The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is
familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very
feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just
tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came

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entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an
adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared
of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier
wishes.
How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain
candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in
the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and
reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We
chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more
harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar
in its patterns of frustration.
He asks her to marry him in order to break the all-consuming grip that the
thought of relationships has for too long had on his psyche. He is exhausted by
seventeen years’ worth of melodrama and excitements that have led nowhere. He
is thirty-two and restless for other challenges. It’s neither cynical nor callous of
Rabih to feel immense love for Kirsten and yet at the same time to hope that
marriage may conclusively end love’s mostly painful dominion over his life.
As for Kirsten, suffice to say (for we will be traveling mostly in his mind) that
we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal, to someone who has often and painfully
doubted many things, not least herself, of a proposal from an ostensibly kind and
interesting person who seems unequivocally and emphatically convinced that
she is right for him.
They are married by an official, in a salmon-pink room at the Inverness
registry office on a rainy morning in November, in the presence of her mother,
his father and stepmother, and eight of their friends. They read out a set of vows
supplied by the government of Scotland, promising that they will love and care
for each other, that they will be patient and show compassion, that they will trust
and forgive, and that they will remain best friends and loyal companions until
death.
Uninclined to sound didactic (or perhaps simply at a loss as to how to be so),
the government offers no further suggestions of how to concretize these vows—
although it does present the couple with some information on the tax discounts
available to those adding insulation to their first homes.
After the ceremony, the members of the wedding party repair to a nearby
restaurant for lunch, and by late that same evening the new husband and wife are
ensconced in a small hotel near Saint-Germain, in Paris.
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who

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don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a
future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

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Ever After

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Silly Things
In the City of Love, the Scottish wife and her Middle Eastern husband visit the
dead at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. They search in vain for the bones of Jean
de Brunhoff and end up sharing a 
croque-monsieur
on top of Édith Piaf. Back in
their room, they pull off what Kirsten calls the “spermy bedcover,” spread a
towel out, and—on paper plates and with the help of plastic forks—eat a dressed
lobster from Brittany which called to them from the window of a deli in the rue
du Cherche-Midi.
Opposite their hotel, a chichi children’s boutique sells overpriced cardigans
and dungarees. While Rabih is soaking in the bath one afternoon, Kirsten pops in
and returns with Dobbie, a small furry monster with one horn and three
deliberately ill-matched eyes who, in six years’ time, will become their
daughter’s favorite possession.
On their return to Scotland, they start to look for a flat. Rabih has married a
rich woman, he jokes, which is true only in comparison with his own financial
status. She owns a little place already, has been working for four years longer
than he has and wasn’t unemployed for eight months along the way. He has
money enough to pay for the equivalent of a broom cupboard, she remarks
(kindly). They find somewhere they like on the first floor of a building on
Merchiston Avenue. The seller is a frail, elderly widow who lost her husband a
year ago and whose two sons now live in Canada. She isn’t so well herself.
Photos of the family when the boys were young line a bank of dark-brown
shelves which Rabih promptly begins sizing up for a TV. He’ll strip off the
wallpaper, too, and repaint the vivid orange kitchen cabinets in a more dignified
color.
“You two remind me a little of how Ernie and I were in our day,” says the old
lady, and Kirsten answers, “Bless,” and briefly puts an arm around her. The
seller used to be a magistrate; now she has an inoperable tumor growing inside
her spine and is moving to sheltered accommodation on the other side of town.
They settle on a decent price; the seller isn’t pushing the young couple as hard as
she might do. On the day they sign the contract, while Kirsten ventures into the
bedroom to take measurements, the lady holds Rabih back for an instant with a
remarkably strong yet boney hand. “Be kind to her, won’t you,” she says, “even
if you sometimes think she’s in the wrong.” Half a year later they learn the seller

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passed away.
They’ve reached the point where, by rights, their story—always slight—
should draw to a close. The Romantic challenge is behind them. Life will from
now on assume a steady, repetitive rhythm, to the extent that they will often find
it hard to locate a specific event in time, so similar will the years appear in their
outward forms. But their story is far from over: it is just a question of henceforth
having to stand for longer in the stream and use a smaller-meshed sieve to catch
the grains of interest.
One Saturday morning, a few weeks after moving into the new flat, Rabih and
Kirsten drive to the big Ikea on the outskirts of town to buy some glasses. The
selection stretches over two aisles and a multitude of styles. The previous
weekend, in a new shop off Queen Street, they swiftly found a lamp they both
loved, with a wooden base and a porcelain shade. This should be easy.
Not long after entering the cavernous homeware department, Kirsten decides
that they should get a set from the Fabulös line—little tumblers which taper at
the base and have two blobs of swirling blue and purple across the sides—and
then head right home. One of the qualities her husband most admires in her is
her decisiveness. But for Rabih it swiftly becomes evident that the larger,
unadorned, and straight-sided glasses from the Godis line are the only ones that
would really work with the kitchen table.
Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no
need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong
together, there is simply—at long last—a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both