The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have
something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more
time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially
rapturous feelings.
The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know
very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.
When the image returns, he can just make out, in a far corner, what looks to be a
drying rack with a few pairs of socks hung on it.
“By the way, where’s the reach-over-and-touch-your-lover button on this
thing?” she wonders aloud.
He’s very much at her mercy. All she would need to do was look up his wife’s
e-mail on the Edinburgh Council Web site and drop her a line.
“It’s right here on mine,” he replies.
In an instant his mind shoots forward to a possible future with Lauren. He
imagines living with her in L.A. in that apartment, after the divorce. They would

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make love on the couch, he would cradle her in his arms, they’d stay up late
talking about their vulnerabilities and longings and would drive over to Malibu
to eat shrimp at a little place she’d know by the ocean. But they’d also need to
put out the laundry, wonder who would fix the fuses, and get cross because the
milk ran out.
It’s in part because he likes her a lot that he really doesn’t want this to go any
further. He knows himself well enough to realize how unhappy he would
ultimately make her. In light of all he understands about himself and the course
of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to
get out of the way fast.
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one
claims to care for.
“I miss you,” she says again.
“Likewise. I’m also intently staring at your laundry back there over your
shoulder. It’s very pretty.”
“You mean and perverted man!”
To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—
would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could
do to Lauren, not to mention his wife. Real generosity, he recognizes, means
admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say . . . ,” Rabih begins.
As he talks through his reservations, she is patient with his stumbles and what
she calls his tendency towards “Middle Eastern sugarcoating,” throws in some
humor about being fired as his mistress, but is gracious, decent, understanding,
and, above all, kind.
“There aren’t many people like you on the earth,” he concludes, and he means
it.
What guided him in Berlin was the sudden hope of bypassing some of the
shortcomings of his marriage by means of a new but contained foray into
someone else’s life. But as he perceives it now, such hope could only ever have
been sentimental claptrap and a form of cruelty in which everyone involved
would stand to lose and be hurt. There could be no tidy settlement possible in
which nothing would be sacrificed. Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he
sees. A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a
marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic,
however compelling both paradigms might be. He doesn’t downplay the loss
either way. Saying good-bye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it

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also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation. Neither
the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right. There is no solution. He is in
tears in the kitchen, sobbing more deeply than he has in years: about what he has
lost, what he has endangered, and how punishing the choices have been. He has
just about enough time to compose himself between the moment the key turns in
the lock and Kirsten enters the kitchen.
The weeks that follow will prove a mixture of relief and sadness. His wife will
ask him on a couple of occasions if anything is wrong, and the second time he
will make a great effort to adjust his manner so that she won’t have to ask him
again.