John Irving - In One Person

“Maybe,” said Mrs. Hadley; she shrugged. She seemed barely interested in the sexual part of my pronunciation problems, as if sexual speculation (of any kind) was in a category as uninteresting to her as my excellent pronunciation in German. I had an Austrian accent, naturally.

“I think you’re as angry at your mother as she is at you,” Martha Hadley told me. “At times, Billy, I think you’re too angry to speak.”

“Oh.”

I heard someone coming up the stairs. It was Atkins, still staring at Mrs. Hadley’s watch; I was surprised he didn’t trip on the stairs. “It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” Atkins reported.

“I’m leaving—you can go in,” I told him, but Atkins had paused on the stairs, one step away from the third floor. I passed him as I headed down the stairs.

The stairwell was wide; I must have been close to the ground floor when I heard Mrs. Hadley say, “Please come in.”

“But it hasn’t been thirty minutes. It’s not . . .” Atkins didn’t (or couldn’t) finish his thought.

“It’s not what ?” I heard Martha Hadley ask him. I remember pausing on the stairs. “I know you can say it,” she said gently to him. “You’re wearing a tie—you can say tie, can’t you?”

“It’s not . . . tie, ” Atkins managed.

“Now say mmm —like when you eat something good,” Mrs. Hadley told him.

“I can’t!” Atkins blurted out.

“Please come in,” Mrs. Hadley said again.

“It’s not tie — mmm !” Atkins struggled to say.

“That’s good—that’s better, anyway. Please come in now,” Martha Hadley told him, and I continued down the stairs and out of the music building, where I’d also heard snippets of songs, choral voices, and a second-floor segment of stringed instruments, and (on the ground floor) another in-progress piano practice. But my thoughts were entirely on what a loser and an idiot Atkins was—he couldn’t pronounce the time word! What a fool!

I was halfway across the quad, where Grau had died, when I thought that the hatred of homosexuals was perfectly in tune with my thinking. I couldn’t pronounce penises, yet here I was feeling utterly superior to a boy who couldn’t manage to say time .

I remember thinking that, for the rest of my life, I would need to find more people like Martha Hadley, and surround myself with them, but that there would always be other people who would hate and revile me—or even try to cause me physical harm. This thought was as bracing as the winter air that killed Dr. Grau. It was a lot to absorb from one appointment with a sympathetic voice-and-singing teacher—this in addition to my disturbing awareness of Mrs. Hadley as a dominant personality, and that something to do with her dominance appealed to me sexually. Or was there something about her dominance that didn’t appeal to me? (It only then occurred to me that maybe I wanted to be like Mrs. Hadley—that is, sexually—not be with her.)

Maybe Martha Hadley was a hippie ahead of her time; the hippie word was not in use in 1960. At that time, I’d heard next to no mention of the gay word; it was a little-used word in the Favorite River Academy community. Maybe “gay” was too friendly a word for Favorite River—at least it was too neutral a word for all those homo-hating boys. I did know what “gay” meant, of course—it just wasn’t said much, in my limited circles—but, as sexually inexperienced as I was, I’d given scant consideration to what was meant by “dominant” and “submissive” in the seemingly unattainable world of gay sex.

NOT THAT MANY YEARS later, when I was living with Larry—of the men and women I’ve tried to live with, I lasted with Larry the longest—he liked to make fun of me by telling everyone how “shocked” I was at the way he picked me up in that gay coffeehouse, which was such a mysterious place, in Vienna.

This was my junior year abroad. Two years of college German—not to mention my studying the language at Favorite River Academy—had prepared me for a year in a German-speaking country. These same two college years of living in New York City had both prepared me and not prepared me for how underground a gay coffeehouse in Vienna would be in that academic year of 1963–64. At that time, the gay bars in New York were being shut down; the New York World’s Fair was in ’64, and it was the mayor’s intention to clean up the city for the tourists. One New York bar, Julius’, remained open the whole time—there may have been others—but even at Julius’, the men at the bar weren’t permitted to touch one another.

I’m not saying Vienna was more underground than New York at that time; the situation was similar. But in that place where Larry picked me up, there was some touching among the men—permitted or not. I just remember it was Larry who shocked me, not Vienna.

“Are you a top or a bottom, beautiful Bill?” Larry had asked me. (I was shocked, but not by the question.)

“A top,” I answered, without hesitation.

“Really!” Larry said, either genuinely surprised or feigning surprise; with Larry, this was often hard to tell. “You look like a bottom to me,” he said, and after a pause—such a long pause that I’d thought he was going to ask someone else to go home with him—he added, “Come on, Bill, let’s leave now.”

I was shocked, all right, but only because I was a college student, and Larry was my professor. This was the Institut für Europäische Studien in Vienna— das Institut, the students called it. We were Americans, from all over, but our faculty was a mixed bag: some Americans (Larry was by far the best-known among them), one wonderful and eccentric Englishman, and various Austrians from the faculty at the University of Vienna.

In those days, the Institute for European Studies was on that end of the Wollzeile nearest the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz and the Stubenring. The students complained about how far das Institut was from the university; many of our students (the ones with better German) took additional courses at the University of Vienna. Not me; I wasn’t interested in more courses. I’d gone to college in New York because I wanted to be in New York; I was studying abroad in Vienna to be in Vienna. I didn’t care how near to or far from the university I was.

My German was good enough to get me hired at an excellent restaurant on the Weihburggasse—near the opposite end of the Kärntnerstrasse from the opera. It was called Zufall (“Coincidence”), and I got the job both because I had worked as a waiter in New York and because, shortly after I arrived in Vienna, I learned that the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall had been fired.

I’d heard the story in that mysterious gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse—one of those side streets off the Graben. The Kaffee Käfig, it was called—the “Coffee Cage.” During the day, it appeared to be mostly a student hangout; there were girls there, too—in fact, it was daytime when a girl told me that the waiter at Zufall had been fired. But after dark, the older men showed up at the Kaffee Käfig, and there weren’t any girls around. That was how it was the night I ran into Larry, and he popped the top-or-bottom question.

That first fall term at the Institute, I was not one of Larry’s students. He was teaching the plays of Sophocles. Larry was a poet, and I wanted to be a novelist—I thought I was done with theater, and I didn’t write poems. But I knew that Larry was a respected writer, and I’d asked him if he would consider offering a writing course—in either the winter or the spring term, in ’64.

“Oh, God—not a creative writing class!” Larry said. “I know—don’t tell me. One day, creative writing will be taught everywhere !”