“Have you got my phone?” he asks Kirsten in an agitated voice. She’s sleeping and wakes up with a start.
“Of course not, darling. Why would I take your phone?”
He squeezes past her and reaches up into the overhead rack, takes down his bag, and fumbles in the outer compartment. An unfortunate reality gradually becomes clear: the phone has gone missing, and with it his communications system with the world.
“It must have been stolen somewhere in the baggage reclaim,” observes Kirsten. “Or perhaps you left it behind somehow. Poor you! We can call up the airport first thing tomorrow and find out if anyone has handed it in. But the insurance will cover it anyway. It’s sort of amazing this hasn’t happened to one of us before.”
But Rabih fails to see the wonder of it.
“You can use my phone if there’s anything you want to look at,” adds Kirsten brightly.
Rabih is furious. This is the beginning of an administrative nightmare. He’ll be made to wait for hours by a series of operators, then have to dig up paperwork and fill out forms. Oddly enough, though, his fury isn’t directed only at his loss; some of it also appears to have found its way to his wife. After all, she was the one who first mentioned the weather, which in turn prompted him to check the forecast, without which the phone might still be safely in his possession. Furthermore, Kirsten’s calm and sympathetic manner merely serves to underscore how carefree and lucky she is in comparison. As the bus makes its way towards Waverley Bridge, an important piece of logic falls into place for Rabih: somehow all the pain and bother and hassle, every bit of it, is her fault. She is to blame for the lot, including the headache that is right now clasping itself like a vise around his temples. He turns away from her and mutters, “I knew all along we shouldn’t have gone on this crazy, unnecessary trip”—which seems a sad and rather unfair way to précis the celebration of an important anniversary.
Not everyone would follow or sympathize with the connection Rabih has just made. Kirsten never signed up to the job of guardian of her husband’s mobile phone and is far from responsible for every aspect of this grown primate’s life. But to Rabih it makes a curious sort of sense. Not for the first time, everything is, somehow, his wife’s doing.
The most superficially irrational, immature, lamentable, but nonetheless common of all the presumptions of love is that the person to whom we have pledged ourselves is not just the center of our emotional existence but is also, as a result—and yet in a very strange, objectively insane and profoundly unjust way—responsible for everything that happens to us, for good or ill. Therein lies the peculiar and sick privilege of love.
It has also, over the years, been her “fault” that he slipped in the snow, that he lost his keys, that the Glasgow train broke down, that he got a speeding fine, that there is an itchy label in his new shirt, that the washing machine isn’t draining properly, that he isn’t practicing architecture to the standard he’d dreamt of, that the new neighbors play their music loudly late in the evening, and that they hardly ever have much fun anymore. And, it should be emphasized, Kirsten’s own list is, in this same category, neither any shorter nor more reasonable: it’s all down to Rabih that she doesn’t see her mother enough, that her tights constantly ladder, that her friend Gina never gets in touch with her, that she’s tired all the time, that the nail clippers have gone missing, and that they hardly ever have much fun anymore. . . .
The world upsets, disappoints, frustrates, and hurts us in countless ways at every turn. It delays us, rejects our creative endeavors, overlooks us for promotions, rewards idiots, and smashes our ambitions on its bleak, relentless shoals. And almost invariably we can’t complain about any of it. It’s too difficult to tease out who may really be to blame—and too dangerous to complain even when we know for certain (lest we be fired or laughed at).
There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.
The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself—and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable.
A few weeks after their return from Prague, a new and far larger problem arises. Rabih’s boss, Ewen, calls a team meeting. After a decent last eight months, the work pipeline is again looking barren, he confides. Not everyone currently employed by the firm will be able to stay on board unless an amazing project turns up soon. In the corridor afterwards, Ewen takes Rabih aside.
“You’ll understand, of course,” he says. “It won’t be anything personal. You’re a good man, Rabih!” People who are planning to sack you should really have the decency and courage not also to want you to like them, reflects Rabih.
The threat of unemployment plunges him into gloom and anxiety. It would be hell to try to find another job in this city, he knows. He’d probably have to move, and then what would Kirsten do? He is threatening to fail in his most basic responsibilities as a husband. What madness it was, all those years ago, to think he could have a career that would combine financial stability with creative fulfillment. It was a mix of childishness and petulance, as his father always hinted.
Today his walk home takes him past St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. He’s never been inside before—the façade has always seemed gothically gloomy and uninviting—but, in his perturbed and panic-stricken mood, he decides to have a look around and ends up in a niche off the nave, in front of a large painting of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down at him with sorrowful and kindly eyes. Something in her sympathetic expression touches him, as if she knew a little about Ewen Frank and the shortfall of work and wanted to reassure him of her own ongoing faith in him. He can feel tears coming to his eyes at the contrast between the challenging facts of his adult life and the kindness and tenderness in this woman’s expression. She seems to understand and yet not condemn. He is surprised when he looks at his watch and realizes that it’s been a quarter of an hour. It’s a sort of madness, he concedes, for an atheist of Muslim descent to find himself in a candlelit hall at the foot of a portrait of a foreign deity to whom he wants to offer his tears and confusion. Still, he has few alternatives, there not being many people left who still believe in him. The main burden of responsibility has fallen on his wife, and that means asking rather a lot of an ordinary, non-canonized mortal.
At home, Kirsten has made a zucchini, basil, and feta salad for dinner from a recipe of his. She wants to know all the details about the work crisis. When did Ewen tell them this? How did he put it? How did the others react? Will there be another meeting soon? Rabih starts to answer, then snaps:
“Why do you care about these incidental facts? It just is what it is: a big mess.”