The Course of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 notto 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