Finding Love in Aspen
As a child, I always had an image in my head of my dream husband (probably because my father was always going on about finding a husband who would take over his job of caring for his three girls). I imagined the man I would one day fall in love with as loyal, true, solid, funny and, of course, gorgeous, like Cary Grant, with a chiseled jaw, smiling eyes and good grooming.
But I was thirty-one, none of the men in my life had been THAT guy, and here I was, still single in a party town, wondering why I hadn’t taken finding that man more seriously over the past ten years.
I was sick and tired of the expression “When you least expect it, it will happen.” I was always expecting it. Who wasn’t?
When I first arrived in Aspen from New York City in 1990, I was heartbroken over a previous relationship and, to say the least, despondent and frustrated. Disgusted with the male race, I wondered how I would ever find a husband. The word “spinster” kept floating into my head, so I looked it up and learned it had originally described women who spun wool. “Great,” I thought. “In no time at all I’ll be a spinster, and I can’t even sew.”
It occurred to me that Aspen might not be the smartest place to be if I ever hoped to get married. Aspen was a place where boys and girls gravitated to play, stay young and defy their parents’ and the world’s expectations. But this was just a transitional phase until I figured out where to go.
Any boy I fantasized about was absolutely and positively no good for me. Ask my sisters. It was time to leave this fantasyland and move to a real city with real people who weren’t trying to escape reality. But first, I would stay for one of my favorite seasons: fall. Ah, fall, filling me with the excitement that something magical was about to happen and replacing all fears with a sense of adventure. And as the golden leaves on the aspen trees began to fall, I thought, how can I leave before strutting my stuff on the ski slopes one more time? I promised myself I’d take off in the spring.
And that’s when I got the phone call from one of my best friends, planting the seed for a new adventure that would rock my world. She had just returned from a trip to Moab, all animated and convinced she had found that guy for me, the one who would save me from all the other guys I’d been enduring lately.
“He’s funny, he’s gorgeous, he’s very cool, and… mellow,” she exclaimed. A man, huh? For me? Nobody had ever said they’d found a man for me before. I’d done just fine finding the bad boys on my own in whatever neighborhood I happened to live in, and I was a bit done with that scene. At the time, I was dating a guy who looked very good on paper, with an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate degree from Columbia (all a boy had to do was say “Columbia” and I was smitten). He lived in Pacific Heights in San Francisco and had invited me to Greece, Turkey and Italy with him, first class.
It all sounded good in theory, but I was taken, and I was quite done with the drama of getting my hopes up with men who ended up dumping me for the next hot and willing girl. So I stored the idea away and left it to fate. If we met and things took off, great. If not, I was contemplating hightailing it out of town and moving to San Francisco in the summer.
It was common knowledge among the young people in town that Aspen was a place where college grads came to party hard and forget the stresses of life for a while, where packs of friends would traipse to Eric’s Bar hoping to hook up. Why not? We were free. Free from the pressures of school, free from parents or any authority figure, and free to feel alive. This was NOT the place to meet your eternal significant other. And I was getting older. It was time to take this marriage-and-baby thing seriously.
As things turned out, my Pacific Heights guy and I called it quits in Turkey, before we ever made it to Italy. Months later, Patty invited me to a Halloween party that this stud of a guy, Wade, would be at. I tried to force down the rush of excitement raging through my body, because if I got too excited, I would most likely botch a perfectly good chance to impress a new man by being too effervescent. My enthusiasm often overwhelmed the shy ones.
Every Halloween, my friend and I shared a tradition: spending most of the evening playing dress-up, drinking lots of wine and shooting Polaroids. This Halloween was no different. A bottle of wine later, we walked out wearing wigs and old European clothes from my parents. We were Yalenka and Nostrovia from Russia, and we made a pact to stick with our new personalities and accents all evening, and drink vodka.
We arrived at the party, and there was Patty standing in the kitchen next to a guy who fit her description to a T. Tall, cute and carrying a very large cardboard ox and an ax, he was Paul Bunyan. Creative, I thought. I could feel his calm demeanor from miles away, and I was by no means calm, so I grabbed Stephanie and raced past the kitchen lest I sabotage any chance I had to impress.
Walking up the stairs to the bathroom to primp before we hit the streets, I felt a presence behind me. I glanced back, and there he was, hot on my trail. “Nice ox,” I wittily blurted out. He smiled a very shy smile, and I launched off to some other world. We reached the top of the stairs, and I leaned against the wall waiting for the bathroom. Facing him in the narrow hallway, I took in what I could without embarrassing myself: his beautiful square shoulders set on a six-foot-two frame, his smile, his smell. “I’m Jillian,” I said, looking up at the fake beard painted on his face. “I know,” he replied. I could barely stand the energy between us and ducked under his arm to slip into the bathroom the moment the door opened. He was gone when I came out.
When it was time to hit the town, the party gathered and emerged en masse into the chilly night to walk downtown and join the festivities, Wade and I shyly avoiding each other. Later, we all gathered on a street corner to decide where to go dancing. I sidled up to Wade. “Are you coming dancing with us?” I asked demurely, the autumn breeze cooling the fire in my cheeks. “I think I’ll pass on the dancing,” he replied, but I urged him into the Paragon, a bar where you might find yourself dancing late into the night in ski boots. We walked in together and cozied up, until a friend in motorcycle leathers interrupted our intimacy and dragged me to the dance floor. Wade took that as a sign to leave. Desperately, I looked over the leather arm draped around my shoulder to say goodbye, and watched him fade to black as he walked out into the night, swinging his ax.
