That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood.
When he can’t bear it any longer, he tiptoes into their bedroom and sits on her side of the bed. He is planning to wake her up but thinks better of it when he sees her intelligent, kind face at rest. Her mouth is slightly open and he can hear the faintest sound of her breathing; the fine hairs on her arm are visible in the light from the street.
It’s cool but sunny the next morning. Kirsten gets up before Rabih and prepares two boiled eggs, one for each of them, along with a basket of neatly cut soldiers. She looks down at the willow tree in the garden and feels grateful for the dependable, modest, everyday things. When Rabih enters the kitchen, sheepish and disheveled, they start off in silence, then end up by smiling at each other. At lunchtime he sends her an e-maiclass="underline" “I’m a bit mad, forgive me.” Although she’s waiting to go into a council meeting, she replies swiftly: “It would be v. boring if you weren’t. And lonely.” The sulk is not mentioned again.
We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker’s fury. We would recognize the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive: “Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.”
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.
Sex and Censorship
They’re in a café they sometimes go to on a Saturday, ordering scrambled eggs, catching up on the week and reading the papers. Today Kirsten is telling Rabih about the dilemma faced by her friend Shona, whose boyfriend, Alasdair, has abruptly been relocated to Singapore for work. Should she follow him there, Shona wonders—they’ve been together two years—or stay in the dental surgery in Inverness, where she’s only just been promoted? It’s a pretty weighty decision by any measure. But Kirsten’s exegesis is proceeding rather slowly and not always linearly, so Rabih also keeps an eye on the events covered by the Daily Record. Some peculiar and macabre situations have been unfolding recently in venues with highly lyrical place names: a history teacher has beheaded his wife with an ancient sword in a house outside Lochgelly, while in Auchtermuchty police are searching for a fifty-four-year-old man who fathered a child with his sixteen-year-old daughter.
“Mr. Khan, if you don’t stop thinking that everything I tell you is merely background noise which you can shut out at will, I promise you that what happened to that poor woman in Lochgelly will come to seem to you like a day at Disneyland,” says Kirsten, who then jabs him hard in the ribs with a (blunt) knife.
But it isn’t just the case of incest in Fife and Shona’s predicament that are preoccupying Rabih. There’s a third claim on his attention as well. Angelo and Maria have owned their café for thirty years. Angelo’s father, originally from Sicily, was a detainee in the Orkney Islands during World War II. The couple have a twenty-one-year-old daughter, Antonella, who has lately graduated with distinction from her course in catering and hospitality at North East Scotland College in Aberdeen. Until something more substantial turns up, she’s helping out in the café, rushing back and forth between the kitchen and the seating area, carrying as many as four orders at a time, issuing constant warnings that the plates are very hot as she maneuvers gracefully among the tables. She’s tall, strong, good-natured—and extremely beautiful. She chats easily with the patrons about the weather and, with some of the regulars who have known her since she was a girl, about the newest developments in her life. She’s single right now, she informs a couple of animated elderly ladies at the table opposite, adding that she genuinely doesn’t mind—and saying no, she’d never try one of those Internet dating things; that’s not her style. She is wearing a surprisingly large crucifix on a chain around her neck.
As Rabih watches her, and without quite meaning for it to happen, one part of his mind leaves behind its normal responsibilities and starts to conjure a sequence of wayward images: the narrow stairs behind the espresso machine which lead up to the flat above; Antonella’s small room, cluttered with still-unpacked boxes from college; a shaft of morning light catching her jet-black hair and throwing her pale skin into relief; her clothes discarded in a pile by the chair and Antonella herself lying on the bed with her long, muscular legs spread wide open, wholly naked apart from the crucifix.
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.