John Irving - In One Person

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 came to Zufall after that Friday-night performance of Verdi’s Macbeth . I’m guessing that JFK’s assassination kind of kicked the late-night-dinner urge out of most of my fellow Americans who were in Vienna that November. The OB-GYN table was morose; they left early. Only Larry and the fruits stayed late.

Karl urged me to go home. “Go find your girlfriend—she can’t be doing too good,” the one-eyed headwaiter told me. But I knew that either Esmeralda was with her opera people or she’d already gone back to our little apartment on the Schwindgasse. Esmeralda knew where I worked; if she wanted to see me, she knew where to find me.

“The fruits are never leaving—they’ve decided to die here,” Karl kept saying. “You seem to know the handsome one—the talker, ” Karl added.

I explained who Lawrence Upton was, and that he taught at the Institute, but he was not my teacher.

“Go home to your girlfriend, Bill,” Karl kept saying.

But I shuddered to think of watching the already-repetitious reports of JFK’s assassination on that television in the living room of Esmeralda’s landlady’s apartment; visions of the disagreeable dog kept me at Zufall, where I could keep an eye on the small black-and-white TV in the restaurant’s kitchen.

“It’s the death of American culture,” Larry was saying to the three other fruits. “Not that there is a culture for books in the United States, but Kennedy offered us some hope of having a culture for writers. Witness Frost—that inaugural poem. It wasn’t bad; Kennedy at least had taste. How long will it be before we have another president who even has taste?”

I know, I know—this is not the most appealing way to present Larry. But what was wonderful about the man was that he spoke the truth, without taking into account the context of other people’s “feelings” at that moment.

Someone overhearing Larry might have been awash in sentiments for our slain president—or feeling shipwrecked on a foreign shore, battered by surging waves of patriotism. Larry didn’t care; if he believed it was true, he said it. This boldness didn’t make Larry unappealing to me.

But it was somewhere in the middle of Larry’s speech when Esmeralda got to the restaurant. She could never eat before she sang, she’d told me, so I knew she hadn’t eaten, and she’d already had some white wine—not a good idea, on an empty stomach. Esmeralda first sat at the bar, crying; Karl had quickly ushered her into the kitchen, where she sat on a stool in front of the small TV. Karl gave her a glass of white wine before he told me she was in the kitchen; I’d not seen Esmeralda at the bar, because I was opening yet another bottle of red wine for Larry’s table.

“It’s your girlfriend, Bill—you should take her home,” Karl told me. “She’s in the kitchen.” Larry’s German wasn’t bad; he’d understood what Karl had said.

“Is it your soprano understudy, Bill?” Larry asked me. “Let her sit with us—we’ll cheer her up!” he told me. (I rather doubted it; I was pretty sure that a death-of-American-culture conversation wouldn’t have cheered up Esmeralda.)

But that was how it happened—how Larry got a look at Esmeralda, as we were making our exit from the restaurant.

“Leave the fruits with me,” Karl said. “I’ll split the tip with you. Take the girl home, Bill.”

“I think I’ll throw up if I keep watching television,” Esmeralda told me in the kitchen. She looked a little wobbly on the stool. I knew she would probably throw up, anyway—because of the white wine. We would have an awkward-looking walk, all the way across the Ringstrasse to the Schwindgasse, but I hoped the walk would be good for her.