After two months, or thereabouts. when I had made the shack into a home of reasonable comfort and attractiveness, I began to paint again.  I had bought canvas and stretchers, and acquired a few more tubes of paint and some additional brushes.  I painted the snow scene outside the living room window, realizing just how much cobalt needed to be added to the white to get the color of the snow.  I painted, stylistically, the busted rocking chair I had found in the barn.  The chair represented, I believe, security. The chair runner, however, rests on the edge of a precipice in danger of falling.   In the background is the strange windowless, three story and empty adobe house in the desert from a familiar and recurring dream I was having.  There is humor in the painting and green growing things, the last two vital for peace of mind.  I knew, by then, that I would survive without scars.

One sunny Sunday afternoon I was invited for drinks with Bruce and Fritz.  I cleaned up and dressed up as much as I thought the occasion demanded and walked the quarter mile path through the wood to their house. Set back from the road, in a small tree-surrounded field, their two story farm house had been modernized, landscaped and kept in good order…no flaking clapboards and leaking roofs in that place.  I rapped on the side door and walked into the vestibule.  Bruce guffawed a welcome.  The sun-filled kitchen was warm and inviting. Geraniums actually in bloom sat on the window sills. Highly polished copper-bottomed pots and fry-pans hung from ceiling hooks. Stove and counter tops gleamed.  It was lovely.

“Boots OFF…before you hit the kitchen”, Fritz shouted. “We’ve just done the floor.  ”He was standing at a tiled counter squeezing anchovy paste onto crackers and arranging them on a tray of canapés.  “Bruce….DRINKS”…

Fritz looked like a German lion-tamer I once saw snapping his whip at a couple of lions in a big cage on “Animal Planet”.  He was of medium height with a wide, rather featureless face, his blond-grey hair slicked back and receding either side of his scalp.  The whole tonsure appeared to be carefully coiffed and waved giving the impression that liberal palm-fulls of mousse had been applied to it before Fritz considered himself ready for company..Fritz was, incidentally, of German ancestry. Not that that fact has got anything to do with anything significant.

“Go through there, Dear, and sit down”  Bruce waved a hand in the direction of the living room beyond an archway.  “Manhattan, all right?”  he asked.  “It’s a bit too cold for gin.”

Elizabeth and Bob had also been invited and were sitting side by side on an enormous sofa, each of them sipping from tumblers decorated with Hawaiian Hula dancers..

“D’you believe this place?”  Elizabeth whispered to me, after we had greeted each other.  “Isn’t it something ELSE?”  I sunk deep with susurrating sound of air escaping from the cushion of a large, square overstuffed chair and looked around. “I don’t know.,.but boy scouts could camp out under these lamp shades” I whispered back. “Talk about gargantuan” Elizabeth gave a snort of laughter into her glass. “Shut up…the two of you”  Bob said quietly. “Free drinks… be nice”

Mein Herr Priapus was featured here and there in the living room…saucy and suggestive sayings were embroidered onto sofa cushions and a foot high molded candle of purplish gray wax in the shape of a penis, supported by a base of two mighty gonads was parked, in pride of place, in the middle of the coffee table. On one wall was a framed charcoal drawing of a young man with an enormous erection. He gazed dreamily off at a far horizon, appearing totally unaware of the tumult going on beneath his waistline.

The whole décor was curiously gross.  Overstuffed, tufted shiny leather sofas had arms flat and wide enough to hold drinks in tumblers, ashtrays and small plates of “nibbles”. The fire was laid in the fire place but not lit  In place of the open fire a small electric burner was doing its best to lend a little warmth and welcome to the atmosphere. The furniture, best described as baronial, was foreign to the house and to the area. No matter, Bruce and Fritz entertained us with amusing snippets of local gossip, particularly about a friend of theirs who lived in the village. A woman, they said, with fondness for vodka martinis and German illustrated pornographic picture books. They called her “the Trollop” and were, they assured us, very fond of her.

Bruce, I noticed, was the “fetch and carry guy”. Fritz, languid and elegant, one arm draped across a sofa back was the Grand Dame to Bruce’s Maitre d’ hotel. Bruce obviously adored Fritz, Fritz, one felt, was tolerant and reliant only. It obviously worked well for them. They had been together for decades.

“Bruce get out the stuff we bought in Hawaii” Fritz drawled. “And I could do with another drink, dear, while you’re up”

Bruce leapt to attention. “Drink first, yes…anybody else for a refill?” I believe all three of his guests said “Yes, please” and held an empty glass in his direction.

The souvenirs were sick-making. Ghastly, crudely carved statues with dropsied bellies and truly malevolent grimacing faces, huge sombreros with shiny raffia embroidery that nobody but a drunk for a wager would stick on his head… It’s hard to fathom, sometimes, what possesses tourists to bring home the stuff they find for sale. It must be a sort of madness that takes over at a foreign booth. A garish raffia sombrero was about as suitable for Fritz as a pair of peek-a-boo knickers, say, on Margaret Thatcher.

Most curiously, however, the “Boys” both seemed to feel that they had made rather clever choices and were well pleased with the loot. People can be very strange, that’s certain.

After a while, when we were all laughed out, half drunk and running out of conversation, Bruce disappeared for five minutes and returned, sashaying down the stairs and into the living room wearing an evening gown of dark blue chiffon fabric with a sequin or two on the ruched bodice.  Bruce, the husband of the couple, was not pretty. Swarthy, with black slicked back hair, a square face on a strong and thickly muscled body, the old sweetheart did not look hot in a dress.

Hardly registering, we all resumed the conversation where it had left off, while Bruce sat, unconcerned in ball grown and brown suede loafers, sipping his Manhattan.

They were charming hosts, sort of “doing their best” to entertain. The buzz around town was that they entertained friends from “the city”…Boston or New York, every weekend, and all sorts of “goings on” were the order of the day on these occasions. The locals, I gathered, were approving and tolerant in large part but prone to intrigued hilarity over green bean and flannel hash suppers round a country kitchen table of a dark evening.

I believe that some friends -“Oscar and Bosie” (so to speak) had cancelled a scheduled visit and that we three, their “Renters” had been invited as a “Let’s get the obligation over with” stop-gap option. I doubted that we would ever be invited again.

During the following summer I was to become aware of their weekend parties as music, loud voices and even an occasional high-pitched shriek of excited hilarity wafted across the meadow from gatherings on their flagstone patio.

Within fifteen years Fritz would be dead.  Bruce, devoted to the point of obsession, never left his side but practically lived at the hospital where his lover and closest friend was dying slowly of cancer. They had, by that time, sold their house and moved together into a trailer on a small corner of their same property. We saw them fairly often over the years and always with pleasure.

When Fritz was dead, Bruce, it seemed, merely went through the motion of living. He lost energy, verve and much interest in anything. He lived on alone dealing with his own medical problems of increased old age. He had unspecified breakdown of his internal organs. He had curious lesions on his scalp and face from skin cancer.

Asked to our summer garden parties, as he always was, he rallied for the occasion, wearing a crepe turban to over the skin cancer soreson his scalp. Not able to walk easily he sat, rooted to a cushioned wicker chair and, cigarette in one hand and drink in the other, he held court, dredging up amusing stories from his well-traveled and colorful life…

They are both dead now. Long gone and missed forever. They belong in a period of my life that seems, in retrospect, to have been peopled by characters of beyond everyday occurrence. Yet, I suppose, nostalgia clothes them too colorfully. Whoever they were I am glad to have been a friend. And that I know is the truth.