The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Love Rat
Rabih is invited to Berlin to give a talk about public space at a conference on
urban regeneration. He changes planes in London and flips through a succession
of magazines over Germany. Prussia lies flat and vast below, under a light
dusting of November snow.
The event is taking place east of the city, in a conference center with an
adjoining hotel. His room, on the twentieth floor, is clinically austere and white,
with views of a canal and rows of allotments. At night, which comes early, he
can see a power station and a procession of pylons striding into the distance in
the direction of the Polish border.
At the welcome-drinks party in the ballroom, he knows no one and pretends to
be waiting for a colleague. Once back in his room, he calls home. The children
have just had their baths. “I like it when you’re away,” says Esther. “Mummy’s
letting us watch a film and have a pizza.” Rabih watches a single-engine plane
circle high above the frozen fields beyond the hotel’s parking lot. As Esther
talks, William can be heard singing in the background, making a show of how
uninterested he is in any father who has had the bad taste to leave him behind.
Their voices sound younger over the telephone; it would be eerie for them to
know just how much he misses them.
He eats a club sandwich while looking at a news channel, through whose
lenses a series of tragedies appear relentlessly uniform and unengaging.
At dawn the following day he practices his speech in front of the bathroom
mirror. The real thing happens at eleven in the main hall. He makes his points
with passion and a deep knowledge of his subject. It’s his life’s work to
champion the virtues of well-designed shared spaces which can bring a
community together. A number of people come up to congratulate him
afterwards. At lunch he’s seated at a table with delegates from around the world.
It’s been a while since he’s experienced an atmosphere this cosmopolitan.
There’s a hostile conversation in progress about America. A Pakistani working
in Qatar decries the impact of America’s zoning laws on turning circles; a
Dutchman alleges an indifference on the part of the nation’s elites towards the
common good; a Finnish delegate compares its citizens’ dependence on fossil
fuels with an addict’s relationship to opium.
At the end of the table a woman is leaning her head to one side, sporting a

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wry, resigned smile.
“I know better than to try to defend my country when I’m overseas,” she
interjects eventually. “Of course, I’m every bit as disappointed in America as the
rest of you are, but I still have a deep sense of loyalty to it—just as I might with
some crazy alcoholic aunt whom I’d stick up for if I heard strangers talking
about her behind her back.”
Lauren lives in Los Angeles and works at UCLA, where she’s studying the
effects of immigration in the San Bernardino Valley. She has shoulder-length
brown hair and grey-green eyes and is thirty-one. Rabih tries not to look at her
too directly. Hers is the sort of beauty that seems unhelpful to encounter in his
present circumstances.
There’s an hour before the sessions start again, and he decides to take a walk
outside in what passes for a garden. His flight home departs early the next
morning, and there’ll be a new project waiting on his desk when he gets back to
Edinburgh. Lauren’s dark tailored dress did nothing to draw attention to itself,
and yet he remembers every detail of it. He thinks, too, of the stack of bangles
on her left arm; he could just see a tattoo underneath them, on the inside of her
wrist—an inadvertent, melancholy reminder of the generation gap between
them.
In the late afternoon, in the corridor leading to the lifts, he’s looking at some
brochures when she walks by. He smiles awkwardly, grieving already that he
will never know her, that her deeper identity—symbolized by the purple canvas
bag slung over her shoulder—will remain forever foreign to him, that he can
write himself only a single life. But she announces that she’s feeling hungry and
suggests that he join her for tea in a wood-paneled bar next to the business center
on the first floor. She had breakfast there that morning, she adds. They sit on a
long leather bench by the fireplace. There is a white orchid behind Lauren. He
asks most of the questions and thereby learns bits and pieces: about her
apartment in Venice Beach, a previous job at a university in Arizona, the family
in Albuquerque, her love of David Lynch’s films, her involvement in community
organizing, her Judaism and her hammed-up terror of German officials, which
extends also to the stiff and thick-necked barman, a character rich in comedic
possibilities, whom she nicknames Eichmann. Rabih’s attention wavers between
the specifics of what she’s saying and what she represents. She is at once herself
and all the people he has ever admired but learnt not to be curious about since
his wedding day.
Her eyes crinkle with laughter as she glances up at the barman.
“ ‘You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam,