In One Person

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.
    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