The Adventure, part 2: Love, Or, What Happens in Vegas, Does Not Stay in Vegas

The possibility had been lurking in the back of my mind, but never really in a conscious way. It was there in the way that you casually wonder about all your heterosexual opposite-sex friends, trying once or twice to picture them naked and then getting weirded out and banishing those thoughts to some dusty and unused part of your head. Somehow the road trip was pushing the idea back into my conscious brain, but still, I hadn’t seriously entertained the idea of John and I together.

And here you think, “Then you laid eyes on him and everything fell into place.” Which is not quite what happened--it took a day.

T and I had spent the week traversing the dusty highways and byways of Utah and the Grand Canyon. We arrived in Vegas about mid-day on Friday. Because John was there for a convention, he was sharing a hotel room with a co-worker, and we spent the afternoon negotiating with the hotel for a new room, with two beds. Romance was far from my mind. I was hot and dusty from the week in Utah, tired of driving, and hungering for a civilized experience. T and I showered, changed into pretty dresses, and dragged John to Bouchon for dinner.

One of the things I love most about fine dining is the theatre of it. The ebb and flow of service, the multiple waiters, the various intricate pieces that, if done correctly, add up to more than the sum of their parts. The wine, the water, the courses, the crumbing of the table, the discussion of after-dinner drinks, the subtle exchange of silverware. After all, isn’t that why we go out? To have someone else prepare the food, bring it to us, and then clean up after us? I’ve dined alone many times and had a ball, but dining with close friends is always better. Especially in the pre-ordering negotiations, when we all got drawn into a long discussion of who was going to have what, in what order, and what wine would go best with all our various selections. Choices were eventually made, and we feasted. It was one of the finer meals in my life. I had veal cheeks, and sturgeon, and white burgundy. It was a far cry from our week of road food, beef jerky and instant oatmeal and barbecue potato chips.

Nothing happened that first night. How could it? T was there, in the next bed. And quite honestly, even if she hadn’t been, I would have fallen promptly asleep anyway. I was too tired and too happily drunk from the wine at dinner. John spent most of the night and the next day at the convention. So I drove T to the airport in the morning, and spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on my blogging and plotting the next part of the trip.

Then John returned.

He walked into the room, and we looked at each other.

And the universe shifted three inches to the left.

Like I said, not quite love at first sight, but close enough.

*

We met in undergrad, in either my junior or senior year. I confess I have no memory of our meeting, or our early friendship. Too many years have passed, and too many brain cells have been killed off in various ways, for me to have retained a completely clear memory of college. He claims it was in Tom Allen’s Shakespeare class, which sounds about right. I was dating, and then living with, and then engaged to, someone else, so I never thought of John as any sort of a romantic possibility. I do remember that when John and I started hanging out on a regular basis, we had a great time together. He had (and still has) a wonderfully wry and quirky sense of humor, and we bonded over “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and “Kids in the Hall.” When I got engaged, I wanted to include him in the wedding--doing his spot-on impression of the minister in The Princess Bride, doing the infamous “Mawwiage” speech.

Life intervened, of course. I graduated and moved two states away for an internship. He met someone and moved to Seattle to start a new life with her. My engagement fell apart and I started a new life elsewhere. We stayed in contact over the years, not necessarily close friends, but retaining the warm camaraderie of college days.

Fourteen years passed in this way. I moved to New York and went through a series of boyfriends, some serious, some not, while John got married, had a child, divorced, moved back to the East Coast, then moved back to the West Coast. We saw each other a few times in the intervening years, all on the East Coast; he even flew to New York for one of my parties. In all those years, we were never both single at the same time.

Until Vegas, that is.