Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [134]
The big obstacle for any woman I had started to get close to up until then was Hurtwood. I loved this house, as I had been there a good part of my life, and it would be important for any woman who came into my life to feel comfortable there, too. Almost all of the women I brought there had found it overwhelming, even threatening. Maybe the atmosphere, with all its memories, was too daunting, who knows? But from the very start, Melia was fine. She loved it, and we had a great time there together. In the early days, our age difference was a bit of a problem for me, though only in terms of how it is viewed by others, for as much as I like to pretend that I don’t care what people think, I really do. I am a chronic, though recovering, people pleaser. But that soon passed, and the strength of our mutual attraction far outweighed anything as superfluous as age, and if she didn’t care, why should I?
When we started to live together, I suddenly felt as if a huge weight was off my shoulders. All the competitiveness and comparative thinking I had experienced in the past just disappeared. I suddenly found myself with a friend and a lover, and the two sides were actually compatible. I didn’t have to look around anymore. My age or her youth seemed pretty irrelevant because the fundamental ingredients were right. We enjoyed each other’s company, respected each other’s feelings, and shared very distinct similarities in our tastes. Most important, we were drawn to one another through love and friendship. Imagine how this felt for me, having just lost the one woman I could never get close to. I had finally found someone who was not only available, but also seemed to have my best interests at heart. The mold was finally broken. Maybe it broke when my mother died, I don’t know. The important thing was, at the age of fifty-four, I had probably made the first healthy choice in a partner in my entire life.
I was happy for the first time in as long as I could remember, and I didn’t really have a plan, workwise or domestically. I just wanted to live in the moment for a while without any resolution. I sensed, however, that Melia wanted, or maybe needed, to know where our life was going. We would talk about it, and I would evade the issue to a certain extent. I had become used to living on my own, and in the years of recovery had learned to enjoy my own company. Committing to a full-time relationship at this point in my life would mean giving up an awful lot of territory, as well as time, which I had only just learned to cherish. I also knew, intuitively, that this was as good as it was ever going to get for me, so really my choice wasn’t too difficult. I had had a good run, if you can call it that, and I was happy to know that my life was entering a new, fuller phase. I had achieved as much as I could on my own, and now I had a chance to find out what a real partnership was like. It would be pure insanity to walk away from this.
Musically, life was full, too. Over thirty years since we had first jammed together at the Café Au Go Go, I finally cut the album with B. B. King that he and I had been talking about for a long time. We called it Riding with the King. Working with B. B. was a dream come true, and I put together a band that I felt could rise to the occasion. I remembered the Atlantic session years ago with Aretha, where there were wall-to-wall guitar players, and thought I’d like to give that concept a try. On bass it was Nathan East as usual, Steve Gadd on drums, Tim Carmen and Joe Sample on keyboards, and Doyle Bramhall, Andy Fairweather Low, and myself on guitars. On one track Jimmie Vaughan joined us, and his contribution worked so well, I kind of wished I’d asked him to play on each song.
All this time I was living in LA with Melia, in the house I had bought a year earlier, when I thought that I might move to LA. It was a beautiful modern construction built by the Japanese architect Isozaki.