Contra
The texts are, at first, purely civil. Did he get back safely? How is her jet lag? Some professional themes come into it, too: Has he received the post conference newsletter? Does she know the work of the urbanist Jan Gehl?
Then, at eleven one night, he feels his phone vibrate and goes into the bathroom. From Los Angeles she has written that she is, truth be told, finding it hard to forget his cock.
He deletes the message at once, takes out the phone’s SIM card and hides it in his wash bag, stashes the phone under a tracksuit, and goes back to bed. Kirsten stretches her arms out towards him. The next day, with the phone reassembled, he sends Lauren a return text from the laundry cupboard under the stairs: “Thanks for an extraordinary, wonderful, generous night. I won’t ever regret it. I think of your vagina.” For a number of reasons, he deletes the last sentence before sending.
As for the never regretting: in reality, surrounded by drying towels, it’s starting to feel rather more complicated.
The following Saturday, in a toy shop in the center of town where he has gone with William to buy a model boat, an e-mail arrives with an attachment. Beside a shelf full of small sails, he reads: “I love your name, Rabih Khan. Every time I say it out loud to myself, it satisfies me somehow. And yet it also makes me sad, because it reminds me how much time I’ve wasted with men who don’t share your genuine and passionate nature, and who haven’t been able to understand the parts of me that I need to have understood. I hope you’ll like the attached photo of me in my favorite Oxfords and socks. It’s the real me, the one I’m so thrilled to know you saw and may see again before too long.”
William tugs at his jacket. There’s dismay in his voice: the boat he’s been obsessing about all month costs far more than he anticipated. Rabih feels himself go pale. The self-portrait shows her standing in a bathroom, facing a full-length mirror with her head angled to one side, wearing nothing but lace-up shoes and a pair of knee-high yellow and black stockings. He offers to buy William a toy aircraft carrier.
The message stays unanswered for the rest of the weekend. He has no time or opportunity to come back to it until the Monday night, when Kirsten is out at her book club.
When he opens his e-mail app to reply, he sees that Lauren has got there first: “I know your situation is difficult, and I’d never want to do anything to jeopardize it—but I was just feeling so vulnerable and silly that night. I don’t usually send naked pictures of myself to men I hardly know. I was a little hurt by your nonresponse. Forgive me for saying that; I know I’ve got no right. I just keep thinking of your kind, sweet face. You’re a good man, Rabih—don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. I like you more than I should. I want you inside me now.”
For the sweet-faced man, things are feeling ever more tricky.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Rabih becomes increasingly aware of his wife’s goodness. He notices the trouble she takes with nearly everything she does. Every night she spends hours helping the children with their homework; she remembers their spelling tests, rehearses lines for school plays with them, and sews patches onto their trousers. She’s sponsoring an orphan with a lip deformation in Malawi. Rabih develops an ulcer on the inside of his cheek, and—without being asked—his wife buys a healing gel and drops it off for him at work. She is doing a fine job of appearing to be a great deal nicer than he is, which he is both extremely grateful for and, on another level, utterly furious about.
Her generosity seems to show up the extent of his inadequacy, and grows less tolerable by the day. His behavior declines. He snaps at her in front of the children. He drags his heels about taking out the trash and changing the sheets. He wishes she would be a little bit awful back to him, in order that her assessment of him might appear better aligned with his own sense of self-worth.
Late one evening, after they’ve gone to bed and while Kirsten is relaying something about the car’s annual service, his discomfort reaches a pitch.
“Oh, and I had the wheels realigned; apparently you need to do that every six months or so,” she says, not even glancing up from her reading.
“Kirsten, why would you ever bother with that?”
“Well, it might matter. It can be dangerous not to do it, the mechanic said.”
“You’re frightening, you know.”
“Frightening?”
“The way you’re so . . . so organized, such a planner, so goddamned reasonable about everything.”
“Reasonable?”
“Everything around here is deeply sensible, rational, worked out, policed—as if there were a timetable all laid out from now till the moment we die.”
“I don’t understand,” Kirsten says. Her expression is one of pure puzzlement. “Policed? I went to have the car fixed, and at once I’m a villain in some anti-bourgeois narrative?”
“Yes, you’re right. You’re always right. I just wonder why you’re such a genius at making me feel I’m the mad, horrible one. All I can say is, everything is very well ordered around here.”
“I thought you liked order.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Thought, past tense?”
“It can start to seem dead. Boring, even.” He can’t help himself. He’s impelled to say the very worst things, to try to smash the relationship to see if it’s real and worth trusting.
“You’re not putting this very nicely at all. And I don’t think anything around here is boring. I wish it were.”
“It is. I’ve become boring. And you’ve become boring, too, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Kirsten stares straight ahead of her, her eyes wider than usual. She rises from the bed with silent dignity, her finger still in the book she has been reading, and walks out of the room. He hears her go down the stairs and then shut the living room door behind her.
“Why do you have to have such a talent for making me feel so damned guilty about everything I do?” he calls after her. “Saint fucking Kirsten. . . .” And he stamps his foot on the floor with sufficient force briefly to wake up his daughter in the room below.
Twenty minutes of rumination later, he follows Kirsten downstairs. She is sitting in the armchair, by the lamp, with a blanket around her shoulders. She doesn’t look up when he enters. He sits down on the sofa and puts his head in his hands. Next door in the kitchen, the fridge lets off an audible shiver as its thermostat kicks the motor on.
“You think it’s funny for me, all this, do you?” she says eventually, still without looking at him. “Throwing the best parts of my career away in order to manage two constantly exhausting, maddening, beautiful children and an oh-so-interesting on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown husband? Do you think this is what I dreamt of when I was fifteen and read Germaine Greer’s bloody Female Eunuch? Do you know how much nonsense I have to fill my head with every day of the week just so this household can function? And meanwhile all you can do is harbor some mysterious resentment about my supposedly having prevented you from reaching your full potential as an architect when the truth is that you yourself worry about money far more than I do, except you find it useful to blame me for your own caution. Because it’s always so much easier if it’s my fault. I ask one thing and one thing only from you: that you treat me with respect. I don’t care what you daydream about or what you may get up to when you go here and there, but I will not tolerate your being uncivil towards me. You think you’re the only one who gets bored of all this now and then? Let me tell you, I’m not constantly thrilled by it, either. In case it hasn’t occurred to you, there are times when I feel a little dissatisfied myself—and I certainly don’t want you policing me any more than you want me doing the same to you.”