Kirsten is a woman of considerable steeliness and authority. She manages a department at work, she earns more than her lover, she is confident and a leader. She has known from a young age that she must be able to take care of herself.
However, in bed with Rabih, she now discovers that she’d like to assume a different role, as a form of escape from the wearying demands of the rest of her life. Her being submissive to him means allowing a loving person to tell her exactly what to do, letting him take responsibility and choice away from her.
The idea has never appealed to her before, but only because she believed that most bossy people were not to be trusted; they didn’t seem, as Rabih does, truly kind and utterly nonviolent by nature (she playfully calls him “Sultan Khan”). She’s craved independence in part by default, because there have been no Ottoman potentates around who were nice enough to deserve her weaker self.
For his part, Rabih has all his adult life had to keep his bossiness sharply in check, and yet, in his deeper self, he’s aware of having a sterner side to his nature. He is sometimes sure he knows what’s best for other people and what they rightly have coming to them. In the real world he may be a powerless minor associate in a provincial urban-design firm, with strong inhibitions around expressing what he really thinks; but in bed with Kirsten he can feel the appeal of casting aside his customary reserve and enforcing absolute obedience, just as Suleiman the Magnificent might have done in his harem in the marble and jade palace on the shores of the Bosphorus.
The games of submission and domination, the rule-breaking scenarios, the fetishistic interest in particular words or parts of the body—all offer opportunities to investigate wishes that are far from being simply peculiar, pointless, or slightly demented. They offer brief utopian interludes in which we can, with a rare and real friend, safely cast off our normal defenses and share and satisfy our longings for extreme closeness and mutual acceptance—which are the real psychologically rooted reasons why games are, in the end, so exciting.
They fly to Amsterdam for a weekend and, midway there, over the North Sea, elope to the toilet. They’ve discovered an enthusiasm for having a go at it in semipublic places, which seems to bring into sudden, risky, but electrifying alignment both their sexual sides and the more formal public personae they normally have to present. They feel as though they are challenging responsibility, anonymity, and restraint with their uninhibited and heated moments. Their pleasure becomes somehow the more intense for the presence of 240 oblivious passengers only one thin door panel away.
It’s cramped in the bathroom, but Kirsten manages to unzip Rabih and take him into her mouth. She has mostly resisted doing this with other men in the past, but with him the act has become a constant and compelling extension of her love. To receive the apparently dirtiest, most private, guiltiest part of her lover into the most public, most respectable part of herself is symbolically to free them both from the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good—in the process, as they fly through the glacial lower atmosphere towards Scheveningen at 400 kilometers an hour, returning unity to their previously divided and shamed selves.
The Proposal
Over Christmas, their first spent together, they return to Kirsten’s mother’s house in Inverness. Mrs. McLelland shows him maternal kindness (new socks, a book on Scottish birds, a hot-water bottle for his single bed) and, although it is skillfully concealed, constant curiosity. Her inquiries, beside the kitchen sink after a meal or on a walk around the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, have a surface casualness to them, but Rabih is under no illusion. He is being interviewed. She wants to understand his family, his previous relationships, how his work in London came to an end, and what his responsibilities are in Edinburgh. He is being assessed as much as he can be in an age which doesn’t allow for parental vetting and which insists that relationships will work best if no outside arbiters are awarded authority, for romantic unions should be the unique prerogative of the individuals concerned—excluding even those who may have, not so many years ago, given one of the pair her bath every evening and, on weekends, taken her to Bught Park in a pram to throw bread to the pigeons.
Having no say does not mean, however, that Mrs. McLelland has no questions. She wonders if Rabih will prove to be a philanderer or a spendthrift, a weakling or a drunk, a bore or the sort to resolve an argument with a little force—and she is curious because she knows, better than most, that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.
When, on their last day together, Mrs. McLelland remarks to Rabih over lunch what a pity it is that Kirsten never sang another note after her father left home, because she had a particularly promising voice and a place in the treble section of the choir, she isn’t just sharing a detail of her daughter’s former extracurricular activities; she is—as much as the rules allow—asking Rabih not to ruin Kirsten’s life.
They take the train back to Edinburgh the evening before New Year’s Eve, a four-hour ride across the Highlands in harness to an aging diesel. Kirsten, a veteran of the journey, has known to bring along a blanket, in which they wrap themselves in the empty rear carriage. Seen from distant farms, the train must look like an illuminated line, no larger than a millipede, making its way across a pane of blackness.
Kirsten seems preoccupied.
“No, nothing at all,” she replies when he asks, but no sooner has she uttered her denial than a tear wells up, more rapidly followed by a second and a third. Still, it really is nothing, she stresses. She is being silly. A dunderhead. She doesn’t mean to embarrass him, all men hate this kind of thing, and she doesn’t plan to make it a habit. Most importantly, it has nothing to do with him. It is her mother. She is crying because, for the first time in her adult life, she feels properly happy—a happiness which her own mother, with whom she has an almost symbiotic connection, has so seldom known. Mrs. McLelland worries that Rabih might make her sad; Kirsten cries with guilt at how happy her lover has helped her to become.
He holds her close to him. They don’t speak. They have known each other for a little over six months. It wasn’t his plan to bring this up now. But just past the village of Killiecrankie, after the ticket collector’s visit, Rabih turns to face Kirsten and asks, without preamble, if she will marry him—not necessarily right away, he adds, but whenever she feels it is right, and not necessarily with any fuss, either. It could be a tiny occasion—just them and her mother and a few friends—but of course it could be bigger too if that’s what she prefers; the key thing is that he loves her without reservation and wants, more than anything he’s ever wanted before, to be with her as long as he lives.
She turns away and is, for a few moments, perfectly silent. She isn’t very good at these sorts of moments, she confesses, not that they often happen, or indeed ever. She doesn’t have a speech ready—this has come like a bolt from the blue—but how different it is from what ordinarily happens to her; how deeply kind and mad and courageous of him to come out with something like this now. And yet, despite her cynical character and her firm belief that she doesn’t care for these things—so long as he has truly understood what he wants and has noted what a monster she is—she can’t really see why she wouldn’t say, with all her heart and with immense fear and gratitude, yes, yes, yes.
It tells us something about the relative status of rigorous analysis in the nuptial process that it would be considered un-Romantic, and even mean, to ask an engaged couple to explain in any depth, with patience and self-awareness, what exactly had led them to make and accept a proposal. But we’re keen, of course, always to ask where and how the proposal took place.