
which he is both extremely grateful for and, on another level, utterly furious
about.
Her generosity seems to show up the extent of his inadequacy, and grows less
tolerable by the day. His behavior declines. He snaps at her in front of the
children. He drags his heels about taking out the trash and changing the sheets.
He wishes she would be a little bit awful back to him, in order that her
assessment of him might appear better aligned with his own sense of self-worth.
Late one evening, after they’ve gone to bed and while Kirsten is relaying
something about the car’s annual service, his discomfort reaches a pitch.
“Oh, and I had the wheels realigned; apparently you need to do that every six
months or so,” she says, not even glancing up from her reading.
“Kirsten, why would you ever bother with that?”
“Well, it might matter. It can be dangerous not to do it, the mechanic said.”
“You’re frightening, you know.”
“Frightening?”
“The way you’re so . . . so 
organized
, such a 
planner
, so goddamned
reasonable about everything.”
“Reasonable?”
“Everything around here is deeply sensible, rational, worked out, policed—as
if there were a timetable all laid out from now till the moment we die.”
“I don’t understand,” Kirsten says. Her expression is one of pure puzzlement.
“Policed? I went to have the car fixed, and at once I’m a villain in some anti-

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bourgeois narrative?”
“Yes, you’re right. You’re always right. I just wonder why you’re such a
genius at making me feel I’m the mad, horrible one. All I can say is, everything
is very well ordered around here.”
“I thought you liked order.”
“I thought so, too.”
“
Thought
, past tense?”
“It can start to seem dead. Boring, even.” He can’t help himself. He’s
impelled to say the very worst things, to try to smash the relationship to see if
it’s real and worth trusting.
“You’re not putting this very nicely at all. And I don’t think anything around
here is boring. I wish it were.”
“It is. 
I’ve
become boring. And you’ve become boring, too, in case you hadn’t
noticed.”
Kirsten stares straight ahead of her, her eyes wider than usual. She rises from
the bed with silent dignity, her finger still in the book she has been reading, and
walks out of the room. He hears her go down the stairs and then shut the living
room door behind her.
“Why do you have to have such a talent for making me feel so damned guilty
about everything I do?” he calls after her. “Saint 
fucking
Kirsten. . . .” And he
stamps his foot on the floor with sufficient force briefly to wake up his daughter
in the room below.
Twenty minutes of rumination later, he follows Kirsten downstairs. She is
sitting in the armchair, by the lamp, with a blanket around her shoulders. She
doesn’t look up when he enters. He sits down on the sofa and puts his head in his
hands. Next door in the kitchen, the fridge lets off an audible shiver as its
thermostat kicks the motor on.
“You think it’s funny for me, all this, do you?” she says eventually, still
without looking at him. “Throwing the best parts of my career away in order to
manage two constantly exhausting, maddening, beautiful children and an oh-so-
interesting on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown husband? Do you think this is
what I dreamt of when I was fifteen and read Germaine Greer’s bloody