In One Person

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.

"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.