It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love to reach a few different conclusions, to recognize that the very things he once considered romantic—wordless intuitions, instantaneous longings, a trust in soul mates—are what stand in the way of learning how to be with someone. He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
The Sacred Start
In the early days of their marriage, and for many years thereafter, it is always the same question for Rabih and his wife: “How did you two meet?”—usually accompanied by an anticipatory air of playful, vicarious excitement. The couple then typically look at one another—sometimes a little shyly when the whole table has stopped to listen—to determine who should tell it this time. Depending on the audience, they may play it for wit or for tenderness. It can be condensed into a line or fill a chapter.
The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn’t deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future—or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.
It is peculiar, Rabih and his wife observe, how seldom they are asked about what has happened to them since they met, as if the real story of their relationship didn’t belong to an area of legitimate or fruitful curiosity. Never have they publicly fielded the one question that truly preoccupies them: “What is it like to have been married awhile?”
The stories of relationships, maintained over decades, without obvious calamity or bliss, remain—fascinatingly and worryingly—the exceptions among the narratives we dare to tell ourselves about love’s progress.
It happens like this, the start that gets too much attention: Rabih is thirty-one and a resident in a city that he hardly knows or understands. He used to live in London but recently moved to Edinburgh for work. His former architectural practice shed half its staff after the unexpected loss of a contract, and redundancy forced him to cast his professional net wider than he would have liked—which eventually led him to accept a job with a Scottish urban-design studio specializing in plazas and road junctions.
He has been single for a few years, since the failure of a relationship with a graphic designer. He has joined a local health club and signed up with a dating Web site. He has been to the opening of a gallery exhibiting Celtic artifacts. He has attended a stream of events loosely connected to his work. All in vain. A few times he has felt an intellectual connection with a woman but no physical one—or the other way around. Or, worse still, a glimmer of hope and then the mention of a partner, usually standing on the other side of the room, wearing a prison warden’s expression.
Still, Rabih doesn’t give up. He is a Romantic. And eventually, after many empty Sundays, it happens at last, almost as he has been taught—largely by art—to expect that it will.
The roundabout is on the A720 heading south from central Edinburgh, connecting the main road to a cul-de-sac of executive homes facing a golf course and a pond—a commission which Rabih takes on less out of interest than because of the obligations that come with his modest ranking in his company’s pecking order.
On the client’s side, the supervisory role is initially assigned to a senior member of the city council’s surveying team; but the day before the project is due to start, the man suffers a bereavement, and a more junior colleague is moved across to take his place.
They shake hands at the construction site on an overcast morning in early June, a little after eleven. Kirsten McLelland is wearing a fluorescent jacket, a hard hat, and a pair of heavy rubber-soled boots. Rabih Khan can’t hear anything much of what she is saying, not only because of the repetitive shudder of a nearby hydraulic compressor, but also because, as he will come to discover, Kirsten often talks rather softly, in the voice of her native Inverness that has a habit of trailing off before sentences are entirely complete, as though she has halfway through discovered some objection to what she has been saying or has simply moved on to other priorities.
Despite her apparel—or, in truth, partly because of it—Rabih at once notes in Kirsten a range of traits, psychological and physical, to whose appeal he is susceptible. He observes her unruffled, amused way of responding to the patronizing attitudes of the muscular twelve-man construction crew; the diligence with which she checks off the various items on the schedule; her confident disregard for the norms of fashion; and the individuality implied by the slight irregularity in her upper front teeth.
Once the meeting with the crew is finished, client and contractor go and sit together on a nearby bench to sort through the contracts. But within a few minutes it begins to pour, and as there is no room to do paperwork in the site office, Kirsten suggests they walk around to the high street and find a café.
On the way there, beneath her umbrella, they fall into a conversation about hiking. Kirsten tells Rabih that she tries to get away from the city as often as possible. Not long ago, in fact, she went up to Loch Carriagean, where, pitching her tent in an isolated pine forest, she felt an extraordinary sense of peace and perspective from being so far away from other people and all the distractions and frenzy of urban life. Yes, she was up there on her own, she answers; he has an image of her under canvas, unlacing her boots. When they reach the high street, there is no café in sight, so they take refuge instead in the Taj Mahal, a somber and deserted Indian restaurant where they order tea and, at the owner’s urging, a plate of papadums. Fortified, they make their way through the forms, concluding that it will be best to call in the cement mixer only in the third week and have the paving stones delivered the week after.
Rabih examines Kirsten with a forensic focus while trying for discretion. He notes light freckles across her cheeks; a curious mixture of assertiveness and reserve in her expression; thick, shoulder-length auburn hair pushed to one side; and a habit of beginning sentences with a brisk “Here’s a thing . . .”
In the midst of this practical conversation, he manages nonetheless to catch the occasional glimpse of a more private side. To his question about her parents, Kirsten answers, with a note of awkwardness in her voice, that she was brought up in Inverness by her mother alone, her father having lost interest in family life early on. “It wasn’t an ideal start to make me hopeful about people,” she says with a wry smile (and he realizes it’s the left upper front tooth that is at a bit of an angle). “Maybe that’s why the thought of ‘happily ever after’ has never really been my thing.”
The remark is hardly off-putting for Rabih, who reminds himself of the maxim that cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
Through the wide windows of the Taj Mahal, he can see fast-moving clouds and, in the far distance, a hesitant sun casting rays on the volcanic black domes of the Pentland Hills.
He could restrict himself to thinking that Kirsten is rather a nice person with whom to spend a morning solving some vexing issues of municipal administration. He could curtail his judgment as to what depths of character could plausibly lie behind her reflections on office life and Scottish politics. He could accept that her soul is unlikely to be casually discernible in her pallor and the slope of her neck. He could be satisfied to say that she seems interesting enough and that he will need another twenty-five years to know much more.