Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (20 page)

James and I drank coffee and waited to see what the day would hold for us. James was looking a little grumpy, probably due to the fact that I’d opened his bedroom door to wake him up, letting the dog run in and give James a very enthusiastic greeting. I really wanted to play with the kitten, so I went to find it. Chance had just bowled him down the hallway again, so I walked over to the sprawled-out bundle of gray fur and picked him up.

His fur was stiff and matted, and when I brought him closer to my face, I realized he was covered in feces. I made a face and abruptly put him down, heading for the bathroom to wash my hands. Peter saw me.

“Aw, no, is he covered in poop again?” he asked. Then he yelled, “Chance! Outside!”

Apparently Chance liked to eat from the kitten’s litter box. The resulting slobber, which now covered the kitten’s fur, was pretty gross.

James looked at me darkly from the kitchen. “Yeah, Chance licked me this morning when you woke me up. Thanks.” Ah, that explained his grumpiness.

Soon we learned that school had been canceled. Due to the storm, there would be no performances that day, and so we had a whole day to ourselves. One day stretched into two, as the storm didn’t slow down. James and I spent the whole time together.

We spent part of these days in the ballet studio connected to the Naumanns’ house, giving ourselves a ballet class and then rehearsing
Nutcracker
to keep up our stamina. But mostly we just messed around. We watched movies on television. We played with Carl and Trevor. Peter and Lisa took us up to a lodge on the top of Mohonk Mountain for dinner one night with the boys. I drew every living creature in the house for my art class. James laughed in disbelief at my regular clumsiness, learning as my family already knew that I was one of those walking oxymorons called Klutzy Ballerinas. We listened to more City Ballet stories from Peter and Lisa. We talked.

I remember one conversation in particular. I was doing some homework in my room when James came in. After a couple of minutes of casual conversation, James started asking some curiously personal questions.

“So, how old are you now?” he asked.

“Twenty-four.”

“When do you see yourself getting married?”

What?
Well, actually I’d always thought I would be married by the age of twenty-four, but I didn’t want to tell him that.

“I suppose before I turn thirty,” I said.

“Do you think you want to have kids?” James asked. The iguana cocked its head at me, as if he, too, were wondering why James was grilling me about marriage and children.

“Yes, I would like to have children,” I told James cautiously.

“Would you ever date a dancer?” he then asked. Many dancers have rules about whether or not they would go out with another dancer.

“Well,” I said, wanting to be truthful, “I used to swear I would never date a dancer.” My life had already been consumed by ballet—I didn’t want to also have my date talking ballet nonstop. “But now,” I said, “I’m open to it.”

After every question, James would nod and then go to the next one, continuing in this vein for a while. I knew there was something on the
line, but couldn’t tell exactly what it was. During all of the rehearsals for these
Nutcracker
performances, I’d realized my crush on him was back full force, but it was still difficult for me to tell how he felt about me. I felt a tension in the air though, and even wondered if he might try to kiss me right there in the Iguana Room.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about things,” James told me. “I’m twenty-seven now, and I’m thinking I want to get married before I turn thirty. My other goal is to keep my hair until I’m forty,” he added, laughing.

The conversation moved on to other subjects, and finally James left, saying he knew I had homework to do. I gazed at the iguana and the iguana gazed back. No wisdom from him anyway. I had no idea whether the conversation meant nothing or a great deal. Confused but a little hopeful, I decided not to put too much thought into it and just enjoy the weekend.

Because of the blizzard, even our regular performances were at risk of being canceled. But we finally got the go-ahead and drove to the theater for our first matinee. I was almost sorry to be returning to the “work” aspect of the weekend. I’d been having such a good time with James and the Naumanns that it felt strange to have to get down to the business of performing. And this would be my first time back onstage since the gig right after I was let go.

James and I didn’t go onstage until the second act of
The Nutcracker
, so we put on our stage makeup and warmed our bodies up during the first act. We were in a very quaint old theater that was supposedly the “oldest hemp house in New York.” A hemp house is a theater where scenery is hung on hemp ropes that the stage crew can pull on and tie off, much like sailors, to raise and lower scenery for different acts. Since the theater was so small, James and I shared a dressing room underneath the stage, going into the bathroom when we needed to change.

At intermission, I put on my tutu and went up onto the stage to warm up some more in my pointe shoes. I felt self-conscious and nervous and
worried not only about how I looked but also about how the performance itself would go.

But then two things happened. First, I remembered that God had a plan for me and that I was doing these performances for a reason. There was no need for me to be afraid; I should accept this opportunity as a gift. I might never dance onstage again, and this weekend was like a little last blessing and a way to find some positive closure to my dancing career.

The second thing that happened was that the children performing from the ballet school arrived onstage to prepare for their entrances.

“Oh, it’s the Sugar Plum Fairy!” they gasped with delight.

They surrounded me, exclaiming over my tutu and asking me a million questions. It came to me then that this performance was not about me at all; it was about the children and the audience and bringing the magical beauty of ballet to life for the watchers’ imaginations. I put aside my self-centered worries and told myself to just enjoy giving a gift of dance to these children and their parents.

The second act began, and it was time for me to go onstage for my first entrance, a solo. Somewhere in the middle of that solo, I felt those old, negative thoughts falling away from me.
You are disgusting
. I dropped the thought on the stage.
Everyone watching you is horrified by your appearance.
I let that thought fall off too. I felt beautiful. I was dancing for God, and I knew He was pleased. God had given me a gift, and I was using it. I felt joyful and free. I was really dancing, really performing, and really loving it in a purer way than I had in a long time.

After the weekend was over, I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I was proud of how I’d danced and proud of how I’d overcome, with God’s miraculous grace, certain emotional mountains I hadn’t even realized I would have to scale. I was sad the performances were over. I’d enjoyed the company of James and Peter and Lisa, and I’d enjoyed feeling like a dancer. Then, to my surprise, after the last performance had ended, James asked me to dance with him at the World Financial Center downtown on New Year’s Eve. This weekend was not, after all, the last time in my life I would get to perform.

The train ride back to the city felt short as James and I talked and enjoyed each other’s company. By this point, we were very comfortable with each other, and he felt like a close friend. I’d never felt this kind of friendship with a man before. We got on the subway from Penn Station, and suddenly, as we approached the Seventy-second Street stop, I realized that James’s stop was before mine. He would be getting off the subway. Our weekend was really over.

The subway began to slow, and I hardly thought before blurting out: “I’ll miss you!” Panicked by my honesty, and afraid of how he would react, I tried to turn it into a joke by batting my eyelashes and looking wistfully at him.

James gathered up his stuff and turned toward the sliding doors.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be calling you. We have to rehearse for New Year’s Eve! How about next Thursday?” And with a wink, he was gone. The doors closed, and I sighed.

Soon enough, it was Wednesday. James called to make plans for the next day.

“So,” James said, “I’ll pick you up around seven.”

My breath caught. Seven o’clock? That seemed late for a rehearsal. And why was he picking me up?

“Okay, sounds good,” I said calmly, trying to be cool.

“All right, see you tomorrow,” James said, and we hung up. That was it.

I stood in my bedroom, staring wide-eyed at my phone. This wasn’t a rehearsal. This was an actual
date
! I immediately called my sister, my go-to person for anything important or interesting that happened to me.

I started talking the moment she answered the phone.

“I think I’m going on a date with James!” I exclaimed, trying not to squeal. Becky gasped. She knew me better than anyone, and she knew that I’d never shown any real interest in a man before. James was the first guy I’d actually wanted to ask me out on a date since Gary from Spanish class back in high school.

“I think you are going to marry him!” she exulted.

“I think I am!” I replied, not caring that I was getting ahead of myself.

And Thursday, December 18, was indeed a real date. I had no idea what to wear. James picked me up at my building right on time. I was so happy to see him that I felt jittery when he smiled at me. He didn’t tell me where we were going, but struck off immediately in the direction of Central Park. Since it was winter, it was already dark, and I wondered why we were going to the park after sundown. Wasn’t that a no-no?

Was James taking me to Central Park to murder me? No, I told my imagination. This was a date, and it was going to be fine. We walked through the park, which was actually well lit and surprisingly crowded, until we came to Wollman Rink, the ice-skating rink.

“I thought we would go ice-skating,” said James, turning to me. Surprised and delighted, I agreed, even though, from the evidence of my only previous attempt, I couldn’t ice-skate at all.

After we survived on the ice with much laughter and flailing on my part, James led me out of the park on the East Side so that we could walk along Fifth Avenue and see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and the famous Christmas windows in Saks and Bergdorf’s. My clumsiness chose this moment to rear its head, probably because I was so excited to be on a date with James, and I kept tripping and bumping into things. Finally, after my tenth near face-plant, James grabbed my hand with a laugh.

“I think I need to hold on to you,” he said. And we held hands the rest of the night. It felt perfectly natural.

We fought our way through the tourist crowd for a while, stopping when something interesting caught our eye. After a while James asked if I was hungry. Since by now it was around nine, I was starving.

“I want to take you to one of my favorite restaurants, but it’s a subway ride away. Is that okay?”

I would have been okay with anything he suggested, I was so glad to be with him, and I happily agreed. We got on the subway and rode down to the Fulton Street stop. When we came up out of the station, we
walked toward South Street Seaport, which I assumed was our destination. But at the seaport, James turned left and we walked across the darkened cobblestone streets of an older New York to a tiny restaurant under the Brooklyn Bridge called Bridge Café. It was late but we were shown a table immediately and had a great dinner of fresh seafood.

After dinner we took the subway home. We both got out at Seventy-second Street, but I was still thirteen blocks from my apartment. James was going to walk me home, since by now it was almost one in the morning.

We were laughing hilariously at something—I think my gum had shot out of my mouth, my awkwardness at work again—when James stopped suddenly and looked at me.

“Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink?” he asked.

Of course I did. I never wanted this night to end. We went to a favorite haunt of City Ballet dancers at the time, a little pub called the Emerald Inn that was a few blocks from the subway stop. It was smoky and full of people, but not so crowded that we couldn’t get two stools at the bar, and no one from City Ballet was there that night. The people in the bar were in a festive holiday mood, and everyone was talking to everyone else as if we were all long-lost friends.

There was a portly man in the corner of the bar holding a glass of whiskey with his eyes half closed. From time to time he would take a sip of his drink, place it carefully on the bar, and then sing parts of beautiful arias and Christmas hymns with a surprising professionalism for an Irish bar crowd. We soon learned that he was a singer for the Metropolitan Opera.

James glanced at me teasingly and said, “You should sing something, Jen.” I’d sung the role of Rosalia in City Ballet’s production of
West Side Story
.

I refused, saying the only Christmas song I knew was “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Someone called out, “Sing it!”

And there was enough craziness in me that night that I did. I started
to sing “Drummer Boy” loud enough for the entire bar to hear me, and soon the patrons around me joined in for the
pa rum-pum-pum-pums
, beating their glasses on the bar in time to the music. When I continued on to the second and third verses, they looked at me with consternation for a moment but then went back to their jobs of
rum-pum-pum-pumming
with seriousness and dedication. We all finished loudly and triumphantly. Someone began another Chrismas carol, and we were off again.

Finally, it was past 3:00 a.m., and James and I reluctantly headed for my apartment. It had been a wonderful night. James walked me all the way home, holding my hand. I thrilled in the moment, never having felt this way about anyone. I wondered if he would kiss me at the door.

He didn’t. He told me he had had a great time and that he would call me soon to rehearse for New Year’s Eve. And then he smiled and left.