I’d only known my girlfriend for a fortnight when I popped the question. I say “girlfriend” but that puts it too strongly; we could have been in the midst of a series of brief encounters. For the sake of complete accuracy, then, I told Rebecca, the woman that I had recently started sleeping with, that I had a very important—in fact a life-determining— question to ask her.
“So can I ask you?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Okay. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to go to Burning Man with me?”
This was in June 2000. Burning Man, the annual freak-out in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, takes place in the week leading up to the Labor Day weekend but because we would be coming from England and because Rebecca, at that time, had a senior job in publishing and because going to Burning Man is a huge palaver and involves months of planning and commitment, we needed to get on the case immediately. She didn’t hesitate.
“Of course,” she said. It was one of the great of courses of all time because although I had talked about Burning Man pretty well nonstop from the moment we met, although I always turned every other topic of conversation round to Burning Man and was interested in almost nothing but Burning Man, Rebecca, prior to meeting me, had not been part of any of the scenes that bring Europeans within the gravitational tug of Black Rock City. She’d never been a raver, wasn’t part of the trance scene, and wasn’t even into nightclubbing in London.
The very short version of what resulted from that of course is as follows: we went to Burning Man and, within a few days of getting back, arranged to get married as soon as bureaucratically possible (October 12, 2000).
We didn’t want to wait and I’m glad we didn’t because I hate waiting. I am temperamentally incapable of waiting. Waiting for me is torture. I’ve spent too much of my life waiting and I can’t wait another second for anything, but in this context—the context of the narrative of how we couldn’t and didn’t wait to get married—it’s necessary, well, not to wait exactly but at least go right back to the beginning, to the night we met.
It was at a party thrown by the art magazine Modern Painters, at the Lisson Gallery, for the launch of the new issue to which I had contributed an evangelical piece about the art of Burning Man. It was a nice party with a very relaxed vibe. By this I mean that, in addition to the expected bottles of red and white wine there was a huge and varied quantity of beer. There was such an endless flow of beer that thirsty guests could relax in the knowledge that it was not going to run out. I was also relaxed because I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. I wasn’t dating anyone at the time but I wasn’t exuding the off-putting air of celibate desperation that has often sabotaged my attempts to get a girlfriend and that, in turn, made me even more desperate to get one. I was, as they say in the submarine world, at periscope depth.
Although I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend I had a look around to reassure myself that there really were no gorgeous women here and that I could concentrate on doing what I had come to do, which was to drink a lot of beer. But then, as I scanned the room, beer in hand, already looking forward to following up that first beer with a second, third, and probably an eighth and ninth, I realized that there was a gorgeous woman in the room. She had long dark hair, eyes like the Madonna; she was tall, thin, and was not smoking cigarettes. If she had been smoking cigarettes the spell would have been broken and I would have concentrated on swilling huge quantities of beer, drinking up a storm and going home. But this very beautiful woman with long hair and eyes like the Madonna was not smoking. She was wearing stylish London clothes. I don’t really know about these things. Especially back then, before I married the woman wearing them, I didn’t. At that stage it was funky trancewear that caught my eye, but she still looked nice in her modest and expensive-looking London anti-trancewear. I established all of this on a number of sweeps through the room but there was never any chance to speak with her because she was always speaking with someone else, and although I was introduced to many people in the early stages of the evening and often hovered in her vicinity, hoping to be introduced by virtue of geographical proximity, it never quite happened. During one of these protracted hovers she did glance over at me, though, and this was all the enticement and incitement I needed to speak to her even though we had not been introduced.
“Have we met before?” I said.
“No, but I know who you are,” she replied, very courteously.
To which I replied, in my mock-pompous way, “Geoff Dyer, of course.”
“Rebecca Wilson,” she said. We shook hands. She was there with a bespectacled guy called Mark who didn’t know I was doing my mock-pompous thing. He thought I was just doing my pompous thing. As a result, I learned subsequently, he thought I was “somewhat of an asshole.” I also learned that, as I had been hovering and generally waiting for a chance to speak to her, Rebecca had said to Mark that she fancied me. To which Mark, who is gay and from Maryland, said, “You don’t want to bother with a skinny, gray-haired old thing like that!”
It was a fine example of the myriad blessings of heterosexuality. From this admittedly small sample we conclude that I had reached the age where I was no longer attractive to men (if I ever had been) but was still attractive to women. It’s even possible that although I was in undoubted physical decline, I was more attractive to women than I used to be because I was no longer giving off the desperate air that had been a feature of life throughout my twenties and, if we are being utterly frank, much of my thirties. The lack of desperation manifested itself in my being comfortable about an inability, as we say in England, to “chat up” women. I had never been able to do this but I had only recently given up trying to, and even if I was, at some level, trying to do exactly that, it didn’t feel like chatting up a beautiful woman with eyes like the Madonna; it felt like chatting to a very nice clever person who happened to be beautiful.
I slightly worry about this in retrospect. Rebecca has a tendency to get cornered by bores at parties. People blah on at her because she is such a good listener. I wonder if I blahed on. And if I did blah on, what did I blah on about? Myself, probably, and Burning Man. It is also possible that an overeagerness to appear intelligent manifested itself in a tendency to express vehement opinions, of a generally negative bent. In practice this meant I denounced people, especially internationally successful authors with high and, in my view, undeserved reputations. To compensate I exaggerated the achievements of underrated writers whose work deserved a far larger audience.
We could easily have become deadlocked in this, but I happened to mention a terrific novel I had just read, published by the company Rebecca worked for, called Reservation Road, by John Burnham Schwartz. And it turned out not only that Rebecca shared my high opinion of this book, but that she was actually John’s editor. She had acquired the book. Yippee! We were in agreement and we were chatting away like mad, having a good old chat, creating positive vibrations and everything, and although I didn’t know that Mark was gay, I was starting to sense that he was just a friend rather than a boyfriend and that he was no longer thinking I was somewhat of an asshole. I was right about this: by the end of the evening, Rebecca told me later, he thought I was a total asshole.
Although we had been having a good old chat, Rebecca said she had to be leaving. There was no need to ask for her phone number. I knew she worked for Weidenfeld and Nicolson and “perhaps,” I said, “perhaps I could call you there.”
“You know where I am,” she said. In a way I was relieved that she left when she did because although I had enjoyed speaking with her I had been somewhat on my best behavior, and now that she had gone I could start drinking up a storm and having the skinful that I had refrained from having in the course of our stimulating chat.
I called her on Tuesday—which, she later told me, was exactly when she thought I would call if I was going to call (which she knew I would). I was forty-two at the time and in some ways I was quite wise, wise enough to know that it is no good trying to set up a romantic encounter with someone in publishing in the guise of a semiprofessional meeting (a lunch, say, to talk about forthcoming books). So I phrased my question very carefully.
“I’d love to see you one evening,” I said, emphasizing but not quite italicizing the “love.” “If that’s possible,” I added after a telling pause.
“Yes,” she said, and then, after an equally telling pause, “that’s possible.” The reply was every bit as clever as my question and similarly encoded. By saying “That’s possible,” she was also intimating that anything was possible. There then followed the part of the conversation I had been dreading, so totally dreading, in fact, that I’d eventually phoned without even being sure how to address it. This was the problem of what to do on our first date. The worst thing you can do on a first date is to do what people nearly always do on a first date: go out to dinner. I couldn’t face that, couldn’t face any aspect of it. I couldn’t face the tacit compatibility check of the whole evening and I couldn’t face the look of disappointment on her face when I suggested—as I knew I shouldn’t, as I was determined not to, but as I knew I would—either that we split the bill or that she pick up the tab and claim it back on expenses. Anything was better than that, than going out to dinner and running through the list of who likes what, but I wasn’t sure what to do instead.
One possibility, one that I hesitated broaching, was that she come down to visit me at my flat in Brighton on the south coast. Although I kept a room in a flat in London, I mainly lived in Brighton, in the greatest apartment I will ever own. It was on the fourth and fifth floors of a building on First Avenue, I said. The top floor was one big chill-out room. One whole wall of this room was a window with doors leading out onto the epic terrace. If it was sunny the distinction between indoors and outdoors dissolved, I said. We discussed various possibilities about what to do but since Rebecca was busy until Saturday, and since people from London always like to visit Brighton, and since I had talked up my flat so much, I said, “How about coming down to Brighton on Saturday?” And she said yes.
Saturday was gray and cold, but did I care? Yes, I cared. I was pissed off. I was really pissed off. I had foreseen a day out on my terrace with the sun beating down, drinking fresh fruit juices and hanging out as though we were in South Beach or L.A. Instead, I was looking out at the grayness pressing against the window. Then the phone rang. It was Rebecca. As soon as I heard her voice I knew she had got cold feet and was calling to cancel, but no, it was just that she had missed her train and was going to be late.
I went to the station to meet her. Her hair was long and dark. She was wearing a loose-fitting Japanese shirt and, in keeping with this Oriental touch, we greeted each other by pressing the palms of our hands together and bowing—something that I’d been affecting since going to Thailand earlier in the year and that she had picked up from spending time in India. It was a nice beginning, ironic and genuine in equal measure without being genuine—or ironic—at all.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said, looking and sounding really quite mortified.
“That’s okay,” I said.
“I hate being late.”
“Me too,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t matter that you were late today but in general I deplore lateness.”
“Me too!” she said.
“I love punctuality so much. I’m not meaning to reproach you but I do love it.”
“I love it too!” she insisted.
“Then why were you late?” I pleaded.
“Have I spoiled everything?”
“Yes. The day is ruined.”
“Shall I just go straight back to London?”
“Shall we have a coffee and talk about it?” I said. “See if we can salvage something from a day that has already been comprehensively ruined?”
“I’d like to try,” she said.
This conversation pretty much set the tone for our entire subsequent relationship. We’ve spent hundreds of evenings since then talking nonsense like this about one thing or another, but, at the same time, we were being quite honest: the fact that we are both so uptight about punctuality makes us feel totally relaxed together.
From the station we went to a café, where we ordered two cappuccinos “ without chocolate on the top” and sent them back because they arrived with chocolate on the top. Even when they were remade, minus the offending chocolate, the cappuccinos weren’t up to much and we had a frank discussion about cappuccinos in general and I blahed on about the cappuccino situation in Brighton in particular. With our cappuccinos we each had a croissant. I say “croissant” but really they were just dreary croissant-shaped buns. I put raspberry jam on mine, to liven it up a bit. After that we walked down to the depressing seafront. Brighton is a depressing place. It’s especially depressing if the weather’s bad and it’s even more depressing if it’s gray in June when it’s meant to be sunny and blue and you have just drunk the kind of scalding bucket of foam that passes for a cappuccino in these parts. We walked along the promenade and looked out at the sea.
“‘Oed’ und leer das Meer,’” I said, and then, after a pause: “Wagner. Tristan und Isolde, of course. Quoted by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land.”
“You really are an asshole, aren’t you?” said Rebecca. “It’s that ‘of course’ that I really hate.”
“I was sort of joking,” I said. “Of course.”
“I wasn’t,” she said, slipping her arm into mine.
It started drizzling soon after this and then, as happens, the drizzle became rain. There was nothing to do except go back to my amazing flat. Rebecca said how much she loved my chill-out room with its lilac walls, UV lights, incense, statues of the Buddha, and its pervasive I’ve just got back from Thailand where I did nothing but get stoned for a month look. Later she said it was like a cross between a vegetarian café at a festival and a nightclub, but that was only after we were married (but before the divergences in our tastes in interior decoration had resulted in some quite brutal arguments). I made risotto—the one thing I know how to cook well. We ate the risotto upstairs in this huge chill-out room, one wall of which was entirely composed of windows against which the rain lashed relentlessly.
It was late afternoon. If it had been sunny, the sun, at this time of day, would have been pouring into the room, flooding everything with gold light. Instead, as Rebecca said, it was “like being on a trawler in the North Sea.” It was still fun, though, especially after we’d had a couple of bong hits. This was a slight gamble: we could have got all weirded out, both by the fact that we were up here in my flat in Brighton and hardly knew each other and by the way the weather was so bad on a day when I had so wanted it to be good. As it happened, the grass made us feel even more relaxed and I stopped getting bummed out about the rain and the lashing wind. We were sitting on the sofa together, listening to Hariprasad Chaurasia play the Raga Puriya Kalyan (“strictly speaking, it is of course an early-evening raga,” I said).
When I was younger I regularly used to try to sleep with women before I really wanted to. I would make passes at them not because I wanted to but because I felt I ought to. If Rebecca and I had gone out to dinner we would either have had to say good-bye after dinner and drinks or we could have agreed prematurely to go home together. As it was, like this, we could just listen to music and chat about cappuccinos or me or Burning Man until gradually, without any nudging or coaxing, our hands touched and we were kissing.
Rebecca stayed that night and the next. On Monday she had to go to work. I remained in Brighton for the whole of that week and on Friday she came down again. “You’re even more beautiful than I remembered,” I said as I opened the door and saw her again.
We didn’t actually go on a date until the week after that, when we went to the launch party for Will Self’s new novel in London. It was in Rebecca’s flat in London, later that night, that I asked her about Burning Man and she said, “Of course.”
I knew we would have a good time there and I also knew that Burning Man is a parable and test. The previous year I had gone with my then-girlfriend and we had known within days that we would split up. I’d kept wishing I was there alone, partly because of all the sexual opportunities that weren’t coming my way, but mainly because of the issue of responsibility. I was left doing everything, taking care of our camp, making sure things didn’t get blown away, while my girlfriend went running around the playa and generally going as crazy as a kid in a sweet shop. We both became total Burning Man converts but we also knew we’d split up. We duly did so the following January, a few days after going to see a film called Lies at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. At the time I did not attach any significance to this. That was just the way it happened.
Rebecca and I flew to San Francisco on Friday, August 25. We hired a van, bought a couple of cheap bikes and tons of food and water. There was so much to take care of and sort out in those few days prior to going to Burning Man that what we mainly looked forward to doing once we got there was sleeping.
There was a slightly strange light in the sky as Rebecca and I headed north from Reno toward Gerlach late on Tuesday afternoon, the day after the festival had started. It wasn’t as bright as it should have been and I had to grip the wheel tight because our van was being thumped by strong winds. We arrived in Black Rock City after dark and couldn’t find the Canadian friends we had arranged to camp with—but we did find some friends from San Francisco. We spent the first night at their camp, sleeping in the back of our van, and the next morning decided to stay put. We also decided not to bother pitching our tent: it was so cold and windy that we were better off continuing to sleep in our van. A good decision, it turned out, since 2000 will be remembered by everyone who went as the year Black Rock City was assailed by terrible winds and dust storms. We spent a lot of time just hunkered down in our friends’ yurt or cowering in the back of our van, feeling it buffeted by these gale-force dust storms. We also spent a lot of time rummaging in our van. A place for everything and everything in its place—that was our motto even if we rarely managed to abide by it. We were always looking for things—a can opener or a pair of socks—that, I insisted in tones of absolute bewilderment, “I had in my hand two seconds ago.” We did other things, fun things, but it’s the rummaging I mainly remember—the rummaging and the weather, which had conspired against us on our first day in Brighton and was conspiring against us on our first time together at Burning Man. To be honest, although it was great being at Burning Man, it was also disappointing. It was windy and dusty and cold. One night it even rained. Our bike tires became so clogged with mud the wheels wouldn’t go round and we had to drag them back to camp.
“It’s like being at fucking Glastonbury,” I whined. The struggle to survive is part of the experience of Burning Man and I can see how, for people from sunny California, it is fun, but, as I told anyone who would listen, we came from a rainy, windy place with poor visibility and I really didn’t need to come all the way to Nevada—to the Nevada desert, what’s more—to experience more of the same. We had a great time but we could have had a better time, which meant we had a terrible time because I spent all my time thinking how much better it would have been if the weather had been better. I cannot make the best of a bad job, put a brave face on things or settle for second best. Anything less than the apotheosis of whatever it is I am hoping to experience will be a crushing disappointment. This is an item of faith with me and although this attitude has been a terrible burden that has, in some ways, blighted my life by making imperfect situations twenty times worse, it has also—as we will shortly see—stood me in good stead in other respects.
From time to time Rebecca has outbreaks of something like herpes around her eyes. She gets these tiny ulcers on the inside of her eyelids and it is agony for her. One morning soon after we had started sleeping together, she woke up with her left eye swollen shut like a boxer’s. It was the saddest thing, especially since her eyes are so lovely. A week after getting back to London from Burning Man I fell ill. At first I had a sore throat and flu, but within days I was sicker than I had ever been in my life. My throat and tongue were covered in thirty or forty white ulcers. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t even get out of bed. My head felt like it was going to implode and explode at the same time. The doctor said that herpes was the most likely diagnosis. I moped around in Rebecca’s flat all day, whimpering and waiting for her to come home with soothing treats—juices, books, CDs—in the evening.
Fortunately, we had already done the paperwork for getting married. We were doing it as cheaply as possible. No expense had not been spared. Two days before our wedding I went to a literary prize-giving at the Reform Club, where I ate a lunch that looked like it had been sitting around since Graham Greene and Anthony Powell had dined there before the war. I’d just gotten over this herpes-type thing and now I had food poisoning. As a result, on the day of our lackluster wedding, I looked like death warmed up. Rebecca looked gorgeous, of course. We didn’t invite our parents, just two friends (one of whom was that asshole Mark). We went to the registry office on the bus and came back home on the bus after a lunch that Rebecca was persuaded—after some initial reluctance—to claim back on expenses. Although I still felt shitty from the food poisoning and the herpes, it didn’t matter because we had at least succeeded in getting married as quickly and cheaply as possible.
Aside from its amazing cheapness, the only unusual thing about our wedding was an agreement we made—a private addendum to the regular vows—whereby I would be free to write anything I wanted about us and our relationship, irrespective of whether it was true.
Obviously, we got married in great haste but were we rash as well as hasty? No, partly because a week at Burning Man is the equivalent of a year of normal life, and partly because this apparent hastiness was actually founded on a long patience. One of the most important qualities in life is to hold out for happiness. I’ve known plenty of people who were incapable of really holding out for their own happiness. They’ve made do, settled for the next best thing, made the best of a less than perfect job. I’d had lots of girlfriends, had even, on occasions, been on the brink of making long-term commitments, but always at some point I was selfish enough to jump ship. Either I would find someone who could be everything to me—or I’d continue as I was, quite happily, on the serial monogamy treadmill with its interludes of loneliness, involuntary celibacy, and total despair. In a world with however many millions of women in it, it didn’t seem too much to hold out for someone who was beautiful, funny, sexy, clever, kind, punctual, with nice manners and good moral bearing. I mention beautiful first because, for me, that was essential if I were to make any kind of commitment or achieve any kind of relaxation. I had to have a beautiful girlfriend. Otherwise, if I went to a party, I’d always be wishing I was with someone more beautiful. Because of this obsession with beauty I’d often had girlfriends who, though beautiful, weren’t friends at all. Now I had a beautiful wife who was my friend and who was clever and kind and everything else. So getting married actually felt like nothing else so much as a liberation. It didn’t feel like settling down—which I’ve never had any urge to do—and it didn’t feel like it required any conscious effort on either Rebecca’s part or mine. We can’t even remember who asked who. It was all like a continuation of that first afternoon when we were sitting on the sofa listening to an early-evening raga and the next minute we were kissing—and then we were married.
I’ve often noticed that certain things that happen in life—often the things that are most important—seem to occur without your conscious participation. It’s almost as if you are oddly passive, that things just fall into place. Of course you are not completely passive, but whereas life often feels like you’re riding a bike with the brakes on—every attempt at progress is met with some kind of resistance—there are instances when you are scarcely aware of having to exert yourself. Destiny is not handed to you on a plate, but sometimes the effort normally demanded by life is replaced by a feeling of ease and grace. You get it in tennis during those strange interludes when you find yourself making strokes in such a way that the distinction between what you have been trying to do and what you are actually doing evaporates and you are just… playing tennis. It happens in writing when the words, which have been coming only grudgingly and haltingly, begin to flow. In both circumstances you know that you are doing it right even though you can’t say exactly what it is that you’re doing differently. This is how getting married felt—like doing something right without being sure why. For me, this was confirmed by a little incident that occurred when we’d been married for a couple of months.
Six months before meeting Rebecca I was in the lingerie department of Fenwick’s on Bond Street in London with my then-girlfriend (with whom I’d first gone to Burning Man). While she was in the changing room trying on underwear, a woman came into the shop. Tall; beautiful eyes, long hair. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, she transfixed me totally. My heart went out to her. There was a smoldering of desire—what kind of underwear was she was buying?—but mainly I felt the familiar melancholy of longing. I sort of fell in love with her then and there, but knew I would never see her again. She seemed to be in a hurry. I watched her pay and leave. She didn’t see me. End of story.
Time passed. A million other things happened, most of them forgotten. I broke up with my girlfriend around this time and then, six months later, met, fell in love with, and married Rebecca. And then one morning I woke up and realized, immediately and with absolute certainty, that the woman lying next to me, Rebecca, my wife, was the woman I had seen that day in Fenwick’s.
After leaving Fenwick’s my girlfriend and I had gone to see a Korean S&M film at the ICA. I couldn’t remember the name of the film but, yes, there it was in my diary for January 22: “Saw Lies @ ICA.” We’d walked down to Pall Mall in bright afternoon sunlight that ricocheted off the windows of buses and cars. The branches of trees were stark against the blue sky. We arrived at the film with several minutes to spare and killed time in the bookshop. All of which means we must have been in Fenwick’s between two and two-thirty. Rebecca checked her diary. Yes, she had been in Fenwick’s that day, at about that time—and she was in a rush, her car was parked on a yellow—buying underwear because, later that day, she was flying off to see her lover in New York.
So it was true: I’d completely forgotten that first glimpse of her—but I had never quite forgotten it. The memory developed as I slept, its colors becoming deeper, more distinct: the ghost of a dream, but permanent, lovely.
2005