Right across from the banquet room in which the Steve Jobs celebrity roast was about to take place, the American Psychiatric Association was having a session of its annual conference. I was standing outside the entrance before going in to roast Steve and all the psychiatrists were milling around in their corner and I saw this tall, slender woman with long blond hair in a very crisp Armani suit.
Even before I saw her face, I knew I was in love with her in a way I had thought was fictional. I had never experienced anything like it in my entire life. She was standing with her back to me, and then she turned and looked right at me over her left shoulder. Her gaze was direct and penetrating and went on for a long time.
I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was a literary monster created to make people feel less satisfied about what they had, and I could not imagine any mechanism that would cause it to actually take place. But we locked in on this beam, and I felt like I was having a hallucination and hearing voices. The whole thing was so dreamlike that I stepped back and rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out what I was going to do about it. Before this woman and I had ever said anything to each other, I felt I had finally found my other half.
Whatever was going on between us, I was not going to let the moment pass without investigation. So I circled her a couple of times. Once I realized she was not going into the Steve Jobs roast but into the psychiatrists’ meeting, I hustled over and said, “Look, this is presumptuous of me but you are something.” And she said, “So are you.” I said, “Where are you from?” And she said, “A little town in British Columbia.” I said, “I’m from a little town in Wyoming, which is sort of similar. Where do you live now?” And she said, “New York.” I said, “Me too.”
I told her where I lived and she said, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” I said, “Why?” And she said, “I just rented an apartment in that building to be my office.” In fact, she had rented the apartment precisely two floors above mine.
She had to go into her meeting, so I said, “If you get out of your thing before I get out of mine, please do me the favor of sticking around.” We did not exchange names. I just told her to wait for me. Later that evening, I was busy running the roast when I looked up and saw her standing at the back of the room.
This hacker I knew who was a strange character was there that night and he said, “I can see what’s happening to you, Barlow. But I’ve got some bad news for you. That woman has a diamond the size of the Rock of Gibraltar on her finger. She’s married.” I hadn’t seen the ring yet, but when I did, I knew it hadn’t come out of a Cracker Jack box. To that point, I had studiously avoided noticing it, but I said, “We’ll see how married she really is.”
I took her to the roast after-party and she immediately went off and flirted with every guy there but me. For some reason, I felt perfectly okay with that. It was just her way. Toward the end of the party, I came over to her and said, “Look, I would like to do something right now, but I know you’re married and I hope it’s okay with you.” And she bent forward and let me kiss her. That was pretty much the ball game.
Her name was Cynthia Horner and she had grown up on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo, a beautiful old mill town right across the strait from Vancouver. One of the things that set it apart is that they have an annual bathtub race from Nanaimo to Vancouver. It’s about thirty miles across the strait, and they sail it in bathtubs with outboard motors.
British Columbia is a part of the world that has a wonderfully well-developed sense of absurdist self-deprecating humor, and one of the things they love to make fun of is Nanaimo and its culture. Because Nanaimo is semi-isolated, the people there have come up with their own way of pronouncing quite a broad variety of words. They speak Nanaim-ese.
Both of Cynthia’s parents were doctors. Her mother was a dermatologist and her father had grown up on a great big ranch south of Calgary. His side of the family included big-time politicians, like the Speaker of the Canadian Senate and the head of the Canadian National Railway. They were all right-wing ranchers in much the same way my father had been.
Cynthia had attended the public high school in Nanaimo and then gone to the University of British Columbia. After graduating from the medical school there, she had gone to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to become a psychiatrist.
The two of us spent the night together, but we did not make love. The next night, I was cohosting a party for a NeXT database software company whose only customer was the CIA. So everybody at the party was CIA. I knew these guys loved to feel hip, so I hired a theatrical group from San Francisco that was entirely composed of really enormous people who were crawling back and forth on heavy ropes over everyone at the party. You would look up and there would be three hundred pounds of flesh above you. It was art.
Cynthia had never taken a psychedelic before or ever done anything wild or bohemian in her life. She had never even smoked a joint, nothing. We took MDA together that night, and she loved MDA and she loved the party.
The next night, the Grateful Dead were playing at Cal Expo, the state fairgrounds in Sacramento, and we went backstage tripping on acid. Cynthia was not a music person at all, and the fact that I was a lyricist for the Dead was not particularly relevant to her. Even though she was the kind of person who would never have been caught dead at a Dead concert, Cynthia liked it a lot and thought the music was great and the Deadheads fascinating.
We were both so completely and hopelessly besotted with each other that I think I could have taken her to a dogfight and she would have thought it was okay. Even though she looked completely incongruous standing by the soundboard in her black Armani suit, Cynthia became a Deadhead.
We spent several more nights together without making love, and I found out a lot more about her marriage. While she had been at the Mayo Clinic, Cynthia had met Diego, who was from Argentina. On paper, he was a perfect match for her. Before anyone had even cracked any part of the eggshell on AIDS, he had been a rising star in research on the disease. I think his family was worth at least half a billion dollars.
Diego moved to New York to continue his AIDS research work, and Cynthia went with him to do her residency at Beth Israel hospital. They got married, once in secret and then again in a big splashy wedding in Nanaimo about six months before I met her. In every way, Diego was the answer to her parents’ prayers.
When I met Cynthia, she and Diego had been together for a couple of years, but they were having problems. In some Latin cultures, a woman has two roles she can play. She can either be a Madonna or a whore. And nobody had ever explained that to Cynthia. After they got married, Diego wanted her to be a Madonna, and she was completely not into that. Cynthia was a pretty sexual being, and she’d already had a number of affairs before I met her.
As I found out more and more about her husband, I thought, “Jeez, I can’t do this. I can’t disrupt their marriage, and this guy is much better qualified to be married to her than I am. Truly.” It was not self-effacing. It was just obvious to me. At one point, I said to her, “It’s a good thing we haven’t made love yet, because I think it’s probably best for you to stay with your husband.” And she said, “No, I think it’s best that we do so you’ll see why I am not going to.”
We moved in together a week after we met. It was one of those completely unexpected acts of providence where two worlds collide and something wonderful comes from the point where they touch.