Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  Ulrik had noticed my newfound confidence enough to acknowledge it in his photo caption that read, “Jock finally DOES have a voice,” but I think I shocked both of us when I proved my new independence by starting an affair with another man. I’d like to blame my actions on the Pyramid Bar and the disco night that they used to host there every week—but I think it had a lot more to do with youth and lust and good old-fashioned paybacks. Ulrik’s dalliances were really wearing on me. The first night that I noticed John Beal at the Pyramid’s Sunday disco event it was because he was noticing me, staring holes into me from somewhere to my right as I ordered drinks at the bar. When I turned to look I was astounded—I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be as good-looking as Ulrik. We said hello, and exchanged names. When he intercepted me on the way to the men’s room a little later, I explained that I had a boyfriend—a boyfriend who was, in fact, right across the room from us.

  When I went back to the Pyramid Bar the following Sunday, John was there again. This time when we talked, briefly, we also exchanged numbers. I was slightly horrified by this brazen act, but when he called and invited me to lunch a few days later, I accepted. We ate at the Tomato Café in Chelsea—I will never forget it—and I was so aware that I was doing something bad that I couldn’t touch my food. John positioned his knees outside mine under the table, and kept pushing my knees together with his, until I had to ask him to stop. I was upset by this rendezvous, but when I went to the Pyramid Bar on the following Sunday, I was armed and in a premeditated mood for crime, whether or not I knew it at the time. I was on a cassette-making jag in those days, and I often made tapes of different songs built around some special theme. Before leaving for the Pyramid that night, I loaded a copy of my most recent cassette of assorted love songs—“Don’t Make Me Over,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “Tainted Love,” and other classics—into my pocket. It just seemed like a good idea to me as I left the house, and I couldn’t say exactly why.

  When Ulrik and Heather got into a big argument about something later that night—I can’t remember what; they were both such aggressive and intelligent verbal wizards, conversation was often a blood sport for them—I looked at Peter Martins’s son, Nilas, and gave him the “Let’s get outta here” look. Needless to say, when Nilas and I left I came up with the bright idea to call John—from a pay phone in the street (because this was still the pre–cell phone era)—and we wound up heading down to John’s apartment in the East Village (parts of which were actually kind of scary in the eighties) so that I could deliver my cassette as a gift. The rest is not really what you would call history, but it is my history. John and I started dating, and before too long I moved (along with the two beautiful shar-peis, named Lily and Sam, whom Ulrik and I owned together) to a place of my own—a whole two blocks away from the apartment Ulrik and I had shared. John and I hung out for about a year. He was a lovely man, an excellent cook, and also a dancer with several modern dance troupes—including the Trockadero ballet, no less. I was shocked when I learned about the latter. He was extremely ugly en pointe in a tutu, but he was gorgeous offstage.

  When you are dancing ten or more hours a day, pouring everything you have into rehearsals and performances, it is difficult to concentrate intelligently on much of anything else. It’s no secret that dancers’ private lives, which get wedged into the narrow slot of time that is left after they tend to their first love, can get notoriously strange and convoluted—and mine was no exception. Recently I was flipping through a “Week-at-a-Glance” diary from 1988 that I kept when I was living on my own for the first time—one of a couple of failed diary attempts on my part during this period. I was reminded of how jam-packed my life had been in those days—both professionally and personally. In the month of January I mention fifteen different ballets I was performing or rehearsing, including The Nutcracker, Allegro Brilliante, Piano Pieces, Afternoon of a Faun, Agon, Brahms/Handel, Liebeslieder Walzer, Symphony in C, Ecstatic Orange, Vienna Waltzes, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Jewels, and Bugaku. Sometimes I was performing two or even three of these ballets in a single day. And of course the visits to bars and restaurants in the same one-month period outnumber the ballets by a factor of at least three to one. The notation “got very drunk,” scrawled across the page as a kind of explanation for why nothing else is written there, appears with embarrassing regularity. January 17 offers a typical entry:

  Sunday. Pop’s birthday. Must call. He turns half a century today.

  Danced Liebeslieder and Brahms-Handel.

  Called Pop, he was very into making me feel sorry for him. He asked what I sent him, I said nothing. He said I should think of him more often, and not hate him. Dinner at Peter Wolff’s. Got very very drunk. Everybody fought.

  To Indochine, then to Pyramid for “the one last nightcap.” Then home.

  A number of significant milestones also occurred within this one year. In February my grandma Rachel died and I flew home to the reservation. (“It was very sad, lots of crying. Went to bed thinking: I must get home to New York, how will I get home to New York tomorrow?” I wrote in my Week-at-a-Glance.) I flew to Virgin Gorda (in the British Virgin Islands) with Heather for a week of vacation. That spring in the company’s American Music Festival (which introduced a total of twenty-two ballets and eighteen choreographers) I danced in five new ballets—Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux’s Five, Robert Weiss’s Archetypes, Laura Dean’s Space, and Peter Martins’s Black and White and A Fool for You with Ray Charles—as well as in the company premiere of Richard Tanner’s Sonatas and Interludes. In June, Heather and I spent a week of vacation in Connecticut at Peter’s country house (“Eating Drinking Relaxing” is scrawled across every diary page for seven days). In July I went with the company to Saratoga; in August we went on tour to Greece, Italy, France, and Japan. In between all of this I got my learner’s permit to drive (finally!), worked with Heather at God’s Love We Deliver to raise several thousand dollars for AIDS relief, did several interviews and photo shoots for various publications, and celebrated Ulrik’s retirement from the company. Somewhere in here I suppose I must have walked poor Lily and Sam.

  What with my dancing and my drinking and my running all over New York and the world at large, it’s no wonder I couldn’t find the time or emotional resources to establish a successful stable relationship with John—or anyone, to be honest. To compound matters, throughout this period, when I was supposedly establishing my independence by living on my own and seeing my new boyfriend, my Week-at-a-Glance reminds me that I was also having frequent dinners and rendezvous—and many very long late-night arguments over the telephone—with Ulrik. At some point in here John moved to Paris for a while to pursue a modeling career, leaving me essentially alone again. Sometimes—especially when we are young and hotheaded—it is our more destructive relationships that are the most compelling, and the path of most resistance is the one we prefer to follow. For whatever reason, after a year of living “alone,” I allowed the very articulate, complicated, handsome, and persuasive Ulrik to convince me to come back and live with him again. As a friend of mine likes to say, sometimes a mistake worth making once seems worth making twice.

  It was pretty clear immediately after we got back together that things were not going well. When Ulrik left the NYCB he had gone into the restaurant business, and as the weeks passed our relationship went from disjointed to disconnected. For several months neither one of us seemed to have the free time—or any overlapping breaks in our schedules, or, for that matter, the emotional skills—to try to address the issue. We just let things unravel and coexisted with Lily and Sam in the big duplex apartment we had rented. Finally the day came when I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t go on. Over the course of a few weeks I packed all my belongings—Ulrik was so busy I’m not sure he even noticed the boxes piling up—and when I found a place (yes, two blocks away again) I called movers and Lily, Sam, and I moved out. I was twenty-five years old, and I was finally—really and truly this time, I told myself—ready to
try to grow up and live life on my own.

  Chop till You Drop: A Last-minute Meal for Fifty or More

  WHEN MY FATHER first dropped the bomb that he had published an announcement in the local newspaper for a “meet and greet” dinner at our house the day after we arrived in Eagle Nest, Luis and I looked at each other and wondered if we should just turn around and get on a plane back to New York. I am proud to report, however, that we pulled it off. We proved that—even in a tiny mountain town with limited grocery resources and cooking in a strange and only semiequipped kitchen—it is actually possible to get up early in the morning and shop for and prepare a full meal for more than fifty guests by 5 p.m. the same day.

  Our menu took shape as we shopped, according to what was available at the Valley Market in the nearby town of Angel Fire: grilled sausages with cannellini beans, green salad, tomato-and-mozzarella salad, garlic bread, and—as the foundation for our megafeast—the ever-expandable, crowd-pleasing penne with Bolognese sauce. The recipe that follows serves eight, but just multiply by ten if you have to feed a village on short notice.

  My Penne Polonaise

  ______

  SERVES 8

  When I began making this recipe as a young ballet dancer I could never remember the name Bolognese, so I started calling it Penne Polonaise, in honor of a familiar ballet step. Over the years, the name stuck. I learned a little trick from our friend Chef Cesare Casella. When the sauce is almost finished add a sprinkle or two of an Indian spice called garam masala. It marries everything and brings a special flavor to the sauce.

  2 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped

  3 celery stalks, roughly chopped

  1 large onion, roughly chopped

  10 cloves peeled garlic (or less if you’re a wimp)

  Salt

  1 box of penne pasta

  2½ pounds mixed ground veal, pork, and beef

  2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil

  1 28-ounce can plum tomatoes (reserve the liquid)

  Pepper

  1 tablespoon each finely chopped fresh thyme, oregano, and rosemary

  1 teaspoon garam masala (available at gourmet and Indian markets)

  ½ to 1 cup grated Parmesan cheese

  Get out your faithful Cuisinart and process the carrots, celery, onion, and garlic in batches to make something similar to a rough cornmeal. Set aside.

  Put a large pot of water, generously salted, on to boil for the pasta.

  In a separate large pot brown the meat in 2 tablespoons of olive oil. When the meat is thoroughly browned, add your vegetable mixture and cook on medium heat for another 5 minutes, stirring regularly.

  Empty the tomatoes and their liquid into a bowl and break up the tomatoes by squeezing them gently (another lesson from my mother, who insisted that food should always be handled with respect) and add to the meat. Season with salt and pepper to taste and add your herbs. Bring to a boil; then turn the heat down to low, cover the sauce, and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring every now and then, so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Add the garam masala and cook for another 10 minutes.

  Meanwhile, cook the penne in boiling water for 2 minutes less than the recommended time, so it’s al dente, and then use a slotted spoon to transfer the pasta to the sauce.

  Add ½ cup of grated Parmesan to your sauce and stir. If the sauce seems too thick or gummy, you can add ½ cup or so of the pasta water and the remaining olive oil. (I love a lot of cheese, so the pasta water is always necessary.) Taste, and adjust the seasoning.

  Serve with more grated cheese, Italian bread, and a very good red wine. Whatever you do, don’t launch into a Polonaise while carrying this to the table, or you will be wearing your dinner.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ______

  Exploring New Country

  Astaire was not a sexual animal, but he made his partners look so extraordinarily related to him.

  —MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV

  Ballet is Woman” is one of Balanchine’s most frequently quoted statements about his art, and to project woman in her most transcendent and absolute form you must have man. This was the ideal of ballet that I was working so hard to achieve every time I stepped onstage, particularly with my partnering roles. When I first started to partner as a teenager, I had been understandably nervous—not only was I a mere upstart dancing with famous ballerinas, I was also completely inexperienced when it came to passion and romance—and I was gay. Would I be able to project a classic male presence convincingly? Could I interact with a woman onstage in a way that would bring the transcendent beauty of the love story alive, as I had seen so many of my idols do? But the wonderful thing about dance is that in the end it really is all about movement and action, and I could worry about these things for only so long before it was time to just get out there and try. I learned early on that if I cast off my anxieties and turned to my partner with openness and trust, the music and the choreography would lift us into the character and emotion and movement of our roles. The key for me, to cite another Balanchine quote, seemed to be “Don’t think, just do.”

  I quickly discovered that I was quite comfortable partnering—I liked the less-exposed position behind a woman and I seemed to have an instinctive sense for where a ballerina needed to be and how to get her there. I liked making myself as quiet and invisible as possible behind my ballerinas. I worked specifically on ways to keep my hands hidden, how to give subtle support so that my ballerinas could appear to take off and float, landing effortlessly and silently, like the sublime creatures they were. Most important, I learned that there was never any need to fake the emotion of a ballet. All the romance and feeling will come barreling through you, as real as the floorboards beneath your feet, if you dance full out.

  By the time I was twenty-five I had proved myself as a competent and even skilled ballet partner with many ballerinas. But when I danced with Heather something bigger was happening; I could feel the two of us entering a more profound realm of collaboration, especially in certain ballets we worked on with Peter—such as Songs of the Auvergne, Ecstatic Orange, Fearful Symmetries. In all of these the three of us were exploring exciting new combinations of lyrical and edgy dancing within a single piece, and experimenting with the ways our bodies could be manipulated to express emotion. Choreographers often get visions and ideas in subliminal ways—there has been speculation that Balanchine’s brilliant use of the deliberate manipulation of his dancer’s bodies in ballets like Agon and Episodes may have been a subliminal reflection of the physical demands of his life with his wife at the time, Tanaquil Le Clercq, a beautiful ballerina who was tragically paralyzed by polio in her prime. I know Peter was hugely influenced and inspired by many aspects of Balanchine’s choreography, but I think he also began to mine a new source of creativity by exploring the specific physical possibilities that arose minute by minute, hour by hour, when he and Heather and I shut ourselves in a studio with some music. It was really exciting. Heather and I had become established as a well-known onstage couple, one the audience both anticipated and enjoyed, and as our repertory expanded, our bodies seemed to fit together more and more naturally, as if specifically designed to be twisted and intertwined in strange and new ways.

  The increased intensity and creativity Heather and I felt onstage was echoed in—and perhaps facilitated by—parallel changes in our private lives. Because I was single for the first time in ten years, I had more free time to spend with Heather offstage. As it happened, Heather also had more time to spend with me. Heather and Peter’s already stormy relationship had been upgraded to a high monsoon category by the late eighties; the two of them were constantly breaking up and then getting back together, only to break up again. I found these romantic upsets very disturbing, probably because I was craving stability and Peter and Heather were basically my surrogate parents. In fact, I wanted them to get married and solidify our little family so badly that I would sometimes fantasize about and plan their imaginary wedding. I may have been a little slow to gr
asp the reality of the situation, but time would make things clear soon enough when Heather and Peter broke up for good and each fell in love with someone else—in both cases, as it turned out, with the person whom they would eventually marry. Heather’s new love was a dashing young dancer named Damian Woetzel, who had joined the company in 1985; Peter’s was our beautiful and well-established star ballerina Darci Kistler.

  All the relationships in my private life seemed to be shifting during this period, and because my private and professional lives were completely entangled, just navigating life on a day-to-day basis could get pretty tricky. Heather and Peter were both still close to Ulrik; Peter was still choreographing new ballets on Heather and me; and I was partnering both Heather and Darci. I told myself that predicaments of this kind must arise in every profession, not just in the intense and inbred world of a ballet company, and I tried to simplify the challenges of juggling all the personality clashes by reminding myself that at the end of each day I knew exactly where my loyalties would lie: with the company and the integrity of our work. I knew it was not the first time nasty private conflicts had threatened to disrupt the professional responsibilities of company dancers—this happens all the time—and I knew the standard operating procedure for such situations. All grudges and differences of opinion and personal problems had to be laid down outside the studio door, so that whatever work went on inside the studio or on the stage could be conducted with a purity of effort and intent. That was the way it had to be, and that was what everyone tried to do.