Carmenere interrupted (a fruity fiction/non-fiction blend)

It’s somewhere past midnight and the music has taken a bit of a down-tempo chill and I’m wondering why I stayed on at the bar after my friends left. I smirk to myself, remember the days when my friends and I didn’t leave whatever watering hole we had hunkered down in for the night: it was the ghastly glare of the ugly lights at closing that would ultimately tumble us out into the streets, talking wildly of nothing. So maybe I’m trying to recapture my youth, but I’m pretty sure it’s less about that and more that I don’t want to go home to my empty apartment just yet. Oddly, the bar had seemed more friendly and intellectual when I had been conversing with my mates, and as I sip my fourth? fifth? glass of Carmenere I realize two things: I’ve had too much red wine, and the friendliness and intellectual capacity that I had felt when surrounded by my friends existed solely because of my friends. They left me behind with some bar stars and a couple of aspiring drug dealers and the rest of the lot are just indistinguishable rabble.
“Fucking rabble,” I commiserate with my half empty (full? empty? full?) glass of wine and stifle a yawn. I wish I’d had the foresight to bring a book or a pick up a Georgia Straight before coming in so I could at least pretend to be engrossed in it instead of feigning interest in Sports Central or whatever channel it is that is being loudly and predominately displayed near the bar. But then I really didn’t anticipate hanging out alone in a bar on this particular Saturday night to begin with. I start to cast my vicious and cutting gaze around the room, playing the age old game, “who would you fuck?”. There are a surprisingly high number of candidates. I think this has to do with the quantity of wine I have quaffed, but we’re talking about the actual act of coitus here, not love and commitment. They are. Two. Distinct. Things.
“You look a little lost in thought, there,” he says. I have no one but myself to blame. He saw me do my little meat market trawl and here he is, ripe for the plucking.
I turn and give him my best bemused, sardonic twisting of the lips and he takes this as an invitation to sit down across from me. In the twenty seconds that have passed I have noticed that he is quite attractive, is likely less drunk than I am and has a certain amount of kindness in his manner. This is atypical.
“I’m John,” he tells me, wrapping his large, warm hand around mine and making me feel vaguely like I’ve been caught doing something untoward.
And then the phone rings in real life and I might normally ignore it, but its Michael’s distinctive ring and I always want to talk to him. He asks me if I had called him this evening and I say no, I didn’t and then he asks again if I’d tried to call because he had been on the phone for quite a while and I say “No, I didn’t call you” and he says, “Why?” and we both laugh. And then he tells me about the fictional book he’s reading about Frank Lloyd Wright (the architect, whose lover and her children, as well as some of his employees were killed by one of Wright’s servants) and how it appears that one of Frank’s clients is all “a-twitter” around him and it looks like it’s leading up to an affair and I say, “Do you think that maybe we might….” and he says, “…be murdered?” and I say, “No. Maybe we could... you know, have an affair?” and he says, “We could. Oh, you mean with each other?”.
So I think I would like to get back to John and Sandra because they were about to have a very deep conversation about the good and evil that abounds in our world, and come up with a rather karmic explanation as to why such a disparity exists. Of course the conversation would be a little more illustrative and engrossing than that which I’ve just plainly described: Sandra would come away from the evening both mesmerized by the topic at hand and by the way John sensed her loneliness and held her proverbial hand as she worked through her muddled thoughts, but did not take advantage of her because he recognized a kindred spirit and the culmination of their conversation and his actions would leave her buoyant and changed.
Have an affair. Yes, with each other.
I’m going to bed. I shall attempt to finish this anon. And if you’re having problems following the plotline, try a couple of glasses of Carmenere.