In One Person

quickly concluded that there were no gay boys among the Institute’s students that year, or none who’d come out—or no one who interested me, in that way.
    We traveled by bus across Western Europe to Vienna—vastly more educational sightseeing, in a hasty two weeks, than Tom and I had managed in an entire summer. I had no history with my fellow junior-year-abroad students. I made some friends—straight boys and girls, or so they seemed to me. I thought about a few of the girls, but even before we arrived in Vienna, I decided it was an awfully small group; it really wouldn’t have been smart to sleep with one of the Institute girls. Besides, I had already initiated the fiction that I was “trying to be” faithful to a girlfriend back in the States. I’d established to my fellow Institut students that I was a straight guy, apparently inclined to keep to myself.
    When I landed that job as the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall on the Weihburggasse, my aloofness from the Institute for European Studies was complete—it was too expensive a restaurant for my fellow students to ever eat there. Except for attending my classes on the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz, I could continue to act out the adventure of being a young writer in a foreign country—namely, that most necessary exercise of finding the time to be alone.
    It was an accident that I ever met Esmeralda. I’d noticed her at the opera; this was both because of her size (tall, broad-shouldered girls and women attracted me) and because she took notes. She stood at the rear of the Staatsoper, scribbling furiously. The first night I saw Esmeralda, I mistook her for a critic; though she was only three years older than I was (Esmeralda was twenty-four in the fall of ’63), she looked older than that.
    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!”