“It’s your big night, Billy—mine, too. I’ve never had vaginal sex, either. It doesn’t matter if I get pregnant. When an understudy clutches, that’s it—it’s over,” Esmeralda said; she’d brushed her teeth and washed her face, but she was still a little drunk, I think.
“Don’t be crazy,” I told her. “It does matter if you get pregnant. You’ll have lots more opportunities, Esmeralda.”
“Look—do you want to try it in my vagina, or don’t you?” Esmeralda asked me. “I want to try it in my vagina, Billy—I’m asking you, for Christ’s sake! I want to know what it’s like in my vagina!”
“Oh.”
Of course I used a condom; I would have put on two of the things, if she’d told me. (She was definitely still a little drunk—no question.)
That’s how it happened. On the night our president died, I had vaginal sex for the first time—I really, really liked it. I think it was during Lucia’s mad scene when Esmeralda had her very loud orgasm; to be honest with you, I’ll never know if it was Joan Sutherland hitting that high E-flat, or if it was Esmeralda. My ears weren’t protected by her thighs this time; I still managed to hear the landlady’s dog bark, but my ears were ringing.
“Holy shit!” I heard Esmeralda say. “That was amazing!”
I was amazed (and relieved) myself; I’d not only really, really liked it—I had loved it! Was it as good as (or better than) anal sex? Well, it was different. To be diplomatic, I always say—when asked—that I love anal and vaginal sex “equally.” My earlier worries about vaginas had been unfounded.
But, alas, I was a little slow in responding to Esmeralda’s “Holy shit!” and her “That was amazing!” I was thinking how much I’d loved it, but I didn’t say it.
“Billy?” Esmeralda asked. “How was it for you? Did you like it?”
You know, it’s not only writers who have this problem, but writers really, really have this problem; for us, a so-called train of thought, though unspoken, is unstoppable.
I said: “Definitely not a ballroom.” On top of what a day poor Esmeralda had had, that was what I told her.
“Not a what?” she said.
“Oh, it’s just a Vermont expression!” I quickly said. “It’s meaningless, really. I’m not even sure what ‘not a ballroom’ means—it doesn’t translate very well.”
“Why would you say something negative?” Esmeralda asked me. “‘Not an’ anything is negative—‘not a ballroom’ sounds like a big disappointment, Billy.”
“No, no—I’m not disappointed. I loved your vagina!” I cried. The disagreeable dog barked again; Lucia was repeating herself—she had gone back to the beginning, when she was still the trusting but easily unhinged young bride.
“I’m ‘not a ballroom’—like I’m just a gym, or a kitchen, or something,” Esmeralda was saying. Then her tears came—tears for Kennedy, for her one chance to be a starting soprano, for her unappreciated vagina—lots of tears.
You can’t take back something like “Definitely not a ballroom”; it’s simply not what you should ever say after your first vaginal sex. Of course, I also couldn’t take back what I’d said to Esmeralda about her politics—about her lack of commitment to becoming a soprano.
We would live together through that Christmas and the first of the New Year, but the damage—the distrust—had begun. One night, I must have said something in my sleep. In the morning, Esmeralda asked me: “That rather good-looking older man in Zufall—you know, that terrible night. What did he mean about the writing course? Why did he call you ‘young fiction writer,’ Billy? Does he know you? Do you know him?”
Ah, well—there was no easy answer to that. Then, another night—that January of ’64, after I got off work—I crossed the Kärntnerstrasse and turned down Dorotheergasse to the Kaffee Käfig. I knew perfectly well what the clientele was like late at night; it was all-male, all-gay.
“Well, if it isn’t the fiction writer,” Larry might have said, or maybe he just asked, “It’s Bill, isn’t it?” (This would have been the night he told me that he’d decided to teach that writing course I had asked him about, but before my first couple of classes with him as my teacher.)
That night in the Kaffee Käfig—not all that long before he hit on me—Larry might have asked, “No soprano understudy tonight? Where is that pretty, pretty girl? Not your average Lady Macbeth, Bill—is she?”
“No, she’s not average,” I might have mumbled. We just talked; nothing happened that night.
In fact, later that same night, I was in bed with Esmeralda when she asked me something significant. “Your German accent—it’s so perfectly Austrian, it just kills me. Your German isn’t that great, but you speak it so authentically. Where does your German come from, Billy—I can’t believe I’ve never asked you!”
We had just made love. Okay, it hadn’t been that spectacular—the landlady’s dog didn’t bark, and my ears weren’t echoing—but we’d had vaginal sex, and we both loved it. “No more anal for us, Billy—I’m over it,” Esmeralda had said.
Naturally, I knew that I wasn’t over anal sex. I also understood that I not only loved Esmeralda’s vagina; I’d already accepted the enslaving idea that I would never get “over” vaginas, either. Of course, it wasn’t only Esmeralda’s vagina that had enslaved me. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have a penis.
I blame the “Where does your German come from” question. That started me thinking about where our desires “come from”; that is a dark, winding road. And that was the night I knew I would be leaving Esmeralda.
Chapter 6
THE PICTURES I KEPT OF ELAINE
I was in German III my junior year at Favorite River Academy. That winter after old Grau died, Fräulein Bauer’s section of German III acquired some of Dr. Grau’s students—Kittredge among them. They were an ill-prepared group; Herr Doktor Grau was a confusing teacher. It was a graduation requirement at Favorite River that you had to take three years of the same language; if Kittredge was taking German III as a senior, this meant that he had flunked German in a previous year, or that he’d started out studying another foreign language and, for some unknown reason, had switched to German.
“Isn’t your mom French?” I asked him. (I assumed he’d spoken French at home.)
“I got tired of doing what my alleged mother wanted,” Kittredge said. “Hasn’t that happened to you yet, Nymph?”
Because Kittredge was so witheringly smart, I was surprised he was such a weak German student; I was less surprised to discover he was lazy. He was one of those people things came easily to, but he did little to demonstrate that he deserved to be gifted. Foreign languages demand a willingness to memorize and a tolerance for repetition; that Kittredge could learn his lines for a play showed he had the capacity for this kind of self-polishing—onstage, he was a poised performer. But he lacked the necessary discipline for studying a foreign language—German, especially. The articles—“The frigging der, die, das, den, dem shit!” as Kittredge angrily stated—were beyond his patience.