Mark

I love the kind way you treat the pansies as if they were roses. Your belly button. Your moustache and beard. I love it when you hug me.

We met entirely by chance. I had no idea that we would later become lovers and life-partners. Both of us were stopping overnight at a hotel. A mutual friend had left a note for you at the desk suggesting you give me a call if you had a spare moment.

You did. I happened to be in my room. If I hadn’t, it is extremely doubtful we would ever have met. We seem to share a number of mutual interests and friends. I liked you, but didn’t think too much about it.
You said offhandedly that you planned to move from San Francisco to L.A. in a few months because of your work. My home was in L.A. We said we would keep in touch.

I love your face just before you wake up. Going to the movies with you. Your laughter.

Several months later I gave a benefit poetry reading in L.A. for the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. It was in the colorful Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theatre at Barnsdall Park. The friend who initially brought us together called to say you would be in town on a short business visit and he would bring you as a guest.
Searching the audience with my eyes, however, revealed that he was seated with someone else. My heart sank. The evening suddenly bored me and became a burden to bear.

It was then I realized how much I cared about you.

I love working with you in the garden. When you get fresh flowers for us each week. Looking at the Channel Two news with you at eleven in bed.

Shortly after you moved to L.A. I asked you to have dinner with me. Looking out my window I saw you park your car and trudge up the steps to my place. Carrying your bulging briefcase, you looked tired. I made us martinis and we talked for a while.

I had made reservations at a Pasadena restaurant. It was supposed to be fun and serve good food. But we found it boring, anachronistic, sedate and uptight. An unsmiling piano player tickled the ivories providing background music like “Tea for Two” for the subdued diners.

Clearly a change of mood was in order. I asked you to dance. You responded with alacrity. I wore my white suit, you were in black, and we engaged in Astaire-Rogers cheek-to-cheek dancing. Did I hear a plate drop from a waiter’s hand, a knife hit the floor, a spoon brush a cup? The self-consciously respectable room came to life. We did a deep dip, paid the check, and left. But then we couldn’t find the car. A magical state of euphoria had apparently taken over our senses.

We did the only sensible thing by going directly home and to bed. Ours was an explosive, passionate, but also tender coming together.

Something was underway. I wasn’t sure what.

I love going out dancing or to a party with you, making Italian spaghetti or gazpacho for you, folding your clean clothes when I take them out of the dryer.

Always we spent Friday nights at your place during the weeks and months that passed. On Saturdays we went out to brunch, visited art museums, hiked, drove to the beach, lay in the sun and swam in the ocean, talked and laughed and shared dreams and visions. Our love deepened. So did our understanding of each other.
I sensed how independent you were. I wondered if you would want to make a commitment.

We traveled together. I remember a romantic week in New York City filled with the theatre, opera, a favorite restaurant in the Village, a visit to the Frick and MOMA, your friends and mine. We drove from L.A. to Big Sur, Carmel, San Francisco, Napa and Yosemite. We enjoyed frolicking naked on windswept beaches, ate fresh berries by a roaring fire to the music of Vivaldi at Dietjen Inn, went mud-bathing and wine-tasting and visited Tassajara, the Buddhist retreat center in the wilderness, where we shared quite and simplicity. Later, at Cabo San Lucas we took a parachute ride over the bay, ate lobster, and made love.

I love being able to share anger and tears with you, joy and fun. Listening with you to the rain falling on the roof.

One Saturday morning at your place I noticed you had cleaned the kitchen and were getting ready to carry out the trash. I offered to take it. But you refused. “I’ll take care of it,” you said adamantly.
Around six months later, however, I was seated reading the morning paper in your place as you tidied up the kitchen. “Malcolm, will you take out the trash?” you asked irritably.

It seemed a significant change had occurred in our relationship. You were giving up control over your sovereign domain, and inviting me to come inside.

A few weeks later over dinner in a crowded and noisy restaurant, when everybody else appeared to be totally oblivious of us, I took a ring out of my pocket and offered it to you. You accepted it.

I love hugging you before falling asleep and waking up with you.

The passing years have been kind to us. Long ago we agreed not to squander joy by exacerbating troubled moments, cutting off communication, and letting our imaginations run riot. We have disagreements and succumb sometimes to the weight of anxiety and rage at life’s exigencies, but manage to share moods and hurts, and stay sensitive to each other’s feelings.

I like the fact that we actively seek out relaxation and play. I remember fondly a week at a deserted beach on Kauai, another on a solitary and sun-drenched shore outside Cancun when I napped beneath a palm tree, using a coconut shell for a pillow; driving up the coast from L.A. for a weekend together, going out dancing with abandon, hiking or looking at art.

I know you, through and through, biblically and otherwise. Your moods and responses to life are not strangers to me. Sometimes you can be terribly irritating, and there are moments when you drive me crazy. I wouldn’t change you for all the world; you are original, fresh, honest, sweet to a fault, and work at friendship more sincerely than anyone I’ve ever met. I confess: I like you.