/ 27 January 2004

Meetings of more than minds

‘Remember that guy, the one who was married!” one cried. ”My mother ran into the love of her life at a conference and nearly left my father,” another friend added quietly. ”I left my bag in his boot,” someone confessed. And the winner: ”I shagged him in the conference room.”

What had started as a serious girl-on-girl discussion of rape had quickly deteriorated into a laughing confessional of all the beautifully bad things we had done at conferences.

I said: ”And what about that big dude that time we were away at that ‘brainstorm’. We had been arguing the whole day! And then suddenly at 4am he tried to stick his tongue down my throat?”

”Not just his tongue,” the friend who had been there reminded me. ”And I saw that coming. He already had his arm around the back of your chair when we started drinking fishbowls at 10.”

What? I don’t recall. Then again, I don’t remember much. But I do know how it all started.

We arrived, 60-odd people, feeling terribly professional. Sure, some us were unwilling at first to leave our lives behind. ”I wish I didn’t have to go on this stupid conference,” I told my then boyfriend. A big part of me meant it.

Another part of me was curious, because some conferences are better than others.

The good kind are those where you are deeply committed to what you are there to do, and so is everyone else. At these, you’re genuinely excited by the meeting of minds. You’re likely to bond with someone you are really interested in, excited by and attracted to.

Then there is the bad kind. The kind when it drags and drags. You doodle, but even your doodles suck. And then finally you are so bored that you find yourself idly sharing mutual smirks, or fighting with, with someone you are really interested in, excited by and attracted to.

This time, I was bored, bordering on psychosis. So I disagreed with everyone. Particularly one guy who spoke English badly, which made him extra-aggro. I was sure I safely hated his guts.

At lunch break, we argued. In the afternoon tea break, we argued again. And after the conference day’s proceedings crawled to a stop, we got drunk together and argued some more. I distinctly remember sparring with him about politics in Afrikaans, which I speak fairly badly.

At about 4am, he tried to stick his tongue down my throat. When I fought him off, he suggested that since we were both in relationships, a blowjob would be acceptable. Perhaps — to be fair to the dude — he was just hoping to shut me up.

It didn’t work and I said no. I’m still proud I could get my mouth around such a long word without gagging.

He did not take it terribly well. But luckily he tried it in a crowded room, not alone in a hotel suite where things might have turned ugly. You never know. I mean, he must have thought I wanted him after all I had said.

You see, for hours we’d been saying what refreshing and brave people we both were. We understood each other’s love for our absent partners so well, too! Oh, and we were actually comrades in arms, but had not realised it until now.

As we talked, planning changes to the universe, we both begun to sense what we each could be. By 3am, I was a budding scriptwriter (and he loved my ideas for films). He was going to start his own paper (and I really thought he should, because he would be like that guy in that film, the title of which I couldn’t remember). Citizen Cane? Vodka? More wine?

I was pretty sure I would never see him again. So for this moment, I could be everything I dreamt of. And I wasn’t the only one losing my head.

All around people were suddenly removed from everyday life (and from their husband, lover or wife) free to invent themselves as they’d like to be and not as they drearily really were to be again on Monday.

Add cabins on the mountainside, each with a door that locked … what happened that night? The beginnings of great affairs? Rowdy one night stands? Fumbled drunken failures? Or nothing much at all? Who can say.

Well, the sun came up at 6am. Sheepish grey-green people slunk from rooms headed, unfocussed eyes downcast, to an uneasy, queasy breakfast before the long last day.