The waitstaff at Zufall had tried to prepare me: When the fall was over—when the winter came, and the tourists were gone—there would be nights when there’d be no English-speaking customers in the restaurant. I had better improve my German before the winter months, they had warned me. The Austrians weren’t kind to foreigners. In Vienna, Ausländer (“foreigner”) was never said nicely; there was something truly xenophobic about the Viennese.
At that café-bar on the Argentinierstrasse, I began to describe my living situation to Esmeralda—in German. We’d already decided that we should speak German to each other.
Esmeralda had a Spanish name—esmeralda means “emerald” in Spanish—but she didn’t speak Spanish. Her mother was Italian, and Esmeralda spoke (and sang) Italian, but if she wanted to be an opera singer, she had to improve her German accent. She said it was a joke at the Staatsoper that she was a soprano understudy—a soprano “in-waiting,” Esmeralda called herself. If they ever let her onstage in Vienna, it would happen only if the regular soprano—the “starting” soprano, Esmeralda called her—died. (Or if the opera was in Italian.)
Even as she told me this in grammatically perfect German, I could hear strong shades of Cleveland in her accent. A music teacher in a Cleveland elementary school had discovered that Esmeralda could sing; she’d gone to Oberlin on a scholarship. Esmeralda’s junior year abroad had been in Milan; she’d had a student internship at La Scala, and had fallen in love with Italian opera.
But Esmeralda said that German felt like chips of wood in her mouth. Her father had run out on her and her mother; he’d gone to Argentina, where he met another woman. Esmeralda had concluded that the woman her father hooked up with in Argentina must have had Nazi ancestors.
“What else could explain why I can’t handle the accent?” Esmeralda asked me. “I’ve studied the shit out of German!”
I still think about the bonds that drew Esmeralda and me together: We each had absconding fathers, we lived in the same building on the Schwindgasse, and we were talking about all this in a café-bar on the Argentinierstrasse—in our flawed German. Unglaublich! (“Unbelievable!”)
The Institute students were housed all over Vienna. It was common to have your own bedroom but to share a bathroom; a remarkable number of our students had widows for landladies, and no kitchen privileges. I had a widow for a landlady and my own bedroom, and I shared a bathroom with the widow’s divorced daughter and the divorcée’s five-year-old son, Siegfried. The kitchen was in constant, chaotic use, but I was permitted to make coffee for myself there, and I kept some beer in the fridge.
My widowed landlady wept regularly; day and night, she shuffled around in an unraveling terry-cloth bathrobe. The divorcée was a big-breasted, take-charge sort of woman; it wasn’t her fault that she reminded me of my bossy aunt Muriel. The five-year-old, Siegfried, had a sly, demonic way of staring at me; he ate a soft-boiled egg for breakfast every morning—including the eggshell.
The first time I saw Siegfried do this, I went immediately to my bedroom and consulted my English-German dictionary. (I didn’t know the German for “eggshell.”) When I told Siegfried’s mother that her five-year-old had eaten the shell, she shrugged and said it was probably better for him than the egg. In the mornings, when I made my coffee and watched little Siegfried eat his soft-boiled egg, shell and all, the divorcée was usually dressed in a slovenly manner, in a loose-fitting pair of men’s pajamas—conceivably belonging to her ex-husband. There were always too many unbuttoned buttons, and Siegfried’s mother had a deplorable habit of scratching herself.
What was funny about the bathroom we shared was that the door had a peephole, which is common on hotel-room doors, but not on bathroom doors. I speculated that the peephole had been installed in the bathroom door so that someone leaving the bathroom—perhaps half-naked, or wrapped in a towel—could see if the coast was clear in the hall (if someone was out there, in other words). But why? Who would want or need to walk around naked in the hall, even if the coast was clear?
This mystery was aggravated by the curious fact that the peephole cylinder on the bathroom door could be reversed. I discovered that the cylinder was often reversed; the reversal became commonplace—you could peek into the bathroom from the hall, and plainly see who was there and what he or she was doing!
Try explaining that to someone in German, and you’ll see how good or bad your German is, but all of this I somehow managed to tell Esmeralda—in German—on our first date.
“Holy cow!” Esmeralda said at one point, in English. Her skin had a milky-coffee color, and there was the faintest, softest trace of a mustache on her upper lip. She had jet-black hair, and her dark-brown eyes were almost black. Her hands were bigger than mine—she was a little taller than I was, too—but her breasts (to my relief) were “normal,” which to me meant “noticeably smaller” than the rest of her.
Okay—I’ll say it. If I had hesitated to have my first actual girlfriend experience, a part of the reason was that I’d discovered I liked anal intercourse. (I liked it a lot!) No doubt there was a part of me that feared what vaginal intercourse might be like.
That summer in Europe with Tom—when poor Tom became so insecure and felt so threatened, when all I really did was just look at girls and women—I remember saying, with no small amount of exasperation, “For Christ’s sake, Tom—haven’t you noticed how much I like anal sex? What do you think I imagine making love to a vagina would be like? Maybe like having sex with a ballroom!”
Naturally, it had been the vagina word that sent poor Tom to the bathroom—where I could hear him gagging. But although I’d only been kidding, it was the ballroom word that had stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What if having vaginal sex was like making love to a ballroom? Yet I continued to be attracted to larger-than-average women.
Our less-than-ideal living situations were not the only obstacles that stood between Esmeralda and me. We had cautiously visited each other, in our respective rooms.
“I can deal with the reverse-peephole-bathroom-door thing,” Esmeralda had told me, “but that kid gives me the creeps.” She called Siegfried “the eggshell-eater”; as my relationship with Esmeralda developed, though, it would turn out that it wasn’t Siegfried, per se, who creeped out Esmeralda.
Far more disturbing to Esmeralda than that reverse-peephole-bathroom-door thing was the bigger thing she had about kids. She was terrified of having one; like many young women at that time, Esmeralda was preternaturally afraid of getting pregnant—for good reasons.
If Esmeralda got pregnant, that would be the end to her career hopes of becoming an opera singer. “I’m not ready to be a housewife soprano,” was how she put it to me. We both knew there were countries in Europe where it was possible to get an abortion. (Not Austria, a Catholic country.) But, for the most part, abortion was unavailable—or unsafe and illegal. We knew that, too. Besides, Esmeralda’s Italian mother was very Catholic; Esmeralda would have had misgivings about getting an abortion, even if the procedure had been available and safe and legal.
“There isn’t a condom made that can keep me from getting knocked up,” Esmeralda told me. “I am fertile times ten.”
“How do you know that?” I’d asked her.
“I feel fertile, all the time—I just know it,” she said.
“Oh.”
We were sitting chastely on her bed; the pregnancy terror struck me as an insurmountable obstacle. The decision, in regard to which bedroom we might try to do it in, had been made for us; if we were going to live together, we would share Esmeralda’s small apartment. My weeping widow had complained to the Institute; I’d been accused of reversing the peephole thing on the bathroom door! Das Institut accepted my claim that I was innocent of this deviant behavior, but I had to move out.
“I’ll bet it was the eggshell-eater,” Esmeralda had said. I didn’t argue with her, but little Siegfried would have had to stand on a stool or a chair just to reach the stupid peephole. My bet was on the
divorcée with the unbuttoned buttons.
Esmeralda’s landlady was happy to have the extra rent money; she’d probably never imagined that Esmeralda’s apartment, which had such a tiny kitchen, could be shared by two people, but Esmeralda and I never cooked—we always ate out.
Esmeralda said that her landlady’s disposition had improved since I’d moved in; if the old woman frowned upon Esmeralda having a live-in boyfriend, the extra rent money seemed to soften her disfavor. Even the disagreeable dog had accepted me.
That same night when Esmeralda and I sat, not touching, on her bed, the old lady had invited us into her living room; she’d wanted us to see that she and her dog were watching an American movie on the television. Both Esmeralda and I were still in culture shock; it’s not easy to recover from hearing Gary Cooper speak German. “How could they have dubbed High Noon?” I kept saying.
The drone from the TV wafted over us in Esmeralda’s bedroom. Tex Ritter was singing “Do Not Forsake Me.”
“At least they didn’t dub Tex Ritter,” Esmeralda was saying, when I—very tentatively—touched her perfect breasts. “Here’s the thing, Billy,” she said, letting me touch her. (I could tell she’d said this before; in the past, I would learn, this speech had been a boyfriend-stopper. Not this time.)
I’d not noticed the condom until she handed it to me—it was still in its shiny foil wrapper. “You have to wear this, Billy—even if the damn thing breaks, it’s cleaner.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the condom.
“But the thing is—this is the hard part, Billy—you can only do anal. That’s the only intercourse I allow—anal,” she repeated, this time in a shameful whisper. “I know it’s a compromise for you, but that’s just how it is. It’s anal or nothing,” Esmeralda told me.
“Oh.”
“I understand if that’s not for you, Billy,” she said.
I shouldn’t say too much, I was thinking. What she proposed was hardly a “compromise” for me—I loved anal intercourse! As for “anal or nothing” being a boyfriend-stopper—on the contrary, I was relieved. The dreaded ballroom experience was once more postponed! I knew I had to be careful—not to appear too enthusiastic.
It wasn’t completely a lie, when I said, “I’m a little nervous—it’s my first time.” (Okay, so I didn’t add “with a woman”—okay, okay!)
Esmeralda turned on her phonograph. She put on that famous ’61 recording of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor—with Joan Sutherland as the crazed soprano. (I then understood that this was not a night when Esmeralda was focusing on improving her German accent.) Donizetti was certainly more romantic background music than Tex Ritter.
Thus I excitedly embarked on my first girlfriend experience—the compromise, which was no compromise for me, being that the sex was “anal or nothing.” The or-nothing part wasn’t strictly true; we would have lots of oral sex. I wasn’t afraid of oral sex, and Esmeralda loved it—it made her sing, she said.
Thus I was introduced to a vagina, with one restriction; only the ballroom (or not-a-ballroom) part was withheld—and for that part I was content, even happy, to wait. For someone who had long viewed that part with trepidation, I was introduced to a vagina in ways I found most intriguing and appealing. I truly loved having sex with Esmeralda, and I loved her, too.
There were those après-sex moments when, in a half-sleep or forgetting that I was with a woman, I would reach out and touch her vagina—only to suddenly pull back my hand, as if surprised. (I had been reaching for Esmeralda’s penis.)
“Poor Billy,” Esmeralda would say, misunderstanding my fleeting touch; she was thinking that I wanted to be inside her vagina, that I was feeling a pang for all that was denied me.
“I’m not ‘poor Billy’—I’m happy Billy, I’m fully satisfied Billy,” I always told her.
“You’re a very good sport,” Esmeralda would say. She had no idea how happy I was, and when I reached out and touched her vagina—in my sleep, sometimes, or otherwise unconsciously—Esmeralda had no clue what I was reaching for, which was what she didn’t have and what I must have been missing.
DER OBERKELLNER (“THE HEADWAITER”) at Zufall was a stern-looking young man who seemed older than he was. He’d lost an eye and wore an eye patch; he was not yet thirty, but either the eye patch or how he’d lost the eye gave him the gravity of a much older man. His name was Karl, and he never talked about losing the eye—the other waiters had told me the story: At the end of World War II, when Karl was ten, he’d seen some Russian soldiers raping his mother and had tried to intervene. One of the Russians had hit the boy with his rifle, and the blow cost Karl his sight in one eye.
Late that fall of my junior year abroad—it was nearing the end of November—Esmeralda was given her first chance to be the lead soprano on the tripartite stage of the Staatsoper. As she’d predicted, it was an Italian opera—Verdi’s Macbeth—and Esmeralda, who’d been patiently waiting her turn (actually, she’d been thinking that her turn would never come), had been the soprano understudy for Lady Macbeth for most of that fall (in fact, for as long as we’d been living together).
“Vieni, t’affretta!” I’d heard Esmeralda sing in her sleep—when Lady Macbeth reads the letter from her husband, telling her about his first meeting with the witches.
I asked Karl for permission to leave the restaurant’s first seating early, and to get to the après-opera seating late; my girlfriend was going to be Lady Macbeth on Friday night.
“You have a girlfriend—the understudy really is your girlfriend, correct?” Karl asked me.
“Yes, that’s correct, Karl,” I told him.
“I’m glad to hear it, Bill—there’s been talk to the contrary,” Karl said, his one eye transfixing me.
“Esmeralda is my girlfriend, and she’s singing the part of Lady Macbeth this Friday,” I told the headwaiter.
“That’s a one-and-only chance, Bill—don’t let her blow it,” Karl said.
“I just don’t want to miss the beginning—and I want to stay till the end, Karl,” I said.
“Of course, of course. I know it’s a Friday, but we’re not that busy. The warm weather is gone. Like the leaves, the tourists are dropping off. This might be the last weekend we really need an English-speaking waiter, but we can manage without you, Bill,” Karl told me. He had a way of making me feel bad, even when he was on my side. Karl made me think of Lady Macbeth calling on the ministers of hell.
“Or tutti sorgete.” I’d heard Esmeralda sing that in her sleep, too; it was chilling, and of no help to my German.
“Fatal mia donna!” Lady Macbeth says to her weakling husband; she takes the dagger Macbeth has used to kill Duncan and smears the sleeping guards with blood. I couldn’t wait to see Esmeralda pussy-whipping Macbeth! And all this happens in act 1. No wonder I didn’t want to arrive late—I didn’t want to miss a minute of the witches.
“I’m very proud of you, Bill. I mean, for having a girlfriend—not just that big soprano of a girlfriend, but any girlfriend. That should silence the talk,” Karl told me.
“Who’s talking, Karl?” I asked him.
“Some of the other waiters, one of the sous-chefs—you know how people talk, Bill.”
“Oh.”
In truth, if anyone in the kitchen at Zufall needed proof that I wasn’t gay, it was probably Karl; if there’d been talk that I was gay, I’m sure Karl was the one doing the talking.
I’d kept an eye on Esmeralda when she was sleeping. If Lady Macbeth made a nightly appearance as a sleepwalker, in act 4—lamenting that there was still blood on her hands—Esmeralda never sleepwalked. She was sound asleep, and lying down, when she sang (almost every night) “Una macchia.”
The lead soprano, who was taking Friday night off, had a singer’s polyp in the area of her vocal cords; while this was not uncommon for opera singers, much attention had been paid to Gerda Mühle’s tiny polyp. (Should the polyp be surgically removed or not?)
Esmeralda worshipped Gerda Mühle; her
voice was resonant, yet never forced, through an impressive range. Gerda Mühle could be vibrant but effortless from a low G to dizzying flights above high C. Her soprano voice was large and heavy enough for Wagner, yet Mühle could also manage the requisite agility for the swift runs and complicated trills of the early-nineteenth-century Italian style. But Esmeralda had told me that Gerda Mühle was a pain in the ass about her polyp.
“It’s taken over her life—it’s taking over all our lives,” Esmeralda said. She’d gone from worshipping Gerda Mühle, the soprano, to hating Gerda Mühle, the woman—the “Polyp,” Esmeralda now called her.
On Friday night, the Polyp was resting her vocal cords. Esmeralda was excited to be getting what she called her “first start” at the Staatsoper. But Esmeralda was dismissive of Gerda Mühle’s polyp. Back in Cleveland, Esmeralda had endured a sinus surgery—a risky one for a would-be singer. As a teenager, Esmeralda’s nasal passages were chronically clogged; she sometimes wondered if that sinus surgery was responsible for the persistent American accent in her German. Esmeralda had zero sympathy for Gerda Mühle making such a big deal out of her singer’s polyp.
I’d learned to ignore the jokes among the kitchen crew and the waitstaff about what it was like to have a soprano for a girlfriend. Everyone teased me about this except Karl—he didn’t kid around.
“It must be loud, at times,” the chef at Zufall had said, to general laughter in the kitchen.
I didn’t tell them, of course, that Esmeralda had orgasms only when I went down on her. By her own account, Esmeralda’s orgasms were “pretty spectacular,” but I was shielded from the sound. Esmeralda’s thighs were clamped against my ears; I truly heard nothing.
“God, I think I just hit a high E-flat—and I really held it!” Esmeralda said, after one of her more prolonged orgasms, but my ears were warm and sweaty, and my head had been held so tightly between her thighs that I hadn’t heard anything.
I don’t remember what the weather was like in Vienna on this particular November Friday. I just remember that when Esmeralda left our little apartment on the Schwindgasse, she was wearing her JFK campaign button. It was her good-luck charm, she’d told me. She was very proud of volunteering for Kennedy’s election campaign in Ohio in 1960; Esmeralda had been hugely pissed off when Ohio, by a narrow margin, went Republican. (Ohio had voted for Nixon.)
In One Person Page 16