Later on, the argument makes even more sense around sex. Why would you think ill of a partner if they left you for an hour to go and rub a limited area of their body against that of a stranger? After all, you wouldn’t get enraged if they played chess with someone you didn’t know or joined a meditation group where they talked intimately of their lives by candlelight, would you?
Rabih can’t stop asking certain questions: Where was Kirsten last Thursday evening when he called her and got no answer? Whom is she trying to impress with her new black shoes? Why, when he types “Ben McGuire” into the search box on her laptop (which he has fired up in secret in the bathroom), does he get only boring work-related e-mails between the two of them? How and where else are they communicating? Have they set up hidden e-mail accounts? Is it Skype? Or some new encrypted service? And the most important and stupidest question of alclass="underline" What’s he like in bed?
The stupidity of jealousy makes it a tempting target for those in a moralizing mood. They should spare their breath. However unedifying and plain silly attacks of jealousy may be, they cannot be skirted: we should accept that we simply cannot stay sane on hearing that the person we love and rely on has touched the lips, or even so much as the hand, of another party. This makes no sense, of course—and runs directly counter to the often quite sober and loyal thoughts we may have had when we happened to betray someone in the past. But we are not amenable to reason here. To be wise is to recognize when wisdom will simply not be an option.
He tries consciously to slow down his breathing. It seems as if he might be angry, but at heart he’s merely terrified. He tries a technique he once heard described in a magazine: “Let’s imagine what Kirsten, if she did have a few experiences with Ben, might have meant by them. What did it mean when I was with Lauren? Did I want to abandon Kirsten? Emphatically no. So in all likelihood, when she was with Ben, she didn’t want to run off, either. She was probably just feeling ignored and vulnerable and wanted an affirmation of her sexuality—things she’s already told me she needs and that I need, too. Whatever she may have done was probably no worse than what happened in Berlin, which itself wasn’t really so bad. To forgive her would be to come to terms with some of the very same impulses I myself have had, and to see that they were no more the enemies of our marriage and our love for having been hers rather than mine.”
It sounds very logical and high-minded. Yet it makes no sliver of difference. He is starting to learn about “being good” but not in the normal, secondhand kind of way, by listening to a sermon or dutifully following social mores from a lack of choice or out of a passive, cowed respect for tradition. He is becoming a slightly nicer person by the most authentic and effective means possible: through having a chance to explore the long-term consequences of bad behavior from within.
So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others, sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative.
Irreconcilable Desires
He longs, firstly, for safety. Sunday nights in winter often feel particularly cozy somehow, with the four of them seated around the table eating Kirsten’s pasta, William giggling, Esther singing. It’s dark outside. Rabih has his favorite German pumpernickel bread. Afterwards there’s a game of Monopoly, a pillow fight, then a bath, a story, and bedtime for the children. Kirsten and Rabih climb into bed, too, to watch a film; they hold hands under the duvet, just as they did at the start, though now the rest is down to an almost embarrassed peck on the lips as the end credits roll, and both are asleep ten minutes later, secure and cocooned.
But he yearns, also, for adventure. Six thirty on those rare, perfect summer evenings in Edinburgh, when the streets smell of diesel, coffee, fried foods, hot tarmac, and sex. The pavements are crowded with people in cotton print dresses and loose-fitting jeans. Everyone sensible is heading home, but for those sticking around, the night promises warmth, intrigue and mischief. A young person in a tight top—perhaps a student or a tourist—passes by and confides the briefest of conspirational smiles, and in an instant everything seems within reach. In the coming hours, people will enter bars and discos, shout to make themselves heard over the throb of the music, and—buoyed by alcohol and adrenaline—end up entwined with strangers in the shadows. Rabih is expected back at the house to begin the children’s bath time in fifteen minutes.
Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronization might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.
Lauren texts Rabih to ask if they might speak online sometime. She would like to hear and ideally see him again: words just aren’t enough.
There’s a wait of ten days before Kirsten has something planned that will take her out of the house at night. The children keep him busy until it’s nearly time, and then, due to a weak Wi-Fi signal, he’s confined to the kitchen for the duration of the call. He has already checked to make sure, repeatedly, that neither Esther nor William is in need of a glass of water, but he turns to look at the door every few minutes anyway, just in case.
He’s never used FaceTime before, and it takes a while for him to get it set up. Two women are now in different ways relying on him. A few minutes and three passwords later, Lauren is suddenly there, as if she were waiting inside the computer all along.
“I miss you,” she says right away. It’s a sunny morning in Southern California.
She’s sitting in her kitchen—living room, wearing a casual blue striped top. She’s just washed her hair. Her eyes are playful and alive.
“I made coffee; do you want some?” she asks.
“Sure, and some toast.”
“You like it with butter, I seem to remember? Coming right up.”
The screen flickers for an instant. This is how love affairs will be conducted when we’ve colonized Mars, he thinks.
Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way they have of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry, and sensitive; they really may have the humor and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature: that everyone—not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts—but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.
The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.
When the image returns, he can just make out, in a far corner, what looks to be a drying rack with a few pairs of socks hung on it.
“By the way, where’s the reach-over-and-touch-your-lover button on this thing?” she wonders aloud.
He’s very much at her mercy. All she would need to do was look up his wife’s e-mail on the Edinburgh Council Web site and drop her a line.