The Course of Love Read Online Free

gift on her birthday. When she turned twelve, a package arrived containing a cardigan fit for a nine-year-old. Kirsten sent it back to an address in Cammachmore, along with a note advising the sender of her frank hope that he would die soon. There has been no word from him since.
    Had he left for another woman, he would merely have betrayed his wedding vows. But to leave his wife and child simply to be by himself, to have more of his own company, without ever furnishing a satisfactory account of his motives—this was rejection on an altogether deeper, more abstract, and more devastatingscale.
    Kirsten lies in Rabih’s arms while explaining. Her eyes are red. This is another part of her he loves: the weakness of the deeply able and competent person.
    On her side, she feels much the same about him—and in his own history there are no less sorrowful circumstances to recount. When Rabih was twelve, after a childhood marked by sectarian violence, roadblocks, and nights spent in air-raid shelters, he and his parents quit Beirut for Barcelona. But only half a year after they arrived there and settled into a flat near the old docks, his mother began to complain of a pain near her abdomen. She went to the doctor and, with an unexpectedness that would deal an irremediable blow to her son’s faith in the solidity of pretty much anything, received a diagnosis of advanced liver cancer. She was dead three months later. Within a year his father was remarried, to an emotionally distant Englishwoman with whom he now lives in retirement in an apartment in Cádiz.
    Kirsten wants, with an intensity that surprises her, to comfort the twelve-year-old boy across the decades. Her mind keeps returning to a picture of Rabih and his mother, taken two years before her death, on the tarmac at Beirut Airport with a Lufthansa jet behind them. Rabih’s mother worked on flights to Asia and America, serving meals at the front of the aircraft to wealthy businessmen, making sure seat belts were fastened, pouring drinks, and smiling at strangers while her son waited for her at home. Rabih remembers the overexcited near nausea he felt on the days she was due to return. From Japan she once brought him some notebooks made of fiber from mulberry trees, and from Mexico a painted figurine of an Aztec chief. She looked like afilm actress—Romy Schneider, people said.
    At the center of Kirsten’s love is a desire to heal the wound of Rabih’s long-buried, largely unmentioned loss.
    Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.
    â€œYou’re in your ‘angry-and-humiliated-yet-strangely-quiet’ mode again,” she diagnoses one evening when the car rental Web site Rabih has used to book himself and four colleagues a minibus freezes on him at the very last screen, leaving him in doubt whether it has properly understood his intentions and debited his card. “I think you should scream, say something rude, then come to bed. I wouldn’t mind. I might even call the rental place for you in the morning.” She somehow sees right into his inability to express his anger; she recognizes the process whereby he converts difficulty into numbness and self-disgust. Without shaming him, she can identify and name the forms his madness sometimes takes.
    With similar accuracy, she grasps his fear of seeming unworthy in his father’s eyes and, by extension, in the eyes of other male figures of authority. On their way in to a first meeting with his father at the George Hotel, she whispers to Rabih without