“It’s right here on mine,” he replies.
In an instant his mind shoots forward to a possible future with Lauren. He imagines living with her in L.A. in that apartment, after the divorce. They would make love on the couch, he would cradle her in his arms, they’d stay up late talking about their vulnerabilities and longings and would drive over to Malibu to eat shrimp at a little place she’d know by the ocean. But they’d also need to put out the laundry, wonder who would fix the fuses, and get cross because the milk ran out.
It’s in part because he likes her a lot that he really doesn’t want this to go any further. He knows himself well enough to realize how unhappy he would ultimately make her. In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.
Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.
“I miss you,” she says again.
“Likewise. I’m also intently staring at your laundry back there over your shoulder. It’s very pretty.”
“You mean and perverted man!”
To develop this love story—one logical consequence of his enthusiasm—would in reality end up being the most self-centered and uncaring thing he could do to Lauren, not to mention his wife. Real generosity, he recognizes, means admiring, seeing through the urge for permanence, and walking away.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say . . . ,” Rabih begins.
As he talks through his reservations, she is patient with his stumbles and what she calls his tendency towards “Middle Eastern sugarcoating,” throws in some humor about being fired as his mistress, but is gracious, decent, understanding, and, above all, kind.
“There aren’t many people like you on the earth,” he concludes, and he means it.
What guided him in Berlin was the sudden hope of bypassing some of the shortcomings of his marriage by means of a new but contained foray into someone else’s life. But as he perceives it now, such hope could only ever have been sentimental claptrap and a form of cruelty in which everyone involved would stand to lose and be hurt. There could be no tidy settlement possible in which nothing would be sacrificed. Adventure and security are irreconcilable, he sees. A loving marriage and children kill erotic spontaneity, and an affair kills a marriage. A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be. He doesn’t downplay the loss either way. Saying good-bye to Lauren means safeguarding his marriage but it also means denying himself a critical source of tenderness and elation. Neither the love rat nor the faithful spouse gets it right. There is no solution. He is in tears in the kitchen, sobbing more deeply than he has in years: about what he has lost, what he has endangered, and how punishing the choices have been. He has just about enough time to compose himself between the moment the key turns in the lock and Kirsten enters the kitchen.
The weeks that follow will prove a mixture of relief and sadness. His wife will ask him on a couple of occasions if anything is wrong, and the second time he will make a great effort to adjust his manner so that she won’t have to ask him again.
Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.
We have not been singled out. Marrying anyone, even the most suitable of beings, comes down to a case of identifying which variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.
In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: “We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”
After the solemn repetition of the last sentence by the congregation, the couple would continue: “We will endeavor to be faithful. At the same time, we are certain that never being allowed to sleep with anyone else is one of the tragedies of existence. We apologize that our jealousies have made this peculiar but sound and non-negotiable restriction very necessary. We promise to make each other the sole repository of our regrets rather than distribute them through a life of sexual Don Juanism. We have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is to each other we have chosen to bind ourselves.”
Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer be at liberty furiously to complain that they had expected their partner to be content with them alone. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, “I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness which our hard-won marriage represents.”
Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal not of intimate joy but of a reciprocal pledge to endure the disappointments of marriage with bravery and stoic reserve.
Secrets
No relationship could start without a commitment to wholehearted intimacy. But in order for love to keep going, it also seems impossible to imagine partners not learning to keep a great many of their thoughts to themselves.
We are so impressed by honesty that we forget the virtues of politeness; a desire not always to confront people we care about with the full, hurtful aspects of our nature.
Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who can’t tolerate secrets, who in the name of “being honest” shares information so wounding to the other that it can never be forgotten—this person is no friend of love. And if we suspect (as we should regularly if our relationship is a worthy one) that our partner is also lying (about what she’s thinking of, how he judges our work, where she was last night, etc.), then we would do well not to act the sharp and relentless inquisitor. It may be kinder, wiser, and closer to the true spirit of love to pretend we simply didn’t notice.
For Rabih, there is no alternative but to lie forever about what happened in Berlin. He has to because he knows that telling the truth would beget an even greater order of falsehood: the profoundly mistaken belief that he no longer loves Kirsten or else that he is a man who can no longer be trusted in any area of life. The truth risks distorting the relationship far more than the untruth.
In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants. It has its justification in stabler and more enduring phenomena than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and, more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the daily satisfactions of those who created them.
For most of recorded history, people stayed married because they were keen to fit in with the expectations of society, had a few assets to protect, and wanted to maintain the unity of their families. Then gradually another, very different standard took hold: couples were to remain together, ran the thought, only so long as certain feelings still obtained between them—feelings of authentic enthusiasm, desire, and fulfillment. In this new Romantic order, spouses could be justified in parting ways if the marital routine had become deadening, if the children were getting on their nerves, if sex was no longer enticing, or if either party had lately been feeling a little unhappy.