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.