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Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to
our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we
never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of
comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We
didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed
for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the
explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.
That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may
instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing
to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a
true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to
explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.
When he can’t bear it any longer, he tiptoes into their bedroom and sits on her
side of the bed. He is planning to wake her up but thinks better of it when he
sees her intelligent, kind face at rest. Her mouth is slightly open and he can hear
the faintest sound of her breathing; the fine hairs on her arm are visible in the
light from the street.
It’s cool but sunny the next morning. Kirsten gets up before Rabih and
prepares two boiled eggs, one for each of them, along with a basket of neatly cut
soldiers. She looks down at the willow tree in the garden and feels grateful for
the dependable, modest, everyday things. When Rabih enters the kitchen,
sheepish and disheveled, they start off in silence, then end up by smiling at each
other. At lunchtime he sends her an e-mail: “I’m a bit mad, forgive me.”
Although she’s waiting to go into a council meeting, she replies swiftly: “It
would be v. boring if you weren’t. And lonely.” The sulk is not mentioned again.
We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made
the special target of a sulker’s fury. We would recognize the touching paradox.
The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real
message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right
now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing
me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to
regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea
that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is
also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in
order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child
within.
Sex and Censorship
They’re in a café they sometimes go to on a Saturday, ordering scrambled eggs,
catching up on the week and reading the papers. Today Kirsten is telling Rabih
about the dilemma faced by her friend Shona, whose boyfriend, Alasdair, has
abruptly been relocated to Singapore for work. Should she follow him there,
Shona wonders—they’ve been together two years—or stay in the dental surgery
in Inverness, where she’s only just been promoted? It’s a pretty weighty decision
by any measure. But Kirsten’s exegesis is proceeding rather slowly and not
always linearly, so Rabih also keeps an eye on the events covered by the
Daily
Record.
Some peculiar and macabre situations have been unfolding recently in
venues with highly lyrical place names: a history teacher has beheaded his wife
with an ancient sword in a house outside Lochgelly, while in Auchtermuchty
police are searching for a fifty-four-year-old man who fathered a child with his
sixteen-year-old daughter.
“Mr. Khan, if you don’t stop thinking that everything I tell you is merely
background noise which you can shut out at will, I promise you that what
happened to that poor woman in Lochgelly will come to seem to you like a day
at Disneyland,” says Kirsten, who then jabs him hard in the ribs with a (blunt)
knife.
But it isn’t just the case of incest in Fife and Shona’s predicament that are
preoccupying Rabih. There’s a third claim on his attention as well. Angelo and
Maria have owned their café for thirty years. Angelo’s father, originally from
Sicily, was a detainee in the Orkney Islands during World War II. The couple
have a twenty-one-year-old daughter, Antonella, who has lately graduated with
distinction from her course in catering and hospitality at North East Scotland
College in Aberdeen. Until something more substantial turns up, she’s helping
out in the café, rushing back and forth between the kitchen and the seating area,
carrying as many as four orders at a time, issuing constant warnings that the
plates are very hot as she maneuvers gracefully among the tables. She’s tall,
strong, good-natured—and extremely beautiful. She chats easily with the patrons
about the weather and, with some of the regulars who have known her since she
was a girl, about the newest developments in her life. She’s single right now, she
informs a couple of animated elderly ladies at the table opposite, adding that she
genuinely doesn’t mind—and saying no, she’d never try one of those Internet
dating things; that’s not her style. She is wearing a surprisingly large crucifix on
a chain around her neck.
As Rabih watches her, and without quite meaning for it to happen, one part of
his mind leaves behind its normal responsibilities and starts to conjure a
sequence of wayward images: the narrow stairs behind the espresso machine
which lead up to the flat above; Antonella’s small room, cluttered with still-
unpacked boxes from college; a shaft of morning light catching her jet-black hair
and throwing her pale skin into relief; her clothes discarded in a pile by the chair
and Antonella herself lying on the bed with her long, muscular legs spread wide
open, wholly naked apart from the crucifix.
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