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In the West, we owe to Christianity the view that sex should only ever rightly
occur in the presence of love. The religion insists that two people who care for
each other must reserve their bodies, and their gaze, for each other alone. To
think sexually about strangers is to abandon the true spirit of love and to betray
God and one’s own humanity.
Such precepts, at once touching and forbidding, have not entirely evaporated
along with the decline of the faith that once supported them. Shorn of their
explicitly theistic rationale, they seem to have been absorbed into the ideology of
Romanticism, which accords a similarly prestigious place to the concept of
sexual fidelity within the idea of love. In the secular world, too, monogamy has
been declared a necessary and crowning expression of emotional commitment
and virtue. Our age has strikingly maintained the essential drift of an earlier
religious position: the belief that true love must entail wholehearted fidelity.
Rabih and Kirsten head home, walking slowly, hand in hand, occasionally
stopping to browse in a shop. It’s going to be a remarkably warm day, and the
sea looks turquoise, almost tropical. It’s Kirsten’s turn to go first in the shower,
and when they’re both done, they go back to bed feeling that, after a long and
hard week, they deserve to indulge themselves.
They love to make up stories during sex. One of them will kick off, then the
other will take it forward and pass it back for further elaboration. The scenarios
can get extreme. “It’s after school, and the classroom is empty,” Kirsten begins
one time. “You’ve asked me to stay behind so we can go over my essay. I’m shy
and blush easily, a legacy of my strict Catholic upbringing. . . .” Rabih adds
details: “I’m the geography teacher, specializing in glaciers. My hands are
shaking. I touch your left knee, hardly daring to believe that . . .”
So far, they have coauthored stories featuring a lost male mountaineer and a
resourceful female doctor, their friends Mike and Bel, and a pilot and her
reserved but curious passenger. There is nothing structurally unusual, therefore,
in Rabih’s impulse, this morning, to initiate a narrative involving a waitress, a
crucifix, and a leather strap.
Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an
alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be
inseparable. The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between
loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them. It proposes
that it can be entirely natural and even healthy for partners in a couple
occasionally to have sex with strangers for whom they have little feeling but to
whom they nonetheless feel strongly attracted. Sex doesn’t always have to be
bound up with love. It can sometimes, this philosophy holds, be a purely
physical, aerobic activity engaged in without substantive emotional meaning. It
is, so its adherents conclude, just as absurd to suppose that one should only ever
have sex with the person one loves as it would be to require that only those in
committed couples ever be permitted to play table tennis or go jogging together.
This remains, in the current age, the minority view by a very wide margin.
Rabih sets the scene: “So we’re in this little seaside town in Italy, maybe Rimini,
and we’ve had some ice cream, maybe pistachio, when you notice the waitress,
who is shy but really friendly in a natural way that’s at once maternal and
fascinatingly virginal.”
“You mean Antonella.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Rabih Khan, shut up!” Kirsten scoffs.
“Okay, then: Antonella. So we suggest to Antonella that after she’s finished
her shift, she might want to come back to our hotel for some grappa. She’s
flattered but a bit embarrassed. You see, she’s got a boyfriend, Marco, a
mechanic at the local garage, who’s very jealous but at the same time
remarkably incompetent sexually. There are certain things that she’s been
wanting to have a go at for ages but that he flat-out refuses to try. She can’t get
them out of her head, which is in part why she takes us up on our unusual offer.”
Kirsten is silent.
“Now we’re in the hotel, in the room, which has a big bed with an old-
fashioned brass headboard. Her skin is so soft. There’s a trace of moisture on the
down of her upper lip. You lick it off, and then your hand moves gently down
her body.” Rabih continues: “She’s still wearing her apron, which you help her
out of. You find her sweet, but you also want to use her in a rather mercenary
way. That’s where the strap comes in. You slide her bra up—it’s black, or no,
maybe grey—and lean over to take one of her breasts in your mouth. Her nipples
are hard.”
Still Kirsten says nothing.
“You reach down and slip your hand inside her particularly lacy Italian
panties,” he goes on. “Suddenly you feel you want to lick her between her legs,
so you get her up on all fours and begin to explore her from behind.”
By now the silence from Rabih’s usual storytelling partner has grown
oppressive.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine, it’s just . . . I don’t know . . . it feels weird for you to be thinking
about Antonella that way—a bit perverted, really. She’s such a lovely person;
I’ve known her since she was sitting her Highers, and now her parents are so
proud of the distinction she got. I don’t like the old chestnut of the man sitting
there, getting off on watching two women licking each other out. Sfouf, it feels,
frankly, sort of stupid and porno. As for the anal thing, to be honest—”
“I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s ridiculous,” interrupts Rabih, suddenly feeling
utterly daft. “Let’s forget I ever said anything. We shouldn’t let something like
this come between us and the Brioschi Café.”
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