Well said, Tampa.
You have me thinking about my BF. I know we said we loved each other when we were in jr/sr high, but after we started dating and having sex with girls, the only time we said the L word, is when one of us said, "There! Right there! Just like that! I love it!". We did sleep/cuddle with each other occasionally, but never held hands in front of the fireplace. I loved him, but I can't say I was in love with him, if that makes sense. We were comfortable with each other, and just had a good time together.
You bring back stuff that had been filed in my memory and almost forgotten. It's the fireplace that did it. A friend of mine, older and rich, was asking me one evening (he had had a bit to drink, as was and still is his wont) if I didn't ever miss sculpting. I think I said that thing people say about living in the moment, and trying not to "miss" anything, ever, from the past. But he insisted. He said he'd be willing to be my agent/angel, and create a grant that would allow me to carry on with my own business, but devote afternoons to producing a collection of the sculptures that he liked so much, which he'd find a gallery for in London, for a show. His commission would be 40% on the sale of the work, and though in the end I wouldn't get a very big share of the takings (because of the stipend he would have already advanced) it would nonetheless be a second start for me, getting back into the art world. So I said yes. In our bunch was a
Broke Straight Boys from Canada. He was really beautiful, with ice blue eyes and floppy light brown hair and an amazing body kept trim and hard by a meager diet and lots of exercise. And he knew how to weld. My mentor asked him to be the sculpting assistant, since the sculpts had always needed two guys to hold the different components in place for welding, and this collection was to be no different in approach. I wasn't thinking about doing anything with a guy, but did notice that I was very chuffed to have this beautiful kid on board. I was just 28 then, and he was almost 25. The age difference seemed to me to be a gaping, abysmal pit; I was almost old enough to be his dad for Chrissakes. Well, after a while he started coming home with me sometimes for a meal and we really got to know each other.
So, Paris, one night we stayed talking quite late in front of the fireplace, two floppy haired, really fit hotties, straight boys doin' guy stuff afternoons with welding torches and metal, relaxin' at the end of the day. I'm a good "fireman", with a certain wolfboy intuition regarding how a specific log behaves burning in a fireplace. I remember noticing that the four logs we had going had stopped flaming and were just pulsing out that midnight orange glow from inside. I knew that if I gave them the least tiny impulse, the least excuse to fire up, they'd flash alight again in a second. So I got up and tore off a tiny corner from a newspaper on the coffee table and flicked it in between two of the logs. The fire burst into life.
He's Canadian, OK, and these things are more important up there I guess. In any case as I sat back down I saw this terrifically complex expression on his face, and whatever it was he was saying had wound down in mid sentence. This look was one you couldn't ignore. After a few seconds of it he spoke. He'd just that second fallen in love with me he said. He looked really impressed by the fact, very serious, and maybe a bit scared. I really dumbly asked him "why just now?" (instead of weeks ago I suppose I meant, god I'm so stupid sometimes). I was too puzzled to be eloquent.
"Because of what you did with the fire," he said.
We worked together for months on that collection of sculpts, and despite all the stuff we did together during that time, the L word didn't crop up again. He came to London with me for the opening, and stayed. I came back here to Palma.
Three years later I heard that he'd signed up as a mercenary soldier in Angola and had died of a bunch of bullets in his belly. It took him three terrible days to do it. I've wished so often I'd told him at least once how much I loved him, but we were too straight for that.
(Here are a couple of newspaper photos I found on the internet from that show that Douglas and I put together so long ago.)
