by Jock Soto
I slept badly that night, listening to the warplanes flying their grim patrols. Was this going to be our way of life from now on? Would we ever catch the terrorists who had killed our innocent men and women? Would we ever regain our confidence as New Yorkers, or were we doomed to carry a permanent burden of vulnerability forward into our future?
The feeling of confusion and vulnerability that enveloped New York City during that fall of 2001 was echoed by an ominous and brooding quality in my personal life. Everything seemed to be shifting for Chris and for me, and it was not clear exactly where we would each land. Chris was getting a lot of work outside the ballet world—he had done some work in the film industry, and he had just landed his first Broadway show, Sweet Smell of Success, starring John Lithgow, which was in Chicago for its pre-Broadway run. This was a big deal, and he was away a lot. Because of this, and because our professional responsibilities had the two of us moving in different directions, we were seeing even less of each other than usual. Despite this, we had decided to move into a fancy new apartment in a brand-new building at Twenty-fourth Street and Seventh Avenue. When the Christmas season rolled around, I was sitting alone in our new New York apartment and Chris was out in Chicago. Our intermittent telephone conversations were often both tense and brief.
Sometime before New Year’s, in one of these telephone conversations, Chris said he had something he wanted to discuss with me, but he wanted to do it in person. My antennae went up immediately. This sounded like classic prelude-to-a-breakup to me—but no one had ever broken up with me before, so I was like, what?! I couldn’t believe it. I asked him outright, on the spot. I said, “What are you doing? Are you breaking up with me? Over the phone?” He said, “No, no, no, let’s discuss this when I get home in a couple of days.” So I hung up and went out to dinner with our mutual friend the dancer Jason Fowler, and tried to push the matter out of my mind.
When I got home a few hours later I had a message on my answering machine from a woman who was one of Chris’s best friends: “Oh my God, I am so sorry that you guys have broken up. If you need to talk please call me.” I was shocked, angry, hurt—but most of all humiliated. This was embarrassing—after all, I was an established principal dancer! And I had just been dumped—via voice mail, by my boyfriend’s friend, no less. I was stunned. I erased the awful message and called Chris immediately and read him the riot act. He was horrified, too. Basically his best friend had broken up with me for him, by accident. It was a bumbling mistake. But there it was. And since I have been the author of some pretty poorly executed good-byes in my day, it seemed only fair to describe a time when the tables were turned on me.
In retrospect, I can see that during much of the six years that Chris and I were together I was confused, and often felt as if our connection was more of a professional collaboration than a real relationship. It was hard to figure out exactly what we were to each other, and by the time we split up I think I was more humiliated by the way it had happened than I was heartbroken. I think Chris was also confused about our relationship, and unsure of how to proceed. He had met a lot of people in New York over the years, and he was very talented and driven. He probably began to realize that it’s a great, big world and that he didn’t have to be locked down with his first serious boyfriend. He explained to me later that he just didn’t know how to break up with me, and I can certainly understand this—I had felt the same way at times with Ulrik.
Looking back on that uncomfortable period of my life, I have to admit that I didn’t handle my first experience as a dumpee with much grace. I was pretty bitchy to Chris for a while—more out of wounded pride than anything else. When he called me and said, “Look, we really have to talk about this,” I said, “There’s nothing to talk about.” And I hung up. In another phone conversation I announced, like the good angry, scorned Navajo brave that I was, “I curse your next relationship!” He said, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Oh yes, I can”—and hung up.
While the end of our romance may not have been heartbreaking for either Chris or me in the long run, it certainly was awkward on several fronts in the short term. For one thing we had just moved into this big, expensive apartment; Chris had bought the apartment with the money from all of the ballets and shows that he was doing, but I owned almost everything in the apartment. Then there was the awkward fact that Chris was starting a new ballet with Wendy and me the following week, and so we knew we would be spending a lot of time in the studio together. The ballet was Morphoses, a very clever work that Chris choreographed on me, Wendy, Damian, and Alexandra Ansanelli. It was just the four of us in a studio with Chris for a month and a half before the premiere in June 2002, all of which was very uncomfortable for me at first. But I respected Chris’s choreography enormously, and I believe he respected my gifts as a dancer and collaborator—as I’ve said, it can be hard, but you have to leave your problems outside the studio. Thank God, Chris and I were always able to stay professional when it came to our art.
As it turned out, Chris and I ended up working together on four ballets after the breakup: Morphoses, Liturgy, Shambards, and After the Rain. They were all beautiful ballets; in fact, they encompass some of our most interesting work. Liturgy, another pas de deux for Wendy and me, was set to a spectacularly beautiful piece of music by Arvo Pärt; the partnering was complex and the music difficult to count, but the result was amazing—sort of like dancing in space. I truly believe we were moving the art of partnering forward, exploring an entirely new realm of expression and connection through movement and music. One of my most unearthly memories is of performing Liturgy with Wendy in Moscow, on the severely raked stage of the Bolshoi theater. The audience loved the ballet, and when I exited the theater and looked up at the Kremlin I was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of their city.
After Liturgy, Chris made Shambards, a beautiful ballet with Miranda Weese and me, set to a score commissioned from composer James MacMillan; and then, finally, the very beautiful After the Rain. This was the last ballet Chris choreographed on Wendy and me, and it premiered in January 2005, just six months before I retired. I remember being in the rehearsal studio one day when we were first working on After the Rain, which was again set to music by Arvo Pärt, and when the choreography seemed to keep coming out just like that of Liturgy, Chris got very frustrated. He called an end to our rehearsal and we all left. The next day we came in and he said, “Wendy, take your hair down and take your pointe shoes off.” She was a little nervous, and she said, “I’ve never done that before. Can I wear my ballet slippers?” Chris said yes, okay. I had done modern ballet before, so I suggested, “I can take my shoes off.” I didn’t know where Chris was going, but this turned out to be the beginning of a very new and inventive pas de deux—one of the most difficult and most beautiful pas de deux I ever danced. The ballet opens with three couples in unitards, dancing against a beautiful backdrop with everything looking well lit and sleek, but with the ominous feeling of an approaching storm. When Wendy and I go offstage, the music begins to get wilder and wilder as the storm hits, and by the time we run back on, the storm has passed and everything has changed. Wendy has let her hair down and she is in a pink leotard. I have taken my shoes off and am wearing only slacks. All of a sudden an amazing early-morning light suffuses everything, and we are dancing in a new way in a new world—after the rain. It was unexpected and fresh and stunning.
Chris is a very gifted choreographer, but perhaps the greatest gift I received from working with him was the friendship and partnership that I found with Wendy. I have mentioned that I always tell my students at the school that as a dancer you must believe in every step and every gesture that you make, or you will never reach the audience. Wendy is the epitome of this—she believes in every nanosecond of every step and gesture. She is one of the hardest working ballerinas of all time, and certainly one of America’s finest ever. What was especially exciting and profound about dancing with Wendy was that we could always stretch each other’s range, meeting ea
ch other anywhere we went. The ideas, the movement, the shapes she could make were amazing. I could manipulate her body with infinitely different subtleties of movement, and she would sculpt her body in response, bringing beauty and magic to every moment of our partnership, beat by beat. We always danced for and with each other, and in the process it was as if we merged and became one soul. Our steps were an extension of the love we felt for each other, for our art, for what we believed in. I truly believe our partnership was a gift to each of us, and that we helped bring the pas de deux into this century. I wish that life worked in a way that would allow the two of us to keep dancing with each other for centuries to come. Even now whenever I speak to her I tell her, “You know I loves ya.” Wendy Whelan—the Hardest Working American Ballerina. This should be shouted from the rooftops, and she deserves to be carried down Broadway every day on a float to the theater. I still miss those moments with her, but I will never forget them.
My professional life continued to thrive in the aftermath of my breakup with Chris, but I personally had been badly shaken by what happened between Chris and me, and I wasn’t that interested in another serious long-term affair. To be honest, I wasn’t even that interested in dating at all. I was working so hard as a dancer—and the process takes a lot more out of you as you get older. Often I would go to the house in Connecticut on the weekends just to collapse and recoup. That spring, when I had some time off, my friend Jason and I thought we really should try to have some fun, so we decided to go on a Gay Holiday. We just drove through Texas, stopping at all the gay bars in Houston and Austin. Next we drove to Dallas to visit Jason’s parents, and then we flew back to New York. The whole thing was kind of scary—scary, and exhausting.
During this post-Chris period I had a string of halfhearted dating blunders, similar to the list of mistakes I had dated during my first “love sabbatical”—this time it was the Bartender, the Architect, the Doctor, the Agent, the Narcoleptic (was I really that boring?), and the Catholic. The Catholic was the last of these ill-suited suitors, as well as the last straw for me. He was a big, handsome guy who would come watch me dance and then take me out to dinner—over and over. Like an idiot I stuck around, until the night he took me to Peter Luger’s in Brooklyn for my birthday. We’re sitting there, having dinner; they bring me my cake; everybody sings; and as he tucks into his cake, the Catholic tells me he is having a tough time because he is torn between me and a flight attendant—oh, and a guy he’s been breaking up with for six months.
I just stared at him. “You don’t get to have three people,” I said quietly. “You get to have one.”
He sighed and said, “God will help me through this.”
“No. God is not going to help you through this,” I said. “I am.” And that was the end of the Catholic—and of my dating career, as it happens. I just gave up. It was too depressing, too tawdry, and I had other, more pressing things to worry about. My body, for instance. I was getting injured more and more frequently, and I had so many aches and pains from years and years of dancing and lifting ballerinas and generally pushing myself physically. I was spending a lot of time with physical therapists Marika Molnar and Michelle Rodriguez, and with my body trainers Declan Condron and Michelle Khai, and with the miracle-worker chiropractor Larry DeMann Jr., who took care of many of us at the NYCB. But it was tough.
I had another disturbing problem that I didn’t like to talk about much back then, or even now. For a long time the pesky ghost who had stalked me during my childhood years had remained mercifully absent, but somewhere in my midthirties she returned. At first I tried to ignore her. I told myself that the whole notion of being haunted by a ghost was a silly hallucination left over from my childhood. But this particular ghost was determined and persistent. I could sense her near me more and more at different times during the night and day—slipping into rooms right behind me, tailing me on my subway commute in the morning, sliding into mirrors just after I had turned away, and staring fiercely at my departing back. I tried to tell myself that even if she was there, she was harmless—but the situation made me increasingly anxious. My mother sent me some of the special sacred cornmeal, and I dutifully sprinkled it around the doors and windows to protect myself. I remember there was one night, when Chris and I were still together, when I was too petrified by the approaching ghost to even move, and poor Chris had to call my mother and get directions on how to distribute the cornmeal.
I sprinkled cornmeal and tried to ignore my strange shadow, but over time she seemed to be getting more and more aggressive. In the spring of 2003 my ghost—or the witch, as she seemed to me to have become by this time—followed me all the way to Binghamton, New York, when I had a dancing engagement there. After the performance that night she crawled into my hotel bed and curled up against me. She had become more than annoying. She was ruining my sleep, wearing me out, and throwing me off-balance. When I told my mother about the situation she insisted that it was time for me to make a trip to the reservation to see our medicine man, a relative whom we always called Uncle Joe. Reluctantly, I agreed.
I always feel caught in the middle when it comes to Navajo traditions and spiritual practices—I feel I can neither dismiss them nor surrender entirely to them. All Navajo ceremonies tend to be long and complicated and exhausting, and the ceremony for the exorcism of my ghost, conducted by my uncle Joe in his hogan on the reservation, was no exception. My mother and father and Kiko were all present, as well as my mother’s good friend my honorary “aunt” Cindy and my half brother Charles (this was the period when he was living with my mother and father in their trailer at the A-1 storage facility in Santa Fe). In addition to being long and complicated, Navajo ceremonies are also extremely sacred and private, and I really should not reveal much about this one except to say that it was at times terrifying and at times painful—and that it seemed to do the trick. When it was all over, Uncle Joe informed us that the woman had been a potentially harmful ghost. He said that when my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father had driven past an accident on the highway just as a woman who had been injured in the accident was dying. He said the woman’s spirit had crawled into my mother’s womb with me. As I think about all of this now, it occurs to me for the first time that perhaps this was why my mother felt me “dancing” in her womb before I was born.
By April 2003 I had rid myself of the Tiresome Catholic, and just a month later I seemed to have also rid myself of the annoying spirit who had been stalking me for years. As a result, on June 15, 2003, when I walked into a New York restaurant and watering hole called the Park one sultry summer night to have a nightcap with my friend Jason, I was finally a free man. Thank God, because that was the night I looked across the room and saw Luis. He was standing near the bar, wearing a suit and tie, looking very dashing holding his ice-cold lager. Everyone else was wearing shorts and T-shirts. I was feeling flirty, so I approached him and said, “So what’s with the suit?”
Luis has an accent that sounds formal and old-fashioned, as if he were born perhaps from Spanish royalty. (When I tease him about this now he always gives me that glare, as if to say, “It’s not funny, because I am royalty!”) He told me, in his elegant, rich voice, that he had just gotten off from work. When I continued with my questions I discovered that he was a chef and a sommelier, and that he had studied at the Culinary Institute of America.
I was immediately taken (and I still am) by Luis’s beauty—his dark hair, his dark eyes, the dimples, that voice—and by the blend of confidence and kindness and panache he exuded: he seemed to be a dashing blend of James Bond, Robin Hood, and a Spanish musketeer rolled into one gorgeous, modern gay man. We were both performing standard bar flirtation that night, but I also sensed instantly, at that very first meeting, that something profound was happening and that Luis and I would be a part of each other’s futures.
Luis and I had our first date that same week, at the restaurant Gramercy Tavern. I was dancing that evening—as always—so of course it had to be a
late dinner. I told Luis that I would arrange a ticket for him for that evening’s performance of the ballet, but he insisted on buying his own ticket. That impressed me. When we sat down at our table in Gramercy Tavern and our waiter approached, I ordered a glass of chardonnay. I thought I saw Luis flinch—had I done something wrong? I am a real ditz about remembering people’s names, or anything else they tell me upon first meeting, and I had forgotten everything from Luis’s and my first encounter, including the fact that he was a professional chef and sommelier. (To be honest, I think I was too busy looking to listen.) There was a slight silence, after which Luis ordered a gin and tonic. When the waiter returned with our drinks, he also brought with him a bottle of La Tâche burgundy—Luis had had it sent over from the restaurant where he worked. I didn’t recognize the wine by its name, but my first sip told me all I needed to know. I had already been impressed that Luis had insisted on buying his own ticket to the ballet; that extraordinary bottle of La Tâche impressed me once more.
As Luis and I got to know each other over the next few weeks we quickly discovered our mutual love of cooking, and then had fun performing our respective and very different culinary styles for each other. I was the first to display my skills. As a cook, I am a self-taught amateur, with a talent for improvisation and shortcuts (I could probably do a whole cookbook of recipes that have Campbell’s soup as the secret ingredient). For my opening act, I cooked Luis a roast chicken, with mashed potatoes and frozen peas. He insisted that he loved it.
Luis, as I’ve mentioned, is a professional chef, thoroughly trained in the best tradition. The first meal he prepared for me was a sautéed fillet of sockeye salmon in a crunchy, armored crust of thinly sliced potatoes, served on a bed of leeks with a beurre blanc sauce and a triumphant final topping of caviar. I was knocked out. And of course I will never forget our first Christmas together. Luis insisted on doing everything for the Christmas dinner. First he shopped for all the ingredients in the city, and then spent three days making a demi-glace—which left our city bathtub full of stock bones. On Christmas Eve we transported the holy demi-glace and the holiday groceries to the Connecticut house, and on Christmas Day Luis set about the business of making our holiday dinner while I busied myself with other duties. When I finally peeked into the kitchen I almost had a heart attack. It was a complete war zone. Every bowl, every pot, every pan, and every spoon had been used.