To Rabih’s new way of thinking, it seems anything
but
kind or considerate to
insist that a spouse return to his room alone to watch CNN and eat yet another
club sandwich while perched on the edge of his bed, when he has perhaps only a
few more decades of life left on the planet, an increasingly disheveled physique,
an at best intermittent track
record with the opposite sex, and a young woman
from California standing before him who sincerely wishes to remove her dress in
his honor.
If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another
person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for
an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the
eighteenth floor in order to enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a
near stranger. Otherwise it may seem that what we are dealing with is not really
love at all but rather a kind of small-minded and hypocritical possessiveness, a
desire to make one’s
partner happy if, but only if, that happiness involves
oneself.
It’s past midnight already, yet Rabih
is just hitting his stride, knowing there
might be objections but sidestepping them nimbly and, in the process, acquiring
an ever more brittle sense of self-righteousness.
A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can
only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of
emotional health.
Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything
in one other being—someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a
co-parent, a co-chauffeur, and a business partner?
What a recipe for
disappointment and resentment in this notion upon which millions of otherwise
perfectly good marriages regularly founder.
What could be more natural than to feel an occasional desire for another
person? How can anyone be expected to grow up in hedonistic, liberated circles,
experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, listen to
music
full of longing and lust, and then, immediately upon signing a piece of
paper, renounce all outside sexual interest, not in the name of any particular god
or higher commandment, but merely from an unexplored supposition that it must
be very wrong? Is there not instead something inhuman, indeed “wrong,” in
failing
to be tempted, in failing to realize just how short of time we all are and
therefore with what urgent curiosity we should
want to explore the unique
fleshly individuality of more than one of our contemporaries? To moralize
against adultery is to deny the legitimacy of a range of sensory high points—
Contra
The
texts are, at first, purely civil. Did he get back safely? How is her jet lag?
Some professional themes come into it, too: Has he received the post conference
newsletter? Does she know the work of the urbanist Jan Gehl?
Then, at eleven one night, he feels his phone vibrate and goes into the
bathroom. From Los Angeles she has written that she is, truth be told, finding it
hard to forget his cock.
He deletes the message at once, takes out the phone’s SIM card and hides it in
his wash bag, stashes the phone under a tracksuit, and goes back to bed. Kirsten
stretches her arms out towards him. The next day, with the phone reassembled,
he sends Lauren a return text from the laundry cupboard under the stairs:
“Thanks for an extraordinary, wonderful, generous night. I won’t ever regret it. I
think of your vagina.”
For a number of reasons, he deletes the last sentence
before sending.
As for the never regretting: in reality, surrounded by drying towels, it’s
starting to feel rather more complicated.
The following Saturday, in a toy shop in the center of town where he has gone
with William to buy a model boat, an e-mail arrives with an attachment. Beside a
shelf full of small sails, he reads: “I love your name, Rabih Khan. Every time I
say it out loud to myself, it satisfies me somehow. And yet it also makes me sad,
because it reminds me how much time I’ve wasted with men who don’t share
your genuine and passionate nature, and who haven’t been able to understand the
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
