Blue Dancer: Remembering Jena Marcovicci

A man I once loved is no longer in the world. His name was Jena Marcovicci, and he was taken out three years ago, but because we had long been out of touch, I found out about his passing only last month at a dinner party.

Jena died in his sleep at the age of 62. He had suffered from heart disease, which had killed his father decades before, and although Jena’s doctors had advised him to undergo a simple procedure involving the implantation of stents, he had put it off, troubled not only at the prospect of the operation but also at the post-op medley of drugs he would need to take for the rest of his life.

According to the man who told the story--we were meeting for the first time, but my shock over Jena’s death jettisoned small talk--Jena had often said, If it’s my time, it’s my time. Jena had long believed life was a dance, and if the Big Guy in the Sky suddenly cut the music off when you least expected it, so be it. That didn’t mean you couldn’t live passionately; if you were Jena, you lived more passionately, your mission to go faster, like one of those Slavic dancers upping the ante the lower he gets to the ground.

I don’t remember much about how or when Jena and I met—only that he wasn’t Jena Marcovicci then, he was Gene Marsten, and his dark hair was cropped close to his skull and he didn’t look anything like Jesus. We met on a tennis court in the city of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where we both grew up. It would not have been at the Pittsfield Country Club because his family didn’t belong (his father owned a small ski shop in town) but at the crumbling concrete courts with the smudgy baselines at Pontoosuc Lake where he often taught.

I wouldn’t have been taking a lesson because I had already stopped playing tournaments. (See “Acing the Blues,” for an account of my fifteen minutes of junior tennis stardom.) I was probably playing with my dad, who was disappointed that I had given the game up, disappointed, too, that I had packed on thirty pounds and started getting C’s at school and was running around with a druggie crowd.

But my forehand was still formidable, and if I was honest with myself, I missed playing. Gene was giving a lesson on the next court. He probably asked if I wanted to hit—he liked helping kids who showed some talent, and he was good-hearted and probably did it for nothing.

I loved playing with Gene Marsten. There was no way I could return his serve or even get back one of his smacking cross-court forehands—he had recently been a qualifier at the French Open—but, like a lion who feels no need to raise himself to full height when not engaged in hunting, Gene rarely strutted his championship stuff. We just rallied; we didn’t even play points, and he urged me to keep the ball going for as long as I could. His voice was whispery soft—the opposite of a bullying coach. He said I didn’t need to kill the ball, didn’t have to punish my opponent or myself—playing was not about winning or losing, being up or down, it was about staying light and focused and ready on your feet, being one with the moment, one with the ball, hitting the sweet spot.

The rudiments of this philosophy—a bit of Ram Dass, a soupcon of Jean-Paul Sartre, a pinch of Dame Julian of Norwich--would become the basis for the course Jena would teach every summer at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. I never took “The Dance of Tennis,” but Gene’s soft voice and existential sureness touched something in me.

I was 16 then, a not very distinguished 11th grader at Miss Hall’s School. The year was 1970. Naked Buddhist Monks were setting fire to themselves in Saigon and Lieutenant James Calley was blowing away Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and the Beatles were bawling songs with weird lyrics like “Why don’t we do it in the road?” My parents weren’t speaking to each other, and my mom almost never got out of bed, except late at night when she prowled the kitchen and we ate Friendly’s ice cream together, though I never told her anything about anything.

If a 25-year-old woman rumbled into our driveway on a summer night in a battered station wagon, beeping her horn for my 16-year-old son, I’d tell her to get the hell out of the state. But it was a different time back then—the country was at war, the generations were at war, kids were dropping acid, joining the Weather Underground and blowing themselves up in Greenwich Village.

My parents probably figured I could do a lot worse than ride shotgun with former tennis star and current Ph.D. student Gene Marsten. Gene looked more like a Marine than a hippie. He didn’t take LSD or smoke marijuana; he didn’t drink beer, or smoke cigarettes. He didn’t even eat meat.

Gene was the first person I ever met who kept journals, kept them not because he wanted to be Walt Whitman, but because he loved words, loved blue pens and black pens and white pages, with lines and without, bound and unbound, and was so inebriated with the joy and mystery and puzzlement of living that he had to write, get it all down before it vanished, like Puff the Magic Dragon.

One afternoon, before we said goodbye for the summer and he headed to Florida to teach tennis and then to California for a semester at Pepperdine, he presented me with a gift. When I imagine this scene, I picture it on the tailgate of his dented blue Buick station wagon littered with old tennis balls and broken-stringed racquets. The present, taped up in a brown paper bag, was as big as a photo album and weighed as much as racquet bag. It was a black, hardbound journal, with 192 blank pages.

“I started keeping journals when I was younger than you," Gene said. "Get into the habit of making an entry every day. Let writing be a friend to you, keeping you company, helping you pay attention. One day you’ll look back and think, ‘Wow, did I really write that?' One day you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve grown.”

The next summer, Gene went to Hungary and came back Jena. The summer after that he grew his hair to his shoulders and decided to give up talking. He bought a chalkboard and draped it around his neck and wrote messages while conducting his tennis lessons. I was already miffed that I could not call him Gene, but the silent vow seemed too weird for words, and I said so.

We were seated across from one another in an orange creamsicle-colored booth at Friendly’s, and the square chalkboard was leaning against Jena on the seat like a sullen child. Jena reached for the piece of chalk dangling from its string, and wrote, “Only you can know your own path, Beck. I will let you go if that’s what you want.”

Then he smiled at me, as self-possessed as Gandhi. We agreed to part. There were no words, no tears, just the tenderest of embraces, our arms wrapping about one another as delicately as raindrops falling on apple blossoms.

Over the next decades, I occasionally saw Jena on the tennis court when I returned to Pittsfield, but mostly I heard about him from friends of friends, the six degrees of separation that linked our unlinked lives. Jena had started teaching at Omega by then, and he had a gig doing sports psychology sessions at Canyon Ranch. He also ran a tennis program for underprivileged kids in L.A. and Miami, something he had started years ago. And he still played competitively, was ranked in the top five in the under sixties in New England.

After my son was born and when he got old enough to play in tournaments, I fantasized that one day I would run into Jena again and we’d hit and maybe he’d give my boy some tips about how to play in the zone. I thought that Jena and I were both still young, our paths still unspooling before us, different but connecting coordinates along the tantric trajectory of our lives.

One warm November morning, I sat in a neighborhood café near my house with a decomposing manila envelope. In black, magic-markered letters it read, “Letters from Gene, and other memorabilia.” It came from a packing box in a storage area, among old tax returns and marked-up college texts belonging to my dead mother.

I had brought the envelope to the café because the country of the past can be as gloomy as a mortuary at midnight, and I wanted to be among bright lights and people sipping skinny lattes. The letters from Gene, all before he became Jena, were nestled among old photographs; there were about thirty, all on folded, graying notebook paper, filled from one side of the page to the other with lively blue-penned print (the f’s and g’s flowing down like happy children into the next line), the hanging shreds from where he had ripped out the pages still visible.

“Dearest Beck,” most of them began, and they included details of afternoons in university libraries, encounters with bums in L.A., as well as random philosophic pronouncements: “it seems so logical that to be really free one should possess little. And then it comes down to basic goals—peace with oneself.”

The letters weren’t literary—the man who told me about Jena’s death explained that he had been dyslexic, which had never been diagnosed or treated and which explained why Jena's two self-published books on tennis never found much of an audience. But Jena’s words, which included advice to me (whom he called his "pig-tailed princess") about how life would get better, were filled with a passionate intensity. “'You must learn to love the questions,'” Jena advised me, quoting Rilke, whose LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET I would carry around like a Bible for most of my twenties.

I have a file on my laptop that I sometimes open when I’m feeling overwhelmed with what Virgil called “lacrimae rerum-- the tears of human things.” The file contains a list of gratitude quotes, and one goes like this: “Somebody saw something in you once—and that is partly why you’re where you are today. Find a way to thank them.” Thank you, Jena.
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