John Irving - In One Person

“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.

FOR THE FIRST SEATING at Zufall, there were more Americans among the clientele than either Karl or I had expected. There were no other foreign tourists—no English-speaking ones, anyway—but there were several American couples past retirement age, and a table of ten obstetricians and gynecologists (all of them Americans) who told me they were in Vienna for an OB-GYN conference.

I got a generous tip from the doctors, because I told them they’d picked a good opera for obstetricians and gynecologists. I explained that part in Macbeth (act 3) when the witches conjure up a bloody child—the child famously tells Macbeth that “none of woman born” can harm him. (Of course, Macbeth is screwed. Macduff, who kills Macbeth, announces that he had a caesarean birth.)

“It’s possibly the only opera with a c-section theme,” I told the OB-GYN table of ten.

Karl was telling everyone that my girlfriend was the soprano singing the Lady Macbeth part tonight, so I was pretty popular with the early-seating crowd, and Karl made good on his promise to let me leave the restaurant in plenty of time for the start of act 1. But something was wrong.

I had the weird impression that the audience wouldn’t settle down—especially the uncouth Americans. One couple seemed on the verge of a divorce; she was sobbing, and nothing her husband had to say could soothe her. I’m guessing that many of you know which Friday night this was—it was November 22, 1963. It was 12:30 P.M., Central Standard Time, when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. I was seven hours ahead of Texas time in Vienna, and Macbeth —to my surprise—didn’t start on time. Esmeralda had told me that the Staatsoper always started on time, but not this night.

I couldn’t have known, but things were as unsettled backstage as they appeared to me in the audience. The American couple I’d identified as headed for a divorce had already left; both of them were inconsolable. Now there were other Americans who seemed in distress. I suddenly noticed the empty seats. Poor Esmeralda! It was her debut, but it wasn’t a full house. (It would have been 1 P.M. in Dallas when JFK died—8 P.M. in Vienna.)

When the curtain simply would not open on that barren heath in Scotland, I began to worry about Esmeralda. Was she suffering from stage fright? Had she lost her voice? Had Gerda Mühle changed her mind about taking a night off? (The program had an insert page, announcing that Esmeralda Soler was Lady Macbeth on Friday, November 22, 1963. I’d already decided that I would have this page framed; I was going to give it to Esmeralda for Christmas that year.) More irritating Americans were talking in the audience—more were leaving, too, some in tears. I decided that Americans were culturally deprived, socially inept imbeciles, or they were all philistines!

Finally the curtain went up, and there were the witches. When Macbeth and Banquo appeared—the latter, I knew, would soon be a ghost—I thought that this Macbeth was far too old and fat to be Esmeralda’s husband (even in an opera).

You can imagine my surprise, in the very next scene in act 1, when it was not my Esmeralda singing “Vieni, t’affretta!” Nor was it Esmeralda calling on the ministers of hell to assist her ( “Or tutti sorgete” ). There onstage was Gerda Mühle and her polyp. I could only imagine how shocked the English-speaking clientele at our early seating at Zufall must have been—those ten obstetricians and gynecologists included. They must have been thinking: How is it possible that this matronly-looking load of a soprano is the girlfriend of our young, good-looking waiter?

When Lady Macbeth smeared the sleeping guards with the bloody dagger, I imagined that Esmeralda had been murdered backstage—or that something no less dire had happened to her.

It seemed that half the audience was crying by the end of act 2. Was it the news of Banquo’s assassination that moved them to tears, or was it Banquo’s ghost at the dinner table? About the time Macbeth saw Banquo’s ghost that second time, near the end of act 2, I might have been the only person at the Vienna State Opera who didn’t know that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It wasn’t until the intermission that I would learn what had happened.

After the intermission, I stayed to see the witches again—and that terrifying bloody child who tells Macbeth that “none of woman born” can harm him. I stayed until the middle of act 4, 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.