While the City Slept (6 page)

N
orbert junior and Teresa are quickly taken out of New York by the tour for
Cabaret,
which goes to Minneapolis, Toronto, San Francisco. Along the way, Teresa becomes close with her brother’s wife and two daughters, but when she isn’t busy nannying, she’s pensive. Nearing thirty, she talks about time slipping away, spends a lot of hours in hotel bedrooms writing in her journal. “She drank heavily when she was depressed,” Norbert says. “But she was always on a journey of self-improvement, too. So I think she mustered up. She kept on going.”

She continues toggling between worlds that are hard to reconcile. “Always spoke about her struggle with religion,” her friend Carmen says. “Always.” She returns to St. Louis for a time, prays about it with her younger sister, Annie, and with one of her sisters-in-law, Jenni Butz.

On a churchwomen’s retreat, Jenni and Annie share some Bible verses with Teresa. “Some difficult verses,” Jenni says, “about her need to turn her entire life over to God and make some really tough changes. And we all were crying, and I remember Ann saying to Teresa, ‘Are you sure you’re going to heaven?’ And with tears streaming down her face, Teresa saying, ‘No.’ And Ann said, ‘Do you want to, right now?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And so we prayed with her, and we showed her scriptures that talked about how much God loved her, and had such great things in store for her life and wanted to bless her, but that that sin was getting in the way and she needed to put it down, and get the forgiveness and the healing that only Jesus can give. And so she did. We prayed, and
she gave her whole heart to Jesus that day, and committed to follow him for her life, and she was assured of her place in heaven, because of what Jesus did on the cross. And the following months, we sat and we studied the Bible together, and we learned, and she was baptized, and she grew, and she struggled, and she raged. She did all of those things. But it was real. Her love for Jesus was real. And she was changed.”

After this, after the
Cabaret
tour is over, Teresa heads for Seattle again but doesn’t let her lesbian friends know. She tries dating men, creates an account on eHarmony. Later, when they reconnect, Carley tells Teresa, “Even if you weren’t gay anymore, you could have called.”

—

She is still gay. She gets into a relationship with another former boat worker, a woman named Amy. It’s 2002, and they live together in a small condo Teresa buys using money she’s been socking away since her time on the boats, even amid all the instability in her life. It’s yet another way she’s like her father, a serious saver. “Did not want to owe anybody anything,” Carmen says. It also helps that Teresa has steady income from work she’s begun doing at Seattle-area hotels, essentially a stationary version of her boat life. All of it adds up to Teresa’s having great credit at a time of exceptionally easy credit, which allows her to get an affordable mortgage on the $145,000 condo. It’s located in Renton, a working-class suburb south of Seattle that the Green River runs by on its way to becoming the Duwamish.

Like Carolyn, Amy won’t talk about their time together, but by all other accounts her relationship with Teresa is intense and rocky. Teresa, Carley says, “put her whole heart into all of her relationships,” and this one ends hard. So do some of the hotel jobs. Teresa tells friends she’s lost one because she disappeared from work to fly back to St. Louis to see her Cardinals in the World Series and lost another because she was told by management to fire maids who were undocumented immigrants, but refused. These endings bother her less than might be expected. “You get
fired from one job, you get another one,” is how a friend describes her attitude.

Girlfriends are a different matter. Teresa has a difficult time getting over people, Amy included.

—

On the night of Saint Patrick’s Day 2005, a Washington State Patrol officer notices a car drifting across lanes on Interstate 5 where it passes through downtown Seattle. It’s Teresa’s black Saab convertible, the car she bought so that when the sun was out in Seattle, there would be nothing between its warmth and her skin. The officer pulls the car over, smells alcohol on Teresa’s breath, notices her bloodshot eyes. She can’t find her registration, keeps handing him, according to the officer’s report, “papers that looked nothing like a registration.” Her speech is slurred, her coordination poor. Perhaps relevant to the standard field sobriety test, she’s noted to be wearing boots with round toes and “two-inch, chunky” heels. Teresa tells him she’s had “a few” beers. Given a Breathalyzer, she blows a .151, which means she’s had more than a few. She’s arrested and later specifies it was four to five Bud Lights, consumed earlier that evening with friends at a gay dance club in Seattle called R Place. She was trying to get back to her condo in Renton. Her occupation: “Currently unemployed.” Paperwork processed, convertible impounded, she’s dropped off at a Denny’s where a friend picks her up.

The arrest shakes Teresa. This is not how she thinks of herself. She gets a large fine, does forty hours of community service at a local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind and with a program called Books to Prisoners. By the time she’s done, her relationship with Amy is
over.

S
undays, Ann and Jennifer attend a progressive service in lower Manhattan. “She dragged me to Broadway shows,” Ann says. “And I dragged her to church.” Jennifer joins the church gospel choir, her Jewishness no obstacle because she’s fundamentally ecumenical, eager to accept community and connection wherever they present. Ann appreciates this, likes that Jennifer is open and spiritual. “Which is kind of a low bar to set,” Ann says, “but when you’re a lesbian, you think that nobody’s ever going to want to come to church with you.”

What Jennifer likes about Ann is that she’s a good writer, smart, well educated, and even-keeled, and “she had that heart quality.” This is what Jennifer says about people she deeply connects with. They have a heart quality.

It’s the first serious relationship either of them has been in. “It was like the butt of every lesbian joke, actually,” Ann says. “You know, like, three hundred fifty square feet, and two lesbians and four cats.” They’d each brought two. Ann is working at the World Trade Center for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Jennifer is working at Update Graphics, where she helps place creative temp workers at advertising firms, fashion houses, financial behemoths, all swollen with excess cash from the tech bubble. When people ask Jennifer why she isn’t doing theater anymore, she tells them, “I just need a break.” Privately, she feels her voice hasn’t fully returned, worries about her weight, begins realizing she can’t deal with the financial insecurity of auditioning full-time. It’s too much like those
early years at the yellow house, the hand-to-mouth existence, the food stamps, the beginning of a downward spiral always close. Plus, desk work is fine. One day, she tosses her musical theater song sheets in the trash.

Ann wonders what’s going on. “Here she had these dreams, and she didn’t audition,” Ann says. “It was hard for me, because she clearly had the talent and the ability.”

—

One morning, Norbert Leo Butz is on the stoop of their Park Slope building. He lives there, too, one of those New York coincidences. Looks familiar to Jennifer, so she strikes up a conversation, and when Norbert tells her he’s an actor, she asks what he’s working on. “He was like, ‘Oh, I’m in
Rent,
’” she says. Jennifer has a friend from the conservatory who’s in
Rent,
too, playing his love interest. So they talk quickly about their mutual acquaintance, and then Norbert heads off into the day. She never sees him at the building again, because he moves out shortly afterward.

—

On September 11, 2001, Ann has just quit her job at the World Trade Center and has begun a new job as a financial planner. With the towers where she used to work in a smoldering heap, she quits her new job, too, and enrolls in seminary. Her relationship with Jennifer hasn’t been working for some time, both of them know it, and with a reminder not to waste time still being picked through across the East River, they split.

T
eresa, needing work, takes a job as a barista at a Starbucks in Seattle. One day, John asks how she remembers all the different drinks. She tells him she’s just making the same thing for everyone. It’s 2006, a time when better-paying jobs are easy to find if she can just get herself together. Eventually, she does, landing work at a company that manages office buildings all over the world, including some in downtown Seattle.

Her new co-workers adore her, the confident Teresa returns, and she decides to make another change. She sells her condo in Renton, takes the $80,000 in equity she’s amassed during the hot housing market, and buys a small red house in South Park, a much shorter drive to work. The house isn’t her first choice, but this is 2007, the height of a real estate bubble that’s been inflating for years now, fueled by unsustainable calculations made in rarefied neighborhoods on the other side of the country, neighborhoods about as unlike South Park as one can find. She’s already been outbid about a dozen times on homes in other parts of the city, and if she wants a house with a yard, which she does, and if she wants to hold to her beliefs about not incurring unreasonable debt, which she does, then this is what she can afford: a $286,000 home with two bedrooms, a yard, a ball field nearby, and a river a few blocks away.

The yard is tiny, the ball field is no Carondelet Park, and the river is a Superfund site. Still, Teresa feels intense pride. She walks people through the place, saying, “I know it’s not much, but it’s mine.” She sticks a George
Bush magnet to her fridge, a totem of the small-business Republican politics she’s inherited from her father. She thrills at meeting her new neighbors and having old friends over for dinner. She sets to work on the yard, which her father comes out to help clear. “It was nasty,” he says.

Because secrets do not keep long in families with eleven children, Norbert senior now knows Teresa is having relationships with women. He keeps his mouth shut and gets to clearing weeds. “We just never really got into it,” he says.

J
ennifer stays in the gospel choir even after the split with Ann, and Ann laughs at how Jennifer is now becoming more popular at her former church than she ever was. Jennifer thinks, “I’m singing a lot. It’s on my terms. It may not be my career, but this feels pretty good.” She gets a new apartment and a new desk job and then, after a time, ends up moving back into the Park Slope building she and Ann used to share, buying a studio there with help from Ann and from her grandmother in Seattle.

She gets into another relationship, of a sort, this one surprising to her and disappointingly one-sided, an extended crush she’s developed on a handsome Orthodox Jewish guy. Still open to all kinds with the right qualities, Jennifer has found herself drawn to him after “incredible conversations about God, and light—and straight in the eyes.” Conversations about mind, body, spirit. “Things that I’m a sucker for,” she says.

By 2006, the housing bubble that followed the dot-com crash that followed the tech bubble is well inflated—close to bursting, though few people are focused on the possibility. With her relationship with the Orthodox Jew going nowhere, Jennifer isn’t sure what’s left for her in New York except the studio apartment in Brooklyn. When she purchased it, monthly payments for the $120,000 mortgage were cheaper than if she’d been paying rent, and now the place sells for $265,000, more than double the purchase cost. She repays Ann and moves back to Seattle in the summer of 2006, thinking, “Maybe I’ll meet a nice Jewish guy there.”

—

She meets a Catholic lesbian instead.

Not at first, though. First, she gets on JDate and goes out with a few nice guys. Nothing much happens. She lives again with her grandmother, who’s in her nineties now and getting sick. It feels good to be able to help the woman who helped her when she needed it in childhood, and it feels good to be near her mother, Marcia, too. On one of Jennifer’s visits home from New York, she’d gone to Marcia, now years into marriage with Vance, and in tears confessed she’d been dating women. In this moment, the open, vulnerable, beaded-necklace-selling side of Marcia offered something Jennifer’s grandmother had been unable to give, something Jennifer needed: support, acceptance, relationship advice. A cord between them began to reconnect.

The money from the sale of Jennifer’s Brooklyn studio allows her a year of relative freedom in Seattle. She does some long-distance freelancing for her old company in New York, temps for a local nonprofit, volunteers with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. After a while, though, she needs a full-time job and finds one at a company called Creative Circle, doing placement for temp workers again. The company trains her in Los Angeles, which is where she is when she places a call to an office building manager in Seattle, a woman named Teresa.

W
hen Jennifer begins her job in Seattle, that same Teresa is the one who takes her to get an ID badge. “That’s kind of when I was first drawn to her,” Jennifer says. “Not necessarily in a romantic way. More like, ‘Who is she? She’s got great energy. I like to be around her.’” Teresa walks with Jennifer down a few floors to get the ID photograph, then walks Jennifer back up to her office. “I remember she was just crisply dressed,” Jennifer says. “She wore a suit every day. She was just happy and positive, wanted to ask questions of our business, how could she help us.” It turns out their offices are across from each other, on the twenty-second floor of the City Centre building, right in the middle of downtown. As a consequence, Jennifer and Teresa see each other often. “And then it really developed in that very, almost childlike crush fashion,” Jennifer says.

She likes watching the way Teresa interacts with people, her smile, her vibrancy, her focus. One day early in this watching, there’s a birthday celebration for a receptionist who works on their floor, a celebration to which they’re both invited. Now, work hours over, she sees a different Teresa. “Outside of work,” Jennifer says, “she was really funny and goofy. Toootally let loose.”

They end up talking music, realize they both love Patty Griffin, both end up saying at the same time, “Ugh! ‘Heavenly Day’ was the best Patty Griffin song.” That weekend, Teresa flies off to Norbert’s second wedding, in Florida, and is gone ten days. Jennifer notices she’s missing her. When
Teresa returns, they pass each other in the hallway, and Teresa mentions she’s headed that evening to the Tractor Tavern, an old bar in the former fishing community of Ballard. A singer-songwriter from Brooklyn is playing. “I know you lived in Brooklyn,” Teresa says. “You should come.” During the concert, making small talk, Teresa says to Jennifer, “My ex, Amy . . .” Later, Jennifer says to Teresa, “My ex, Ann . . .”

As she says this, she notices surprise in Teresa’s eyes.

—

The concert ends, they say good night, and then a weekend intervenes. Jennifer thinks about her the whole time. The next Tuesday is July 31, 2007, the day they’ll come to consider their anniversary. Walking by Teresa’s office at the end of the day, Jennifer notices Teresa looks upset. She asks her if she’s okay, and Teresa replies, “Do you want to get a drink or something?”

They head across the street to a hotel with an outdoor bar on the third floor, a kind of tree-house platform amid skyscrapers, and sit there for about three hours, Teresa talking about the difficulties she’s been having with her ex, whom she’s still untangling from after their breakup, Jennifer listening. After a time, Jennifer tells Teresa, “I feel like you have a choice now. You can keep wanting something from her that you’ll never get, or you can release her. And release yourself.”

—

Teresa has a gift certificate with her for a coffee shop on Capitol Hill, once auto row and now Seattle’s gay neighborhood. “I’ll drive,” Jennifer says. It’s evening, but Teresa isn’t one to stop drinking coffee just because it’s evening. They walk around, talking for what seems like hours more, commonalities pulling, silent cautions nagging, “and then I drive her back to her car,” Jennifer says. “One of the very last things she told me as we’re driving into the parking lot was ‘Oh yeah, I’m a Republican, and I voted for George Bush in the last two elections.’” She tells Jennifer about
the DUI she got a couple years back, too, which is typical Teresa, getting everything on the table at once. Jennifer takes it all as a sign that Teresa feels safe with her. She pulls up next to Teresa’s car. She parks. They keep talking. And then Teresa says, “I really want to kiss you.”

Jennifer wants to kiss her, too. “Probably did the entire night,” Jennifer says. “I mean, I found her to be stunning in every way. In this crazy way.” She’s already picked up on a dichotomy in Teresa, and she likes it: the core firmness, the strong sense of right and wrong and family and how, at the same time, “she was kind of a mess.” But the firmness, the rootedness, was clear. “The rest of her could be a mess because of that,” Jennifer says. “And I think that’s what I found to be so beautiful, is that she could laugh, and cry, and clap, and giggle, and be crazy, or be sweet, in all of these ways, yet there was this, like, line, this really clean, firm—almost like a tree trunk. Of course we kissed. And it was awesome. And we sat in the car, in the parking lot, for probably like an hour and a half. I remember, it was different than anything I had ever felt. I felt at
home.”