While the City Slept (5 page)

W
hen her summer on the
Spirit of Seattle
is over, Jennifer returns to the conservatory. Then, after one more semester, she leaves. Her teachers in Boston ask if it’s money. It’s not money, she tells them. She just wants out. Back in Seattle, she enrolls in a community college and reconnects with Ruben, the musical theater director from her high school. She tells him she’s thinking of giving up on theater and becoming an accountant, and he listens but puts her back onstage in a community production he’s directing, sees in her eyes how much she loves it, says, “You know, I really think you should just go back to the conservatory.”

She asks a dean if it’s possible, and the answer is yes. They’ll continue a scholarship she’d been on, too. In the fall of 1993, Jennifer returns to the conservatory and this time finds friendships easier. The teacher who’d been cruel to her ends up leaving soon after she gets back, and she’s rooming with a supportive man from Cincinnati named Michael Grayman. He watches, impressed, as Jennifer performs in a new kind of role, playing one half of a lesbian couple in
Falsettoland
. “Just owned it,” Michael says. Jennifer feels herself connecting, too, but doesn’t make any link between herself and the sexuality of her character. “Didn’t really think anything about it,” she says. “Again.”

—

Most of the men Jennifer meets at the conservatory are gay, like Michael, and most of the women are straight, like Kerri, but with one of the few
lesbians she encounters, a musician rooming with a friend of hers, Jennifer notices something. “I remember being like, ‘Ooh. Hmm, that’s interesting energy,’” Jennifer says. “Because it’s just different energy.”

Jennifer is an acute measurer of human energy. When she likes someone, it’s because she picks up on a good energy, or powerful energy, or irresistible energy. An empath is how she describes herself, someone who noticed early her ability to read the emotional weather, a skill she thinks developed as a protective measure amid the chaos and quick mood changes of her home life. It has become like one of her senses. She will look at someone, and listen to someone, and hug someone, but all the while she is also measuring energy. Perhaps it is this ability, working beyond its usual parameters, that around this time begins delivering a kind of electric shock in response to certain women.

She is by now very familiar with the coming-out process, has watched it over and over with her gay male friends in the theater, sees how the pain only intensifies the longer one waits, has said to herself, “Man, if I ever wake up one random morning and I’m suddenly attracted to a woman, I’m gonna deal with it.” The summer of 1995—the same summer Teresa, who’s almost three years older than Jennifer, is floating the Mississippi aboard the
American Queen
—Jennifer decides to stay in Boston. In the evenings, she waitresses, and during the day she works for the conservatory at a job that involves setting up a Boston Harbor cruise for incoming freshmen. She works with the school’s bursar on this project, and when the cruise is over, the bursar approaches to offer congratulations. Jennifer is now twenty-two and about to become a senior. The bursar is thirty-five.

“She put her hand on my shoulder,” Jennifer says, “just completely appropriately, too. And I was like, ‘Oh.’ Like, here’s that moment that I never expected to happen.” The moment keeps repeating. Being in the woman’s presence makes Jennifer nervous; routine work conversations make her sweat. She writes the woman a card. She receives a card in return.

The woman thanks Jennifer, reminds Jennifer that she works for the
school, and then writes something like, “Whether I wanted to or not—and we’re not gonna go into that—nothing could ever happen. So, I want you to know, because of that you actually can completely trust me. My heart belongs to someone else right now, but what you’re going through is normal. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything. It could just be me. But, if you want to talk about it, I’m here for you. I always will be here for you. I think the world of you.”

Jennifer doesn’t do much in her exterior world with the experience. Thinks it might be just this one woman, although one of her friends, when she tells him about it, says something like, “We’ve all seen that coming.” Jennifer hasn’t. At the same time, she’s becoming distracted by graduation, is preoccupied with what to do next in pursuit of landing on Broadway. She gets several callbacks for roles in
Les Misérables,
which is encouraging, but again her size is an issue. It still doesn’t fit, in Broadway’s eyes, her voice. She sings in a workshop that year and a respected agent is there, and this agent passes word to a friend of hers, Craig, that she has potential—if.

“Craig was the kindest,” Jennifer says. He tells Jennifer he’s passing on the agent’s words because he believes in her, then tells her something like, “The agent says you are so beautiful, so talented, but he can’t do anything with you. He says your face, and your beauty, and your voice sound like leading lady ingenue. But your body is, like, the best friend. If you took care of that”—and here Jennifer snaps her fingers, mimicking the way Craig snapped his fingers, mimicking the way the agent snapped his fingers—“he would sign you in a second.”

Jennifer absorbs this, is grateful for the feedback. “It’s amazing how you can have that carrot and still not be able to do anything about it,” she says. She heads home to Seattle, planning to get a job, save money, and then move to New
York.

T
eresa has been dating a fellow crew member aboard the
American Queen,
a woman from California named Carolyn. She won’t speak about their relationship, but she’s had the day she first saw Teresa tattooed on her: May 25, 1995. “They did not hide,” John says. “Once Teresa went somewhere, she went all the way.”

On another break from the boat, Teresa heads for Montgomery, Alabama, where Norbert junior is living with his first wife and earning an MFA in theater. After a performance, she tells him. “That was a great, great night,” Norbert junior says. “We sat in my little Datsun B210 station wagon. We were probably smoking cigarettes and drinking at this big park in Montgomery, Alabama. It was late. It was late, late. And there was no one around. We had the whole park to ourselves.” He encourages her, tells her he isn’t surprised. “I was like, ‘My God, I’ve known for years.’”

Next, Teresa writes to her mom. “A wonderful letter,” Dolly says, but also “heartbreaking.” It’s not what she’s wished for her daughter. “If I could have changed anything,” Dolly says, “I would have done whatever.” At the same time, “I loved her dearly, and telling me she was gay was certainly not going to change that.” She lets Teresa know this, in person, and after she does, Teresa begs her not to tell Norbert senior.

—

The relationship with Carolyn doesn’t last, and Teresa’s work takes her onward to another boat in the fleet, the older
Delta Queen
. She becomes
executive housekeeper for a time. Then in the fall of 1997, at Seattle’s only lesbian bar, Wildrose, two women, Carley Zepeda and Carmen Hernandez, notice a woman sitting alone, sipping a beer, watching a football game. They stop their pool game and ask if she wants to come sit with them. “And she’s like, ‘Sure!’” Carley says. “You know Teresa, she wasn’t gonna be shy. I think she was very happy to be invited. She was drinking a Bud Light in a bottle, of course. Cold as they come. There was no other beer.” (By now, Teresa had gotten over the worst of her anger at Anheuser-Busch.)

Teresa tells Carley and Carmen she’s from St. Louis and has just moved to town. Knows the place from her time on the Clipper Cruise Line and is now working for one of her older brothers, Tony, who’s started a small catering business in the city. Tells them about life on the Mississippi steamboats, tells them she’s still thinking about Carolyn. It’s a great night, the first of many for the three of them, a new triumvirate. “We were young,” Carley says. “We had easy jobs. We weren’t doing anything but working to play.”

A year passes like this, and then Teresa decides it’s time to relocate again. “Her brother fired her three times,” Norbert senior says. It’s likely her departure from Seattle is connected with one of those times, perhaps with a story Norbert senior tells, with certain pride, of Teresa’s helping her brother at a catering gig for Microsoft and a man in a suit saying to Teresa, “Hey, babe, come over and give me another cup of coffee.”

“Well,” Norbert senior says, “if you call Teresa ‘babe’ and give her directions, you know she’s not going to do it.”

—

On October 20, 1998, the day after her twenty-ninth birthday, Teresa sets out on a drive to New York City, where Norbert junior is now living and working on Broadway, making a name for himself as Norbert Leo Butz.

The journey inspires a four-page letter to her friend Carley, in which Teresa recounts “many miles, ten days, and many stories and incidences—as I’m sure you can imagine, even traveling I’m the same old Butz.” As the
letter tells it, in Yellowstone National Park she almost walked into a bison. In Custer State Park, she stopped for a picnic and ended up in a standoff with a wild mule.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, she paid a visit to one of her old boats and, as she was waiting along the Mississippi for it to pull in, ran into a local television news reporter doing a human-interest piece. The segment still sits in the News Channel 8 archives in La Crosse, and it shows the
Delta Queen
pulling in to town, decked out in patriotic bunting, red paddle wheel spinning, steam whistle blowing, and Teresa there to greet it in gray shorts and a white sweatshirt, eyes bright with excitement, brown hair short, earrings shaking as she shouts, whoops, runs up to two African American crew members and bear-hugs them, then sneaks up behind a white guy in an officer’s uniform and hugs him, too, from behind, startling him.

REPORTER:
Teresa Butz was visiting La Crosse today for the first time, but in many aspects she returned home . . .

TERESA:
There’s no escaping it. You know, your whole life is on that boat . . . You eat there, and you sleep there. I miss it, because life slows down on the water.

She speaks of the “old, mystical feel” of the riverboat, and the encounter makes her think about going back to the
Delta Queen
. “Then again,” she writes to Carley, “I may ditch all of the above and go to Australia.” She promises to let Carley know “as soon as I know myself.”

—

She doesn’t end up in Australia.

Instead, after arriving in New York, she becomes a nanny for Norbert, who’s just landed a role headlining the national tour of
Cabaret,
playing the show’s master of ceremonies. “Sexually deviant, androgynous, bisexual,” Norbert says. “A great
character.”

J
ennifer lives with her grandmother upon her return to Seattle, working days at a photo-processing business as a receptionist. It’s a job where no one makes much money and the employees all tend to eat lunches together, brought from home. During these lunches, Jennifer begins to develop a crush on a co-worker, and to her surprise it’s reciprocated. When they kiss, Jennifer thinks about the smoothness of women, how much she prefers it to stubble. She performs in local musicals and goes to local auditions, and after one a theater director chases her outside, tells her she’s beautiful, her voice is incredible, she’s a great actress, but he just wants to be honest with her: it’s hard to know where to place her because of her size. “You know,” she says. “I’ve heard that before. Thank you.”

There’s another call from
Les Misérables
in this year. They want her to audition again, will fly her down to Los Angeles, and the opportunity feels huge, defining. She stays with a friend in L.A., ends up awake all night with stomach pain from nerves, barely has a voice the next day. “Didn’t have the greatest audition,” she says. When she doesn’t get the part, she tells herself she’s ruined her chance.

—

The woman from the photo shop is thirty-seven, and she’s worried her relationship with Jennifer won’t last—that Jennifer will want to date other women soon, that Jennifer’s theater ambitions mean she’s not long for
Seattle, anyway. She’s right. But while they’re still together, Jennifer tries to come out to her grandmother. It doesn’t go well. Her grandmother says she must have been manipulated, doesn’t want to hear it when Jennifer says she’s actually the one who initiated things. “So, what do you wanna do?” Jennifer says. “You want to run three thousand miles away and live your life where you don’t have to explain anything to anybody.”

—

She arrives in New York in the fall of 1997, about a year before Teresa does. She knows people who temp at Manhattan law and financial firms, has heard it’s decent money, so she gets right into that. She meets a woman in a basketball league—“Crazy attracted to her,” Jennifer says—but they don’t have a lot of kissing chemistry. She meets a woman who lives in Boston, and it’s better kissing chemistry, but that woman cheats on her. She goes to auditions. Nothing comes of them.

Something isn’t feeling right, singing is harder than it used to be, and it turns out she needs surgery for a condition akin to calluses on her vocal cords. After the surgery, her voice is slow to return.

At a workshop, someone tells her she doesn’t seem to have much vocal control. The stress of auditioning begins to outweigh the joy, and outside her theater pursuits she isn’t feeling a part of anything. So she gets on PlanetOut, an early gay dating site, and just after the turn of the millennium meets a preacher’s daughter who lives near her in Brooklyn. Their first date is at a lesbian bar called the Rising Café. Jennifer, who doesn’t drink much, has a beer, and the woman, Ann Kansfield, notices they click easily. Ann makes plans to go see Jennifer perform a show she’s been working on with Kerri, her conservatory friend, a cabaret act at a Manhattan club. As the show approaches, Ann finds herself getting more nervous than Jennifer. The night of the performance, Ann’s blown away. Soon they’re living together in Park Slope.