The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

To be mature is, we’re told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for
babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone. It’s what wise
people have taught us since our earliest days: Let Jack play with your fire
engine; it won’t stop being yours if he has a turn. Stop throwing yourself on the
floor and thumping your small clenched fists on the carpet in rage. Your little
sister may be Daddy’s darling. But you’re Daddy’s darling, too. Love isn’t like a
cake: if you give love to one person, it doesn’t mean there is less for anyone else.
Love just keeps growing every time there’s a new baby in the family.
Later on, the argument makes even more sense around sex. Why would you
think ill of a partner if they left you for an hour to go and rub a limited area of
their body against that of a stranger? After all, you wouldn’t get enraged if they
played chess with someone you didn’t know or joined a meditation group where
they talked intimately of their lives by candlelight, would you?
Rabih can’t stop asking certain questions: Where was Kirsten last Thursday

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evening when he called her and got no answer? Whom is she trying to impress
with her new black shoes? Why, when he types “Ben McGuire” into the search
box on her laptop (which he has fired up in secret in the bathroom), does he get
only boring work-related e-mails between the two of them? How and where else
are they communicating? Have they set up hidden e-mail accounts? Is it Skype?
Or some new encrypted service? And the most important and stupidest question
of all: What’s he like in bed?
The stupidity of jealousy makes it a tempting target for those in a moralizing
mood. They should spare their breath. However unedifying and plain silly
attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we
simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has
touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no
sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal
thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But
we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom
will simply not be an option.
He tries consciously to slow down his breathing. It seems as if he might be
angry, but at heart he’s merely terrified. He tries a technique he once heard
described in a magazine: “Let’s imagine what Kirsten, if she 
did
have a few
experiences with Ben, might have meant by them. What did it mean when I was
with Lauren? Did 
I
want to abandon Kirsten? Emphatically no. So in all
likelihood, when she was with Ben, she didn’t want to run off, either. She was
probably just feeling ignored and vulnerable and wanted an affirmation of her
sexuality—things she’s already told me she needs and that I need, too. Whatever
she may have done was probably no worse than what happened in Berlin, which
itself wasn’t really so bad. To forgive her would be to come to terms with some
of the very same impulses I myself have had, and to see that they were no more
the enemies of our marriage and our love for having been hers rather than mine.”
It sounds very logical and high-minded. Yet it makes no sliver of difference.
He is starting to learn about “being good” but not in the normal, secondhand
kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a
lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a
slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through
having a chance to explore the long-term consequences of bad behavior from
within.
So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others,

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sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up
poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal
people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative episodes, in
which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of
collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a
bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative.

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Irreconcilable Desires
He longs, firstly, for safety. Sunday nights in winter often feel particularly cozy
somehow, with the four of them seated around the table eating Kirsten’s pasta,
William giggling, Esther singing. It’s dark outside. Rabih has his favorite
German pumpernickel bread. Afterwards there’s a game of Monopoly, a pillow
fight, then a bath, a story, and bedtime for the children. Kirsten and Rabih climb
into bed, too, to watch a film; they hold hands under the duvet, just as they did at
the start, though now the rest is down to an almost embarrassed peck on the lips
as the end credits roll, and both are asleep ten minutes later, secure and
cocooned.
But he yearns, also, for adventure. Six thirty on those rare, perfect summer
evenings in Edinburgh, when the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried foods, hot
tarmac, and sex. The pavements are crowded with people in cotton print dresses
and loose-fitting jeans. Everyone sensible is heading home, but for those sticking
around, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief. A young person in a
tight top—perhaps a student or a tourist—passes by and confides the briefest of
conspirational smiles, and in an instant everything seems within reach. In the
coming hours, people will enter bars and discos, shout to make themselves heard
over the throb of the music, and—buoyed by alcohol and adrenaline—end up
entwined with strangers in the shadows. Rabih is expected back at the house to
begin the children’s bath time in fifteen minutes.
Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures
driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing
directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the
divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be
found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and
chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and
passion with routine.
Lauren texts Rabih to ask if they might speak online sometime. She would like
to hear and ideally see him again: words just aren’t enough.
There’s a wait of ten days before Kirsten has something planned that will take
her out of the house at night. The children keep him busy until it’s nearly time,

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and then, due to a weak Wi-Fi signal, he’s confined to the kitchen for the
duration of the call. He has already checked to make sure, repeatedly, that
neither Esther nor William is in need of a glass of water, but he turns to look at
the door every few minutes anyway, just in case.
He’s never used FaceTime before, and it takes a while for him to get it set up.
Two women are now in different ways relying on him. A few minutes and three
passwords later, Lauren is suddenly there, as if she were waiting inside the
computer all along.
“I miss you,” she says right away. It’s a sunny morning in Southern
California.
She’s sitting in her kitchen—living room, wearing a casual blue striped top.
She’s just washed her hair. Her eyes are playful and alive.
“I made coffee; do you want some?” she asks.
“Sure, and some toast.”
“You like it with butter, I seem to remember? Coming right up.”
The screen flickers for an instant. This is how love affairs will be conducted
when we’ve colonized Mars, he thinks.
Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may
truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the
humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by
their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind
the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current