One of my deeply treasured pastimes is enjoying a leisurely, long bath with James Gibson. It’s a new favourite. He didn’t like baths before, and he’s not one to spontaneously alter his ways, so it’s been a slow and gentle journey to bath-time bliss. But I love it so much.
I say: Would you like to have a bath? And he says: Really? (He still finds it strange, luxurious, old world, and unexpected.) I say: Yes. And he says: Okay. We’ll run the bath – not too hot, or it becomes a sweat-box – and I’ll decorate the texture and the pleasure of the experience with lavender bath salts, or Radox muscle soothe, or some wonderfully fragrant bath gel, like caramel, or lemon & lime.
We’ll get in the bath and lie down. Rest. Resting. Rested. We both ease back, our heads at either end of the bathtub. We give in. When you lean back and relax completely, the ledge feels comfortable at your neck, and you let the heavy bath take the weight from your poor, tired head. You let your limbs melt. The water gives your whole body a huge hug, and you feel safe and comforted; somehow happier. Sometimes we have music. Sometimes candles. Sometimes, nothing: the bathroom is plain, and there are small water sounds, and we are held by the warmth.
He talks. Oh! Does he talk. We’ll be in the bath for an hour, and I’ll ask him a question, and he will talk for an hour. And I love it. I rest, and I understand that, for now, I don’t need to do or think about anything else. I can lie very still, and listen to James talk. He’s an eloquent speaker; he chooses his words carefully and thoughtfully. When he’s thinking how to best describe a situation, or a person, or how to best phrase a thought, or an idea, or a conflict, he pauses for as long as he needs, to think. The room is quiet. He finds the perfect words, and invites me into his mind, again.
He’s talking about dogs.
“My parents took in an insane, orphan border collie and she was so aloof that I never really got to know her.” Long pause. “She went missing one weekend that I was visiting and we spent hours looking for her without success… A few days later, my ma called me at court to say that she’d found her floating in the dam.” Pause. “The image of it was so sad. It’s horrible when dogs die.”
He’s talking about childhood.
“I developed asthma as an infant and my parents had no idea what it was. It became full-blown pneumonia and I was hospitalised for a while; fucker nearly took me out. I had a couple more minor hospital admissions in my early years and it’s sort of plateaued since adolescence, but ‘sickly kid’ is pretty apposite.” Pause. “I occasionally wonder if I would have become a different person if I’d been able to play sports with my friends. Instead, I sort of retreated inside to books and computers and took a completely different social trajectory.”
Long pause. A world of pause.
“I really hated school. High school, in particular, was a consistently horrible experience; six years of being pushed down repeatedly. So when, at the end of Year 12, when all of the other students were getting teary-eyed and nostalgic about leaving one another and going out into the world alone, I was actually euphoric. And it really irritated me that kids who had made my life hell for the past half-decade suddenly wanted to make like they were going to miss me; I certainly wasn’t going to miss them.” Pause. “There was a Year 12 formal, a party, and a valedictory dinner, and I bailed on all of them. The day after the valedictory dinner, the Year 12 co-ordinator took me aside and told me off for not attending; it transpires that he’d awarded me the English prize and things got a bit awkward when he called my name to collect it and nobody came up. That was fine with me.”
He’s talking about books.
“Before I slept, I read a couple of chapters of ‘The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love’. The last chapter described the colossal heartbreak in Nestor’s past and the longing in his soul.” Pause. “I dreamed of a great heartbreak in my past; not one in particular but a conflation of lesser heartbreaks that did. And I was Nestor, and I was lost.” Pause. The sound of water, lapping.” I should have woken a great deal sadder than I did.”
I listen.
All of my muscles become drowsy. All of my skin cells drink the water, and fall asleep. Sometimes we’ll kiss. I’ll climb over his body and hug him, underwater. Particularly, when the water is cooling off, I hold him close and use his body for heat. I like seeing his body. We say: We need to make time for this. We need to make time to be naked together.
It took a while to convince him about baths. When I first met him, I saw his flat had a bath, and I asked if he ever had one. No way, he said. I’m not into baths. But gradually, he’s seen me take my time, enjoying myself, resting and relaxing in peace. When we went on holiday this year to the small, summery beach town of Byron Bay, we chose a place with an enormous spa bath. We woke up in the morning, had a bath. Walked around town, had a bath, with beer. Left the water in. Came back from dinner, hopped back into the bath, with herbal tea. It was hot in Byron; even late at night, the water was still warm. We talked, and lay there in silence, and closed our eyes, and talked some more.
That’s his picture, up top. He always looks like that. I love him, and I love spending time with him, and I love the luxury of our bathing ritual. I met him on OkCupid. When I asked him to send me a picture of him at work, he sent me this:
