Every Step You Take (13 page)

As it turned out, my colleagues and I would be the last four dancers chosen by Balanchine before he died. Even without knowing this, I felt deeply honored by his invitation, and I was determined to prove myself worthy. I worked harder than ever in my own classes and rehearsals, and watched every rehearsal and performance I could, paying particular attention to the way the star couples—Heather Watts and Bart Cook, Darci Kistler and Sean Lavery, Peter Martins and Suzanne Farrell, Patricia McBride and Helgi Tomasson—partnered each other. The smoothness, the complexity of movement, the way the lines between their two bodies blended and through a series of physical actions evoked a magical beauty—that was what I wanted to create someday. I tried to carry my observations back with me to my own work, and gradually I began to feel that I might be at the threshold of understanding ballet on a deeper, more intuitive level. Progress required hours and hours of work, but there were definitely some breakthrough moments for me, both as a dancer and as an observer. I will never forget the performance, for instance, when I “saw” Suzanne Farrell for the first time, in the sense of truly understanding her extraordinary talent. She was dancing the “Diamonds” pas de deux from
Jewels
with Peter Martins, and I was standing in the wings, watching. Suzanne was so beautiful and otherworldly I could barely breathe. I wanted to nudge the people around me and ask them if they could believe what they were seeing. Afterward I was still standing in the wings, watching, as all the corps and soloists filed away, leaving Balanchine alone with principal dancers Suzanne and Peter Martins. I often tried to eavesdrop on these little sessions when Balanchine would huddle with the stars of the evening to go over their performance, hoping to learn from his comments. He was leaning in toward Suzanne, looking at her intensely, talking to her. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but a moment later, as he turned and wandered off as if in a dream, it seemed to me that, although Balanchine had created this ballet and seen it many times before, he had been as moved and dazzled by this performance as any member of the audience on that night.

I threw my entire being into what was now my official “profession”—and I immersed myself just as passionately in my love affair with my older boyfriend. Our relationship was not something that I took lightly. I was sixteen, and head-over-heels in love for the first time in the way that only teenagers can be in love. Everything in life felt so charged and exciting, and to the little “Puerto Rican–Indian ballet sissy” from Arizona that still lurked inside me, the world seemed to be expanding at an amazing rate, getting bigger and brighter on every front with every day. That July I traveled with the company to the annual summer season in Saratoga Springs for the first time, and my friend Espen and I, along with Ulrik and another wonderful dancer in the corps named John Bass, stayed together in a house on Saratoga Lake. I rehearsed my heart out all day, and in the downtime between and after rehearsals and performances I hung around the edges of the brilliant and witty older crowd that Ulrik was part of, watching and listening and trying to master their social jargon. On Sundays I was dumbfounded when Ulrik and John Bass whipped through the
New York Times
crossword puzzle in less than an hour—I couldn't even get a quarter of the way through Monday's puzzle, which was the easiest. I was self-conscious about my lack of formal education—the last formal classroom I had been in was my seventh-grade year in California. I listened carefully to the animated conversations all around me, trying to decipher the multilingual puns and one-liners that for the most part flew right over my head. I knew this was not a world I could compete in, so I didn't try.

At first Ulrik and I tried to keep our relationship secret, not only because he was supposedly still involved with another man but also because of my tender age. I don't think we did a very good job of being discreet, because at a certain point word came down from higher-ups at SAB that Ulrik should break it off with me—or else. I believe there was a suggestion that my parents might have to be contacted if we didn't stop seeing each other. This was a devastating turn of events for me, and when Ulrik bowed to the authorities and broke up with me—by telephone—I started bawling like a two-year-old. I felt it was the end of my world, and I was inconsolable.

I returned to Edward Villella's town house after the summer session in Saratoga in a tumultuous state of mind, and when I discovered that the boy who had sublet from me had left everything in tatters—trash everywhere and my bed a gritty horror—I had a kind of meltdown. Sobbing and swearing, fueled by the raging hormones of a brokenhearted teenage boy, I packed all of my belongings in a huge old rusty metal trunk that was my only luggage, called my fellow dancer and new friend Lisa Jackson to ask if I could come stay with her for a while, and moved out.

My intention had been to nurse my broken heart in anonymous and unknown surroundings, but as it turned out, my love crisis—like so many teenage love tragedies—was short-lived. Ulrik and I soon decided to ignore the authorities and get back together. August is often a nonworking (and unpaid) month for the NYCB, and Ulrik, Julia, John Bass, and Julia's parents had all made plans to head to the island of Hydra in Greece, where they had rented a house. When Ulrik suggested that I join him there later that month, I was thrilled. My first trip to Europe, on a mission to be with my beloved.

I don't believe I consulted anyone about this trip. When I received the first tax refund of my life, for $980, I simply cashed it and bought myself a round-trip ticket to Athens—which left me $20 to live on for the rest of the month. I cringe when I remember my arrival in Athens on that first European trip of my life. I had dressed for my travels in cowboy boots and khaki pants and a bright orange shirt with gold stripes and a leather vest, and I was lugging
THE TRUNK
—the rusted metal monstrosity, crammed with my life's possessions. Ulrik had come over from the island to meet me at the Athens airport, and he took one look at me and collapsed into laughter. “Is this your
suitcase
?” he asked. He looked tanned and breezy in his perfect-for-the-Mediterranean khaki shorts and sandals.

That whole trip was so exotic and surreal for me—I felt as if my already incredible expanding universe got supersized in those two weeks. We traveled to Hydra by hydrofoil, and when we reached the island Ulrik explained to me that there were no cars there. “We will need a donkey,” he said, eyeing my trunk. But all the donkeys and all the donkey boys were taking their afternoon siesta—so Ulrik and I each grabbed one end of the trunk, and in the blazing midafternoon heat we wrestled that bastard up the steep stone steps that crosshatch Hydra's seaside cliffs, all the way to the next little fishing village, where our house was perched high above the blue Aegean.

The magic of my first visit to that Greek island is something that will never leave me. The physical drama of the land itself and the way the light raked across it, the sounds of the donkeys and roosters and dogs, the way the smell of the salty sea mixed with that of the pungent dry hills—all of these thrilled me. I had experienced the desert of Arizona, the streets of New York, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, but Hydra gave me my first real taste of the varieties of experience the planet can offer. The trip expanded my understanding of beauty, and my appetite for new places and experiences. The people we met, an eclectic mix of artists and wanderers from all parts of the world, seemed equally exotic. We made friends with the painter Brice Marden and his wife, Helene, who had a house on the island, and with an eccentric beachcomber named Von Furstenburg. At night we partied until the sun came up, and on our 6 a.m. walks home we dove off the ancient seawalls into the salty sea. When Heather Watts arrived by hydrofoil one afternoon, the glamour quotient of our little group—and the testosterone levels of all the heterosexual men on the island—bumped up several notches. Everything felt dreamlike and magical—as if I had landed in a Mediterranean version of the
Nutcracker
with my very own Prince. When Julia and I had to head back to New York before the others, I stepped onto the hydrofoil that would take me to Athens and took one last look at Ulrik—tanned and wearing only his shorts, smoking a cigarette, and waving good-bye from the dock—and fell sobbing into Julia's arms.

By the late fall of my first season with the NYCB, Ulrik and I had moved into a two-bedroom floor-through in Chelsea with Julia, who, over the course of the summer, had become my dear friend as well (and remains so to this day). As a new company member, I was dancing nonstop, I was madly in love, and I even seemed to be establishing a kind of surrogate family in New York through my various connections within the dance world. There was a comforting sense of domesticity to my evenings at home with Ulrik and Julia, when we all cooked and ate together. Julia often invited us to join her at her parents' house for dinners and other exotic soirees, affording me glimpses into a world and a way of life I never knew existed. The Gruens lived (and still live) in a vast apartment that is filled with books and antiques and is redolent of that shabby-chic aura that seems to settle around lives of unpretentious intelligence and elegance. Evenings at the Gruens' were always exciting in the purest sense because you never knew who would show up or where the evening would go. On many occasions we would all dress up in black tie, just for the hell of it, and the evening would take on the festive feel of a bygone era. After dinner there would often be piano playing and singing, and always plenty of “chaaam-pers” and art-world anecdotes courtesy of Julia's writer-photographer father, John. The Gruens will always have a special place in my heart, and I sometimes wish I could go back and sit at the Gruens' dinner table once more and discover what on earth I was thinking. The world I had landed in was a far cry from the house in Paradise Valley, Arizona, that I had left behind.

The company and conversation at these soirees dazzled me, but I was not about to jump into the fray myself—the chance that I would say something astoundingly stupid was just too great. Often I would retire to the kitchen to watch Julia's mother, the accomplished artist Jane Wilson, prepare our elaborate meals, helping her whenever I could. Watching Jane work in the kitchen or set a table taught me so much about entertaining with elegance and style. Those sessions were also when I first discovered how much I loved to cook. Jane was a wonderful and inventive chef, and the beautiful roasts and elegant desserts she turned out seemed nothing less than a miracle to me. I began experimenting more and more with cooking at home—with erratic results. I remember the first meal I made for Ulrik, Julia, and John Bass—a dense, rock-hard, way-overcooked meat loaf that slipped off the serving platter when I tripped on the rug and then went bouncing like a small bowling ball across the floor. Everybody politely stifled their laughter, and we all choked down the runaway entrée after I maneuvered it back onto its platter. I had another disaster on New Year's Eve, when I decided to make my first Caesar salad. In my eagerness to have everything ready on time, I made the salad and dressed it that afternoon—and it sat until midnight, at which point it was a soggy, inedible pile of green mush.

Probably my most painful cooking episode was one that also taught me an important lesson about culinary hubris. In a fit of confidence I decided to contribute to the bounty at the Gruen household by bringing a homemade tiramisu to one of our gatherings. I didn't know what mascarpone was at the time, and when there was none at the grocery store I substituted another exotic-sounding cheese—Gorgonzola—figuring it would do just fine. I transported my masterpiece in a pan with foil over it, and I should have realized from the sloshing and spillage in the taxi on the way over that something was wrong. The smell alone was unbearable, and as I climbed the stairs to the Gruens' apartment I began to panic. What had I been thinking? Maybe nobody would notice—or, better yet, maybe nobody had ever had tiramisu.

Wait a minute—hadn't John Gruen lived in Italy? I was humiliated as I presented my sloppy, swampy-smelling creation, and angry with myself for daring to impose such a pathetic failure on others. I made a secret vow that night that I would be more careful about such experiments in the future, and particularly careful about sharing them with others. For a long time after the debacle of the Terrible Tiramisu I made a point of restricting my public offerings to my two proven strengths to date: dancing and silence.

I
T WAS SEVERAL
years after the disastrous night of the Gorgonzola tiramisu before I could get back on the tiramisu wagon. I am happy to say that I now have a very simple, very fast, and very good tiramisu recipe that I execute with consistent success for all kinds of occasions. Also, happily, my friendship with all the Gruens has survived my culinary blunder. When Julia turned fifty, Luis and I went to her birthday party, hosted by Mimi Thompson and her husband, James Rosenquist, at their loft in TriBeCa. Julia's parents, Jane Wilson and John Gruen, in their eighties now but still going strong, were both there. Jane looked ravishing in a long dress, her eyes highlighted by that black eyeliner that was so stylish in the sixties and seventies. Jane is still painting, better than ever, and John has published yet another book—
Callas Kissed Me
…
Lenny Too
.

On that evening celebrating Julia's fiftieth, I was struck by how lucky I am to still share evenings with a grande dame like Jane and an artist like John and a dear friend like Jules. Family comes in many shapes and guises, and as I have said before, the Gruens will always have a special place in my heart as part of my New York family. May John's stories never stop coming; after all, he did kiss Callas—and Lenny too! And may all the Gruens forgive me for that evening when I stumbled into their lovely apartment carrying the terrible-smelling tiramisu.