by John Irving
In Larry's opera, some cynical queen--someone a lot like Larry--is the narrator. The narrator sings a lament--it's deliberately foolish, and I forget how it rhymes. "Too many Indians, not enough chiefs," the narrator laments. "Too many chickens, not enough roosters." It was very relaxed, all right.
There is a chorus of bottoms--numerous bottoms, naturally--and a comically much-smaller chorus of tops. If Larry had continued his opera, it's possible he would have added a medium-size chorus of bears, but the bear movement didn't begin until the mid-eighties--those big hairy guys, consciously sloppy, rebelling against the chiseled, neat-and-trim men, with their shaved balls and gym bodies. (Those bears were so refreshing, at first.)
Needless to say, Larry's libretto was never made as an opera; his career as a librettist was abandoned in-progress. Larry would be remembered only as a poet, though I remember his gay-opera idea--and those many nights at the Staatsoper, the vast Vienna State Opera, when I was still so young.
It was a valuable lesson for the young would-be writer that I was: to see a great man, an accomplished poet, fail. You must be careful when you stray from an acquired discipline--when I first hooked up with Larry, I was still learning that writing is such a discipline. Opera may be a flamboyant form of storytelling, but a librettist also follows some rules; good writing isn't "relaxed."
To Larry's credit, he was the first to acknowledge his failure as a librettist. That was a valuable lesson, too. "When you compromise your standards, Bill, don't blame the form. Opera is not at fault. I'm not the victim of this failure, Bill--I'm the perpetrator."
You can learn a lot from your lovers, but--for the most part--you get to keep your friends longer, and you learn more from them. (At least I have.) I would even say that my friend Elaine's mother, Martha Hadley, had a greater influence on me than Lawrence Upton truly had.
In fact, at Favorite River Academy, where I was a junior in the winter of 1960--and, Vermont boy that I was, given my naivete--I had never heard the top or bottom words used in that way Larry (or any number of my gay friends and lovers) would later use them, but I knew I was a top before I'd ever had sex with anyone.
That day I made my partial confession to Martha Hadley, when Mrs. Hadley's obvious dominance made such a strong but bewildering impression on me, I absolutely knew that I ceaselessly desired fucking other boys and men, but always with my penis in their bottoms; I never desired the penis of another boy or man penetrating me. (In my mouth, yes--in my asshole, no.)
Even as I desired Kittredge, I knew this much about myself: I wanted to fuck him, and to take his penis in my mouth, but I didn't want him to fuck me. Knowing Kittredge, how utterly crazy I was, because if Kittredge were ever to entertain the possibility of a gay relationship, it was painfully clear to me what he would be. If Kittredge was gay, he sure looked like a top to me.
IT'S REVEALING HOW I have skipped ahead to my junior year abroad in Vienna, choosing to begin that interlude in my future life by telling you about Larry. You might think I should have begun that Vienna interlude by telling you about my first actual girlfriend, Esmeralda Soler, because I met Esmeralda shortly after I arrived in Vienna (in September of 1963), and I'd been living with Esmeralda for several months before I became Larry's writing student--and, not long after that, Larry's lover.
But I believe I know why I have waited to tell you about Esmeralda. It's all too common for gay men of my generation to say how much easier it is today to "come out" as a teenager. What I want to tell you is: At that age, it's never easy.
In my case, I had felt ashamed of my sexual longings for other boys and men; I'd fought against those feelings. Perhaps you think I've overemphasized my attraction to Miss Frost and Mrs. Hadley in a desperate effort to be "normal"; maybe you have the idea that I was never really attracted to women. But I was--I am attracted to women. It was just that--at Favorite River Academy, especially, no doubt because it was an all-boys' school--I had to suppress my attraction to other boys and men.
After that summer in Europe with Tom, when I'd graduated from Favorite River, and later, when I was on my own--in college, in New York--I was finally able to acknowledge the homosexual side of myself. (Yes, I will say more about Tom; it's just that Tom is so difficult.) And after Tom, I had many relationships with men. When I was nineteen and twenty--I turned twenty-one in March of '63, shortly before I learned I'd been accepted to the Institute for European Studies in Vienna--I had already "come out." When I went to Vienna, I'd been living in New York City as a young gay guy for two years.
It wasn't that I was no longer attracted to women; I was attracted to them. But to give in to my attractions to women struck me as a kind of going back to being the repressed gay boy I'd been. Not to mention the fact that, at the time, my gay friends and lovers all believed that anyone calling himself a bisexual man was really just a gay guy with one foot in the closet. (I suppose--when I was nineteen and twenty, and had only recently turned twenty-one--there was a part of me that believed this, too.)
Yet I knew I was bisexual--as surely as I'd known I was attracted to Kittredge, and exactly how I was attracted to him. But in my late teens and early twenties, I was holding back on my attractions to women--as I'd once repressed my desires for other boys and men. Even at such a young age, I must have sensed that bisexual men were not trusted; perhaps we never will be, but we certainly weren't trusted then.
I was never ashamed of being attracted to women, but once I'd had gay lovers--and, in New York, I had an ever-increasing number of gay friends--I quickly learned that being attracted to women made me distrusted and suspected, or even feared, by other gay guys. So I held back, or I was quiet about it; I just looked at a lot of women. (That summer of '61 in Europe--when I was traveling with Tom--poor Tom had caught me looking.)
WE WERE A SMALL group: I mean the American students who'd been accepted to the Institut fur Europaische Studien in Vienna for the academic year of 1963-64. We boarded one of the cruise ships in New York Harbor and made the trans-Atlantic crossing--as Tom and I had done, two summers before. I quickly concluded that there were no gay boys among the Institute's students that year, or none who'd come out--or no one who interested me, in that way.
We traveled by bus across Western Europe to Vienna--vastly more educational sightseeing, in a hasty two weeks, than Tom and I had managed in an entire summer. I had no history with my fellow junior-year-abroad students. I made some friends--straight boys and girls, or so they seemed to me. I thought about a few of the girls, but even before we arrived in Vienna, I decided it was an awfully small group; it really wouldn't have been smart to sleep with one of the Institute girls. Besides, I had already initiated the fiction that I was "trying to be" faithful to a girlfriend back in the States. I'd established to my fellow Institut students that I was a straight guy, apparently inclined to keep to myself.
When I landed that job as the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall on the Weihburggasse, my aloofness from the Institute for European Studies was complete--it was too expensive a restaurant for my fellow students to ever eat there. Except for attending my classes on the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz, I could continue to act out the adventure of being a young writer in a foreign country--namely, that most necessary exercise of finding the time to be alone.
It was an accident that I ever met Esmeralda. I'd noticed her at the opera; this was both because of her size (tall, broad-shouldered girls and women attracted me) and because she took notes. She stood at the rear of the Staatsoper, scribbling furiously. The first night I saw Esmeralda, I mistook her for a critic; though she was only three years older than I was (Esmeralda was twenty-four in the fall of '63), she looked older than that.
When I continued to see her--she was always standing in the rear--I realized that if she were a critic, she would at least have had a seat. But she stood in the back, like me and the other students. In those days, if you were a student, you were welcome to stand in the back; for students, standing room at the opera was free.
; The Staatsoper dominated the intersection of the Karntnerstrasse and the Opernring. The opera house was less than a ten-minute walk from Zufall. When there was a show at the Staatsoper, Zufall had two dinner seatings. We served an early supper before the opera, and we served a later, more extravagant dinner afterward. When I worked both seatings, which was the case most nights, I got to the opera after the first act had begun, and I left before the final act was finished.
One night, during an intermission, Esmeralda spoke to me. I must have looked like an American, which deeply disappointed me, because she spoke to me in English.
"What is it with you?" Esmeralda asked me. "You're always late and you always leave early!" (She was clearly American; as it turned out, she was from Ohio.)
"I have a job--I'm a waiter," I told her. "What is it with you? How come you're always taking notes? Are you trying to be a writer? I'm trying to be one," I admitted.
"I'm just an understudy--I'm trying to be a soprano," Esmeralda said. "You're trying to be a writer," she repeated slowly. (I was immediately drawn to her.)
One night, when I wasn't working the late shift at Zufall, I stayed at the opera till the final curtain, and I proposed that I walk Esmeralda home.
"But I don't want to go 'home'--I don't like where I live. I don't spend much time there," Esmeralda said.
"Oh."
I didn't like where I lived in Vienna, either--I also didn't spend much time there. But I worked at that restaurant on the Weihburggasse most nights; I wasn't, as yet, very knowledgeable about where to go in Vienna at night.
I brought Esmeralda to that gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse; it was near the Staatsoper, and I'd been there only in the daytime, when there were mostly students hanging out--girls included. I hadn't learned that the nighttime clientele at the Kaffee Kafig was all-male, all-gay.
It took Esmeralda and me little time to recognize my mistake. "It's not like this during the day," I told her, as we were leaving. (Thank God Larry wasn't there that night, because I'd already approached him about teaching a writing course at the Institute; Larry had not yet told me his decision.)
Esmeralda was laughing about me taking her to the Kaffee Kafig--"for our first date!" she exclaimed, as we walked up the Graben to the Kohlmarkt. There was a coffeehouse on the Kohlmarkt; I'd not been there, but it looked expensive.
"There's a place I know in my neighborhood," Esmeralda said. "We could go there, and then you could walk me home."
To our mutual surprise, we lived in the same neighborhood--across the Ringstrasse, away from the first district, in the vicinity of the Karlskirche. At the corner of the Argentinierstrasse and the Schwindgasse, there was a cafe-bar--like so many in Vienna. It was a coffeehouse and a bar; it was my neighborhood place, too, I was telling Esmeralda as we sat down. (I often wrote there.)
Thus we began to describe our less-than-happy living situations. It turned out that we both lived on the Schwindgasse, in the same building. Esmeralda had more of an actual apartment than I did. She had a bedroom, her own bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, but she shared a front hall with her landlady; almost every night, when Esmeralda came "home," she had to pass her landlady's living room, where the old and disapproving woman was ensconced on her couch with her small, disagreeable dog. (They were always watching television.)
The drone from the TV could be constantly heard from Esmeralda's bedroom, where she listened to operas (usually, in German) on an old phonograph. She'd been instructed to play her music softly, though "softly" wasn't suitable for opera. The opera was sufficiently loud to mask the sound from the landlady's television, and Esmeralda listened and listened to the German, singing to herself--also softly. She needed to improve her German accent, she'd told me.
Because I needed to improve my German grammar and word order--not to mention my vocabulary--I instantly foresaw how Esmeralda and I could help each other. My accent was the only aspect of my German that was better than Esmeralda's.
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, Auslander ("foreigner") was never said nicely; there was something truly xenophobic about the Viennese.
At that cafe-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 cafe-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 divorcee'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 divorcee 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 divorcee 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.