And yet now, some years later, they lie next to each other in the marital bed with about as much sexual tension between them as there might be between a pair of leathery grandparents tanning themselves on a Baltic nudist beach.
Arousal seems, in the end, to have very little to do with a state of undress; it draws its energy from the possibility of being granted permission to possess a deeply desirable, once forbidden yet now miraculously available and accessible other. It is an expression of grateful wonder, verging on disbelief, that in a world of isolation and disconnection, the wrists, thighs, earlobes, and napes of necks are all there, finally, for us to behold; an extraordinary concept that we want to keep checking up on, perhaps as often as every few hours, once more joyfully touching, inserting, revealing, and unclothing, so lonely have we been, so independent and remote have our lovers seemed. Sexual desire is driven by a wish to establish closeness—and is hence contingent on a preexisting sense of distance, which it is a perpetually distinctive pleasure and relief to try to bridge.
There is very little distance left between Rabih and Kirsten. Their legal status defines them as partners for life; they share a three-by-four-meter bedroom to which they repair every evening; they talk on the phone constantly when they are apart; they are each other’s automatically assumed companions every weekend; they know ahead of time, and at most moments of the day and night, exactly what the other is doing. There is no longer very much in their conjoined existence that qualifies as distinctively “other”—and there is therefore little for the erotic to try to bridge.
At the close of many a day, Kirsten is reluctant even to be touched by Rabih, not because she no longer cares for him, but because she doesn’t feel as if there is enough of her left to risk giving more away to another person. One needs a degree of autonomy before being undressed by someone else can feel like a treat. But she has answered too many questions, forced too many small feet in too many shoes, pleaded and cajoled too many times. . . . Rabih’s touch feels like another hurdle in the way of a long-delayed communion with her neglected interior. She wants to cleave tightly and quietly to herself rather than have her identity be further dispersed across yet more demands. Any advance threatens to destroy the gossamer-thin shell of her private being. Until she has had sufficient chance to reacquaint herself with her own thoughts, she can’t even begin to take pleasure in gifting herself to another.
We may, in addition, feel embarrassed and almost intolerably exposed when asking for sex of a partner on whom we are already so deeply dependent in a variety of ways. It can be an intimacy too far, against a backdrop of tense discussions around what to do with the finances and the school drop-off, where to go on holiday and what kind of chair to buy, also to ask that a partner look indulgently upon our sexual needs: that they put on a certain article of clothing, or take a part in a dark scenario we crave, or lie down in a particular pose on the bed. We may not want to be relegated to the supplicant’s role, or to burn up precious emotional capital in the name of a shoe fetish. We may prefer not to entrust fantasies which we know can make us look ludicrous or depraved to someone before whom we otherwise have to maintain poise and authority, as required by the daily negotiations and standoffs of conjugal life. We might find it a lot safer to think about a complete stranger instead.
The week before, Kirsten is alone in the house, up in the bedroom, one mid-afternoon. There’s a program on the television about the North Sea fishing fleet based at Kinlochbervie in the northwest. We meet the fishermen, hear about their use of new sonar technology, and learn about a worrying decline in various piscine populations. At least there’s a lot of herring about and the supply of cod isn’t too bad this year, either. A fisherman named Clyde captains a boat called the Loch Davan. Every week he goes out on the high seas, often venturing as far as Iceland or the tip of Greenland. He has a brutish, arrogant manner, a sharp jawline and angry, impatient eyes. The children won’t be back from their friends’ for another hour at least, but Kirsten gets up and shuts the bedroom door tightly nonetheless before taking off her trousers and lying back on the bed.
She’s on the Loch Davan now, assigned a narrow cabin next to the bridge. There’s a fierce wind rocking the boat like a toy, but above the roar she can just make out a knocking at the cabin door. It’s Clyde; there must be some emergency on the bridge. But it turns out to be a different matter. He rips off her oilskins and takes her against the cabin wall without their exchanging a word. The bristles of his beard burn her skin. He is, crucially, barely literate, extremely coarse, almost preverbal, and as utterly worthless to her as she is to him. Thinking about the sex feels crude, urgent, meaningless—and very much more exciting than making love in the evening to someone she cares about deeply.
The motif of a beloved taking second place to a random stranger in a masturbatory fantasy has no logical part in Romantic ideology. But in practice it is precisely the dispassionate separation of love and sex that may be needed to correct and relieve the burdens of intimacy. Using a stranger bypasses resentments, emotional vulnerability, and any obligation to worry about another’s needs. We can be just as peculiar and selfish as we like, without fear of judgment or consequence. All emotion is kept wonderfully at bay: there is not the slightest wish to be understood, and therefore no risk, either, of being misinterpreted and, consequently, of growing bitter or frustrated. We can, at last, have desire without needing to bring the rest of our exhaustingly encumbered lives into the bed with us.
Kirsten isn’t alone in finding it safer to partition off some bits of her sexuality from the rest of her life.
Tonight Rabih checks that his wife is asleep, whispers her name, and hopes she won’t answer. Then, when he is sure it is safe, he tiptoes out, thinking he might, after all, make a good murderer, and heads down the stairs, past the childrens’ rooms (he can see his son curled up with Geoffrey, his favorite bear) and to a little annex off the kitchen, where he navigates to his favorite chat room. It is almost midnight.
Here, too, things are so much easier than with his spouse. There’s no need to wonder whether another person is in the mood; you just click on their name and, given the part of the Web they’re in, assume they will be game.
He also doesn’t have to worry, in this milieu, about being normal. This isn’t the version of himself which has to do the school run tomorrow, or give a talk at work, or later host a dinner party with a few lawyers and a kindergarten teacher and his wife.
He doesn’t have to be kind to or care about others. He doesn’t even have to belong to his own gender. He can try out what it’s like to be a shy and surprisingly convincing lesbian from Glasgow taking her first tentative steps towards a sexual awakening.
And then, the moment he’s done, he can shut off the machine and return to being the person that so many other people—his children, his spouse and his colleagues—are relying on him to be.