This remains, in the current age, the minority view by a very wide margin.
Rabih sets the scene: “So we’re in this little seaside town in Italy, maybe Rimini, and we’ve had some ice cream, maybe pistachio, when you notice the waitress, who is shy but really friendly in a natural way that’s at once maternal and fascinatingly virginal.”
“You mean Antonella.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Rabih Khan, shut up!” Kirsten scoffs.
“Okay, then: Antonella. So we suggest to Antonella that after she’s finished her shift, she might want to come back to our hotel for some grappa. She’s flattered but a bit embarrassed. You see, she’s got a boyfriend, Marco, a mechanic at the local garage, who’s very jealous but at the same time remarkably incompetent sexually. There are certain things that she’s been wanting to have a go at for ages but that he flat-out refuses to try. She can’t get them out of her head, which is in part why she takes us up on our unusual offer.”
Kirsten is silent.
“Now we’re in the hotel, in the room, which has a big bed with an old-fashioned brass headboard. Her skin is so soft. There’s a trace of moisture on the down of her upper lip. You lick it off, and then your hand moves gently down her body.” Rabih continues: “She’s still wearing her apron, which you help her out of. You find her sweet, but you also want to use her in a rather mercenary way. That’s where the strap comes in. You slide her bra up—it’s black, or no, maybe grey—and lean over to take one of her breasts in your mouth. Her nipples are hard.”
Still Kirsten says nothing.
“You reach down and slip your hand inside her particularly lacy Italian panties,” he goes on. “Suddenly you feel you want to lick her between her legs, so you get her up on all fours and begin to explore her from behind.”
By now the silence from Rabih’s usual storytelling partner has grown oppressive.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine, it’s just . . . I don’t know . . . it feels weird for you to be thinking about Antonella that way—a bit perverted, really. She’s such a lovely person; I’ve known her since she was sitting her Highers, and now her parents are so proud of the distinction she got. I don’t like the old chestnut of the man sitting there, getting off on watching two women licking each other out. Sfouf, it feels, frankly, sort of stupid and porno. As for the anal thing, to be honest—”
“I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s ridiculous,” interrupts Rabih, suddenly feeling utterly daft. “Let’s forget I ever said anything. We shouldn’t let something like this come between us and the Brioschi Café.”
Romanticism hasn’t only increased the prestige of monogamous sex; along the way it has also made any extraneous sexual interest seem unvaryingly foolish and unkind. It has powerfully redefined the meaning of the urge to sleep with someone other than one’s regular partner. It has turned every extramarital interest into a threat and, often, something close to an emotional catastrophe.
In the fantasy in Rabih’s mind, it could have been such a tender and easy transaction. He and Kirsten would have chatted with Antonella in the café, all three of them would have recognized the tension and the appeal, and then in short order they would have ended up back at Merchiston Avenue. Antonella and Kirsten would have made out for a while as he looked on from an armchair, then he would have taken Kirsten’s place and had sex with Antonella. It would have felt warm, exciting, and wholly meaningless in terms of the marriage and of Rabih’s essential love for Kirsten. Afterwards he would have walked Antonella back to the café, and none of them would ever mention the interlude again. There would have been no melodrama, no possessiveness and no guilt. At Christmas they might have bought her a panettone and a card by way of thanks for the orgy.
Despite the liberal atmosphere of our time, it would be naive to assume that the distinction between “weird” and “normal” has disappeared. It stands as secure as ever, waiting to intimidate and herd back into line those who would question the normative limits of love and sex. It may now be deemed “normal” to wear cutoff shorts, expose belly buttons, marry someone of either gender, and watch a little porn for fun, but it also remains indispensably “normal” to believe that true love should be monogamous and that one’s desire should be focused exclusively on one person. To be in dispute with this founding principle is to risk being dismissed, in public or private, with that most dispiriting, caustic and shameful of all epithets: pervert.
Rabih belongs firmly outside the category of the good communicators. For all that he nurses some strongly held views, he has long found the journey towards expressing these fraught with obstacles and inhibitions. When his boss, Ewen, announces a new corporate strategy of concentrating more on the oil sector and less on local government contracts, Rabih doesn’t—as someone else might do—request a meeting and sit down with him for half an hour in the top-floor conference room with its view over Calton Hill to explain why this policy shift could prove not only mistaken but possibly dangerous. Instead he remains largely quiet, making only a few gnomic remarks and fantasizing that others will somehow magically deduce his opinion. Similarly, when he realizes that Gemma, an entry-level staffer who has been taken on to assist him with his workload, has been getting many of her measurements wrong, he feels inwardly frustrated but never raises the issue with her and simply does the work himself, leaving the young woman amazed by how little there is for her to do in her new job. He’s not secretive, controlling, or withdrawn for malicious reasons; he just gives up on other people—and on his ability to persuade them of anything—with unhelpful ease.
For the rest of the day, after their visit to the Brioschi Café and the humiliating business about Antonella, there’s the kind of tension between Rabih and Kirsten that often follows on from aborted sex. Somewhere in his mind Rabih feels a disappointment and irritation that he doesn’t know what to do with. After all, it isn’t right to start making a fuss when your partner isn’t wild at the idea of having a threesome with a recent graduate who knows her way around a plate of eggs and happens to look nice in an apron.
What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.
As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.