We decided to go house hunting that spring. While he continued touring, I went ahead to make arrangements. When he arrived, I took him everywhere. We bought oils in the marketplace, visited the musical instrument shops on Mohammed Ali Street, and sat in the nightclubs watching the belly dancers. We got henna tattoos on our hands and walked around the Great Pyramids. We looked at houses and visited mosques and ruins.
At the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, we stood for a long time, looking at Akhenaten and Nefertiti, listening to the tour guide’s short version of their great love story. Akhenaten had desperately wanted a son, but Nefertiti gave him six daughters, so he had a male child with someone simply known as “The Younger Woman.” But his undying love for Nefertiti overcame her wrath. He raised her up as an equal, and together they revolutionized Egypt and changed the world.
We stood there for a long time, taking it all in, fate and coincidence swirling around us. It wasn’t just that we looked like these people or the fact that they were called Children of the Sun by some. We felt connected to them in a way we couldn’t explain or speak about to anyone but each other. It was profound. It was real. We didn’t want to leave that room, and when we finally did, it was because we needed to be alone together in private.
When we came home, it was as if we’d started a new life together, reborn to each other. We’d found each other again, and the miracle of that made us laugh and love each other even more. He had created a beautiful office for me right next to his office on the second floor, and I loved occupying it along with Mia and a tankful of tropical fish, all of whom had names, including Larry the Starfish. Outside the door, the doves were always billing and cooing softly.
I went in every morning feeling loved and creative and energized, and I started tracking my temperature with a basal thermometer. My spirit felt ready to have another baby, and I wanted to make sure my body didn’t miss any opportunities.
In April, EMI/Capitol shut down, which pretty much screwed my husband’s distribution deal, and that was a bitter disappointment, but he was already on to the next thing—the Newpower Soul album and rehearsals for the Jam of the Year Tour—because moving on to the next thing was always his defense mechanism of choice. He had another batch of songs he’d pulled from the vault, and those were coming together on a project called Crystal Ball. He was also hanging around with Clive Davis, the president of Arista, engaged in the early stages of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, and I have to say, Clive had the best take on the never-ending question, “What do you call him?”
“It’s like when you get married,” said Clive. “You can’t call your father-in-law ‘Dad’—that’s awkward—so you run around, looking for substitutions, and then you end up just saying ‘Hi.’”
For a long time I’d wanted to do a major project of my own, and I felt ready. Ever since I saw the Joffrey Ballet interpret some of his music, I’d been thinking I’d like to form a dance company and take that idea to the next level.
I told my husband, “I want to do something like the Joffrey did, but I want to make it even better.”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” he said. “Tell me what you need.”
“Just give me the music.”
I sat dancer style on the floor in front of my fish tank with thirty Prince, , and New Power Generation CDs spread out on the carpet in front of me. This was only a fraction of my husband’s enormous body of work. In addition to all this music and everything still on the shelf and in the vault, he’d written a play and an opera, and he’d created the NPG Orchestra to do the music for our wedding. He’d always wanted to do something on Broadway. And then there was Kamasutra. I looked at the image of myself dancing on the cover. My shadow was the symbol that was now his name. This music was moving and told a story about a love affair between a rock star and a ballerina.
I went next door and said, “I want to do Kamasutra.”
I developed a script with a three-act structure. The first act was the hits, because Mama gotta pay them bills. The second act was Kamasutra, because—wow. It was classical instrumental, and with a darkness and sexiness that a dancer would drool to move to. The third act was all new music, because our long-term vision was to eventually come together in one spectacular show we could take on tour together. It meant a lot to me that he treated me with such respect, never second-guessing or selling me short. From the early years of our friendship, he made me feel that my endeavors as an artist mattered as much as his did, but this was something beyond that; he was prepared to invest in my vision. I was absolutely in the driver’s seat, but I welcomed his input.