Ever since I was a little girl growing up in the South, country music had been the background sound track of my life. My father would blast Willie Nelson on our pickup truck radio, singing off-key, to my sister’s groans. My mom recorded me mournfully singing “Rhinestone Cowboy” as a child with the thick twang of coastal Carolina in my voice. But I didn’t fully love and embrace country music, ironically, until I moved to New York.
My clock radio just happened to be tuned to the one Manhattan country music station when I set it up in my bedroom after my family and I moved into our new apartment. Since I didn’t know any of the other stations, I left it there until I could find the popular rock station. After listening to one song by the Judds, I was hooked and gave up my search for popular, cooler New York rock. I loved Garth Brooks and Clint Black and Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, and the Judds and Mary Chapin Carpenter were particular favorites. Their songs were sweet and funny and filled with bluegrass-tinged harmony to which I would try to sing along, mostly unsuccessfully. I thought if I could live my life all over again, I would do it as a country singer.
When I found Denim and Diamonds, I discovered a little oasis in the city. It was across town from me and had a large white horse rearing up on the awning outside. On the ground floor there was a regular bar, but downstairs was a large space with tables and cowhide chairs surrounding a sunken dance floor glittering beneath a rhinestone disco saddle. Country music blared from the speakers, and I was in heaven.
I began to visit regularly by myself, usually once or twice a week. There were two free dance lessons early in the evening, followed by line dancing and couples dances, and there was no drink minimum, perfect for me, since I was alone and didn’t want to drink. I would go for the dance lessons and then stick around, ordering water from the disgruntled bartender, having a great time for just the cost it took me to get over to the East Side on the bus. Because of my dance training, the lessons were easy, and I could pick up the regular line dances I didn’t know throughout the rest of the evening just by watching a couple of repetitions. I would spend hours on the dance floor having fun all by myself—it wasn’t a “pickup” place because most people came with their dance partners. This meant that I was left happily alone unless some of my friends had come along.
One night around 1995, James joined a group of friends and me at Denim and Diamonds. I was surprised to see him there because I didn’t think him the type of guy who could tolerate country music. But word had gotten out at NYCB about Denim and Diamonds, and when a group of dancers came, we usually had a blast and practically took over the dance floor. He ended up line dancing beside me, and though he managed to turn the fairly tame line dances into wilder versions of themselves, I started to think he might be all right. During breaks between dances, he always seemed to be near me, and we talked about inconsequential things, shouting over the music of Brooks & Dunn. I didn’t find James as threatening as I had before and was noticing changes within myself; I was nurturing new and different aspects of my personality as I searched for an identity outside ballet. I was having fun with a guy and realized I might be . . . interested.
But then on the cab ride home with James and some others, he suddenly said that he was meeting a friend and had to get out of the cab early. It was late at night, and I enviously assumed he was meeting a woman. Disappointed, I realized that he was operating in a different world from mine with different values, and I put him out of my mind.
Another moment during that same year when my heart thawed a little toward James was during a rehearsal for a non–City Ballet gig. Christopher Wheeldon, a fellow dancer and budding choreographer, had asked us to perform in a ballet he had made for two couples that was to be danced uptown at Riverside Church. Chris made James and me partners. During a pause in the rehearsal one day, we were all grouped around the video screen so that we could learn our next steps. Out of the blue, James suddenly did a very silly imitation of Steve Martin in The Jerk. Surprised, I laughed out loud and wondered again if there was more to this guy than a bad-boy attitude.
While I was having my difficulties over the next few years, James was going through his own period of struggle and growth. He began to run his own gigs, taking out small groups of dancers to perform outside City Ballet’s regular work. He joined the dancers’ committee for the union, helping to negotiate the dancers’ contracts and becoming an advocate for the dancers and a liaison with management. And at the age of twenty-five, James began to confront his ideas about God and truth, and to explore what kind of life he really wanted to live. Though he had been raised Catholic, religion had dropped away from his daily life, and he came to realize he needed more of God. So he was changing as much as I was, though we were on separate journeys at the time.
I told no one, not even my closest friends, that I’d been fired from the company in February 1997. My family members were the only ones who knew, although it was clear to everyone else that I was having some issues. I kept dancing, always hoping that my problem would soon somehow be fixed. Despite my obvious troubles, James invited me to perform in some performances he had organized in Vermont and Massachusetts that would take place after the company’s summer season in Saratoga Springs. I agreed, hungry for any performance opportunity, particularly away from the judgmental eyes of the company. Knowing it could be my last chance to get out onstage, I traveled to Vermont with the group directly from Saratoga, where I believed I’d just danced my last season with the New York City Ballet.
The gig was a blessing for me in many ways. The other six people on the trip were some of my best friends and favorite people in the company. I felt only acceptance and warmth when I was around them. We were dancing fun ballets, one of which was a ballet for three dancers that Christopher Wheeldon had created during a previous choreography workshop. In Saratoga, Chris choreographed a new solo just for me that somehow managed to tap into everything I was feeling and fighting at the time. The solo started out with my arms crossed behind my back as I struggled to free myself from invisible bonds; the music built until I was able to break free and dance fully in the space of the stage. The other ballet I was dancing was the pas de deux from Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes. My partner for that ballet was James.
We all spent a week together performing, and the best part of the week was the last leg of our tour in Nantucket. None of us had been to the island before, and during our free time we explored as much as we could. We were hosted by families on the island and stayed in their houses as their guests. James and I started to spend a lot of our free time together, just as friends, but I realized that I was developing a crush on him. On one of our free afternoons, some of us rented scooters to go to the beach, and I ended up riding on the back of James’s. For me, it was a very daring thing to do; two of my girlfriends opted to go back to the house and rest, and normally I would have been right there with them. But I wanted to have some fun with this boy that I was starting to like, so I went.
It was a great afternoon. I remember particularly the moment when our group arrived at the beach and everyone ran into the water. I purposefully stayed behind, wanting to be last so that no one would look at me in my bathing suit. Somehow, though, no matter how slowly I moved, James was still there talking to me, waiting to go into the water with me.
Finally, there was nothing else for me to do but head toward the ocean. James still lingered.
“Aren’t you going in?” I asked, hoping he would run ahead of me.
“I wanted to watch you go first,” he replied flirtatiously.
“I’m embarrassed,” I finally said, horrified that I was admitting this to him.
“Why?” he asked casually. “Jen, you are gorgeous.” But he spared me the moment and ran ahead of me, daring me to catch up with him. He had no idea how much his words meant to me.
That night, I couldn’t sleep and didn’t feel like staying inside the house with the other girls. James was in the backyard talking t
o the guys, but I didn’t feel like being part of that group either, so I walked around to the front of the house and sat on the hood of one of the cars, lying back to look at the stars. It felt nice to be alone with my thoughts and contemplate the beauty of the night sky; stargazing had been a favorite pastime for my father and me since I was a child. But I was also yearning to talk to James, and as the night wore on I finally realized I might have to take the initiative and go talk to him myself. Just as I was about to go around to the back of the house, James came to find me.
He hopped up beside me on the hood of the car, and we just talked like two good friends. I felt so happy sitting there, talking to him about nothing in particular. I wanted the night to last forever, but since we had a performance the following day, James finally suggested we go in and get some sleep. We were both reluctant.
The performance was a blur but for the feelings of both freedom and sadness as I danced; this was probably my farewell to the stage. For all of my friends, this was just a fun gig, a chance to dance something new and make a little money. But for me, it was my good-bye to ballet and the beginning of a big unknown.
After the performance, we went directly to the ferry that would take us to the mainland. There our group split up into two cars for the drive through the night back to New York City. I got myself into the car James was driving along with my two good friends Elizabeth Walker and Dena Abergel. We all settled in for the long car ride, knowing we wouldn’t get back to the city until around 4:00 a.m.
I taught the girls my family’s car song, a complicated tune with two separate parts that my mother had learned at summer camp when she was a child and then passed on to my sister and me. It takes a lot of practice and repetition to get the two parts coordinated, and we sang it over and over, trying to perfect it, until James begged us to take a break. Then James was in charge of the conversation, and true to his nature he decided to ask a difficult, thought-provoking question to get a discussion going.
“So, Jen,” he asked me. “What are you looking for in a husband?”
I was flabbergasted. Dena and Elizabeth looked at me with raised eyebrows, laughing a little. I wondered: Did he have an ulterior motive, or was he just being flippant?
I decided to give James a serious answer, so I had to think. What was the most important characteristic I was looking for in a husband? Was it the hero, the prince I’d prayed for as a child, writing down lists of my future husband’s qualities and then hiding them in my drawer? I realized that what actually mattered the most to me was that my husband be a Christian man. I wanted to be able to share my faith with him. Obviously I wanted friendship and attraction and humor and faithfulness, but the main thing I wanted—needed—was to be able to walk beside my husband in faith and to raise our children together to walk with Christ.
But I paused—I was afraid to reveal my answer. What if I told this to James, and it turned him off to me? We hadn’t talked about religion yet, so I didn’t know where he stood. I had no idea about his faith at all. I liked him so much, but I really couldn’t tell yet if he was looking at me romantically. I decided to take a chance and lay all of my cards on the table. That way, if he was really interested in me, he would know what he was getting into before we even started. And if my faith scared him off, then neither one of us would have wasted our time on something doomed to fail.
“Well, I suppose the most important thing to me would be that my husband is a Christian,” I said, not sounding very confident.
“Really,” he said, sounding surprised. I think everyone in the car was a little surprised, actually. They probably imagined I would answer more lightly than that. But I had a real crush on James, and it was worth it to me to be totally honest, just to see how he would react and whether he was thinking of asking me out.
My revelation kept the little car occupied for a while. As can only happen among close friends stuck together in a small space in the middle of the night, we ended up talking intensely about every subject imaginable. We discussed religion endlessly. Elizabeth was a Protestant from the South like me, Dena was a devout Jew, and James was a lapsed Catholic. We talked about marriage and relationships: Dena was married, Elizabeth had a boyfriend, I’d never had a boyfriend, and James was at loose ends. All of this led to my second bombshell that night.
“Actually, I don’t want to have sex until I get married,” I said timidly. I knew that in the world I inhabited, this assertion could make me seem really uncool.
Silence. For several long moments, no one spoke. Then soon no one could stop speaking. James had a lot of questions for me, some of which were uncomfortable because I’d never discussed my opinions on these subjects before outside my family. I have never been vocal on controversial subjects, always content to let others do the talking when it comes to difficult topics. But here I was with two of my oldest friends and the man I had a crush on, so I figured now was the time to speak up, if ever. When James asked me difficult questions, such as “But what if you really love each other?” I answered them as honestly and humbly as I could, offering my opinions and hiding nothing. I figured that in the end, it would be best that way. James respected my opinion and seemed very interested and thoughtful.
We finally arrived in Manhattan around 4:30 a.m. The darkness of another humid summer night was punctuated by stoplights and walk signals as we neared my apartment building on Eighty-fifth Street. We were all exhausted and had grown silent.
James pulled up in front of my building, and I gave quick hugs to Dena and Elizabeth.
“Thank you so much for bringing me on the gig, James. I had a great time,” I said.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” James replied.
“Oh, you don’t have to,” I said, even though his offer pleased me. “I’m fine. You can see me through the window.”
He ignored me and got out of the car to get my luggage, carrying it up the stairs in the little entrance that led to the locked door of my lobby. He set my suitcase down, looking tired from the long drive.
“Well, thank you again,” I said as we looked at each other.
He leaned forward, and we did that very New York kiss on the cheek that friends give each other to say hello and good-bye. I hadn’t done it growing up in the South, but by now I was a pro at it. Then I turned, unlocked the door, waved, and went inside. As I watched James go back to the car, I realized that I felt sad already, and wistful. It occurred to me that I might never see James again. But I thought there was a connection, and I went inside and fell asleep, hoping that James had felt it too, and that he would call me soon so that we could see each other again.
He didn’t call. As I floundered in the darkness of that summer, I figured I’d misunderstood things, and I let my crush on him fall away along with my love for dance.
Three months later, in October 1997, I was in a much different place emotionally. I had jobs, was finishing up college, and was starting to take ballet class again. I was still fragile but was beginning to figure things out. I was relishing my rediscovery of God and felt certain that even if I didn’t know in what direction He was taking me, He knew, and He had a plan.
Then one day I got a phone call. I screened it, as I always did at that time. I never knew when it would be an uncomfortable call, so why not choose whether or not to deal with it?
I stood in my bedroom with my giant cat, Storm, purring on the bed and watched my answering machine, waiting to see who it was. My breath caught when I heard James’s voice. Butterflies rushed through my stomach, and I had to calm myself to actually listen to what he was saying.
“Hey, Jen, it’s James. I was just calling about that Nutcracker gig we were going to do up in New Paltz for Peter Naumann. It is in early December, so I wanted to see when we should get together to rehearse. Give me a call when you get the chance. Okay, bye.”
I was shocked for two reasons. First of all, no one from the company had called me since I�
�d left. I don’t believe it was on purpose—the schedule of City Ballet can be so overwhelming that they probably hadn’t had the time or energy. Also, I’d been very successful at closing myself off from my friends.
Secondly, he was calling me to dance with him?
I was horrified. What Nutcracker gig? When had I agreed to do it? We must have discussed it a long time ago, and maybe I’d just said yes, hoping or assuming he would forget. I certainly had forgotten! There was no way I could do the performances with him, I thought. I was too heavy and too out of shape, even though I was taking some ballet. I was taking for fun, not to be ready to perform. I would be terrible, and it would be embarrassing.
I worried all day, wondering what I would say to James. A thousand lies and excuses came to mind, ways that I could avoid the truth and save face. But the more I thought about it and prayed about it, the more I realized that I needed to take a step as the real me and not hide behind a persona of false perfection, as the old Jenny would have done. James was a good guy and a friend, and despite my summer crush on him, I didn’t have to hide from him. I would tell him the truth.
I returned his call that night after a long, nervous day. I was actually hoping that he would not answer so I could just leave it all on his machine, but of course he did.
“Hello?”
“Hi, James, it’s Jenny.”
“Oh, hey!” He sounded excited. We chatted a bit. Then I took a deep breath and plunged in.
“Look,” I said, “I don’t think I should do that gig with you. I wish I could, but I’m really out of shape.”
“There’s tons of time for you to get in shape,” said James. “And we can rehearse a lot too, which will help.”
I realized I would have to be more explicit. I’d never come right out and called myself overweight to a fellow dancer; I’d always avoided the word, using phrases like “out of shape” or “bigger than usual.” But I was going to have to do it this time. I felt myself blushing and held my clenched fist over my stomach.
Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet Page 15
