The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to
understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even
better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us.
That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgives us
for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a
dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled
psyche.
“You’re in your ‘angry-and-humiliated-yet-strangely-quiet’ mode again,” she
diagnoses one evening when the car rental Web site Rabih has used to book
himself and four colleagues a minibus freezes on him at the very last screen,
leaving him in doubt whether it has properly understood his intentions and
debited his card. “I think you should scream, say something rude, then come to
bed. I wouldn’t mind. I might even call the rental place for you in the morning.”
She somehow sees right into his inability to express his anger; she recognizes the
process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust. Without
shaming him, she can identify and name the forms his madness sometimes takes.
With similar accuracy, she grasps his fear of seeming unworthy in his father’s
eyes and, by extension, in the eyes of other male figures of authority. On their
way in to a first meeting with his father at the George Hotel, she whispers to
Rabih without preamble: “Just imagine if it didn’t matter what he thought of me
—or, come to think of it, of you.” To Rabih, it feels as if he were returning with
a friend in broad daylight to a forest he’d only ever been in alone and at night
and could see that the malevolent figures which had once terrified him were
really, all along, just boulders that had caught the shadows at the wrong angles.
There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at
last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of
propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled,
or as “normal” as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild,

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hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and
accept us for.
At eleven at night, with one supper already behind them, they go out for another,
fetching barbecued ribs from Los Argentinos, in Preston Street, which they then
eat by moonlight on a bench in the Meadows. They speak to each other in funny
accents: she is a lost tourist from Hamburg looking for the Museum of Modern
Art; he can’t be of much help because, as a lobsterman from Aberdeen, he can’t
understand her unusual intonation.
They are back in the playful spirit of childhood. They bounce on the bed.
They swap piggyback rides. They gossip. After attending a party, they inevitably
end up finding fault with all the other guests, their loyalty to each other
deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.
They are in revolt against the hypocrisies of their usual lives. They free each
other from compromise. They have a sense of having no more secrets.
They normally have to answer to names imposed on them by the rest of the
world, used on official documents and by government bureaucracies, but love
inspires them to cast around for nicknames that will more precisely accord with
the respective sources of their tenderness. Kirsten thus becomes “Teckle,” the
Scottish colloquialism for 
great
, which to Rabih sounds impish and ingenuous,
nimble and determined. He, meanwhile, becomes “Sfouf,” after the dry
Lebanese cake flavored with aniseed and turmeric that he introduces her to in a
delicatessen in Nicolson Square, and which perfectly captures for her the
reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of the sad-eyed boy from Beirut.

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