Rabih’s father was taciturn and severe. Only one generation removed from a life of extreme poverty and agricultural labor in a small village near Baalbek, he had been the first in his family to escape and go to university, though he would continue to preserve a long ancestral legacy of being careful around authority. Speaking up and volunteering one’s opinions were not standard practices among the Khans.
The education in communication imparted by Rabih’s mother was no more encouraging. She loved him fiercely, but she needed him to be a certain way. Whenever she returned from her airline work to the anxious atmosphere of Beirut and of her marriage, her son would see the strain around her eyes and feel that he mustn’t add to her problems. He wanted more than anything to put her at ease and make her laugh. Whatever anxieties he felt, he would reflexively conceal. His job was to help keep her intact. He could not afford to tell her too many tricky but true things about himself.
Rabih thereby grew up to understand the love of others as a reward for being good, not for being transparent. As an adult and as a husband, he lacks any idea of how to make something coherent out of the nonnormative parts of himself. It is neither arrogance nor a sense that his wife has no right to know who he really is that makes him secretive and hesitant; rather, it is sheer terror that his tendencies towards self-loathing will be intensified to an unbearable degree by the presence of a witness.
Were Rabih less afraid of his own mind, he might be able to square up to Kirsten with his desires, like a natural scientist holding up for a colleague’s inspection some newly discovered, peculiar-looking species which both of them might strive to understand and accommodate themselves to. But he instinctively feels that there is quite a lot about himself that it would be wiser for him not to share. He is too dependent on Kirsten’s love to map out for her all the places to which his libido regularly takes him. She thus never learns about the woman her husband daily admires behind the till at the newsagent in Waverley Station, or his curiosity about her friend Rachel on the night of her birthday, or the dress that turns him on in a shop on Hanover Street, or some of his thoughts about stockings, or some of the faces that, unbidden, occasionally pass through his mind while he is in bed with her.
The first heady period of sexual adventure and total honesty passes. It is significantly more important to Rabih now that he remain attractive to Kirsten than that he be a truthful correspondent of the reality of his inner life.
Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key—a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.
The blame is not on Rabih’s side alone. In having on the tip of her tongue such words as weird and perverted, Kirsten does little to foster an atmosphere ripe for revelations. Then again, she uses these words not out of nastiness or contempt but rather out of fear that, by tacitly endorsing Rabih’s fantasies, she may end up giving them greater license and so undermine their love.
She might instead, in another mood, as a different person, have said something like the following in response to her husband’s scenario: “The nature of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar, and frankly not a little disgusting to me; but I’m interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are. The person thinking of Antonella just now is the same person I married in Inverness and the same little boy who stares out from that picture on top of our chest of drawers. It’s him I love and refuse to think badly of, however much his thoughts may sometimes disturb me. You’re my best friend, and I want to know and come to terms with your mind in all its weird byways. I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I’d like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.”
Or conversely, she might have revealed the vulnerability that has lain all the while behind her annoyed demeanor: “I wish I could be everything to you. I wish you didn’t have such needs outside of me. Of course, I don’t really think your fantasies about Antonella are repulsive; I just wish there didn’t have to be—always—that imagined someone else. I know it’s madness, but what I want most is to be able to satisfy you all by myself.”
In the event, Rabih didn’t speak, and Kirsten didn’t listen. Instead they went to the cinema and had a thoroughly nice evening together. In the engine room of their relationship, however, a warning light had come on.
It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes—hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more.
Rabih resigns himself to being partially misunderstood—and, unconsciously, to blaming his wife for not accepting those sides of his nature that he lacks the courage to explain to her. Kirsten, for her part, settles for never daring to ask her husband what is really going on in his sexual mind outside of her role in it, and chooses not to look very hard at why it is that she feels so afraid to find out more.
As for the raven-haired subject of Rabih’s fantasy, her name doesn’t come up in conversation again for a long while, until one day Kirsten returns with some news after having a coffee at the Brioschi Café. Antonella has moved up north to work as the head receptionist at a small luxury hotel in Argyll, on the western coast, and has fallen deeply in love with one of the housekeepers there, a young Dutch woman to whom—much to her parents’ initial surprise but also eventual delight—she plans to get married in a few months’ time in a big ceremony in the town of Apeldoorn, information that Rabih receives with an almost convincing show of complete indifference. He has chosen love over libido.
Transference
Two years into their marriage, Rabih’s job remains precarious, vulnerable to an unsteady workflow and clients’ sudden changes of mind. So he feels especially pleased when, at the start of January, the firm wins a large and long-term contract across the border in England, in South Shields, a struggling town two and a half hours southeast of Edinburgh by train. The task is to redevelop the quayside and a derelict hodgepodge of industrial sheds into a park, a café, and a museum to house a local maritime artifact, the Tyne, the second-oldest lifeboat in Britain. Ewen asks Rabih if he will head up the project—a distinct honor, yet one which also means that for half a year he will have to spend three nights a month away from Kirsten. The budget is tight, so he makes his base in South Shields’s Premier Inn, a modestly priced establishment sandwiched between a women’s prison and a goods yard. In the evenings he has supper by himself at the hotel restaurant, Taybarns, where a side of mutton sweats under the lamps of a carving station.