In One Person (26 page)

“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?” Esmeralda 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?”

Ah, well—there was no easy answer to that. Then, another night—that January of ’64, after I got off work—I crossed the Kärntnerstrasse and turned down Dorotheergasse to the Kaffee Käfig. I knew perfectly well what the clientele was like late at night; it was all-male, all-gay.

“Well, if it isn’t the fiction writer,” Larry might have said, or maybe he just asked, “It’s Bill, isn’t it?” (This would have been the night he told me that he’d decided to teach that writing course I had asked him about, but before my first couple of classes with him as my teacher.)

That night in the Kaffee Käfig—not all that long before he hit on me—Larry might have asked, “No soprano understudy tonight? Where is that pretty, pretty girl? Not your
average
Lady Macbeth, Bill—is she?”

“No, she’s not
average,
” I might have mumbled. We just talked; nothing happened that night.

In fact, later that same night, I was in bed with Esmeralda when she asked me something significant. “Your German accent—it’s so perfectly
Austrian,
it just kills me. Your German isn’t that great, but you speak it so authentically. Where does your German
come from,
Billy—I can’t believe I’ve never asked you!”

We had just made love. Okay, it hadn’t been that spectacular—the landlady’s dog didn’t bark, and my ears weren’t echoing—but we’d had vaginal sex, and we both loved it. “No more anal for us, Billy—I’m over it,” Esmeralda had said.

Naturally, I knew that I
wasn’t
over anal sex. I also understood that I not only loved Esmeralda’s vagina; I’d already accepted the enslaving idea that I would never get “over” vaginas, either. Of course, it wasn’t only Esmeralda’s vagina that had enslaved me. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have a penis.

I blame the “Where does your German
come from
” question. That started me thinking about where our
desires
“come from”; that is a dark, winding road. And that was the night I knew I would be leaving Esmeralda.

I was in German III my junior year at Favorite River Academy. That winter after old Grau died, Fräulein Bauer’s section of German III acquired some of Dr. Grau’s students—Kittredge among them. They were an ill-prepared group; Herr Doktor Grau was a confusing teacher. It was a graduation requirement at Favorite River that you had to take three years of the same language; if Kittredge was taking German III as a senior, this meant that he had flunked German in a previous year, or that he’d started out studying another foreign language and, for some unknown reason, had switched to German.

“Isn’t your mom French?” I asked him. (I assumed he’d spoken French at home.)

“I got tired of doing what my alleged mother wanted,” Kittredge said. “Hasn’t that happened to you yet, Nymph?”

Because Kittredge was so witheringly smart, I was surprised he was such a weak German student; I was less surprised to discover he was lazy. He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. Foreign languages demand a willingness to memorize and a tolerance for repetition; that Kittredge could learn his lines for a play showed he had the capacity for this kind of self-polishing—onstage, he was a poised performer. But he lacked the necessary discipline for studying a foreign language—German, especially. The articles—“The frigging
der, die, das, den, dem
shit!” as Kittredge angrily stated—were beyond his patience.

That year, when Kittredge
should have
graduated, I didn’t help his final grade by agreeing to assist him with his homework; that Kittredge virtually copied my translations of our daily assignments would be of no help to him in the in-class exams, which he had to write by himself. I most certainly didn’t want Kittredge to fail German III; I foresaw the repercussions of him repeating his senior year, when I would also be a senior. But it was hard to say no to him when he asked for help.

“It’s hard to say no to him, period,” Elaine would later say. I blame myself that I didn’t know they were involved.

That winter term, there were auditions for what Richard Abbott called “the spring Shakespeare”—to distinguish it from the Shakespeare play he had directed in the fall term. At Favorite River, Richard sometimes made us boys do Shakespeare in the winter term, too.

I hate to say this, but I believe that Kittredge’s participation in the Drama Club was responsible for a surge in the popularity of our school plays—notwithstanding all the Shakespeare. There was more than usual interest when Richard read aloud the cast list for
Twelfth Night
at morning meeting; the list was later posted in the academy dining hall, where students actually stood in line for their opportunity to stare at the dramatis personae.

Orsino, Duke of Illyria, was our teacher and director, Richard Abbott. Richard, as the Duke, begins
Twelfth Night
with those familiar and rhapsodic lines “ ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ ” not ever needing any prompting from my mother on that subject.

Orsino first professes his love for Olivia, a countess played by my complaining aunt Muriel. Olivia rejects the Duke, who (wasting no time) quickly falls in love with Viola, thus making Orsino an overproclaiming figure—“maybe more in love with love than with either lady,” as Richard Abbott put it.

I always thought that, because Olivia turns down Orsino as her lover, Muriel must have felt comfortable in accepting the role of the countess. Richard was still a little too much leading-man material for Muriel; she never entirely relaxed in her handsome brother-in-law’s company.

Elaine was cast as Viola, later disguised as Cesario. Elaine’s immediate response was that Richard had anticipated Viola’s necessary cross-dressing of herself as Cesario—“Viola
has
to be flat-chested, because for much of the play she’s a guy,” was how Elaine put it to me.

I actually found it a little creepy that Orsino and Viola end up in
love—given that Richard was noticeably older than Elaine—but Elaine didn’t seem to care. “I think girls got married younger back then,” was all she said about it. (With half a brain, I might have realized that Elaine already had a real-life lover who was older than she was!)

I was cast as Sebastian—Viola’s twin brother. “That’s perfect for you two,” Kittredge said condescendingly to Elaine and me. “You’ve already got a brother-sister thing going, as anyone can see.” (At the time, I didn’t pick up on that; Elaine must have told Kittredge that she and I weren’t interested in each other in that way.)

I’ll admit I was distracted; that Muriel, as Olivia, is first smitten with Elaine (disguised as Cesario) and later falls for
me,
Sebastian—well, that was a test of the previously mentioned disbelief business. For my part, I found it impossible to imagine falling in love with Muriel—hence I stared fixedly at my aunt’s operatic bosom. Not once did
this
Sebastian look in
that
Olivia’s eyes—not even when Sebastian exclaims, “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!”