Every Step You Take (22 page)

As idyllic as our Connecticut homesteading seemed on the surface, over time I think all three of us could feel a spider's web of tensions being spun between us on other levels. It was a complex situation that I'm sure some shrink would have a field day dissecting—a sort of poor man's
Hamlet
. Heather and Peter, my surrogate mother and father, had split and now Heather was with Damian, one of the company's up-and-coming talents. For years Heather and I had been unbelievably close, but every day Heather and Damian were growing closer and closer. They were a heterosexual couple, while I was a single and, at that particular moment, roving gay man. But bigger and more unspoken than any of these conflicts was another huge and frightening change that we all knew was looming: Heather was closing in on forty-one. She had many other interests tugging at her—she had been designing costumes, working incredibly hard with the nonprofit organization God's Love We Deliver, gardening, cooking, and writing. In the fall of 1994, she went to Peter and told him she had decided it was time to retire.

I was horrified at the thought of dancing without Heather, and that last season with her was very emotional and tough. I couldn't believe she was leaving, just like that. It seemed impossible. I had watched dancers retire before, but this was different. Heather was a ballerina whom I'd watched with awe since I first got into the company, marveling at her combinations of edginess and smoothness and the way she manipulated complex movements to create a surreal beauty. Heather was the gifted partner with whom I now danced to create the same kind of surreal beauty in dozens of ballets. She was at the center of my career and my art, and I felt we were at our prime. And now she was going to step down, just turn the faucet off and shut down her magic. I could see that the decision made sense for her, but it terrified me.

The night of Heather's retirement performance, January 15, 1995, was one of the saddest and most emotional nights I ever experienced. We danced Balanchine's
Bugaku
and Peter's
Valse Triste
, and we danced them well—but I was trying so hard not to cry the entire time we were performing. I wanted every moment to last a lifetime. I remember running offstage after our last steps together and bringing armloads of roses back to her and bowing on one knee. We had had fifteen years of dancing together, and of being great friends offstage as well—it was fully half my life at that point. A long, long time. When I looked up I saw tears glistening in Heather's eyes, too, and I saw that she was still in every way and in every moment exactly what Balanchine had once called her: his “wild orchid.”

Life takes some very strange turns, and one of the strangest in my case has been that for the past several years, Heather and I, who were once so close, have not spoken much. Over time the two of us have had so many experiences together, and now life has taken us each in our own direction. But one thing we will always have is our memories of our performances together. Those special moments onstage, the great premieres and the opening nights, will never fade. And as long as I live I also will never forget the day of my own retirement, ten years after Heather's, and the look on Heather's face and the tears in her eyes as she threw me flowers from the audience. She threw roses, a big beautiful bouquet of pink and yellow and white roses that she and Damian had grown in the garden of the Connecticut house we once shared.

As I think back to the years when Heather and Damian and I were trying to make a cozy family nest for ourselves in the Connecticut countryside, I am once again haunted by questions about where my real family was nesting during the same years. For the most part, their visits had remained as rare as ever, but at one point during this period their nomadic ramblings brought them east, and they decided to settle in Mashantucket, Connecticut. We were all excited at the prospect of seeing one another more regularly, and they actually did visit me several times at the country house that Heather and Damian and I shared. We spent both the Fourth of July and the following Christmas together there that year, and I remember that for me it was strange—and in many ways stressful—to suddenly have family present at these major holidays. Old tensions that had been dormant for years quickly came to life. One example that stands out occurred during their Christmas visit, on Christmas Day. My mother was wearing a pretty, all-white outfit, and just as we were sitting down to Christmas dinner my father turned to her and announced that she looked like a fat marshmallow. I got so angry that I screamed at Pop and insisted he apologize. Mom and I were both always watching our weight, and my strong reaction may have been because, in part, I took the “fat marshmallow” comment personally. But a more important factor in my anger was the long-standing feelings I had toward my father. Given his performance as a husband, in my opinion my father had no right to criticize my mother, ever, about anything. Whatever my reasons for yelling at my father back then, the memory of that moment breaks my heart now. I saw him so rarely, and for everyone's sake I wish I had controlled my temper.

Shortly after that Christmas visit, my parents hit the road again, heading back to points west and resuming their restless travels, and our experiment with living near one another was officially over. Curious to know where they had come from before that short Connecticut stint, and where they went afterward, I decided to consult my mother's computer files. The answers I found to the blanks in my memory surprised and touched me. Before coming to Connecticut my parents had been working as managers of a mobile home park in Arvada, Colorado, and then as managers of the Gig Harbor RV Resort in the state of Washington. “Joe and Jo are self-starters, dependable, consistent, energetic and resourceful organizers. Both are effective communicators, friendly and recognize priorities and work well together to meet deadlines,” my mother wrote in her introduction to their joint résumé. It was after these two stints that Mom and Pop moved to Mashantucket, Connecticut, and when they left Connecticut they went west again, where they lived in Many Farms, Arizona; Gallup, New Mexico; Canutillo, Texas; Pasadena, California; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. And these are only the stops that made it into Mom's résumé.

Reading my mother's résumé filled in more than the geographic blanks in my memory. I learned all sorts of things about what she had been doing while I was dancing my heart out in New York and playacting as landed gentry at my new property in upstate Connecticut. In Mashantucket, Mom worked with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Elders, as an arts-and-crafts and Native regalia researcher and instructor; in Many Farms, Arizona—the same valley where her father had grown his famous tomatoes so many years ago—she submitted a proposal, received approval, raised $285,000 in funding, and founded a nonprofit organization called the Many Farms Senior Wellness Center. In addition to her long list of standard office and secretarial skills, Mom notes her expertise in “native regalia, sewing machines and other sewing methods, bead work, kiln work, paints and other arts and crafts.”

Once again I am humbled by the breadth and energy behind my mother's many accomplishments, and reminded of the truth in the opening sentence of the book she never got to write: “One never really gets to know one's parents.” As I examine my own life I am beginning to feel that I took everything for granted when I was growing up. I spoiled myself and had the strangest notions of grandeur and poverty. To me, the reservation and the life people led there always seemed poor and sad. Only now am I beginning to realize how rich it actually is—rich with culture, rich with natural beauty, rich with tradition. The house I shared with Heather and Damian in Connecticut may have looked fancy and rich, but did I ever really feel nourished there the way my mother was nourished by her land and her heritage? It is hard to say. I do know I would give anything to sit down and have just one more Christmas dinner with both my white-marshmallow mother and my salsa-singing father (at whom I hope I will never again scream).

F
OR DECADES OF
my life, the annual run of Balanchine's beloved
Nutcracker
ballet put the kibosh on any out-of-town holiday travel—we dancers got Christmas Day off, period—so every Thanksgiving and Christmas I was inevitably an orphan-guest at the holiday dinners of some kindhearted family in New York. John Gruen and Jane Wilson wrapped me into their family holiday meals on many occasions when I was young, as did Peter and Heather and several other company members who were grown up enough to actually have homes.

These days the NYCB is dark on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day—such a luxury! But there are still plenty of dancers and colleagues of Luis's from his busy restaurant and sommelier worlds who can't make it home or who have nowhere to go, so every year we put together a dinner for a random assortment of orphans and strays. This is always one of my favorite parties of the year, because we never know who will fill the chairs. What will be on the table is more predictable: a groaning board of standard holiday side dishes and a big old spiral-cut smoked ham. When it comes to gifts they always say it's the thought that counts, so if you are hosting a crowd of unknown size for Christmas, why not think of something easy and give yourself the gift of time?

I always try to keep every other aspect of this meal simple too. For hors d'oeuvres I go to the Chelsea Market and put together a big platter of cheeses, salami, and crudités. For flowers I buy bunches of red roses at the corner deli the night before and keep them in a bucket of warm water—a trick Heather taught me. Just before the guests arrive I cut the stems short (about four inches) and arrange the roses in stemless wineglasses or jelly jars down the center of the table. A couple of big candles and some holly sprigs here and there, some classic holiday music in the background, and a tray of glasses filled with rosé champagne to greet guests as they arrive—with friends like these who needs family?

______

SERVES 10 GENEROUSLY, WITH LEFTOVERS

This really has to be the easiest dish in the world. I like to get a Cook's spiral-sliced hickory-smoked honey ham, but there are many variations of the same. Usually the glaze comes glued to the side of the packaged ham, and instructions (which may vary) are printed on the inside—so remember not to throw the wrapper away too soon.

1 10-pound spiral-sliced hickory-smoked honey ham, with glaze packet

Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Put the ham flat-side down in a large roasting pan, pour the juices from the package the ham came in over the meat, and cover it with aluminum foil. Put the ham in the oven. Let it cook for 2 hours without touching it. At this point, if there is a lot of juice at the bottom of the pan, I pour half of it out, and then baste the ham with the remaining juice. Spread half of the glaze from the glaze packet over the ham, put the aluminum foil back on, and cook for another 50 minutes. Finally, spread the remaining glaze over the ham and cook for another 10 minutes without the aluminum-foil cover. Remove from the oven and let the ham rest, covered with foil, until ready to serve.

This ham makes a perfect entrée for a Christmas crowd, but it's just as good in spring, with some gorgeous asparagus in balsamic vinaigrette. Or serve it for a Sunday brunch with garlic bread, so guests can put their ham between two luscious garlicky crusts and chomp away.

______

Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.

—M
ARTHA
G
RAHAM

A
fter that sad January evening in 1995 when I danced my final
Bugaku
and
Valse Triste
with Heather, I was completely lost. It still seemed impossible that she was gone, and I felt totally alone and exposed. Heather and I had been dancing together for so long, and we knew each other so well, both on- and offstage—I wasn't sure there would be much of me left up there onstage without her. I was thirty and I was beginning to feel my years—we boys do all the lifting, and over time our joints pay the price. I had been suffering from more aches and more injuries with each passing year, and in the winter of 1995, as I confronted the prospect of my first season without Heather, I honestly wondered if it might be time for me to retire as well. I thought about this quite seriously, the big question being, of course, what else could I do?

Heather and Damian and I still shared the house in Connecticut, and we would hole up there together whenever we could, doing our best to maintain the work-hard, play-hard lifestyle we had led before. Heather and I launched a new partnership when we began to work together on a cookbook that would present some of our favorite meals. This gave us a comforting transitional partnering mode, but in truth the basic frame beneath our rolling adventure had changed—two of us were still performing in Lincoln Center every night, while one of us was moving on to explore new territory. The cadence of our days, the rhythm of our professional responsibilities, had been altered—and as time passed everything else began to change, too.

One inevitable change resulting from Heather's retirement was that I began to partner other ballerinas more frequently, and as a result, my stage rapport with various company members began to open up and expand. Of course everyone in the company dances with one another in all kinds of combinations, and over the years I had had the privilege of partnering many astoundingly talented ballerinas. But my partnership with Heather, in the final years before she retired, had become such an intense and defining aspect of my professional life that it had overshadowed most other experiences. In some situations my closeness to Heather even complicated matters. Relations between Heather and Darci, for instance, had always been a little distant—not just because Peter had been involved with each of them, but also because of fundamental differences in their personalities and styles. After Heather's retirement, Peter began casting me with Darci more often, and I was pleased when a deeper friendship began to develop between us.