In One Person

that I
wasn’t
gay, it was probably Karl; if there’d been talk that I
was
gay, I’m sure Karl was the one doing the talking.
    I’d kept an eye on Esmeralda when she was sleeping. If Lady Macbeth made a nightly appearance as a sleepwalker, in act 4—lamenting that there was still blood on her hands—Esmeralda never sleepwalked. She was sound asleep, and lying down, when she sang (almost every night) “
Una macchia
.”
    The lead soprano, who was taking Friday night off, had a singer’s polyp in the area of her vocal cords; while this was not uncommon for opera singers, much attention had been paid to Gerda Mühle’s tiny polyp. (Should the polyp be surgically removed or not?)
    Esmeralda worshipped Gerda Mühle; her voice was resonant, yet never forced, through an impressive range. Gerda Mühle could be vibrant but effortless from a low G to dizzying flights above high C. Her soprano voice was large and heavy enough for Wagner, yet Mühle could also manage the requisite agility for the swift runs and complicated trills of the early-nineteenth-century Italian style. But Esmeralda had told me that Gerda Mühle was a pain in the ass about her polyp.
    “It’s taken over her life—it’s taking over
all
our lives,” Esmeralda said. She’d gone from worshipping Gerda Mühle, the soprano, to hating Gerda Mühle, the woman—the “Polyp,” Esmeralda now called her.
    On Friday night, the Polyp was resting her vocal cords. Esmeralda was excited to be getting what she called her “first start” at the Staatsoper. But Esmeralda was dismissive of Gerda Mühle’s polyp. Back in Cleveland, Esmeralda had endured a sinus surgery—a risky one for a would-be singer. As a teenager, Esmeralda’s nasal passages were chronically clogged; she sometimes wondered if that sinus surgery was responsible for the persistent American accent in her German. Esmeralda had zero sympathy for Gerda Mühle making such a big deal out of her singer’s polyp.
    I’d learned to ignore the jokes among the kitchen crew and the waitstaff about what it was like to have a soprano for a girlfriend. Everyone teased me about this except Karl—he didn’t kid around.
    “It must be
loud
, at times,” the chef at Zufall had said, to general laughter in the kitchen.
    I didn’t tell them, of course, that Esmeralda had orgasms only when I went down on her. By her own account, Esmeralda’s orgasms were “pretty spectacular,” but I was shielded from the sound. Esmeralda’s thighs were clamped against my ears; I truly heard nothing.
    “God, I think I just hit a high E-flat—and I really
held
it!” Esmeralda said , after one of her more prolonged orgasms, but my ears were warm and sweaty, and my head had been held so tightly between her thighs that I hadn’t heard anything.
    I don’t remember what the weather was like in Vienna on this particular November Friday. I just remember that when Esmeralda left our little apartment on the Schwindgasse, she was wearing her JFK campaign button. It was her good-luck charm, she’d told me. She was very proud of volunteering for Kennedy’s election campaign in Ohio in 1960; Esmeralda had been hugely pissed off when Ohio, by a narrow margin, went Republican. (Ohio had voted for Nixon.)
    I wasn’t as political as Esmeralda. In 1963, I believed I was too intent on becoming a writer to have a political life; I’d said something terribly lofty-sounding to Esmeralda about that. I told her that I wasn’t hedging my bets about becoming a writer—I said that political involvement was a way that young people left the door open to failing in their artistic endeavors, or some such bullshit.
    “Do you mean, Billy, that
because
I’m more politically involved than you, I don’t
care
about making it as a soprano as much as you care about being a writer?” Esmeralda asked me.
    “Of course I don’t mean
that
!” I answered.
    What I should have told her, but I didn’t dare, was that I was bisexual. It wasn’t my
writing
that kept me from being politically involved; it was that, in 1963, my dual sexuality was all the politics I could handle. Believe me: When you’re twenty-one, there’s a lot of politics involved in being sexually
mutable
.
    That said, on this November Friday, I would soon regret I’d ever given Esmeralda the idea that I thought she was hedging her bets about becoming a soprano—or leaving the door open to failing as an opera singer—
because
she was such a political person.
    F OR THE