The Course of Love Read Free

he might give her a hand with the bag of files she is carrying, in response to which she laughs and tells him not to be so sexist. It doesn’t seem the right moment to reveal that he would no less gladly help her to move house—or nurse her through malaria. Then again, it only amplifies Rabih’s enthusiasm that Kirsten doesn’t appear to need much help with anything at all—weakness being, in the end, a charming prospect chiefly in the strong.
    â€œThe thing is half of my department has just been let go, so I’m effectively doing the work of three people,” Kirsten explains, once they are seated. “I didn’t finish till ten last night, though that’s mostly because, as you may already have picked up, I am something of a control freak.”
    So frightened is he of saying the wrong thing, he can’t find anything to talk about—but because silence seems like proof of dullness, neither can he allow the pauses to go on. He ends up offering a lengthy description of how bridges distribute their loads across their piers, then follows up with an analysis of the relative braking speeds of tires on wet and dry surfaces. His clumsiness is at least an incidental sign of his sincerity: we tend not to get very anxiouswhen seducing people we don’t much care about.
    At every turn he senses the weakness of his claim upon Kirsten’s attention. His impression of her freedom and autonomy scares as much as it excites him. He appreciates the lack of any good reasons why she would ever bestow her affections upon him. He properly understands how little right he has to ask her to look upon him with the kindness which his many limitations require. At the perimeter of Kirsten’s life, he is at the apogee of modesty.
    Then comes the pivotal challenge of knowing whether the feeling is mutual, a topic of almost childlike simplicity nonetheless capable of sustaining endless semiotic study and detailed conjecture. She complimented him on his grey raincoat. She let him pay for their tea and papadum s. She was encouraging when he mentioned his ambition to return to architecture. Yet she seemed ill at ease, even a little irritated, on the three occasions when he tried to bring the conversation around to her past relationships. Nor did she pick up on his hint about catching a film.
    Such doubts only inflame desire. For Rabih, the most attractive people aren’t those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgment) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons—perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection—leave him turning for a little while in the wind.
    The longing proves, in its own way, exquisite.
    Eventually, Rabih looks up her phone number in the council paperwork and, one Saturday morning, texts his opinion that it might be sunny later. “I know,” comes the almost instantaneous reply.“On for a trip to the Botanics? Kx”
    Which is how they end up, three hours later, touring some of the world’s most unusual tree and plant species in Edinburgh’s botanical gardens. They see a Chilean orchid, they are struck by the complexity of a rhododendron, and they pause between a fir tree from Switzerland and an immense redwood from Canada whose fronds stir in a light wind coming in off the sea.
    Rabih has run out of energy to formulate the meaningless comments which typically precede such events. It is thus out of a sense of impatient despair rather than arrogance or entitlement that he cuts Kirsten off in mid-sentence as she reads from an information plaque, “Alpine trees should never be confused with—” and takes her face in his hands, pressing his lips gently against hers, to which she responds by shutting her eyes and wrapping her arms tightly around