by John Irving
"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 divorcee 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 apres-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 apres-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 Muhle's tiny polyp. (Should the polyp be surgically removed or not?)
Esmeralda worshipped Gerda Muhle; her voice was resonant, yet never forced, through an impressive range. Gerda Muhle 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 Muhle 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 Muhle 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 Muhle, the soprano, to hating Gerda Muhle, 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 Muhle'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 Muhle 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.)
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 Muhle 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 Muhle 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 Muhle, 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 Karntnerstrasse 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.