Avenue of Mysteries (15 page)

Wasn’t
that
how Dorothy was looking at Juan Diego in the half-second before she wrestled him over and pulled him on top of her? It had been, albeit briefly, a scary look. And now, beneath him, Dorothy resembled a woman possessed. Her head thrashed from side to side; her hips thrust against him with such a powerful, upward force that Juan Diego clung to her like a man in fear of falling. But falling
where
? The bed was huge; there was no danger of falling off it.

At first, he imagined that his nearness to an orgasm was responsible for how acute his hearing had become. Was that the muted radio he
heard? The unknown language was both disturbing and strangely familiar. Don’t they speak Mandarin here? Juan Diego wondered, but there was nothing Chinese about the woman’s voice on the radio—nor was this voice
muted.
In the violence of their lovemaking, had one of Dorothy’s flailing hands—or her arm, or a leg—struck the panel of push-buttons on the night table? The woman on the radio, in whatever foreign language she was speaking, was—in fact—
screaming.

This was when Juan Diego realized that the screaming woman was Dorothy. The radio had remained as muted as before; it was Dorothy’s orgasm that was amplified, above any expectation and beyond all reason.

There was an unwelcome confluence of Juan Diego’s next two thoughts: coincident to his strictly physical awareness that he was coming, in a more sensational manner than he’d ever done so before, was the conviction that he should definitely take two beta-blockers—at the earliest opportunity. But this unexamined idea had a brother (or a sister). Juan Diego thought he knew what language Dorothy was speaking, although it had been many years since he’d last heard someone speak it. What Dorothy was screaming, just before she came, sounded like Nahuatl—the language Our Lady of Guadalupe spoke, the language of the Aztecs. But Nahuatl belonged to a group of languages of central and southern Mexico and Central America. Why would—how could—Dorothy speak it?

“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Dorothy was calmly asking him in English. She’d arched her back, with both hands held behind her head on the pillow, to make it easier for Juan Diego to reach over her for the phone on the night table. Was it the dimness of the light that made Dorothy’s skin appear darker than it really was? Or was she truly more dark-skinned than Juan Diego had noticed until now?

He had to stretch to reach the ringing phone; first his chest, then his stomach, touched Dorothy’s breasts.

“It’s my mother, you know,” the languid young woman told him. “Knowing her, she called my room first.”

Maybe
three
beta-blockers, Juan Diego was thinking. “Hello?” he said sheepishly into the phone.

“Your ears must be ringing,” Miriam told him. “I’m surprised you could hear the phone.”

“I can hear you,” Juan Diego said, more loudly than he’d intended; his ears were
still
ringing.

“The entire floor, if not the whole hotel, must have heard Dorothy,”
Miriam added. Juan Diego couldn’t think of what to say. “If my daughter has recovered her faculties of speech, I would like to speak with her. Or I could give
you
the message,” Miriam continued, “and you could tell Dorothy—when she is once again
herself.
”

“She is herself,” Juan Diego said, with an absurdly misplaced and exaggerated dignity. What a ridiculous thing this was to say about anyone! Why wouldn’t Dorothy be
herself
? Who else would the young woman in bed with him be? Juan Diego wondered, handing Dorothy the phone.

“What a surprise, Mother,” the young woman said laconically. Juan Diego couldn’t hear what Miriam was saying to her daughter, but he was aware that Dorothy didn’t say much.

Juan Diego thought this mother-daughter conversation might be an opportune moment for him to discreetly remove the condom, but when he rolled off Dorothy, and lay on his side with his back turned to her, he discovered—to his surprise—that the condom had already been removed.

It must be a generational thing—these young people today! Juan Diego marveled. Not only are they able to make a condom appear out of nowhere; they can, as quickly, make a condom
dis
appear. But where
is
it? Juan Diego wondered. When he turned toward Dorothy, the girl wrapped one of her strong arms around him—hugging him to her breasts. He could see the foil wrapper on the night table—he’d not noticed it before—but the condom itself was nowhere to be seen.

Juan Diego, who’d once referred to himself as a “keeper of details” (he meant
as a novelist
), wondered where the used condom was: perhaps tucked under Dorothy’s pillow, or carelessly discarded in the disheveled bed. Possibly, disposing of a condom in this fashion was a
generational
thing, too.

“I
am
aware that he has an early-morning flight, Mother,” Dorothy was saying. “Yes, I
know
that’s why we’re staying here.”

I have to pee, Juan Diego was thinking, and I mustn’t forget to take
two
Lopressor pills the next time I’m in the bathroom. But when he tried to slip away from the dimly lit bed, Dorothy’s strong arm tightened around the back of his neck; his face was pressed against her nearest breast.

“But when is
our
flight?” he heard Dorothy ask her mother. “
We
aren’t going to Manila next, are we?” Either the prospect of Dorothy and Miriam being with him in Manila, or the feeling of Dorothy’s breast against his face, had given Juan Diego an erection. And then he heard
Dorothy say: “You’re kidding, right? Since when are you ‘expected in’ Manila?”

Uh-oh, Juan Diego thought—but if my heart can handle being with a young woman like Dorothy, surely I can survive being in Manila with Miriam. (Or so he thought.)

“Well, he’s a
gentleman,
Mother—of course he didn’t call me,” Dorothy said, taking Juan Diego’s hand and holding it against her far breast. “Yes, I called him. Don’t tell me
you
didn’t think about it,” the caustic young woman said.

With one breast pressed into his face and another held fast in his inadequate hand, Juan Diego was reminded of something Lupe liked to say—often inappropriately. “No es buen momento para un terremoto,” Lupe used to say. “It’s not a good moment for an earthquake.”

“Fuck you, too,” Dorothy said, hanging up the phone. It may not have been a good moment for an earthquake, but it also wouldn’t have been an appropriate time for Juan Diego to go to the bathroom.

“There’s a dream I have,” he started to say, but Dorothy sat up suddenly, pushing him to his back.

“You don’t want to hear what I dream about—believe me,” she told him. She’d curled up, with her face on his belly but turned away from him; once again, Juan Diego was looking at the back of Dorothy’s dark-haired head. When Dorothy began playing with his penis, the novelist wondered what the right words were for this
—this postcoital play,
he imagined.

“I think you can do it again,” the naked girl was saying. “Okay—maybe not immediately, but pretty soon. Just
look
at this guy!” she exclaimed. He was as hard as the first time; the young woman didn’t hesitate to mount him.

Uh-oh, Juan Diego thought again. He was thinking only about how much he had to pee—he wasn’t speaking symbolically—when he said, “It’s not a good moment for an earthquake.”

“I’ll show you an earthquake,” Dorothy said.

T
HE NOVELIST AWOKE WITH
the certain feeling that he had died and gone to Hell; he’d long suspected that if Hell existed (which he doubted), there would be bad music playing constantly—in the loudest possible competition with the news in a foreign language. When he woke up, that was the case, but Juan Diego was still in bed—in his brightly lit and blaring room at the Regal Airport Hotel. Every light in his room was on,
at the brightest possible setting; the music on his radio and the news on his TV were cranked to the highest possible volume.

Had Dorothy done this as she was leaving? The young woman was gone, but had she bequeathed to Juan Diego her idea of an amusing wake-up call? Or perhaps the girl had left in a huff. Juan Diego couldn’t remember. He felt he’d been more soundly asleep than he’d ever been before, but for no longer than five minutes.

He hit the panel of push-buttons on his night table, hurting the heel of his right hand. The volume on the radio and TV were muted sufficiently for him to hear, and answer, the ringing phone: it was someone yelling at him in an Asian-sounding language (whatever “Asian-sounding” sounds like).

“I’m sorry—I don’t understand you,” Juan Diego replied in English. “Lo siento—” he started to say in Spanish, but the caller didn’t wait.

“You asswheel!” the Asian-sounding person shouted.

“I think you mean ass
hole
—” the writer answered, but the angry caller had hung up. Only then did Juan Diego notice that the foil wrappers for his first and second condom were missing from his night table; Dorothy must have taken them with her, or thrown them in a wastebasket.

Juan Diego saw that the second condom was still on his penis; in fact, it was the only evidence he had that he’d once more “performed.” He had no memory past that moment when Dorothy had mounted him for another try. The earthquake she’d promised to show him was lost in time; if the young woman had again broken the sound barrier in a language that sounded like Nahuatl (but it couldn’t have been), that moment hadn’t been captured in memory or in a dream.

The novelist knew only that he’d been asleep and
hadn’t
dreamed—not even a nightmare. Juan Diego got out of bed and limped to the bathroom; that he didn’t have to pee forewarned him that he already had. He hoped he hadn’t peed in the bed, or in the condom, or on Dorothy, but he could see—when he got to the bathroom—that the cap on his Lopressor prescription was off. He must have taken one (or two) of the beta-blockers when he’d gotten up to pee.

But how long ago was that? Was it before or after Dorothy left? And had he taken only one Lopressor, as he’d been prescribed, or the two he’d imagined that he
should have
taken? Actually, of course, he should
not
have taken two. A double dose of beta-blockers wasn’t recommended as a remedy for missing a dose.

There was already a gray light outside, not to mention the blazing
light in his hotel room; Juan Diego knew he had an early-morning flight. He’d not unpacked much, so he didn’t have a lot to do. He was, however, meticulous about
how
he packed the articles in his toilet kit; this time, he would put the Lopressor prescription (and the Viagra) in his carry-on.

He flushed the second condom down the toilet but was disconcerted that he couldn’t find the first. And when had he peed? At any moment, he imagined, Miriam would be calling him or knocking on his door, telling him it was time to go; hence he pulled back the top sheet and looked under the pillows, hoping to find the first condom. The damn thing was not in any of the wastebaskets—neither were the foil wrappers.

Juan Diego was standing under the shower when he saw the missing condom circling the drain at the bottom of the bathtub. It had unrolled itself and resembled a drowned slug; the only explanation had to be that the first condom he’d used with Dorothy had been stuck to his back, or his ass, or the back of one leg.

How embarrassing! He hoped Dorothy hadn’t seen it. If he’d skipped taking a shower, he might have boarded his flight to Manila with the used condom attached to him.

Unfortunately, he was still in the shower when the telephone rang. To men his age, Juan Diego knew—and surely the odds were worse for
crippled
men his age—bad accidents happened in bathtubs. Juan Diego turned off the shower and almost daintily stepped out of the tub. He was dripping wet and aware of how slippery the tiles on the bathroom floor could be, but when he grabbed a towel, the towel rod was reluctant to release it; Juan Diego tugged at the towel harder than he should have. The aluminum towel rod pulled free of the bathroom wall, bringing the porcelain mounting with it. The porcelain shattered on the floor, scattering the wet tiles with translucent ceramic chips; the aluminum rod hit Juan Diego in the face, cutting his forehead above one eyebrow. He limped, dripping, into the bedroom, holding the towel to his bleeding head.

“Hello!” he cried into the phone.

“Well, you’re awake—that’s a start,” Miriam told him. “Don’t let Dorothy go back to sleep.”

“Dorothy isn’t here,” Juan Diego said.

“She’s not answering her phone—she must be in the shower or something,” her mother said. “Are you ready to leave?”

“How about ten minutes?” Juan Diego asked.

“Make it eight, but shoot for five—I’ll come get you,” Miriam told
him. “We’ll get Dorothy last—girls her age are the last to be ready,” her mother explained.

“I’ll be ready,” Juan Diego told her.

“Are you all right?” Miriam asked him.

“Yes, of course,” he replied.

“You sound different,” she told him, then hung up.

Different? Juan Diego wondered. He saw he’d bled on the exposed bedsheets; the water had dripped from his hair and diluted the blood from the cut on his forehead. The water had turned the blood a pinker color, and there was more blood than there should have been; it was a small cut, but it kept bleeding.

Yes, facial cuts bleed a lot—and he’d just stepped out of a hot shower. Juan Diego tried to wipe the blood off the bed with his towel, but the towel was bloodier than the bedsheets; he managed to make more of a mess. The side of the bed nearest the night table looked like the site of a ritualistic-sex slaying.

Juan Diego went back in the bathroom, where there was more blood and water—and the scattered ceramic chips from the shattered porcelain mounting. He put cold water on his face—on his forehead, especially, to try to stop the stupid cut from bleeding. Naturally, he had a virtual lifetime supply of Viagra, and his despised beta-blockers—and don’t forget the fussy pill-cutting device—but no Band-Aids. He stuck a wad of toilet paper on the profusely bleeding but tiny cut, temporarily stanching the flow of blood.