In One Person

because I wanted to see the sleepwalking scene—Gerda Mühle, and her polyp, singing “
Una macchia
” (about the blood that still taints Lady Macbeth’s hands). Maybe I’d imagined that Esmeralda would emerge from backstage and join me and the other students faithfully standing at the rear of the Staatsoper, but—by act 4—there were so many vacated seats that most of my fellow students had found places to sit down.
    I did not know that there was a soundless TV set backstage, and that Esmeralda was glued to it; she would tell me later that you didn’t need the sound to understand what had happened to JFK.
    I did not wait till the end of act 4, the final act. I didn’t need to see “Birnam Wood remove to Dunsinane,” as Shakespeare puts it, or hear Macduff tell Macbeth about the caesarean birth. I ran along the crowded Kärntnerstrasse to Weihburggasse, passing people with tears streaming down their faces—most of them
not
Americans.
    In the kitchen at Zufall, the crew and the waitstaff were all watching television; we had a small black-and-white TV set. I saw the same soundless accounts of the shooting in Dallas that Esmeralda must have seen.
    “You’re early, not late,” Karl observed. “Did your girlfriend blow it?”
    “It wasn’t her—it was Gerda Mühle,” I told him.
    “
Blöde Kuh
!” Karl cried. “Stupid cow!” (The Viennese operagoers who were fed up with Gerda Mühle had called her a stupid cow long before Esmeralda started calling her the Polyp.)
    “Esmeralda must have been too upset to perform—she must have lost it backstage,” I said to Karl. “She was a Kennedy fan.”
    “So she
did
blow it,” Karl said. “I don’t envy you living with the outcome.”
    There was already a scattering of English-speaking customers, Karl warned me—not operagoers, evidently.
    “More obstetricians and gynecologists,” Karl observed disdainfully. (He thought there were too many babies in the world. “Overpopulation is the number-one problem,” Karl kept saying.) “And there’s a table of queers,” Karl told me. “They just got here, but they’re already drunk. Definitely fruits. Isn’t that what you call them?”
    “That’s one of the things we call them,” I told our one-eyed headwaiter.
    It wasn’t hard to spot the OB-GYN table; there were twelve of them—eight men, four women, all doctors. Since President Kennedy had just been killed, I didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to break the ice by telling them that they’d all missed the c-section scene in
Macbeth
.
    As for the table of queers—or “fruits,” as Karl had called them—there were four men, all drunk. One of them was the well-known American poet who was teaching at the Institute, Lawrence Upton.
    “I didn’t know you worked here, young fiction writer,” Larry said. “It’s Bill, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” I told him.
    “Jesus, Bill—you look
awful
. Is it Kennedy, or has something else happened?” Larry asked me.
    “I saw
Macbeth
tonight—” I started to say.
    “Oh, I heard it was the soprano understudy’s night—I skipped it,” Larry interrupted me.
    “Yes, it was—it was
supposed to be
the understudy’s night,” I told him. “ But she’s American—she must have been too upset about Kennedy. She didn’t go on—it was Gerda Mühle, as usual.”
    “Gerda’s great,” Larry said. “It must have been wonderful.”
    “Not for me,” I told him. “The soprano understudy is my girlfriend—I was hoping to see her as Lady Macbeth. I’ve been listening to her sing in her sleep,” I told the table of drunken queers. “Her name is Esmeralda Soler,” I told the fruits. “One day, maybe, you’ll all know who she is.”
    “You have a girlfriend,” Larry said—with the same, sly disbelief he would later express when I claimed to be a top.
    “Esmeralda Soler,” I repeated. “She must have been too upset to sing.”
    “Poor girl,” Larry said. “I don’t suppose there is a
plethora
of opportunities for understudies.”
    “I suppose not,” I said.
    “I’m still thinking about your writing-course idea,” Larry told me. “I haven’t ruled it out, Bill.”
    Karl had said he didn’t envy me “living with the outcome” of Esmeralda not singing the part of Lady Macbeth, but—looking at Lawrence Upton and his queer friends—I suddenly foresaw another, not-so-pretty outcome of my living with Esmeralda.
    There weren’t many English-speaking operagoers who