When I continued to see her—she was always standing in the rear—I realized that if she were a critic, she would at least have had a seat. But she stood in the back, like me and the other students. In those days, if you were a student, you were welcome to stand in the back; for students, standing room at the opera was free.
The Staatsoper dominated the intersection of the Kärntnerstrasse and the Opernring. The opera house was less than a ten-minute walk from Zufall. When there was a show at the Staatsoper, Zufall had two dinner seatings. We served an early supper before the opera, and we served a later, more extravagant dinner afterward. When I worked both seatings, which was the case most nights, I got to the opera after the first act had begun, and I left before the final act was finished.
One night, during an intermission, Esmeralda spoke to me. I must have looked like an American, which deeply disappointed me, because she spoke to me in English.
“What is it with you?” Esmeralda asked me. “You’re always late and you always leave early!” (She was clearly American; as it turned out, she was from Ohio.)
“I have a job—I’m a waiter,” I told her. “What is it with you? How come you’re always taking notes? Are you trying to be a writer? I’m trying to be one,” I admitted.
“I’m just an understudy—I’m trying to be a soprano,” Esmeralda said. “You’re trying to be a writer,” she repeated slowly. (I was immediately drawn to her.)
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 Käfig 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 Käfig—“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 café-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, Ausländer (“foreigner”) was never said nicely; there was something truly xenophobic about the Viennese.
At that café-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 café-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 divorcée’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 divorcée 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 divorcée 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.