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.
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 divorcée 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!)