In One Person

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.