I wasn’t as political as Esmeralda. In 1963, I believed I was too intent on becoming a writer to have a political life; I’d said something terribly lofty-sounding to Esmeralda about that. I told her that I wasn’t hedging my bets about becoming a writer—I said that political involvement was a way that young people left the door open to failing in their artistic endeavors, or some such bullshit.
“Do you mean, Billy, that because I’m more politically involved than you, I don’t care about making it as a soprano as much as you care about being a writer?” Esmeralda asked me.
“Of course I don’t mean that!” I answered.
What I should have told her, but I didn’t dare, was that I was bisexual. It wasn’t my writing that kept me from being politically involved; it was that, in 1963, my dual sexuality was all the politics I could handle. Believe me: When you’re twenty-one, there’s a lot of politics involved in being sexually mutable.
That said, on this November Friday, I would soon regret I’d ever given Esmeralda the idea that I thought she was hedging her bets about becoming a soprano—or leaving the door open to failing as an opera singer—because she was such a political person.
FOR THE FIRST SEATING at Zufall, there were more Americans among the clientele than either Karl or I had expected. There were no other foreign tourists—no English-speaking ones, anyway—but there were several American couples past retirement age, and a table of ten obstetricians and gynecologists (all of them Americans) who told me they were in Vienna for an OB-GYN conference.
I got a generous tip from the doctors, because I told them they’d picked a good opera for obstetricians and gynecologists. I explained that part in Macbeth (act 3) when the witches conjure up a bloody child—the child famously tells Macbeth that “none of woman born” can harm him. (Of course, Macbeth is screwed. Macduff, who kills Macbeth, announces that he had a caesarean birth.)
“It’s possibly the only opera with a c-section theme,” I told the OB-GYN table of ten.
Karl was telling everyone that my girlfriend was the soprano singing the Lady Macbeth part tonight, so I was pretty popular with the early-seating crowd, and Karl made good on his promise to let me leave the restaurant in plenty of time for the start of act 1. But something was wrong.
I had the weird impression that the audience wouldn’t settle down—especially the uncouth Americans. One couple seemed on the verge of a divorce; she was sobbing, and nothing her husband had to say could soothe her. I’m guessing that many of you know which Friday night this was—it was November 22, 1963. It was 12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was seven hours ahead of Texas time in Vienna, and Macbeth—to my surprise—didn’t start on time. Esmeralda had told me that the Staatsoper always started on time, but not this night.
I couldn’t have known, but things were as unsettled backstage as they appeared to me in the audience. The American couple I’d identified as headed for a divorce had already left; both of them were inconsolable. Now there were other Americans who seemed in distress. I suddenly noticed the empty seats. Poor Esmeralda! It was her debut, but it wasn’t a full house. (It would have been 1 P.M. in Dallas when JFK died—8 P.M. in Vienna.)
When the curtain simply would not open on that barren heath in Scotland, I began to worry about Esmeralda. Was she suffering from stage fright? Had she lost her voice? Had Gerda Mühle changed her mind about taking a night off? (The program had an insert page, announcing that Esmeralda Soler was Lady Macbeth on Friday, November 22, 1963. I’d already decided that I would have this page framed; I was going to give it to Esmeralda for Christmas that year.) More irritating Americans were talking in the audience—more were leaving, too, some in tears. I decided that Americans were culturally deprived, socially inept imbeciles, or they were all philistines!
Finally the curtain went up, and there were the witches. When Macbeth and Banquo appeared—the latter, I knew, would soon be a ghost—I thought that this Macbeth was far too old and fat to be Esmeralda’s husband (even in an opera).
You can imagine my surprise, in the very next scene in act 1, when it was not my Esmeralda singing “Vieni, t’affretta!” Nor was it Esmeralda calling on the ministers of hell to assist her (“Or tutti sorgete”). There onstage was Gerda Mühle and her polyp. I could only imagine how shocked the English-speaking clientele at our early seating at Zufall must have been—those ten obstetricians and gynecologists included. They must have been thinking: How is it possible that this matronly-looking load of a soprano is the girlfriend of our young, good-looking waiter?
When Lady Macbeth smeared the sleeping guards with the bloody dagger, I imagined that Esmeralda had been murdered backstage—or that something no less dire had happened to her.
It seemed that half the audience was crying by the end of act 2. Was it the news of Banquo’s assassination that moved them to tears, or was it Banquo’s ghost at the dinner table? About the time Macbeth saw Banquo’s ghost that second time, near the end of act 2, I might have been the only person at the Vienna State Opera who didn’t know that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It wasn’t until the intermission that I would learn what had happened.
After the intermission, I stayed to see the witches again—and that terrifying bloody child who tells Macbeth that “none of woman born” can harm him. I stayed until the middle of act 4, because I wanted to see the sleepwalking scene—Gerda Mühle, and her polyp, singing “Una macchia” (about the blood that still taints Lady Macbeth’s hands). Maybe I’d imagined that Esmeralda would emerge from backstage and join me and the other students faithfully standing at the rear of the Staatsoper, but—by act 4—there were so many vacated seats that most of my fellow students had found places to sit down.
I did not know that there was a soundless TV set backstage, and that Esmeralda was glued to it; she would tell me later that you didn’t need the sound to understand what had happened to JFK.
I did not wait till the end of act 4, the final act. I didn’t need to see “Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane,” as Shakespeare puts it, or hear Macduff tell Macbeth about the caesarean birth. I ran along the crowded Kärntnerstrasse to Weihburggasse, passing people with tears streaming down their faces—most of them not Americans.
In the kitchen at Zufall, the crew and the waitstaff were all watching television; we had a small black-and-white TV set. I saw the same soundless accounts of the shooting in Dallas that Esmeralda must have seen.
“You’re early, not late,” Karl observed. “Did your girlfriend blow it?”
“It wasn’t her—it was Gerda Mühle,” I told him.
“Blöde Kuh!” Karl cried. “Stupid cow!” (The Viennese operagoers who were fed up with Gerda Mühle had called her a stupid cow long before Esmeralda started calling her the Polyp.)
“Esmeralda must have been too upset to perform—she must have lost it backstage,” I said to Karl. “She was a Kennedy fan.”
“So she did blow it,” Karl said. “I don’t envy you living with the outcome.”
There was already a scattering of English-speaking customers, Karl warned me—not operagoers, evidently.
“More obstetricians and gynecologists,” Karl observed disdainfully. (He thought there were too many babies in the world. “Overpopulation is the number-one problem,” Karl kept saying.) “And there’s a table of queers,” Karl told me. “They just got here, but they’re already drunk. Definitely fruits. Isn’t that what you call them?”
“That’s one of the things we call them,” I told our one-eyed headwaiter.
It wasn’t hard to spot the OB-GYN table; there were twelve of them—eight men, four women, all doctors. Since President Kennedy had just been killed, I didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to break the ice by telling them that they’d all missed the c-section scene in Macbeth.
As for the table of queers—or “fruits,” as Karl had called them—there were four men, all drunk. One of them was the well-known American poet who was teaching at the
Institute, Lawrence Upton.
“I didn’t know you worked here, young fiction writer,” Larry said. “It’s Bill, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” I told him.
“Jesus, Bill—you look awful. Is it Kennedy, or has something else happened?” Larry asked me.
“I saw Macbeth tonight—” I started to say.
“Oh, I heard it was the soprano understudy’s night—I skipped it,” Larry interrupted me.
“Yes, it was—it was supposed to be the understudy’s night,” I told him. “But she’s American—she must have been too upset about Kennedy. She didn’t go on—it was Gerda Mühle, as usual.”
“Gerda’s great,” Larry said. “It must have been wonderful.”
“Not for me,” I told him. “The soprano understudy is my girlfriend—I was hoping to see her as Lady Macbeth. I’ve been listening to her sing in her sleep,” I told the table of drunken queers. “Her name is Esmeralda Soler,” I told the fruits. “One day, maybe, you’ll all know who she is.”
“You have a girlfriend,” Larry said—with the same, sly disbelief he would later express when I claimed to be a top.
“Esmeralda Soler,” I repeated. “She must have been too upset to sing.”
“Poor girl,” Larry said. “I don’t suppose there is a plethora of opportunities for understudies.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“I’m still thinking about your writing-course idea,” Larry told me. “I haven’t ruled it out, Bill.”
Karl had said he didn’t envy me “living with the outcome” of Esmeralda not singing the part of Lady Macbeth, but—looking at Lawrence Upton and his queer friends—I suddenly foresaw another, not-so-pretty outcome of my living with Esmeralda.
There weren’t many English-speaking operagoers who came to Zufall after that Friday-night performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. I’m guessing that JFK’s assassination kind of kicked the late-night-dinner urge out of most of my fellow Americans who were in Vienna that November. The OB-GYN table was morose; they left early. Only Larry and the fruits stayed late.
Karl urged me to go home. “Go find your girlfriend—she can’t be doing too good,” the one-eyed headwaiter told me. But I knew that either Esmeralda was with her opera people or she’d already gone back to our little apartment on the Schwindgasse. Esmeralda knew where I worked; if she wanted to see me, she knew where to find me.
“The fruits are never leaving—they’ve decided to die here,” Karl kept saying. “You seem to know the handsome one—the talker,” Karl added.
I explained who Lawrence Upton was, and that he taught at the Institute, but he was not my teacher.
“Go home to your girlfriend, Bill,” Karl kept saying.
But I shuddered to think of watching the already-repetitious reports of JFK’s assassination on that television in the living room of Esmeralda’s landlady’s apartment; visions of the disagreeable dog kept me at Zufall, where I could keep an eye on the small black-and-white TV in the restaurant’s kitchen.
“It’s the death of American culture,” Larry was saying to the three other fruits. “Not that there is a culture for books in the United States, but Kennedy offered us some hope of having a culture for writers. Witness Frost—that inaugural poem. It wasn’t bad; Kennedy at least had taste. How long will it be before we have another president who even has taste?”
I know, I know—this is not the most appealing way to present Larry. But what was wonderful about the man was that he spoke the truth, without taking into account the context of other people’s “feelings” at that moment.
Someone overhearing Larry might have been awash in sentiments for our slain president—or feeling shipwrecked on a foreign shore, battered by surging waves of patriotism. Larry didn’t care; if he believed it was true, he said it. This boldness didn’t make Larry unappealing to me.
But it was somewhere in the middle of Larry’s speech when Esmeralda got to the restaurant. She could never eat before she sang, she’d told me, so I knew she hadn’t eaten, and she’d already had some white wine—not a good idea, on an empty stomach. Esmeralda first sat at the bar, crying; Karl had quickly ushered her into the kitchen, where she sat on a stool in front of the small TV. Karl gave her a glass of white wine before he told me she was in the kitchen; I’d not seen Esmeralda at the bar, because I was opening yet another bottle of red wine for Larry’s table.
“It’s your girlfriend, Bill—you should take her home,” Karl told me. “She’s in the kitchen.” Larry’s German wasn’t bad; he’d understood what Karl had said.
“Is it your soprano understudy, Bill?” Larry asked me. “Let her sit with us—we’ll cheer her up!” he told me. (I rather doubted it; I was pretty sure that a death-of-American-culture conversation wouldn’t have cheered up Esmeralda.)
But that was how it happened—how Larry got a look at Esmeralda, as we were making our exit from the restaurant.
“Leave the fruits with me,” Karl said. “I’ll split the tip with you. Take the girl home, Bill.”
“I think I’ll throw up if I keep watching television,” Esmeralda told me in the kitchen. She looked a little wobbly on the stool. I knew she would probably throw up, anyway—because of the white wine. We would have an awkward-looking walk, all the way across the Ringstrasse to the Schwindgasse, but I hoped the walk would be good for her.
“An unusually pretty Lady Macbeth,” I heard Larry say, as I was steering Esmeralda out of the restaurant. “I’m still thinking about that writing course, young fiction writer!” Larry called to me, as Esmeralda and I were leaving.
“I think I’m going to throw up, eventually,” Esmeralda was saying.
It was late when we got back to the Schwindgasse; Esmeralda had thrown up when we were crossing the Karlsplatz, but she said she was feeling better when we got to the apartment. The landlady and her disagreeable dog had gone to bed; the living room was dark, the television was off—or they were all as dead as JFK, the TV included.
“Not Verdi,” Esmeralda said, when she saw me standing undecided at the phonograph.
I put on Joan Sutherland in what everyone said was her “signature role”; I knew how much Esmeralda loved Lucia di Lammermoor, which I put on softly.
“It’s your big night, Billy—mine, too. I’ve never had vaginal sex, either. It doesn’t matter if I get pregnant. When an understudy clutches, that’s it—it’s over,” Esmeralda said; she’d brushed her teeth and washed her face, but she was still a little drunk, I think.
“Don’t be crazy,” I told her. “It does matter if you get pregnant. You’ll have lots more opportunities, Esmeralda.”
“Look—do you want to try it in my vagina, or don’t you?” Esmeralda asked me. “I want to try it in my vagina, Billy—I’m asking you, for Christ’s sake! I want to know what it’s like in my vagina!”
“Oh.”
Of course I used a condom; I would have put on two of the things, if she’d told me. (She was definitely still a little drunk—no question.)
That’s how it happened. On the night our president died, I had vaginal sex for the first time—I really, really liked it. I think it was during Lucia’s mad scene when Esmeralda had her very loud orgasm; to be honest with you, I’ll never know if it was Joan Sutherland hitting that high E-flat, or if it was Esmeralda. My ears weren’t protected by her thighs this time; I still managed to hear the landlady’s dog bark, but my ears were ringing.
“Holy shit!” I heard Esmeralda say. “That was amazing!”
I was amazed (and relieved) myself; I’d not only really, really liked it—I had loved it! Was it as good as (or better than) anal sex? Well, it was different. To be diplomatic, I always say—when asked—that I love anal and vaginal sex “equally.” My earlier worries about vaginas had been unfounded.
But, alas, I was a little slow in responding to Esmeralda’s “Holy shit!” and her “That was amazing!” I was thinking how much I’d loved it, but I didn’t say it.
“Billy?” E
smeralda asked. “How was it for you? Did you like it?”
You know, it’s not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.
I said: “Definitely not a ballroom.” On top of what a day poor Esmeralda had had, that was what I told her.
“Not a what?” she said.
“Oh, it’s just a Vermont expression!” I quickly said. “It’s meaningless, really. I’m not even sure what ‘not a ballroom’ means—it doesn’t translate very well.”
“Why would you say something negative?” Esmeralda asked me. “‘Not an’ anything is negative—‘not a ballroom’ sounds like a big disappointment, Billy.”
“No, no—I’m not disappointed. I loved your vagina!” I cried. The disagreeable dog barked again; Lucia was repeating herself—she had gone back to the beginning, when she was still the trusting but easily unhinged young bride.
“I’m ‘not a ballroom’—like I’m just a gym, or a kitchen, or something,” Esmeralda was saying. Then her tears came—tears for Kennedy, for her one chance to be a starting soprano, for her unappreciated vagina—lots of tears.
You can’t take back something like “Definitely not a ballroom”; it’s simply not what you should ever say after your first vaginal sex. Of course, I also couldn’t take back what I’d said to Esmeralda about her politics—about her lack of commitment to becoming a soprano.
We would live together through that Christmas and the first of the New Year, but the damage—the distrust—had begun. One night, I must have said something in my sleep. In the morning, Esmeralda asked me: “That rather good-looking older man in Zufall—you know, that terrible night. What did he mean about the writing course? Why did he call you ‘young fiction writer,’ Billy? Does he know you? Do you know him?”
In One Person Page 17