I Found True Love on the Las Vegas Strip

I’d been hesitant about accompanying my brother on his annual Vegas New Year’s trip with his buddies. I had no friends who might want to come with us — really, no friends at all in those days. It was 1996, and I was 22.

The last time I’d been to Vegas, it was at age 19 to marry my high school boyfriend. That was the year my mother was dying, a year punctuated by trips back home to sit in long shifts at her bedside, so she would never be alone in the hospital. I’d wanted stability, and to show her I was okay.

By graduation, my husband and I had split. I moved back to my father’s house and hung out with my older brother and his friends, going out and drinking, making up for all those years when I was good and straitlaced. All of us had the kind of place-holder jobs that made our parents anxious. I worked as a substitute teacher, going from school to school, and thought I wanted to be an actress. Everything felt transitory. Mostly, I waited for my real life to begin.

My mother had always told me that only a woman of bad character would get divorced. She’d been loath to let me play with the children of divorced women. She was born in Japan in the 1930s, and in her generation, a divorced woman was often an outcast. It simply wasn’t done. “Once you’re married, you need to stick to it no matter what,” she would tell me. Though my father had never said he was ashamed of me, I felt I’d failed myself. My family. I swore I wouldn’t remarry until I was in my thirties. If then. I would do everything right.

Despite this vow, somehow everyone I’d dated was particularly wrong.

Men who were dating multiple women, men with alcohol or drug habits that were on the edge of being out of control, men with amorphous job goals.

To sway me in favor of Vegas, my brother showed me a video of their last outing, starring a friend of his I hadn’t met.

Keith was not like my brother’s other friends. He narrated the Vegas proceedings like a Mystery Science Theater emcee. I watched him gesture with his hands — big, strong, well-shaped. He flirted with some forgettable women.

My brother told me about him. Keith was stuck at boot camp, awaiting his security clearance, and was now on his way to the Ranger Indoctrination Program. His degree was in Classics. I’d never met anyone who enlisted in the army, not with a college degree. Pre-9/11, we thought that patriotism belonged to our parents and grandparents, those who’d fought all the wars so we could drift aimlessly through our twenties.

I rewound the tape and watched it again and again, like a 12-year-old girl watching a teen idol.

“You’ve met him,” my brother told me.

I barely remembered. When I was 14, this guy had come around, he was eighteen with a floppy halo of sun-bleached hair and tanned skin like a surfer. He made my mother, who loved meeting my brother’s friends, laugh and laugh.

So I went. I shared a ride and a room with strangers, someone else’s sister and friend. The men drank watery beer from the keg and watched sports, making vague plans for fun. They told me, “The real party starts when Keith gets here.”

The next evening we met Keith in the booking parlor of a casino, amid rows of chairs facing television screens. His hair was shaved. He wore a striped button-down shirt and jeans and had the straightest posture of anyone I’d ever seen. I felt a jittery lump in my throat.

He said hello to me and shook my hand, but wouldn’t meet my eye. Then he sat down in the row ahead of me. An old man advised him to hit on some women across the room, but Keith didn’t move.

Later, at the motel, he came to talk to my roommate, the sister of his best friend. Suddenly he peppered me with questions. I told him about college, subbing. He related strings of facts about his family and his life. A long discourse on the greatness of teachers. I asked why he wasn’t an officer, since he had a college degree. He wanted to be a Ranger, he said, and there was no guarantee of that if he was an officer. “I wanted to prove to myself I could do it. Have some adventure before I got too old.” He wanted to be an FBI agent or a U.S. Marshal after he got out.

He was the first man I’d met in a long time who had any goals. Who was doing something unique. I liked him, but I didn’t think he liked me any more than he liked his friend’s sister. At one point he looked at my face as if he was assessing the doneness of a cake. “Your eyes are the color of caramel,” he said in an emotionless tone, as if describing the weather. I decided he was not flirting, that he was just hungry for conversation after his basic training.

“Does he always talk that much?” I asked the sister after Keith left.
“Never,” she answered.

The whole group went to a casino, but split off into smaller groups. Nobody invited me along. Keith was alone, too, at a blackjack table all night, chugging free drinks and winning money. I wandered around the perimeter of the casino a few times, until I found an attractive man talking to an older woman and, bored, wanted to see if he’d leave her for me. He did.

I walked by Keith’s blackjack table with the man in tow, and Keith grabbed me. “Can I go to your room until the others get back? I don’t have a key.”

I wondered if this was his move, if he didn’t want me to leave with this man. But Keith said nothing else. I gave him the key.

The next morning, I paid for my own breakfast. The man drove me back.

It was New Year’s Eve. Crowds swarmed the Strip, closed to traffic, and people gathered on the street, giant alcoholic drinks in hand.

Keith brought me a beer in a plastic coin cup. It tasted like a mouthful of sweaty quarters. I blanched and handed it back. “I can’t — this cup is dirty.” I waited for him to tell me to go get my own beer, the way every other man I had ever known would have. Instead he disappeared and brought me the cup, washed out. Clean.

The clock struck midnight. 1997. Keith gave each of my roommates a “Happy New Year” and a chaste peck, but when I stepped up, he wrapped his arms around me. “Happy New Year.” We kissed for real.

He told me he’d had to play blackjack to win enough gas money to drive cross country. About how much we understood each other. He still had two years left in the army and I had my own goals to accomplish.

He hesitated.

A woman walking by cupped her hands around her mouth. “Aw, come on, ask her already!”

Keith laughed. “I know you just got out of a relationship, but I can see us getting married one day.”

I made a half-hearted attempt to pull away. He was crazy. This was Vegas, not real life. Besides, I’d slept with someone else the night before. How could that ever be overcome, even if we lived to be a thousand? What kind of sorry How I met your father story would that make?

But part of me wanted to go with him wherever he went.

“Maybe,” I said. He held onto me, his body solid, substantial. Perhaps he was telling me these things so I’d sleep with him, and I wasn’t planning on that. My head told me to be cynical, keep watch. “I don’t know.”

We parted ways. I didn’t expect to hear from him again.

Then, a few weeks later, a letter arrived. It was one polite page, talking of inconsequential things. I still couldn’t see how this would lead anywhere. I asked my brother if Keith was nice. There had been other friends of my brothers whom I’d dated, some my brother had warned me against, though I never listened. My brother thought for a moment. “Keith’s the kind of guy who will go out in the middle of the night and get food for you.”

A week later, Keith called me. We talked about Shakespeare. Why was he using up his precious calling card minutes to talk about a Shakespeare play? He lived in another state. This relationship was going nowhere. I refused to be touched.

Then, one evening after Valentine’s Day, I arrived at my friend’s house. There was Keith, perched on the back of his convertible. He’d been at the Ranger Indoctrination Program and looked like a military recruitment poster now. “I have a week off. I came to see you.”

I considered my future plans. Call me in five years. A relationship would be messy. I didn’t want to fail.

But then I thought of my mother again. In the hospital, her tortured heart slowing, she told me, “I just want you to be happy.” Maybe this would work out, maybe not.

Life, I knew, was not necessarily long.

I said the scariest thing I could think of. “I’m glad you came back.”

Margaret Dilloway is the author of Sisters of Heart and Snow, from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. She lives in San Diego with her husband, Keith, and three children.

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