In One Person

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 stuck 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!)
    Esmeralda turned on her phonograph. She put on that famous ’61 recording of Donizetti’s
Lucia di Lammermoor
—with Joan Sutherland as the crazed soprano. (I then understood that this was not a night when Esmeralda was focusing on improving her German accent.) Donizetti was certainly more romantic background music than Tex Ritter.
    Thus I excitedly embarked on my first girlfriend experience—the compromise, which was no compromise for me, being that the sex was “anal or nothing.” The
or-nothing
part wasn’t strictly true; we would have lots of oral sex. I wasn’t afraid of oral sex, and Esmeralda
loved
it—it made her